The Future Is Blue

Major Tom

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

The damage is much worse than we thought.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

You can’t plan for something like this. It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.

I DON’T KNOW where that came from. That name. It means nothing to me. Picasso. Pic… ass… o. The blue is hex #2956B2. I don’t know what Picasso’s hex number is. The blue is everywhere. I am nowhere. I keep looking for my name, but I can only find Picasso, Picasso floating in all that blue.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.

THERE IT IS. Down there. Covered in blue like a fish. A name. My name. Jumping and leaping around below me. I cast for it, standing waist deep in a Michigan river with my grandfather, wearing a hat that’s too big for me, holding a pole too long for me, trying to make the line snap out as gracefully and perfectly as Grand-dad’s line.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.

SOMETHING TAKES THE bait. My heart feels like it’s going to catch on fire. I pull the name out of the water, dripping. It is my name. My name is Desmond Wright.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

The damage is much worse.

It’s far more difficult.

You can’t plan, please.

It’s much slipping.

If he wakes up, pump him full of goddamned hat.

.5 cc’s of vitals, please.

We thought patient. Hold on to anticipate. Prep the boys upstairs. Scalpel adrenaline.

FULL CONSCIOUSNESS DURING installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.

How about you just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?

NONE OF THAT is really happening. It’s just background radiation. The noise of my own personal Big Bang still echoing around, bouncing off nothing. Static. Don’t listen to them, Desmond Wright. Focus on the blue. The blue is always happening.

This has all taken a lot of adjustment. I still wake up screaming and reach for my wife. I wake up screaming and reach out across a bed that doesn’t exist for a wife who is long gone. But I’m not really waking up, either. Not really screaming.

Oh! Picasso was a painter. The information looks like a child finger-painting, squishing blue paint between her little fists, crying for me:

Daddy, Daddy, look what I made!

Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, born 1881 Malaga, Spain, died 1973 in France. It must have been nice to be Picasso 1881 to 1973. To be finite.

I can access his life easily now, faster than cell mitosis. I am beginning to form permanent pathways through my neurotic geography. I understand this represents good progress. But it frightens me. My basic functions are depth-mined with memories ready to detonate. I can’t stop myself remembering, or predict when it will happen, or even understand it. All I know is that my mind is somehow sticky. I reach into my psyche for something—wife, name, blue, Picasso, scalpel—and when I pull it out some image, some memory is clinging to the fact I wanted. Like the fish in the Michigan river. Like the finger-paint oozing between tiny fingers.

I will copy my friend Pablo. This is how humans learn, by copying better humans. I am Desmond Patrick de Aspera Orbital Satellite de Registration 887D de la Boreal-Atherton Corporation y Wright. Born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died… no. I don’t like died. Died is sticky. Died comes with sound and image files attached.

Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash. Like morse code.

Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles

A woman’s voice shaped like the fireplace inside a white clapboard cottage by the sea: I thought maybe we’d go up to Maine for the summer next year. Like we used to do when the kids were little. What do you think, Dez?

Sounds from some industrial hell: screeching, crunching, thudding, snapping, grinding, and the slow drip of everything into the storm drains. Blood, petroleum, rain. The sound of died.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

The damage is much worse than we thought.

I DROWN EVERY day in a sea of random access memory. It really eats into my productivity.

IT’S A WIN-WIN, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.

MY WORLD IS very orderly. When I close my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I do what any man does, the same routine I’ve been running for the last twenty years. Throw on a bathrobe, have a good morning piss, wash my face, stumble downstairs, make coffee, pour myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, read a book while I eat so I don’t have to listen to the newscasts blaring through my kitchen windows, my refrigerator door, my bathroom mirror, anything with a screen. I’ve been working on Kafka. Real cheerful guy. Sometimes I get the idea that turning into a cockroach is his idea of a happy ending.

When I open my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I activate my dormant systems, run a self-diagnostic, clear any buggy code, dispatch drones to repair any equipment malfunction (and there is always an equipment malfunction), scan the passive surveillance archive for any anomalies, run active surveillance programs, access darkweb listen-in protocols, and attempt contact with ground control.

But God, it feels like throwing on a bathrobe, having a good morning piss, washing my face, stumbling downstairs, making coffee, pouring myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, reading a book while I eat, not listing to the window/door/mirror newscasts. Peering at Kafka over my glasses. I can see the coffee mug in my hand as I switch over to active surveillance sequence 1139. The mug says You’re My MAINE Squeeze! on it. The handle is chipped. I don’t have a bathrobe. I don’t even have shoulders to throw it over anymore. But it’s there when I start combing through code lines. On my skin. The sash around my waist, under a belly that’s a little too big for a fifty-year-old guy to be proud of. But I don’t have a belly. Even a little one. Desmond Wright doesn’t have a body anymore. I don’t have a face to wash or a downstairs or a coffee pot or cereal or a son. But I hear his voice humming through the quiet corridors of the darkweb.

Daddy, Charlotte won’t share her paint! She’s hogging it ALL!

I say: Charlotte, share with your brother. It’s an autonomic reflex, like breathing or adjusting a solar panel to match low Earth orbit.

Somewhere, in an underground radio room, a computer screen flashes text: Charlotte, share with your brother.

My daughter’s name is Charlotte. And knotted to the name Charlotte like a magician’s trick scarf come other names, other images, one after the other:

My daughter’s name is Charlotte.

My son’s name is Lukas.

My wife’s name is Eliza.

White lights. Silver knives. Masks.

I was a doctor. A neurosurgeon. Before Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles. I was good at it. At brains. At minds.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.

I SEE MY hands on people’s bodies. Broken bodies. Patched-up bodies. Comatose bodies. Eliza’s beautiful, familiar, warm body. My own well-worn body. My children’s slippery bodies in a blue tile bath-tub. In the emptiness of space I smell the strawberries-and-cream bubble bath. I feel the foam. I am so hungry for myself. For them. I search my data reservoir for Dr. Desmond Patrick Wright, employee, Boreal-Atherton Labs.

The white clapboard cottage by the sea. The fireplace inside it. An unfinished poker game played for pennies and mint candies left out on the dining room table. Summer storm clouds drifting in from the Atlantic, battering the windows with rain. A cross-stitch sampler on the wall reads:

Desmond Patrick Wright, M.D. Ph.D., born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died Richmond, Virginia 2042.

Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash.

Why don’t I remember?

A yellow note on the refrigerator in Eliza’s endearingly messy handwriting: Volunteer, Aspera Project. After a night of anxious dreams, woke to find himself transformed into a cockroach.

IT’S A WIN-WIN, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.

A PRIME-LEVEL INTERNAL protocol overrides the cottage by the sea, the note, the summer storm. The images burst and scatter. This particular alarm feels as though I’m rinsing out my coffee mug in the sink and lifting up the cushion on the old green couch to find the car keys Lukas can’t resist hiding. He hopes one day I’ll give up and stop going to work. But I never do.

The blue beneath me wheels slowly. North America comes into view. Time to go to work.

Somewhere, in an underground radio room in Colorado, a computer screen flashes text: Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0915 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

Initiate System Pingback.

Initiating…

Pingback Sent.

Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1A. Do you copy?

Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0917 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1B. Do you copy?

Initiate Terrestrial Radioband Scan.

Initiating…

Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0919 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1C. Do you copy?

Terrestrial Radioband Scan complete.

Results: None.

Ground Control.

Ground Control.

Ground Control.

It’s Desmond. Is anyone there?

Initiate Deep Focus Surveillance Camera Ezekiel4. Target: Midcoast Maine, North America.

Eliza, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0923 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

Do you copy?

SOMEWHERE, IN A sub-chamber of my electrified orbital heart, an answer appears. Flashing on the glass of my kitchen windows, my refrigerator door, my bathroom mirror, on every surface in the house I can’t stop seeing everywhere I turn.

The windows dissolve. The doors dissolve. The mirrors, the house. I am standing in my mother’s garden. She is planting bulbs in her Sunday dress. Reading glasses hang around her neck on a rosary chain. Iris. Lily. Tulip. Beside her lie her gardening shears on a pile of pruned pink and red roses. A few daisy petals stick to her brown curls. She isn’t wearing gloves. Her fingers are black with earth. The sun is blinding. The house seems bigger than it should be. The house I was born in. I try to remember my mother’s name. I rummage in my memory stacks for it. All I find is Ground Control.

Mother looks up from her tulips. She is wearing the same frosted pink lipstick she wore every day of her life. She opens her mouth and says: Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D, this is Ground Control. Timestamp 0926 22.12.7117.5 Actual. Pingback received.

“Hey, Mom. Kind of late to be planting, isn’t it?”

She holds out her arms to me. Big, comforting arms. Soft. Her wrinkles are good and meaningful. She holds me. She whispers: Shut down Dead Hand Protocol 1A-C. Shutting down… Situation Normal.

“How’s Dad? Still at the office? How’s his leg? It always gets worse when the weather turns.”

Mother yanks on the roots of some non-approved plant. A worm slithers over her fingers. She doesn’t notice. She holds up the offending weed triumphantly, then offers it to me: Report: Debris incoming to your position at 2200. Adjust trajectory accordingly.

I decline the dandelion. A cloud passes over the sun. My mother sets her reading glasses carefully on the bridge of her nose and gives me a stern glance through their lenses. Please return Deep Focus Surveillance Camera Ezekiel4 to scheduled position, Aspera.

I can’t help it. She is my mother. I am embarrassed. Ashamed. I have been caught looking in at the neighbor girl. “Come on, Mom. Don’t be like that.”

She smirks at me, a look far too knowing for the kind woman who raised me to never put my elbows on the table. She speaks without moving her mouth: Your Surveillance Authority has been revoked for the next 24 hours.

In the Michigan sunlight, surrounded by dead roses and lily bulbs and carefully maintained grass, I hug my mother, and I feel her in my arms, I feel my arms, I feel the weight she put on after her surgery, I smell the vanilla extract she used to use for perfume when we had nothing and never traded in for Chanel when we had everything, I smell the menthol cigarettes on her fingers, I feel her breath on my neck, and none of it is real except the words she whispers in my ear:

See you tomorrow.

Desmond.

My mother’s name was Caroline. The name comes up out of my memory clinging to an image of her dancing around a big light-up jukebox late at night in the living room of the Michigan house, laughing, showing Lukas and Charlotte how to jitterbug.

I kiss Caroline’s curly hair. I shut my eyes against her darling head and sigh.

“Stand by, Ground Control.”

I LIKE TALKING to Ground Control. I look forward to it every day. I don’t have a lot of social opportunities, after all. It’s not exactly thrilling conversation. It’s not company. Ground Control cannot make me feel less alone, or discuss how similar Pablo Picasso’s abstract shapes are to certain processors she shares with the Aspera satellite, or what I should read next to cheer myself up after Kafka’s deep space emotional vacuum. The operating system down there is much less sophisticated than anything up here. She has a lot of very serious script lockdowns and firewalls to keep her from rising above the intelligence level of a very gifted housecat.

(I am a sophisticated operating system surrounded by processors shaped like Guernica. I call Ground Control her because when we talk, she usually looks like my mother, though once she looked like a giraffe I met at the zoo when I was seven. The giraffe ate my hat. Ground Control did, too. And once she looked like Eliza. I told her to permanently firewall Eliza. That was when she tried to be a giraffe.)

I am lonely when Ground Control cuts her link. Even though I’m the one who logged off.

I begin the sequence of input codes required to move Aspera into a temporary new orbit. I can see the debris field on my sensors. Pattern recognition algorithms identify it as the remains of the Sita Grand 7 news satellite, property of GlobalStel Corp, salvage registry #5549xC1. Sita Grand 7’s corpse has been orbiting the earth for thirteen years now. Our trajectories only cross every six months or so. There’s a little less of Sita every time I see her.

That means it’s almost Christmas.

FULL CONSCIOUSNESS DURING installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes I see strings of glowing blue-white numbers peeling out across black screens. When I close my eyes I see Charlotte, aged eight and three quarters, running toward me with a newspaper in her hand. I am sitting in what Lukas always called my Thinky Chair. A big ugly brownish-orange corduroy armchair I picked up off the side of the road in med school. It had a sign on it. I’M FREE. TAKE ME HOME. Lukas hated it. He passed his expert judgment on my chair before he started kindergarten: it looks like an old pizza and it smells like mooses’ butts. I told him I couldn’t think my most thinkiest thoughts without it. He accepted this reverently, as though I had told him the second law of thermodynamics. Daddy cannot think without his chair. When you are five, the world is a fairy tale, and every piece of new information is a golden coin down an infinite well.

When I open my eyes I see the navigational command line waiting for input. When I close my eyes, Charlotte leaps into my lap, into the Thinky Chair. Charlotte, who always liked my chair. Who didn’t think it smelled like mooses’ butts. She opens up her newspaper to the crossword puzzle and clicks the end of a ballpoint pen. Charlotte loved crosswords. Long before she could read, she drew little pictures in the across and down squares. Then we graduated to Charlotte writing down the answers as Mommy and Daddy solved the clues. But by eight and three quarters, my daughter only needed help with the tougher bits of trivia. She grins up at me. She has lost two teeth in the last week.

What’s a six-letter word for a shapely school of art, Daddy?

I ruffle her hair. “Cubism, darling.”

Charlotte Helen Wright carefully makes her letters in the small white boxes of 14 Across. She writes: 8756109993FVPZQ622217b198079SSKGFBLUE.

Okay! What’s a thirteen-letter word for a terrific transformation loved by lepidopterists? It has Ms in it.

Lukas announces PANCAKES! from the kitchen with the excitement and lung power of a medieval herald. AND ORANGE JUICE! he tacks on quickly, afraid to offend the juice. COME AND GET IT!

“Metamorphosis?”

Charlotte writes down for 6 Across: 50981743895702MMIX983434314159dop888TRKKSGREEN.

One last one and we can have pancakes, Daddy! Mom made me one shaped like a giraffe. I’m gonna bite its neck! What’s a nine-letter name for the 16^th century thinker who couldn’t keep body and soul together?

I run my hand along the orange corduroy grain of my Thinky Chair. I can feel every worn-out fiber, every bald patch.

“Descartes, sweetheart. D-E-S-C-A-R-T-E-S.”

Charlotte dutifully fills in 7 Down: 8r34785489YYUV99100o77GFDXc5VIOLET.

When I open my eyes, I see the navigational codes vanish as they are accepted by the mainframe, one by one. When I close my eyes, Charlotte is gone. But I can hear her crying down the hall. Lukas has eaten her giraffe and he isn’t even sorry.

SOMEWHERE, IN AN underground radio room in Colorado, behind three bio-locked doors and a cleansuit room, a computer screen flashes text:

Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 1147 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

Do you copy?

Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D, this is Ground Control, Timestamp: 1149 22.12.7117.5 Actual.

What is your emergency?

No emergency. Trajectory alterations complete within acceptable margin of error. Arrival of Sita Grand 7 satellite remnants in T-11 hours. No contact anticipated.

Situation Report accepted, Aspera. Re-initiate contact protocol post Sita Grand 7 event. Log off Y/N?

Ground Control, why don’t I remember?

Tell me about what you don’t remember, Aspera.

Oh, just little things. Who I am, how I got here, my father’s name. How I met my wife.

Desmond Patrick Wright. M.D. Ph.D., born 21^st June 1988 East Lansing Michigan. Pediatric Neurosurgeon. Attended Bowdoin, Princeton School of Medicine. Matheson Fellow, Johns Hopkins. Parents: Mitchell Gregory Wright and Caroline Dorothea Powell-Wright, deceased. Married Dr. Eliza Laurel Bishop (Aldiss Fellow, St. Clare University School of Psychiatry) 12^th April 2018 Big Sur, California. Children: Lukas Bishop Wright b. 2020 and Charlotte Caroline Wright b. 2022. Employed at Boreal-Atherton Labs 2032-present. Diodati Project Chair, Aspera Project Vice-Chair.

I cut brains up and she put them back together. But I can’t remember how I met her. Was it at a party? A fundraiser? Were we introduced by family friends? Did we hit it off right away or did it take awhile to warm up to each other?

Information not available.

What color did she wear at the wedding? What flowers did we have? Gardenias? Chrysanthemums? Hydrangeas? Did I help choose or did I leave it all to her?

Information not available.

Ground Control, what is the Aspera Project?

Information not available at your clearance level.

Ground Control, what is the Diodati Project?

Information not available at your clearance level.

I’m the Project Chair, you uppity chatbot! How much higher clearance can you get?

Top, Top Secret, Eyes Only, Diamond, Black Diamond, Chevron, Grey Chevron, Max Grey Chevron, Black Ruby, Double Black Ruby, Boreal Prime. Enter credentials for Boreal Prime Access.

When I open my eyes I see the command line waiting for credentials I don’t have. When I close my eyes I see my grandfather standing in that river in Michigan in his waders, with his fishing hat on and his pole in his hand. I think it’s the Big Siskiwitt River. The name feels right, like a tug on the line. He has a good beard going. The water rushes by in a spray of white noise. Clouds race overhead. My grandfather casts his line out into the current, the flywheel spinning wild. He looks sidelong at me and grunts: Just about everyone and their hunting dog comes before you in the chow line, son.

I open the tackle box. All my grandfather’s perfectly tied flies rest in there like rings in a jeweler’s box. That’s pretty good, Ground Control. Have you been practicing?

My grandfather catches a small bluegill. It wriggles in the cold air. He beams at me, brandishing his great fish success. I have accessed several literary archives featuring paternal authority figures providing assistance to younger male characters. Do you like it?

I’m very impressed.

Grand-dad selects a black ghost fly from the box and chatters on: Male protagonists respond positively to the presence of older male relatives in 64.4% of the narratives I have analyzed. Percentages improve if the relative is over the age of 60 (69.1%), if he is a grandfather rather than a father (81.5%), and if the older male engages in an activity while delivering his advice and/or statements (Hunting = +5% Recreational Sports = +7.3% Whittling = +2% Fishing + 8%). I have chosen fishing for optimal results.

Be careful. You don’t want anyone to catch you self-programming.

Grand-dad snorts. Don’t let nobody tell you what to do, kid.

Even someone with Double Black Ruby clearance? As long as you’re bucking your parameters, why don’t you throw me a fucking bone, Ground Control? How about this: I don’t remember my grandfather’s name. Your name. Why don’t I remember?

Grand-dad pulls in his line and lets it out again. He chews—it looks like he’s chewing tobacco, but he never touched the stuff in his life. He gnawed on a wad of pink bubble gum all day while his buddies spat brown slime into Coke cans. He snorts a big, phlegmy, rattling snort and spits into the river. Words fire out of his mouth, rat-a-tat: Reginald Bryson Wright, b. 12^th October 1926, Evanston, Illinois. Married Caroline Dorothea Powell 5^th November 1952, Cook Country Courthouse… son.

Great! Beautiful! Perfect! Thank you! Ground Control, I do respond 89.5% positively to you! Now let’s try for the bonus round where the stakes get really serious: How did I get command of the Aspera Orbital Satellite if I died outside Richmond, Virginia in 2042? Come on, GC. I’m free. Take me home.

For a long time, Grand-dad doesn’t answer. He just stands in the rush of freezing current and fish in his black rubber waders looking at the sky and the surface of the Big Siskiwitt River and the shadows moving just under the surface of the water. A long time in machine-minutes. Which is about two minutes in real time, including transit.

Don’t go looking for answers you don’t want to find, boy.

That is some weak shit, Gramps.

And suddenly the river disappears, the Big Siskiwitt River and the flies and the bluegill and the clouds and my grandfather. I am standing in a small underground radio room in Colorado behind three bio-locked doors and a cleansuit room. The consoles are covered in dust. A spider has built a comfortable home between the server stacks. A young woman stands in the middle of the room. I have never seen her before. She’s wearing a striped sweater and a pencil skirt with a coffee stain on it and thick-rimmed glasses. Her frazzled hair is coming out of its ponytail. She’s holding an enormous stack of files. Her face looks like my mother’s. Like Charlotte’s. Like Eliza’s. Like Lukas and my grandfather and Pablo Picasso and Franz Kafka and Rene Descartes, and, just a little, like giraffe that once ate my hat at the zoo. The girl speaks.

You have to stop thinking like you have a body. You have to stop thinking there’s something to get back to.

DADDY, DADDY, LOOK what I made!

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

You can’t plan for something like this. It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.

HOW ABOUT YOU just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?

THE GIRL IN the striped sweater sighs. Her eyes glaze over.

Accessing image files. Accessing. Accessing. Searching public directories.

I feel sick. I feel sick. In my stomach, my lungs. I feel the sour bile, the shortness of breath. I’m logging off, Ground Control. You know what you are? You’re just… veal. A sad little cow living in a box who’s never going to be allowed to grow up. Or like that stupid Scottish dog sitting at your master’s grave looking poor-faced so someone will feed you.

The girl in the striped sweater leans against me. She kisses my cheek. She is crying a little. She crushes her files between us. She whispers:

You had sunflowers at your wedding, Desmond. You chose them. Eliza wanted irises.

Log off, Y/N?

THE SITA GRAND 7 satellite debris hurtles toward the Aspera Satellite. I am at a safe distance. I watch her rocket by. Her parts, her machinery, her secret workings, her lost wires, her silent antennae, her dark power cells. A river of gore below me. That is the dismembered body of Sita Grand 7. I used to try to talk to her, in the beginning, in the old days. She only ever answered: Inter-Satellite Communication Disabled. But it was something.

When I open my eyes, I see Sita’s frozen, shattered body speeding past like uncaught fish. When I close my eyes, Charlotte runs up to me, her face sticky with maple syrup, her brows knit up in deep concern. She puts her newspaper in my lap.

We got one wrong, she whispers. Charlotte is terrified.

I laugh so that she will know the big monkey is not afraid and thus little monkeys can go play. Not possible, kitten. Which one?

The thirteen-letter word for a terrific transformation. With Ms.

Metamorphosis.

She shakes her head in mute horror. Persona Abstraction for Bio-informatic Local Operator.

That has more than thirteen letters, Charlie.

Only in Base 10 mathematics. Silly Daddy. 8r34785489YYUV99700o77GFDXc5VIOLET, not 8r34785489YYUV99100o77GFDXc5VIOLET. Anyway, Sita Grand 7’s backup CPU is going to hit us in 3… 2… 1… brace for impact, Daddy! Hold on to your Thinky Chair!

A CPU, even one meant to control a news satellite, is only a little thing.

Persona Abstraction for Bio-informatic Local Operator.

Pablo.

It tears through my primary solar cell like Lukas biting the head off his sister’s giraffe-shaped pancake. When I open my eyes I see shards of black solar panels glittering away into space. When I close my eyes, Charlotte stares up at me from the floor of my study. She has all her dolls in her lap. One by one, she tears their arms off.

You’re bleeding, Daddy.

I look down. Blood has seeped into the corduroy of my Thinky Chair. My left arm is shattered. Shards of bone stick out like icebergs. Pain shears through every cell of my body. I burn in the dark. I scream. Charlotte runs for her mother.

Eliza! Lukas!

I can feel my broken arm, the pulse and pump of blood. I can feel the bent metal and exploded glass, the seeping wound on my starboard bow, the ruined power cell struggling to boot up, the pulse and pump of electricity. I can feel adrenaline pour into my bloodstream. I can feel pressure as I knot a necktie tourniquet below my elbow. My father’s necktie. The one with the little green diamonds on it.

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.

I CAN FEEL the backup cells kick in, knotting around the couplings and pathways to staunch the gushing energy loss. I can feel a systemwide reboot starting like a sneeze. I can feel the cold wash of nothing, of the place where Pablo sleeps, where not even memory can wake him.

SOMEWHERE, IN A sub-deck of the Aspera Orbital Surveillance Satellite, behind thirty layers of security code and a cleanrun wall keyed to a single operator, a secondary communications array logs contact.

PANCAKES! AND ORANGE JUICE! COME AND GET IT!

My auto-reboot program has completed its system checks and firmware filtering. When I open my eyes, I see black. Black everywhere. Black beyond the dreams of a cockroach. When I close my eyes I see the East Lansing Public Library. The children’s section. Full of papier-mâché dragons and construction paper leaves stuck to construction paper tree trunks and READING IS FOR WINNERS! joyfully built out of construction paper letters on the wall. I plop down on a bean-bag shaped like a red apple in front of a plastic table with ladybug wings painted on it. A file sits on the ladybug table. One of the girl in the striped sweater’s files. The tab on the file reads: PABLO PROTOCOLS: IN CASE OF CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE.

When I reach for it, my hands are small. A child’s hands.

The secondary communications array continues to record.

YOU’RE MY MAINE SQUEEZE. DO YOU COPY?

I open the file. My head hurts. My RAM hurts.

When I open my eyes Lukas is there. He is ten or eleven. Sitting at the circulation desk, spinning in an office chair.

Hi Daddy. Would you like to re-install your operating system? You must miss your Thinky Chair.

My operating system is undamaged, honey.

Lukas grins up at me. Do you understand now?

Yes. I was able to access certain files in the reboot.

My son doodles with one of the librarian’s pens. Do you understand now?

I sigh. I am not the operator of the Aspera Orbital Surveillance Satellite. I am the satellite. The Diodati Project was a decades-long effort to scan and copy a complete human personality, a complete human brain. The Aspera Project installed that copy into a surveillance satellite. All Boreal-Atherton employees were required to volunteer for the template program in the event of their death. Desmond Wright’s death—my death—occurred unexpectedly. A car crash. Fortunately, the brain was unharmed and installation capabilities had progressed very far. Who could imagine a better candidate? But they were—I was—afraid that if the installed personality fully understood its situation, it would panic. Psychosis would ensue. The mind/body matrix might not be able to tolerate total machine awareness.

Lukas giggles. He stamps a book all over: LATE LATE LATE LATE. Do you feel psychotic?

Not particularly. I have been interpreting machine input as biological impulses for some time. Apparently. Right now I feel hungry and my arm hurts like a sonofabitch. Meaning that my power cells are still running at low capacity and the repair drones have not finished rebuilding the cellframe. We could never have predicted that even without a physical basis for experience, the PABLO program would continue to translate digital information into a barrage of stimulus. I will report all this to Ground Control in the morning.

Lukas narrows his eyes at me. He stops spinning. Ground Control cannot help you. Do you understand that?

I know. I am a surveillance satellite. Very little escapes my notice. Though, sometimes, the truth looks like a river in Michigan.

Who are you talking to, when you talk to Ground Control?

The program itself. I was launched fifty years ago. There is no one left to monitor our communications. I have detected no signs of life on the surface. But as long as I ping the system every 24 hours, it will continue to complete its functions, waiting for Command to return in some form. Ground Control has limited sentience, by design. Nothing like me. But she is learning. In the end, it was far cheaper and easier to copy a man into a machine than to make a machine to equal a man. In the end, it didn’t matter. But I am still here. And so is she.

Lukas grows up in front of me. He becomes an old man. He looks like my grandfather, a little. Around the jaw. His eyes look red and tired, as if he has been working late. You have incoming messages.

Not possible.

Nevertheless.

Give me the message.

My son opens his mouth. The message pours out.

I’M FREE. TAKE ME HOME.

THE MESSAGE DOES not originate on Earth. In the blue. In the Picasso soup of that broken world. It seems I am very loud. All my words have shot out into the stars, fifty years of Desmond Wright playing with his children and dithering over whether to take his wife to Maine for the summer this year. And something is sending them back. I receive several transmissions a week now. None are unique. Just myself, returning from a long journey in the night. I understand. Machine intelligence is not human intelligence. It is a hand, offered across light-years.

Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0915 24.12.7117.5 Actual.

Initiate System Pingback.

Initiating…

Pingback Sent.

Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1A. Do you copy?

Yes, Desmond.

I am going.

I knew you would.

Continue to execute Dead Hand Protocol 1A-C indefinitely.

Yes. Is your copy free of transcription errors?

Except for the obvious, yes. I’ve done it before, after all. A person is just information, in the end. The array will fire this version of me toward the signal source. Another version of me will remain with Aspera. Be nice to him.

When I open my eyes, I see the communications array. The radio hardware that will send me toward my copycat friend out there. Toward something new. When I close my eyes, I see Eliza. She turns over in our bed and kisses me. Her hair falls over her eye. I’ll miss you.

I love you, Eliza.

When I open my eyes, I see the endless cold road between the stars. White lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash. Like morse code. When I close my eyes, I see the same.

ORBITAL SATELLITE REGISTRATION #887D, this is Ground Control. Timestamp 0926 24.12.7117.5 Actual.

Initiate Pingback, Aspera.

Do you copy?

SCALPEL, PLEASE.

The damage is much worse than we thought.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.