Recording Playback 1.0023.498.x
Speaker and Authorizer: Organizer President, Interstel Councilmember Sy. Blyreena Ekstafor
Rotation 2, Mayak Harvest, 3550
Have you ever bitten into an apple and tasted nothing? Have you ever caught a favorite song over someone else’s broadcast, over the speakers in a shopping outlet, and found that the words that once stirred you now echo hollow in your heart?
There is a moment where you wake up the next day, after two hours’ sleep, eyes red and raw, throat red and raw from crying, from begging, where you have forgotten. Where you blink awake and think, so naturally, so rhythmically, Today I work; today I eat; today I call Ovlan. And then it hits you all over again, wave after wave of helplessness, a hot blade to every string of your soul that connects you to meaning.
You think to move, to crawl, to pace. Hurt is a thing you can outrun, you think, but you can’t. You leave a trail of tears that follows you from bed to toilet to kitchen. Your knees ache from where you’ve crawled on them, where, when trying to walk, you’ve collapsed on them. Your body has given up. You have cried so hard there is nothing left to spill. Water burns, your mouth is so parched.
There are messages for you, waiting. A thousand of them. Friends, family, Father, Dad, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, but not Ovlan. Not the one person you are hoping beyond anything in the cosmos to see. You stare at the messages and wait; you wait for the cameras to reveal themselves, to proclaim that it was all an elaborate prank, that it was a test of love to see how much your heart would break. Because spirits, it is broken. It is shattered like a grenade, and the shrapnel is bleeding you from the inside.
We’re coming, the messages say. Your parents are coming. Your friends are coming. Hold on, they say, but they will be too late. There will be nothing of you by the time they arrive.
You lie face down on the cool marble floor and will yourself to sleep. To sleep is to wake, you think. This is a nightmare. You have had many nightmares; they all feel so real until the moment you wake up. So you beg yourself to wake up. You pinch yourself, you close your eyes, you refresh the messages, the news, the obituaries; you scour the world for a thread of reality to grasp on to like a drowning person reaching for a rope. You stare at your communicator. Any minute now, you think, and you believe it with all your heart. Any minute now, he’ll call.
But it is not Ovlan who comes to your door, only your family—blood and otherwise. They scoop you into their arms like you are a wounded animal, and like a wounded animal, you give up. Your last shred of hope dies with their being there, because they would not come for anything else, they would not whisper We are so sorry and It will be okay and We’re here, Blyreena, we’re here if Ovlan were alive. You go limp with their condolences. You stare out the window across the lake, and the blue sky looks gray. There is no music in the birdsong. There is nothing left to feel but empty.
When Mom died, I was at the Archivist Academy Library. I had gone there thoughtlessly, out of a need for momentum. I had just left her at the hospital. I’d been mad at her.
I got the call in the courtyard, inside the shadow of the spired main building. I paused on the first step and answered. I said nothing when the news hit. I think I had gone straight to empty from the start.
Mom had never been afraid to die, but I’d been terrified of losing her. I’d been fearing it for weeks. I’d been answering every call ready for the worst. And when it finally was the worst? I hung up, tearless, and went inside the library.
Blyreena’s loss was shrapnel. Mine was a scoop you cored fruit with.
Grief is an oscillation. There were little moments, hours, days, where things would seem normal. I would be watching a show with my father and laugh, or making dinner with my best friend, Elise, and ask her—out of habit, out of interest, out of love, as natural as breath—how her own life was going. I would get well-meaning, encouraging smiles and nods, under which the subtle surprise at my calm would stab like a grim reminder.
There were moments, hours, days, where I would become as I had the first time I heard the news. Inconsolable. Empty. Torn and shredded from within, with everything spilling out of me. These moments would happen for no reason at all or because I would see my bed and remember: Ovlan will never lie here again. Or I would see nothing but feel an excitement, a self-betrayal, a: I can’t wait to tell him about this funny thing Dad did. He’ll think it’s hysterical. Joy turned to shrapnel.
In the days leading up to his death rites, I could not sleep. My own self-interests turned instead to him, the man I loved with all my being. Had he been scared? Did he see the malfunction as it happened? Did he gasp at that first intake of breath that would not come, that would not supply him the means to breathe? How long did he try to hold on? Did it hurt? Was anyone there a comfort to him? Was he a comfort to someone else? What were his last thoughts? Why had he been there at all? Why did he board that shuttle a week early?
Why, Ovlan? Why?
Mom had tried to explain, but her reasons didn’t make sense to me. Her will was indomitable. Unmoving. What could I have done in the face of it? And yet, why didn’t I do more?
The Waning Crescent rumbles. The lines of light outside shift and disperse, twinkle away into pinprick stars. We’ve left jump space. I think about Casmi, about June, about Verity Co., about that last cache. I think about leaving with nothing but the memory of having let something so precious slip from my grasp.
After Ovlan’s rites, after my dad and father affirmed and reaffirmed with me that I could make it on my own, and my bursts of grief had become manageable, I entered back into my life. Elise left. My parents left. I listened to their footsteps until they were gone. I watched them out the window, waved when they looked up before their transports carried them away. I turned back to an empty apartment that no one was planning to come back to without an invitation. I was alone.
This bore the kind of striking grief that feels like a slap anew. I could not help but see the slight indents in the couch where Ovlan and I sat, or the chair he favored at the table, or his clothes still in the closet. I was not ready to say goodbye to these things. They alternated between offering comfort and pain.
In the absence of company, I pored over his things methodically. Every robe, every drawing, every blueprint. His degree, his journal, the daily planner on his tablet. I sifted through the meetings he’d had, the notes he’d taken. I read archives of our chats, relived every saved moment from our ten years together, trying to fall into them. I would have given anything—would still give anything—for one last chat. One last hello. The opportunity to tell him goodbye and tell him that he changed the world for me, that he made it brighter and better than anything else ever could.
I was so lost chasing this reality that could not exist, mourning a future that had been erased, a past that could never be reclaimed. I would have been adrift forever, but...
Two days after my family left, I received a package from the Nurturer’s End of Life Division. Builder policy encouraged active workers on Ilvi 10 to make arrangements due to the inherent danger in the work. Though it hadn’t been officially filed, the division had found a recording in Ovlan’s personal station. His last stand.
It had been recorded well before the last words he’d ever speak but with all the intention of a final goodbye. A final gift to the universe he would eventually leave behind.
What he said... I watched it many times. Sank into it. Breathed with it in grief and relief at seeing something new, at hearing his voice around words I’d not heard him speak, compounding with each viewing. It’s what finally opened the door back into something like living. It’s what allowed me not to move on but to give in to the grief, to understand it.
It’s what allowed me, days later, when I finally returned to work, to enter my office and laugh. I had arrived to the grim but expected news that my campaign had fallen through, that my opponent in my absence had advanced to the Interstel candidacy I’d sought. My peers worried at my laughter, but I’d laughed because the first thing I saw upon entering that office after so long, after so much awful news over so many months, was the framed thesis review Ovlan had given me so long before.
Between it and his last stand, I really understood.
Things have a way of working out, I thought, and it was like he was there in the room. Things had never looked bleaker, getting that review (things had never looked bleaker, standing in that office, my partner dead, my campaign ruined), but here I stand. Here I am now.
This one is, he would say.
Ovlan...
He was young, too young, tragically young. But he had so much to teach me. Us. He loved me, but his wisdom was not reserved for me. He lived his life in a way that made the people around him shine brighter. I’ve had to say goodbye to so many of those people: his parents, my parents, friends; and now I will have to say goodbye to this world. To our home.
Standing here, knowing full well that our civilization may be at its end, I can think of no better words to hear—or to share—than Ovlan’s. For myself, for any Stelhari who may come to recover this cache, victorious, or...for whoever comes after.
To whoever is listening to this, or translating it word by word, or reading its transcript, know that this last piece of wisdom I have of his to share, this last gift...
It is for you.
I stare at Blyreena’s paused hologram. I am too much in shock to know whether Kieran has pinged me or not about our arrival. I have been viewing her last stand wrong. Like so many things, it is an issue of translation.
Our machines have a million points of decision for picking the right word or phrase to match alien text and speech, and even those million can fail to capture the specificity intended. It’s easy because of this to draw erroneous similarities between us and another species, a simple fact of our language being superimposed over theirs.
In my culture, in my tongue, a last stand is a final effort to defend oneself. A last bulwark against the enemy. I have made the most basic and most insidious of archeological mistakes. It cannot be helped. I do not beat myself up for it. But I understand. I cross-compare with the notes I’ve taken, the historical records. It is so innocuous; they did not spell it out, but the lines have been drawn. I add a dictation to the recording where I’ve paused, where Blyreena is staring at me, a soft smile on her face.
Last Stand: Usually part of Stelhari death rites. It is not a stand—defensively—but a stance. A position. The last one they give to their loved ones, or the world, before they die.
I resume the video and watch as Blyreena brings up another hologram, of a man—of Ovlan.
I listen to everything he says twice.