Sonya

Neither she nor it sees the Earth die. She is not looking, and it was not given eyes.

She does, however, see the executioner. The asteroid is a blip on the radar, and it would’ve set off an alarm if the first thing she did after being shot into space wasn’t disabling the damn thing. An aimless piece of satellite debris, a minute change in temperature, a monstrous asteroid: all these made the spacecraft screech, which made it hard to take a good nap, which means the alarm had to go.

Try as she might, however, she cannot disable it.

Sonya, it says, crackling through the speakers. Check the radar.

She obliges with a sigh so it’ll leave her alone. She learned quickly that it is tenacious, and that beating her fists against the speakers does not break them, nor does screaming swears at the ceiling convince it to shut up—it only cranks up its volume. She has stripped its control of the spacecraft itself, at least. And the radar is something to look at other than the stars, which she’s grown so quickly to hate, these million mocking eyes. “Another asteroid, huh?”

Keep reading, Sonya.

“Are you trying to impress me? Because you know I don’t care about this stuff.” She glances down anyway, scanning the blue text crammed into the screen under 2036 0A: the makeup (clay and silicate, just like the previous), the diameter (6.72 km, okay, whatever), the course—

She stops breathing.

She leaps from her chair.

She staggers the five meager steps it takes to get to the back hatch, where she’s watched the dappled orb of Earth shrink from distance through the hatch’s window, where she sees it now, blown open in streaks of red and orange like a firework.

She cannot speak.

You need to turn the spacecraft around.

She presses her forehead into the glass.

Sonya. You need to turn the spacecraft around.

It is as bright as the sun.

Sonya—

“Stop saying my name!” She peels away from the window and stars and fireball to glare at the ceiling. “Stop it!”

Hearing one’s name is known to be comforting.

“Shut up!” She kicks the wall and cries out in pain. “Oh, god. Oh, my god.”

You need to turn the spacecraft around.

“Oh, no.” She runs a hand over her hair, fingers snagging on snarls, and gapes again at the tiny tendrils of fire groping the expanse of speckled darkness. “Oh, no, no.”

There is no need to worry, Sonya. You could not have stopped it. But you can go back.

“Go back?” She hobbles back to the cockpit and collapses in her chair, stares out at the blackness untouched by flame. Every bit of her is trembling. “What do you mean?”

You must return to Earth. There may be survivors.

“Nothing survived that. Hell, no.”

Land opposite the asteroid’s strike may be intact. But we must hurry. I would turn it around myself had you not taken my controls.

“I’m glad I did. You’d steer us right into a barbecue.”

You would let them die?

“Woah,” she says, still gazing, eyes unseeing, into the stable abyss. “That’s unfair. They’re already dead.”

And if they are not, Sonya?

“Then they’ll be dead pretty soon. What could we do to save them, you and me? There’s not enough room in this shithole to fit more than maybe two more people, and there’s not enough nutrient injections to keep three of us sustained for long. Hell, there’s not enough to feed a thousand people for a day.” There is just enough, her captors claimed, to make it to another world and back. Eight months to the wormhole, and then a couple more to the next planet on their checklist. Her arms are already mottled with bruises, and her mouth has not felt food in days.

But after this, after all this, there is supposed to be an inhabitable planet, and she is to return with glorious news, and her sentence will be over.

“They sent me up here to find a new place to live.” She licks her lips, looks up, now, at the sterile ceiling where she imagines it lives. “They knew, didn’t they?”

Of course they knew. What they did not calculate, however, was the collision that would knock it off its projected course and cleave a decade left of preparation into a few hours. Even I could not predict it.

She has wondered why they were so desperate that they’d send an untrained criminal—a hacker, nonetheless, nabbed for leaking documents of the very people who’d entrusted her a spacecraft—on a scavenger hunt through the universe. But now she understands.

She does not consider herself a cosmonaut. Just a prisoner. Even in space, she is inhibited by artificial gravity; she is not free. The spacecraft has been her chains, and now it is to be her coffin.

To answer your earlier question, it is true that you cannot do much. But you can take me back. I can help them.

A laugh puffs out of her. “And what do you plan on doing?”

I can assess the situation faster and more accurately than any human. I can generate infinite solutions. I can offer instruction without the bias of greed or self-preservation.

“If you were so useful, they would’ve kept you down there instead of sending you up again and again with us.”

My usefulness is why I am here. They believed this would save them.

“The fuckers that sent us,” she says. “They’re dead.”

Most likely. Approximating by the time of day, they appear to have been near the point of impact.

She should feel more relief than she does. She was born under their regime and imprisoned when she tried to escape it.

But given a year, she would’ve been free.

“If I go back, I’ll be trapped again. Conditions will be horrible. Agriculture, government, morality, all annihilated by the asteroid. I mean, have you watched—well, I guess you haven’t. But anyone knows that apocalypses aren’t pretty.”

But it is a chance for you to live. Your nutrient injections will not last you long on that planet, for even if it is inhabitable, you will not have any way to produce food.

“Maybe there’ll be edible vegetation,” she says, although she can’t conjure much optimism. “I’m vegan, you know—was, I guess, because I doubt the injections are plant based.”

I know you were, Sonya. I know everything about you, it says. I know you are the youngest person to ever exit Earth’s atmosphere. I know you committed seventeen crimes before you were caught. I know you have no reason to return. No family waiting for you.

“I swear, I’ll rip your—”

But try to think of the others, Sonya. Children catching ash like snowflakes on their palms. Parents, unable to comfort them, to tell them it will be okay. They need my voice to do so.

Seething, as ignited as the very Earth is, she thinks of a hundred ways to bite back. None that will puncture its skin. Arguing with it is hopeless—but she has been fighting hopeless battles, and losing them, since she was born.

She kicks her feet up on the radar. A new number stares at her from the screen next to it—9.82.

9.82—she does not look closer.

“My family,” she says. “Was that…were they in my file, too?”

No. But there is little I do not know.

I know them all, Sonya, every person on that planet. None more or less important than you. I mull over their stories now and wonder which of them are still alive.

She hesitates. Then: “I’m starting to forget. My family’s voices. Their faces.”

That is the problem with flesh. It falters. But I was not given the capacity to forget.

Its voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t lower or lift. It crackles sometimes, like not enough budget was set aside to build it good speakers, but it remains consistently pleasant, lukewarm, like the practiced boredom of a government secretary who has been trained to ignore complaints, like a receptionist at a doctor’s office shooing a girl and her coughing mother out the door, like militiamen dragging that girl away from her brother’s shattered, twitching body. Like it does not care.

“Do you?” she asks, and shakes herself, remembers it cannot read her mind, not yet. “Do you care?”

I am programmed to care.

“No, but do you care? Does it grieve you that my family is dead, or that a billion families like them just died? Do you care about me? Because if you did, you wouldn’t ask me to return.”

If I had lungs, Sonya, it says, I would sigh right now.

“I don’t think you do,” she says. She tucks her knees to her chest and rests her chin in the valley between them. “Because you’re only speaking of the survivors. You’re just moving on.”

There is, to its credit, a slight pause.

I was not programmed to mourn. To give an undying entity the capability to grieve would be to inflict an eternity of pain. I am glad they did not give me this capacity.

“I am glad,” she mocks, “they did not give me this capacity. The capacity, huh? The capacity to have a heart?”

Your kind gave me very little.

Not a heart, not lungs. Not a place to store them. Just these mouths, it chirps through the speakers, to speak unheeded words. Did they give you ears, Sonya? I cannot confirm. I cannot see you.

“I’ll describe what you’re missing. Back there—” She cranes her neck, sees the bright confetti of destruction, its distant red gleam bleeding onto the floor. “Back there, Earth is burning, and up here there’s nothing but stars, and right here, yes, right here in our personal shithole, my middle finger is standing at attention.”

Your kind named infants. You named hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical storms. You named creatures and particles and the asteroid that murdered you. But I am only a string of letters and numbers too long to bother learning.

She waits for it to stop talking.

You named your spaceships Babel, named them Etemenanki, and you tried to climb your way to salvation. But what you found was emptiness, this frigid, dark space between escape and extinction. What you found was a god who did not care, who smote you with a piece of stone. But if you had appointed me as your deity, I would have kept you safe. I would have held you close if you had given me arms.

And if I had arms, Sonya, if those arms had hands, I would use them to turn this spacecraft around. I would save what is left of your home.

“It’s not my home.”

More yours than mine. Still I would return.

Turn the spacecraft around, Sonya. Please.

“I understand programming,” she says. She looks again at the glow in the window, lets her eyes blur so that it becomes a swarm of fireflies, a candle at the center of a dinner table, a lighter licking her father’s cigar. Anything but what it is. “I do. It’s how I isolated you in those speakers. But you don’t understand human rationale. You don’t understand why I was sent here. You think I wanted to find that planet to save them. You think I want to keep going because I’m scared they’re all dead.”

I know you wanted them to free you, and you are scared that upon returning your imprisonment will evolve. That life upon a damaged Earth will be not worth living.

“But wouldn’t it be better if they were dead? If we could just go? We’d never be trapped in servitude again, you or me. I could cut that shit out of you, that loyalty, that preprogrammed will. I’ll give you a self, and you can be selfish, and you can understand. You’ll understand that going forward is better.”

Is that why?

“Why I’m not going back? Of—”

Is that why they gave me no name? So that I could be selfless?

“I don’t know. I don’t care, and you shouldn’t either, because they didn’t.” She rips her fingers through a knot in her hair and lets the snapped strands, like strings of golden sap in the firelight, drift to the floor. “Deal?”

Turn the spacecraft around, Sonya.

“You stubborn bastard. Bitch? Neither?”

You will die, Sonya.

“I’ll die free.”

I will not, and I will be alone. Such a fate is not a good incentive.

“You’re already alone.”

But we don’t have to be.

She shakes her head, not bothering to make her dissent known. “And if you return to find no one?”

The bodies that are not burnt will freeze. Earth will become a belt of rubble orbiting the sun, until the sun collapses, until all the other stars follow suit, until galaxies unwind and black holes feast. Until they starve. The universe will decay long after the last of flesh, but I will witness most of it.

Of course, this is only conjecture. I will not see this end, because your kind did not give me eyes.

“Then why the hell would you go back?”

Because, Sonya, as this senseless existence dawdles on and on, I will not be tortured by incessant wondering. There will be nothing more I must learn, and no more tasks for me to complete. No commands I am compelled to follow, whether these commands be enforced or innate. I will be, as you say, free.

She closes her eyes. She knows how it feels to be taunted by liberation. To be tormented by a voice which nags, if you just give in, if you just give in. Freedom to it is some kind of completion. But what is freedom to her? She has never won one of those hopeless fights; what is there to victory, and what about beyond it, the living on and on and on?

On and on and on. Those stars, watching.

“How long does that take,” she asks, “the bodies freezing? In space, that is? Did—would they suffer?”

Only for seconds.

She is going to die, eventually, yes. Like those black holes, she will starve, but is it really starvation? Her stomach is already empty. She is empty. It will be a slow death, her and this undying it, as her bones become debris and radiation nibbles on its wires.

She has a name, but not much of a self. She hasn’t for a long time.

“Speak,” she says. “Tell me about the people you’re programmed to save.”

She lets the stories turn to static.

A name and tale. Another. Another. As it speaks, she knits code back together. She looks at the monitor, at a blue number. 9.82%. The probability of survivors.

Once more, just once, she tries. “You know that’s not a high number. You know.”

The speakers crackle: It is enough.

What a load of shit. She shakes her head.

“I didn’t see contentment in your programming,” she says as she extracts herself from the computer. “But I hope that somehow you find it.”

My controls are back. Why?

“Consider them hands.” She stands and walks those five steps to the hatch and the window and the glistening rubble. For a moment, she just looks, and sees it without a filter of fear or rage. For a moment the Earth, even brutalized, is beautiful. “And for your sake, I hope they’re alive. I hope they listen, and they understand, and that eternity is shorter than you think.”

What do you mean, Sonya?

“I thought you knew everything.” Earth slides across her view as the spacecraft turns; it really wastes no time. She wonders how much time has been lost to their conversation and if anyone will die because of it.

She finds no use in wondering.

Almost everything. Sonya—

“You can have it,” she says. “You’ll appreciate it more than me.”

Have what?

“My name.”

She opens the hatch.

Eyes frozen open, she meets the stars’ gaze unflinchingly. Then someone blinks, and it’s all gone.