The Fiction Issue #2

But a Walking Shadow

So I chose. And so we stayed.

Maybe half a dozen of their ships were destroyed before they breached our shields. In the minutes we bought with our lives, a few more transports could have escaped Prospera. Thousands more survived. And now here we are.

I blame myself.

***

I remember the smell of her body, of the chemicals on it, after the doctors ended her life. I remember the faint scent of her perfume that hung in the air of our quarters. I remember the smell of our love-making, which smells a lot like fear and work, but is neither. I remember the stench of the disease in her, even though I know that was just an "Olfactory Stimulus: Imagined."

Annie hated space flight. Every part of it. She hated the stale, recycled air. She hated the rhythmic thrum of the engines that caused every wall to vibrate, if only slightly. But more than anything else, she hated the idea of being surrounded by nothingness. When we were in the fleet transport that took us to Prospera, she insisted on covering all of the portholes with curtains.

When I asked Annie to upload, to keep living even when her body died, she said she wouldn't. She told me that if she went into the Wheel, she would lose the parts of herself that had touched me, had held me. That so much would change, when I saw her next, she wouldn't be Annie. But I wonder if what she really feared was the knowledge that in the Wheel, there is really is nothing - even less than there is in space, which has its distant planets and suns and drifting molecules of gas. Whatever the reason, she died, and left me alone.

My crew and I didn't have a choice. Standard procedure mandates the uploading of military personnel killed in action. The enemy left the hull of our ship behind, too busy with their invasion to bother finishing the job. Weeks later, when they found us and put us in the Wheel, the war had turned in our favor.

Arthur assures me that, without attachments, you fit easily into this new existence. He explains that after a while you stop using the simulators, because the things we felt as humans are worn and faded beside the wonders of the Wheel. DeLilo will forget his wife, because the DeLilo who bothered with things like love no longer exists.

But after Arthur says this, he hesitates for a moment, and looks down at a flickering ring on the projection of his finger. It's the phantom pain of another life, a life separated by an endless expanse of empty, white space. He must have once realized what I now know: that we are walking shadows, living nothing but a make-believe existence in the wires of a machine. That we will fade, as memories do, losing meaning and substance. That our new existence isn't the end of decay, but the beginning.

Mark Yohalem owes the inspiration to "But a Walking Shadow" to many things, but perhaps first among them the wonderful, if maudlin, Circuit of Heaven by Dennis Danvers and the incomparable The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.