This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter to the left than to right. His ears are too big. And while the eyes below his frown shine with their own bright intelligence, I know immediately that he is natural<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I haven’t spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: “Who are you?” Not what I’m supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question anyone<\/i> on Eriophora<\/i> asks, after coming back.<\/p>\n
“I’m yours,” he says.<\/p>\n
I want to let that sink in, but he doesn’t give me the chance: “You’re not scheduled for this shift, but the Chimp wanted extra hands on deck. We’ve got kind of a situation brewing on this next build.”<\/p>\n
“Situation?” It can’t be good; the appearance of new crew can only mean the death of old.<\/p>\n
“Maybe a contact scenario.”<\/p>\n
I wonder how many centuries ago he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.<\/p>\n
He doesn’t tell me. He only says, “There’s a sun up ahead. Half a lightyear. It’s — flickering. Chimp thinks maybe it’s talking to us.”<\/p>\n
And Chimp’s not smart enough to deal with it on his own. They built him that way.<\/p>\n
“Anyhow…” My son shrugs. “It’s not like there’s any mad rush. You’ve got lots of time to catch up.”<\/p>\n
I nod, but he hesitates. He’s waiting for The Question, but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be pristine<\/i>, built from perfect genes buried deep within Eri<\/i>‘s iron-basalt mantle, safe from the sleeting blueshift. And yet my son has flaws. I see the damage in his face, I see those tiny flipped base-pairs resonating up from the microscopic and bending<\/i> him just a little off-kilter. He looks like he grew up on a planet. He looks borne of parents who spent their whole lives hammered by raw sunlight.<\/p>\n
How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us to get here? How long have I been dead?<\/p>\n
How long<\/i>? It’s the first thing everyone asks.<\/p>\n
This one time, I don’t want to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter to the left than to right. His ears are too big. And while the eyes below his frown shine with their own bright intelligence, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiblet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}