We’ve been at war with the inhabitants of the star Gliese 71 for almost a thousand years. We don’t know who they are, what they look like, or why we’re fighting.

In my earliest memories of the war, I am a child of perhaps three. I’ve learned to use the vidcaster in the living room, and all day I’ve used it to fill the space with cartoons, documentaries, real-time weather images from around the world, a live-cam of something deep blue belching smoke far beneath the ocean, people shouting at each other in languages I cannot comprehend, educational programs aimed at children much older than I, and finally the evening news. A rocket ship, all glass and mirrors and fields, appears on the carpet in the middle of the room.

My father’s voice begins describing the ship, using words I barely recognize as words at that age, much less understand. The newscaster is not my father, of course – the SI running the channel merely deduced that I would pay more attention to my father’s voice, so it simulated that to read the script.

Tiny men, no higher than my ankle, appear and board the spacecraft. A few moments later the entire affair shakes, lifts off the carpet with a brilliant flare, and vanishes into the ceiling. I gawk at it, amazed, while in the background my father’s voice drones on, unheard. I only have eyes for the column of smoke and ears for the rumbling echo of its departure.

A few minutes later, my real father enters the room. He surveys the scene and picks me up.

“You’re too young for this, Allie,” he says. The vidcaster switches to a cartoon, and my father sits with me in his lap, and together we watch something bright and colorful that I cannot recall. 

But I always remembered that ship alighting into the sky, the latest in an endless volley of spears hurled by mankind into the darkness.

[hr]

My father believed in seeing the world with clear eyes, and he wanted the same for his son. He told me stories before bed to help make sense of our times. This is one.

Once upon a time, Allie, mankind was alone in the universe.

We wondered, sometimes, if there were other intelligences out there. Other minds in the stars. People looked up at the night sky with wonder and hope. Then one day, March 4, 2071, to be precise, the inhabitants of Gliese 71 fulfilled the wishes of many on Earth by reaching out and establishing contact with our planet.

Within one second, more than a billion people were dead. 

There was no warning to speak of. A few computers at NASA and CNSA detected the loss of some distant satellites outside the moon’s orbit, and then the sky over half the world caught fire.

It took nearly a decade for humanity to fully understand what had happened – to engineer backward, from effects to cause, and guess at the weapon that had struck us. To be fair, most of humanity was simply struggling to survive in those early days, building greenhouses and nuclear power plants and enormous caverns in the bedrock to hide from the sky. We didn’t know if the next attack would come in one day or one year or never at all. Sometimes, when I read the histories of the Crisis and what came after, I’m amazed humanity simply stayed sane.

The fire in the sky was the visible result of hundreds of tons of iron dust, travelling just below the speed of light, as it impacted the upper reaches of the atmosphere. When they struck the atoms in the air, the grains of iron dust transformed into a shower of exotic particles and hard radiation that heated the air to thousands of degrees. The countless fireballs grew together, until the entire sky burned with the light of a million suns. The kinetic energy released was as if a small nuclear weapon detonated over every square kilometer of the planet.

The epicenter of the attack was over the Algerian Sahara. Every organic object within a thousand miles evaporated. The Mediterranean Sea boiled. The forests of Europe burned so hot the soils became a calcified mineral ash, white like snow. Over a dozen nations simply ceased to exist – not a single person inside their borders survived the holocaust. Years later, when the first humans reentered Greece, they were only able to identify Athens by the melted iron posts along the Piraeus port, once used for mooring ships.

Later, in a smoke-shrouded world, someone whose name is lost to time calculated how much energy it took to accelerate so much mass to such phenomenal velocities: approximately 400 zettajoules, a number so large it’s meaningless to all but high-energy physicists. It is a small but measurable fraction of the sun’s entire output for one second.

But those calculations had yet to come. In that first day, humanity’s only desire was to survive as half the world burned. The inflamed atmosphere expanded, lifting smoke and ash high into space, and as the planet rotated the glowing embers wrapped around it like bands, sparking new fires wherever they landed. Tidal waves several miles high swept across the Atlantic ocean and washed as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains, destroying the eastern seaboard. The surface of the moon melted, and for days it dominated the night sky with a double crescent – half-lit by the sun, half-lit by magma.

By the end of the first day, another billion humans were dead. A third billion would follow in the next week. The survivors scrambled to save what they could, restore some semblance of order, and find enough food for tomorrow. Humanity’s 200,000 year childhood ended, and we grappled with two dark epiphanies: we were not alone in the universe, and we were at war.

Sleep tight, Allie. Your mother and I love you.

[hr]

It is autumn, and I am lying on my back on a hillside just south of the Humanities, Arts and Sciences college at Lexington, and my eyes are closed to enjoy the late October sun in the hour between my last class and the next, and a soft red leaf drifts onto my face.

I brush it away with my fingers, about to discard it, but its rich color catches my eyes. A sugar maple leaf, brilliant and vivid like the flesh of a watermelon. I twirl it by the stem between my fingers.

Broadleaf trees, including this maple and all its friends, went extinct in the first few days after the Crisis. Ninety-five percent of all life on Earth died along with them, mankind almost included. Only thanks to the seedbanks at Svalbard and some clever genetic tinkering had we resurrected them. All that passes through the back of my mind as I marvel at this tiny miracle of life.

The dry autumn grass beside me rustles as Gynnifr rolls onto her side. Her hand reaches out, slender fingers twining with mine. She touches the leaf, running the tip of her finger along its toothed edge. 

“See an error?” I ask with a smile. Engineers, even engineer students, are always looking for ways to improve the world. 

She snorts quietly and snuggles up to my shoulder. “Leaves are allowed to have errors. It’s within tolerance.”

Joking? Maybe. Her sense of humor can be so dry it gives me nosebleeds. Rather than respond, I set the leaf on her hair and wrap my arm around her. The warm sun becomes my world again, and the soft rhythm of Gynnifr’s breath slowly lulls me back to sleep.

The alarm wakes me just a few minutes later. A tiny pulsing light appears, visible clearly even through my closed eyelids. Once the SI is sure it has my attention, the light expands into text:

>1440: UPCOMING APPOINTMENT // THEORETICAL DIPLOMACY 660 CAPSTONE

I shut the alarm off with a mental grumble. I want nothing more than to stay here, lying in the sun with my girlfriend, but I can’t afford to skip capstone seminars, not if I want to graduate anytime soon. I push myself up to a seated position and brush away more fallen leaves.

Gynnifr stirs beside me. She sits up as well, and her eyes defocus for a moment. Checking my schedule, probably. After a moment her gaze snaps back to me, and she leans forward to give me a peck on the cheek.

“Dinner tonight?” she asks.

I return the kiss on her lips. “Sure, my place?” I’ve already mentally instructed my apartment to clean the kitchen and bedroom.

“Sounds good.” She gives my hand another squeeze, and then we depart.



My advisor, Professor Goldberg, is waiting for me when I arrive in his office. I’m the only grad student in his capstone course this semester, and our seminars take the form of relaxed conversations between educated adults. His is the last course I’m required to take before graduation – only his approval and my thesis defense stand between me and a job in the Foreign Service’s diplomatic corps.

The professor’s office is a riot of greenery. Houseplants have taken over the desk, covering the antique wood with ivy feelers and leaves. A massive jade plant near the window soaks up the sun and blocks access to most of his bookshelves, which in turn are filled with seashells, driftwood sculptures and tiny, sealed diamond spheres filled with spiderworts and other aquatic plants. The blue-green curtains are sheets of living kelp, engineered to survive in an office environment rather than the mid-latitudes sea. They fill the air with a pleasant salt scent, like we’re at the beach.

“Allie, welcome.” The professor reaches across his desk to shake my hand, then gestures at the chair opposite. “Please. Tea?”

“Sure,” I say and sit. A few ambitious mosses have started to overgrow the arms of the chair, and I gently peel them away and put them on the floor, where they join a carpet of sphagnum already several inches deep. “Green?”

I sometimes wonder if all the plants are a subtle joke on the professor’s part. He is the oldest human I have ever met, nearly three-hundred years old, and his mechanical limbs fill the air with a quiet whir as he sets about brewing the tea. Chrome seams run along his joints like tattooed circuitry, a throwback to bionic prostheses developed long before he was born. For all I know, those arms might [i]be[/i] original work, which would make them some of the oldest continuously operational simulated devices on Earth.

Or maybe they’re modern limbs, made up to resemble antiques. I’ve never worked up the temerity to ask.

“There we go.” He sets a small, steaming cup before me and smiles. His eyes, at least, are modern, warm and brown and as seemingly alive as mine.

I take a small sip from the cup. The bitter flavor lingers on my tongue. It’s fake, of course – real tea went extinct during the Crisis, and no one back then bothered to save any live samples. We have only written descriptions of its flavor to go by. Still, it tastes nice, and I nod appreciatively.

“Did the committee respond to my draft yet?” I ask.

“Yes, they’re very impressed. Dean Achebe asked me to remind you that the offer for a teaching position is still open. You could be on your way to a doctorate next year, and professorship after that.”

“Next year’s too late. [i]Now[/i] is too late. We should already be reaching out to the other races. We should’ve started years ago.” By the time I finish, a heat has entered my voice. I sit up straighter. The little teacup seems like such a tiny, insignificant thing.

Goldberg sighs. “That is youth speaking. Believe me, Allie, there is always time. We could wait a thousand more years if we wanted.”

It’s an old argument between us, and I know that neither of our positions will shift. We’ve settled on either side of a divide within the discipline of Theoretical Diplomacy.

Before the Crisis, diplomacy was an art practiced between nation states. Countries nominated diplomats to represent each other in embassies or forums like the United Nations. The stakes were high, but the practice was stately, refined and gentle. Such statesmen were accorded the highest levels of respect.

Then came the war, and nation states simply stopped existing. The surviving half of humanity had no choice but to come together and forge a single government. In the blink of an eye, like so many other things, international diplomacy ended.

It might have been the beginning of a new discipline: interstellar diplomacy. Certainly, the Earth government tried. We built massive radio telescopes and used them to transmit language primers, dictionaries, full motion video, music catalogues, pleas for restraint, overtures of peace and even the terms of our surrender toward Tau Ceti. If the Gliesiens ever heard us, they never responded. Interstellar diplomacy died stillborn, and for centuries our only debates were in the form of hyperkinetic missiles, atom lasers and stellar-scale weapons.

We learned, over time, that other races lived in the stars. We hear them, sometimes – tight, highly encrypted gradio bursts and other spacetime modulations. As the war dragged on, we heard them more and more. Someone out there is watching our conflict with the Gliesiens with great interest.

We would love to talk to them. For a full decade between attacks on Tau Ceti, we focused all of Earth’s resources on communicating with these unseen aliens. We discovered new branches of fundamental science just to send them messages by quantum relay. They’ve never responded. They have no interest in speaking to us, it seems. Only watching and waiting to see who emerges victorious.

The only diplomacy in the 31st Century occurs on drawing boards, in articles posted to the thoughtsphere, and in academic settings like the professor’s office. It is, all of it, theoretical.

“The war is almost over,” I say. It’s almost blasphemous, saying it outloud like that – how many generations of humans have thought the same thing, only to be proven wrong by fire? But this time, more than any other time in the past thousand years, it might actually be true. It may even be over already. “The day that happens, we start reaching out to the stars again. You want me to be in school while humanity takes that step?”

He shakes his head. “We’d be foolish to reach out so soon. All that alien races would see is humanity, victorious and soaked in blood. Would you want to be friends with us? Best if we wait a few thousand years, until memories have faded and we’ve demonstrated our desire to live in peace. There’s no rush.”

“A thousand years?” I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. “Patience may be a virtue, but any virtue can become a vice if held too strong.”

“Exactly how I would expect a twenty-six year old to think.” The professor’s tone is light, and I can see a smile hiding behind his teacup. “In time, you’ll come to appreciate the long view.”

“Too long.” I slump back in the chair. “The most important day in the past thousand years is coming up in just a few months, and you just want to hide afterward?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’ll celebrate just as much as anyone else if it turns out we’ve won. As much as these old limbs will let me, anyway. Just don’t go confusing victory with progress. The hardest part of war has always been what comes after.”



Later that night, laying beside Gynnifr in bed in my apartment, I find myself unable to sleep despite her best efforts to exhaust me. She has given up for the moment and snoozes, her dark hair spilled out over the pillow like a fan. 

Restless, I conjure up a few recent articles on the war, projecting them on the ceiling overhead. They’re a private cast, so only I can see them; even if Gynnifr woke she would only see me staring up at the sky. 

The headlines all have the same number: 136 days. That’s how much longer it will take for the fleet’s broadcast to reach us from the attack on Tau Ceti. In 136 days, give or take, we’ll know if we won the war.

Most of the articles have the same trid video, a stellar map of the sun and the nearest stars. Sol is a yellow circle in the center, Tau Ceti (or Gliese 71, if you prefer the older name) a smaller white dot 12 light years away. The animation runs in a loop, showing the departure of our latest fleet almost 80 years ago, its arrival at Tau Ceti 11 years ago, and its maser broadcasts back to us. Those thin, ethereal waves have crossed 96% of the way back to Earth.

Gynnifr lets me know she is awake with a touch on my cheek. I banish the vidcast and turn to nuzzle her hand.

“You should grow your beard out for the anniversary,” she says. Her voice is thick with sleep.

I consider that statement. “What?”

She rouses a bit more, her eyes focusing on my chin. “Your beard. You should grow it out, like men used to. It could be, like, this long when the message reaches us.”

I capture her fingers and kiss them. “Not all men a thousand years ago had beards.”

She pushes herself up on her elbows, the blankets falling from her bare shoulders to spill onto the bed. “Yeah, but a lot of guys are doing it. It’s a nostalgia thing. And you can shave it when we’re done.”

“I’ll think about it.” And I do, for a few seconds. “What are women doing to commemorate the anniversary?”

“Mostly wearing old-style clothes,” she says. A long pause, then, “I’m thinking of growing breasts.”

I blink. A quick word-search explains what she means. “Your mammaries? Why?”

She smacks my chest lightly. “Breasts, you doof. They’re called breasts on humans. And women had them back then.”

I know that to be vaguely true from history lessons. But videos and pictures from the pre-Crisis era almost always show people with clothes, and I have trouble imagining it in real life. Gynnifr’s bare chest, pressed up against mine, is like every other human’s I’ve seen, distinguishable as female only by her slightly larger nipples and less pronounced musculature. Imagining her with anything more is surreal. What would that even look like?

A quick, subconscious image search provides the answer. Well, then. “Don’t those get in the way?”

“Uh, you can bind them with cloth or something, I think. Keeps them from bouncing. There’s guides on the thoughtsphere for how to do it.”

Guides. Wonderful. That means she’s put a lot of thought into this already. I lay my head back on the pillow. “You’re really doing it?”

“Yup.” She curls up beside me. “C’mon, it’ll be fun. Beards and breasts. Maybe some friends will want to join in.”

Well, in for a penny. I bring up my onboard’s menu, navigate through couple pages, and find the options for facial hair. They’re turned off by default. With a mental shrug, I turn them all on. Gynnifr has gone silent beside me, and a quick ping reveals that she’s deep in the menu for her pituitary gland module, making the necessary adjustments to simulated hormonal levels. 

My face starts to itch. The sensation vanishes after a few seconds, and I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.

Nostalgia can be a trap sometimes, I think.

[hr]

Once upon a time, Allie, humans didn’t know what stable meta-state materials were.

That changed when the Gliesiens attacked us with them, 93 years after the Crisis.  It was a discovery in the sense of Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas, though more from the perspective of the Native Americans.

Meta-state materials exploit quantum physics’ understanding of the state and position of atoms. By manufacturing a Bose-Einstein condensate and then – this is the hard part – using a very high frequency gamma laser to impart spin data to every particle in your particle soup, you can convince two atoms that they actually occupy the same space at the same time. Do this three or four times and your BE condensate, normally only as dense as fog, starts to become something more like water. Do it a thousand times, up until you hit your laser’s information entropy limit, and you can create something denser than any naturally occurring material outside a stellar core. A liquid so dense that a brick of solid uranium will float on top of it, barely depressing the surface.

You know the science museum downtown, Allie? I should take you there someday. One of its most popular exhibits is a hands-on display featuring a few milliliters of stable meta-state BE condensate. It appears silvery gray to the human eye, in a diamond cup on top of a diamond plinth that connects to the bedrock in the museum’s lowest floor. It has to be kept super-cold to preserve its rather confused state, but if you touch it, for just a few seconds, you feel a faint tug at your fingers, as though you have magnets embedded in your bones and the cup is filled with iron.

It is gravity. Those few milliliters contain enough matter to bend spacetime at a scale humans can detect.

Imagine a spear made of such material, about a meter long and frozen solid by space. Accelerate it to a high percentage of the speed of light (because the Gliesiens have a fetish for this sort of combat), aim it in the direction of your enemy’s star system, and wait a few decades to see the results.

By 93 AC humanity was better prepared for attacks. We had dustnets extending about a half-a-light year out from Sol, able to provide early warning of the next Gliesien attack. We’d gotten tired, by then, of sending them messages and not hearing any response, and many people were already thinking it was time to switch from purely defensive measures to something more offensive.

The second attack settled that question.

Dozens of meta-state spears were detected passing through the dustnets. The Gliesiens aim was better this time (only a small percentage of their first attack actually struck Earth – most was wasted on the rest of the inner solar system). Computers analyzed the incoming missiles’ trajectories, isolated the few that might actually hit Earth, and intercepted them with a combination of steel BBs, shaped plasma charges and – my personal favorite – thermonuclear-boosted x-ray lasers.

Only one spear came anywhere near Earth. It struck a glancing blow to the moon, knocking off a continent-sized piece of regolith that tumbled erratically for a few months before settling into an uneasy ring around its parent body. Moonrock meteorites lit the night for decades as they fell to Earth.

Once we knew such materials [i]could[/i] exist, it was only a theoretical hop, skip and jump before we started manufacturing them ourselves. The Gliesiens’ second attack thus turned out to be something of a gift, for which we’ve repaid them dozens of times over.

Sleep tight, Allie. Your mother and I love you.

[hr]

Autumn moved to winter. As always, time seemed to accelerate whenever it approached a decision I didn’t want to make. 

The Humanities, Arts and Sciences college held a holiday party at the dean’s house on campus the night before winter break. One final chance to unwind, especially for grad students on the verge of matriculation. The next few months would be a sprint toward my thesis defense and graduation. 

Gynnifr meets me outside on the porch. She stands on her tiptoes to peck my cheek, her lips playing with the short bristles of my beard.

“Hey,” she says. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” I return the kiss. “Thanks for coming, by the way. I always feel awkward at these things.”

“You should see the Engineering department’s parties,” she says. She slips her arm inside mine and drags me toward the entry. “They can get pretty wild.”

Dean Achebe and his husband are holding court inside their home. It’s more of a mansion than a house, the product of an ambitious building spree when physical universities came back into vogue a century ago. Even the student dorms would seem palatial to pre-Crisis students.

The walls all display wintery scenes, animated with falling snow and distant lights that suggest lanterns on horse-drawn carriages. Above, the ceiling displays a slowly rotating starfield centered on Polaris. I know without checking that if I go outside, the image will perfectly match the real stars.

Gynnifr and I shake the dean’s hand. His husband (Pankaj, I think?) is closer to my age, so we kiss each other’s cheeks. They take our coats like good hosts, and for a moment I’m overwhelmed by the awkward sense of being served, even in such a minor way, by people who are clearly my social superiors. It rubs my propriety wrong.

Gynnifr isn’t bothered. She’s wearing a chameleon shawl over her shoulders that adopts the color of the space around us – dark blue with pinpoints of light, here. The rest of her torso is bare, a summer fashion in defiance of the winter weather. She must be eager to show off the progress her chest has made.

“Drinks?” she asks, already smiling.

“Sure.” I see Dean Achebe moving through the light crowd of students and professors toward us, a steaming drink in his hand. “Hot cider? I might be a few minutes.”

She follows my gaze, then nods. “No problem. I see some girlfriends I need to say ‘hi’ to.” With that, she steps into the crowd toward the refreshments, her hand lingering for a moment on my arm before separating.

I turn toward the dean, who is already extending a hand for me to shake. “Sir, thank you for having us over.”

“Of course, Allie,” he says. “Events like this are my favorite part of the academic experience. I wouldn’t mind if the University someday decided to hold classes in professor’s houses. Though, I’ll allow that other professors may disagree. I like the beard, by the way.”

My hand can’t help reaching up to scratch my whiskers. “Thanks. It’s my girlfriend’s idea.” I glance around for Gynnifr, and see her chatting with a group of girls our own age. They’re dressed in archaic fashions: ruffled skirts and sheer dresses and even lacy bonnets. 

“Everyone’s doing something for the anniversary, it seems,” the dean says. “Pank and I are thinking of starting a family.”

I blink. “That’s a big decision, isn’t it?”

He shrugs. “We’ve been thinking about children for a while. I’ll be a hundred next year, you know. I feel like I’m ready, anniversary or not. Besides, if the war’s really over, what better way to celebrate the start of a new era?”

I wish I had a drink. My hands feel empty and purposeless without something to hold. “What if the war’s not over, though?”

He shrugs. “Then we’ll keep going on as we have been. But enough about me, Allie, what about you? Did Goldberg tell you about our offer?”

Decisions. Just what I didn’t want to think about tonight. “He did, sir. But with things the way they are, I think I need to be working. The Foreign Service Corps is planning to double their size within a year. It’s a good time to graduate with a degree in TD.”

“Which means there’s demand for students, too. Who’s going to teach them, Allie?”

“Professor Goldberg—”

Achebe waves a hand. “Goldberg just wants to research and write. You know you’re the only student he’s taken in years? If I tried to saddle him with a class of undergrads, he’d revolt. Probably go to Columbia or somesuch. We need someone who can train the next generation.”

I frown. “And the actual diplomacy?”

“The actual diplomacy can wait. Light only travels so fast, you know. But students? They need nurturing now.” He clasps a hand on my shoulder. “Think about it, won’t you?”

“I will, sir. I’ll think about it.” It’s the least I can offer.

“Good, good.” Achebe looks over my shoulder. “I see your friend is back. Enjoy the party, both of you.”

I turn to see Gynnifr approach with a drink in each hand. She’s somehow gained a flower, tucked in the hair over her ear. It’s blue, dusted with white snow that fails to melt at room temperature.

She hands me a mug filled with steaming cider. “Have a nice talk?”

“Not really.” I take a long sip and let the burning liquid sting my tongue. “Do engineers have these problems?”

“Nah, we’re always in demand. Good track record for the past thousand years, you know?” She turns around and leans back against my chest. “Hold me, I’m chilly.”

I snort, but wrap an arm around her waist nevertheless. “You’re half naked.”

“I know, I thought it’d be warmer in here. Shouldn’t there be, like, a fire or something?”

“That is traditional.” I look around, but don’t see a fireplace. “Wanna check the other rooms?”

She does, and we wander through the home, stopping to mingle with friends, mostly hers. They form little groups by discipline – synthetic geneticists, physicists, mathematicians, mass communications and others. As usual I’m the only diplomacist. Diplomacy is so out of fashion that only a few students graduate each year from every university in the world.

That will change soon. So many things will change, soon.

Eventually we find our way to a living room given over to traditional decoration. A Christmas tree dominates one corner, and a wide fireplace hung with stockings fills the room with a welcome heat. Broad glass doors overlook the mansion’s snow-filled backyard. Gynnifr abandons her place by my side and dashes over to the fireplace, taking a seat on the hearth. Her chameleon shawl begins to glow orange and yellow and red.

I take a seat beside her. “Better?”

“Mhm.” She arches her back, leaning as close as she can to the glass panes covering the fire. “S’nice.”

A few minutes pass in mutual silence. Gynnifr’s eyes are closed, and I can’t tell if she’s perusing the thoughtsphere or just enjoying the fire. After a moment I realize she’s humming some quiet tune in time with rhythmic shift of her shoulders.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Calories per square centimeter,” she answers instantly. “There must be some ideal value for sitting near a fireplace like this. Close, but not so close you get thermal burns. You?”

I shake my head. Engineers. “The war, I guess.”

“So dramatic.” Her hand finds mine, and our fingers lace together. “What about it, this time?”

“How odd it is that it might end on the one-thousandth anniversary of its start. I think whoever was in charge eighty years ago must’ve timed the fleet’s launch deliberately.”

“Hm.” Her eyes defocus for a moment as she browses something. “Looks like a lot of people feel the same way. There’s a whole subnet dedicated to conspiracy theories about the timing.”

“What do you think?”

She shrugs. “Sometimes coincidences are just that. Besides, does it matter? The war ends in a few months or in a few decades. We can’t lose, not anymore.”

I swallow. Hadn’t I said the same thing to Goldberg? Hearing it from someone else, the audacity strikes me cold. “Famous last words.”

“You know it’s true.” She leans her head against my shoulder. “I almost feel sorry for them. Hell, they’ve probably been dead for twelve years now, and I still feel sorry for them.”

“Even after everything they did? Billions dead? And humanity like this?”

“A thousand years ago, Allie. Almost four hundred since the Crisis ended. For all we know, none of the Gliesiens who started the war are even still alive. Maybe they want—wanted peace just as much as we did, by the end.”

I stare out the glass doors opposite the fireplace. The cold snow seems impossibly distant compared with the warmth of the fire. “Why didn’t they ever say so, then? Why not talk to us?”

“That’s the diplomat in you asking.” She rubs my arm. “It’s what I like about you.”

I turn toward her, letting her slide into my lap. “Just that?”

She grins. “Well, you’re cute, too. And that beard’s dead sexy.”

“Flatterer.” I lean down to kiss her. “Wanna go home?”

“Love to, lover.”

[hr]

Once upon a time, Allie, there was a crisis. It was so big that we called it the Crisis, and everyone knew which one you meant when you said it. They could hear you capitalize the word.

Not a single human died in the Gliesiens’ second attack, the one with the meta-state spears. In less than a hundred years we’d gone from completely defenseless to being completely unharmed by an assault from a star-faring species. We started to think pretty highly of ourselves.

We launched attacks of our own. Crude weapons, by today’s standards: multi-gigaton-yield nuclear missiles, then antimatter torpedoes. The flashes when they detonated were visible from Earth. None of them apparently hit Gliese, but it was the effort that counted, especially back then.

The war became a slow stalemate, with decades passing between attacks. Entire generations were born and grew into adulthood knowing the war only as some sort of distant curiosity, applicable to them in the same sense that the sun will someday expand to swallow the Earth, but that day is so far away we can safely forget it. Mankind slowly extended its tendrils out into interstellar space. We heard the other races out there, whispering between the stars, but none of them ever wanted to talk to us.

The last successful attack, the end of the Crisis, stuck in AC 584. An anti-proton beam sliced the Earth open like a melon. The Gliesiens had made a great deal of technological progress since tossing iron dust at our solar system. If they’d made that progress a bit faster, they might’ve won.

But they didn’t, and by AC 584 we were ready for anything. Their attack just accelerated some decisions we’d already made. After that, there was nothing more to be afraid of. The Earth’s crust was still glowing, but the Crisis was over. We cast off our greatest vulnerability, and on that day we won. Everything since then has just been a long epilogue.

Goodnight, Allie. Your mother and I love you.

[hr]

It is January, the week after the start of the semester, and it’s cold outside. The kind of day that inspires you to stay indoors and do nothing productive with your time.

I could be anywhere I want, of course. The thoughtsphere makes physical addresses obsolete. But I don’t mind being being here. It gives me time to think and time to waste. With weeks to go until the fleet’s message reaches Earth, it seems like everyone’s life is on pause. No one wants to make any big decisions until we find out what happened twelve years ago at Tau Ceti.

The model on my dining room table is a 1:150 scale replica of a Mitsubishi Corsair Medium General Purpose Lift Vehicle, the same rocket from the vidcast in my earliest memories of the war. Its ion rockets, an old but reliable technology, can lift nearly a thousand tons of cargo out of Earth’s gravity well. For combat, it can be outfitted with low-power weapons, suitable for ship-to-ship combat, were such a thing ever to occur (in one thousand years of war, it never has). Otherwise it functions as a perfectly capable logistics vessel or capital ship tender. It was the most common ship in the last fleet we sent to Tau Ceti.

The real Mitsubishi Corsair is constructed from synthetic metal amalgams, exotic matter and fields of various flavors. Half the ship is simply invisible to the human eye. Gynnifr tried to explain its construction to me once with a series of progressively simpler metaphors that finally ended as a cat on a Ferris Wheel, except the cat is made of strings that can be manipulated across the three real-space dimensions and seven micro-dimensions, and the cat is either half alive or half dead, which sounds like it should be the same thing but isn’t if you’re into quantum engineering.

My model is made of thin steel sheets, cut with a laser into hundreds of two-dimensional pieces that can be folded, origami-like, into the semblance of the rocket. It’s not accurate or functional, but the effect is somehow striking when all complete. I already have a spot by the window picked out for it.

A ping from my agent software gets my attention. It’s Gynnifr, asking if she can come over. I also notice she has a point-of-view window open over my shoulder, watching me work on the model. I give her a quick thumbs-up and return to my task.

She arrives a few minutes later with lunch. Chinese, I think – it smells sweet and spicy and tangy. She leaves it in the kitchen to stay warm and wanders past me into the bedroom. 

“Mind if I shower? Was at the gym,” she calls.

“Knock yourself out.” I hear the shower start before I’ve even finished speaking. I can’t help but smile.

When she joins me, I’m folding a small metal brace for an ion rocket fuel tank. She sits across from me in silence, nude except for the towel wrapped around her hair, and watches as I bend the thin steel with tweezers. 

She doesn’t speak until I set the piece down. “How’s the toy coming?”

I don’t take the bait. “Fine. Maybe another day or so.”

“Mhm.” She sets her elbows on the table and leans forward to examine my work. Her breasts have grown enough to have their own distinct mass now, separate from her chest. They rest lightly on the table, and I wonder if she’s gotten used to them yet. “Looking good.”

“But?”

“But what?” Her face is a picture of innocence. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it, though.”

“Mm, maybe.” She prods the model with a fingertip. “Why not just virtualize it?”

“That’s cheating. Besides, it’s not real.”

Gynnifr scoffs and focuses on the table beside the model. After a moment, a perfect replica of a Mitsubishi Corsair, fields and exotic matter and all, appears right beside its steel doppelganger. She reaches out and picks it up.

“How is this any less real?”

“It’s just ones and zeros, Gyn. You just… thought it into existence, not built it.”

“Ones and zeroes are real, doof. Welcome to, like, three-hundred years ago.”

I shrug. “Still not the same.”

She jabs a finger at me. “See? That kind of existential bullshit is why I went into real science.”

“And yet, you’re dating a diplomacist.” I reach out to snag her finger with my own. “What went wrong? Maybe, deep down, you really like profound philosophical questions with no valid answers about the nature of reality.”

“Oh, no.” She stands, hands on hips, but she’s smiling too. “Right now we’re gonna have some virtual sweet and sour chicken, then I’m taking you in the bedroom and fucking the existentialism right out of you. Copy?”

I grin and set the tweezers down. “Yes ma’am.”

There are worse ways to settle phenomenological disputes.



Spontaneous gatherings break out across the University – all over the world, really – as the countdown nears its final hours. We know from the stream of broadcasts from the fleet that their final attack is about to begin. Or was about to begin, twelve years ago. We’re all receiving dispatches from the past.

Neither Gynnifr or I want to be alone. Even being alone together isn’t enough, so we seek out other humans’ company. The quads around campus are filled with hundreds of couples and groups, reclining on the grass or on picnic blankets, food set out all around them. Faint music plays from dozens of sources, gently mixing with the babble of conversation.

I find a spot beneath a sugar maple on a little hill and take a seat against its truck. The branches above are still bare from winter, but I can see tiny buds lurking at their tips. In a few weeks it will start to send out shoots of real growth.

Gynnifr sits beside me. “I like this. It’s nice.”

“Yeah.” I look around. “Should we be… I dunno. Should we be happy or sad about this? We’re ending a war by destroying another world.”

She looks down at the quad, and is silent for a bit. There is none of the revelry I expected out there, no wild drunken shouts. Just people like us, waiting. 

“It’s like a wake, I guess,” she says. She reaches into her satchel and pulls out a bottle clear amber fluid. “I brought whiskey and sour mix, though, so we’re getting drunk either way.”

We spend a few minutes mixing drinks and ice, clink our sours together, and take a sip to start the evening. The sun is low on the horizon. Our timezone happens to align the setting of the sun with the destruction of Gliese. I ponder that for a while.

Gynnifr’s eyes are unfocused as she tracks the fleet’s stream. “They’re in position,” she says. “Five minutes.”

I nod, though she can’t see the gesture. It’s time. I close my eyes and slip into the thoughtsphere with her.



Space resolves around me. I am floating in it, without body, just a point of consciousness. A quiet ping beside me lets me know Gynnifr’s dot-avatar is near.

The fleet is below us. From this distance they appear as a thousand bright stars in a grid. Flashes of light spark around the periphery as the Gliesiens attack, but their fields seem to be holding without effort. For the first time in human history, ship-to-ship combat is actually taking place. Bright fireballs erupt as invisible lasers find their targets.

It’s just a sideshow. The main event is taking place in the center of the formation, where the capital ships have extended their manipulators. Arms and panels peel out from them, dozens of kilometers wide, until they resemble a swarm of lionfish. 

I look at Gliese. It’s green, just a tiny dot from this distance. My perspective leaps across space until I am in orbit overhead. Emerald continents crisscrossed by rivers spin below me. A massive orbital habitat rings the planet. Countless ships, unlike anything ever designed by a human mind, dart around it like minnows among coral. It’s beautiful.

The fleet’s countdown reaches zero, and the capital ships activate their fields. Their target is not Gliese, but its star. I turn to Tau Ceti to watch the impact.

We tested this process on our own star, first, to make sure it worked. Just a little tweak with long-range fields, reaching through the higher dimensions into the core of the sun to twist some of the fundamental laws of the universe in a localized space. Obviously, we were careful to make only small adjustments to our own star.

For Tau Ceti, we throw caution to the wind. Dozens of capital ships extend their fields into the star’s core, creating a localized space where nuclear fusion simply stops happening. The effect only lasts a hundredth of a second before the generators in the ships overload and fail, but it is enough. Tau Ceti begins to collapse. Pressure in the star’s core doubles, triples, and as fusion restarts pressures begin to climb an exponential ladder. The outer shell of Tau Ceti’s photosphere, nearly one percent of the star’s mass, blows outward in the largest coronal mass ejection ever witnessed outside of a nova.

The ejecta takes nearly an hour to reach Gliese. Individual ships, with their fields, can weather the assault, like sea-faring ships of old turning their prows into the waves. But a planet is not a ship – the star’s blast strikes it like a tidal wave.

Gliese’s atmosphere blows off in seconds. The crust heats, glows and peels away, revealing the mantle within. The planet, more liquid now than solid, begins to distort like a raindrop. Molten pieces the size of continents break away, connected by glowing rivers hundreds of kilometers wide. Gliese’s two moons, geologically inactive and solid throughout, simply shatter as the blast wave passes.

The transmission lasts for hours. The fleet stays long enough to ensure that nothing remains of Gliese 71, and then begins its long journey home.



It is nearly midnight when I fall back into my body. Gynnifr is already awake, swirling a fresh drink. She takes a sip, then offers it to me.

I take it and look up at the stars through the branches of the sugar maple. They look the same. Somewhere out there, other races are seeing the same images. Or perhaps they notice the momentary disruption of Tau Ceti’s emission lines. I wonder if that makes them want to talk to us.

“Should we be happy?” Gynnifr asks. Her voice is calm, but I can see she’s been crying.

“They deserved it, didn’t they?” I’m not sure I know the answer myself. “I mean, they… Have you ever turned off all your layers? Just viewed the world as it is?”

She shakes her head. “Humans were designed to live in a habitable world. Seeing it as anything else can cause anxiety or depression.” It's a rote statement, a standard warning presented by our onboards.

“I know, but… join me?” I offer my hand.

She accepts it. I open up my onboard’s menu, and walk her through the process, slowly disabling all of the layers and sensory filters and consensual reality that form our understanding of the world. 

The people around us vanish first. Little dot-avatars tagged with sequence numbers indicate their virtual positions. The buildings vanish next, leaving a rolling, dark landscape. That vanishes too, leaving just bare earth and rock. Finally I disable the climate, spectral, temperature and vibration layers, and we view the Earth as it is.

Magma flows across half the landscape. Broken shelves of rock miles high emerge from the world’s shattered crust at odd angles, succumbing over the centuries to gravity’s slow pull. An orange glow rings the horizon, fading to a deep black overhead. There is no atmosphere to speak of anymore. Dozens of new moons, ejected from the earth when the Gliesien’s anti-proton beam split the world, drift slowly across the sky. I watch them, hypnotized by their slow rotation. They are as barren and dead as the planet around which they orbit.

Finally, Gynnifr pings me with her distress. I rotate my view to see her dot-avatar shaking.

[i]Sorry[/i], I send. With a few mental twists I restore the filters and layers and deceptions, and we’re back on the campus quad, reclining beneath a sugar maple, surrounded by others still watching replays of Gliese’s destruction.

I pull her a bit closer. “You okay?”

She takes a long drink. “Yeah. Let’s… let’s not do that again, though.”

I steal another sip from her drink. It is all virtual, of course, as fake as the rest of the world, but somewhere in the center of the Earth the computer running my process accepts the notion of alcohol and adjusts its simulation of me to account. The warm buzz I’ve been riding intensifies just a tad.

“Sorry,” I say again.

“It’s fine.” She leans against me, and I can feel her shivering still.

I sit with my girlfriend and gaze back up at the stars. Around me, thousands of other ghosts do the same, contemplating the universe and our place in it, as ever we have done since humans first walked on this earth.