io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Death Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee. Enjoy!
Death Echoes Overlapping By Megan Chee
On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the customs of each person’s native community. This was the most sacred of tasks. Carelessness or disrespect was not tolerated; just one mistake meant immediate dismissal.
The interstellar megacivilization of Tau Andromeda was built across five planets. Every day, millions of the dying and the recently dead were ferried on great funeral ships to the necropolis station. It was best if they arrived before drawing their last breath, but that was not always possible.
When a body was ready, the keepers of the tomb harvested their death echoes in glowing thuribles. The thurible breathed in the energy from the death echoes, until the core was saturated with pale blue light. The energy was channeled through a series of metal pipes, culminating in an immense vat at the center of the space station, which was in turn distributed to the energy grids of each of the five planets.
To the people of Tau Andromeda, the act of dying was no tragedy, but a gift given gladly in return for the pleasures of life. Their megacivilization lived in peace and plenty, fueled by the passing of those who came before.
But aeons passed, and no golden age stays golden forever. Civilizations rose and fell on the five planets of the Tau Andromeda system. There were schisms and wars and reunions. There was disease and disorganization. For a time, the rise of new religion saw the decline of the death echo harvests, with the old practice suddenly seen as archaic and heretical. Eventually, the population of Tau Andromeda dwindled and died out.
Now, the planets of Tau Andromeda are overgrown with wildlife, nature reclaiming the skyscrapers of a once-advanced megacivilization. The keepers of the tomb are long dead. The necropolis station hangs silent in space. The tombs remain, preserved eternally in the cold dark expanse.
• • •
Millions of years after the golden age of Tau Andromeda, civilizations on three different planets are destroyed. Their deaths are almost instantaneous. One is swallowed by a gamma-ray burst. One annihilates itself with a weapon of mass destruction. One collapses under a swarm of matter-devouring nanobacteria, self-replicating at astonishing speeds: an undiscovered lifeform introduced to the planet by a small asteroid.
These three planets are in different galaxies, vast distances away from one another. Their civilizations have no concept of the others’ existence. It is a physical impossibility for anyone from any of these worlds to ever meet. But in their moment of destruction, their death echoes—that strange energy, only ever truly understood and measured by the keepers of the Tau Andromeda necropolis space station—ripples out across impossible distances. Their death echoes overlap and reverberate through space and through time.
• • •
Earth, AD 2237. It is monsoon season on the Singapore Strait. The rain cascades in heavy sheets, drumbeat-loud against the metal platforms of the Singapore Floating Archipelago.
Esther sits on the top level of the watchtower. She sips a cup of watered-down kopi as she keeps a bored eye on the dashboard set up on her desk. She is supposedly monitoring for unauthorized foreign activity on the storm-tossed sea: motorized sampans that abandoned the Jakarta Megaship’s endless voyage around Indonesian waters, or submarines that drifted away from the Undersea Federation of Malaysia.
As usual, there is no unauthorized foreign activity to be found. She is increasingly aware that her job at the Department of Security is a defunct role, a symbolic gesture of the government’s protection. Nowadays, there are no pirates, no organized crime, no drug trade. There aren’t even any refugees. No one is fleeing from their homes in the hope of a better future, not anymore.
While wars rage across the rest of the world, the superpowers of east and west tearing each other apart over the remaining slices of habitable land, their forgotten corner of Southeast Asia is slipping quietly away into the rising ocean.
A cartoon envelope pops up at the bottom of the monitor, an old-fashioned symbol indicating that she has received a message. Esther sighs but clicks on it anyway. As expected, it’s from Wei Jie.
“can we talk? after work”
She replies: “maybe weekend,” and then mutes the interdepartmental chat.
She ended her relationship with Wei Jie last week. She doesn’t feel particularly sad about it, but Wei Jie seems to feel enough for both of them. He sobbed through the short, awkward conversation. “Is it because I keep nagging you about the baby permit? I’ll stop bringing it up, I promise. Maybe next year we can think about it.”
It’s not about the baby permit, although she was indeed baffled that he actually still wanted to reproduce, even with the last remnants of human civilization on the brink of extinction. It’s his obliviousness. It’s the fact that he genuinely believes there will be a next year, and a year after that. The fact that he works in the Department of Home Affairs but still somehow failed to notice that no one’s baby permit applications are getting approved anymore. That, if nothing else, is a clear signal that there are no future generations to plan for. Their only priority now is to make sure that the citizens who are currently alive can keep on living in decent conditions for as long as possible.
Once she began to feel the blunt edge of contempt, she knew the relationship was over.
Unfortunately, he can’t seem to accept what is blatantly obvious to her. What is the point of this obstinate refusal to accept the truth? He’s not the only one. There are so many people still valiantly planning for an impossible future, still willfully blind to the facts. Esther accepts the imminent end, lets the inevitability of it wash over her and through her. It’s okay. Sooner or later, everything returns to the sea.
She gazes out at the raging, empty ocean. She knows with a deep, self-satisfied certainty that she has nothing to complain about. Throughout history, billions of people led short, brutal lives and died unpleasant deaths. She, at least, has been privileged enough to live for thirty-five years, and although it’s mostly been a slog, she can’t deny it was interspersed with brief moments of happiness, maybe even love. She feels flatly contented.
• • •
In the verdant meadows of the planet Autura, the Collective morphs into the Farmer. The Collective consists of trillions of tiny Units. The Units are miniscule insectoid creatures with shiny black exoskeletons.