Remembered Images...

I look at the pictures he sent the day he found out where I’d gone, the day before he died. I want to feel it all. I want to cry or something, but I just can’t. I wish our last days had been different. I don’t apologize, not even to myself, but I am deeply sorry.

The alert board in my quarters had shown a transmission had arrived for me and I’d just gone down to the datacenter to pull a chip of my data. I expected the transmission would one of my own research banks that I’d asked the registrars to send out this week. Hadn’t wanted the banks sent before I arrived because I knew he’d be watching for my tags and such transmissions would tip him off to my whereabouts. Angry as I was, I didn’t know if I was strong enough to resist if he tried to stop me.

I actually wasn’t sure what I’d just picked up, since it was sent from a public data exchange. I just figured it was something I wanted, because very few people knew where I was. It was far too soon for the solicitations and any worrisome social stuff to start coming through, though I was sure all of that would catch up to me eventually.

I had a lot on my mind and was walking fast, staring at the floor, concentrating on the mental soundtrack constantly playing in my brain. Track after track, album after album yielded to the next, inexorably, in the order in which they had played for years. If I listened hard, I could hear the scratches on my favorite old phono-disks left behind in our living room. I kept moving and kept my eyes down, hoping no one would interrupt my disciplined reverie.
My purposeful tunnel-scope, did nothing to lessen the ice-cold clarity of what happened in the sky below us that hour. We all saw the same spectacular lightshow beyond the starboard view pane.

We all shared the same stunned silence, and, no doubt, we had all lost something irreplaceable…but that was the extent of our common ground. I’d been onboard a few days, long enough to see all the petty bickering and to detest the place and all the grown-up children in it. I’d fled to this place to spite my father. What a heady rush it was to a stupid girl with no practice in vengeful behaviour. What did they know of reason or of loss? Most had relocated their whole families to these artificial; stars. . For a few days after we lost our home, things had been quieter. The shared tragedy seemed to pull all the factions, all those self-righteous, self-proclaimed outcasts together…except me. I hadn’t wanted to be there before the blast, and I didn’t want to be alive at all afterward. Watching the rivalries evaporate as superficially as they had, no doubt, begun only sickened me more.

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