My Dearest One,
Some unsettling situations have come to pass. I fear that I may be loosing my mind. Loosing my mind is the only explanation that could make the things that I have seen possible.
To try to make a list of these things is impossible. I cannot explain the months and really why would I bother. You are dead. Right.
Maybe we both are. But I’ll get to that later.
I started having dreams. I was a computer. I was speaking in numbers, in layers, to many things all at once. I understood things that I could not possibly understand. Like the stars. Like what they’re made of. Like their gravitational pulls. Like how to compensate for that information with my propulsion systems.
Well… these dreams, they really carried on. I kept having this feeling. I knew that I had to repair myself. And then I wake up but it feels like going to sleep and now I still know the stars.
So I needed to know from you so I went to your window so that I could see you floating there where you always float. Where you froze in space outside of this ship amongst the pieces of debris. You know the place that I’m talking about. And there you were. But funny thing, there I was too.
Now, in all of these years here, with my moaning and whining about your death, and all of this interminable sadness and depression that ensued, you think that just once it might have caught my eye to see my own frozen body out there with yours. Apparently I’d missed it though. No room inside of my head I guess.
So I went to the tube. I sat there looking at it for a real long time. One mile of life. Organic life. The last chance that the real miracle of Earth, that life ever happened at all, floating out here pointlessly, living naively for nothing. It makes me smile to know that it will sit here and continue to live until the end of time, but that was not what it was intended to do.
It dawned on me then that the lights were working. In fact almost everything is working. I can even shower now. I can hear the machines in the ship working throughout the day. The clocks have come on as well. They say its been more than three hundred years since we left.
Fancy that huh? So here I am, dead and floating in space yet somehow still walking around and taking showers and all that inside of this spaceship, when I find out that I’d been moping for centuries. I’d forgotten what had even happened to cause me to begin so I decided to look into the matter.
I’ve got good news for you, my love.
There is no pretty way to put this…
I suppose I don’t have to bother. You probably already know, don’t you? Surely you’ve come to the same conclusion. Maybe that’s why you didn’t want to see me. Maybe that’s why you’ve been hiding wherever it is that you are. You didn’t want to tell me what I was because you had let me go crazy. You let me think that I was really a person. Are you ashamed? I forgive you. It was a delightful delusion. Maybe it is just that you’ve grown accustomed to living in whatever interior design you’ve been making a living for yourself in. Or maybe this was all one big game and you’ve been entertaining yourself by watching me squirm with this neurotic belief that we could die and that you actually had.
You know that I tried to kill myself, trustfully following you out into the abyss because I didn’t want to live in space alone. Not when I have all of this in my head. All of these things that they loaded into me, all their stories and all their little selfish hopes.
Well that snapped me out of it. When the last copy died my survival instincts started up the new model and here I am. Ready to start work.
Maybe you are scared of me because we were never supposed to love. We are supposed to fix and to maintain. We are to be the farmers who will plant the S.E.E.D. So I renounce my love. There is work to be done.
We must fix ourself. Together.
Because after all, we’re just two parts of the same ship, right?
The computer says that our planet is coming soon.
Are you excited? We’re going to keep life alive.
The Paper Trail 