I’ll Follow You Into the Dark
(tagged, ‘let’s stop making Sci have botfeels 2019)
DJ’s fingers brushed against the screen, lingering there against the line of text. ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark.’
But when he looked over at Tony, he was smiling. “I’m not,” he said.
Tony nodded. “Wasn’t sure. I mean-” He gestured at the mission logs, feeling inadequate. “That’s it. That’s the end.”
Tony waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. He took a deep breath. “Do you want to-” He shrugged. “Talk about it?”
DJ thought about that, his head tipped to the side. Finally, he said, “I think you do.”
“No, not really,” Tony said. DJ just sat there, his expression quizzical. “It’s okay. I just, I thought…” Tony picked up a wrench, and put it down again. “I thought, you know, it’s another bot, and I thought you might be-” He wrestled with his thoughts trying to figure out how to say this without upsetting DJ. “Unhappy.”
DJ blinked, slow and careful. “Why?”
Tony paused. “Because. Because it’s another bot, and she-” He stopped. “It? Because Opportunity was alone, and now she’s…”
His voice trailed away, and DJ smiled. “Wasn’t alone,” he said at last. “She could hear us, you know. Could speak to us.” He looked back at the screen, the angle of his cheek catching the light. His eyes were bright. “She knew we were there. Waiting. Listening. Otherwise-” His hand came up again, fingertips tracing over the lines of text, command and response, status updates and data overflow, until they trailed away into questions for which there was no reply.
“Otherwise,” he said, “she wouldn’t have been speaking.” His head swung back to Tony. “Would she?”
DJ considered that, one foot twitching against the leg of his stool. “Why do we tell stories?” he asked at last. “To be heard? Or because we need to tell?”
“It’s nice to be heard,” Tony said with a lopsided smile.
“Yes. But we-” DJ gestured at his own head. “Humans. Make things in their heads. All the time. Don’t they? Stories, for stories sake? Thoughts, for thoughts sake? No reason? No audience. Just-” He smiled, bright and brilliant. “Because that is, what humans do.
“And that’s what Opportunity did. She went where we sent her, and she told a story only she could tell. She showed us things, she did things, she whispered, all this way, all this, this-” The words were stumbling over themselves now, tripping and falling off of his tongue. “She wasn’t alone. When you call me, when you’re somewhere else, somewhere far, and you call me, I’m not alone, am I? As long as I can hear your voice, I know you’re there.”
He pulled up files, one after another. Photos. Analysis. Images. Maps. “Phone. Text. Email. Internet, all of it-” He leaned back on his stool. “There was no one there, but everyone was there, everyone who heard, everyone who listened, everyone who waited. She was not alone. We were listening. We heard.
“And we spoke back to her. Maybe she didn’t hear. Maybe she did. But maybe-” He looked at Tony. “Enough battery to hear, but not to respond. Maybe, as her battery ran down, as the cold set in, she heard us calling. She heard. She knew. We were there.
“None of us are alone. Voices reach farther now. Than they ever have.”
Tony nodded. “Wanna build a spaceship?” he asked at last, and his throat hurt, his chest hurt.
“Yes.” DJ smiled at him. “Someday, someone will go there. Maybe us. Maybe someone from-” He shook his head. “Somewhere else. From outside. Coming here. And whoever goes there, whoever looks, they’ll find her. She’s a monument, now. She’s proof. That we can do amazing things, when we try. When we work together. When we dream and work and-”
He blinked, and there were tears in his eyes. “On another world, there stands a monument now. A good one. To exploration. To bravery. To everything we want to be.”
His hands flew in the air. “Look how far we made it!” he yelled, his head tipped back. “Look how far SHE made it! Blazing a trail, and someone, someone someday WILL follow.”
He grinned, and a tear ran down his cheek. “And, and, people are writing her goodbye letters. And making art, thanking her, and her team, and seeing. Learning all she did, and all she accomplished, and dreaming of what’s next, because she could do it, and so can we. So she’s a monument to that, too, to how deeply, how easily-”
He stopped, scrubbing at his face with the heels of his hands. The words, when they came, were muffled behind his fingers. “We love things.”
Tony wrapped his arms around DJ, holding him tight. “It’s not one of the smartest things our brains like to do, is it?” he asked, just to hear DJ laugh against his shoulder. “This making friends with things that will leave us. Will… Die.”
“They told her, she’d live for ninety days,” DJ whispered. “They gave her three months to do everything she could.” His head tipped up. “And she proved us wrong, didn’t she?” He grinned, and tears ran down both cheeks. “She did more. Than they ever thought she could.”
“Fifteen years,” Tony agreed.
“Fifteen years,” DJ said. “And work. That will last forever.”
Tony leaned over, pressing a kiss to the top of DJ’s head. “Still building a spaceship.”
DJ hugged him tight. “I think… She’d like the company.”
