Second Suicide: A Short Story (Kindle Single) Read Online Free Page B

top of the
mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it
was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.
    Two days to planetfall , and a radio tech’s madness consumes me. I
should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill
afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a Liaison Officer. I am trained to dig
and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself
curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.
    #
    It is
download day, one day before planetfall . After mess,
we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight
confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but
they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research
terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray
thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.
    Will I wake
up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my
rebirth, please don’t let me die tomorrow? What a strange life. It is
only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final
death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until
it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do we do? We grow bored of it.
    Before I
joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we
are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How
many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording
these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is
really eating at me becomes clear:
    I do not
dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my
own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am
used to making planetfall with the last of the
landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and
relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have
already been turned beneath the soil.
    So this I
dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death
becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the
next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there
will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this
as well.
    The scanner
records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls
still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more
permanent, silent state.
    And with
this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel
like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the
next Gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something
up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a Liaison
Officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last
routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt.
And he relents.
    The date is
near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull
up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing
messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look
bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no
bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden
away.
    I fish the
locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had
another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it
all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning,
that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.
    #
    It is planetfall , and as our attack craft soars down through the
atmosphere toward this green and blue and