“I’m not an invalid, mom!” Luna complained, “I can move around without that thing.”
“Luna, you’ve already fallen down twice now,” Emily said, “You’re eighty now, what would you have done if Minato hadn’t been around to hear Fumiko shouting for help? Fumiko’s been using hers. She can’t just run outside to find somebody if something happens to you either.”
Luna kept grumbling, but eventually accepted the sturdy cane reluctantly and used it to stabilize herself as she walked around. They moved over to the sitting room where Luna sat down in her chair with a grunt, her arms trembling slightly as she gripped her cane as she lowered herself down.
“How’s it going with Kenji?” Luna asked after catching her breath, “You run out of your stories yet?”
“No,” Emily said, “I’ve still got a few more I think. They’re just floating back there waiting for something to remind me of them. I’m surprised how popular his idea was, to start writing everything down that’s happening. My stories and the history of what’s going on in the villages… Didn’t think he’d end up being a historian of all things.”
Luna chuckled, “He always was rather focused on his studies. I’m glad that… someone’s doing all of that. Imagine if they had to ask you about the past every time they wanted to know?”
“Yes. I’m glad he’s writing it all down. It’s good that now not everyone has to be a farmer if they don’t want to.”
There was a silence between them before there was a clicking behind them. Emily looked around and saw Fumiko rounding the corner and using her cane as she moved.
Emily stood up.
“No, mom, I’m fine,” Fumiko said and waved her off as Emily went to try to help her to sit next to Luna. Seeing that Fumiko was fine, Emily returned to sit in the chair she’d been in before.
“Do you two need anything?” Emily asked, “Are you taking your bone supplements? I’ve still been working on improving them, but if you take them every time then they should…”
“Mom,” Fumiko said to interrupt Emily’s rambling, “We’re just old. It’s fine. Don’t work so hard that you forget to spend time with us and all your other children, hm? I’ve heard you haven’t emerged from your lab for days at a time until Minato told you about Luna’s accidents. That you told him that you haven’t slept in over a year. You need a mental rest sometimes even if you don’t actually need the sleep.”
Emily sighed.
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to do my best to keep everyone healthy. I do get obsessed sometimes. I’m just worried about you two.”
“We’ve had a good life, haven’t we?” Luna said, “I don’t think I’d do anything differently if I were to go back. I think that’s a sign that things went right. We’re not like you, we can only live for so long.”
“I… I know,” Emily said, “But I don’t want either of you to go. Any of them. Why can’t you just live forever like I do?”
“If only,” Fumiko laughed before letting out a light cough as something got caught in her throat.
“We’re not dead yet. Let’s just make the… best of it that we can.”
“Okay…” Emily said with a lump in her throat, “I promise.”
— — —
Emily sat there sitting on her knees with her head bowed as the rain came down on her bowed head. Even the weather had chosen to match her mood today. Everyone else had left hours ago, not able to ignore the cold rain like Emily could after the funeral. The water soaked her clothes so they stuck to her, almost like they were trying to cling to her and comfort her in her grief.
She reached out and put her hand out and touched the gravestone. Luna and Fumiko’s gravestone. Luna passed away in her sleep. The stress and grief the next morning had given Fumiko a heart attack and taken her from them too in one fell swoop.
They had both lived to over ninety years old. It was such a long time, yet it had also been nothing at all. Emily had dealt with the death of several of her older children by now, grieving for them each time. But none of that compared to the grief that she felt now as she sat there in the rain next to Luna and Fumiko’s grave.
Emily was so soaked that any tears that she might have let out were swallowed by the rain before she could ever feel them on her face.
Emily just sat there and let her emotions wash over her. Then suddenly the whistling of the wind and the patter of rain around her stopped all at once. She was frozen in place, unable to move. There in front of her she could see a display of a field of raindrops frozen in time and hovering suspended in the air. Glittering like hovering crystals surrounding her on all sides as the light peeking through the frozen dark rain clouds above reflected off of the drops.
Her eyes shifted to the side even as her body remained unmoving and there it was standing besides her, staring down at Luna and Fumiko’s grave. Its orange blazing eyes turned back to Emily after a moment. The Shadow.
It spoke in a reverberating chorus of a dozen whispers that warbled and changed in pitch and tone as they all spoke. It was softer, not the overwhelming wave of sound and noise like it had been when it had spoken to Emily last back on Earth. Back when she’d become an Immortal, no matter how hazy her memories of it were. She still remembered how overpowering the Shadow’s voice had been back then. Now when it spoke it was softer, more controlled. Making her head pulse and throb in pain but not sending her reeling with a single word.
“Cessation. Cessation of thought and growth.
“A single blade of grass lost in the field.
“An endless plain of grasses, grown and shriveled, each someone who you've seen and known.
“Is this not the source?
“Is this not what causes your pain?
“My winding path through time, seeing of each only a single frame.
“Of the creature’s caught in my gaze.
“Yet I still can not see what it all means.
“Without an end, would this make you happy?
“With endless time to see your frames, could I find your meaning?
“And know how to imagine what life as you could be?
“Ah, the knowledge of the cycle it enters me.
“Time is so strange in this reality, only moving one way for thee.
“An origin and an end.
“A circular and winding path of time, I can see.
“But choose, and I will leave.
“Never have seen, never have been.
“A death to all of humanity it would be.
“But you and the others won’t have suffered needlessly…
“Because of my curiosity.
“What is your choice, Emily?”
Emily didn’t answer, her mouth sealed shut by her frozen state. But she noticed that the Shadow wasn’t staring at her but a point just behind her that she couldn’t see.
The Shadow’s orange eyes tracked something completely invisible as it apparently walked around her and stopped just in front of it.
“I see.
“Perhaps you’re right to blame me,
“The elder Emily,”
The Shadow said calmly to the invisible figure.
“Yet my path is set.
“Derail the path, end it all.
“Humanity would have ended itself even without me… and let the bombs fall.
“Or I can continue as things have already and always have been.
“Those are the two things that can be.
“I’m sorry.
“You’re the beginning of the cycle, the first human that I ever see in its turns and loops.
“Ever will see.
“Saw back then.
“Only you can tell me to leave before I’ve already started interfering with this reality…
“Beyond the point of inevitability.”
Another long pause as the Shadow stared at the invisible person in front of it.
“Peter Rose will have the Immortality that he asked for.
“His mark in time is already etched.
“But without you and the others, returning humanity to what it was is not something that he can hope for.
“He had his own choice to end or to always be as I’ve given to thee, and he desired to proceed.
“If the cycle is broken then the other Immortals will never be.
“He is a straight line in the circle of time. He has chosen always to be, to always will be.
“What is your choice, Emily?”
The Shadow remained standing there and it looked down at its chest.
“There’s no use fighting.
“Hitting me accomplishes nothing.
“Neither does attempting to flee.
“What is your choice, Emily?”
There was another long pause, this one for over five minutes as the Shadow’s orange eyes tracked a figure that appeared to be pacing around. The Shadow’s body was completely motionless, only its eyes moving.
“Why?” The Shadow said,
“Why should I try, wish to be?
“To see something beyond me?
“You are all so weak, so easy to cease.
“Yet I can still not find, understand,
“Your minds or how perspective as one of you could be.
“That is fascinating.
"To have something I cannot be.
“I’ve given you this choice.
“Because I thought…
“That perhaps you most of all would have the right to expel me.
“So, what is your choice, Emily?”
Everything went silent again for a few minutes as the Shadow continued staring into nothing as Emily sat there frozen in place. Finally, the silence was broken by a voice that came from thin air. The Emily frozen on the ground recognized the voice as her own, only wearier and sounding like they’d resigned themselves to their decision.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Yes,” the other Emily’s disembodied voice said, “I choose the world that was built, Shadow. Despite everything… I had at least one happy and full lifetime here on Gaia with Luna and all my other children. That’s more than most people ever get. Immortality has its bright spots even if it’s been so long since I’ve been able to make myself see them. I don’t want humanity to disappear just because something as selfish as not being able to appreciate all the good things that I have now.”
“Very well. The path continues. It twists and turns and loops on its travels.
“Another turn around I go.
“I hope that you can appreciate your Immortal life once more,
“And break from the solitude that you’ve had to endure.
“Off I go, to inspect the people of Earth.
“So that hopefully this time I may finally learn…
“What it’s like to be as a mortal.”
The Shadow turned its blazing orange eyes to Emily who was still frozen on the ground.
“Now, forget young Emily. This choice is not one for you to know until you’re ready.
"To choose the cessation or continuation of this reality."
Reality fuzzed and distorted around the Shadow as Emily’s eyes widened in fear before she felt the Shadow’s voice vibrating through her body and then her mind and vision only showed her blackness.
— — —
Emily stood up from Luna and Fumiko’s grave and slowly walked away. She had grieved for long enough. Her children needed her. She had to make the best of the remaining time she had with them as she could.
And work at the nursery again. Something to take her mind off the memories of the past that kept flitting through her head.
Gaia was her home, and these were her people. She had to do her best for them and not let herself wallow in her grief anymore. Luna and Fumiko wouldn’t have wanted that for her.
— — —
Emily gasped as she jolted awake. She looked around in a panic and looked around at the unfamiliar room. It took a few moments for her to place it or the woman snoring next to her. Asuta. This was her home. She was back in the future over thirteen million years later.
There she’d been, following along with her younger self the whole way. All the pain and suffering during the destruction of Earth. The long emptiness and loneliness on the ship between solar systems that Emily knew so well deep in her heart by now after the same lonely scene repeating so many times since.
But then there was Gaia, and her beginnings there. Emily had forgotten so much of what had happened back then despite her best efforts to remember.
She sat up and pinched her clothes together and rubbed them between her fingers. She was dressed in the clothing band again. Covered in the little nanites in something that could have been as good as magic to her old self. A reminder of how much things had changed from back then.
The Shadow…
What a choice.
But she thought she understood somewhat now.
Just like she and Sean hadn’t been able to change things for her past self, the Shadow couldn’t change things either past a certain point. It was… locked in to its choices.
It was like even though the Shadow knew exactly what it would do, it was forced to do it anyway without being able to alter its actions from how they'd always been. Emily glanced back to the snoring Asuta before opening the door to their room and slipping outside and walking through the hallways of their home.
She’d spent centuries in the past, following every moment of her past self’s life up until the scene at the grave.
To her now, it would be nothing more than a blink of an eye. Mere centuries of time, a small blip in her long life. But when she was there every moment had felt vital and vivid, with her unable to relax even for a moment as she soaked in every detail possible around her in her invisible ghostly form.
Should she have stopped the cycle? Told the Shadow to leave and not turn anyone else Immortal including her except for Peter Rose? And he had been given the same choice as she was and chosen to stay an Immortal. She wondered if he’d chosen already or if it’s something that he’d do in the future. With the way the Shadow worked, it didn’t seem to matter. For all she knew Peter Rose would choose to remain Immortal in a billion years. Or had chosen to do so years after he became Immortal. She was still in the cycle, and to the Shadow everything they did was predetermined, set out in stone from the very beginning.
It made her head hurt and twist into knots as she tried to puzzle the cause and effect before she eventually gave up. It had been her choice there, she was sure of it. She somehow knew that if she’d any free choice in her life then that had been the one moment where it was true. The choice that the Shadow had given her over the grave of Luna and Fumiko. She wasn’t even entirely sure why she believed that, or why she was so sure, but somehow she just knew that it had been her choice alone.
Emily let out a long breath as she kept walking. She’d chosen to be Immortal. She was probably the only person in the whole universe except for Peter who had ever chosen to be Immortal. Everyone else was transformed whether they liked it or not.
It made her feel better about it, like she had some agency over her Immortality now. Even if it really shouldn’t have made a difference.
Still, ambushed and drawn in through the portal to the past in a dream…
It seems that she really had no chance of delaying going again even if she had tried her best. Avoiding playing the Foundation of All game hadn’t changed a thing.
Suddenly without even meaning to, Emily found herself in front of a holodeck. She walked inside the room and activated the system with a wave of her hand and the room went dark for a moment before she was immersed in the digital world.
She navigated through the menus as she stood on the omni-directional treadmill below and hovered her finger over the start button for a moment. But then she pressed it and started a new game. She opened her eyes to the blaring alarm of the ship and navigated through the tutorial and took the escape pod down to the surface.
She looked out the window wistfully as she got a glimpse of the surface of the Earth below her. The continents were slightly the wrong shape, she could see that now. Little spurts of land came out around the poles and made them look like slightly malformed blobs compared to what they should be.
Emily had the image of the ice covered earth seared into her mind, so when she’d recreated it over a million years later the real shapes of the land beneath had blurred in her mind.
The landing pod touched down and Emily stepped out into the city and took a deep breath.
Her recreation of the city where her brother Sean had died. She wandered the streets, picking out the inconsistencies and faded details that had come back to her mind after her return to the past. She kept moving until she was standing outside the building that she’d called home for years. She went up the stairs and stood outside of the door to the apartment.
She went inside and found that despite everything, its structure was accurate. Almost exactly the same as Emily had seen it in the past.
She went to the center of the room and stared at the two beds on either side of the room. One for her and one for her brother Sean. There in the center and out of place among everything was a bulky heater sitting in the center vibrating and running despite no source of electricity to power it. Emily could tell how primitive it was just by looking at it. These days in the galaxy only the lowest scammers or the desperately poor would ever be caught with technology like this.
But it had been all they had back then.
Emily left the empty buildings and using her administrator commands teleported to the crater at Border Station Three. The skeletons of the soldiers at the checkpoint, all of the bodies decayed long ago and leaving only their bones and rusted metal and scraps of cloth behind. She remembered watching as a ghost over her younger self’s shoulder as she walked past the horrific scene of scorched bodies like it was just yesterday. On her desperate quest to find Sean and save him from the end of her world.
She kept moving until she reached the crater in the ground where the town of Border Station Three itself had used to be. Where her parents had been when the bombs had dropped. She teleported again and there she was in CODA city, everything destroyed. All of it wrong and slightly off. But it evoked the same feelings as what had happened back then.
The bunker of the Brazilian president. Emily ran her hand down the digital recreation of the surface of the nuclear missile that had carried all of the Immortals into orbit. The hologram she felt as she ran her hand over the digital object.
Her fingers trailed across the surface of the missile before she opened up the menu again and teleported again.
Here in the plains of Mongolia across the planet is where she had placed it. She had only guessed the geography of the Earth based on the broad strokes that she remembered. So she arrived in the open plains of softly waving grasses. Not the bright green grasses of Earth. But the darker green of Gaia.
All the plants were from Gaia, all the familiar plants and small animals so much more familiar to her than the life on Earth was to her now.
She looked through the seemingly endless plains of grass, but she hadn’t come here for just that. Laid out in front of her in neat rows and stretching far into the distance were lines of gravestones. In even rows and all neatly set up in their lines.
Emily started at the beginning. Fumiko and Luna, their names carved into the stone just how it had been back on Gaia. She scrutinized the tombstone and there wasn’t a single flaw. She’d always worried and obsessed about getting it just right. Like recreating the grave with a single flaw would be disrespectful to their memory.
Emily kept walking down the row, one after another. All fifty of the original children. Then their children. Their children. Everyone that she'd ever known and who had died. The row of gray gravestones kept extending into the distance as she kept walking and taking in all of the names one after another.
She stopped at the graves of Minato and Elise for a moment. At Aurora’s. Then again at Kenji’s. She kept walking until after what felt like hours of walking she’d quietly walked past the front row of the tombstones. Moving to the next row she turned around and walked down back the other way. She walked along, and glanced upwards into the distance after a few minutes. The lines of tombstones stretched into the distance and the horizon. Every person that she’d known who died in her long life had a gravestone here. Starting with her children on Gaia and extending forward into the modern day for the few mortals she’d helped or connected to even for the briefest of moments. All of their names were here.
Emily kept walking along the lines of tombstones, taking in the names. She was traveling through time as the number of names grew as she traveled in her slow walk with a thoughtful frown on her face. There were some glimmers of notable people that stuck in her mind even now.
She kept moving and reached the end of Gaia. To the tombstones there was no gap at all. Everything stayed in their even lines, measured by the names of the dead, not the years that passed between the deaths. But as Emily walked down the next full row of tombstones, she still hadn’t moved forward more than a few weeks in time. So many had died during that last disaster on Gaia.
Eventually she reached the end of Gaian names as she started her travels through the universe. An eternal wanderer and explorer, never settling down for long. The names grew unfamiliar and varied. They gained little labels of what planet they were from and the date that she’d met them. A short descriptor and little summary to remind her how she had known them.
Emily had known all of the Gaian names almost by heart and hadn’t needed a reminder. But she did here with these people. Even if she didn’t recognize them now, every mortal with a tombstone had been someone important to her at some time. Someone who had helped her, somebody who she had helped. Someone who had given her a kind word on the street. A beggar that she’d given money in exchange for his name.
Every connection big and small was engraved into the lines of graves as she went through her life again in the long walk.
“Hey, babe. What are you doing back here again?” Emily heard from beside her. She looked up and saw Asuta standing there, having joined as a second player. Emily had unconsciously set it as an open world. Maybe she’d been hoping for something like this to happen.
“Just thinking,” Emily said, “I’ve had another vision of the past from the Shadow. Walk with me? I’ve nearly reached one hundred thousand years old now. I still have a ways to go.”
Asuta peered at Emily in concern for a moment before seeming to decide to not say anything. She nodded and the two of them walked side by side through the lines of graves together again.
And eventually… Eventually they reached the end. Asuta didn’t say a word as Emily reached the last gravestone and stopped. This one was dated to only a few decades before she first met Sean. The modern one, the young Immortal. The mortal was a vendor in a big city who’d flirted with her and complimented her as she bought some fruit from him. Even the memory of the small interaction had helped cheer her up for weeks afterward when she was feeling down.
“This is it,” Emily said, “Everyone that I’ve ever lost. Literally stretching the horizon with just their names. I told myself that I was helping them out of guilt. Out of obligation to make up for what happened. To Earth. To Gaia. To make up for what I’ve done. But maybe… I think that I’ve more than made up for anything I might have done unintentionally by now. I shouldn’t stop, not after working so hard to help people for so long. But I’ll… I’ll be a knight. Like in those stories that I told Kenji. Doing good because I want to, not because I think it’ll make me feel better or help me redeem myself somehow. Kenji did always love my stories of knights and chivalry. And the rest of the Gaians. I’m sure they’d love the idea of me being a knight.”
“I’m sure they would,” Asuta said in a subdued tone, “What did you see this time? What did the Shadow do?”
Emily glanced up to Asuta, “It got me. Put the portal in my dream. ‘A simulation of another kind’ it said. Kind of funny when you think of it like that.”
“Wow. That sly shadowy bastard,” Asuta said, “I’d like to slug it a few times, show it what I think of it using technicalities like that on you. Are you… okay? You seem more… solid than before. Like you’re more sure of yourself now.”
Emily took a deep breath in and out.
“I… am. That’s a good way to describe it. I feel more… rooted. Steady. I saw everything terrible on Earth again, but also some of my happiest years too. All of these graves. They’re not just signs of death, but all the happy moments I had with all of them too. Just look at them, stretching to the horizon.”
Emily waved her hand behind her to gesture to the rows of gravestones behind them stretching to the horizon.
“There’s so much happiness right along with all of that death. Over time I’d almost forgotten that part completely, I think. And don’t worry. I punched the Shadow for you. All it did was stand there and scold me for being so useless. Basically told me to stop wasting our time and answer the question that it asked me.”
Asuta’s eyes widened, “You actually… Punched the Shadow? And it didn’t atomize you or… Send you to another galaxy or… Whatever the heck it can do? What was the Shadow asking you?”
“It’s complicated,” Emily said, “But it was… It offered for me to kill myself and everyone else. Time travel things, the Shadow would have never granted anyone Immortality. Even back from the beginning. So we all would have died, when the Earth was destroyed, as mortals. When we humans destroyed ourselves even without the Shadow around. You and everyone else in the galaxy would have never existed at all. But on the other hand it would finally be over at last for me. All the pain, all these deaths… None of them would have ever happened either. Would never happen again. Snapped away like they’d never been if the Shadow hadn’t been there to create all of us Immortals. Interfered with our reality. Doing what it thought was right in its own confused way.”
“Emily, I…” Asuta said, sounding disturbed, “Surely you didn’t even think about it?”
Emily didn’t answer. She turned to Asuta, “It doesn’t matter. I chose this. To be Immortal. Now, in the distant past. It was my choice. I chose this. For some reason that makes a difference.”
Asuta didn’t say anything in reply, opening and closing her mouth but no words came out.
“Thanks for walking with me,” Emily said, “Let’s log out.”
Asuta nodded and after navigating the menus for a few seconds the holodeck shut off and Emily was standing there with Asuta in the chamber across from her. The two of them walked to the door and outside, Asuta still looking disturbed and slightly lost.
Emily put her hand on Asuta’s shoulder.
“Hey, you want to fight?” Emily said gently.
“Fight?” Asuta said, perking up immediately, “You mean like a game, right? Chess or a board game?”
“No, real combat,” Emily said, “Just how you like it. Visceral fist on flesh. Wrestling for supremacy in the mud and hard earned victory for every inch of ground. No holds barred. Eye gouging, hair pulling, I won’t hold back this time like I have before.”
“Yeah! I- but- why? I know you hate it. Why now? Why after this? Shouldn’t I be comforting you?”
“I think we could do something relatively mindless for a while,” Emily said, “Get in the flow. And we stopped feeling pain a long time ago. Physical pain at least. Maybe we could have a tea party after to balance things out.”
Asuta’s smile that had crept up her face dropped slightly before it returned.
“Okay,” she said, “True combat and brutal competition and then a tea party. That sounds just like us.”
“Yeah. Just like us,” Emily repeated and held out her hand, “Let’s go.”
Asuta grabbed Emily’s hand and then they walked outside and had a brutal fight and then a cultured tea party. By the end of it they both felt much better than they had before.