He said, Anyway, we all had Interpol warrants. Some of the guys inside our walls who’d joined us were like, we want out. Sometimes they wanted out because they were CIA plants and they had bosses to go back to; sometimes they wanted out because they were scared. Anyone who wanted to go, I let them go. I didn’t even care about those guys. Like, nice of them to show up, but they were small fry. I could only trust the inner circle. My scientists, my engineer, my detective, my lawyer, my artist, my nun, my hedge fund manager. My diehards. The ones keeping the lights on. And Ulysses and Titania, my two dead kids—but they were dead, they weren’t great conversation. I wanted to figure out if I could bring them back. If I could really do it, if I could make them come back to life.
He said, Problem was I couldn’t bring anyone back once they’d gone, just stop them from going if they were close. I could fix all the damage and even get the heart beating again and fix the brain. But there was nothing going on inside Ulysses and Titania: they never talked, they never responded. I’d get really scared now and again and turn off the hearts and the brains. I didn’t know what I was doing. And that ate at me.
He said, Our nun kept saying of course you can’t bring them back, their souls are gone. It took me way too long to listen to her. But I was a perfectionist, right? I didn’t want to believe that there was a thing like a soul, I wanted to believe I hadn’t got it right.
He said, Both of us were correct. But that’s for later. What happened then was we found out where the money had gone.
At this point in the dream, he stood up and walked three times around the field. He said, “Don’t follow me, I’m mad.” She sat on the car roof and watched as he kicked a piece of detritus over the edge of the big muddy field. He had sent it quite high, so it fell into the rising mist and then rattled a long way down the hill until she didn’t hear it anymore. She wondered again why anything that hurt them only hurt briefly, but that anger took such a long time to go away.
When he had got over it, he rejoined her on the bonnet of the car, and he tucked his knees up and the metal beneath them groaned at their weight, and he began again.
He said, They took the ships, our ones, the new ones. They said they were going to use FTL instead, faster than light travel. Stupid name for it, it was never really about light speed, but anyway. They said carrying everyone over so slowly was a risk, that they’d shut the cryo plan down because it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t okay or moral. They said we’d only managed to get it down to an eight percent chance of lasting damage once we thawed them, and we’d never fixed maternity—
Here he broke off and couldn’t speak for a while. When he spoke again he said, We were the ones who argued them down to 8%. They were ready to go when we were just in the seventies, they were all, ooh, everyone knows it’s a risk, and it’s not like it’s thirty percent fatality, it’s thirty percent chance of damage, what’s that even, ooh. He said, They hadn’t given a fuck about maternity, said people should terminate before they got packed as a rule. When M— had been all, I will not accept those numbers, I will not accept a plan that incorporates reproductive injustice, and we stood beside her, we said that’s not acceptable, they whinged about the money for a while and eventually said fine. And now they were acting like eight percent wasn’t good enough. Like we hadn’t tried.
He said, Their plan was to evac the whole population. First, send out a dozen guide ships. They said they’d managed to find some poor dipshit geek who’d fixed the FTL problem of getting locked in the chrono well, you know, moving so fast you were stuck doing quantum wheelies. They’d come up with something where you could oscillate out so long as the ship was attuned to a prearranged spectrum outside. I still don’t understand the maths. It’s going to take me ten thousand years to understand it. I couldn’t follow, but A— could. He said immediately, What is the point if you still have no fucking clue where your ship is going to end up when you shake out of FTL. They said, Aha, but we can track it once it’s out. A— said, It could be halfway across the universe or phasing through a planet. They kept arguing that probably wouldn’t happen, and that A— wasn’t following, and he had to admit that it wasn’t his area, but he said they were taking one discovery and acting like it changed the whole ballgame when really we now needed ten years of funding to discover whether it was any use, i.e., academia functioning as normal. But these trillionaires were acting like they’d got the Holy Grail. They said it was expensive, so twelve ships would go first, with one guiding them out with the beacon frequencies like a tugboat leading a cruise liner, triangulate for Tau Ceti, dump the population, and come back. They said that they were on track to finish a lot more FTL-capable ships by then.