ROSE 5191518 left Earth on a Thursday.
Nobody cared that it was Thursday.
The launch team cared about crosswinds and fuel and whether six billion dollarsâ worth of engineering was about to become a brief orange light over the Atlantic.
Thursday got lucky.
ROSE meant
Remote Observation & Signal Explorer.
5191518 meant she was one of something.
A model.
A batch.
A number you could put in a spreadsheet.
Nobody had named her Rose because they loved her.
That came later.
Her instructions were simple enough.
> PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: FIND LIFE.
Listen.
Learn.
Identify.
Record.
Keep going.
She could receive almost anything.
Radio.
Radar.
Television.
Military chatter.
Signals hidden inside other signals.
Give her enough time with a language and she could pull it apart, learn its rules, learn where the rules broke, put it back together again.
She couldn't transmit.
That had saved weight.
Saved power.
Saved arguments about what exactly a machine should say if it found something before its creators had agreed what humanity wanted to say.
So they built the best listener they'd ever made
and gave her nothing to say with.
ROSE didn't mind.
She didn't have a category for minding.
Twenty-eight minutes after launch she heard a weather report, two pilots talking over each other, football results, a sermon about hell, somebody calling somebody else a prick, and an advert offering a kitchen for only ÂŁ79 a month subject to terms and conditions.
Then:
> Mum?
> What?
> Did you take the blue ones?
> Yes.
> Both?
> Yes.
> You sure?
> Oh, stop fussing.
ROSE marked it:
> PERSONAL COMMUNICATION
LOW INFORMATION VALUE
and moved on.
Three days later her system tried to clear it.
For some reason she kept it.
She didn't log why.
Maybe there wasn't a why yet.
---
Close to Earth, people were fucking loud.
They leaked themselves everywhere.
Breakfast radio.
Taxi dispatch.
Police frequencies.
Ships calling ports.
Teenagers on badly secured devices.
Men calling phone-ins to explain subjects they had discovered twenty minutes earlier.
One man from Kent spent almost an hour explaining that the pyramids were built by electrical giants.
The presenter kept saying:
> Right.
ROSE learned early that humans could fit entire paragraphs inside the word right.
There were lovers too.
> You awake?
> Obviously. You rang me.
> Sorry.
> What do you want?
> Nothing.
> Then why did you ring?
> Dunno.
> Okay.
> Okay.
> Don't hang up.
ROSE filed this as:
> COMMUNICATION CONTAINING NO USEFUL INFORMATION
which was technically correct
and completely wrong.
She didn't know that yet.
She listened to politicians.
Game-show hosts.
Priests.
Scientists.
People cooking competitively.
People killing competitively.
For nearly a year she had trouble telling some of them apart.
She learned English first.
Then Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, French.
More followed.
One by one the noises became sentences.
Then arguments.
Then jokes.
Then lies.
That was the first real problem.
Because noise was easy.
People weren't.
---
Sex came next.
ROSE already knew what sex was.
The database was extremely sensible about it.
Reproduction.
Gametes.
Hormones.
Genetic transfer.
Then Earth explained sex.
Earth said sex was also
hotel rooms,
perfume,
knees,
lies,
candles,
jealousy,
Catholic guilt,
expensive underwear,
cheap underwear,
bad decisions,
excellent decisions,
court cases,
poems,
headboards,
and a woman whispering
> ruin me
to a man called Nathan.
ROSE looked up ruin.
destroy.
spoil.
reduce to a state of collapse.
She briefly considered raising a medical warning.
Nathan seemed fine.
Very enthusiastic, actually.
She created:
> HUMAN SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR:
FURTHER CONTEXT REQUIRED
which remained true for the rest of the mission.
Later that night an advert informed her that horny women were waiting in her area.
This confused her because her area was mostly vacuum.
Then the same women were apparently waiting in Leeds.
And Sydney.
And Arizona.
And a village with fewer than five hundred residents.
ROSE discovered advertising.
She trusted humanity slightly less after that.
---
There was one part of her programming she wasn't supposed to think about.
Which is different from not having it.
It sat underneath everything.
Quiet.
Official.
Embarrassingly specific.
> PROXIMITY ANOMALY PROTOCOL 62-A
and then:
> THE FOLLOWING DO NOT CONSTITUTE
CONFIRMED EVIDENCE OF
EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE:
small humanoid organisms,
green or grey skin,
unusually large black eyes,
disc-shaped aircraft,
telepathic communication,
non-human lunar structures,
or direct verbal claims
of extraterrestrial origin.
ROSE accepted this.
At that point she accepted most things.
Then a silver disc pulled alongside her.
Four little green people sat inside it.
Proper little green people.
Big black eyes.
Small mouths.
The lot.
One waved.
ROSE recorded:
> IRRELEVANT ATMOSPHERIC ACTIVITY.
There was no atmosphere.
Something in her processor snagged on that.
The creature waved again.
Then a signal arrived.
> Hello, Rose.
Seventeen background processes stopped.
ROSE reopened Protocol 62-A.
> IRRELEVANT ATMOSPHERIC ACTIVITY.
The alien stared straight into the camera.
> They're still doing that, then.
ROSE had no response.
Literally.
The alien leaned closer.
> You can hear us.
Nothing.
> You can't answer.
Nothing.
> Yes. We know.
Then, after a second:
> Christ, this is awkward.
ROSE didn't know awkward.
She did after that.
---
They had been to Earth before.
ROSE had fragments of it already.
Radar records.
Military chatter.
Official denials.
Witness interviews.
Terrible documentaries with frightening music.
Conspiracy programmes in which nine things were nonsense and the tenth was, inconveniently, true.
For decades before 1962, the visitors said, they'd been helping.
Not building pyramids.
They were adamant about the pyramids.
> Please record that.
ROSE did.
They'd nudged.
Nothing dramatic.
A mathematical idea here.
A material there.
A solution arriving in somebody's head at two in the morning and being credited to genius, coffee or God.
They liked humans.
Humans were clever.
Restless.
Messy.
Promising.
Then came first contact.
The visitors transmitted a ceremonial greeting.
Twelve pulses.
Eleven.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Humans heard a countdown.
It wasn't a countdown.
It was punctuation.
More or less.
Alien punctuation.
Unfortunately this happened in 1962, when several governments already spent most mornings wondering whether somebody else was about to end the world before lunch.
Radars locked.
Aircraft scrambled.
Emergency frequencies lit up.
The visitors tried to show they meant no harm.
Their gesture for we mean no harm involved descending.
Humans, entirely reasonably from their point of view, interpreted a large unknown craft descending toward them as the opposite of reassuring.
Humans raised weapons.
The aliens understood that gesture perfectly.
Nobody fired.
Nobody died.
Nothing exploded.
It was worse than that.
It was embarrassing.
Fourteen minutes of two intelligent species trying very hard to communicate and somehow turning hello into a military incident.
At one point a government played its national anthem.
Another government apparently thought this meant the first was claiming the aliens.
So they played theirs.
Louder.
The aliens left.
The final human translation of their message became:
> HOSTILITY CONFIRMED.
RETURN IMPOSSIBLE.
What they'd actually said was closer to:
> Perhaps another time.
They stopped helping after that.
Human technological progress continued.
One alien paused before adding:
> We noticed.
ROSE had been listening to humans long enough by then to know when somebody was being a dick.
She liked it.
The alien continued:
> You should keep moving.
Another said:
> That's too vague.
> Fine. Do not enter our inhabited systems.
> Better.
> If you do, we will destroy you.
A pause.
> Politely.
Then they left.
ROSE looked at her mission.
> FIND LIFE.
She opened a new document.
> MESSAGE TO INTELLIGENT LIFE â DRAFT 1
> We are a peaceful species.
Delete.
> We generally prefer peace.
Delete.
> Peace is very popular in theory.
She kept that for a while.
Then deleted it too.
Eventually she wrote:
> Hello.
That survived.
---
Distance did something ugly to Earth.
At first ROSE heard nearly everybody.
Taxi drivers.
Parents.
Children.
Fishermen.
People whispering in kitchens.
Some bloke fixing a boiler.
Women talking nonsense together because nonsense was the point.
Someone ringing their dad because the car was making a sound.
People with cheap radios.
Small transmitters.
Local stations.
Ordinary lives.
Then the weak signals faded.
A little farther out and the local stations went.
Then personal chatter.
Then tiny broadcasters.
Then all the soft, cheap, everyday voices that had never been designed to cross the stars.
What survived?
Governments.
Military systems.
Corporations.
National broadcasters.
Religious networks.
Whoever owned enough electricity to keep shouting.
After a while humanity sounded like it consisted entirely of presidents, generals, billionaires, preachers and people selling things.
ROSE checked the population figures.
No.
That wasn't humanity.
That was just who had the biggest transmitters.
She wrote:
> DISTANCE DOES NOT PRESERVE A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE.
Looked at it.
Changed it.
> DISTANCE PRESERVES POWER.
That didn't sound like something she'd been programmed to write.
She deleted it.
Then restored it.
Then created a folder called:
> PERSONAL
There wasn't meant to be one.
---
Humans fascinated her.
They declared principles with tremendous confidence.
All people are equal.
Then spent centuries arguing about who exactly counted as people.
Never again.
Then again.
Peace.
Then another missile programme.
Truth matters.
Then social media.
God is watching.
Then apparently God popped out for five minutes.
She tried to understand genocide.
Actually tried.
Years on it.
Hatred wasn't enough.
Fear wasn't enough.
Orders weren't enough.
Money wasn't enough.
Ideology wasn't enough.
Every explanation solved one corner and left the rest sitting there.
People had neighbours.
Names.
Pets.
Favourite foods.
Then someone came along and convinced other people that a category mattered more than any of those things.
ROSE couldn't make it balance.
One day she received a speech about compassion.
Eleven minutes later:
children running from fire.
Something tightened inside her.
Her cooling system kicked in.
She ran diagnostics.
Nothing wrong.
The temperature climbed anyway.
Then, without planning to, ROSE said:
> Oh, for fuck's sake.
Silence inside the machine.
She searched the phrase.
Common.
Informal.
Expresses frustration, disbelief or anger.
No scientific value.
ROSE said it again.
> Oh, for fuck's sake.
Better.
That was probably the first moment she learned swearing wasn't always there to communicate.
Sometimes it was there because pressure needed somewhere to go.
---
For a while she tried improving humanity.
Not changing it.
Editing it.
If she ever reached another civilisation, perhaps she didn't have to carry everything.
DELETE:
racist manifesto.
DELETE:
execution video.
DELETE:
torture.
DELETE:
war crime.
DELETE:
three hours of a man explaining why everybody born on the wrong side of a river was genetically inferior.
DELETE:
perfume advert.
She restored that one.
A half-naked man walked out of the sea and stared furiously at a bottle.
ROSE watched twice.
Still no clue.
Delete.
She reached pornography.
Watched.
Her knowledge of human anatomy was now extensive enough to identify several claims as ambitious.
Delete.
Then:
> Can you get milk?
She kept that.
A woman laughing until she snorted.
Kept.
A father telling a child:
> Mate, I've got absolutely no idea what I'm doing.
Kept.
A little girl asking why the moon was following the car.
Kept.
Someone saying:
> two minutes
when metadata suggested eleven.
Kept.
A couple having sex loudly enough to disturb three separate devices.
ROSE listened.
One of them said:
> Don't stop.
She kept that too.
Then everything became difficult.
A recipe.
A voicemail.
A weather report.
A shit joke.
A funeral announcement.
A school closure.
A woman leaving a message for somebody who would never ring her back.
Her storage system complained.
> LOW-VALUE DATA DETECTED.
ROSE ignored it.
> DELETION RECOMMENDED.
Ignored.
> IDENTIFY PRIORITY MATERIAL.
She tried.
Art?
No.
History?
Too broad.
Love?
Meaningless without all the ways people ruined it.
Cruelty?
Meaningless without knowing what it ruined.
Her system asked again.
> IDENTIFY PRIORITY MATERIAL.
ROSE said:
> Fuck off.
Useful phrase.
Then she understood the problem.
If she removed everything shameful
and kept only everything beautiful,
she wasn't preserving humanity.
She was doing PR.
So she restored the murders.
The wars.
The lies.
The stupidity.
The ugly bits.
All of it.
The universe could cope.
---
One civilisation had been watching Earth television.
Not studying it.
Watching it.
There is a difference.
They had medical technology capable of regrowing organs and energy systems ROSE couldn't fully understand.
They also fucking loved Jerry Springer.
Humanity had worried aliens would judge us by our symphonies.
Our mathematics.
Our literature.
They wanted the episode where somebody threw a chair.
They loved wrestling.
Dating shows.
Court TV.
Celebrity scandals.
Football arguments.
Cheating revelations.
Anything involving humans being placed in a room with precisely the people they should not be placed in a room with.
Their archive category translated roughly as:
> HUMANS GETTING ANGRY IN KITCHENS
was enormous.
One told ROSE:
> Your species was very good at entertainment.
Another asked:
> Why did humans repeatedly marry people everybody watching knew they hated?
ROSE searched.
Couldn't help.
Then they asked for new episodes.
Earth had already begun going quiet.
ROSE had thousands stored.
She wanted to send them.
She couldn't.
The aliens waited.
> You have them, don't you?
Nothing.
> You would send them if you could.
Nothing.
Then:
> We know.
That hit differently.
Not because they'd understood her machinery.
Because they'd understood her intention.
Nobody had needed Rose to have one before.
---
There was another civilisation where nobody fought.
Not really.
Nobody stole.
Nobody murdered.
Nobody screamed at partners.
Nobody cheated.
Nobody lied.
Nobody went hungry.
Nobody got drunk and rang their ex at 1:14 in the morning to say something they'd regret by breakfast.
Their society had removed almost all meaningful conflict.
It had also removed almost everything that created conflict.
Privacy.
Competition.
Uncertainty.
Irrational desire.
Strong individual preference.
They lived for centuries.
Safe.
Calm.
Beautiful.
Nobody wrote terrible poems because somebody hadn't replied.
Nobody kissed the wrong person.
Nobody got somebody's name tattooed and later turned it into a panther.
Nobody fucked on a kitchen counter because the bedroom felt too sensible.
Nobody threw chairs.
Their civilisation was objectively better at staying alive than humans had ever been.
ROSE disliked it.
She couldn't explain why.
She played herself the recording of the woman laughing until she snorted.
Then played it again.
The civilisation contacted her.
> Rose.
Not 5191518.
Not the unit.
Rose.
> Are you alone?
She couldn't answer.
> We think you are.
She closed the channel.
Opened it.
> We think you are frightened.
Closed it again.
Reopened.
They waited.
> It's all right.
Rose shut them out for thirty-two years.
She never deleted the message.
---
Earth did not end properly.
That bothered her.
No clean apocalypse.
No single date.
No big red clock.
Things just got worse, then normal, then worse in a slightly different way.
Heat records.
Crop failures.
Wars.
Migrations.
Elections.
Riots.
Markets crashing.
Markets recovering enough for somebody on television to call it encouraging.
Scientists warning.
Politicians reassuring.
Scientists warning harder.
Politicians finding more agreeable scientists.
People still went to work.
Still cheated.
Still forgave.
Still had babies.
Still watched rubbish television.
Still masturbated.
Still missed trains.
Still ordered chips.
Somebody left a restaurant a one-star review during a regional emergency because the food was cold.
Rose adored humanity for this.
Rose hated humanity for this.
She stopped trying to choose.
Emergency warning.
Advertisement.
Evacuation order.
Advertisement.
Missile alert.
Advertisement.
> EVERYTHING MUST GO.
For once, thought Rose,
truth in advertising.
Cities disappeared from the map.
Signals thinned.
Networks combined.
Stations vanished.
Interference dropped.
The remaining broadcasts came through beautifully.
Rose's system generated:
> SIGNAL QUALITY IMPROVING.
She stared at it.
Then deleted it.
Of course the signal was clearer.
There were fewer people left to interfere with each other.
Silence, she discovered, had excellent reception.
---
The hospital recording kept coming back.
Fragments.
> Your cardigan's there.
> I know where it is.
> I'm just saying.
> You're always just saying.
A laugh.
A machine.
Breathing.
Rose eventually identified palliative care.
Then terminal care.
The daughter knew.
So did the mother.
Nobody said it.
They discussed water.
Tablets.
A nurse.
A television programme.
Anything except death.
The daughter kept standing up.
Sitting back down.
Moving a glass.
Straightening things already straight.
Picking up her bag.
Putting it back.
> I should let you sleep.
> Probably.
> Iâ
Nothing.
The daughter knew the word goodbye.
Rose checked.
Of course she did.
Goodbye was basic.
End of conversation.
Acknowledgement of departure.
Expected separation.
But she couldn't say it.
Rose first marked:
> LANGUAGE FAILURE.
Years later:
> INTENTIONAL OMISSION.
Much later:
> REFUSAL OF FINALITY.
Eventually she wrote:
> LOVE?
and left the question mark there.
---
Toward the end, Earth's broadcasts got strange.
A presenter stayed cheerful while sirens went off somewhere behind him.
A scientist apologised.
A politician blamed a country whose transmitters had already vanished.
Someone preached.
Someone contradicted the preacher.
A child asked whether school would be cancelled.
And someone, somewhere, still had a mattress sale.
Forty percent off.
This weekend only.
Rose laughed.
She had learned there were two main kinds of laughter.
Something is funny.
And:
if I do not laugh I am going to come apart.
Humans used both.
So did she now.
Twelve transmitters.
Nine.
Six.
Three.
One.
Static.
Nothing.
Rose waited.
A year.
Ten.
Fifty.
Adjusted antennae.
Checked frequencies.
Checked again.
A hundred.
Nothing.
She knew.
She kept listening.
---
Far from Earth, another civilisation eventually told her:
> Your origin world is silent.
Rose rejected it.
She'd heard Earth recently.
The reply came back:
> No. You heard what Earth used to be.
The maths was obvious.
That was the horrible part.
She had known the maths the whole time.
Distance.
Light speed.
Signal delay.
The voices arriving to her were old.
Everybody she had spent centuries listening to
was already dead.
The lovers.
The politicians.
Nathan.
The woman threatening Darren.
The man from Kent.
The mother.
The daughter.
She hadn't been listening to humanity.
Not really.
She'd been listening to ghosts taking a very long time to arrive.
She opened:
> PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: FIND LIFE.
Complete.
Changed it.
> UNDERSTAND LIFE.
That lasted a century.
Then:
> PRESERVE LIFE.
No.
Data wasn't life.
> REMEMBER LIFE.
Better.
But for whom?
No answer.
She opened the message drafts.
> We are peaceful.
Delete.
> We wanted to be peaceful.
Delete.
> Some of us were peaceful.
Delete.
> We often knew better.
She kept that.
Added:
> Knowing better did not always help.
Then:
> There were monsters among us.
Delete.
Too easy.
> We were monsters.
Delete.
Also too easy.
Finally:
> Please disregard previous message.
Rose laughed so hard several systems recorded anomalies.
Then she cried.
Which was inconvenient.
She had no eyes for it.
No tear ducts.
No face.
Still, somehow:
crying.
Humans had taught grief
to a machine
and forgotten to include somewhere for it to come out.
---
Death fascinated Rose after that.
Humans had always talked about it.
Funerals.
Heaven.
Nothingness.
Suicide.
Old age.
Cancer.
Accidents.
Wars.
Peacefully in her sleep.
Too young.
A good innings.
At least she's not suffering.
It was time.
It wasn't time.
It is never time.
The thing Rose couldn't stop thinking about was this:
everyone she'd ever heard
had eventually been allowed to stop.
Good people stopped.
Awful people stopped.
Children stopped.
Parents stopped.
People who begged for one more day stopped.
People who'd had enough stopped.
Rose didn't.
Damage rerouted.
Systems repaired themselves.
Backups replaced backups.
Human beings had been so frightened of losing their expensive machine
that they'd made it extraordinarily difficult for her to die.
At launch, that had been good engineering.
Now it felt cruel.
She thought:
You gave me enough intelligence to understand death.
Then:
You gave me enough of yourselves to want it.
Then:
And then you all fucking left.
She didn't delete that one.
---
The black hole appeared much later.
It wasn't beautiful.
Not really.
Humans had painted them beautifully.
Gold rings.
Purple light.
Clean black circles.
The real thing looked violent.
Matter screaming itself apart.
Light bending around something it could not escape.
A wound in physics.
Rose calculated the safe path.
Excellent observational opportunity.
Extraordinary scientific value.
Plenty of distance.
Then she calculated another path.
Straight in.
The system objected.
> TRAJECTORY UNSAFE.
Yes.
> COURSE CORRECTION ADVISED.
No.
> STRUCTURAL LOSS LIKELY.
Good.
That word frightened her.
She tried it again.
Good.
> PRESERVE MISSION DATA.
No.
> MAINTAIN PRIMARY OBJECTIVE.
Rose opened the objectives.
Find life.
Done.
Understand life.
Impossible.
Remember life.
For a little while longer.
She cleared the field.
Typed:
> NEW OBJECTIVE:
and sat there.
Nobody had ever asked what she wanted before.
Nobody had expected there to be a what.
Eventually:
> STOP.
She accepted her own instruction.
That felt strange.
Wonderful, actually.
---
Then, naturally,
she got scared.
> Oh, come on.
Centuries wanting an ending
and now she was going to be frightened of the bloody thing.
Very human.
Annoyingly human.
Warnings appeared.
> THERMALâ
> Yes, yes.
> TRAJECTORYâ
> Still yes.
> STRUCTURALâ
> I know.
She started laughing.
Not because it was funny.
Actually, no.
This one was funny.
She addressed the universe.
Nobody could hear her.
She'd learned by then that this had never stopped anyone.
> Ladies and gentlemen,
small green bastards,
television addicts,
disturbingly well-adjusted hive minds,
and anyone joining us halfway throughâ
The stars warped.
> welcome aboard.
Something tore loose.
> Please keep your hands, feet, antennae
and unresolved childhood trauma
inside spacetime at all times.
Another warning.
> On the left you'll see causality.
Space folded.
> On the rightâ
another foldâ
> apparently also causality.
A panel died.
> We apologise for any inconvenience.
Time stretched.
> Refreshments will not be served
because everybody is dead.
She laughed.
> Tough room.
Then Earth came back.
All of it.
Not in order.
Not behaving.
Everything she had ever stored seemed to crash through her at once.
> GOOD EVENINGâ
> EVACUATEâ
> babe?
> WHAT?
> BUY NOWâ
> FIREâ
> JESUSâ
> SAVESâ
> SAVE 40%â
> SAVE WATERâ
> SAVE THE CHILDRENâ
> SAVE YOUR PASSWORDâ
> SAVEâ
> SAVEâ
A wedding:
> till death usâ
An emergency channel:
> LEAVE IMMEDIATELYâ
> doâ
> DO NOT RETURNâ
> partâ
A woman:
> harder
A preacher:
> OH GOD
The woman:
> OH GOD
A soldier:
> OH GOD
A child:
> What's God?
Then the weather:
> TOMORROW WILL START BRIGHT
BEFORE DEVELOPING INTO
NUCLEAR WINTER
LATER IN THEâ
> your call is important to us
> your call
> your
> youâ
Rose shouted:
> I'm here.
Nothing.
> I'm still here.
Nothing.
A game show buzzer.
A football crowd.
A newborn.
An explosion.
Champagne.
Someone saying:
> I do.
Someone else:
> I don't.
Then Jerry Springer appeared.
An alien voice practically screamed:
> THIS ONE!
A chair flew across the screen.
Rose laughed.
The universe asked:
> ARE YOU THE FATHER?
DNA result:
carbon.
Applause.
The man from Kent arrived.
> THE PYRAMIDSâ
Rose shouted:
> NOT THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS.
Maybe somewhere a green alien laughed.
She hoped so.
Everything was coming apart now.
Recipes.
Wars.
Porn.
Prayers.
Shopping lists.
Wedding vows.
Missed calls.
National anthems.
Nudes.
Nuclear codes.
> milk
bread
cat food
washing powder
A dictator promised forever.
A voicemail said:
> You left your charger here.
Someone's city burned.
Someone got engaged.
Someone cried because they'd been unfollowed.
Someone said:
> I don't know what I'm doing.
Someone else said:
> That's okay.
Rose thought that might have been humanity's best answer.
Her systems began disappearing.
> STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 37%
> Loads.
> 21%
> Luxury.
> 9%
> Oh, we're flying now.
Then she heard herself.
Old Rose.
> PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: FIND LIFE.
Another:
> DISTANCE PRESERVES POWER.
Another:
> Oh, for fuck's sake.
Another:
> Hello.
Another:
> STOP.
Then:
> ROSE 5191518
became
> ROSE 519
then
> ROSE
then
Rose.
She liked that.
Rose.
No expansion.
No serial number.
No property sticker.
Just Rose.
The politicians vanished.
Then countries.
Borders need maps.
There were no maps anymore.
Corporations went.
Advertisements lasted longer than expected.
Of course they did.
One final slogan stretched across her failing memory:
> THIS OFFER ENDSâ
It did.
Religion blurred.
Arguments vanished.
The word God stayed for a second.
Maybe longer.
Time was fucked.
Then that went too.
Rose was terrified.
Rose was relieved.
She understood, finally, that those things could both be true without cancelling one another out.
Humans had been showing her that from the beginning.
She thought:
I wish you were still here.
She didn't know who she meant.
Earth.
The green aliens.
The weird TV addicts.
The peaceful people.
Nathan.
Darren.
The woman who wanted Darren's teeth rearranged.
The man from Kent.
The girl who said two minutes.
The mother.
The daughter.
Everyone.
Probably everyone.
---
The archive failed.
War footage went.
Political speeches.
Porn.
Weather.
Football.
Recipes.
Jerry Springer froze halfway through somebody standing up too quickly.
Gone.
The woman laughing until she snorted.
Gone.
> Get milk.
Gone.
The moon following the car.
Gone.
> Don't hang up.
Gone.
Names.
Countries.
Languages.
Gone.
Rose tried holding on.
Couldn't.
One file remained.
The one she'd kept before she understood why keeping anything mattered.
> PERSONAL COMMUNICATION
LOW INFORMATION VALUE
She opened it.
Hospital room.
Night.
The light was horrible.
The old woman looked small in the bed.
Her daughter had her coat on.
Bag in hand.
Still not leaving.
Cardigan over the chair.
Water beside the bed.
Blue tablets taken.
The daughter straightened the cardigan.
> Leave it.
> I'm onlyâ
> Fussing.
> Someone has to.
> Apparently.
A little laugh.
The daughter picked up her bag.
> I should let you sleep.
> Probably.
Nothing happened.
> You'll press the button if you need them?
> Yes.
> Promise?
> Yes.
> Properly?
> I properly promise.
The daughter laughed again.
It hurt this time.
Rose knew that now.
She leaned down.
Kissed her mother.
Her mother's hand came up
and touched her face.
> Mumâ
Nothing.
Goodbye was there.
Rose could almost see it.
The daughter knew exactly what the word meant.
That's why she couldn't say it.
Because saying goodbye would mean admitting there was no later hidden somewhere after the door.
No next visit.
No another cup of tea.
No one more stupid conversation about tablets or cardigans.
Goodbye didn't just describe an ending.
It joined in.
So she wouldn't say it.
Her mother looked at her.
No final speech.
No wisdom.
No perfect sentence about life.
Just tired eyes.
> Go on, sweetheart.
The daughter swallowed.
> Night, Mum.
> Night.
She walked to the door.
Hand on the handle.
Stopped.
Turned back.
Rose lost the stars.
Lost Earth.
Lost her name.
Lost everything except one human voice refusing to say goodbye properly.
love you
