To Return Home

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

Cover image from Unsplash

2.5

The room started to spin as the blackness enveloped John. I felt as though my body was being ripped apart, piece by piece, each molecule separating from all the rest. I lost all sense of what was happening around me, and my mind focused on the link with him. Suddenly, it simply disappeared. I don’t know what happened with it. One moment, I could feel it, and the next there was simply nothing.

For a long time, I stared at the hologram in horror, but there was nothing to see. It was entirely black. Was my husband still there? I couldn’t tell from that at all.

I looked around, and found everyone staring at me. Dumbly, I asked, “Could the tricam have burnt out? That was a bright flash.”

For several minutes, no one answered, then Marc said, “No. The tricam doesn't use any standard light sensors. It measures the light differently. There's no way to overload the sensors.” He took a deep breath. “There isn't anything to see there, Rose.”

My legs got weak, and I couldn't think of anything to say. My father must have thought I was going to faint, so he grabbed me. I sensed time passing, so I don't think I did, but my next real moment of awareness I was in my bed, crying.

Strangely, I found myself wondering if my bots would take it upon themselves to protect my mind from the death of my husband. Then, I realized we'd convinced the damned things not to do that. We needed to face our bad memories as well as our good ones. They made us who we were.

I reached out, fervently hoping to sense the bond between us. I couldn't sense it, but I couldn't sense it's absence either. There was just... nothing.

My door opened and Carla entered. She seemed to be trying to gauge my awareness, so I said, “Hi Carla.”

She smiled, then sat down beside me. “I was worried,” she told me. “You've been unresponsive for several hours. We had a huge argument with your bots.”

What? I should have known about that. Had my bots blocked my memories?

“Why?” I asked.

“You were unresponsive. The memories of John were intertwined with your entire life. Blocking them took so much, you were catatonic.” So they had tried to block them!

“What am I going to do without him?” I asked.

I saw a tear in her eye. “I don't know, Rose.”

I was tempted to look away, but what was the use. If blocking my memories of John almost turned me into a vegetable, they knew how much I was hurting.

While I wept some more, Carla quietly left the room. A little while later, Paula entered. She sat down in the chair that Carla had been in and took my hand, not saying anything for what seemed like hours, until I felt I had no tears left in me. My head ached from the weeping, but I was able to look at Paula finally.

“How?” I asked.

“Do you deal with this?”

I nodded.

“You've got to accept it, Rose.”

“How?” I asked again.

She looked at me with such love and sympathy. She knew what I was feeling. “Sweetie, it's hard, but you need to hold onto what you had with him.” She took a deep breath. “I know the severed bond is painful. It's a physical pain.”

“I don’t feel a severed bond,” I told her.

She looked at me strangely. “I find that hard to believe, Rose. You and John loved each other more than I think anyone on this ship did! If anyone is going to feel the severed bond, you are.”

I shook my head. “I'm not trying to argue, Paula. I just don't feel anything like a severed bond.”

I thought about it for a little while, then asked her, “Could the bots have removed the feelings from the bond?”

“Can you remember the bond?”

“I believe I can,” I said, “but how can I know? The bots can change everything about me.”

She nodded in understanding.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. The tears welled up in me again. I was utterly overwhelmed by the pain, not of a severed bond, but because I had no idea what was happening. I couldn't feel anything.

I slipped into a dream world, and I could hear my bots talking.

“Have you blocked my bond from me?” I called out to them. “I need to know!”

“We have not,” they responded.

“Then why was I unconscious before?”

“We were going to. You witnessed your husband die. Your sisters convinced us that would not be a good thing to do.”

I felt the tears again. They seemed that they would never end. “But I didn't feel a severed link!”

“The reason is unknown.”

“What reason?” I asked.

“We have discussed this with other bots. You should feel a severed link, but you do not.”

“But I don't feel the link at all!” I exclaimed, despondent.

“This is true.”

Perhaps in a dream state, I understood things better. “From what I understand, a singularity was formed when the device was triggered. Could the gravity well block the frequency? Might that not explain my lack of feelings either way?”

Before they could answer, I awoke.

-=#=-

I wondered if what I had experienced in my dream was real or not, but when I looked at Paula, she was wide-eyed.

“Was that real?” she asked me.

“My conversation with the bots?” I asked for clarification.

Her eyes got even wider, and she nodded.

“I woke up before they could answer me,” I lamented.

I stood and told Paula that I wanted to be alone for awhile. I don’t think she wanted to leave me, but I needed some time alone.

Once she left, I sat down. I dried my tears, and made my way to the piano in the living room. I started to play, venting my emotions.

-=#=-

I stayed away for a few days, but eventually, I entered Daddy's office and it seemed to be in pandemonium. I simply stood and watched, getting the lay of the land, so to speak. His desktop was replaced by a console which seemed to have several different work stations.

The downstairs half of the ship was beginning to accelerate, and Paula was manning her controls, keeping our physicallight connections strong so we were pulled along with it. Why was this happening? It seemed that Amos was doing what he could to get away from us, but that capability wasn’t available to him anymore.

I walked slightly around the console, staring at the stations. Something told me to touch a spot on the area that would normally be up to John to control. A gauge sprang into being in front of me, and I made an adjustment.

Paula turned to stare at me. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

Daddy and Marc were staring at us.

“It’s like we were suddenly locked into exact position relative to the downstairs section.”

“I saw that the gravity drives weren’t as strong as they could be, so I turned-- -them up.” It was all I could really say.

“How did you know?” Marc asked as he looked at the readouts.

“Something just…” I searched for the right words, but couldn’t find them. I ended up shrugging my shoulders.

-=#=-

Sometime later, I was in my home with my sisters glaring at me.

“What is going on?” Paula demanded.

“What do you mean,?” I asked, confused.

Carla wasn’t having any of it. “Rose, you’ve been in my mind just about as much as I have. I’ve gotten to know you pretty well.”

I looked at her standing there, her hands on her hips. She reminded me of a Captain, on a generation long voyage, trying to get her people home from the Delta Quadrant of the Milky Way. Interestingly, John and I had discovered that we were in that area of our galaxy not too long ago, while we were watching some ancient television.

“What are you saying?” I asked her cautiously.

“You’re not acting predictably.”

“I just lost my husband,” I exploded. “Would you care to explain what is predictable about that?”

She sat down, and her demeanor softened. “My bots aren’t able to predict how you’re going to react to things right now.”

Paula turned her attention from me to Carla. “Are you saying you can communicate directly to your bots?”

I was shocked as well. “How can you do that?” I asked. “I asked my a question a couple of days ago, but I could only talk to them in a dream.”

Carla appeared uncomfortable. “I suppose it’s something that I learned while Amos was in control.”

I shrank away in fear. “Don’t touch me!” I screamed, terrified. “Get away from me!”

“What’s going on!?” Carla was very confused now.

“He’s still here! He killed John, and he’s still in you!” I tried to back away having no control over my actions.

Paula grabbed me as I flailed my arms at my little sister. “Perhaps you should leave and let her calm down,” I heard her say.

I was crying uncontrollably now, the pain of the last few days taking over.

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