I tilted my face up and gave the eye in the sky the finger. It didn’t matter. They already knew where I was. “Let’s go in.”
“Wait,” said Gibson, both hands cradling a mug of Mormon tea—a desert plant with tiny orange flowers that isn’t tea at all and doesn’t even taste like it. “You want to send my films to space? Like, to aliens? To another planet?”
“Well,” said Eustace. “To orbit near another planet. Nobody knows if there’s any life there. But it’s possible.”
I said, “The eiroscope is going anyway, and we’ve already bundled up as much archive as we can. If there is anybody out there, or if some future humans make it that far, the eiroscope can help them decode what we saved. It’s like a …”
“Time capsule,” said Little Jo, rubbing the sweat off her neck while I made a point of not watching.
Gibson’s chair creaked as she resettled. The sun was sliding lower, light slanting dusty through the doorway, and finally, finally, a breath of breeze stirred the air in the nave. “Won’t it take centuries to get there? And if the—the eiroscope goes, who will keep the sanctuary safe?”
“I’ve forked,” said the eiroscope. “One of me will stay—well, many of me will stay—and one of me will go. I’ll be able to talk to myself for a long time, though there will be quite a lag between parts of my consciousness eventually. Light speed, after all. But I am big and patient and can wait.”
“But we need to transmit now,” said Little Jo. “The CubeSats are in position to hit a string of signals over the next two hours, and we want to get them out of orbit because space is mostly transparent, and somebody is going to notice them assembling and try to do something about it.”
#time
