December 19th, 2125
"Auntie?" You poked your head into the sitting room on the top floor of your mom's old home on Mars, looking around to where you knew Juno was sitting. The tall brunette looked up from the extended tablet in her hands with a smile at the sound of your voice, and slid the device closed with one hand whilst beckoning you into the room. It was one of your favourite places in the house, with a wide window looking out towards the rim of the ancient caldera that held Mytikas. There was a long couch stretched out opposite, making that view the centrepiece of the room, and several comfortable chairs scattered in a circle around it.
"Yes, Iris?" You liked Juno's voice. It was warm and calm, and quite detached in its own little way from the benevolent chaos that had engulfed the house. Mandy talked like that sometimes, but with Juno, it was always. She wasn't distant, but there was a distance in her own relationships, there even with her siblings. Harry had the same thing, in a way, their own scars from the Week of Sorrows. You had tried to imagine what that would be like once. You never would again.
"Um," you temporised, shaking free of the memory of that construct. "I was wondering if I could ask you about something. One of the take-home projects for next year was to examine how a facet of our society has changed, and I, I wanted to ask something a bit deeper than the suggestions." Juno looked at you for a moment, and you felt your toes clench with phantom tension.
"Something old, then, if you've come to me. Come and sit down," she patted the space on the couch beside her, waiting until you obliged before continuing with the question you'd expected. "What did you choose to ask, Iris?"
"Before," you fumbled for the words a moment, whilst Juno waited patiently and calmly for you to find them. "Before the Week of Sorrows, before the Secrets, human life was limited. I found a word when I looked it up, mortal – a Greek word which meant 'Doomed to Die'." Your aunt went very still. "I know you weren't alive then, that the Second Secret had already done much to change humanity before you were born, but," you stopped at the look on Juno's face. She'd gone very pale, so much so that her freckles stood out like harsh dots, but that was only because she understood.
"Auntie Vi belonged to our parents before she belonged to me," she finished for you. "And even though she's not…real," that word cost her something, "in the same way as you or I, her memories could show you far more than I could ever tell." Green eyes locked with yours, still as a millpond, and deeper than you'd ever seen them. It was almost, no it was intimidating, but you didn't look away. "Why is this so important to you, Iris?" she asked after a long moment.
"History, it, what we've lost," you looked away, staring unblinking out through the window at the light of the sunset. "What you lost," you corrected yourself, voice small, "that I never lived. Thousands of years when humanity had only decades of life, where you lived and died in figurative instants and yet did so much with that time. You built homes, forged nations, created beauty in so many ways that can still inspire people today. You've not stopped doing that even after more than half a century of knowing your lifespans are functionally infinite. It's carved into your memory, into your beings, in a way that I still don't understand. I've tried. So this," you shrugged, looking back from blazing gold light of the sun. "This is my trying another way to understand."
Juno nodded. "It's a lot you're asking," you held your breath, that was a pause, not a stop. "But you're family, Iris. And there's no reason for you to be barred from this." She extended the tablet again with a practiced flick of her wrist. "The only question is are you sure. Some of what Vi has in her memory isn't pleasant." You considered that, considered the fractured pain of the simulation you'd made for yourself once. This wouldn't be a simulation, this would be real. Real people, real loss.
"I have to try, Auntie," you told her finally. "I think that's part of what it means to be human." Bright green eyes softened in response, a touch of wistful sadness pulling a solemn line into a small smile.
"Oh Iris," Juno tapped a handful of keys, and you felt something nudge at the edge of your perception, a request from the Virtual Intelligence that Juno had used to allow her and her siblings to survive without the need for caretakers after the Week of Sorrows. You checked the connection, and then confirmed your request for a copy of its memory gestalt, focusing on the incoming stream of data. So focused that you almost missed your aunt's next words. "Mandy was so lucky to find you."
You started to reply, but the first memories from the gestalt hit you before you could. A human face, you could recognise some similarities to your mom and her siblings' features, lined strangely with age. They were smiling, clearly excited as they powered the interface unit on for the first time. There was a name given, recognition of a sort, but so much less than your own understanding of the term. You weren't given the time to process it further. More memories poured through you, the chronicle of almost a century of watching and catering to the needs of those the Virtual Intelligence was bound to. Glimpses of a humanity before the Secrets, then the change that came with the discovery of the First and Second of those mysterious things, decades compressed into an eyeblink. You experienced aspiration and hope second-hand, guessing on your own from the total lack of emotional context in the recordings. The workings of a race still uncertain in a much wider world, growing more secure as their understanding of it grew.
Then the break, the loss. The Week of Sorrows. You saw terror and fear, crushing grief. Only afterwards would you realise that you'd wilfully destroyed some of those recordings as they'd crossed your perceptions. Things you hadn't wished to see, or at least remember. Had that included your mom's last farewell to your grandmother? You didn't think you'd ever try and find out.
Recovery, fighting against bitter despair. The stories your mother had told you, witnessed without artifice. Hard memories, but as they moved forward, you saw the defiance overwhelm despair as it gave way to hope. And through it all, nine and a half decades of memories, you saw the same pattern. Change had come after humanity had discovered the Secrets, change in all aspects of their society, but there was…had truly so little changed?
People lived. They existed. They fought the seemingly inevitable, but now that wasn't time, it was the enemy that had taught them in a way no other lesson could that there were fates far worse than death. Humanity had always fought against what it felt it couldn't defeat, since before anything one could truly call 'humanity' had existed. With every generation, your mothers' ancestors had fought for more time, for the chance to do more with their lives. Millennia of progress, without even the dream of the Secrets, all to fight to a draw the most deadly enemy in human history; time.
But since its defeat, there hadn't been enough of it to actually change anything. Not truly. And the culture you knew was still deeply shaped by the possibility of death, just from another source. With the Shiplords an ever-present sword of Damocles above humanity, was it any surprise? For humanity to escape their mortality, you'd have to escape that. And the only way for that to happen…
You abruptly found yourself back in yourself, blinking away tears. Juno was crouched beside you, expression concerned as she held you up. You blinked again, and saw her expression relax slightly. Your obviously lying system clock informed you that only a few minutes had passed. That must have been a few decades, at least.
"Iris?" Juno said, and you realised belatedly that it was at least the sixth time she'd done so. "Are you alright?"
"I," you considered that word, how you could add to it, what you could use it to say. You made up your mind. "I think I'd like to go downstairs and hug my moms." You found your legs a little shaky when you rose, but Juno's supporting presence was there to stop you falling. "Would that be alright?"
"Of course."
