Letters From a Past Which Lies Ahead

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Janet, I have never beheld an aphorism more bleak. I wish that you could shout my name from the inky reach of Sedna and its tantalizing vibrations would launch from your lips like a flock of migrant birds, purposeful and swift, to appease the winter of my longing.

For it is utter cruelty that your words must always arrive in mute translations of zeros and ones. A ballet with no orchestra, your msg delights my eyes and occupies my mind but it is lacking the dimension to satiate my hunger for the complete art of you. Against my eyelids I can map the beckoning shadow where your neck and shoulder juxtapose, and should my imagination fail me, I own one hundred billion pixels that arrange into your various shapes. As for the soft slick of your skin, I sometimes stroke the pillow of my own wrist and pretend—but your voice, Janet. The memory of that fine instrument has evaded recollection of late, and its absence barks the loudest.

Yet somehow through its punishing silence, I have parsed what I believe to be both the surface and the depth of your msg, and will respond twice to your most pressing question. First, to address the surface: I joylessly report that I have received no decision on my petition to deploy to the TNO front. Second, to allay the flickering hint of worry I glimpsed buried in your words: Should it be approved, never doubt that I will forsake the comforts of soil and atmosphere in a snap for any opportunity to worship the rising and falling shadow of VP-113 from the OOS viewdeck with you. I keep the fantasy of it alongside my memories, so that I may trick it into eventuality.

Forgive me now for the length it will take, but I must share the rumination that plagues me recently, for you are the only haven in which I find witness. Do you remember one of our earliest conversations about the celestial preservation of myth, and those fascinating histories possessed by the names of the larger objects in the Milky Way? We enthused together over the reckoning that our well-worn maps so clearly define what were once mere parallax estimations of mathematics and light, named for fantastical deities as a sort of tribute to their elusive mystery. And you then appealed to linguistics that alphanumerism is a superior poetry, and I, eternal devotee to the archives, pledged loyalty to the nomenclature that paints the sparser universe of antiquity. Now I must confess to you that this is in part because I sometimes wonder if an ancient name bears greater consequence than it would be possible to measure with objectivity. It would embarrass me to divulge to anyone else, Janet, that I stake some belief on the shaky ground of ghosts, but what crossed my mind recently was this:

It struck me first that most of the front’s imperialist mining territories—Sedna, Pluto, Orcus, and those other desolate resource footholds of the Allied Faction—were named for `chthonic` deities (those with some rulership over the `underworld`/spiritual notion of afterlife). I was immediately haunted by the gruesome coincidence of the hundreds of millions of lives that those icy battlegrounds have claimed in decades past. That the outer reaches of our solar system are now a veritable graveyard compels me to lend credence to (I admit) a rather bizarre notion... Is it possible that a name with such power as these could be predictive, or otherwise prescriptive?

And if so, I am struck by an even greater unease. Janet, could it have been the original settling of Mars, a god portrayed by archival legends as quick to anger and starving for battle, which first cursed our solar system with ceaseless war? Or do you truly believe that we were always warring, long before Red Dawn, perhaps even long before Earth, perhaps as long as there was land to be subtracted and the compulsory division of mxn’s weaponized opinion?

(I must wonder at the latter especially, because the vacillating convictions that form the Factions’ declared differences are too flimsy and ephemeral for me to rightly comprehend today, let alone that such pointless self-destruction could subsist over the course of eons).

Indulgent it may be, I choose to believe we have claimed an ancient name and unleashed some harrowing spell, and that humxnkind was surely kinder to itself when its entirety was relegated to one small surface of one shared planet which—I know I've told you before—they sometimes referred to as `mother.` As to that, it is little wonder why. Imagine the intimacy and comfort of a singular spinning rhythm to hold the collective in its constance! And imagine Janet, Earth or Mars or elsewhere, that our sundering could have been subject to such a more enticing fate.

For instance, if you were stationed at the Western Rise, each morning I might send the slight and milky countenance of Phobos to greet you at noon; he would return to kiss my sky before supper and confide in me what secrets he saw of you. To know that we would always share the passing of time in much the same way... And to think, if that is all we ever had known... Who could declare an enemy within such synchronous communion?

And if I can love you thusly with such incomprehensible vastness between us, then how is there not only ever peace, Janet?

Alack, my poetry wanes and so too will my byte allowance if I indulge it any further (how I tire of our indifferent masters—Always at the mercies of metal and data). I will leave you with this riddle. What to make of Eris's orbit as the TNO front's new zone of neutrality, being that its namesake was once regarded as a patron of discord: Beautiful irony, or ominous prophecy? I will not divulge my inclination on this yet (although you may guess at it easily enough). I want you to tell me yours first, in your next msg, assuming you do not regard my assignation of meaning as daft or superstitious.

Please msg soon.

Yours entirely, Allison