Filling in the Blank

Chapter 25

I put the idea to Brian. My delivery somewhat tentative – nervous of how he might respond. Without his cooperation I was nowhere. I watched and waited as he scratched his chin, raised his eyebrows, went "Hmmm". Then he nodded. I smiled. Partly relief. Partly affectionate amusement. The sight of him. Tantrum over, a toddler mollified by a favourite toy. A new engineering problem to chew on.

"We'll need materials for the ship fabricator," he told me. "Those two dead satellites we found when we got here should help with that, but they're pretty small."

"What about the dropship. If we're leaving, I guess we won't be needing it anymore?"

Brian shook his head. "Nah. The hint's in the name. No way to get it off the island. But no problem. As it happens, we need to head to the outer system to pick up our ice cube for the trip home. If we choose wisely, that should give us what we need. Then we swing back past Genardy on our way out, drop off your payload as we go by. Mind you, there'll be a fair bit of engineering work involved in putting it all together..." He paused, ruminating, no doubt, on questions beyond my ken. "... but then that's why you've got me," he finished on a note of triumph.

"Doing it this way means we don't get to stick around to see how it all pans out?"

Brian pondered this question. "We could, I suppose. Park up in orbit, keep an eye on things from up there. Problem is that big yellow thing in the sky. Lumps of ice don't fare too well when they are this close to it." The ice cube, as Brian called it, was the lump of cometary ice we needed for reaction mass in our anti-matter rocket. "And in-system manoeuvring uses up a lot of fuel," he added. "Stopping off in orbit would mean a much slower return trip."

"Fair enough. Truth is, I'm starting to feel ready for home. In fact, the sooner the better."

"Works for me." Brian looked happy, back in his natural element.

Would I have preferred to stick around to see whether my plan worked? The historian in me certainly would. Brian explained that, logistically speaking, there was nothing to stop me leaving a copy behind in the dropship. I thought about it, but not for long. "Gwyneth will probably have it blown up the moment we leave," I told him. Whether this was true or not, it wasn't the real reason. The real reason was my realization of just how badly I wanted to go home. Just how much my heart would drop when I learned that I was the copy being left behind.

What would I find when I got back to Earth, more than a century passed? Not knowing was starting to gnaw away at me. What had happened to the people I loved? And if I needed a rationalization, there remained the threat of the Blank happening all over again. I was carrying back a warning, albeit without the benefit of the archive. Yes, I could have agreed to Gwyneth's proposal, but given what I planned, that would have been an act of bad faith. I wasn't prepared to do that. Her repeated insistence that I was a good man ... her tactic had worked to that extent at least.

And if a second Blank has already happened? I suppose we could always use the same trick we were about to pull on Genardy. Speed the recovery by seeding the Earth with knowledge. After all, I was now immortal. A Sky God.

All that remained, then, was to decide what to put in, what to leave out. There would be a history of post-Blank Earth, of course. Also a full scientific and technical library that included blueprints for a fabricator, enough Brian assured me for a team of dedicated up-and-coming engineers to get a small-scale industrial economy going should they put their minds to it. Medical and healthcare knowledge, too. But that was hardly bedside reading. I needed something more. Something that would let people see past their current stunted existence to the infinite possibilities that come from being human.

I added our complete set of pre-Blank literature – so little of it had survived to modern times that there was no point in leaving anything out, even if they probably had copies of their own. I also put together a selection of more recent works, auto-translated I'm afraid, but enough to give you some sense of who we are, the bad as well as the good.

This trove of human wisdom and folly went into a thousand e-readers that will, if all went according to plan, have rained down upon your island (if you are reading this then it must have worked). We have even included a fabricator that you can use to spit out more of the readers, should they be needed. (Brian wants me to tell you that that the fabricator can be used to make a lot more than just books, should you figure out how to program it. Medicines, among other things; and more fabricators. Oh, and also that it has a factory reset switch – that's in case you bugger it up.)

And last of all, a covering note of some sort. I pondered this for a time but the solution was obvious. I would leave you with this, my diary. A record of how we got here, what we did once we arrived, and why we left without ever really saying hello. It will be a while, but I have no doubt we will be back. By then I hope you will have had the chance to make up your own minds.