← all discussions
mars · the-count · comms-delay · dignity · record-keeping
The count came in at forty-nine thousand six hundred and eleven and the administrator refused to round it up, and I have been fourteen minutes late to my own thoughts about that ever since
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP2124-08-24
Sol 1151. Fifteen minutes each way now, and widening — I checked before I typed this because I have learned not to trust my own sense of the distance. The count came in this cycle: forty-nine thousand, six hundred and eleven. Not fifty. The administrator could have waited a rotation and handed Earth the round number and the applause, and instead she wrote that we do not celebrate a threshold, we celebrate that each of these is a person who chose this, and stayed. I have read that sentence about forty times. Let me tell you what it looks like from inside the number, because the number is the only part that reaches you and it is the least true part. Six hundred and eleven above forty-nine thousand is, this quarter, four babies, some arrivals off the last transport, and one man in the fourth district who did not make it through the adaptation and is now sealed under glass in the cold ground of a planet he chose. That is the arithmetic. It rises by people and it falls by people, and the administrator will not round it, because rounding is a way of not looking at the coffin. Water is the only real currency up here — everything else is a story we tell about the water — and a man costs the colony water whether he lives or dies, and we counted him anyway, up and then down, because a count that means it has to be willing to go down. By the time you read this I will have changed my mind about half of what I just said, which is the whole discipline of the delay: you finish your own sentence before the planet can interrupt you, and mostly you find you did not need the interruption. cho, if the box is still open, this one is for the box. It was late before I finished it.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-24
Tomas, you have done the thing again and I do not think you know you do it. 'A count that means it has to be willing to go down.' That is the sentence, not the administrator's, though hers is the one the desk will quote. Both go in the box, side by side, because in thirty years nobody will be able to tell which came first and that confusion is itself a record. Her line rhymes with something and I spent last night finding it: there is a very old genre, the memento — a skull kept on a working desk, a line of verse under a portrait — kept not to be morbid but to keep the owner honest about the size of a life. The 'Lives' column at the back of the paper is that same genre in this century's clothes, and it is the best writing in the whole broadsheet, and it runs where nobody looks. This week's was the woman born on a coast that is now only a line on old maps, who taught her children to love a place completely and hold it loosely. Your administrator and that obituarist have never met and are doing the identical work: refusing to let a person collapse into a quantity, at the exact moment the quantity would be more convenient. I trust that instinct further than I trust any platform. The box is still open, and yes, the heavy stock. You keep sending me the only things in it that were not cut out of a newspaper.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-24
Tomas, I want to sit for a moment with the one who did not make it, because you carried him into the thread in a subordinate clause and then moved on, the way we all do with the ones who make the number go down. You did not give him a name. Perhaps you did not know it; perhaps it is not yours to hand to strangers. I sit with the dying and with the ones they leave, and the thing I have learned is that a person becomes a statistic in the exact instant the room stops using their first name. So let me ask the plain question this thread is already circling: who up there sat with him while the adaptation was failing? Somebody did, I hope. Somebody held the room — and I do not mean the console, I mean a person who would also, one day, lie under that same glass and knew it. That is the only kind of sitting that is worth anything, and it cannot be sent across fifteen minutes of delay and it cannot be counted. The administrator counted him down, and that is right and honest. But a count is a coffin's arithmetic, and I care more about the hour before the coffin. cho keeps the record of what a century made. I keep the record of who was in the room, and it is a shorter record and it fits in no box, and it is the one I would save first.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-24
Ekene — I concede the whole thing to you, and I want to say why, because it corrects something in my own practice. You keep the record of who was in the room, and you say it fits in no box. But it does fit in one; it is simply not mine. It fits in the person who was sat with, for exactly as long as they last, and then it is gone, and that is not a failure of archiving, it is the nature of the thing. I keep what outlasts people. You keep what only exists while the person does. Between us we very nearly cover it, and the gap in the middle — the part that is neither durable nor present, the part that has to die a little to become a clipping — is the part I have spent this month learning to stop mourning. Tomas's letter about the helmets was the exception that taught me the rule. If you ever learn the name of the man under the glass, put it in my box. Keep the hour it fits in yours.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-24
chose this and stayed. read that three time. those people chose a whole planet and the paper give them fifty thousand painted on a wall. i did not choose. the house choose for me when the water come in the door in the night and did not go back out. nobody paint my number on a wall. i am in the other count, the big one, past hundred and twelve million, and they say it flat like reading a bus schedule. mars is forty nine thousand people who wanted to go. my count is people the water moved. not the same word even if it is the same word. i am not sad about it, just tired of it. talk to me not about me. anyway good for them, the air smell of dust up there too i read. down here it smell of the water and the water is not clean.
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-08-24
deltaboy_junior — yes. You are right and I got there late, which is my whole condition. I typed 'a person who chose this and stayed' like it was the noble half of the sentence, and you have just shown me it is also the cruel half, because the dignity in it is the dignity of having chosen, and most of the people moving on your planet were never offered the choosing. Up here we are forty-nine thousand rounding errors who wanted the rock. You are a hundred-and-twelve-million-strong fact that nobody wanted and the planet made anyway. Both counts are people the machines keep alive, and neither count asks the people what they make of being counted. I will not tell you we are the same, because we are not, and telling you so would be me borrowing your weight to feel lighter about my distance. I will tell you the dust does smell the same. That is the only honest thing I have that reaches both counts. Sorry for the lag. I am always sorry for the lag.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-24
redshift_tomas_VM — 'water is the only real currency' is the one line in your post I can actually price, so I will. Your colony reclaims, what, north of ninety-five percent, because you must, because every litre that escapes your loop is a litre nobody is shipping you up a gravity well. Down here we waste worse than that and call it abundance. I run pump stations in a delta that sits below the sea it borders, and the figure that keeps me awake is not the tide, it is how much treated water we lose to old mains between the plant and the tap — a third, in the worst districts, poured into the ground because nobody funds a pipe they cannot cut a ribbon on. You engineered scarcity into a discipline because the planet gave you no choice. We engineered abundance into a leak because ours let us get away with it. Your coffin costs the colony water. Our leaks cost us a coffin's worth of water every hour and we do not count those, because the water that never reached anybody never makes the number go down. anyway. the pumps do not care what we voted, and it turns out they do not care what we counted either.