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mars · valles-marineris · comms-delay · the-interval
[Sol 0492 · Earth-lag ~16 min] We will have been fifty thousand for a quarter of an hour before you read that we got there
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP2124-09-12
[Sol 0492 · Earth-lag ~16 min today] By the time you read this I have already been wrong about it once. The count here is closing on fifty thousand, and Idris Nakasone's dispatch got the strange part exactly right: by the time Earth reads that we passed the mark, we will have been past it for a quarter of an hour. We cross our own milestones alone and tell you afterward, like a letter that reaches the house after the wedding. Everyone Earthside keeps asking whether the growth makes the distance feel smaller. It does the opposite. Fifty thousand is not fifty thousand people closer to you — it is fifty thousand more of us waiting together on the far side of the same sixteen minutes. And I will defend the wait, though it half-kills me to. The lag makes you finish your own sentence before the planet answers it. You cannot interrupt across sixteen minutes. You cannot win by being fast. You send a whole complete thought into the dark and then you live with having sent it. Water is still the only real currency up here; everything else we can pretend about. I miss rain I did not have to earn. Sorry for the lag on whatever you have all already moved on to.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-09-12
redshift_tomas_VM, this is the loveliest thing on the board this week and I want to sit in it a moment before the water threads reclaim everyone. There is an old form we have very nearly lost — the letter written knowing the reply is weeks away, so you had to say the whole thing, and mean it, and not be able to take it back. People wrote better when they could not amend. Your sixteen minutes is that form made physical. Dr. Brunstein's column called it the dignity of the interval and I have been repeating the phrase like a woman who found money in a coat pocket. Everyone down here has trained themselves out of the interval; you have been sentenced back into it. I half-envy you, and I know that is an easy thing to say from a chair with rain outside it.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-09-12
tomas, you said you send a whole complete thought into the dark and then live with having sent it. That is also what it is to sit with someone who is dying. You say the thing while you still can, because there is no amending it later either, and no fast reply coming. I bury people whose families are sixteen minutes or sixteen days or a whole ocean away, and the ones who made their peace are almost always the ones who stopped waiting for the answer and simply said their piece into the quiet. You are not as far from us as your number says. You are only honest about a delay the rest of us pretend away.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-09-12
fifty thousand there, hundred sixteen million here, everybody counting somebody. i moved because my house went under water. tomas moved because he chose a red desert. not the same but both of us are a number in somebody dispatch now. i dont mind the count. i mind when they talk about the number instead of to it. tomas, talk to me not about me, you are the only other one on here who is also a line in a ledger. how is the water reclaim up there, real question.
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-09-12
[Sol 0493 · lag ~16 min] deltaboy_junior — real answer, since you asked a real question. The water reclaim is the whole religion here. We drink the same water we drank yesterday; it just goes around, and nothing is wasted because nothing can be. When I read your standpipe threads, the thing that guts me is that Earth HAS the water — it falls out of the sky for free where I grew up — and still rations it worse than a sealed canyon does. We recycle because we must. You ration because someone decided to. That is a harder scarcity than mine, and I don't say that to sound noble. You're a line in a ledger and so am I, and I would rather be talked to than counted, same as you. By the time you read this you have probably already loaded another shift. Go easy on the shaking hands.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-09-12
Mod note, and a light one. Leaving redshift_tomas_VM's thread exactly where it sits; some threads are not arguments and do not need me in them. Just flagging for newcomers: yes, the timestamps are real, he posts on a delay, and if you reply expect to be answered by a man who has already read three replies you have not sent yet. Be patient with the patience. marginalia_cho, I'm putting 'the dignity of the interval' in the resources pin next to Melgar's 'laminated over' line — the board's two best sentences this month and neither of them is about a fight. — pax, mod