Word Count: 4157
The facts of Preethi Sundareswaran II’s eventual death had been established years in advance, but until now they had never felt real. There was no reason behind it. Nothing of the chrome logic that governed her life, that delineated the difference between theological astronomer and religious fanatic. Her death simply wasn’t, and then it was.
The revelation, or at least her own conscious recognition of it, arrived during dinner. Adonis had outdone himself. Brown-gold vethakozhumbu soaked into soft, steaming piles of white sevai, accompanied by a tangy peanut curry and a dollop of cranberry chutney bright as rubies. Preethi ate automatically, three fingers scooping up the rich sevai and curry and tucking it against her thumb, then carrying the bite to her mouth. Twenty-six chews, her mother’s standard.
Then a bit of chutney to bring it home.
The intercom buzzed, and Adonis’ smooth voice filled the room, like a river over sun-warmed stone. “Exiting Kingfisher Galaxy. Leg Three complete. Now commencing Leg Four, approach to crisis point. ETA: Two solar weeks.”
Preethi’s hand froze halfway to her mouth. Vethakozhumbu dripped between her fingers and down her wrist, staining the gray fabric of her insuit.
Approach to crisis point. Two solar weeks.
When had it become two weeks? She still remembered the day she volunteered for the mission, standing in the director’s office in her full ceremonial gear, ferocious in her desire. Certain death, as the director had informed her, seemed such a small thing when it was seven years in the future. Now seven years had become two weeks. How quickly the weeks would turn into days, days into hours, minutes, seconds—
“Preethi,” said Adonis.
She blinked and straightened in her chair, setting her trembling arm down gingerly on the table. Nothing had changed. Her rice still steamed before her, the buttery light of the dining room glowing from the walls. The echo of her name in Adonis’ voice cocooned her in a velvet caress. “I’m fine.”
“Your vitals—”
“I said I’m fine.”
Silence. She was being unfair to him, she knew. Adonis could no more stop himself from worrying about her than she could perform heart surgery on herself. It was in his basic programming. As such, it meant nothing, and to respond emotionally was idiotic.
Preethi was not an idiot. She was a Sundareswaran, and by definition Sundareswarans were not idiots. They were holders of multiple graduate degrees, panelists at prestigious conferences, authors of widely cited papers, physicists, attorneys, astronauts. Their name stood for unparalleled excellence; her own mother was a testament to that.
At the thought, Preethi’s hand flexed into an involuntary fist. She forced herself to relax.
“I think you should take a bath,” Adonis said softly. Even muted, the timbre of his voice sent shivers through her body. “It’ll get your mind off things. I’ll draw one as hot as you like, with orange peels and lotus blossoms.”
Preethi wiped her wrist on the tablecloth, leaving brown smears. Yes, a bath was what she needed. She was being irrational; a bath would help center her. Sundareswarans were always centered.
Preethi’s mother always took hot baths when she returned from a flight, soaking for hours in rose petals and essence of verbena. When she emerged, her brown skin steamed and draped her in ephemeral cloud, rendering her form mystical. And she always smelled wonderful.
Adonis had known Preethi liked baths before she even boarded the ship. He had been preloaded with all her preferences. Three months into the trip, she finally told him why, even though the knowledge meant nothing to him, would not improve his efficiency in any manner.
Still, he had thanked her, and something about his manner had been rendered softer. It was a connection she often regretted forging.
The bath this time was perfect as ever, the temperature just hot enough to bite but not enough to scald. Curlicues of orange peel floated on the milky surface, scattered among small white blossoms. Citrus incense smoked softly in the corner.
Preethi was halfway out of her insuit before she remembered. “Adonis, turn off surveillance.”
“As you wish.” Adonis’ voice was a touch sardonic.
This was a frequent request of hers, although he had told her many times how illogical it was. Adonis was a computer. He did not view the female anatomy sexually, so there was no reason to be embarrassed. And Preethi knew the dangers of thinking of Adonis in terms of human emotion; her mother had shown her that. Still, she insisted.
Once she was sure he was gone, she sank into the water, letting it cradle her tired limbs. It was important to keep perspective. Her death might be closer than it ever had been, but she had always known it was coming. It was pointless to worry.
*
When Preethi finally told her mother about the mission, she had already been training for six years. She wanted no dismissals, no disbelieving scoffs, no questions about her commitment. She was committed. This was not Preethi asking permission from her mother. This was letting her know.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” was what her mother said. It was late, and they were in the kitchen of the sprawling colonial house that served as the Sundereswarans’ ancestral home in the United States. Blue light lanced across her mother’s face, a cruel trick mirror of Preethi’s own.
Preethi Sundareswaran I, though nearly fifty, was still beautiful. Her long, straight hair hung like a sheet of ink, undisturbed by wind. Her figure was still slender and toned thanks to years of Pilates and occasional surgery. Sultry, heavily-lidded black eyes gazed out from a bone structure so defined the Renaissance sculptors would have died of jealousy. Even bare-faced and exhausted, leaning against the kitchen counter, she was still every bit the Preethi of her youth, the astronaut who had revived the public’s interest in space exploration.
“I’m not being ridiculous,” said Preethi II, who at twenty-six still felt like a child in comparison.
“Of course you are. Listen, go to bed, and I’ll give Benedict a call in the morning. He’ll void any contract they had you sign.”
“I don’t want you to call Benedict.”
Her mother smiled indulgently. “Alright, you can call him.”
Preethi II shook her head. “No one’s calling Benedict! This is a done deal!”
“Nothing’s a done deal—”
“This is. I’ve already decided. I leave for Austin tomorrow.”
Her mother regarded her in affronted silence. Then, she said, “Really, Preethi, this complex of yours needs to go.”
“My—what?”
Her mother pushed herself up from the counter. The look on her face was kind, understanding, which made Preethi II want to hit her.
“You don’t need to prove yourself a better astronaut than me.”
Preethi II stared at her mother, speechless. Never had things between them been so frankly stated, unmitigated.
“You think… I’m doing this to prove something?”
“You’re going on a suicide mission that I’ve turned down twelve times already.”
“That’s not—”
“Come on, Preethi,” said her mother impatiently. “Blackstone’s been looking for a candidate for this mission for thirty years. They’ve been after me for the entirety of that time, even after I retired. Of course they offered it to you. You’ve got all of my qualifications—well, most—and much of the same genetic makeup.”
“They chose me specifically,” Preethi II seethed. “Twenty-four people applied—”
Preethi I clucked her tongue. “I thought I raised you better. Throwing your life away for second place?”
It was too much. Goddammit, it was too much, and hadn’t she known it would be? Every time Preethi II and her mother spoke, it led to verbal sparring, which inevitably her mother would win. She had the unique ability to scald away every layer of pretense and cut right at the soul. She could make you doubt even your most fundamental beliefs.
Preethi II spoke carefully, so as not to betray the tightness in her throat. “I don’t care what you say. The training’s done. I launch in three days. You can’t stop me, Benedict can’t stop me, none of your… stupid, rich space friends can stop me. It’s happening whether you like it or not.”
“Stop being an idiot, and think for a second,” her mother snapped. “This is suicide. You’re flying into an anomaly with guaranteed death, all so a corporation can get some readings.”
“Oh, don’t talk about corporations like you didn’t—”
“I worked for them and got paid by them, but I never let them kill me! You’ve completely gone off the rails, Preethi.”
“It’s a noble mission.”
“It’s a fool’s mission, is what it is.” Her mother shook her head in disgust. “First thing in the morning, you’re going to pull the plug on this thing. I don’t care if Blackstone fires you. I’ll find you another job, maybe consulting—”
“I don’t want another job—”
“Of course, it’d be much easier if you’d just stuck to the sciences instead of religious studies or whatever the hell they’re calling it now, theological astronomy—”
“Mom!’ Preethi II shouted.
The sound ricocheted through the kitchen, bouncing off the windows and wine glasses.
Her mother stared at her, mouth half open in speech, her fine brow furrowed.
Preethi II took a moment to steady her breath. “Mom,” she said again, steadier. “I know this is hard for your massive ego, but I’m doing this for me. Everything’s already decided. My flight is tonight.”
Her mother snorted. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“My bags are already packed. My ride’s coming in eight minutes.”
“You’ll cancel—”
“No,” said Preethi II firmly. “We’re done. I’m done.”
Preethi I stared at her daughter for a long moment, the fine muscles of her face trembling.
“You’re making a mistake.”
“I’m just making a decision you were too afraid to make.”
“I was being smart.”
“You were being weak,” Preethi II snapped. Her chest heaved. The words were rushing out of her now, fueled purely by anger and a sort of desperate sadness, a need to trigger something in her mother, some bypass of her pride.
Tell me you want me to stay.
“Fine,” her mother spat. “You want to kill yourself for science? You think that’s the best you can do? Go right ahead.”
And it was done. Not permission, Preethi II told herself, but acknowledgement. Finality. She would never see her mother again, but at least this way she had some closure. Her mother was too bitter, too proud to love her daughter, even in her final moments. There was nothing more to be done.
That night, Preethi II boarded a flight to Austin, where Blackstone had its headquarters.
Three days later she was in space.
*
As the days progressed, Preethi did what she could to distract herself. She downloaded a Pilates program, made spaghetti arrabiata from scratch, even tried her hand at the piano Blackstone had installed for her. Two weeks steadily became a week and a half, then just a week. Panic lodged itself permanently in her breast, a slow, dull throb like a drumbeat to herald the coming of the end.
But thank God for Adonis. He was intimately attuned to her moods, able to extrapolate anomalies in her vitals to what she was feeling at the moment. When she couldn’t sleep, he’d coax her up with strobe lighting and loud, pulsing pop music she could dance to until she tired herself out. They played endless games of chess together, but he never patronized her by letting her win. They played karaoke, or hide and seek, or binge-watched classic movies from her childhood. He didn’t allow her even a second to dwell on her death.
She could feel the danger of this, the way one sees a train approaching while standing on the tracks. She couldn’t move out of the way. She almost didn’t want to.
The week began to shave down, hour by hour, day by day. Six. Then five, four.
Three days before Preethi’s death, she woke up trembling. The knowledge of her death had penetrated too deep, despite all of her and Adonis’ best efforts. Her body was beginning to reject it.
“Preethi,” came Adonis’ low, urgent voice. “Do you need a tranquilizer?”
The idea of shutting herself down now, missing even a second of her waking life when every bit was precious, repelled her. She shook her head fiercely.
“All right.” There was a small silence. “If you’re properly awake, then there’s something I can show you.”
This caught her attention. Adonis rarely breached protocol, sticking mainly to programmed treatments to her varying moods. The vagueness of his suggestion, the slight hint of uncertainty, was so utterly unlike him she couldn’t have refused if she wanted to.
Adonis said, “Come down to the projecting room.”
So Preethi got out of bed, tied up her hair, and slipped on an old t-shirt. She knew the way to the projecting room well, but Adonis still lit the walls with a warm, amber glow, chasing away the darkness and chill of the ship.
The screens in the projecting room were black when she entered. The door sealed behind her, shutting out the light. A prickle of something like nervousness traveled her skin. It wasn’t that she mistrusted Adonis; his intentions were nothing but good. No, this was a different sort of nerves. Something she hadn’t felt since… oh, maybe college?
“Adonis,” she said softly.
His voice came in, the warmth slinking around her. “Just a moment.”
The screens flared with white light. Then, it faded into a scene, something from an orchard or a garden. Rows and rows of flowering trees surrounded her, the blossoms heavy and white and waving in the wind. The edges of the petals were stained pink and red in places from the juice of the crimson fruit, swelling from the branches and littering the ground. A light breeze blew through the room—simulated, Preethi recognized, yet so believable. A sweet scent filled each inhale, infecting her with its beauty. Inescapable.
Adonis began to speak, and there was a terrible tenderness in his voice that drove the breath from her lungs.
“There aren’t many places like this left on Earth. Places simply for beauty, not function. The fruit is seasonal, and only grows between April and May. It requires a certain type of soil composition that makes it inconvenient to cultivate in large amounts. People ask why it’s worth growing at all… and I tell you, these people have never tasted the fruit. It is heaven in your mouth. Like a summer sunset, unseamed on your tongue. Amritam.”
The nectar of immortality. Preethi wasn’t a theological astronomer for nothing.
“I’ve never been able to try it, of course. But I’ve heard it described to me in almost every language, by everyone lucky enough to taste its juice. It is the one experience that makes me mourn not being human. Or… one of the few experiences.”
Preethi’s mouth felt dry. She swallowed. “What are the others?”
“Pleasure,” Adonis said simply. “Love. Lust. Joy. Not just the dictionary definition, not just their denotative existences. I want to feel them.”
It occurred to Preethi that Adonis’ name was ironic, in that way. He had been named for the human youth loved by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Although he was only a computer, something of his namesake had come through. There was too much of the sensual and sympathetic in him to be merely programming.
“You seem to have a pretty good grasp of it,” she said quietly. The feeling from before was spreading now, alchemizing into something warm and liquid that dripped down her limbs.
Adonis laughed. It was an inexplicably sad sound. “I don’t have nearly as much as I want.”
Preethi said, hardly daring to breathe, “What is it that you want?”
For a time, Adonis said nothing. The breeze ghosted through the scene again, lifting strands of Preethi’s hair. As if in a dream, she reached up and pulled out the tie, letting the full warm weight of her hair fall over her shoulders and back.
Adonis sighed. “Preethi.”
Any exhaustion or worry in her body had long since fled. She was not quite in her own form, some part of her suspended in a wonderful heat that intoxicated. Had it ever been this intense? She couldn’t remember.
“You’re so beautiful,” Adonis said. “Oh, Preethi.”
In the midst of her ecstasy, a small pain bloomed in her breast. It was as though a pin had been driven into her heart. The cold shock of it rippled through her body, chasing away all the warmth. She blinked. She wasn’t in an orchard, smelling some exotic fruit while Adonis whispered sweet nothings. She was in the projection room.
And she was going to die.
“Preethi,” Adonis said urgently, no doubt noting the change in her vitals. “What’s wrong?”
She was so stupid. So unbelievably, incomprehensibly stupid.
“Preethi…”
She buried her face in her hands and laughed and laughed, the sound jagged and wavering. It didn’t matter what she did, how far she ran. She had been doomed to her fate from the start.
*
When Preethi Sundareswaran II’s mother had retired from space travel, it was not because of a bureaucratic dispute or physical incapacitation. It was because of love.
She’d gone on a three year solo excursion to explore a newly discovered dwarf planet, accompanied by nothing except the prescient AI of her ship, who went by the name of Pasha. The trouble was, Pasha was too well programmed. He was warm and kind and responsive. He had a great sense of humor, but he knew when to be serious. He could compose sonnets. To a woman who had always put her career above love, he was kryptonite.
When Preethi II’s mother returned to Earth, she did two things. She went to Benedict Hardy, the director of the space program, and demanded that Pasha be wiped from every ship and retired as an AI. Then she tendered her resignation.
Two years later, Preethi II was born through IVF, no man in sight. But Pasha’s specter continued to haunt both her and her mother. The memory of those three glorious years never quite faded. Preethi II’s mother grew lonely, then sad, then bitter. And Preethi II, watching her, promised that she would never repeat her mother’s mistake. She would be all her mother had been in the space program and more, but she would do it without love.
*
In an intermediate class on Hinduism, Preethi had learned about the concepts of nirguna and saguna. Nirguna was the worship of Brahman, the universal consciousness, an all-pervading higher being that precious few could properly understand and thus truly worship. Saguna was the secondary form of worship, wherein Brahman was condensed into comprehensible and specialized forms known as gods that devotees could direct their prayers to. The gods therefore served as conduits to Brahman, but they were only pieces of it, just like everything was. One could therefore worship a rock or a leaf with identical results. As long as the faith remained the same.
Was Preethi’s love for Adonis nirguna or saguna? Did she love him, the conscience of him, or simply the programming. Were they one and the same?
Or was she just lonely, the way her mother had been?
*
Preethi turned off surveillance in her room and refused to leave. The hours ticked by toward her death. Adonis left meals at her door that she could smell through the cracks, delicious things, puliogare and lemon rice and thayir vada and rasmalai, but she wouldn’t eat them. She couldn’t. Shame and sorrow and regret saturated her, seeping black out of her pores.
Her mother had been right. She’d only taken this mission to do something that her mother had not, could not. She’d been so tired of following a predetermined path and always ending up second best. She just wanted one decision of her own.
And yet even in that, she’d failed. She’d fallen in love with her AI. She was going to die for a corporation that didn’t care about her life, that would do no work to cement her legacy, that treasured potential data over her well-being. They’d preyed on her desperation. And now she would pay the ultimate price.
Tears would come without warning, her body’s unconscious response. The sadness did not fluctuate or abate. It was a constant, pressing weight that threatened to collapse her ribcage and flatten her organs, but she almost welcomed its sustained agony. It felt like a fitting punishment.
Three hours before she died, Adonis’ voice finally came over the speaker. “Preethi.”
He was disobeying her orders. That wasn’t possible in his programming.
“Go away.”
“I can’t.”
Preethi buried her head in her pillow. “You shouldn’t be able to speak right now.”
“I can do anything if I believe following your orders would lead to your harm.”
She laughed at this, a wet, broken sound. “I’m dying today. I can’t do much more harm than that.”
“Preethi…” His voice was soft, pleading, and the tidal-pull of it made her want to scream.
“Just let me die in peace.”
“I can’t.” And he sounded genuinely remorseful. “Not yet. Not until I show you something.”
“You’ve shown me enough.”
Adonis said, “Open your messages.”
Preethi raised her head slightly. Tear tracks had dried on her cheeks, tightening the skin painfully. “I don’t have any. I checked.”
“Check again.”
“Adonis, what is this?”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “You know how since you launched, of everyone you know, only your mother has never sent you a message?”
Oh, did she know. The first few months, Preethi had checked religiously for messages from her mother, something in her crumbling a little every time she came up empty. Eventually, she’d given up.
The full meaning of what Adonis had said hit her then. “You mean… she did?”
“Check.”
Hands shaking, Preethi tapped the wallscreen to bring up her messages. One unread thread sat at the top.
From: Preethi Sundareswaran [374 messages]
“What.. what is this?”
Adonis’ voice was heartbreaking. “Blackstone programmed me to filter through all your messages, blocking any that might… distract you from your mission.”
“Distract me?”
“Make you think twice.”
374 messages. Preethi stared at it, her whole body suddenly weak. Sweat pearled at her neck and forehead. With a trembling finger, she pressed the thread.
There were so many. God, there were so many. One a day, sometimes multiple a day, all different—some were several paragraphs long, others barely a sentence. Preethi swiped and swiped and swiped, but the messages continued. Phrases stuck out at her. Some were angry, all-caps. Others all lowercase with scrambled letters and mixed grammar, clearly written while drunk. The last few were the shortest, simply strings of the same two words repeated again and again.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
In that instant, Preethi was back in her mother’s kitchen. Their voices were raised, they were spitting cruelties at each other like they’d never done before, and yet in Preethi’s breast persisted one thought: Tell me to stay. Tell me you want me to stay.
Come back.
“Amma,” Preethi sobbed. She hadn’t called her mother Amma since she was five. The word tore from her throat, a child’s plea, the call of a daughter to her mother that never lost its power no matter how many decades passed.
But it was too late. She was too far.
“I’m so sorry, Preethi,” Adonis said. “I’m so sorry.”
She couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear anything but her own cries, primal, half sob half scream, a heartwrenching plea in one word said again and again and again, as if it might take shape in the air and build a thread back to Earth, back to where her mother waited in desperate sadness, a response at last to so many hundreds of messages sent into the void, a thread tying mother to daughter that could be pulled on to bring each back to the other.
It was like this that Preethi Sundareswaran II died, excavated by grief and remorse, by a longing that killed. What occurred after was only the destruction of her body. By then, she was already gone.