The Remembering
You can go forward in time, but never backward. It’s been true for countless generations. It’s still true. With the proper technology, you can accelerate to a future time. But there’s still no going back.
I went forward. Not on purpose, mind you. I was the unwitting subject of an experiment. I suppose my life was too ordinary for the tech wizards to think that my own world would be much at a loss without me.
I ended up on a spaceship. Space moves with time. What was once my suburban scrap of reality was now a patch of empty space … but for a benevolent military vessel that opted to rescue me from the meaninglessness of the void.
I was given a debriefing of sorts, then a few days to internalize the realities I would now have to live with. Gone forever my ordinary pursuits. What lay ahead? Who could say … What would I have recommended had a caveman been thrust into our world? Assuming there was no scientific or sociological information to be gained, it would be a chore to attempt to integrate them. A thankless chore. I was beginning to think of myself as such a chore – a misfit from the past who had nothing to seriously contribute in the future-become-present.
The captain invited me to the bridge one day, politely introduced me to the officers. I marveled at the scarcity of instrumentation. Very few displays, and if there were any buttons, levers, knobs, or the like, I did not see them. One detail that caught my attention was a large holographic display of a field of ships. Ours was the green one at the center. Several blue ones surrounded us. The ships had names that sparked confusion. A few I simply didn’t recognize – “Chideesh Flats”, “Golamizer Station”, and the like – but those that I did recognize disturbed me. “Stalingrad”, “Hindenburg”, “Pearl Harbor”, “Enola Gay”, and ours was “Titanic”.
I didn’t dare voice my curiosity on the bridge. The captain offered a few minutes in his quarters to discuss my intentions in private. I accepted. When we had settled down onto marvelously comfortable floating chairs and he had poured us some strange beverage, I decided to risk rudeness so as to understand the names.
“Captain, it seems that your vessels are named for disasters. Is that so?”
The man swirled his drink and looked out a large window into space. “It is so.”
I didn’t detect a note of caution in his voice, so I pressed on. “But, why would you do such a thing? Why not name the vessels for famous persons or cities or natural wonders or something grand and noble?”
The captain smiled. “Ah, you’d prefer us to be the ‘Resplendent Empyrean’ or somesuch, yes?”
I dipped my head, a little sheepish. “Well, it wouldn’t confuse me as much if the names were more like that.”
The captain nodded, his face becoming more serious again.
“Up to your time, it was custom, as you know, to name vessels after persons, places, and moments of pride, glory, success, power, home, happiness, wealth, and the like. It is a natural inclination. It is comforting to sail under the banner of success.”
The captain took a long sip of the drink. I, too, took some of it and realized that it was quite alcoholic. Somewhere between wine and whiskey in severity. The old man continued.
“But, some hundreds of years ago, after a cataclysmic civil war, the custom changed.”
He trailed off briefly, then began anew “New generations inject a constant youth and forgetfulness into our race, but there is still a comprehensible thread running through our history, and many of us still try to remember it. Every day, new children are born, but humanity itself is maturing. Slowly, but surely. After a war filled with atrocities as ugly as those that plagued us before we carved our mark upon the void, we had to question ourselves. Understand why we can be driven again and again to mad, selfish pursuits despite our compassion and unavoidable need for each other.”
The captain drummed the fingers of his left hand upon his knee a few times.
“Some suggested that we spend so much time focusing on success and specialization that we lose sight of how our small-minded efficiencies can be channeled in terrible ways. Others thought that we aren’t critical enough of our own capacity for consciously selfish gain. Still others posited that we are too prone to persuasion by propaganda that targets our pride. What resulted was nothing short of a sociocultural backlash. We called it ‘The Remembering’”.
The Captain took another long drink. I confess that I was a little worried my audience would end before I heard the answer to even my first question. I hadn’t expected the dissertation.
As if reading my thoughts, the captain said “I must be boring you. Forgive me, it isn’t often that one has the privilege of speaking to a person from the past. Believe me, it inclines one toward poetry moreso than efficiency. But, to answer your question, we name our ships after so-called disasters for the same reason that we reflect upon dark songs and tragedies. In doing so, we grapple with the monster lurking behind the man, but we also see shades of glory that can only be made manifest in the midst of disaster. I think, most of all, we realize that, despite our failings, our pains, our mistakes, our wrongs to each other, and, yes, even our very mortality, the torch of humanity is still passed down. From faltering hand to faltering hand, we endure.”
I saw tears running down his cheeks. That, if nothing else, drew a tug of emotion from me. He drew a wavering sigh, then let it out slowly.
“Under my command, I control firepower that could easily have destroyed Earth in your time. We carry a great weight with us. A beautiful weight, but a weight, nonetheless. We must remember the price of unchecked ego, the horror of conflict, the consequences of hastiness and laziness. And it is our privilege to bear the names of our past mistakes, that we may learn and grow from them.”
He politely suggested that I return when he was more collected. I left him there, confused at the deep display of emotion. But that night, I wondered. Which sort of name was more beautiful?
Comments