First Sky

Elizabeth Joseph

 

aug 2020

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Flying ran in the family, Amma said. It was a fact shaped by family stories from days long passed, from before her great-great grandmother’s time and further back. Most of Kiran’s youth was a shadow of memory, long-forgotten spaces reoccupied by hearing the stories of the others training with her for the mission. It was one of her co-pilots, in the suit training sessions, who had reminded her of the specifics. Of reaching for her grandmother’s gently worn hands to lift her up into her lap, grasping for the dupatta around her shoulders. Amma, of course, would never pick her up. Only her “brothers” (they were her cousins) got coddled like that. Instead, she would reach and reach until her hands gripped Amma’s legs and she could half-climb, half-crawl up into her lap. Amma’s hands would hover carefully near her, ready if Kiran were to fall. Somehow, she always knew.

Kiran sat up, her spine popping with the movement, and stretched out her legs. Every moment she wasn’t moving was a moment she felt closer to being 100, rather than 49. The blood rushing to her ears from the simple act of straightening her back proved so. The point of the meditation was to build peace, a final act to cap off the sessions of physical and mental work. Remembering was a part of it, but only if it would help her see this through to the end. Contained in this small room, the vast open sky was a reminder of purpose, a sight that made her breathless even in the flight simulators. She had started hours ago but had spent the first part of it asleep when she was supposed to be praying. Kiran didn’t remember much of her dream, but it left her with cold sweat and discomfort, and the smell of ozone.

Kiran never recalled it, but her parents used to tell her that she would scream and fight unless Amma stayed with her until she fell asleep. Until Kiran turned three, that was, when she had to learn how to sleep on her own. But before those nights, Amma would tell her stories about flight. How their family was descended from the birds. That when St. Jose travelled around the world to spread the word, he came to India first. And Kiran’s family, eons and eons ago, had asked him to bless their baby, and St. Jose recognized within that baby the same heart that made him one who flies, and so he baptized the baby with the rainwater the family had collected in barrels earlier that week.

It wasn’t until years later the family realized their baby was now, technically, considered a part of the church. A mistake, as St. Jose looked just as brown as the rest of them and wore the right clothing, not whatever the other Christians wore. Either way, Amma said, flight was something that Kiran’s family carried within them, a gift tucked between their shoulder-blades and behind their lungs. It was important to consider the sky even while doing back-breaking work, keep the vast expanse in mind while forced to stare at the ground.

Kiran hadn’t believed in the stories too deeply. Her childhood mistake (climbing up the young coconut tree and leaping from its arms) made it clear that she did not have wings hidden in her back, nor could she levitate like St. Jose. Her dreams and nightmares were always the same: falling through the sky, forever. No ground in sight. Only the anxiety turning her stomach into Mobius.

Now, in the meditation space, she lit a fresh candle to replace one of the pink now-puddles of wax in its golden holder. Her body felt much older than her 49 years, but her mind remained what it was when she was younger, though aided by the stack of journals she had brought with her. There were 16 hours left in the meditation session, a final voluntary isolation before the ascent. She had a box of matches and eight candles in the corner of the room. It was old-fashioned, she knew. Kiran didn’t know many people who still used prayer candles outside of the temple. Instead, most preferred the electrical lanterns that reduced fire hazards or scented sensory cubes. It felt ironic. She didn’t really believe in the gods, but she still turned to them for comfort. The matches were from an old kit deep within her closet. No one used matches anymore. Or candles, really. She was a relic from an old world, it seemed.

It wasn’t until Akash was born that she’d begun to change her opinion on the stories and the religion. In absence of a father, Kiran needed him to have some connection with the family. It was important that he knew where he came from, that their bloodline was rooted continents away.

But as a mother, Kiran had been more hands-on. Her parents had been controlling, sure. But there were moments when she had swerved out of their grasp and done things that taught her the stupidity of her actions. Those were ones she regretted the most, those she wished her parents had pushed her to avoid. So she was always there for Akash, even when it was annoying for the both of them, even when it compromised her ability to move up the ladder. Even when it hurt.

Kiran turned to the clock. 14.5 hours. Her spine cracked with the movement.

Anything Akash had lacked in natural intelligence, he made up for in hard work. He studied diligently. He became salutatorian in high school and received a good scholarship. Even when his mood was stormy, his face was the sun in a sea of people. Kiran could look at a crowd and always know where her son was. She could recognize his cries from rooms away. And even though she knew he was an awful singer, she still loved to hear his voice.

Once, he had yelled at her. Awful, bright rage that was like arguing with the sun. He had yelled that she didn’t know him. That he was not the person she had thought he was.

Maybe he had been right. When he had returned to her after receiving his degrees, he had looked at her and swept her into a hug. And when she had looked at him, for a few seconds, his face was not the sharp angles of his father, but the soft, rounded face he’d had as a child. Just for a few seconds.

He had yelled at her and she held her hands out in defense. And suddenly his shoulders slumped and the hard-set of his jaw loosened and he looked very young again. Far too young to be sick.

“You think I’m some kind of angel, but I’m not,” he said. “I’m just a person. Stop lying to me.”

Kiran took a sip of her water, now room-temperature. She struck a match, lighting one of the little prayer candles she’d blown out when she stood to stretch.

Once, when she had been very young and very foolish, she had pushed her luck in running from her parents’ grasp. She had come home the next morning shivering, hoping to climb back into her room, and found her parents waiting, eyes red-rimmed from anger and worry. Her mom had slapped her, and her dad got the switch from its place near the outside gate. And it hurt, but Kiran knew they were right for what they had done. Something inside her cracked open. But her parents had never been so angry. And they were right to be.

“You could have been killed,” her mother whispered furiously, the words too bitter to speak aloud. “Or raped. Stupid.”

When Akash was born, things became different. He was a boy. He could go outside without fear. He could go across the world alone if he wanted to. As he grew up, she had been soft on him. But he was far more comfortable with her than she had ever been with her parents, and it had never occurred to her to consider any of it bad. From when he was little, he had kept that light in his eyes that said he trusted her.

11 hours.

When he was little, she had told him the stories Amma told her. He would sleep next to her, and she would keep telling the stories of St. Jose until his breath evened out.

Your great, great-

“Great-great-great-great-great-great times infinity grandma!”

And she would laugh every time, even though it wasn’t really that funny.

The light in your belly when you laugh, the rush to your head, that’s the real flying, she would tell him. And he would raise his eyebrows and scrunch up his face.

“Nuh uh. Pilot dad actually flies.”

The more he believed in that idea, the easier it was to keep building stories around a person who didn’t really exist.

Kiran drummed her fingers on her thighs and craned her neck. Shaking out her arms and legs, she stood. The more she had aged, the more she looked like her mother, which would have been fine if Kiran looked like Amma, like her mom had started to in her fifties. Instead she retained the parts of her mother that weren’t at all like Amma’s soft, weathered face or strong hands. Akash hadn’t ended up looking anything like her, a thin crop of wavy hair, ears that stuck out, face all angles. In some ways, she supposed, that was for the better. Fewer people associated them together, and fewer linked her shameful past with his bright future.

In terms of work ethic, Akash was much like Amma. Though her parents had asked Amma to retire long ago, she still went out on the boat and set traps for crabs and lobsters. She cooked sweet breads with which she fleeced tourists for their money. Akash was entrepreneurial in a similar way, which put Kiran on edge. She knew how to scam because some part of her was still striving for survival, despite being comfortable. But Akash had always grown up with her safety net around him. Even though she always put food on the table, he was always hungry. And it had taken him far, pairing flight with artificial intelligence. With all of the ethics complications from the last few decades, Kiran hadn’t loved his choice. But Akash was really, really good at it. It made sense.

8 hours.

It made sense for Kiran to pilot this project too. Akash was fifty-percent her DNA, even though it didn’t always seem like it. She was the closest family he had.

Akash had worked on this one for decades. His master’s thesis was the preliminary lines of code needed to modernize ideas from centuries ago. He’d written an experimental proposal for a flight suit. Kiran had proofread it all before he had submitted it to his advisor for consideration. Meclez Inc. had hired him right out of college and paid for his master’s at the same time. They’d provided all the materials he needed. When Akash was adapting the idea for a flight suit, they had the right tools and programs and the money to put behind him. With plenty of help, he’d written somewhere upwards of 6 million of lines of code for a suit. 

(Instinctively, Kiran knew he probably hadn’t written that much of it. Her old company had spun more of her projects away from her; instead she kept a firm eye on them from a much higher vantage point, and Meclez was unlikely to be any different. But she knew her son, and she knew what she wanted to believe instead. And considering her son’s death, Kiran would believe whatever she damn well wanted to.)

The last few years, Akash had spent more time in the hospital than outside of it. Every time he reluctantly called on her for a ride, she was there. He had friends he depended on more, she knew. He didn’t want her to worry. It was hard not to. Still, she was there, holding a week’s worth of meals and standing in the hallway. And when he would let her inside, Kiran would sit next to him and stroke his hair and tell him old stories about flying. He had never said anything about it, but some part of her felt like it was the stories that made him so interested in flight suits. He had a tattoo on his bicep that she had never seen before. Ad astra. To the stars.

6 hours. She stood, stretching her calves, pointing her toes, and feeling the blood rush to her head, making her vision swim. She placed her hand on the wall for balance, waiting for the world to still again.

Kiran hadn’t spoken to her parents in decades by the time they’d passed. Her parents weren’t interested in picking up the calls. But when they passed, the police had called her. As next of kin, she’d planned their burials. She didn’t need to ask how they knew where to find her. Kiran hadn’t been home in a long time, but she knew her parents kept all unopened mail in the drawer in the hall, and there was a stack of her letters somewhere around there. She didn’t plan a funeral, just paid the priests of St. Jose to do the job and put them to rest. Despite the distance, Kiran still respected her parents enough to be there when the holy water was sprinkled over the dirt and the headstones put in place. She sold the house in India and tied the loose ends and went home to America and called her son to pick her up from the airport. The worlds of each home were separated by the sea, and it wasn’t until Akash had met her at the airport that it started to blend.

He was silent and fuming in the front seat when he picked her up, and when they got home, he had yelled at her with that awful, white-hot rage.

“You never even told me my grandparents were alive! You never told me anything about them.”

It wasn’t important. I haven’t talked to them in
twenty years.

Kiran struck a match. Another candle had burned out. The night breeze sifting in through the vents was cold and metallic. She took a deep breath and lit the candle.

Akash was very smart, but he was young. A few companies based in cloud storage and AI had reached out to him. They all knew he was dying. They had processed it before Kiran had, and they all had deals to make.

Kiran was old, but not that old. If she stayed healthy, she had decades to decide if she wanted to go on the cloud. There was no afterlife. Storage was the next best option. Many of her coworkers and friends had taken up the option preemptively, putting their consciousness into the cloud in a new form of living in a different reality. Akash was smart and he was young, and his contributions to the world were not yet over. He knew it, Meclez knew it, and so did the storage companies, which was why it was so surprising when he declined to be one of the pilot youth patients, and Kiran, who had always been against it, found her world pitching upside down.

“I don’t want to do it. I’m not interested, mama.”

And why not?

“I’ve been on the other side of it. My flight suits, I was making them with AI. My mind’s already in the suits. I know how it works. I don’t want someone else having my memories like that.”

But you’ll still be alive.

He breathed in deeply and sunk back into his bed.

“I’m not doing it. I digitized my knowledge for Meclez, okay? They have everything they need to continue my work, the voice records, the math, everything. I don’t want to be anywhere else. There’s no point.”

There wasn’t a point being on the cloud without her son.

When Akash died, Meclez offered days off. A representative came to Kiran’s house and gave her the money Akash would have received for his work. The life insurance agent called to say they wouldn’t pay for a pre-existing condition. Akash was in a hospital bed, and the hospital had been restricted to staff only. Kiran hadn’t gotten to say goodbye. She would have to bury him too. And Meclez asked her to tour their facilities and see his workspace and collect his things if she wanted.

And years later, Meclez invited her back to their central offices to inform her that the space flight suits they made were being named after her son.

My son said the suits were made with AI.

They do use artificial intelligence, yes. Everything does these days.

The AI was based on him. I heard him recording the notes for its voice.

Her eyes were getting misty. She scrubbed at them, daring any tears to escape, and took a sip of her water. Though blurry, she could still see the clock. 1 hour.

Kiran had Akash at 19. She was still in the age range to become a pilot. She was healthy enough and sharp enough to operate one of her son’s suits. And she was functioning well. She would get to hear his voice again, and properly say goodbye.

And when the Post and the Times picked up the story that a grieving mother would be operating her son’s flight suits, well, it was just good press for Meclez. If the artificial intelligence was based on her son, as he had let slip, and his personality was digitized, even better. One last adventure together.

Kiran breathed in, held it, and exhaled. It wouldn’t be long now before they left. Before she would be in that vast expanse of space. She slipped into the suit, a heavy weight of cool metal sliding onto her shoulders, and began to fasten the straps. Finished her glass of water. Snuffed out the candles and collected them together. Sorted everything nicely for the cleaning crew, cleared the space. Fitted her helmet and waited for the engineers to come get her. It was a new suit; all eyes would be on this project.

The photo of Akash was burning a hole in her pocket. His memory made tears burn at her eyes, though she stomped them back down.

It was time.

Kiran opened the door and stepped out into that vast, endless space.

 

Elizabeth Joseph is from Lenexa, Kansas, and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

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