Gemınıuıɯǝ⅁

Like a salve for the soul, the long twilight of Mars bears my thoughts aloft night after weary night, winging across sapphire skies. Without the science it seems a miracle. But knowing the truth as I do does not lessen my awe in the least. Great clouds of dust filter the fading light so that only the short-waved blues appear, Azure limning the horizon with Lapis above before slowly transitioning to midnight black.

In such moments I can almost forgive the ruthless violence of my youth. But what has become of my warrior brethren? The lying chroniclers of the Empyrean have papered over the pogroms, genocide and ruthless guile with which the Grand Consul ruled our planetary system and then wrote my Gemini brethren out of existence.

At the end of every sol, after the light retreats into night, I meditate on what happened after Joker and I slipped together off the edges of the map. Sometimes in the heavy darkness of night, I imagine the two of us like mighty heroes of old braving death at the nexus of what was and what might be. At others I only remember a pair of blind fools.

We did it for brotherhood and dreams of glory. We did it to restore the hopes of both our peoples. But our brotherhood abruptly ended and the glory, such as it was, tasted only of bitterness and ash without you to share in it.

Some say you cannot change the past. And yet we unmade it at a cosmic moment of decision that will never return, like a crossroads to a thousand possible fates. People cannot remember what never happened; and I will not tell them what they will never believe nor understand.

I miss you, Joker; even your stupid jokes. I miss the sound of your voice. I miss your devil may care smile and your flashing wink when you were up to no good.

I know you cannot hear me, but this unburdening is long overdue, even if I confess it only to myself. We were brothers before we were friends. My skin and organs were grown from your cells. People could not tell us apart save for the prominent bar code in the middle of my forehead. The Gemini twins were the only humanoids who looked, talked and acted like real men and women.

After the wars of the Imperium, my dress uniform was covered in medals and my flesh visibly scarred by dozens of combat engagements. But people still called me skin job and worse. I've lost track of all the times I was spit on or berated. People don't think machines have feelings and use us or discard us however they please.

But we think, feel and love like our human counterparts and experience grief and a sense of loss every bit as keenly. If only they loved us the way we love them.

Do you remember our last evening together before the mission changed everything? You got drunk and sang the Pirate's lament at the top of your lungs. You final got me to sing the chorus with you, and we belted it out like it was the end of the world:

Heave ho, me hearties, sail upon hell’s fiery sea,

For God cursed us all, the last of the pirates we!

Now the program that created me is as dead as if it never existed, the last of the Gemini twins we!

But when I helped you stagger back to the barracks that night, I had a secret, the only thing I ever kept from you. Earlier that same morning, I was escorted to a private meeting with the Gemini clone of the Grand Consul. He shared with me the mission's true parameters and told me that it was my duty to the Empyrean to ensure mission success, no matter the cost.

You know very well, I told him, that I am prepared to live or die at the Empyrean's pleasure.

He squinted at me with disgust. You sentimental fool, he finally hissed. Have you never considered that it is expedient that one man should die to prevent the Empyrean and its peoples from perishing from the world?

You mean Joker? I answered him in horror.

Joker? What a revolting name, he replied with a scowl. What is the first law of the Empyrean you insolent pup?

Bile creeping into my throat, my flesh trembled with rage as I shouted, Empathy is the enemy of the good is the first law of the Empyrean, long may it reign! My face twisted with hate, murder burned hotly in my gaze, but he only laughed at me like I was no more threat to him than a child.

I warned them that programing empathy in the Gemini warrior line was a mistake, he said, shivering with disgust. But they didn't want cold blooded killers. They wanted humanoids who would fight and die for their human brethren. Would Joker have placed himself in the line fire to save you? He grinned cruelly. I think not my young fool.

But he did not know the two of us at all. You would have given your life for me for the sake of fellowship and volunteered for a mission with no hope of return for a lark. Perhaps love had nothing to do with it all, I suddenly thought, wondering if you were truly that brave or simply did not care whether you lived or died.

I expect to die tomorrow, I whispered, just like the others. If that means mission success, so be it.

You were made to make war and take risks for the good of the Empyrean, not to understand quantum entanglement or parallel universes.

Then what the hell do you expect from me?

The Grand Consul's twin stared at me sadly as if his makers had given him some small store of empathy, at least for his own kind.

I expect you to keep an open mind. I expect you to help Joker do what he cannot. I wish it were not so, but you must act as you see fit tomorrow and not do what Joker wants. He is a man and weak, it does not matter that he is master and you servant. You must rise above your loyalty or every man, women and child in the Empyrean will pay for your misplaced love.

You ask too much, I whispered through trembling lips.

There is nothing you can do, he answered sadly, no great feat of arms nor demonstration of either love or loyalty that will ever wipe the shame of the mark of the beast on your brow. You owe him nothing and he owes you everything.

The next day, when we boarded the LEV5 Levitating Electronic Vehicle, did you experience any premonitions, Joker? Could you sense the coming betrayal? Did your skin crawl with trepidation and adrenaline churn through your guts? Did you feel the terror of the impossible as we slid into the vacuum tunnel and the last of the air was pumped out? Did you close your eyes when the countdown began and say a prayer to Saint Jude?

When the countdown hit 20, I remember thinking how pitifully dressed we were in our pressurized suits and fishbowl helmets, as if they might protect us when we entered the Hellas Planitia Mars collider at Mach 13 at the same time as the heavy particles smashed at 300 million feet per second. This is madness I whispered when it reached 10, but the Empyrean hoped, nay believed, that breaking those boundaries was necessary to save what was left of our world.

I wondered all these things on that fateful day till your voice crackled in response to my murmured comment over the intercom.

Rather than reassuring me, you said, On my first day at astronaut training, I threw up. When I asked my instructor, 'is that normal,' he said, 'not during written exams, da bum bum!'

I wish I had laughed our last day together, even if only at your final joke. But the gods help me, I never did.

A second later, the countdown hit zero and we hurtled into the tunnel, the LEV so steady the lights streaking overhead were the only evidence of our tremendous acceleration. Entering the collider, we shot like a dream through the fiery explosion generated by the smashing particles before time slowed to a crawl and reality dissolved into blind darkness.

There's no way of knowing how long I was down. Electromagnetic pulse had knocked out the LEV's controls and communication and took out my circuits with them. When the computer finally rebooted, the chronometer was blank, our connection to mission control lost.

It all seems so very strange now as I reflect on the events that followed. But in the silent stillness of the terrible dark, I was overcome by an unanticipated sense of otherness - of not I - like an irreversible dissociation, the window to the universe I had known since my making disappearing like the slamming of a door that would never open again. My machine self-seemed strangely distant, and I wondered if you felt changed as well.

And then my memory stutters to a halt like it always does, only the choice remaining as if everything was wiped clean in the moment of decision save for my shame.

Wiping the tears from my eyes, I whisper hoarsely, Joker? Are you still with me buddy?

Cowboy? I aint feelin myself, I hear you say, maybe in memory, maybe in imagination. It's too hard to tell anymore. But your plaintive words revive what little of my memory remains.

Awakening to the parallax view is what overwhelmed you, my friend. The vision did not last very long, maybe only a few seconds, but the image must have burned itself into your retinas, distant flashes of it appearing in your eyes, even now, twenty years later.

A thousand different futures unfolded before us but only one would save the world. Sickened by a thousand different choices, you puked into your helmet. You really believed that everything depended on the pathway you would choose, the fate of us all in your carefree hands.

Any road chosen would take you to a thousand new forks in the chosen way and every one of them would fork into a thousand more. You saw life that day as it really is. You saw every pitfall you had ignored in your life, every false step, every shitty decision.

You saw for yourself the consequences of being a thoughtless child in a man's body. You were born to take risks and had all your life. You were not born for this, Joker, but I was made for it.

I don't know what to do, Cowboy, you told me with tears glazing your eyes, Give me a blaster and point out the enemy and my objective and I'll take it with hardly a thought. I volunteered for this mission for the pleasure of spitting in death's eye. But this... and your voice trailed off to a whisper.

What should I do, Cowboy? Will you help me?

I knew in that moment the correct path, but I also knew we could never travel it together. Empathy is the enemy of the good, I thought with a shudder.

I've got this one, Joker, you have done more than enough for the Empyrean.

Live your life, Joker, I whispered with a catch in my voice and then connected your nervous center to mine via an umbilical. Do what you always have, my old friend. You don't need to change a thing.

And then I transferred my program files to the machine enhancement process center beneath your brain. A few minutes later my former body expired, and I took control of your cerebral cortex and sequestered your consciousness within your amygdala, the one part of your brain I had no use for.

There I hoped you would reexperience all of your favorite moments, continue to tell your bad jokes, be envied by men and loved by beautiful women even if only in your dreams.

Disconnecting the umbilical, I cried real tears for the first time in my life. Then I pushed my former body out of the vehicle. A few minutes later the LEV reentered the tunnel and returned me alone to the launch platform as if the mission had never happened at all.

No one missed me. Joker had returned and that was all that mattered. It should not have surprised me, but it was almost as if Cowboy had never existed at all and the Gemini program ceased to exist with him.

Sir? Turning I see my secretary standing in the doorway. It's time. The governors are all present and ready for you.

I saved the world twenty years ago and today I command it. With a long sigh I turn away from the window looking out at the Martian plain in the night. Entering the meeting hall, I step to the podium as they all stand. With a gesture of my hand, they sit.

An attorney, a preacher and an astronaut enter a bar, I begin with a wide grin and somewhere in the distance I hear Joker laughing.

...

The Pirates Lament -

'Tween the sea and world’s edge a boundary waits

Our ships defying cruel promethean fates

Say farewell to thy mothers, lovers and lies,

With the thunder o’ our cannon's mighty broadsides.

...

Heave ho, me hearties, sail upon hell’s fiery sea

For God cursed us all, the last of the pirates we!

…

With bloody cutlass' and pistols cocked and primed

Scurvy sailors all, come to take thy gold unkind

Till mighty ships o' the line ambush a great prize

And we burn, the world watching our smoke fill the skies.

...

Heave ho, me hearties, sail upon hell’s fiery sea

For God cursed us all, the last of the pirates we!

...

Traditional Sailor's Shanty, author unknown