The Colonel Read Online Free PDF

left-overs entertained.
    Helen Keeton is still technically his wife. Annulments are straightforward enough when a spouse ascends, but a few forms don’t alter the reality of the situation one way or another and the Colonel never got around to doing the paperwork. She doesn’t answer at first, keeps him in Limbo while she finishes whatever virtual pastime he’s caught her in the middle of. Or maybe just to make him wait. After a year, he supposes he can’t complain.
    Finally a jagged-edged cloud of rainbows descends into his presence, the shattered fragments of a stained-glass window. Its shards swirl and dance like schooling fish: some nearest-neighbor flocking algo that conjures arabesques out of chaos. The Colonel still doesn’t know whether it’s deliberate affectation or just some off-the-shelf avatar.
    It’s always struck him as a little over-the-top.
    A voice from swirling glass: “Jim…”
    She sounds distant, distracted. As disjointed as her own manifestation. Fourteen years in a world where the very laws of physics root in dreams and wish-fulfillment: he’s probably lucky she can speak at all.
    â€œI thought you should know. There was a signal.”
    â€œA … signal…”
    â€œFrom Theseus. Maybe.”
    The flock slows, as though the very air is turning to treacle. It locks into freeze-frame. The Colonel counts off seven seconds in which there is no motion at all.
    Helen coalesces. Abstraction congeals towards humanity: ten thousand fragments fall together, an interlocking three-dimensional puzzle whose pieces desaturate from bright primary down to muted tones of flesh and blood. The Colonel imagines a ghost, dressing in formal attire for some special occasion.
    â€œS—Siri?” She has a face now. The particles of its lower half jostle in time to the name. “Is he—”
    â€œI don’t know. The signal’s—very faint. Garbled.”
    â€œHe’d be forty-two,” she says after a moment.
    â€œHe is,” the Colonel says, not giving a micron.
    â€œYou sent him out there.”
    It’s true enough; he didn’t speak out, after all. He didn’t object, even added his own voice to the chorus when it became obvious which way the wind was blowing. What weight would his protests have carried anyway? All the others were already on board, in thrall to a networked mob so far beyond caveman mentality that all those experts and officers might as well have been a parliament of mice.
    â€œWe sent all of them, Helen. Because they were all the most qualified.”
    â€œAnd have you forgotten why he was most qualified?”
    He wishes he could.
    â€œYou sent him into space chasing ghosts,” she says. “At best. At worst you fed him to monsters.”
    And you , he does not reply, abandoned him for this place before the monsters even showed up.
    â€œYou sent him up against something that was too big for anyone to handle.”
    I will not be drawn into this argument again . “We didn’t know how big it was. We didn’t know anything. We had to find out.”
    â€œAnd you’ve done a fine job on that score.” Helen’s fully integrated now, all that simmering resentment resurrected as though it had never been laid to rest at all.
    â€œHelen, we were surveyed . The whole damn planet.” Surely she remembers. Surely she hasn’t got so wrapped up in her fantasy world that she’s forgotten what happened in the real one. “Should we just have just ignored that? You think anyone else would miss their child less, even if Siri wasn’t the best man for the job? It was bigger than him. It was bigger than all of us.”
    â€œOh, you don’t have to tell me. For Colonel Moore so loved the fucking world that he gave his only begotten son.”
    His shoulders rise, and fall.
    â€œIf this pans out—”
    â€œIf—”
    He cuts her off: “Siri could