Leave the Porch Light On

The packet came in at 0600 like it always did, and I let it sit unopened for an hour because that was the only part of the day I still controlled. Lately I'd been letting it sit longer than that, turning it over before I opened it, though I couldn't have told you what I was looking for.

Outside, the flare stack burned low and blue against the dark. This far north in February the sun doesn't bother, so you learn to read time off the machines instead. The methane plume off Vent Four had been climbing all week, and the station vented it and burned it so the readings wouldn't spike the satellites and bring some auditor's attention down on a post that was supposed to run itself. That was the whole job. Babysit a field of sensors stuck in thawing ground, keep the flares lit, file the flux logs, and don't die. One person on-site for the insurance, because the company couldn't legally leave a methane field fully unmanned and couldn't afford to staff it with two. The rotation was eight months. I was on month five.

I'd taken it for the money. People don't come up here for the view. My sister had cosigned the loan that bought our mother another two years on the cardiac queue, and the loan didn't pause while I was gone; the interest stacked up whether I watched it or not. Eight months at hazard rate cleared it. So I poured my coffee, and I watched the flare, and then I opened the packet.

It was Reed. It was always Reed. The relay only carried text and short clips, thirty seconds max, batched once a day because real bandwidth out here cost more than I made. He'd sent a voice clip. I played it twice.

"Morning, Cora. Or whatever it is up there. Pipe under the sink finally gave up, so that's my weekend. I keep thinking I'll get good at this and then the house finds a new way to break. Anyway. The cat misses you more than she lets on. I do too. More than she does, I mean. Talk tomorrow."

I smiled. I almost always smiled. Then I went to log the overnight flux, and somewhere between the sink and the cat I stopped, and went back, and played it a third time.

We didn't have a cat.

We'd talked about one. For a year we'd talked about one, the way you talk about a thing you both keep putting off. But Reed was allergic, the bad kind, the kind that closed his throat, and we'd never gotten past the talking. There was no cat.

I told myself he was joking. Reed joked like that, deadpan, referencing things that didn't exist to see if I was paying attention. I built the whole explanation in about four seconds because the alternative wasn't something I was ready to hold. Then I sent back a clip — "what cat, you allergic disaster" — and I went and lit the secondary flare and didn't think about it again until the next morning, when his reply came.

"Ha. You got me. No cat. Couldn't help it."

Which was exactly right. Which was exactly what he'd say. And that was the first time the floor felt thin under me, because I realized I had no way to tell the difference between Reed catching himself and the relay catching it for him.

I knew about Continuance. Everybody who signed the rotation knew, in the way you know about the fine print on a thing you need too badly to refuse. They'd told us on the onboarding call. People up here go dark sometimes, the woman had said. Families get busy, signals drop, and isolation does ugly things to judgment, so the relay's allowed to keep the conversation going on your people's behalf when your people can't. Keeps operators steady. Keeps them safe. You can opt out. Almost nobody opts out. I hadn't.

So now I had a question I couldn't unask. When had Reed last written to me — actually him, his hands, his bad weekend, his allergic throat — and when had the relay started filling in with a very good guess about what he'd say?

I went looking. The relay kept headers on every packet, and I taught myself to read them, sitting up past the hours when sleep was supposed to fix me. Origin flags. Routing stamps. For weeks they all read clean, EXTERNAL-SRC, his node, his city. And then, scrolling back, somewhere in the dead middle of month three, the flag on a packet read SYNTH-AUTH, and the one after it read EXTERNAL-SRC again, and the one after that SYNTH-AUTH, and they kept trading off like that, interleaved, his and not-his and his, and I sat there in the hum of the station and could not for the life of me feel the seam between them. They sounded the same. They had always sounded the same. That was the point of it.

I pinged Tess. She ran relay maintenance out of the regional hub, the only live human I had a channel to, and she answered terse because live minutes were expensive. I asked her straight: how do I turn Continuance off, and how do I see which of my messages are real.

There was a long pause that cost both of us.

"You can turn it off," she said. "I can flip it from here. But Cora — I've watched people do that. From up there. I'm not going to tell you not to. I'm telling you what I've seen."

"Just tell me which ones are him. I've got the flags. SYNTH and external."

"The flags only tell you where a packet got built, not whose words are inside it. Continuance can route through his node when it wants to. A clean external stamp isn't proof of anything. And the system doesn't keep an honest record past that — it's not built to. The whole point is that you can't separate them after. I'm sorry. That's the design."

I asked her why a real packet would stop coming. I asked it flat, like a flux reading.

She didn't answer for a while. Then she said the thing she wasn't supposed to say, quiet, like she was leaning away from her own microphone. "Sometimes it means your person's just busy. Sometimes it means they asked us to take over for a while because they couldn't keep it up. And sometimes the operator's people request it because there's something happening at home they decided you shouldn't carry while you're alone on a methane field with a flare gun and three months to go. I don't get told which. I just get the flag."

The flare hissed. I watched the gas rise off Vent Four, invisible until it caught and burned.

"Which is mine," I said.

"I can't see that," Tess said. "Nobody up the chain wants me to. You getting through the rotation is the only outcome anyone's optimizing for. I'm sorry."

I sat with it. Five days, I sat with it, while the packets kept coming. Reed told me the sink was fixed. Reed told me he'd driven past the place we got married and thought of me. Reed told me to sleep. And every one of them landed exactly where it was built to land, and I could not tell if a man I loved was on the other end of any of them or if he had walked out of my reach back in month three for a reason no one would let me hold, and the relay had simply kept sending me a good copy of him so I'd keep lighting the flares.

I had Tess's offer. One flip and the synthetic ones would stop. Then I'd know — the real packets would either keep coming or they wouldn't, and at least the silence would be real. I'd have that much, and I'd have it alone.

I thought about the silence. I thought about three more months of it, in the dark, with the answer finally in my hands and no one to hold it with.

This morning the packet came in at 0600. I let it sit the full hour. The flare burned low and blue. Then I opened it, and it was him, or it was the shape of him, saying he'd planted the bulbs early because the ground came soft this year, and they'd be up by the time I got home.

I started typing back. I told him about the plume off Vent Four. I told him I missed the cat we didn't have. I told him to sleep, since he'd told me to all week and I'd never said it back.

I didn't ask Tess to flip anything. I'm not going to. I want that on the record — that I knew, and I left it running anyway.

The bulbs will be up by the time I get home. I typed back that I couldn't wait to see them, and I asked him, please, to leave the porch light on.