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Naomi Nagata was dead.
Fifty years after the ring space collapsed, on a hospital bed in the void city Persistence of Heart, she drew her last breath. Amos Burton was there to hear it.
He wasn’t the only one. Various friends and accomplices Naomi had built up over the years, some close to their own deaths and others with decades yet in them, had sat around the bed throughout the week, coming and going. Late one night, the room lights still dim and the quiet only broken by the beeping of machines and ragged breathing, Amos sat with two others. A man and a woman from Luna. He’d seen them before, but knew nothing else about them. A nurse stood next to the door of the room, head bowed. Waiting for the inevitable.
Then it happened.
Naomi drew another harsh breath, exhaling with a cough. Another did not follow. The machines kept beeping. There was a change in her expression, her facial muscles relaxing. Nothing more. She was asleep when she died.
Muffled sounds came from the other man, older than Amos, and it took him a moment to realise what it was. Crying. Comforting whispers came from the woman. Empty whispers. Full of false assurances.
Amos stood up, nodding at the other two and the nurse as he left. As if leaving a cafe where they were close friends and the nurse a waiter. His mind looked back over the last few minutes as he walked, repeating facts as if preparing for an exam.
Naomi. The closest thing to a friend that he’d had. The only person who’d even come close to understanding him. Dead. Naomi. Dead. Naomi. Dead…
His expression did not change as he left the hospital, the same smile still plastered on his face. Most people needed sleep, but he didn’t. Not since the creatures on Laconia had healed him up. He could sleep, if he lay down in the dark for long enough, but there was no reason to do that. Last time he’d done it was over fifty years ago, when they’d rescued Tiny from her shitty father.
He slept again that night.
***
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
By the time he woke up, feeling a groginess that he hadn’t felt for long enough to forget that it was a thing, her name was everywhere. In the news, in the corridors of the ship, in the workshop as Amos walked in, the muttered syllables drowning out the whining of saws and ripping metal.
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
“Oye, sorry about the loss, bossmang.” Pablo said, walking beside him. He was a reedy man from Ceres, with tattoos covering half his visible body. Amos could feel a dozen other eyes on him, watching. Waiting for a reaction. “You should take a break, que si? Me and the boys got everything covered here.”
“I’ll pass, Pablo,” Amos replied, with an amicable smile. The same one he always wore. “But thanks for the offer. You seen Cayor?”
Pablo gestured towards the cutting machinery in one corner of the large room, obscured by workers and sparks. “Was working on a mech arm, last I saw him. Again, sorry about her.”
And with that, Pablo walked off. It was the first and last time anyone talked to him about Naomi.
Not that he expected anyone to talk to him about it. He’d lost more people than most of the city’s inhabitants had birthdays. Bobbie. Alex. Holden. And now Naomi.
***
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
Her name was in the bar as well, on terminal screens and in the sea of voices that ebbed and flowed around him. Getting drunk wouldn’t help him, not in any way that mattered, but Amos did it anyway. Without passion, taking one shot after another, the burning sensation in his mouth giving no satisfaction. He didn’t speak to anyone else, and they didn’t speak to him, despite the business of the shop. Eventually, after the fourth shot, he stopped feeling all the eyes watching him.
A nod to the bartender as he stood up on shaky feet, a cursed sense of deja-vu fleeting through his mind. It was just like the hospital last night, with the old couple he’d never met and the nurse standing like a grim reaper. Waiting for her death, so that he could remove the body and stuff it into an airlock, jettisoning it as if Naomi’s body was worthless, now that her mind was gone. And it was, wasn’t it?
No, the body wouldn’t be ditched yet. There was going to be a funeral - it would happen then. There was going to be a funeral, right? Where was the funeral? Amos imagined it happening at that moment, in a room overflowing with people, more bodies milling in the corridors outside, while he walked around the ship shit-faced.
But that was just his imagination. Unless the funeral really was today, and the seventh shot of vodka had wiped that reminder out of him.
***
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
Her name was not in the gym, but it repeated in his mind anyway as he strapped on a pair of gloves. Or tried to. One kept falling off, and Amos forgot about it after his third attempt.
Half his punches didn’t land on the punching bag, maybe more. But still he kept punching, the force of his throws no weaker than they had ever been. The bloody protomolecule kept him strong as well as alive. There was no-one else in the gym, so Amos guessed it must have been late.
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
Her death hadn’t been a surprise. Illness had struck her a year ago, so Amos had had plenty of time to accustom himself to the idea of her death. Another moral compass, another friend, dead. Did the protomolecule, did his repairs, have a limit? He’d shrugged off bullet wounds like it was nothing, and medical scans had shown that whatever the laconian creatures had done, it had left his organs beyond fucked. What else could he survive? The vacuum of outer space? Hard radiation, burning whatever insides he had now?
Was there anything that could kill him? Maybe he’d live until the universe cooled down into its death, leaving only him floating through the dead void. Last man standing. Last thing standing.
Those thoughts fleeted through his blurred mind, in-between punches. But none of them could override the syllables, rattling in his head, the sound of thousands of voices fused together into something unrecognisable. All of them chanting the same thing.
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.
Na-o-mi. Na-ga-ta.