Wanderer

1 Jess lay on the bed beside Ali, keeping still so he wouldn’t wake her. The lights were off but he wasn’t looking at anything in the room anyway. Instead he was using his implants to study messages that the Wanderer had intercepted. Messages flying between ships. Messages about him and about the Wanderer itself. While the messages varied greatly, two strong themes came through. One was that Jess and his incredible ship were heroes, saviours. Almost gods in some of the messages. Those sending them enthused about all that Jess and the Wanderer had achieved – both preventing the universe itself from being destroyed and stopping the marauding threat that was the Taint. The other type of messages took a very different tack. Those sending that type of message considered the Gift, the name those who had fallen to the Taint used for it, as a wonderful thing and they viewed Jess’s destruction of the Gift as a horrific crime. The words those used to describe Jess were varied but murderer, demon, and evil, all turned up frequently. Those seemed to focus far more on Jess than the Wanderer. It seemed the Wanderer got to share in the credit for what they’d done far more than the blame. Yet in some ways Jess preferred the negative messages to the ones that praised him. He had some understanding of where those feelings came from. Whether they were true feelings or whether they had been forced on the victims of the Taint and were still hanging around Jess didn’t know. He suspected he never would, and he wondered if there really was a simple answer to that question. Either way, he could understand they were struggling with withdrawal from the sense of unity they’d experienced. But those who saw Jess as a hero? That he couldn’t understand. He’d simply been in the right place at the right time with the right incredible ship. He didn’t see himself as a hero. In fact he looked back at all that he’d done, all the destruction he’d unleashed and especially all the lives he’d ended, and saw himself as more monster than hero. Stifling a sigh he moved on to the next set of messages. The implants in his head that he was using to communicate with the ship also allowed him to speed his thoughts, so he was able to process many hundreds of messages in the time it would otherwise have taken to read one. That didn’t make them any easier to work through. He stifled another sigh, and started working on the next batch. He’d barely started when he was startled by a sharp poke in his back. “Don’t think that just because you’re using your implants I can’t tell what you’re doing!” said Ali, her voice playful. “I can see exactly what you’re looking at, though I still don’t understand why you’re putting yourself through it.” “I’m not really sure either.” Jess rolled over in bed, and raised the lights a little so he could make out Ali’s face. As with so many things involving the Wanderer, there was no conscious thought to it, he just wanted to see Ali so the ship increased the lighting. It was a link he no longer questioned, or even noticed most of the time. “Who cares what any of them think?” asked Ali. “None of them know the truth. None of them know what you went through, what you were willing to sacrifice, and none of them know what the Taint was truly like. You did what you had to. You did what was right, and thanks to you there is still a universe and there are still people. Thanks to you they’re free to argue about whether or not you did the right thing.” “I know. It’s difficult, though. I can’t help wondering whether if I’d just done things differently less people would have died. I wonder if Teeko would still be here, or Nova, or the thousands upon thousands whose deaths I caused. Some hero!” “You’re my hero! Who cares what anyone else thinks? And now, since you woke me up, I think the hero deserves a reward…” The smile on her face was soon echoed on Jess’s, and as she pulled him close he stopped worrying about anything else… for a while at least.