Pins and Needles

Stellar Year 4587, 1st Entry

I don’t quite know where to begin. I don’t think anyone does, when they try to put a whole life’s worth of actions into words — good ones, bad ones, it makes no difference. The reckoning will come, and with it, maybe, absolution. Or maybe not.

I started this journey as an ordinary man from the Known Fringe. Not poor, but not sitting on much either. A quiet life, the kind with no dreams worth calling dreams. If you’d asked me back then whether I’d one day be Counselor of the New Galactic Empire, I’d have laughed in your face. I thought I’d die on Caleth, married to the girl two streets over.

Fate had other plans.

People have asked me why I bother writing these memoirs. Why go to the trouble of telling a story so many others have already told, and told better than I ever could. I’ve never had a good answer for that. Maybe it’s to set down my version. The truth, and not the fiction so many people insist on believing instead. Or maybe it’s because I’m dying, and I want to feel the rush of living it all again — one last time, even if it kills me a little faster.

My voice doesn’t hold the clarity the machine needs to transcribe anymore. So I use my fingers, shaking and worn out as they are. It’s a slow process, an agonizing one. But there’s a strange comfort in it — a kind of freedom I didn’t expect.

I know I’ll be cast out for what I write here. For the secrets not even my wife knows. For the skeletons kept locked away, year after year. Not out of fear. Out of shame. A man in my position isn’t supposed to feel shame — I know that. But I don’t stop being a man because of the seat I sit in. I held principles once that felt more fixed than the hardest rock in this solar system. And like rock gives way to wind and water in the end, I gave way to power.

If I had to choose a starting point for this journey, it wouldn’t be the moment I realized things were about to change. It would be the moment they did change — the moment my fate was sealed, back when I couldn’t even crawl yet.

I have no memory of that day. I was only a baby. But I had access to the footage, once, before I lost it somewhere in the corridors of the war. And I can tell you this — that footage rewired something in me.

The footage opens on something almost mundane. That’s what unsettles me most, every time I watch it back — how ordinary it all looks at the start. An exam room like a thousand others on Caleth. Walls the color of sand, the same shade as the dust outside, as if nobody had bothered to make the place feel different from the rest of the planet. Even in there, it smells of scorched metal — it smells of scorched metal everywhere on Caleth, the first smell any child on that planet learns to recognize, before they even have words for anything.

My mother sits in a chair that used to be white. She’s holding me. I don’t know how to laugh on purpose yet — in the footage I’m fussing at nothing, that small repeating cry of a creature who doesn’t yet have the words for what it’s feeling. She rocks me slowly, without looking down at me. She’s watching the door. Waiting.

It’s a routine visit. Nothing that doesn’t happen every day on that planet the gods and the Union both forgot. A fever, maybe. A cough that wouldn’t quit. I couldn’t tell you for certain — no one ever told me, and the footage has no sound for that first minute, just the image trembling faintly, like the room’s old security camera was as tired as everything else on Caleth.

The doctor comes in. A thin man, glasses, the kind of face you forget five minutes after seeing it. Nobody remembers the names of the men who change everything, not until it’s too late for the name to matter.

He examines me the way he’d examine any feverish baby in that sand-colored room. His movements are mechanical, the same motions repeated a thousand times on a thousand other children before me. And then — I can’t say the exact second, the footage carries no mark for it, but I know it happened, because the man’s posture shifts in a way no medical training ever teaches — he stops.

He runs the test again. I stare up at him with those baby eyes that don’t know how to lie yet, don’t know how to hide anything, and he looks back at me like I’ve turned, in the space of a minute, into something entirely different from what I was before.

The air changes. I don’t have a better way to say it. I see it in the footage before I understand it — my mother straightens her back, an inch, maybe two, just enough for a woman who’d spent her whole life reading waiting rooms and exam rooms the way other people read a coming storm.

The doctor says something. There’s no sound for this part — an old fault in the recording, they say, though I’ve always had my doubts about faults that only ever seem to strike at the moments that matter most. But I know what he said, because I’ve been told, so many times over that I no longer know if it’s memory or just repetition by now.

He said he was going to report it.

Not out of malice. That much has always been clear, in every version I’ve ever heard. There was no hate in the man. There was fear in him, and there was what he probably called honor. In a Union that hunts gene-carriers the way other places hunt vermin, hiding a positive newborn is just as dangerous as being the newborn yourself. He had a family. A name to protect. And, above all, he had the quiet, settled conviction of men who’ve never once had to choose between their principles and someone else’s life.

My father arrived a moment later — the footage catches him already halfway through the door, called in from the waiting room, his face still not knowing what it was about to find. I watched that face change a thousand times over the course of my life. I never once saw it change as fast as it did in that footage.

They tried everything, the two of them. Words first — my father knew how to talk when it mattered, I learned that early. Then arguments. Then, when the words and the arguments started sounding hollow even to their own ears, money. I can see it in the footage — my father’s hand reaching into his pocket, offering, almost begging without letting his voice give him away.

The doctor stepped back. Just one step. But it was enough to say everything there was left to say.

He didn’t budge. I never knew whether it was courage or terror that kept him standing there — maybe both, in equal measure, the way it so often is with men who refuse to bend. You don’t buy a man like that. You buy the weak ones, the ambitious ones, the ones who’ve already put a price on their own conscience somewhere along the way. That doctor had no price because it had never once occurred to him that he might.

There’s a moment — I see it every time I watch the footage, and it’s the moment that still turns something cold in me, more than anything that came after — when it became clear there was nothing left to say. Not from either side. The doctor straightened his coat. My father lowered the hand still holding out the offer that had just been refused.

My mother hadn’t said a word this whole time. She didn’t need to. She knew, before either man did, what was coming. I watch her pull me tighter against her chest, slowly, the kind of gesture a mother makes without thinking, an instinct older than any Union law. My fussing stopped right around then. Maybe I felt something in her. Or maybe that’s just the story I tell myself now, all these years later, trying to make sense of what my baby eyes couldn’t understand yet.

My father closed the door.

What happens next in the footage is fast. Too fast for me to describe with the kind of calm I’d like to bring to it. He moved like a man who’d done this before — because he had, of course he had, dozens of times, just never for me. The doctor never even registered what was happening. It was clean. It was quiet. It was everything years hunting men like the one I’d grow up to be had taught my father to make it.

My mother looked away. Not out of weakness — she was never weak, I’m certain of that, even without a memory of my own from that day. She looked away because there were parts of my father she’d rather not watch, even knowing they existed, even knowing it was those very parts that were about to let me survive the afternoon. You love the whole man, or you don’t love him at all, she told me once, years later. But that doesn’t mean you have to look at every part of him at the same time.

He told her to go. Two words, maybe three — the footage has no sound, and no one, not even her, ever wanted to repeat exactly what was said in that second. All that’s left is the gesture: his head tilting toward the door, his eyes still on the body on the sand-colored floor.

She walked out with me in her arms. She didn’t look back — I can see that clearly in the footage, the one shot where the camera catches her face-on before she leaves the frame. She didn’t look back, not once.

He stayed behind. Cleaned up what needed cleaning. Erased what needed erasing from the records of that forgotten little office on a forgotten little planet. And somewhere between that moment and the day I was finally told the whole story, my father became — without my ever choosing it for him — the man who killed so that I could one day sit here and write these pages.

It’s a strange thing to know that the first thing I ever did in this life — before I could crawl, before I could speak, before I had a single memory of my own — was kill a man without laying a finger on him. All it took was being born.

It would be decades before I understood he was only the first of many.