The Edge of The World - Citizen Sleeper 2

Spoilers for Citizen Sleeper 2's ending.

The night I finished Citizen Sleeper 2 I poured a glass of beer, sat on the balcony and felt every inch of my own flesh, both a prison and a marvel. I sometimes think about my last beer. Not the one I just had, but the final beer. An ice cold glass. The pornographic texture of bubbles and that slight sting in the middle of the palette. I wonder what I'll miss more: the actual taste, or that specific, vibrant sensation that comes with an ice cold lager on a summer afternoon. Beer, for me, is one of these materials that collapses time. I'm suddenly nineteen again, lying on the floor of my brother's house sweating through a ninety percent humidity evening. I'm burning pod in my Mum's garage with Ruby. A DSLR weighs on my neck at Rachel's wedding. I sit outside the yurt that night and sip a coopers while owls call out to each other across the high-hills and gum trees. I pour the beer in front of me, and I'm in my ex's empty place the night before Christmas. I've cleaned the flat within an inch of its life. I sit on the cool bathroom tiles and drink a lager. I am in love, but I have not yet realised this love is bad for both of us. I'm drinking from a stein, singing Taylor Swift at two am with Marissa, my brother and Grace trying to have an actual conversation nex to us. All of this time. So much time. So little time. These experiences glitter through the frosted glass and kaleidoscope on the back of my tongue.

I sometimes think about my last beer.

The epilogue of Citizen Sleeper 2 follows a brief but explosive life, and I find myself picking up the loose of my life, but as I do, I can do less each cycle. My body decaying, just a little, from the effort of defeating Laine. And as death looms, I invest in helping my friends. I manage to find Juni the data she needs, just barely. She uses the data to revive lost information from Solheim, a corporate demagoguery who ruled The Belt before the most recent apocalypse. And Juni brings a Solheim construct to life. I stare at this ghost-figure, The Warden, and wonder: "could such a tool of corporate oversight ever be used for something good?" And yet as I ask the same questions of the world every day, we must contend with the fact that, even that tool, is a person, after a fashion. Even the die-hard capitalists are people, too, even if they do not speak like people and do not care about people. "I couldn't leave her there, alone in the dark," says Juni. "I've been in that dark pit, and I won't condemn another being to it."

That dark pit... that place between places. I feel myself slipping there, cycle by cycle. All of this investment for a future I will not see. I wake one morning. A phantom reflection of a nightmare. "You find yourself once more, as you do every morning, as you will continue to do, cycle after cycle. Until you can't. You wonder what part of you has changed, what system is failing. Your frame is silent, its complaints only felt in ambiguous sensations. The glitches seem random, unpredictable, but also inevitable."

Here is when I noticed three of my dice are permanently glitched out. I'm not just sick, I'm dying. Each cycle, even among friends on Olivera, I can do very little each day. And so the work is slow, and the work is good. I run the farm stacks. I refine hydrogen. Day by day the colony comes closer to functional independence. Day by day I come closer to the end, yet surrounded by the drive of the locals and the infectious good mood of all around, I barely think of it. This small slash of community beyond the market and beyond capitalism. The work is slow, and the work is good.

The end grows closer each cycle, and as each drive is closed, each story closed, I begin to feel a quiet peace. Sera and Bliss drift with me on that last day. They hold me in their hearts. Time at last: so much time and so little time. When the end comes, as I spiral into darkness, I slowly choose my path forward on the final spears of lightning going dark across my cortex. I ride the last neurons as they dispatch and flicker toward fading receptors. "An image: Sleepers gathering to talk in the shop as you shut down the terminals at the end of a cycle. Bliss perched on the counter. Stories shared, and comfort found. A future."

I sometimes think about my last beer. What wonders and mistakes will sweep in atop that carbonation. What new, unforseen works will lay in my shadow instead of at my feet. The many I've lost will be there, too, representations in my mind, each experience erroded by each recollection, the perfect flawed hard-drive of my mind will envelope me in that collapse, the entropic spasm of sense memory hidden at the start of every glass of beer. I hope I remember all of the people who saved me every day. I hope in that sleep, if I am indeed to dream, that I choose the right dream.

I do have this one dream. Me and my brother are camping in Nullarbor National Park. We're sitting around a fire, the edge of the world to our backs. Patrick is there, so is Darth and Rye and Marissa and Cam and Lucy and James and we're drinking beer from a cooler. Something cheap and awful, cans of four X and VB, chilled by a block of dried ice. We're arguing about something that doesn't really matter: the subject has always difused by morning, but we're arguing seriously about something silly. James has built a fire in a pit, and he fusses and over-engineers the thing, keeping himself occupied. Alex is listening with quiet interest.

I take a beer from the cooler. I walk from the tents into the headwind. The salt makes the air cool and firm. The wind snaps at my coat. I pull the waterproof tighter. The moon is barely a crescent. The stars are occluded by layers of shifting cloud but I can feel the void ahead of me. Waves rush against the cliff far below, each urgent and seeking, each a million millionth of the errosion that formed this place. The plaque to my right is invisible in the evening, casting the barest of shadow onto the dark limestone. I can't remember the whole inscription. The poem lays just beyond my grasp, eroded by a force I've long forgotten. All I know for certain is that my pebble will remain on the shore of eternity, and that there will never be a footprint on the earth quite the same as mine.

If I am indeed to sleep, and if perchance to dream, I hope that I choose this dream.