Blip, Rippling Across Millennia
From The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts:
“Yeah, we’re not quite sure what that is,” one of the gearheads said when I asked hir. “He does it sometimes.”
“He’s dancing,” I said.
Se regarded me with something like pity. “More likely just twiddling his thumbs. Running some motor diagnostic that kicks in when there’s a few cycles to spare.” Se raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you ask him?”
Though everything that happens in The Freeze-Frame Revolution happens in blips, not all blips are equal in measure.
Sometimes the Eriophora — that machine/rock/spaceship/AI hybrid hurling through space housing a crew of tens-of-thousands of humans — wakes up a handful of those people in his present millennium to perform a task for a few hours like monitoring the build of the latest warp gate. Sometimes other members of the crew, awoken a few millennia later or earlier, spend work time speaking with the AI voice/brain named Chimp to work through a problem or spend leisure time talking about personal politics.
Sometimes the novel itself uses a blip to introduce a group of people, like what you see above.
Until this point, you only hear about the “she” of the main character (your narrator), a few of her friends and cohabitants told as “he” and “she” as they arise in the story, and the repeated references to Chimp as “he,” likely a hint at the sound of his voice.
Then on page 68, well into the story, you see this reference to a “gearhead” referred to with the pronoun “hir.” The narrator refers to this person within the recollection of a memory she had on Earth before the launch — many thousands of years ago relative to the present of the moment of recall. Strangely enough, that gearhead, involved in the building of Eriophora, could be long dead for all you know, lost in the mortal time scale that doesn’t fit with the thawing and dethawing of personnel aboard the rock ship that could fly until the universe’s heat death if he wanted to.
Yet se, despite hir presence as a secondary character in the novella, was given hir own blip that, to me, felt much more influential than the amount of ink on the page suggests.
There are only three lines of print here; I didn’t clip them from information above or below. And in those lines you’re introduced to how a future humanity regards anyone who doesn’t identify as “him,” “her,” “she,” or “he.”
The gearhead, in this sudden, short, ordinary interaction, becomes a representative of everyone who wouldn’t identify with the gender of the protagonist or any of the other crew members you meet before that point. It was precisely the quick and unassuming nature of this passage that impressed me so much.
Watts didn’t create a lengthy explainer through dialogue or, perhaps worse, through exposition, about the nature of gender and identity in this future world. Instead, he let a few words lift well beyond their weight. He let the direct showing of an interaction between people, where one person happens to use the pronoun “hir,” exemplify equality that would have been undercut by any words that felt the need to explain the situation as anything but commonplace.
Watts’ directness here caught me off guard. Most of the other stories I read don’t include anything beyond the word “they” as a pronoun that isn’t “he” or “she.” So when Watts’ matter-of-factly used “hir,” I thought it was a misprint until the first and second uses of “se” made their appearance.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution doesn’t otherwise explicitly call itself out as a progressive tome in our present world that doesn’t uniformly endorse the use of the pronouns in this passage. Even so, this passage seems to push the novella in that direction.
When the gearhead disappeared from the narrative, I found myself considering hir influence on the story world in all the future blips I read that reached thousands of years beyond hir appearance.
This person became so influential that, as I continued reading the story, I had to reconsider what type of people would have been selected to take part in the mission to the stars. The novella only notes they need to be fit for space travel and mentally aligned with the goals of the mission to chart and enable connections between the vastness. In my head, I was left thinking that anyone not Ok with the complete acceptance of all lifestyles would have been deemed unfit for this or any other mission. This moment expanded my opinion of and mental picture of the other characters of the story.
This secondary character could have been described as anyone. Watts made sure it was someone unique, and with that choice and the compact interaction used to introduce hir, he created the effect of broadening his fictional expanse in a way that traveling millennia into the future couldn’t have done alone.
This brief blip in time, microscopic in its relative scale, had enough power to impact everything around it, reaching through time and illuminating the present. A fitting addition to journey that relies on exactly that theme as its binding.