▸ Column · Modern-day Earth in the Invincible comic universe — the asker is Earth-based; her match is stationed at an off-world GDA research outpost
THRAGG replies.
Replied to by Thragg, with a rebuttal from Invincible.
The letter
So I matched with Milo on one of those interplanetary apps — my range was set to Earth-local only, I thought, but his profile came through from a Tau Ceti research outpost (he's a GDA contractor, I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly where) and we've called every single night since November. Almost eight months now. There's a comm delay, we work around it. I know his voice when he hasn't slept. We have a playlist that's over four hundred songs long.
I booked passage on the next shuttle to go see him over the summer, and now I can't stop hovering over the cancel button. What if the person I can talk to for hours across a signal delay is just... a stranger once there's no screen between us? What if I walk into the arrival port and have to basically reintroduce myself to someone I feel like I already know?
My sister Harper keeps asking if I'm "sure he's even real." I am sure — his face is there every night on my comms, it's not that — I just don't know if we're real once we're in the same room. That's the part I can't figure out. And I don't know if being this scared about it means something, or if I'm just catastrophizing.
— Eight months in, Atlanta
Thragg replies
The question underneath your letter is simple. Is the structure sound, or was sentiment the only thing holding it up? There is one way to answer it. You board the shuttle.
This hovering you describe is not caution. It is the sensation of discipline being incomplete — the feeling that appears at the edge of any resolution you have not yet finished forming. You took every material action: eight months of calls, a four-hundred-song record of time given, a booked passage. Your actions have already answered the question. Your anxiety has not caught up to them yet.
I have assessed structures that failed under load. I do not regard failure as loss. I regard it as information. If what you built holds in the same room that it held across a comm delay, you have something sound. If it collapses the moment the screen is removed, then the screen was load-bearing — which means it was not a relationship, it was a comfort mechanism. You needed to know that before you built further. Either outcome returns what you require. Refusing to board returns nothing except a life spent not knowing.
One thing I will note without pretense: there is something in physical proximity that my framework does not adequately account for — something that transmits in the same room but not through a relay. I cannot compute what it yields. What I know is that the version of you who cancels the passage will never find out.
Board the shuttle.
— Thragg
Invincible weighs in
Look, I have to push back on something. You're not running an experiment. Milo isn't a load-bearing structure to be audited. "Either outcome gives you what you need" — no. That's not what a person is.
I've wrecked relationships by treating them like problems to solve instead of people to actually show up for. The fear you're describing right now isn't incomplete discipline. It's what caring feels like when the stakes are real. That part gets a vote.
Relearning him in person isn't a failure state. That IS what real is. The awkward, doesn't-transmit-through-a-relay part. The next part.
Get on the shuttle. Not to collect data. Because you already want to.
— Invincible
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