Telling Stories

urrrrrgh this one came out terrible and ham-handed. Not at all happy with it.

—

The ship shook violently. It was Sarah’s third time landing on a planet, and as far as she could tell it wasn’t going to be any less rough. It certainly didn’t help that the mood aboard Umbra was one careless remark away from a shouting match. Her last two landings had been helped by the fact that they were routine, and the crew had been happy enough to put up with her panic and complaints of an upset stomach; if she complained now she’d probably get her head bitten off.

She’d only been woken twelve hours or so ago; the Umbra‘s slow approach through the solar system had been far too slow to wait through, and since she had no skills to contribute to the landing she’d been kept asleep for as long as possible. If she’d had her way, she would have been allowed to sleep until the ship touched down, but the captain hadn’t been confident that their approach would go undetected and had ordered every member of the crew to be woken up before the final approach, just in case things went pear-shaped.

That alone was odd, really. Before now, the captain had always acted with complete assurance. If something was spooking him, Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details. He was at least keeping his worries to himself; Rachel had shown no such restraint. The violent approach probably wasn’t doing the pilot’s temper any favours, but she had been snapping at everyone long before Umbra had needed her at the helm. To make matters worse, Sarah had found herself the target of more and more of these outbursts.

The price of duty, she thought to herself. Her patient was the reason the crew were going to Earth in the first place, after all: Rachel’s venom was only being directed her way because the broken cyborg was still lying in suspension. Sarah honestly didn’t know what the rest of the crew thought of her stubborn defence of the man; some of them seemed to have known him from before his loss of identity, but they hadn’t given her any clues as to what he had been like. It didn’t matter, anyway: his injuries were so horrific that she would have felt compelled to help him even if he had been her enemy, and his total loss of functional memory made the issue moot. She didn’t think that the pilot’s enmity came from a grudge, anyway: Rachel was scared, and the crippled man in Sarah’s care was only a threat because he compelled her to return home.

What could possibly be waiting for her there? Sarah knew that Earth was not necessarily a friendly place – the fact that they were approaching in complete stealth made that abundantly clear – but the crew were hardly unprepared. In the past, such a situation might have provoked curiosity, but this time Sarah found herself not caring about the reasons for Rachel’s temper. The woman was being selfish and cowardly, and if the crew thought it an unfair judgement then it was their loss: they had gone and made her the ship’s doctor, and she was going to damn well do her job.

This could theoretically be full of spoilers for the work it’s intended to be a part of, but it really hints at more than it tells. The ending is a horrible mess, too.

—

It would be wrong to say that I was persuaded. To me, persuasion implies an argument for a change in opinion or decision, and my fears were non-negotiable – If I had been receptive to rational argument, I would probably have come around without his intervention. I was not just afraid of an uncivil reception; I knew that I had not been forgotten, and that any welcome I might receive would have teeth in it. So: why did I agree?

It was not because I loved him – although I did – because love would offer me no more defence than Sarah’s platitudes. It certainly wasn’t a matter of coercion, either; he couldn’t inflict any greater loss upon me than the total loss of my self that I feared. I was going to meet my maker, and no emotion, loyalty, or duty would save me from being broken down and moulded to suit her whim.

But Alex was not afraid. He lived with the calm assurance that the sea could not hurt him. It was not a simple matter of courage – I had seen the ocean consume many who had thought themselves invulnerable, and Alex’s calm came not from courage, but from certainty. He didn’t share the fear of the sea that I knew plagued everyone else aboard: my home was simply not capable of conjuring anything that might threaten him. He was a synthesis of machine and man, pieced together with the express purpose of transcending human limitations. He did not simply have contingencies for unexpected situations: his entire body could react and change to fit new demands the instant they became apparent. I still do not know what  had made him – whether he was the product of human love or icy calculation – but I knew that he had been crafted by an imagination of transcendent power, one that was every bit the equal of the twisted goddess who waited for me.

His presence – his existence – steadied me. The fact that he had been made showed that the goddess I was returning to was one of many – it was simply impossible for her to have conceived such a self-sufficient being. He did not make her power any less formidable – the sea was her domain, without a shadow of a doubt – but he made it less absolute. My mind still believed that returning would be worse than suicide, but my faith in my mother’s absolute power to twist and control had been broken.

That’s where I made my fatal mistake: the instant after my mindless terror fled. The joy it brought made me forget all about the boring, mundane fear of simply being killed, and so without thinking I had agreed to head to Earth and face my creator. It was only after I had agreed that I remembered how utterly stupid the enterprise was on its own merits – merits Alex was no longer arguing with me.

Damn him.

Here’s the next bit – turns out that there was way more than I had time to write before heading off, so it’ll be a two-parter. Not entirely happy with how much this is an inner monologue rather than a scene, but that’s a problem for the future.

—

When Umbra finally came to rest, the impact was so subtle that I had difficulty discerning it; the last few minutes of our descent had been so slow as to be almost imperceptible. The captain wasn’t taking any chances with this final phase of our approach: he was determined to avoid drawing any attention to the trench we were hunkered down in.

As far as I was concerned, this level of paranoia wasn’t warranted. Our atmospheric entry had been dramatic, yes: any object of Umbra‘s mass hitting the ocean surface at supersonic speed would have been noticed. The fact that we had eluded detection by Earth’s guardian sensor network – created specifically to detect and intercept wandering asteroids before they collided with the planet’s surface – would rouse worry if not outright suspicion. It was entirely possible that this region of the sea floor would be searched, if the planet’s authorities were suspicious of the impact.

The prospect of being hunted clearly terrified the captain, but I knew better. He was used to space, where heat couldn’t easily be hidden and the medium was clear enough for a hunter to pick up its prey from tens of thousands of kilometres. If there was anything I had learned before getting on his ship, it was that the ocean didn’t work that way. The abyss was a place that drank in light and returned nothing – radio and lasers were worse than useless, and this deep even sound was unreliable for anything beyond navigation thanks to the planet’s muted microquakes. In the time it took any searchers from the surface to get this deep, Umbra would be virtually underground, sitting in a tunnel dug into the wall of the chasm. A searcher could pass within five metres of our concealed entrance and be none the wiser.

No, I wasn’t worried at all about the next few days. The prospect of a week or so to lie low and wait was welcome: piloting Umbra through entry had worn my nerves so thin that even the least objectionable human company was grating. Exhaustion was all that had prevented me from lashing out at everyone who had complained about the rough landing – as if they could have even gotten the ship through the atmosphere without burning up. Six hours of rest had brought my body’s strength back, but my mind was still on edge, and everybody knew it. The crushing pressure all around us didn’t worry me at all, but as I stared into the black I felt trapped nevertheless.

Returning home at all was a defeat; to do so seeking help was intolerable. Common sense told me that there would be nobody left to care about it, that two centuries of absence would have milled out every face and name I had ever known – but I knew common sense was wrong in this matter. My mother would have found a way to cheat death, I was certain: for all her high-minded talk of people integrating seamlessly with the planet, she would never have found the humility to simply decompose and return to nature. The only niche she would ever occupy would be that of an absolute ruler.

I stopped pacing my cabin and sat down. Alex was elsewhere, probably supervising the excavation: he knew that even he was unwelcome in my current mood. Or maybe especially Alex; he was the one who had talked me into this stupid enterprise, after all. Damn him for getting involved. I didn’t owe the cripple a thing, and Sarah could harp on about altruism and obligation until her sanctimonious little jaw came loose for all I cared – she had nothing at stake here, and the principles she held so dear would offer me no protection. No amount of guilt could have persuaded me to face what I feared was waiting for me in the southern ocean – and yet Alex got me to agree to it anyway.

After midnight, but whatever. Part 3 will be coming on Sunday still! This time round I’ve taken a first-person, present-tense approach, which I felt would work best for the character this scene is about. Think I might try mulling it over from some other angles in the future, as I’m not entirely happy with it. …and looking back at the last post, so much for dialogue! It might happen next time, though. >_>

—

I feel cold.

I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting, and Sarah’s assurance that she would be back in twenty minutes hasn’t been useful. Everyone on the ship talks in minutes, kilometres, years. I haven’t worked up the nerve to tell them that I don’t know what these things are. The words sound familiar, but my memory only tells me that they use the words in the same way I used to: attached to numbers, and sometimes in complex and dependent relationships that hint at a system tying them all together. Kilometres per second, joules per gram, newtons per square metre – they all sound right whenever I hear people talking about them. There’s every chance that I once knew what they meant and how to use them; I might have even thrown them around with the same abandon. Certainly, I would never have stopped to think about whether or not they meant anything to the people I used them with.

I remind myself of this whenever I grow impatient at being left here. I know that I can’t contribute anything to the running of the ship, and that this whole expedition is for my benefit. That knowledge is all that keeps me from asking for it to be called off. I certainly haven’t lost my desire to see again – I know for a fact that I want to be whole. The cost, however, has given me second thoughts.

I don’t know who I was before I woke up, and the fractured memories that come to me seemingly at random have become agonising. I can grasp them when they arrive – even use them as a window into the present where suddenly the perplexing names and places all fit together – but they inevitably slip away and I cannot force them to stay. I know that what I hear ought to make sense, but it remains incomprehensible. The crew have made it clear to me that these ghost memories will not leave me, or at least cannot be forced out of my head. They’ve also told me that the rebuilding process they can offer me at the end of this journey is one that will permanently sever the damaged machines I still have in my head; if whoever I used to be is still alive in them, then I will have forever lost my chance to reclaim my history. Sarah has always told me that I must think of myself as a new person and not as a cripple with no memories, but I can’t help but feel that doing so means I condemn whoever I have been to annihilation.

More time passes – I can’t imagine how much, but my thoughts do not move anywhere new before Sarah comes back, full of soothing words. She guides me up from my seat and helps me up onto a platform. I’m told to lie down, and as I obey I am confined and feel wetness all around me. Everything has come full circle now: I am in a coffin again, just like the one they found me in. Fear floods through me but I know it to be impotent: it has no more power to affect me than my boredom or my guilt. The only truth I have left to me is that the future can offer no greater terror than the one that has already been visited upon me.

So, a little something different here. This is the first version (of about four, or at least I intend it to be something like that) of a story: my intention is to tell the same basic plot from a different point of view each time. This is my first dabbling in a long time with a story I’ve had ticking over in my brain (and lying around the internet, in various states of embarrassing not-really-what-I-want-to-write-anymore-ness) for at least five years. Hopefully the later versions will be a bit less wordy; in my defence, it’s tough writing about a piece of metal floating in space. Humans at least offer the option of dialogue!

—

The ship lay quiet, lit only by the engine flare of its departing crew. The sun it orbited was too distant to provide any real light out here in the Oort cloud – a casual observer would have struggled to tell it apart from the brighter stars in the distance. Any human left aboard the ship might have felt loneliness; the crew were departing for the solar system’s hot centre, taking a slow approach that would take them the better part of a decade, and the ship would be left alone for the duration of their trip. Even after their arrival, communication would be terse, time-lagged, and one-way – they were trying to keep a low profile, after all – and while their departure was anticipated to be much speedier than the trip in, it would still take a very long time by human reckoning.

Perhaps fortunately for the departed crew, the ship did not have enough of a mind to feel lonely, or to even understand the concept of loneliness. It was quite content to wait until it was needed, hiding in near-total darkness next to a chunk of primordial ice. After all, it was still extraordinarily busy even without a crew to pamper and ferry from place to place. Ongoing repairs needed attention and occasional redirection, the pseudo-comet it was anchored to needed to be explored for potential fuel, and it needed to maintain a constant watch for any potential interlopers. It made no special effort to conceal itself; the sheer size of the Oort cloud made a random encounter with interstellar traffic staggeringly unlikely, and made a methodological search a truly daunting prospect. Certainly, none of the ship’s crew would have given either of these possibilities even a passing thought – they certainly would not have wasted their time looking to check if they were wrong. Mathematics was on their side in this matter, and time – as always – was not. The ship, however, was not in a hurry. Its attention could be divided many times before impairing its decisions, and its days were not numbered. Given its vast capacity for attention, even the ludicrously low expected return of time sunk into looking for searchers or accidental intruders was still a profitable expense of its resources.

It also needed to be alert for any cries for help that might come from down the gravity well: if they came they would already be old, so it could not afford to delay upon receiving one. Uncertainty was even less acceptable: any urgent message would probably only be sent once, and would be cast to a deliberately broad part of the sky. The ship therefore had another task: to construct and maintain an extremely broad network of receivers, spread far enough apart to avoid their target being occluded by any stray planets or comets that might happen to be in the way at the very instant they were needed. This was itself a long-term project, as the journeys its manufacturing robots had to make in order to get into position were often comparable in distance to the one being made by the crew.

The emergency network wasn’t the only listening the ship needed to do, either. It had been a very long time since it and its crew had last been this close to Earth, and the humans had not had time to puzzle out the two centuries’ worth of political, social, and technological changes that had taken place since their departure. It fell to the ship to reel in the babble of radio broadcast coming from the inner system and digest it. Conjecture would necessarily be kept to a minimum – the ship was if nothing else not sufficiently bright to reach any but the most elementary conclusions based on such fragmentary information – but it would at the very least be able to compile a digest of the new ideas and facts it was being bombarded with and present it to the crew in time for their awakening on the final stage of their approach. It had been their hope that they would need none of this – the people they were hoping to meet were not likely to be included in any discussion leaving the planet – but knowledge was power, and they had no intention of being any more ignorant than they could help when isolated on the most ancient and heavily populated world in known space.

These duties did not trouble the ship; they were not even duties to it so much as necessities. Its whole sense of self was constructed around the fulfilment of its functions, and it was more than capable of meeting the demands they made of it. As long as it was able to perform its duties, it would continue to wait; and when it was needed, it would be ready.