The Singer

The skirling whirl of a traditional Irish band greeted me as I stood outside Dick O'Dow's Irish Pub. I handed the burly bouncer my ID and replaced it, entering through the propped-open green doors and into the darkened interior. The contrast between the mellow amber glow of sunset and the perpetual midnight of the pub was jarring; heavy chandeliers depended from the low ceilings, dim, orange-glowing bulbs made to look like candle flames were the only illumination besides half-a-dozen flat-screen TVs tuned to Sports Center. Thick, scratched, scarred wooden tables ran the length of the room opposite the bar; the tables resembled hunks of driftwood from a shipwreck that had been retrieved and polished. The floors looked ancient, scuffed, weathered gray wood that seemed to have centuries of stories to tell. I remembered one of the bartenders telling me that the floor planks were from an 18^th century Irish hospital, and this made me think of the ghosts that must reside silent in the whorls of the wood grain. 

The band was the pièce de résistance of the pub, permeating the atmosphere with the lilting, jigging music. The band is a four-piece: a tall, thin man with angular features, round, gold-rimmed spectacles, and graying hair receding in a U-shaped cul-de-sac played the penny whistle with thin, deft fingers; the fiddler was the diametric opposite, short, portly, red-bearded and long-haired, sheened with sweat as he sawed his battered, well-loved fiddle; next to the fiddler was the bodhran player, a man with fine silver hair neatly parted, an iron-gray beard closely-trimmed framing patrician features, thumping his hand-held drum and stomping his polished leather boots on the stage to the rhythm; last was the singer and guitar-player, an elegant woman, tall and willowy, thick black hair shimmering in the dim light like raven wings.

It was her I had come her to see. Her eyes were the color of moss furring a tree-trunk in the afternoon sun, and she sang flawless Gaelic in a dulcet, haunting voice. I stood at the bar and ordered a whiskey, sipped it as I watched her sway with the music. She scanned the crowd absently, strumming her guitar with red-painted fingernails. Her gaze swept across me, but didn't see me. This was reassuring. I wasn't ready to be seen, just yet.

The bartender, who had just moments ago handed me my drink with a smile, passed by me without a glance, without even a flicker of recognition. Moments slid past, slow like sunset, and my anticipation mounted. I was growing restless, my palms damp and warm, my feet tapping a too-fast rhythm. Slow down, I told myself. Not yet.

Another whiskey, another greeting from the same bartender, as if he'd never seen me before. The set must have just started when I arrived. Damn. Impatience scoured through me; I gouged patterns in the bar-top with my fingernail, deep runic shapes incised in the hard wood.

A third whiskey, and I was feeling fine now, if burning with restless, hungry vexation. The set had to be almost over. Ah yes, now they were thanking the crowd, setting down instruments and filing out to the alley for a breath of fresh air.

I followed them out, lit a smoke, approached her with a broad smile that I hoped seemed genuine and friendly. She smiled back, shook my hand. Her palm was cool and dry, sending bolts of electric excitement through me. I caught her up in conversation, droll, mundane chit-chat. Her band-mates went back in, and I could sense her desire to end this conversation, to go with them.

It's not that easy, the fun hasn't begun yet, my lovely. Your fair, pale skin is far too perfect. I stroked the hilt of the knife in my pocket; yes, now it was time. Now.

 She never saw it coming, the poor, beautiful, doomed thing.

Oh, what fun.

MAN/MACHINE

01.10.1004

Lyss,

Things on Perepeteia have become untenable. It's gone from a few rocks thrown, a few people dead, a few Dual-sings lynched in retaliation, into rioting in the streets and full-scale battles. The unit I'd become attached to was dispatched to try to keep the peace—at least, that was the orders. In reality, they just wanted to crack skulls, human or not. I had to slip away, I couldn't stomach it.

I've got no problem fighting, I'm no lily-white pacifist, that's for damned sure, but I'm no butcher either. And I've got no problem with anyone on either side of this scrum, although it seems to me as if the Dual-sings oughta get their due rights. They are people, right enough. Maybe, sure, they're not humans, technically, but they feel, they speak, they evolve, they...I don't know...they evince all the characteristics of humanity. It doesn't seem programming to me. When the Look-Alike Case happened, just after the war on Luna, people discussed this very issue. Cybrex had invented robots that looked, acted, and felt like real people, only they were inanimate machines. Of course, they didn't stay that way, the Androidicons. All the HoloNet fictions were coming true, Androidicons developing past what the inventors had intended, and causing all sorts of problems Earthside. I'm not sure how it all shook out, as I got shipped to Kleuer just as things were getting really heated. But this situation with the Dual-sings smacks of that same issue: what defines an individual? What is a person?

For me, a person is someone I can sit down with and have a good old fashioned talk with, someone I can shake hands with, or sock in the jaw, or kiss, and not predict the response based on programming. These Dual-sings, they're people. Odd, hard-to-look-at people, maybe, but they're people. And I cannot, will not be party to any effort to suppress their bid for equal rights. That doesn't mean I'm ready to join their side either.

I don't know what I want, or where I fit.

I'm wandering J-Temp, alone, dressed in torn uniform pants and a ground-length heavy coat pilfered off of a dead man in an alley. I kept my Patrol-issue boots, tablet, shock-sticks, and pulse-rifle, just because I feel more of a man if I'm armed. The fighting is intense, now, door-to-door, civvies against Patrol against Dual-sing. No one is cleaning up the dead, no one is using tactics or organization. It's a free-for-all hell, and no telling who'll win.

As I scratch this entry into the tablet, sitting in the shadows of dead-end alley, a knot of Patrol thugs are being systematically overrun by a much larger group of Dual-sings, not twenty feet from my hiding spot. The Sings seem organized. They've got a plan and leader to keep 'em following it. Patrol doesn't stand a chance, I think. They're cornered in a courtyard, surrounded, wounded, and desperate, but desperate men put up a savage fight. Just look at the Colonials on Mars. Those bastards were primal. We couldn't stop 'em until every last one of 'em had been shot to pieces. A Pyrrhic victory, the Old Man called it. Which amounts to no victory at all, if you boil it down.

01.11.1004

Midnight after the last entry. The Patrol lasted longer than I expected, but it was inevitable. The Dual-sings were crafty, they went for the head-shots, to preserve the gear of the dead men. The plan, as I could see it, was to get the uniforms and try to infiltrate with whoever could pass for human. Smart, that.

I'm feeling less and less connected. I don't know how else to put it. My brain and body, my mind and my soul are not fully in sync with my body. Memories waft up and wash over me, time slows down and speeds up, sounds get louder and louder, lights get too bright and the night seems less dark. Just now, I can hear a rat scrabbling in the darkness beneath me, hear its jaw chomping and its breath soughing slightly. There's fighting to the east and to the south.

I fell asleep writing that entry, and now it's dawn. Someone is screaming, a few streets over. A woman. I can't listen to it anymore, I've got to do something.

Damn it, I didn't want to get involved.

01.12.1004

Alyssa,

Now, this is just a record for myself. A means of keeping track of my thoughts, a place to work out my confusion. I don't think I can keep up the pretense that these entries are to you anymore. You're dead, my love, and to write letters I'll never send to a woman I'll never see again seems like running in circles. I have to let you go. I'm sorry I couldn't save you, my heart. You didn't deserve to die that way.

Goodbye.

01.13.1004

I died. Here's what happened: I heard screaming, and went to investigate. I should've kept my nose out of it, but it's just not my nature. She was a Dual-sing. A Patrol thug was raping her, beating her. She was nearly dead by the time I found her, and the bastard was still hammering away. I blasted his head into a splatter of red on the walls, threw his body into the street. The poor girl couldn't even move, could barely breathe. Half-dead, all beautiful. I picked her up, realized she was nearly as tall as me, knew she was Dual-sing by her hair. It's not hair, it's like...the filaments in the old-style lightbulbs they had in that museum of old-Earth tech. Thin, almost invisible strands of metal, twisting in braids. Her hair chimed when I lifted her, glowed dull red from within the strands of metal. It was as if her hair knew that she was hurt, maybe dying. That sounds silly, I guess, but it was my impression then, and it rings true, even now. I picked her up, carried her into the street. She was heavier than she should have been. Tall and lithe, willowy and delicately curved, she should have been a feather in my arms, instead she felt...like carrying a machine. But she wasn't a machine. She was warm against my skin, her blood dripped red from her bruised, battered face. Her skin was bruised and yellow by her ribcage and beneath her breasts, and I could tell she had broken ribs in a few places. She moaned, whimpered, cracked her eyes open, peered at me with violet eyes that glowed with preternatural luminosity through her slitted eyelids.

“I don't know where to take you,” I told her. I was whispering, for some reason. The city around me was dead silent, but for the distant concussive thumping of a battle somewhere miles away across the pyramidion.

“Down...beneath..” she croaked. She turned her head, flopped over to one side, looked around, lifted a limp, weak arm to point vaguely towards the eastern wall. “That way...to the Mosque of Ibn Haran... catacombs entrance...alley behind.” I had no idea where the Mosque of Ibn Haran was, but I knew what a mosque was, so I set off in the direction she had indicated. By the time I found the mosque, I was sweating and trembling. The girl, the Dual-sing, was dead weight, passed out but alive. The mosque was enormous, a cupola rising hundreds of feet into the air, spires and minarets spiking the sky, gold leaf on the roofs and trimming the arched windows of painted glass, white-washed walls, the whole surrounded by a wrought iron fence to keep out the infidels. The muezzin was ululating his call to prayer, and it brought me back to Mars with jolting suddenness. I slump the pavement, the girl in my arms a heavy weight across my legs. I laid my head against the bars of the fence and stared up at the city around me, eyes seeing, but mind re-living the past. Beyond the mosque, the city is a welter of building, all of them uniformly tall and thin, like reeds in a pond. I doubt anyone here would understand the simile, never having seen a pond, or reeds, but that's the image I see when I look around me. They've built vertically, here. There is no wind within the pyramidions, no weather at all, so buildings can rise up high and thin like needles stood on end, stacked one atop the other in impossible structures. They are round, made from what appears to be seamless glass windows that reflect like mirrors, making the city glint and glimmer and seem even bigger than it is; the towers are built cheek-by-jowl, less than fifty feet between sides in some places, and in others, they are touching, with walkways and bridges spanning the two, attaching them. There are a couple smaller buildings scattered here and there, like this mosque. The streets are laid out in a grid pattern dissected with diagonal cross-cutting side-streets, and the whole is lit, at night, by luminous globes a hundred feet in diameter strung like over-sized Christmas lights from the girders that prop up the ceiling. The lowest level is two thousand feet high, at least, probably more. I've never understood the physics of what makes the pyramidions so stable a structure, but it seems to work, and these people have taken the idea and expanded it into something unbelievable in scope.

The sky above us, outside the pyramidion, is yellow, like sulfurous gas, and the land is barren wasteland, empty brown and red gently rolling hills is some places, flat as the Kansas plains of my boyhood, a dusty expanse of dead earth. I can see the lure of a place like this, open, uninhabited: they can build pyramidions one next to other until the whole globe is covered with the gleaming transtanium structures, each one holding millions. The race can expand exponentially before running out of room. It is an unlovely place, but it serves a function.

Like Mars. The Red Planet. It was a place of death, at the end, and its crimson appearance was awfully apropos. I can't think of that. Can't, just can't. I shake my head, shake away the images that cling to my consciousness like cobwebs.

Are there spiders here? Probably not.

The girl moans, coughs, and I am stirred out of my delirium. I realize that I'm dehydrated and starving. I haven't eaten or drunk anything in a long time...days...

Drunk? Or should it be drank? I can't remember now. I haven't had anything to drink in days, is what I'm trying to say.

The entrance to the catacombs is hidden carefully, at the back end of a blind alley, behind a door that seemed perfectly natural, a back door to a shop or apartment. Behind it was a staircase, low, narrow and steep. I have to duck almost double, which makes carrying the girl almost impossible, but she is limp still, barely conscious.

As I glance back up at what I've written, I realize I'm vacillating between past tense and present tense. My memory is difficult to control, since the cryobed. Past and present bleed together, and it's difficult to tell, sometimes, whether I'm living an experience currently, or remembering something that's happened. To make it all the more confusing, I have a habit of composing the entries in my head before I write them down, so I tend to forget whether or not I'm composing or writing. It all bleeds together.

I think I'm telling the story of how I died. Yes, I do believe that's it; so this should be past tense, then, and I'll just stick to that. It's easier, I think. It puts distance between me and all that's happened, and that's a good thing.

We entered the catacombs, and now the girl directed me with a weak finger pointed this way or that. The catacombs were dark, dank, and low, echoing every footstep to sound as if a thousand nightmare monsters were creeping through the darkness behind me. My pulse-rifle has a lamp on it, shedding a dull yellow spear of light into the thick darkness of the subterranean passage. It took me several minutes to realize that these tunnels were truly catacombs, underground burial chambers. The walls on either side were carved with shallow niches six feet long and two feet high, stacked four high. Each niche held a body, wrapped in a kind of bag rather than a hard coffin. The tunnels were a maze, stretching for miles in every direction, winding and looping and dipping and rising, crossing and re-crossing. I cannot imagine how many miles of catacombs there must be beneath the ground, if this is how they dispose of their dead. It seems archaic and bizarrely low-tech, but there is much I simply cannot understand.

I was thoroughly lost within moments, but she seemed to know where she was going, and indeed, within maybe fifteen minutes, we had left the catacombs and emerged in what looked like an underground cavern, a natural space that had been turned into a city. I stood amazed for many long moments, staring, unbelieving. It was hyper-organized, gridded and uniform in layout, but each building looked handmade, like an expression of the builder, some tall and thin, others short and squat, some colorful and bright, others white and utilitarian. Light was provided by the same globes that lit the upper world, and the cavern was so enormous as to make it feel as if one weren't underground at all.

I was seen immediately, and surrounded by a host of curious, hostile Dual-sings, some normal looking, others looking as if nature and technology had fused in an accidental freak of evolution. No two were the same. They took- her from my arms, disappeared with her, and I followed as best I could, pushing through the crowds that whispered and muttered at the appearance of a human in their midst. They healed her, somehow. I was brought to her side, and when she awoke, she took my hand, thanked me in a voice like synthesized bells.

“I'm Cully,” she told me. Cully? That baffled me. It was a word I'd heard back up above, in reference to a specific kind of Dual-sing, ones that sold themselves. A cully was a prostitute.

“Yes,” she said, eyes firing and flashing, “that kind of Cully. It's what I was, though not by choice. I took the word as my name, because it was my identity, and now...it's a reminder.” I didn't pursue the subject. 

What I'd seen wasn't prostitution, it was rape, and I knew it.

She must've seen or sensed the thoughts running through my head. “He'd decided he didn't have to pay for it,” she said. She leveled an odd look at me, saying, “You know, now that you're here, among us, I'm not sure what we're going to do with you. No human has ever seen this place before.”

I had a sinking feeling in my gut that told me where this was going. “And then you're going to tell me that I can't leave, now that I've done my good deed of saving you.”

Cully smiled, laughed gently. Her laugh sounded like a spoon tinkling against glass, exactly so, like a recording. Eerie, but beautiful. “Pretty much.”

“Would it make a difference if I said that I couldn't get back here if I tried? After the first few turns, I was lost completely.”

“No, that won't matter. Humans don't even suspect that there is a secret community of Dual-sings. You even knowing that there is such a thing...it compromises you.” I sighed, leaned back, tried to collect my thoughts. I hadn't felt any more at home among the real humans...

Real humans...as opposed to what? These weren't humans, I couldn't deny that. At least, not fully. But they were people. What comprises an individual? Sentience? Emotion? Enough philosophizing, back to the story.

I just sat there, for a long time, staring at her, lost in thought. She was beautiful, human or not. Her eyes were magnetic, fiery, like purple supernovae, lush with emotion writ plainly. Her hair, too, was an expressive part of her beauty. Now, at rest, at home, and healing, her hair was a gentle, vibrant green, like oak leaves when seen backlit by the sun.

There are no trees here. I miss trees, grass, early morning dew on my feet.

Already her bruises were fading, and she seemed less tired with every passing second...as if she were being recharged...

I followed what I had taken to be an IV line in her arm, but the line was opaque, and it terminated, not at a IV tree with the clear bag of regrow meds, but at the wall, in socket. She was being recharged, literally, and was healing in the process. This struck me as so funny that I laughed out loud. I have sounded slightly unhinged, because Cully regarded me quizzically.

“What's funny?”

“Nothing...I just haven't ever seen anyone get...recharged before. That's all.”

“Recharged? What are you talking about?”

I pointed at the cord in her arm. She fingered the cord, and then looked back at me, confusion in her violet eyes. “You've never seen a med-line before?”

“Med line? I thought it was a Dual-sing thing, like...recharging a battery...”

She shook her head, making her hair chime. “What's a battery? Where are you from? Who are you?”

I guessed I had misjudged a few things, and given myself away in the process. “My name is Vargos Vale. 

I'm new to J-Temp. New to Perepeteia in general.”

 “How can you be new to Perepeteia? Were you born on a far-scout?”

“Kind of. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Told me what? And what does 'kind of' mean?” I hesitated. Now, it seems stupid. I was talking to someone who was an outcast, who had to live in a secret, underground city because normal society didn't like her kind.

“I came in on a far-scout, that much is true. But I didn't go out on one, and I wasn't born on one, either.” Cully tilted her head to one side, puzzled. “I was born on Earth.”

“Earth...?” She said the word as if it tasted strange, like it was a word only heard rarely, an exotic word used by scholars and mystics. “How...how is that possible? Humans left Earth a millennium ago, and no one even knows where it is anymore. They teach human kids about it in grade school like it's a myth.”

“It's real. How...it's a long story. The short version is that I was part of the Exodus and something went wrong I was in cryosleep, kind of, and my ship got damaged. We...I...got knocked off course, without power, and I drifted in space, for what turned out to be a more than thousand years. I was found, by accident, by a far-scout. They sent me here.”

Cully was silent for a long time, processing what I'd told her. To her credit, and my relief, she didn't seem to disbelieve me. “So you really don't know much about anything, do you?” She seemed sympathetic, almost.

“No, not really.”

“Who is 'we?'”

She'd caught that slip. “Just...someone who was with me. Someone I cared about. She...her cryobed shut down, and she...didn't make it. Mine malfunctioned and went to back-up power, which kept me alive, kind of. I hadn't gone completely under, so I was awake.”

“I don't know much about cryosleep. It's ancient tech, these days. Some humans use it, sometimes, just as a fad. They'll go under for a while and come back up.”

“Well, it puts you to sleep, freezes you, starts at the feet and works upwards. I was frozen physically, but then the accident happened. Eyesight and consciousness get turned off together. They're connected, somehow. Well, when the ship got hit, I was left awake.”

“You mean, you drifted, awake, and seeing, for a thousand years? How is that possible? Didn't you go crazy?”

This was touching on things I wasn't comfortable with. “I...I don't know. At some point, I think I just fell asleep, or something. Things get blurry, if I try to think about it. I don't think the human mind is meant to experience that kind of thing, just empty, unmoving time. I couldn't move, couldn't smell or hear. I could only see, and think, and remember. I think my mind just...shut down.” I hadn't really thought about any of this too carefully, but something about Cully...the words just poured out. “I'm not sure I've really woken up, truly. I feel...disconnected. Time doesn't feel the same, anymore. I don't feel the same. I feel...like I'm not a person any more. Like my mind and body and soul are three different things now. Awake, asleep, thinking, remembering, feeling...it's all the same, it all runs together. Everything is confused and blurred.”

Cully reached out a hand, touched my arm. Her eyes drilled into me, struck deep into me, held me fast. I couldn't look away, and I felt a brush against my mind. It was delicate, careful, tentative, but real. Cully's eyes were locked on mine, and I could feel concentration coming from her in palpable waves. My instinct was to lock down, run away, push back; instead, I sat still and let her in. I don't know why. There was no sense to it. I didn't even believe in telepathy, for God's sake.

Then, like a concussion, I was duality. She was there inside, reading me, rifling with quick, sure mental fingers through the contents of my mind; I was seeing her, too, and something told me that this was a conscious decision on her part, somehow. She didn't have to let me see her, but she did, to reassure me.

I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, I could only feel her thoughts and mine twined like vines. She was sad, and angry. She hated who she had been, and longed to remake herself.

The universe shifted between us, and I was seeing her through my own eyes, and seeing myself through hers. She saw with mechanical precision. There was no focus or blur, no near and far: all things were inherently clear and sharp, from the fine hairs on arms and the flecks of gold in my eyes (oh Lyssa, you always loved those gold flecks in the brown of my eyes) to the far crags and stalactites on the ceiling of the cavern, thousands of feet away.

Her thoughts left me whirling, mentally. She thought in a logical procession, computer-fast computations and sequences; conversely, there was a strain of illogical emotion running through it, wound around the logic like ivy creeping up a tree trunk, urges and desires, fears and love and hate and curiosity that was entirely human. She was assessing my character at the same time that she was trying to decide how she felt about me, if she was attracted to me, if she wanted me to take her hands in mine or not, if she wanted to remember how it felt to be carried by me through the tunnels, my strong arms like silken steel around her...

It was fairly strange to think of myself in those terms, to see myself in that light. I shuddered, pulled back, took my arm from her touch. The connection between us was snapped like a cord stretched too tight.

I've been delaying the telling of the important part. Now I come to it. It's unavoidable, but hard to tell, mainly because it all happened so fast.

They took me topside with them. They'd ended up trusting me, and I them. I felt more in common with them. They let me be. They understood that I liked to sit at the farthest edge of the cavern and be alone. It was quiet there, and peaceful. I could feel Alyssa, there.

It's been easier and easier to let her go, now that I've got Cully around to distract me. It feels like betrayal, in a way, but I know she would want me to move on. Cully and I are friends, but there's a glimmer of something there, a respect, a tentative attraction that we haven't dared look at too closely.

After months below ground, emerging topside was like rebirth...again. Like coming out of a cocoon, blinking and stretching in the bright sunlight. Above, all was chaos.

The riots and street warfare hadn't subsided; the entire planet was in a state of warfare, a many-factioned free-for-all, with Dual-sings stuck in the middle. The group I was with—Cully, myself, three big, warrior types that also looked mostly human, and a person that was some kind of androgenous, deaf-mute healer—were sent to observe the state of things, to find any Dual-sings and try to bring them to the underground city, Sessura.

It turns out even the Dual-sings were divided: some wanted to stay and fight, get their rights, kill and destroy as much as possible in the process and then start over. Others wanted just to be left alone—this was the smallest faction, and quickly eradicated. The other group were the ones who wanted to leave, to board a colony ship and set out to find somewhere they can live on their own, start a new society. Cully and the Sessurians were of the last group, and they were willing to break a few human heads to get away, if that's what it took.

And it did.

We were ambushed.

We were moving in a tight group down a main thoroughfare, myself in point, Cully behind me, Apothika, the healer in the middle, and the three warriors—Herick, Dove, and Lure—in the rear. A dozen Patrolmen slipped silently out of an alley behind us, opened fire, dropping Herick like a sack of stones. The rest of us jumped through an open door, watching Herick bleed out less than ten feet away. Pulse-rifles barked in their harsh, throaty voices, sending small incendiary shells flying at near light-speed, so that bark and explosion were simultaneous. I lifted my own rifle, peeked around the lip of the door, took a bead on a Patrol thug and dropped him. Cully had a weapon that looked like a pistol, but fired silent needles with machine-gun rapidity; Lure and Dove had pulse-rifles like mine, and Apothika simply sat against the farthest wall, black, almond eyes unblinking and emotionless, hairless gray head bowed, thin arms and legs folded.

Of course, the dozen who ambushed us were just the fore party, the ones sent to corner us. When we had them whittled down to a manageable number, a hundred more poured out of a side-street a mile away and sync-marched towards us with unhurried arrogance.

We took our chances. Dove scooped up Herick and ran as hard as he could, dropping small, blinking black globes behind him. They beeped in a quickening pattern; I knew they were some kind of explosive. Cully was beside me, Apothika in front, running as lightly as a deer, its breathing unlabored. Then, without warning, Dove and Lure were down and bleeding at my feet and Cully was behind a door, a dozen feet away, Apothika behind her; three thugs faced me, close enough to punch, pulse-rifles leveled and firing. I felt a twinge in my brain, and time slowed. I saw rifle-round inching towards me; I dropped my rifle and pulled out my shock-sticks, jabbed them both simultaneously. When the pronged tips touched flesh, a burst of blue-white electric fire arced around their bodies, jerking them like rag dolls, dropping them instantly to the ground. The last one took a shock-stick to the throat, spraying me with bright blood.

I forgot to move out of the way. I was hit in the chest, blowing me back a dozen feet.

I laid on the ground, staring up at the girders and lights far above, dizzy, deaf, hurting, dying; Apothika's genderless face appeared above me, mouthed words I couldn't hear, bent over me, a needle in its hand. 

Cold washed over me; blackness swallowed me.

01.20.1004

I woke up underground, tethered to machines that hummed and beeped. I was awake, but my eyes were stubborn, refused to obey.. “We were able to save your life, Vargos Vale,” came Cully's voice. “But there was a cost.” I opened my eyes slowly, performed the unconscious routine of taking stock of one's self after an injury. I've been injured many times before, and nearly died once before as well; this stock-taking is no new experience for me. This time, however, was unique.

Where before I would flex my toes, wiggle my fingers, roll my shoulders and tense my muscles, this time I could do none of those things. I looked down at myself, and saw not flesh-covered bone and hospital sheets and blankets, but the dull metallic gleam of an un-fleshed Androidicon, or the version of that for this age. Horror spread through me like post-battle adrenaline wearing off. This wasn't a cybertronic leg or arm, this was...all of me. I felt myself, mentally, emotionally, in my spirit and soul, but...physical sensation was entirely absent.

“What...what did you do to me?” I asked. I turned my head to find Cully: servomotors whirred gently and my vision rotated a precise ninety degrees. Cully was on a platform a few feet away, a small hovering disc more than a dozen feet off the ground. How was that possible?

I lifted my hand, and the servomotors whispered again, subtly louder this time. The appendage that rose into my line of sight was five-fingered, as a human's but huge, big enough that Cully could have sat in the palm with room to spare. It was a hand made for the vacuum of space, for the arid landscape beyond the transtanium of the pyramidions, meant to clutch titanic tools and colossal weapons. I looked down, and the motion was again exact, mechanically precise. At least I was bipedal, with knees that bent the right way. I recognized the body model. It was an elaboration of the out-ship-ops exo-mech, except this one had been worked over by the Dual-sings. I saw these exo-mechs on the Rakehell, mechanized suits that could also be used remotely. They were used for everything from repairs done in vacuum to waging wars in human-hostile environments. They were amazing tech, and I'd always wished for a chance to take one out as an exo-suit.

This wasn't what I'd had in mind.

“I know this is a drastic change, Vargos, but it was the only way to preserve your entity. Your physical shell was too badly damaged to be saved.” I turned back to look at Cully. Sympathy and concern glittered in her eyes.

“So what did you do? There's no body inside this exo-mech, is there?”

“No, there isn't.” At least she didn't sugar-coat the answer.

I am a mech, now. All those ruminations on individuality suddenly seemed more apropos than I could ever had guessed.

Canto of Wording

I am inundated, deluged, avalanched, flooded, caved-in, buried in words.  Poetry, criticism, plays, ancient letters from stodgy dead men, essays, stories...they fill my thoughts like recurring waking dreams; like reciting the Hail Mary, my pen is a rosary, clicking and whirring in absent-minded ritual.  Am I about to go into 17th Century British Poetry, or Early American Lit? Am I writing an essay? A reading response? A daybook entry? Should this be in iambic pentameter and rhymed couplets?

I see words all around me, piling and pooling beneath me, rising up and bearing me heavenwards, lapping at my nostrils and wavering at my eyes; words whirl in a grand amalgamation of thoughts unconnected by so paltry a thing as punctuation and conjunctions.  I swallow in desperate gulps turns of phrase archaic and lyric and oft-insensible; I arch my back to float upon the rolling roiling press of words, I relax into them.  I slowly and suddenly evolve gills to breathe in this elemental profusion, I develop a taste for their acrid saltiness, their exotic tang.  I delve down now, twist and rush through through through the words which are my native land, my home my life and my reality; I arc through waves of words in a graceful glissade, rolling and porpoising with sheer joy.  I let the words lull me, let them lilt in my synapses, wash to and fro in my ear canals like tides rising, tides falling, all under the sway of silver-shrouded Lady Luna.

My words here are my song, sung to fill the heavy, quiet spaces, that shrill and lovely discordia concors, that silence ringing with the wails of ghosts, the shades of words unspent and yet to be born, words that haunt me, beg me in tolling syllables to give them voice, to give them their due moment of elegiac song.

Free the Flood

There is a moment of silence before my fingers begin their slow crawl across the keyboard, like that frozen moment of silence as you look in the rearview mirror and see the grille of a car barreling towards you, that fear-fraught tableau when you realize you cannot avoid what is about to happen. It's just a few letters at first, the hesitant tap-tap-tap of exploratory thoughts beaming down from the unexplored depths of my mind's lyric/prose ocean, the intermittent, percussive tick-tick-tick-tick of the backspace key as the word-stream starts, stutters, stops, gutters, and gushes forth once more. I have delved down without the re-breathing apparatus of a defined plan; rather, I have simply plunged in, head-first, chasing after the hazy, wavering image of an idea as seen through the diamond scintillation of unformed, fragmentary thoughts tossing in the deeps of my soul.

Like most ideas, it begins with two simple catalytic words: what if. Those two words hold the power of genesis, from them have sprung mighty theses, entire civilizations writhing with life, bright and vivid characters.

What if...?

Like those two words, a blank page holds a world, a universe of potential, and that is the jumping-off point, for me, in this moment. The blank page itself is the force that sets my fingers to flying; like a flash flood, it starts with a trickle, gradually increasing to a stream, then a river, then a roaring rampage that cannot be stopped until it is spent.

When I write, I set my mind to...what do I call it?...tabula rasa, Locke's blank slate; put another way, I write in a frame of “no mind,” the Buddhist intentional emptiness in search of ultimate nirvana. The words flow out of their own accord, with little to no prompting from my consciousness. I am not empty, when writing, however. It is not a brainless, zombie-like apathy, it is an emotional process, a sensory process: I hear the words tolling in my skull and rolling in my ear canals, tingling on my tongue and dancing on my tastebuds, I can see them floating and lilting in my vision, buzzing along my skin and tickling the fine hairs on my forearms like a caterpillar crawling up my arm; if I use the wrong word it jars and jangles my nerves, pounds on my taut sensibilities, I cannot rest until I find the right word, I pounce on the syntactical error like a puma pouncing on a mountain goat.

There is no “zone.” The backlit, glowing screen of my cheap laptop is the zone, the blue lines racing across the notebook page is the zone, the pen gripped in fingers ready to spill ink in delicate floral arrangements, words resting each upon the other in intricate cochleate patterns. But do not mistake this for ease. It is far from easy. It is a kind of magical summoning, it sometimes seems, and all magic comes with a price. One must practice, and fail, and practice again, devote hours to finding the perfect balance, the correct alignment of idea, style and purpose. I cannot just sit down and conjure prose for free; there is a cost, as with all things. The outside world must be tuned out, faded into grainy haze at the edges of consciousness; homework, housework, fussing babies, arguing children, these must be quieted and set aside; worries and stress, love and dislike, these too must be relinquished, so that the words might be brought forth to do my bidding.

Now, in this moment of composition, the outside world is pressing in upon my bubble, and the crashing gallop of words is tripped and halted. I shake my head and glance around, the clack-click-click is slowed, my breathing deepens from the unconscious quick shallow panting of the mid-flow rush. Now I must rest a moment in between clauses, blink and meander mentally between sentences. The end is coming...I can feel it approaching, looming, beckoning. I welcome it, as much as I regret it. The end of a piece is always bittersweet, all the more so when the writing has burst forth with such possessive potency, gripping me as in the crushing coils of a python.

And to think, all this emerged from the seed of a single notion, germinated during the walk from classroom to classroom.

Is there a message? Is there a moral meant to be imbued, here? Not in the Mother Goose, Aesop kind of way. If there is, it simply to cherish words, to embrace the moments when it all happens perfectly, when the planets align and douse you with the sentences phrased just so to please the ear and the mind most fully. It won't always happen, though, and that's okay. Sometimes, the well of creativity is dry, and in those times you must pull deeply on the reserves within, like pursing lips to produce spit when your mouth is dry.

And now, the end has arrived. The flow has returned to a trickle and soon must cease completely. I take a deep breath, and let it be.

Fín.

The Chronicles of Vargos Vale

PEREPETEIA

The next several weeks passed in a blur. I barely remember any of it, honestly. I got checked up by the medics and their machines, got outfitted for gear and drafted into some kind of ground troop unit. I'd never thought I'd be a soldier again, but here I am, wearing a uniform and saluting men half my size.

This place, this time...it's all so different. I suppose that's to be expected, but it's a shock to the system, especially since I'm still having trouble inside myself. My time in the cryobed...that endless time of...unbeing...I guess is the best word for it—that time changed me. I don't feel the same in my mind, I don't feel the same in my body or my soul. If I close my eyes, I'm back there. Blink...blink...blink. Silence. Not even silence, actually, but rather the complete absence of sounds. I found a sensory-deprivation chamber, on board this ship...this man-made star floating in the heavens...and in it, I still couldn't find the kind of silence that experienced in that cryobed. In the sense-dep pod I was still able to hear my heart beating, I could wiggle my toes or flex my muscles, I could hear the sound of my breathing...it's not the same as being deaf and numb, not being able to hear or feel.

During the battle in the Mars Colony Pyramidion, I took a round to the helmet, an incendiary round. The helmet saved my braincase and my life, but left me completely deaf. I had to be shipped back Earthside and have my hearing repaired, which took months in the regrow tank. Being deaf isn't the same either.

But still, I can only sleep in the sense-dep pod. In a real bunk...every sound sends me into a panic. Every tick of shifting metal, every klaxon in the farthest wings of this ship...I hear it all. Awake, I can deal with it, the hypersensitivity. When people speak, even in conversational tones, it sounds like they're yelling in my ear, even if they're forty feet away. A door whooshing open across the barracks room sends a puff of air that I can feel like a wind. I can hear men's bellies gurgling.

Time, too, is unreliable for me now. Sometimes, seconds will drag by over what feels like hours. I will be sitting at a table in the mess-hall, and the men next to me, carrying on a conversation, will be moving in slow motion. Hands, gesturing, will crawl through the air with syrupy slowness, words will drip and drawl, strands of hair will waft and drift as if through water.

I miss water. There are no pools here, no baths or showers. Just a decontam chamber that scrubs you down in a matter of seconds, without ever touching you.

Time also will speed up, those same mess-hall mates will move like a HoloNet on fast-forward, words blurring and piling one atop the other, gesticulations too-fast. It alternates, slow to fast, then back to slow, then without warning, all will return to normal. And never a warning. All I can do is sit back, keep still, and watch. Speech was impossible, in those bubbles of distorted time. I couldn't summon words, couldn't form them or produce them. At first, I couldn't even move, but I learned, later.

Of course, everyone is curious about me. The man who saw the Exodus, the man who drifted through space for a thousand years, while humanity evolved without him.  The giant. These people are tiny, here. They move strangely, speak strangely, think strangely. They walk in a gliding shuffle, the gait of people who spend a lot of time in low- or zero-grav, but they walk this way even when the grav is normal. It seems ingrained in them, a racial trait. I've discovered that some of these men on this ship were born here, raised here, and expect to die here. The Rakehell is a far-scout, it turns out, a ship designed and built to patrol the edges of mapped space, and to push those boundaries, to extend the map. My ship, it seems, was at the very edge of explored territory, and only a bored, sharp-sighted scan-tech drew attention to my derelict craft.

These men will spend their entire lives aboard this ship, disembarking only for brief planet-side leave. This is unfathomable, to me. I've asked the commander who rescued me, the officer in charge of outship-ops, to get me a transport to civilization.

I need to see more of this new humanity, this new civilization. I can't live the rest of my life on this far-scout. I just can't.

*      *      *

Perepeteia is a wild, strange, exotic place. Nothing here is like anything I've ever encountered before. Even the people, those that I recognize as humans at least, have changed beyond my understanding. The men and women aboard the Rakehell are on the fringes of society, exempt from the vagaries of social custom and fad. They exist outside of society, away from anyone other than those like them, officers and soldiers and members of the shipboard culture. This society on Perepeteia is humanity in all its inconstancy and fad-driven indulgence. Hair and clothes, technology, transportation, everything is totally inexplicable and ineffable. Women have hair with some kind of light in them, like neon tubes woven around their natural hair, which is itself dyed, it looks like. Clothes are outright bizarre. They exist for fashion, rather than function. Nudity is the norm and clothes are a choice to exhibit what the individual sees as exciting or as an expression of personality. Skintight pants of transparent material, sometimes translucent just enough to disguise things, seem to be the fad, as well as shirts that hang down to the feet in the back, cut away in front and sleeveless, or tassels hanging from sleeve points or collars. Also popular are tattoos inscribed in gold or silver, somehow non-toxic, or in glowing neon, across the face or wrapped around the forearms and hands; everyone carries weapons. There is no police force, only a token display of soldiers to prevent outright lawlessness, but very little is enforced except the injunction against outright murder in public. If you can get away with it, it is left uninvestigated. Theft, larceny, prostitution, these are as common as handshakes and kissing. For all of this, however, Perepeteia is surprisingly welcoming. People don't so much accept you as much as they simply don't care who or what you are as long you don't infringe on their space. I walk among them unremarkable, for once in my life. My mere size has always been enough to set me apart my whole life, so it is a strange feeling to walk down a street without being stared up at.

There are things here that don't seem to be...people. Or, not humans. I can't tell if they are androids or robots or cyborgs, but they are bizarre mixtures of machine and human: men with plasma rifles where a hand should be, women with computer displays in their forearms, metal legs or camera-eyes, anti-grav booster platform from waist down as if a man had been grafted onto a hoverbike at his waistline. Others are more normal appearing, just one little thing slightly off. Hair that isn't hair, or eyes that glitter too much with a mechanical sheen, skin that doesn't feel right when they brush against you in the street, voices that hiss and crackle with faulty transistors as opposed to a cough or sneeze. Perhaps the humans take me to be one of these mechine-man amalgams. I have seen no natural person that is above six feet tall, as if evolution has made them smaller, perhaps from generations that were born, lived and died aboard a colony-transport.

Perepeteia itself is a place that requires some getting used to. Low grav, for one thing, not Earth-moon low, but noticeable to me. Twin suns, huge, one yellow and hellishly bright, the other a dull dying red. Its a hot, arid, low oxygen planet, so the inhabitants have turned the Pyramidion technology from the Mars Colony to their own uses and expanded upon them. On Mars, a Pyramidion was an independent city-state, a pyramid of transparent titanium—transtanium—layered in horizontal floors like a highrise back on Earth, before the cities were all destroyed. Now, on Perepeteia, the Pyramidions are being built on an unbelievable scale, wide enough at the base to contain two or three metropolises; and they built vertically as well, rising nearly a mile into the scorching sky, containing four layers, each layer, or floor, holding several spread out cities or villages. And there are dozens of these Pyramidions on Perepeteia, each one governed independently, as on Mars, each one holding millions of souls. The human race has definitely expanded in the last thousand years.

They all have names, but damned if I'll be able to get them all straight any time soon. The one I've fetched up in is called Juris Tempe, or J-Temp. As on Mars, the richest of the rich live at the peak, and the further down you go towards the base the poorer and rougher more packed the living quarters get. I'm at the very bottom of course, living with a garrison of off-duty ground troops. It's at once entirely too familiar, and dreamily unreal. Soldiers are soldiers, and they tell the same basic jokes, just couched in new terminology and slang, but the outfits, the technology, the housing arrangements, all of this takes a while to get used to.

No one seems to realize that I'm not actually part of the ground troops. I've been absorbed by the system, and no one has noticed. I salute, wear the uniform, do the drills and PT, all of which is basically unchanged, and if anyone notices that I've done something wrong or say something weird, or don't understand a reference, I tell them I was on a far-scout, and they nod sympathetically, as if that explains everything.

I suppose it does, at that. They ship out, and they return after several generations have passed back planet-side, and everything has changed. For me, its not just the surface details that have been altered, but the very fabric of human culture. There are no racial boundaries anymore, but stereotypes and bigotry abound, nonetheless, just directed towards new targets.

*      *      *

I have been just scribbling all these thoughts and memories down as they come to me. I was issued a “tablet”, a paper-thin sheet of clear rubbery material that can be folded, balled up, bunched up, soaked, burned, or crushed without being compromised. These tablets are the personal computer device of this age, a person's entire connection to the virtual world of information, and most people seem to have a way of interacting with it directly through their brains or eyes, through some kind of implant that I, of course, never got. I can still use it manually, however, and that suits me better. I'm not ready to get an implant yet.

I suppose I should organize this record. For who, for what? I don't know. For myself, I guess, so I can look back and see where I have been and what I have gone through. 

So, today's date seems to be 24.13.1004. Apparently, there are 24 months here, and 40 days to a month, and it is the year 1004 P.E., which makes it, according to my calender, somewhere around 3217 A.C.E., as they dated things when I was growing up Earth.

I think I like using the 1004 date better. It makes it seem a little less...difficult to swallow.

24.15.1004

I can't help thinking how proud of me Lyss would be, if she knew I was finally writing regularly. She was always after me to write more. She said the letters I'd written her, when I was stationed at the Kleuer Pyramidion Base, were, in her words, achingly poetic. I don't know what-all that means, but I take it as, she likes my writing. So, I'll address these journal entries as to her, and write them as if she were going to read them, out in the far beyond of death.

Dear Lyss,

You wouldn't believe this place. Everything is huge and fast. The people are loud, gruff, busy, self-absorbed. You would hate it. No one smiles at you on the street, or shakes your hand when you meet them.

For me, as a soldier, its a good life, thus far. It's what I know, and for all the inexplicable aspects of the world around me, it's the one familiar thing I can rely on: get woken up before sunrise, or I should say, suns-rise, PT with the squad, dress out, breakfast, patrol. My unit, my adopted unit, is assigned to patrol the ground level of J-Temp. It's a dangerous job. Those who live down here, they have no love for uniform, and with good reason. These men, they're brutal. Thugs, really. I march with them and keep to myself, defend if I have to. The others, they take what they want, be it goods or people, and do what they want. There's places we don't dare go, warrens of alleys dimly lit and stinking of abject poverty and slow death. Even we, with out guns and armor and shock-sticks, we don't dare enter those mazes. We'd be overrun and smothered, we'd just disappear.

For all that, though, I understand these people, in a way. Their speech and appearance are strange to me, but they are still humans, and we change little, at the core. They struggle to survive, day to day, they love and hate, seek pleasure and avoid pain, they joke and swear, they kiss and slap and fight and make love.

I'm no sociologist, no philosopher or psychologist, I'm uneducated. I'm just a soldier, a grunt. But it is a fascinating, if disorienting and lonely, experience, to live and move among this culture to which I am alien.

24.20.1004

Dearest Lyss,

Something is happening here, on Perepeteia. It's not just J-Temp.. All the other Pyramidions are being swept up in it too. Something to do with “Dual-sings.” I've done some asking around, and the best I can figure, the situation is this: Dual-sings are a race of people that are kind of like cyborgs, but not really. No one can explain them in a way that makes a damn lick of sense. Those strange people with machine parts, they are Dual-sings. Dual-singularities. Machine, human, and neither, and both. It's horridly complicated, apparently. They are human in that they are born, they love and breathe and have babies, but they are also cybertronic, bio-mechanical. The machinery is organic, grown somehow, and they can graft onto themselves true, dead machinery.

Dual-sings are at the heart of the unrest, I'm told. They don't have a place in society, except at the bottom of the bottom. If prostitutes and drug-dealers and murderers are the scum of society, most people look at Dual-sings as being the putrid mold that grows on the scum, turns it into unidentifiable sludge. They have their own society, their own culture, a secretive underworld that scuttles in the shadows of Perepeteian life.

The Dual-sings are rising up, rebelling. They want rights, they want recognition. They want to vote, they want to come out of the shadows, and the humans won't let them. It's complex, though, because some dual-sings want to take their rights using any means necessary, however violent and extreme, and others want to separate. It all sounds familiar. I barely graduated high school, but I remember hearing this story a hundred times.

The faction proposing violence is the most numerous, it seems.

Am I willing to take up arms against these people, these strange creatures called Dual-sings?

I don't think I am. They've never harmed me, in any way, for all that they are bizarre looking. The civil wars on Mars and Luna were different, Lyss, you know this. I wouldn't ever tell you much of what happened there. I didn't want you have the nightmares that kept me awake. You were too sweet and innocent and kind and loving. Too willing to see the bright side, the best in every situation. Those awful bloody revolts were...hell. Nightmares made alive. Men airlocked, eyeballs bursting, skin shriveling and lungs collapsing, screams silenced by the vacuum, red blood leaking out into red dust, clotting in ponds of blood-mud...Lord help me, I still dream of those battles, even now. When I sleep, that is. I still can't sleep well. The hypersensitivity hasn't gone away, and the distorted time sense...that is something I'm slowly learning to control.

I miss you, Alyssa. I hope this unrest blows over, but I can feel, in my gut and my bones, that it won't. The tension in the air is palpable. Secrets float in the wind, curses follow us on patrol, humans disappear without warning, whispers of uprising flutter in the hot winds from the black alleys.

Where do I fit in to all this? There are only two sides, and I'm on neither.

I wish you could tell me what to do, Lyss.

A Gothic Horror (Nosferatu)

Moonlight softly wavers through the window,
shedding silver spears, gently piercing gloom;
towers tall and spires spiked 'neath the midnight
moon like a brilliant moon echo silence.
The landscape dreams: rolling hills and glitt'ring seas,
delicate drifts of cloud, stars like scattered gems,
a mansion, ancient, sprawling on a hill;
this dream-still tableau is broken, shattered
 by a piercing scream, a note of horror
stamped in aural ink upon the sleeping night.
This scream by winging bats is swift pursued,
a maddened flutter of screeching demons;
      now the eldritch night is broken,
      and evil things are woken.

Look now at the all but empty tower,
rising highest all above the rest,
into the only room that's warm with life,
at the lovely, trembling maiden huddled
by the oaken door, breast heaving, breathless.
She, staring at a pool of shadows cold,
shrinks against the door, fumbles with the lock,
clasps her ragged shift to her shivering skin.
The shadows shift and part to reveal deeper shades,
shapes that move, uncast by light, shapes with eyes
that gleam with hellish hunger, unholy glee.
Her fear at every panted breath exhales,
vapor making gnashing jaws drip more drool.
      With growls those maws closer creep,
       cries she, "wake me from this sleep!"

The lock at last gives way, the door swings out,
the frightened maid flies forth, loudly shrieking.
Scratching claws pursue, evil laughter booms
through darkened hallways, mirth of ghoulish things.
In haste she flees, with slapping, tripping feet,
down circling stairs, past open doors like mouths.
She turns her head, she seeks in vain a glimpse
of the hell-wights  in pursuit,  demons lewd
and leering, like drunken rakehell villains,
but  cold as death, stinking still of open graves.
Fleet of foot they fly, more than mortal man;
taunting shades are they, whispering vile threats,
rushing wind-swift round, cutting with their claws
      they prick and nick, lick and lave,
      lap their tongues at wounds they gave.

A game these cold ones play, as much for fear
as her sweet red blood; they wait with patience
until she's steeped in dread, in terror bathed.
Across a chessboard they play their devil's game,
moonlight silver squares, shadows form the black;
'round her they glissade horror's waltz of death.
Hall to hall, wing to wing, floor to floor
they've played their dreadful game of cat and mouse,
but this tormented maid swiftly weakens
and her flight is slowed, panting turns to sobs,
desperate pleas for life strike deaf, inhuman ears
elicit further hungry, cursing growls.
      In a fury they descend,
      limbs and skin to rip and rend.

When at last their game is done,
sated thirst for lust and fun,
they circle 'round pounce and leap,
they sink in fangs, piled in a heap;
no more she weeps, no more cries,
one last gasping breath she sighs,
with a sob she falls and dies.

Thawed

At first, time distorted. All I had to keep track of its passage was the blinking, and my own sense of time, but then, after what might have been an hour or a year or a month or a second, I began to lose track of the blinking, lose track of my thoughts, lose track of my sense of existence. Then—and this was a slow progression—I began to feel a distinct disconnect from my self-awareness. I had no body, had no breath in, breath out, no gentle synchronous thump-thump thump-thump of my heart beating...only my thoughts, and those became erratic and meaningless, fragments of memory, long sequences of waking dream, or fantasy, or memory and dream mingled together, narratives in which I was not myself but someone else, a HoloNet character interacting with my mother, or Alyssa or my squad-mates from the service. I relived the battles on the Lunar Colony and Mars Project, those strange silent scrums, when explosions were muffled and cut short, when rifles fired in silent bursts of too-bright flashing fire, when mates were twisted and thrown dozens of feet in the low-grav landscape to bleed in drifting clumps of red. Then I would board, in those distorted dream-memories, a transport cruiser, which in reality had landed safely and brought me to Alyssa, but in the dream would loop out past Saturn and slingshot into the far infinity beyond our human reach, and I would find strange aliens with too many eyes and not enough limbs and wars would be waged and men I never knew would die next to me firing un-invented weapons.

Then I would wake and the red light would blink, blink, blink and I would remember and there would be Alyssa, dead and frozen, a nude statue encased in glass and silver. In those moments, I would wish for another meteorite to finish the job and release me from this eternity of undeath. It never comes, and time ceases to have meaning. My mind begins to float, lost in the ether. I can catch, through a porthole just inside my range of vision, glimpses of the stars whirling and spinning and drifting, sometimes a distant satellite or nebula or quasar or galaxy, and once a mighty asteroid gliding majestically past, craggy and pitted. I cursed when it failed to crunch me into freedom.

Then, finally, there was no I, no me, no present or past or Alyssa; I closed my eyes and saw stars on the screen of my mind, still and bright and imaginary, and they too faded and I slept, dreamless and peaceful, eternal.

I was woken by a juddering crash that rocked the stars outside the porthole, made the glass of the cryobed rattle around me, then there was the hiss of the airlock, unheard but seen as the gasses shot out of the seal-rings. I struggled to orient myself. I was not I, for many moments, just a vague notion of occurrence, disconnected from anything. Two things like men floated through the opening, set their feet to the metal floor, touched a button on their forearms and their boots adhered to the floor with a sudden shock. They explored the chamber, leaned over Alyssa's cryobed, and then I wished I could hear, to know what they were saying, for the gesticulated eagerly, pointed to the blinking light was my only evidence of reality or waking truth. One of them came over and stood above me, and I saw that it was in fact a man, a real human, in a ship-suit the like of which I had never seen. Close-fitting, hardened like an exoskeleton, but limber at the joints, a transparent helmet revealing a rugged, unshaven face, showing an expression of extreme shock. He looked down at me, met my gaze, narrowed his eyes, and then when I shifted my gaze, he stumbled backward and grabbed the arm of his companion and jerked him around, pointed at me, lips moving rapidly. The other shuffled over to me, looked down at me; I blinked, and he too took an involuntary step backward. They both stared at me for several long seconds before bending to examine the read-out of the cryobed. They took a very long time to do so, pointing, disagreeing, finally pressing buttons and stepping back to watch as the cryobed woke me, gradually and gently.

It was painful, waking up. It began as a tingle in my toes that turned to fire; the tingling spread upward to my legs and torso and arms, followed by the agony of fire licking along my skin and inside my veins and muscles. My face was last, and my hearing returned, ringing and echoing. The lid swung open, and I tried to lift myself out, but couldn't. One of them gently took my hands and pulled, lifting me out. I managed to drag my legs out, but they wouldn't take my weight completely, not yet. I slumped back, waved the men away, held up a finger to signal that I needed a few moments. My throat was dry, parched and scraping as I swallowed; I couldn't speak. The burning receded, leaving a tingling and buzzing as of waking limbs. Finally, I stood at my full height. The men in the strange armor craned their necks up at me in surprise. I had been nearly curled up in the cryobed: I am a large man, clearing seven feet one inch in my bare feet. A full two terms in the service left me extraordinarily fit. These men couldn't be more than five foot five, at the most, but I could tell that they were highly-trained, strong and rugged. These were soldiers; men of war can recognize one another at a glance.

They put their shoulders under me, one on each side, and half-dragged me through the door into their ship. I was halfway through the portal when I stopped, shook myself free of them, stumbled drunkenly back into the dead, derelict Icarus, over to Alyssa. I bent over the glass, kissed its cold surface above her lips, whispered a prayer in the thin icy air, to God, to all the gods, asked them to care for her soul in the hereafter. The men watched, but didn't interfere. They saw the emotion writ on my features, in my movements. You don't get in the way of a grieving warrior, you allow him space and silence to mourn in his own way, you wait at the edges, offer stoicism, offer no platitudes, for you know better. They respected the ritual.

Finally, I was ready to leave her, but I took the green blanket that had last known the touch of her skin, wrapped it around my naked hips, and made my way out of the Icarus, taking one last glance at what had been my tomb. The cryobeds were darkened and starlight gleamed dully on the silver bases, flashed in shifting points of white on the glass tops.

I was disoriented still, mentally. I couldn't feel emotions fully, couldn't form coherent thoughts. I had said goodbye to Alyssa out of habit, instinct. She was a part of me, and I was leaving her, but I didn't feel the grief, not really. It was there, on my face, in my heart, but the emotion was disconnected. I was still a mind floating in the ether, I wasn't I, yet. I knew my name: Vargos Vale. I knew I had left Earth as part of the Exodus. That was the sum of my knowledge.

Who were these men?

How long had I drifted, asleep?

The men helped me, supporting me with difficulty. Their ship was like a fantasy, like something from the HoloNet. Gleaming white and black and silver surfaces, flickering, transparent readouts, irising doors, winding hallways, wide, floor-to-ceiling windows that offered mind-boggling glimpses of the universe just beyond. As soon as the seal between ships was broken, the stars began to move. It took me a moment to realize that that meant this ship was departing, with me on it. I pressed my forehead to the window and watched for a glimpse of the Icarus. When it came, it brought curses to my lips. The damage was far more extensive than I had realized. The exterior was blackened and pitted, the cockpit completely destroyed. It was dented and broken, burnt to a crisp. It was, I realized, a miracle that I was alive at all. I watched the once-sleek craft drift out of sight, trying to reconnect my soul to my body, trying to forget the image of 

Alyssa lying dead and ever-perfect in the cryobed.

I heard someone clear his throat behind him. I turned and recognized one of the men who had rescued me. “Thank you for rescuing me,” I rasped. My voice was like sandpaper scraping across metal. The man held out a bottle of water to me, and I drank greedily.

“Welcome aboard the Rakehell,” he said. “I'm Commander Lucas.” His voice was deep, a soft, menacing growl. He wore a gunmetal-gray uniform with crimson trim and pouldrons on his shoulders. He carried himself as an officer would, with that cocksure confidence of a man used to giving orders, hands clasped behind his back. It sent me back to my days as a soldier and I unconsciously fell back on my military training. I saluted crisply, heels together, back straight.

“Glad to be aboard, sir,” I said.

“It's quite remarkable that you're alive, mister...”

“Vale, sir. Gunnery Sergeant Vargos Vale, United Earth Special Forces, retired.”

A look of shock and confusion flitted across the Commander's face. “UESF? My gods...how long were you in that ship, Gunny?”

“Well sir, I truthfully don't know. We were hit by asteroids or something just as our cryobeds were going through the start-up. Alyssa's bed was shut down after she was cold, but mine wasn't done yet, so when it went to backup power, it stopped the process and there wasn't enough juice to finish. I was awake, but frozen physically, trapped and aware.”

Lucas looked horrified at the thought. “Well, when did you board the ship?”

“I don't know the exact date. It was at the tail-end of the Exodus, is all I know. Alyssa and I were some of the very last to leave.”

“The Exodus?” Lucas was incredulous. “Are you sure? Cryosleep can give you funny dreams, sometimes...”

He didn't seem to believe me. “Yes, sir. I'm sure. I was never completely under...” Something in his demeanor gave me chills down my spine. “What is the current date?”

“It is the year 1004 P.E., Post-Exodus.”

At first I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. 1004? That meant I had been asleep for...“A thousand years?” I barely managed a whisper. My breath caught, and I fell backward against the window. How was that possible? A thousand years?