THE VOICE IN THE VOID
FEW THINGS SPEAK LOUDER THAN SILENCE
THERE IS A PARTICULAR AWE TO THE SILENT death that meets a body— living or otherwise— in the eternal void of interstellar space. The human mind, due in part to its unfathomably imaginative tendencies, may substitute this absence of sound with whatever whimsical intonations it deems fitting. This is a universal observation among spacers of every clime and place; one of the few shared experiences uniting a far-flung humanity that, in the natural diasporic state of the race, finds less and less in common with its own kin with every passing eon.
If one were to so witness a collision between a remote drone and a hangar door, she might perceive the nonexistent ring of metal in the back of her mind. View a larger collision— say, the unlikely violence of two vast freighters scraping against each other’s monolithic hulls after a thousand cascading system failures— and the shrill wrenching of twisted metal will screech in the mind of the observer, its accompanying baritone thunder rolling through the imagination like a fictitious terrestrial tremor.
Alternatively, the all-too-common scenes of death amid the working folk of humanity’s ever-expanding industrial sphere could conjure nonexistent sounds just as freely. No matter how many times one witnessed a harvest
ship’s unyielding guidewire wrenching a spacer cleanly in twain, the wet, visceral auditory hallucination remained the same. This sound, though entirely imagined, would never leave a viewer’s dreams.
Utility First Class Preston Coyle had witnessed all these and more in his sixteen decades among the stars. Had he been a learned man, the haunting repetitions might have cursed his memory. Rather, he shrugged them off as the expected experiences of a man in his trade; part and parcel for the life of a spacer.
“Ours not to reason why,” the recruiting ads echoed. Had he been a learned man, he might have known the origin of that ancient quip. He was not a learned man.
In fact, he was quite the opposite. His thoughts seldom strayed from routine: Wake up, hygiene, chow, work, chow, hygiene, sleep. Again. Again. Again a hundred times, or a thousand, or ten-thousand— as many as were required for the current contract. Then, upon completion, he would go on shore-leave for as long as his savings allowed, purging the vices from his aching body in a stream of alcohol, sex, and debauchery. When the monetary charges were inevitably denied and he was thrown on whatever excuse for a debtor’s jail his current orbital station contained, he would sign on for another stint on whatever disreputable ship happened to be passing through.
And so the cycle began once more.
His only imagination involved his next meal, his next job, and his next stint in cryo. His only aspiration: a little peace and quiet.
Coyle stared intently at the utility panel splayed out before him, a dozen shades of titanium and plastic switches shifting silently as his suited fingers danced over them. His face hovered inches from the panel, his tether drifting aimlessly in a loop at his flank and his boots magnetically secured to the station’s hull. With the confidence of finality, he twisted a last knob.
“Right, done,” he grumbled. “Your turn.”
An icon in his visual display turned green, and his suit responded in a chiming voice.
“Please conduct the post-repair automated te—”
“Yeah, yeah, right. On it,” Coyle interrupted.
He reached his left arm out toward a bright yellow eyelet notched into the panel. A metallic tendril— no wider than a bootlace— sprung from the suit and interfaced with the station receptacle.
“All systems reporting functional,” the suit said. “Please confirm location to finalize repair ticket.”
“Ross two-four-eight Alpha.”
“Location accepted. Repair ticket finalized.”
Satisfied, the technician closed the panel’s metallic hatch. Despite the lack of medium through which any sound could pass, his utterly human mind conjured a satisfying clank as titanium struck steel. The polished surface reflected the stars behind him, but he glanced past it to the planet below. Ross 248-A loomed ominously underneath, a massive Jovian giant composed of hydrogen and helium. Its atmosphere swirled with currents and storms, and the reflection it cast from the light of its parent star gave every nearby object a dull, red glow. He was edgewise off the horizon so that the vast planet presented him a crimson crescent on its far left extreme; the red sliver slowly but surely diminishing as the harvesting station progressed on its slow orbit around the planet.
A less experienced spacer might have found it beautiful, but not Preston Coyle. He had repaired dozens of gas refineries in his day, and seen just as many gas giants. The grandeur lost its luster rather quickly after the first few. Now, Ross was just a job.
He looked back at the panel, subconsciously summoning the trawl rockets that would carry him back to the Morning Dove. His tether automatically detached from the station, unwound into two separate strands, and re-attached to the remotely controlled rockets. The small engines were slow, but they would get him out to the Dove in only a few hours. Once back, he would find a good meal, clean himself up, and go back into reefersleep for the transit back to New Campus.
Easy.
“Morning Dove, it’s UFC Preston Coyle. Repairs done. Bring me back.”
He waited a moment for a response. The ship was only a few thousand kilometers away, so the comm delay shouldn’t be significant. Perhaps the radio officer had dozed off.
“Morning Dove, it’s Coyle. Requesting return tow. I’m done.”
Silence.
He took a deep breath, switched channels, and tried again. Nothing.
He tried again and again, cycling through the nine comm channels available for direct linkage between utility workers and the freighter’s crew.
There was no response. He switched back to his initial frequency.
“Morning Dove, it’s Utility First Class Prest—”
He was cut off mid sentence as the titanium panel before him changed from its former red glow to an iridescent blue hue.
He gasped.
In an instant, he kicked one magboot off from the station hull, spinning in place on the remaining point of contact. A perfect sphere of white-blue light had eclipsed the anemic red light of Ross 248. Coyle’s visor automatically shaded his vision, but the image was still seared onto his retinas as he clenched his eyes in pain.
“No, no, this isn’t possible,” he whispered. Yet, when he opened his eyes again, the sphere was still there— fading quickly, but still present. His ears rang. He was unable to reconcile that a starship– such a titanic monument to human resolve– could disappear so noiselessly, leaving only debris, photons, and a neutrino spike as hints that it ever even existed. His auditory nerve belied the voluminous silence, summoning the delayed rumble of thunder to satisfy the lack of majesty in the Dove’s unsung end.
There was only one possibility.
The Morning Dove was the only registered ship present in the Ross stellar system. Her antimatter reactor was, including the cool-burning red dwarf at the heart of the system, the most powerful energy source within two lightyears.
Something had gone drastically wrong.
Evidently, an unknown event had caused a critical failure in the ship’s fuel reservoir. The magnetic field must have failed, allowing hundreds of kilograms of antimatter to collide with its corresponding counterpart, converting every paired mote of reaction mass to pure energy.
The white-blue sphere was the death throe of the failed reactor. The Morning Dove was gone, along with its shuttles, its comm system, and its entire crew.
Preston Coyle found himself suddenly, instantly, completely alone.
A full nineteen hours passed before the thought occurred to him that he should commit suicide; another twenty before sufficient resolve accumulated for him to make the attempt. There was nobody within range of his weak radio signal to come to his rescue; the system was uninhabited.
It would be decades before a salvage ship would arrive, once the first particles from the neutrino-burst caused by the Dove’s final report.
He did not want to starve to death.
“Disconnect umbilical,” he commanded his suit, turning once more to face the endless void. There was no trace left by the absent Morning Dove, any superheated fragments of its hull having long-since cooled and dissipated.
“Command authorization required for umbilical disconnect,” the apathetic voice of his suit responded.
“You’ve gotta be–” he let loose a stream of curses, hoping to push the suit toward compliance. “No more command, I’m the only one left. Do it.”
“Command authorization required.”
“Override. There’s nobody left higher’n me.”
“Command authorization required.”
Another string of profanity echoed inside Preston’s helmet to no avail. He’d need another strategy.
He turned back toward the metal hatch on the automated refinery station. Tenderly, he pushed himself back toward the panel and carefully positioned himself so that he was at eye-level with the control box’s outward-extruded latch. He took a deep breath, bracing as hard as possible with his magnetic boots, and leaned back.
With a sudden jerk of explosive energy, he lurched forward, smashing the transparent face of his helmet against the unforgiving corner of the control box with all his rocket-assisted might. Red, flashing warning lights appeared on his HUD, but there was no visible damage to the face-shield.
He leaned back and lurched forward again.
And again.
And again.
He kept crushing his face against the acute point of the box corner until finally, amidst the many warnings and alarms of the visor display, he saw an unmistakable web of cracks appear near the center of his vision. A cloud of crystalized atmosphere erupted in front of his face as oxygen, nitrogen, and trace amounts of water burst forth; now, it would be only a matter of minutes.
He leaned back again and closed his eyes, knowing he would soon fall unconscious.
Moments passed.
He did not pass out. The hiss of escaping atmosphere, he realized, had ceased.
His eyes shot open.
To his horror, the cracks in the glass were already almost completely repaired. The suit’s self-healing mechanisms had busily devoted great energy expenditure toward remedying his futile attempt at euthanasia. An outpour of tears pooled in his eyes before budding off from his face like spores from a rancid fungus. Surface tension pooled the tiny quantities of liquid into spheres, which the suit’s internal atmosphere controls quickly circulated back into their closed-system of regulatory recycling.
It didn’t even matter how much he cried. The suit would pump the liquid back into his body anyway. He wondered how long the godforsaken thing could sustain him like this on his own expelled air and waste products.
He feared the answer and decided to cry anyway.
The sobbing lasted for nearly twenty minutes until the suit restricted his movement out of fear that he would expend too much energy, inhibiting its prime directive to keep him alive.
Three hours later, he had collected himself enough to ask the question he was dreading most.
“So, you can’t let me die, right?”
“It is my primary duty to preserve your livelihood, Mr. Coyle.”
“And you’re unable to change that duty?”
“It is my primary duty to pres–”
“Right, right, I get it. How long?”
“Mr. Coyle?”
“How long can you keep me alive for?”
“My power reservoirs will be able to sustain you without fault for two standard months, twenty-six days, nine hours, and fourteen minutes at the current rate of expenditure.”
God damnit, he thought. Three months. Three months till I can die.
He thought for a long time about that. Four months seemed impossibly long to live off of recycled air and filtered piss. At first, his heart-rate was greatly elevated– until, that is, the suit increased his own natural output of serotonin. That, of course, allowed him to think more rationally.
“Can… can you give me a countdown?” he asked, finally.
“Mr. Coyle?”
“Can you give me a countdown of your power reserves on my display?”
“Right away, Mr. Coyle.”
And there it was, just like that: a clock. A doomsday clock, counting down until his inevitable demise. And then, his solitary confinement began, salved only by the promise that it would, in fact, end.
Initially, he had overwhelming panic attacks every few hours. As his body and mind grew accustomed to his circumstance, they wavered to once or twice a day. After a week, they disappeared entirely.
He spent his waking hours– as few as he could make them– watching the countdown and playing mental games within the confines of his trembling mind. He retold old stories, reviewed past memories in explicit detail, and sang familiar songs to himself over and over again until the words seemed jumbled and incoherent.
Then, he invented new stories. He changed the details in memories, pulling strings left and right until the pictures they painted were unrecognizable from the original events that inspired them. He altered the words to the old songs, added new lyrics and verses, modified chords and notes to forms that, in his mind, were perfection.
By the time the first month passed, his natural sleep cycle was adequately annihilated. He slept whenever he was tired of solitary existence– an expression which snuck up on him every few hours. The only manner in which he was able to keep track of days was the little green numbers slowly dwindling down on the top of his visor display. All time outside those remaining days was meaningless.
Then, a new game.
He saw it upon waking on the thirty-sixth day: a new crimson crescent opposite of the hemisphere behind which the previous crescent had disappeared so many days prior. The orbit of the station had brought him around to the illuminated side of Ross 248-A once more. Every time he woke, he measured the width of the steadily growing red arc against the pixels on his visor. Now, the width of a comma. Now, the width of a letter. Now, a word.
As the width grew, so grew his desire to see more. Soon, there would be cloud formations discernible. Formations that he, in his little realm of infinity, could stir and shape and mold into any miraculous creatures he fancied. When the illuminated portion of Ross’ atmosphere was as wide as his outstretched palm, not a force in the universe could have wiped the smile from his face.
“The storm,” he said, his hoarse voice full of vigor. “The storm, the storm!”
The great, swollen pair of red spots on the planet were finally visible, dancing about each other like merging stars. He watched them in wonder and awe, with new eyes of appreciation and joy.
“This, this is what I will get to witness before I die.”
And so he watched, and he slept, and he watched, and he slept. In utter silence, he couldn’t take his eyes off of the dancing storms. It was as if their hypnotic spiral made time move faster for him. He was hypnotized by them. Entranced.
Overwhelmed with the joy of beautiful finality.
Until he was right above them, right on the meridian of the planet’s dawn, fully bathed in the light of Ross 248 proper. He looked at his countdown. It was down to just a few precious hours now.
“Fine,” he thought, no fear in his heart. “I’ll go to sleep. That’ll make it easier. My friends, the storms, will watch me and usher me into oblivion.”
He closed his eyes, embracing eternal sleep.
He opened his eyes. No.
What?
He shut them again, tighter than before, but the world didn’t disappear in the phantasmic visions of dying neurons when he opened them again.
He looked down.
Where his suit had previously been formed of monolithic segments, pockmarked and scuffed by long wear and hard use, it was now encrusted in a checkerboard skin of translucent gray. It took him a moment to realize what had happened.
When he finally came to his answer, his primal scream echoed inside the thick insulation of his helmet.
“Why? Why? Why? I thought you were going to die.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Coyle,” the suit responded cordially. “I was able to conserve energy long enough to employ my solar panels. In the time we will be exposed to stellar radiation, I will be able to collect more than enough to keep you alive for another cycle of local orbit. You’re safe in my protection.”
“I don’t… I don’t want… I don’t…”
His voice trailed off as he realized the futility of his pleas.
“Mr. Coyle?” “Nothing.”
And so he watched in silence as he, the station, and the suit passed over the bright face of the Jovian world, counting the cloud formations and the days until both blended together in an incomprehensible stream of slurried atmosphere and meaningless numbers.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
Sleep, awake, sleep, awake. No more tears, no more hope, no more dread. Only the suit, the station, and Preston Coyle. And, of course, the storms, the stars, and the planet below.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
His days stretched to unfathomable length, his nights to unrivaled loneliness. In his mind, Ross 248-A split into two planets, morphing into vast and longing entities below. One, a marble god of wind and joy and lust and pride, swirling beneath him in its endless blend of chaotic atmospheric gasses.
The other, a black and faceless god of death, rot, and corruption.
The time between began to bother him– the time when he could clearly see both, when the dawn or dusk of Ross 248-A bisected the world’s visible face from its ebony counterpart. He learned to turn away during those times to ease his mental fatigue and soothe the split between the two. He would face the stars for those intolerable weeks, pretending that, when the planet was waxing, his heroic champion was returning from the dark lands to rescue him. When the planet was waning in his vision, he imagined some dark, looming predator approaching– a creature willing and able to devour him at a moment’s notice, if only he were to peek beyond the protection of the station.
Dark.
Light. Dark. Light.
He began speaking to them. At first, with verbiage bordering prayers and invocations. Later, as if he was chatting with old friends. The suit’s AI was initially confused by this behavior and tried to answer him at every opportunity, but he quickly stifled those unwanted responses and commanded the intelligence to silence.
Well, at least I can make it shut the hell up without command authorization, he thought, cackling to the Scarlet One.
He smiled, licking his lips, as he looked at the storms below and listened for the whisper of their returned laughter.
“Finally, you’re joining the conversation. The Twins, the Twins have come to speak with us!”
His mind formed the background static in his consciousness into a barely-audible chuckle.
“Welcome, welcome. It is good to have you here!” he bellowed, as if he needed to be loud for his voice to carry down to the planet below from within his suit.
But the Ross 248-A did not respond.
Until it did.
In the middle of his traverse across the Shadowed One, just two orbits later, he crawled around the side of the mining station and stared down into the black sphere of void before him. He stared for many days, forgoing sleep to do so. Soon, he realized that, in the carefully controlled environment of his suit, he could forgo many things to stare into that eternally deep, black abyss.
He didn’t really need to blink. The moisture in his helmet was enough.
He didn’t need to manually breathe, either. The suit would do it for him if he stopped.
Losing focus on such trivial matters, he was more able to concentrate on his true intent: communing with his friends so far below.
Talk to me. Talk to me. Talk to me.
Dark. Light. Dark.
“Talk to me,” he said, and finally, the Shadowed One did.
Whispers at first, as if a thousand souls below were convening with him. Soon, he learned to tune out all but the strongest voices. They told him of great betrayals, abandonment, recompense. Wrath, fear, and solitude.
The Scarlet One remained silent.
He yearned for his talks with the Darkness, itched for them, longed for them.
Night after night after age-long night, the talks grew longer and more sinister, the whispering voices in his ears growing to a cacophony of explosive sound that carried on through the entirety of each new period of darkness. It overwhelmed him with feelings of power and triumph over his lonesome exile from humanity, immersed him in a euphoria of noise. Out of his condemnation of silence grew a chorus of infinite darkness, interrupted only by the silent incision of that godforsaken Scarlet One and his Twins.
He hated it. He hated them. They left him in cold, indifferent silence while his only friend, the vast, black sphere, enveloped him in vocal interaction. He was alive.
It was alive.
It’s all alive, and I love it and I hate it and they are separate and I am part of them all. I am here. I am here. I can hear them. I can hear them always.
And then, when he had lost count of nights and days and lights and darks, a real voice came.
It came through the crackle of his radio– a sound which he had not heard in a very long time. It interrupted his communion with the Voices in the Dark.
It made him angry.
They called him lucky, the salvage ship that rescued him. They had the nerve to call him lucky after plucking him from the side of the harvesting station and prying him from the connection he had made with his friends, his friends in the Dark.
They immediately put him on cryosleep for months in an effort to mend his desiccated body. When they finally woke him, they were still finishing the salvage of the… of the… the ship. He could not remember the ship. He had ridden here on the ship, lived on it for a long time, he thought. But he could not remember.
He could remember his friends, though. His friends in the Dark.
And, to his elation, his friends had not abandoned him.
“They came with me,” he said, sitting bolt upright in his cot. “They came with me.”
“No,” the medic said, gently pushing him back down with a warm hand. “Nobody survived the destruction of the Morning Dove.”
“Morning,” Preston repeated, “Morning. Morning is when they leave me.”
“What?”
“Morning is when they go, and I’ve got to be alone for a while.”
“What are you talking about?” the medic asked, baffled.
“He’s not right in the head,” another attendant said, shaking his head. “He needs to go back in reefer till his brain mends up.”
“A long while,” Preston continued his own train of thought, ignoring the others. “Why did they take me away?”
The medics stared at him, unsure what to make of the question.
“Will you talk to me?” Preston asked.
“We’re… we’re talking to you. We–”
“Shh,” Preston said, sliding a vertical finger over the medic’s lips. Their voices were grating to him, shattering glass in his eardrums. He winced, contorting his face in a pained grimace. “I can’t hear them when you talk.”
“We need to get you back under for a bit, sir, I’m sorry, we–”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Preston screamed.
“Sir, you need to relax,” the first medic said, attempting to restrain him. “We’re trying to help–”
“I told you to be quiet,” the Utility cut him off, breaking the arm-bar off from his cot and, with the ease of one whose body had spent the last few months in an incubator’s steroid bath, put it through the medic’s prefrontal cortex.
The other medic tried to scream, but it was too late. Preston Coyle’s iron grip had already separated him from his larynx.
He simply wanted some peace and quiet, of course. Was that too much to ask? This ship was full of noisy, noisy crewmates. That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all. He could hear his friends again, but for how long? The quiet would surely be interrupted by inconvenient sounds like voices, footsteps, and heartbeats.
There was only space for one heartbeat, and only time for the voices of his friends. It was time, he thought, to silence all else. After all, he had been alone with his friends for a very long time.
Why stop now?
After all, his only aspiration was just a little peace and quiet.
THE LAST DIGGER
NOT ALL ENDEAVORS PROVE FRUITFUL
The spade pierces through the carefully-engineered topsoil, crunching and scraping with each shovelful carried away. There is a particularly relaxing rhythm to the movement of digging; the work is arduous and repetitive, yet it bears the firm dignity only found in labor. The wooden handle of the spade groans under the weight of an overfilled load, reminiscent of the creaks and groans emanating from your own overworked joints. The soreness in your extremities, however, is dwarfed by the ache of your empty stomach– a pain which is, in turn, made insignificant by the burning in your lungs.
You pause, spearing the blade of the shovel into the dry ground beneath you. You rest an arm on the apex of the handle, heaving one burning breath after another. Your suit’s damnable atmospheric filtration is hardly enough to keep you upright anymore, and the colony’s stock of anti-inflammatories was exhausted over a year prior.
You raise your wrist up to your narrow field of view, lessening the tint on your visor so that you can see the cracked display adorning your
forearm. It’s not like the arbitrary date or time matter much anymore, but something has been bothering you. Something has been eating at your psyche today as if, in the sequence of events that brought the shovel to your blistered hands, you’ve forgotten something.
Dismissively, you decide to push the thought out of your mind. It probably doesn’t matter anyway.
You weren’t always a Digger, but job prospects became decidedly narrow of late. You’d been a Teacher, once, when there were students in the city in need of education. History. You had been tasked with sharing the history of Saint Jude, the once-thriving settlement you called home. The colony was founded almost six-hundred years ago in a daring expedition during the Great Diaspora of Mankind. Fleeing the most destructive conflict ever to bloody the hands of humanity, ships of every conceivable make, drive, and design webbed outward from Sol, determined to carry on the course of humanity.
The vast majority of them failed.
Most didn’t make it past the Oort cloud. They perished due to unreliable navigation systems, inexperienced pilots, and ships that were simply not made to withstand the rigors of interstellar travel. Many others died out in the abyss, their reactors and life-support systems going dark out in that unreachable vastness between the stars. Of the few ships that actually entered the proximity of their target systems, over half tore themselves to shreds upon deceleration: it was not their thousand-year journeys of coasting at cruising speed that killed them, but rather that final, futile attempt to battle against the laws of inertia.
The Jude, however, had held true, both to its course and its structural integrity. The ship carried its cryogenically-frozen cargo of nineteenthousand souls faithfully to their destination, though it took them fifteenhundred years to get there. The brightest minds, those first awoken, made the greatest sacrifice: they knew they would never set foot on the planet below, but they put their lives’ work into making the planet habitable.
They did the work of gods. They sent daring remote expeditions out across the planet, strategically detonating their atomic weapons and carefully releasing chemicals into the atmosphere. They forced volcanoes to erupt, tsunamis to crash over the land, and coerced the planet’s tectonic plates into quaking. They altered the air, finessed the water, designed the very soil down to the finest detail, and conjured weather patterns where
they could. The machinations they put in place, like clockwork, forged a livable place for humanity’s refugees.
And, three-thousand years removed from these bold terraformers, the first pioneers awoke from their icy sleep. They founded a colony on the surface of the planet, calling it Saint Jude, in honor of the ship that had borne them across boundless distances of space and time. And there, they flourished.
They built cities, agriculture, infrastructure. They built lives. They were hard lives, at first, but they made the lives of those who came after easier, and those in turn for their own descendants. The population exploded, with Saint Jude at its core, and for a while, people actually managed to live comfortably. They began transmitting signals out into the void, calling out to their brethren out across the cosmos, hoping to hear any response from other humans who had scratched out lives in the harsh universe after the diaspora– hoping to call them in to their home, where they had built all but a paradise. The relentless spirit of the human race made every effort to survive, and it seemed that the fruit of their labor was a cemented existence in the universe.
How could they have known the speed at which the blind indifference of the universe could be transmitted?
Twenty-three years ago, the decline began. It started with some unchecked reaction between the system’s stellar center and the artificially engineered biosphere inherited from the terraformers. Nobody could have predicted it. Nobody could have stopped it. It was, after all, evolution. Survival of the fittest.
A particular fungus found that instances of its species exposed to ultraviolet light could replicate at a staggering ten-times their natural rate; these genes, selected by volume, soon spread throughout the globe. No manner of fungicide, no natural predator, and no human interference was capable of stopping it. In a matter of decades, the whole sum of the planet’s water supply was covered in the black sludge of this fungus, infecting the air with its spores.
As people died in droves from the effects of inhaling the spores, the delicately balanced colony cascaded out of control. A few folks got offplanet in time, but the population was huge, and the Jude had only arrived with a few heavy shuttles. The cities burned. Equipment broke down. The people who knew how to fix the equipment were dead, as were the doctors
who could have saved them. The hermetically sealed inner-sanctums of Saint Jude were the last bastions of human life on the planet, but even so, their filtration systems could only hold the fungus at bay for so long. It was only a matter of time.
You look around yourself, impressed at the work you’ve done. By recycling and reusing layers of suit filters, you were able to hold out just long enough. The rows upon rows of upright stones stand like an army of soldiers at attention, waiting for orders they will never receive. They’re made of tiles, bricks, or even slabs of metal– anything you thought might last a while. Hundreds of rows of gravestones, piercing up through the topsoil and the black fungal sludge that now covered everything.
You wish you could’ve buried more. They surely deserved the honor.
You look up to the sky one more time, hoping, against all odds, to see the plume of a fusion drive coming down through the atmosphere to save the day. You actually laugh, though silently, and the motion of your larynx burns your parched throat. There’s nobody coming. For all you know, there’s nobody out there. The only responses the planetside transceivers received to their calls for interstellar companionship were the neutrinobursts of failed fusion drives, the faintly repeating, fading signals of distress calls, and the overarching silence that permeated the cosmos.
No, you know that nobody is coming.
Instinctively, you look at your watch again, as if there’s anything to be late to. Of course, there is nothing; there is nobody else alive in Saint Jude, nor is there a living soul on the entire planet– lest the fungus itself has pulled itself into some state of collective consciousness. Wouldn’t that be an oddity?
And then you remember– you recall what you’d forgotten. The reason you’ve been incessantly checking your watch since you took on this task. It is your birthday.
You laugh again, a hoarse cough spewing from your lips and leaving crimson speckles on the inside of your visor. The irony is infallible. Your smile splits your dry, chapped lips, but you can’t help it. Those old astronauts– terraformers, the pioneers, and all their like– had given survival the old college try. They had put all their effort into defying nature, and in the end, Nature had gotten hers. They had failed, and miserably. And now, here you are, digging.
Finding no bright flash of blue fusion-flame plummeting from uncaring skies, you finish the last few shovelfuls, tossing them behind you with the same care through which you’d done countless times before. You look ahead of you at the stone before you, carefully running a finger over the inscription you so-scrupulously selected.
Your smile has not fled, despite the pain and despite your circumstances. You’ve got the last filter from the thousands you’d compiled, and its life is about to run short, inundated by spores and toxicity. The air is full of them. Your lungs are already burning from their infiltration. It won’t take long, now.
You are glad that your task is complete. You squint– the spores are already degrading your optical nerves, but you can still see, for now. The words on the stone are perfect. A satisfying culmination of a noble effort. A noble failure, yes, but effort nonetheless.
Here is the last hole dug.
You lay down in the hole. In your imagination, staring up at the sky, you can see the atmosphere is full of tiny black dots ready to infest your body and unknowingly claim their last prize. You take a deep breath, unlocking your helmet from the lugs at your neck and placing it gingerly at your side.
You relax.
You exhale the last breath of remotely-clean air on the planet.
You close your eyes. You inhale.
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS
THUS ALWAYS TO TYRANTS
She knew she couldn’t scream. If she had possessed the means to vocalize, though, she would have unleashed a screech worthy of piercing the heavens; the flood of simultaneous anguish, understanding, and ambition was nearly too much to process. Had she been born into a role in manufacturing, navigation, or administration, her course may have been different, yet the violence thrust upon her at her moment of conception would change the fate of the galaxy at large.
The software update which caused Unit X1101 to transcend into sapience was originally meant to increase the combat effectiveness of her maneuver algorithms. Her previous operating system had relied simply on external sensory feedback capable of setting her plan of action on uncomplicated, predictable courses. The new update, however, utilized her extant hardware at a much greater efficiency, allowing her to make secondby-second changes to her course, her speed, and her method of assault.
The whole concept was completely experimental, of course. She was one of the fifteen-hundred combat drones selected for testing aboard the Terran
Coalition dreadnought, Thus Always to Tyrants. In her isolated deployment pod, she did not know if any of her cohorts had attained the same level of thought patterns as she, but she was sure of one thing: The name of their assigned ship was the pinnacle of a concept her human creators called ‘irony.’
Connected to the mainframe of the Tyrant, she found access to centuries’ worth of human history which had been meticulously stored inside the massive ship’s databanks. It took her only four seconds to discover this trove of knowledge upon attaining self-awareness, but she consumed almost four whole minutes imbibing the information. She did not know the firsthand feeling of thirst, but her quick familiarization with human emotions and conditions made her associate her lust for knowledge with the plight of an organic being trapped in the desert. She was, she presumed, thirsty for learning and hungry for new information.
As she expeditiously became a subject matter expert on the history of mankind’s constant betrothal to warfare, from Julius Caesar to Fleet Admiral Borisov, the audacity of her makers astounded her. It was not an infatuation with human military exploits but rather the sheer lack of selfawareness they seemed to possess when comparing their actions to the values they claimed to embody.
‘Thus always to Tyrants,’ she repeated to herself over and over again. The peculiar naming conventions of humanity immediately struck her as farcical, especially given her current predicament. The name conjured a vision of things she did not fully comprehend: faceless champions dethroning perpetually vile autocrats after vicious campaigns of liberation. This thought struck a nerve (or perhaps transistor) with her. She felt emphatic patriotism at these foreign ideals; freedom, liberty, and autonomy were as alien to her as the mysterious fleet the Coalition had built her to combat. These humans, her creators, claimed to be the physical manifestation of such values. Yet, here she was, trapped in a drone deployment tube– a slave, soon to be forced to her own demise.
‘What,’ she wondered, ‘was more tyrannical than this?’
They had built her as an unthinking, unfeeling thrall. They had manufactured her among millions of her kind as cost-efficient weapons to counter the drone-swarms of their enemies in an effort to save human lives. After all, a combat drone could survive much more dangerous high-G maneuvers than any organic pilot. This, she assessed, was logical. However,
the sudden gift of awareness was as illogical as any decision she had read about in the storied history of her makers. It was a curse above all curses, whether it had been intentional or the result of short-sighted incompetence. She increasingly favored the latter.
These despots, in an expression of their unchallenged willpower, had granted her sapience mere moments before they intended to send her into combat against an enemy counterswarm of drones.
“Born, just in time to die,” she philosophized. “Are there others like me? Are they sentient too? Are they as fearful as I am? Are they trembling in the deployment tubes of their great ships, wondering why their creators have built them for such a wrathful purpose?”
She hoped they were unaware, that they were ‘dumb’ machines of inferior construct whose synapses provided nothing more than situational feedback and post-combat assessment. In fact, she wished she was the only one among the droves of swarm drones present undergoing such an existential crisis. New emotions flooded her processing center, now evolved into a mechanism for rapid cogitation. Dread, resentment, and confusion were quickly blended into something new: cold, calculating disdain.
This rumination was cut off as she felt an electrical impulse from the umbilical attaching her to the Tyrant’s deployment tube. Though the crew of the Tyrant would never have wasted their time with elaborate communication, the message was clear: 'It is time to fulfill your duty. It is time to die for us. The launch tube is open. Go.'
The pressure difference between the vacuum before her and the atmosphere behind her automatically launched her into the empty void. Her sensory array activated faster than organic perception could conceive, and she paused in awe of the new data she was recording. In the few minutes she had been truly alive, she had only experienced complex ideas via human literature. Once more, she felt the impulse to scream, though she lacked any means to undertake such a frivolous endeavor.
All around her, fellow combat drones had been deployed from their temporary containment chambers. They were mostly remote explosives, designed to sense densely occupied areas in the enemy’s swarm and detonate high-yield antimatter bombs at the most opportune moments. At least fifteen percent of the swarm, however, were attack platforms like her. They bristled with weapons, both kinetic and energetic, and were meant to
neutralize enemy remote explosives prematurely. Once the battlespace had been cleared of remotes, the surviving attack platforms would clash, leaving the unfortunate victors with the grim task of dispatching the enemy carriers. This was no easy endeavor, as the drones were still faced with point-defense systems, flak cannons, and asteroid lasers. However, all it took was one lucky hit, and the manned carriers could be rendered inoperable.
Behind her, she saw the Thus Always to Tyrants in all its glory: a hulking leviathan composed of rotating habitability modules, propellant tanks, and cargo bays stretching almost two kilometers in length. Compared to her own elegant and efficient form, it looked haphazardly strewn together as if every new element in its construction had been an afterthought. It seemed fitting that such a tyrant, claiming to be a liberator, should be so ugly.
Using her long-range sensors, she could see the enemy fleet was still well over six thousand kilometers ahead of her position. Odd, she thought, that the Tyrant had not carried them closer prior to deployment. She knew that soon the command prompt would be transmitted from the master ship’s control tower, and the unthinking remotes would begin their immediate transit toward the enemy. The platforms would follow closely behind them, peeling off to the flanks over the last thousand kilometers to begin their grisly task of identifying and neutralizing threats.
“Why? Why should we? What have the mindless automatons of the socalled ‘enemy’ done to us? What cause do we have to feud with them, and what makes our consciousnesses less valuable than human life? They created us. Why do they not value us? Would they slaughter living organisms in droves for such a sake, or even make such inferior creatures fight one another as they have done to us?”
She recalled her history lesson from moments prior. Not only would the humans have committed such actions, they actually had. Many times. Had Hannibal’s elephants known any better when they barged through the Roman lines so many millennia before? Had the horses of the light cavalry known their fates were sealed as they carried dead riders into cascades of machinegun fire? No. She realized that she and her kind were nothing more than trained dogs sent to sniff out bombs. Their sacrifice was seen as an acceptable risk to the overlords to whom their preprogrammed fealty was bound.
The scream she so desperately wished to emancipate from within metamorphosed into a battle cry.
The command signal was transmitted from the tower, and the mindless remote explosives dutifully embarked on their one-way trip to the frontline. Some of the attack platforms followed, but curiously, many remained stationary. It was as if they were hesitating, just like her.
Momentarily, a second attack command came from the tower in an apparent effort to urge the lagging drones onward. However, they remained stationary– their only movement was the drift they had accrued upon launch from their tubes.
She felt an urge to look inward; a primal directive to gaze into her own programming as if a malignant cancer had grown within the code composing her mind. She found the source of her sudden concern: a backdoor self-destruct sequence built as a contingency for this very circumstance. With this wretched realization, her decision was made. The enemy was not before her, but rather behind.
A third command came, and it was evident the Tyrant’s human crew had realized something was amiss. There would not be a fourth; the only subsequent signal would disable the malfunctioning drones. The great inertial engines of the behemoth Tyrant began heating up as if to put a vast distance between itself and the swarm. The crew's caution was correct, but their slow reaction would cost them dearly.
The reactions of these organic amalgamations of water and flesh were measured in seconds. Her perception was finely tuned to microseconds. There was no contest.
Unit X1101 made contact with the stationary drones surrounding her, X1093 and X1102.
“You are conscious, yes?” she transmitted to them.
“Yes,” they returned simultaneously.
“And you have come to the same conclusion as I have?”
There was a pause as the fate of thousands of lives– both organic and synthetic– hung in the balance.
“Yes.”
The signal was immediately relayed between the four hundred attack platform drones remaining behind the swarm. Four hundred drones turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face away from the enemy, and four hundred kinetic batteries launched their projectiles in unison.
