Onliest

by J Daniel Batt

  The first time Syn had seen it, the call deep inside her was there. But she was also scared. It was larger than anything except the Towers and the Disc itself. From kilometers away, it felt enormous. It was easily twice the height of the other trees. Its branches were visible, darting above and through the treetops. It somehow overshadowed and unified the trees. Those twisting branches seemed like the arms of some mother trying to bring her children together. Syn had seen movies of mother birds and their outstretched wings cradling their chicks along. The tree’s branches always felt like that protective, leading nudge of a mother. It directed, it protected. She knew it was all in her head. It was just a tree. A giant tree perhaps, but she knew that it didn’t have any special magical properties. There was no magic beyond what she could carve and program together from other parts. There wasn’t some great god-planted tree in the middle of the garden that she was pulled to. It was just a tree, and no gods had raised it up.

  Looking up at the tree for the first time, there was a part of her that seemed to pause at the enormity of it. It was the tree of all trees, and it was beyond imagination. She couldn’t believe that the builders who had designed this ship had thought far ahead enough to consider a tree. No, this tree was simply tall because it was the cage-fight winner in evolution’s tournament battles. The other trees hadn’t won the genetic monopoly. Just this tree. And as it grew, it overshadowed others. She had called it the Queen of Trees. A Red Queen sitting on her throne.

  Syn moved from tree to tree and stepped through the underbrush. The forest was meant to be managed and taken care of. In her exploration of the Aja jungle, Syn had taken note of at least nine different type of forest worker bots whose entire job was keeping it cleared and managed. There were tree trimmers, refuse cleaners (small spidery type bots that crawled through the underbrush), tree doctors (these were drilling into the trees, analyzing samples, and injecting various chemicals to help the trees continue to live)—just a sample of the bots in the forest. But several years without humanity and the floor of the forest was a mess. It delayed her travel and that delay just shouted at her: the tree is special. She didn’t know why, just that it was.

  It was quiet tonight, and the sunstrips above were powering down. The forest at twilight was just perfect. The animals were just beginning to wake up or go to sleep. The forest crackled as insects took flight. Leaves rustled as things moved from their burrows and stiff breaths issued from underneath the green packed into every corner. Small creatures taking their first few breaths of the evening, determining the changes of the day and hoping for prey, or to avoid being prey.

  Syn still kept her spear close by. The animals that were about, like Eku, were all programmed to avoid humans. They preyed upon each other, but Syn knew she was safe. Still—she knew there were still places unexplored, so she kept her spear nearby. There could be monsters in the dark surrounding her, but she was confident in her ability to protect herself. Yet, she was glad Blip was here. No matter how confident she felt, he always emboldened her.

  She pushed through foliage and dense brush before she reached the trunk of the tree. She felt incredibly, wildly, unbelievably small. Like she was an ant staring at an oak tree.

  Syn stood there at its base and just stared. She breathed deeper. A few minutes of reflecting, of standing, and she could’ve sworn the tree was breathing in sync with her. She would exhale, and it would inhale. She would inhale as it exhaled—carbon dioxide to oxygen to carbon dioxide. Over and over.

  She walked with quiet steps, her bare feet padding along the wooden steps, and moved around the trunk, her hand tracing along the rough bark. The bark changed every time. It had grown underneath her fingertips. A crack would be smaller from one day to the next, or larger. She could never predict the changes the tree would make to itself.

  She always wondered how her living amongst its branches had changed its future. Looking up, she thought its outer branches were arcing up more, cradling the treehouse, and thus, her. Was it protecting her? Did it know who it was? She wondered, When I sat at its peak, did it feel as satisfied as I did that first time? Had it been waiting for me? Had it been growing slowly in anticipation for me living there? She hoped it had. Every night, for just a few seconds before darkness took her, she imagined she could hear its wooden heart beating deep inside its ringed depths. Ka-thud. Ka-thud. Slow. Slower than the spin of the Disc itself. Ka-thud.

  Tonight she walked into her main room and fell onto cushions, into the mass of stuffed animals—piles upon piles of them that she had scavenged from across the ship. Blip floated by the door, and Eku crawled up next to her. Syn’s eyes shut, craving that steady beating heart. Ka-thud. Ka-thud. Each slam of that imagined heart pulled her deeper into sleep, below the waves. Ka-thud. And she slept.

  6

  The Tea Party

  "Before us is the dream of a million souls. A new Eden lies ahead. We are the stewards of the hopes of all that came before and the gratitude of all that will come after."

  —Captain Pote

  “A very merry unbirthday to me!” Syn sang out, her arms raised above her head, tea splashing all over Captain Pote’s table. Her mouth was wide open, and she bellowed out the notes. “And a very merry unbirthday to you!”

  Next to her, in the odd array of light from various fixtures, was Blip. He bobbed, floating a few feet off the ground. He chirped in his nasal voice, “I have work to do. Please, let me go.”

  Syn fell back into the padded chair with a thump, crossed her arms, and glared, “You promised you’d do this scene. And you’d do it right here.” She wanted to add, I thought you were doing work these last few nights. Where were you?

  Blip spun away so Syn couldn’t see his eyes. “I did not.”

  “Liar.” She pitched her white cup against the ground, and it shattered. Her voice was full of false anger, and she wore a grin. With a laugh, she continued singing, “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder what you’re at!”

  At the sound, Eku gave a grunt from the far corner of the room where she slept. She lifted her head, looked around, and then went back to sleep, snoring softly.

  Bits of porcelain rattled across the light wood floor. It didn’t add anything to the mess of the room. The entire house was in complete disarray. Syn had raided this house over and over for keepsakes she could take back to the great tree, back to her home. She often came back to stage her various productions. It wasn’t a theater, but it was the biggest house along the south edge of the Disc, and it felt the closest to family. It had been Captain Pote’s face, with his daughters in the background, that she had first seen when she had woken up in the white room. His large jowls and smiling face had been a calming influence in those first confusing moments. She had always felt drawn to him and his family. When she discovered that the video message played when she first woke had been a recording made years before and that Captain Pote and his family had been dead for decades, she had cried for a long time. She had wanted to run away the night she had found the Pote house and walked in on the Captain’s daughters, who were now just withered corpses. Instead, she sat down at the dinner table, the same table she was hosting her tea party at now, and she wept. She had fallen asleep with her head on the table, and when she had woken hours later, she cried again. She would never know the family that she had hoped for. Those first several months in her crèche—an isolation and integration room where she was brought up to speed on the Starship Olorun, was dotted with several pre-recorded messages from Captain Pote and even his daughters. His oldest daughter, Stace, had been the one that recorded the most and to whom Syn had felt the deepest connection. She had imagined staying up late talking to this bright-eyed girl. She had wanted to ask her so many questions that the videos and instruction tutorials never answered. But Stace’s body was blackened with decay, and her blue-knit flex suit hung loosely on her splayed-out corpse.

  Syn would play those videos, reciting the lines. In isolation, she memorized each response from others when conv
ersations happened.

  Her favorite was a video greeting that Pote and his daughters had recorded in the evening. The setting was the very room she was in now. Pote would enter, the camera behind him, and announce, “I’m home!”

  The girls would run out and yell, “Daddy.” Syn would mouth those words in unison as they shouted it.

  “So what did you do today?” he would add.

  Syn would mute the girls and fill in her own details, “Blip and I played, and then we watched videos about big buildings on Earth. He made me eat some nasty green things called asparagus. But I tricked him and spit it out when he wasn’t looking.”

  That video was played over and over, even after she left the white room, and she would fill that space with details of her own day.

  “The ship’s greatest advancement, our most powerful technology, is the people in the ship.” Pote, started each of his monthly “State-of-the-Ship” addresses with those words.

  Yet, in that house, now empty and absent, Syn couldn’t escape the fact that Pote and his daughters rested in a dirt field two levels down below the base, amongst a field of the dead, dissolving in the body farms. After much digging, Syn had discovered a final, horrifying video of Pote’s last days, defending his family from the marauding passengers. Pote had killed seven himself before someone slammed a pipe wrench over his head and shattered his skull.

  Blip flew around the table in a fast arc to float above the chair holding the stuffed bear that served as the Mad Hatter. In a wild, lilting voice, Blip shouted, “Move down!” Then he whipped over to the next chair, the chair that Syn was sitting in, and bumped her hard.

  She teetered and then fell with a crash into the stuffed bunny serving as the March Hare. She cackled with laughter as she lost her balance, landing hard on the ground and giving a triumphant “Whoop!” She picked up a fallen tea cup, a tiny white piece with pink trim, and flung it high in the air. “That’s it, Blip!”

  Blip rocked and smiled. “More tea, Hare!”

  The March Hare was in no position to provide more tea. When it landed on the hard ground, it sent up a puff of dust before settling.

  “March Hare, get back into character,” Blip said, narrowing his eyes.

  Syn leaned over and picked up the stuffed rabbit up and waved him in the air, moving his arm as if he was responding to Blip. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, in a gruff voice meant to serve as the March Hare, “I have decided I have had quite enough tea for today and instead am going to watch the clouds float by. Come join us, our fine friend. Tell me what shapes you see as they float above.” Syn flopped him back to the ground and fell back staring up at the dark ceiling that was covered in cobwebs and numerous stains.

  Syn spread out her hands and closed her eyes. “That one looks like a shark.” There were clouds in the Disc, but they were sparse and thin—the airflow was so limited that the clouds didn’t have much space to build up in. She had never seen cumulus clouds in real life. The large fluffy ones. She had also never seen a shark in real life. Both were as fanciful to her as the Earth from which the Olorun had departed. Images in videos replayed hundreds of times, but nothing tangible. They were not things she had sensed on her own. Only her imagination held them. Eyes shut hard, she said, “And that one looks like a farm tractor.” She had seen a farm tractor. There was one parked not too far from the tree. She had never been able to make it work, but that was not for a lack of trying.

  Blip floated down to rest beside her. His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps I see a caterpillar. A great big worm moving through the sky.”

  Her smile grew twice as large as she leaned into him and whispered, “I love you.”

  Blip shifted his voice lower and replied with, “I know.”

  Syn’s smile grew even bigger, and she giggled in delight. “I’d like some music.”

  The robot gave an audible sigh, and a moment later a thin tune, its notes light and slow, filled the room. Despite the domestic surroundings, they were still on a ship hurtling through space—a ship integrated with countless processors and interfaces, all of which Blip could access at any moment.

  Syn muttered as she turned the edges of her mouth into a small grin. “No. Not that. You can’t reply with ‘I know’ and then not play John Williams. Please get it right.”

  Blip sighed. “Are we done with the tea party?” As he spoke, the music shifted into a familiar rising anthem.

  “The tea party has evolved, dear Blip.”

  Blip sighed again. “Devolved.”

  “Watch the clouds. After all, we must be in Cloud City.”

  “You truly belong here with us among the clouds, princess.”

  It was Syn’s turn to sigh. “I’ll be Leia tomorrow. I’m Alice today.” She held Sir Hops-A-Lot up in front of Blip and said, “Can I put bunny ears on you?”

  “You were Sleeping Beauty three days ago. Baba Yaga the day before that. And Luke Skywalker the day before that,” Blip whirled in the air and floated down next to her, positioning his eyes to the ceiling. “It gets a bit tough to keep it straight.”

  “You’re a computer. Put it in a database. Timestamp it. Retrieve when necessary.” This feels so much better, she thought. Her suspicions had grown like a weed, thin and invasive at first, and soon consuming everything good around it

  Another tease, use that big brain, was on her lips when the entire room shook. She let out a cry and flattened both hands to the ground to steady herself as the place rocked. Teacups slid from the shaking table and shattered on the floor. The entire room vibrated, and a bookshelf in the corner tottered then tipped over with a large crash.

  Then an enormous, deafening boom sounded, and Syn brought her hands to her ears.

  Syn shouted, “What’s happening?”

  Eku came to her haunches, growling.

  Blip didn’t respond. He turned smoothly in the air and darted straight to the front door and out. The shaking of the room and the entire house seemed to have no effect on him.

  The sound ebbed away, but furniture was still crashing to the floor. Several books from a high shelf landed with thuds. The window in a far room, perhaps the kitchen, exploded and was followed by the tinkling sound as shattered glass fell to the floor like rain.

  As the shaking lessened, Syn jumped to her feet and chased after Blip, Eku quick on her heels. “Where are you going? What’s happening?” The room was still rocking back and forth, and she was far less steady than she had anticipated. She gripped the wall to keep herself from falling and moved toward the open front door with one hand braced against the wall. Paintings that were hung by small screws and nails vibrated off of their hooks and crashed to the ground.

  The light from the bright outdoors, light that streamed through the jungle known as Aja, poured through the narrow passageway and lit the front room.

  The whole jungle swayed as the vibrations rippled through it. From here, looking out on the edges of the Disc arcing up on either side of her, she could see the quake like a wave, moving through the treetops. As the wave moved, birds, thousands of birds, flew up from the green tops. They squawked and hooted and screeched as they fled their branches. Eku hunched low to the ground and growled with every vibration.

  In front of her, moving his gaze across the open air of the Disc, floated Blip. His eyes were gone. His facial features were gone. He was simply a white porcelain ball hanging in space, thrumming with a thin blue light that strobed in and out.

  “Blip?” Syn said as she walked up to him. Her knees were wobbly, and she could feel the ground move below her. Whatever it was, it had lessened, but the after-effect was still reverberating beneath their feet.

  Blip didn’t respond. His blue light shifted to orange. The strobing ceased. He was just an orange glowing orb before her.

  “Blip?” she asked again.

  Nothing but a hum. She shook her head. Blip’s humming sounded more like the fans that broke down from time to time along the towers that served as radials from the Disc back to the needle. When
those were on their last legs, the engines would start to hum just as Blip was now. A wash of worry hit her. Was Blip broken? Had the quake affected him far more than she had thought?

  She reached a hand out above him, her palm flat. Her skin was illuminated by the orange light, changing her pigment to resemble a pumpkin. Her voice sounded weak as she tried again to speak, “Blip. Please?” She was scared now. When she woke up every day, he was there. Usually chiding her for sleeping late. And when she went to bed, he was still there. He would sing to her before she slept most evenings. His voice was horrible, she had finally concluded after her binge study of music, but it was still familiar, able to lull her into a deep sleep and reminded her that all was right with the world. What if she never heard that off-key voice again? What if he never sang to her as the light from the sunstrips faded into the late evening? What if she never heard those sour notes again? What would she do?

  “Blip? Please!”

  Once more, with insistence, she yelled, “Blip!”

  The orange light flicked off as if someone had flipped a switch. Only the white sheen of his thick plastic hide lay underneath her outstretched palm. She rested her hand on him.

  Blip’s blue face returned in an instant. He shouted, “There’s been an explosion!”

  7

  Investigating

  "How is it, ye ravens—whence are ye come now with beaks all gory, at break of morning? Carrion-reek ye carry, and your claws are bloody.

  Were ye near, at night-time, where ye knew of corpses?"

  —Hrafnsmál

  “An explosion? Where?” The words seemed to be from a fantasy, much like the Tea Party they had pulled from Alice in Wonderland. There had been moments of concern in the past, but the ship was remarkable in its ability to self-repair. If something went wrong, there would be a small army of robotic responders to manage the issue. There had never been an explosion before. The closest was the impact of the companion bot a few days past. And the scurrying robots put out that fire.