Spectral Velocity
Page 6
The entire time they edged toward their exit, Cybele continued to run through and discard plan after plan—all of them ending either with Cybele’s death, or total memory loss.
She knew, without a doubt, that Finlay would not have wanted her to join him in his amnesiac state. She followed them down the court or, pacing them and keeping her weapons drawn on them, even as Finlay stared at her blankly.
When they arrived at the dock holding the alien ship, Cybele took a shot out of desperation—but, although she managed to take out another guard, there was no way to stop the remaining members of The Witch’s boarding party from rejoining their ship.
Still, The Witch turned back for a parting comment. “I’ve already sent a message to New Terra. You won’t be welcome there, either.”
The door swished to a close behind her, cutting Cybele off from all that remained of Finlay.
Within minutes, The Witch’s alien-designed ship disconnected, and disappeared into the blackness, presumably to take Finlay back home.
In that moment, Cybele fractured, like shattered glass sending shards flying out into the space around her.
Her thoughts spun in ever-expanding circles until she was no longer certain what was Cybele and what was the vast emptiness of space.
The prince was the one who was supposed to blinded, sent to the wilderness to wander, lost and alone. Not the princess. She should be exiled to live safely in the village until the prince should stumble upon her.
But her life had never been a fairy tale.
I never was a princess.
Chapter 12
Grief settled into Cybele, folding into and through her with the certainty of a well-placed knife thrust that took months to finally find his mark. She moved through the Rapunzel-320’s sterile, white, hallways, following her daily routine—that step that she took every day to make sure she remained alive, continued moving forward toward the cluster of bright lights in the sky before her.
But there was no reason for it. Her entire impetus had been to explore the universe with Finlay.
She thought she knew, thought she understood, thought she could project into the future and see what it might be like to face a life without them by her side. But it never occurred to her that she might face a life without him in the universe. All of her earlier contemplations, those moments when she considered what it might be like to go home and leave him behind, had carried as their underpinning the knowledge that even though she couldn’t see him, or touch them, or contact him in any way, he had been, had existed, still fully himself.
In some ways, it was if she were the one who no longer existed. She ghosted through the ship, picking at food enough to stay alive, stepping into the lab long enough to continue her latest simulations and experiments.
But she didn’t cry.
Instead, she let the pain soak into her, suffuse every cell, flood her tissues, course through her veins.
If the pain of Finlay’s memory wipe had been a knife thrust, then its aftermath was a toxin that had coated the blade and entered her bloodstream, running through all parts of her until it filled her up, and there was nothing of Cybele left.
Only poison.
She was out of synch.
Or maybe out of phase.
Like reality wasn’t happening in the right order.
Even gravity was getting it wrong.
It was as if she could, at any moment, slip straight through the floor beneath her, and out into the eternal darkness of space.
Sometimes she felt as if she lived there already.
As the Rapunzel-320 had once orbited Old Earth, she now orbited the ship, herself a minuscule moon.
Always alone.
Eventually, she began to doubt her own sanity.
Was any of it ever real? she wondered.
Once upon a time, a long time ago.
And far, far away.
I no longer exist.
Not as a person—merely as fragments of consciousness, trapped in a ghost body on a ghost ship.
How fast could a ghost fly?
How far?
* * *
Finally, the day came when the Rapunzel-320 could get a strong reading on the lights traveling near the planet she and Finlay had planned to colonize.
Except there was no planet.
“Computer, analyze.”
“The dust appears to be the remains of the planet Hawking-1016 after a catastrophic event.”
Cybele leaned both palms on the control panel in front of her. She preferred to do everything manually these days.
VR made her cry.
“Computer, is there any other habitable planet nearby?”
“There is not.”
Cybele nodded. “Time for plan B then,” she muttered to herself.
Entering a new course trajectory into the computer—one that would eventually lead her to the farthest solar system in the known galaxy—she went back to the lab.
Her plan solidified, it took less than three weeks for Cybele to complete the necessary work.
Finally, the day came when she could put her new experiment to the test. Setting up a voice controlled box next to her cryo-chamber, Cybele settled in, carefully arranging the electrodes and sensors that would work to keep her alive during the long journey ahead.
Maybe as she slept, she would heal.
That was the only reason she looked forward to the possibility that someday she’d wake up to a world that could accept her.
She could go down-planet.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
It has nothing to do with a chance to speak to another person.
Another lie.
And maybe to find someone who could learn her private language?
Absolutely not a reason to look forward to that day.
Her fingers flew across the control panel, changing the parameters of the cryosleep.
No. No more lies.
Not even a real cryosleep. Not a traditional one, anyway.
Not that she would ever remember, should she wake up.
“Computer, in thirty seconds, activate the reengineered memory gun.” She waited for the computer’s acknowledgment, checked the gun’s placement within the voice-controlled box, then asked for cryo-sleep to begin in thirty-five seconds.
With a final swipe, she disabled the wake-up command.
Auto-restart: off.
She closed her eyes, waiting—
And allowed herself to slide toward sleep—
Unconsciousness—
To drift into the future—
Eventually, someone will wake me.
The prince, blind and afraid, wandered through the desert until he stumbled upon the princess in the village where she had been living half a life. Her tears of joy upon recognizing him fell onto his eyes, and he was healed.
They lived happily ever after.
A sharp ray of light shot from the box and pierced her skull, leaving her only a few more seconds of herself.
The biggest lie of all—
The Rapunzel-320 slipped silently through the vast night, alone and on its way to nowhere.
THE END.
About the Author
Margo Bond Collins is addicted to books, coffee, and SF/F television. She writes paranormal and contemporary romance, urban fantasy, and science fiction.
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