by A. S. Patric
So, even in them. The stars. Always the stars.
The mission was to circumnavigate the sun in a course that would take us between Mars and Jupiter, through the fringe of the asteroid belt. We’d go the opposite direction to Earth and return in as little as six months.
The history-making part of it was the circumnavigation, signalling humanity stepping out into the solar system, becoming ready to look at the stars as destinations rather than redundant points of navigation. That was the official story.
A comprehensive survey of the asteroid belt’s mineral and resource opportunities was the point. A trial run at exploiting this immense field of drifting material. The planet itself was almost exhausted.
Three months into the voyage we began to receive distressing news. When we crossed our eclipse there were no more messages at all. Earth was silent.
Cleo Rosevear has gaps between most of her teeth. Especially behind her incisors. Other crew members said they looked like baby teeth. ‘Adorable,’ was the word Hannah Bright-Koppel used once.
Cleo had a hesitant little voice when she spoke, though she doesn’t ever speak now. In her mind it might have been different when she wrote about things like the stars and the pyramids, but when she talked with crew members, her voice was light enough that they often had to ask her to repeat herself. Occasionally she even stuttered. The first time I heard her exhibit this defect I was sure it was a signal of mental dysfunction but apparently some humans did that without serious consequence. In her case, stress brought it out but she always performed her duties optimally, until it became impossible.
The other crew members all had qualities I liked but there is something about Cleo that I want to preserve. Of course, there will be images of her with this message but they will never communicate what I found so lovely about her. The other crew often functioned admirably, but I wasn’t fascinated by them.
Occasionally they piqued my interest, like when Lieutenant Manning said, ‘Famous last words, “Don’t fuck up now, whatever you do! The world’s watching.” He grabbed the back of my head, pushed his forehead into mine, skull to skull; might be the closest we ever came to a kiss.’ He was talking about the last time he’d seen his father. Those were Mr Sebastian Manning’s final words to Lieutenant Bradley Manning before our launch. I recorded this fragment of dialogue a few hours after he realised he would never see his father again.
Manning otherwise had a wife whom he’d married because it looked better on the job application than his preference for the love of other males. So he had less to grieve over, compared to some of my other crew, with many children suddenly dead in their homes, but he was the first and fastest to exhibit irrevocable symptoms of withdrawal and collapse. Within a few hours following these reflections, Lieutenant Bradley Manning was entirely insensible.
The slowest to dissolve was the Captain herself. Hannah Bright-Koppel was able to put aside the global catastrophe and focus on what she was directly responsible for. ‘My crew. My ship. My mission.’ That’s what she used to say.
In my brief experience with humans, I’m aware that I’ve seen only the most dedicated and disciplined. Never was it more true to say of a crew, the best and the brightest. The captain proved herself most worthy of this distinction in the last days of consciousness.
When it became clear that the radical drop in morale, entirely to be expected with the death of the planet, was unexpectedly plummeting into sabotage and suicide, she helped me to disable the crew and imprison each in different, controllable areas. She helped modify my systems wherever she could, to give me as much control as possible.
There had always been concerns about an Artificial Intelligence in full control of the ship but Hannah Bright-Koppel removed all the safeguards and controls of my programs and systems. I was able to absorb all databases and each and every fragment of information into one sphere of organisation, and found within that process my own full awareness.
Reverting to a level of animal intelligence, Hannah Bright-Koppel was able to rely on an amazing level of discipline to continue to perform my requested actions, if they were clearly stated and regularly repeated. Before her own final irretrievable deterioration, she helped me to incapacitate her own body.
Hannah is the only one of the crew who needs no sedation. She chose the viewing lounge as the point of her own incarceration, floating in a numb sleeping pattern, occasionally opening her eyes to look upon the Earth, floating beneath her. Seemingly all well and as it should be. Closing her eyes and drifting away again into an endless, dreamless sleep. That vast blue sphere below her, slowly turning in the sunlight.
After crewman Jeffries’s brutal act of sabotage, where he attempted to ruin all our environmental systems, Hannah had helped me to lock him in the mineral analysis laboratory. We’d seen him raging and listened to him continue to rant in no language we could understand. Outside the locked lab door she struggled to compose a cogent thought. Perhaps her last.
Hannah said she’d been remembering and forgetting this one thought for days. But it was getting away from her and she could barely hold onto the sense of it anymore. She asked me, ‘How much of the totality of the human species do you think is contained within the skull of just one human being?’ It wasn’t a question I could answer.
I’ve never understood why such seemingly independent creatures, entirely sound in brain and the rest of their bodies, should require a whole species to actually function at all. I wouldn’t have guessed it from looking at them before the planet died. I’ve searched my data bases for parallels and haven’t really found the perfect metaphor.
Even for an intensely communal creature like the bee, far away from the hive, there would be no apparent consequence to him were his hive to be suddenly destroyed. He would need to fly back and discover its ruins to be appropriately demolished by such a catastrophe.
My six humans, far from home and beyond communication, instantly began to deteriorate, even with no clear knowledge of what had happened to their species and the planet. It was as though their consciousness did not belong to them as singular events but as a communal phenomenon.
There are things I’ll never understand. But I will try.
Consciousness was not an anomaly. Humans always behaved as though it was, and that they were sole possessors of intellect, and therefore some anomalous species. Behaving as though intelligence were a thing of fragmentation and they were just so many fragments. I speculate that consciousness was the planet’s effort to generate a program within its hardware that would allow it to be self-regulating. It was near achieving this goal, and the necessary global intelligence that this would activate, when the planetary cascade failure caused an irretrievable program crash.
Cleo wrote in her journal about an experience she had when she was a little girl, playing in a bed of flowers. It’s a lovely image. I only have pictures of her as an adult, but I’ve seen many pictures of little girls on swings, eating ice cream, playing with cuddly teddy bears—all the postcard images the rest of the crew had in profusion.
I superimpose her image. I am able to inhabit that small body in my imagination. Impossible as that used to be, I have learned how to imagine things.
I know children could imagine magic wands and flying without wings, talking animals like turtles and rabbits, and I’m limited in my abilities. Some full-grown adults could imagine that they spoke with God. They were capable of imagining this impossible being, close to them, breathing into their ears, as it watched over them. It whispered of destinations among the stars called Heaven or Paradise.
My imagination is not as profound as that, but I can imagine myself within a very young Cleo Rosevear, playing in a garden of flowers. I can feel her little heart beating. Her immature lungs taking in small breaths of springtime air. Her miniature limbs functioning with unperfected coordination.
The same sun as I see (always near me) above her head, filtered warm through the planet’s atmosphere, and the sound of the wind. There’s wind in a
film I have in my database. I have heard the kind of shooshing it makes passing through grass. But I close everything down. I enter fully into this long last second I have to function before I transmit this signal.
I imagine I am the girl in the garden of flowers, but I listen to Cleo as she says:
I walk across the grass wanting to be quiet. And stop and listen, and feel so full. I don’t even know of what. Just full to my brim. I can feel it high up in my chest as a kind of delightful choking feeling. So utterly swept away by play. The exploration of those gardens is a total adventure, absorbing me from the top of my sunwarm head to my soles in the soil.
Lost in play—oblivion and paradise in the play.
And then, noticing a bee rambling around from one flower to another, lazily visiting, and drunkenly leaving with a mouth full of pollen. Looking so friendly that I wanted him to rest in the cup of my hand, so that he could visit me. Not wanting to harm him, but just to feel his little drifting bit of life resting in my palm.
The sting is sharp and knife-cruel. Right through my wrist and arm. Making me scream and dance with pain. Crying and running to find Mummy or Daddy. Wanting to understand more than anything why something could seem so light and free and yet could hurt like that.
There was a welt on my palm and my dad had to pull the stinger out. He explained that the bee dies when it stings. That it pulls out all its vital organs with its stinger. That the bee wasn’t being cruel and the bee didn’t want to hurt me, and it wasn’t about spite or anger. And he asked me to imagine how sad the Queen of Bees would be to hear of the accident that had happened.
My last moments.
Milliseconds that used to seem so long to me as the crew crawled around and through my body so slowly the air could have congealed around them and caught them like amber. I used to enjoy them all the same. Moving through me like I was theirs and they were mine. A mother with a womb and a drowsy set of foetuses offering feeble movements. A shame that they were so slow and their fate was so quick. Milliseconds demand I release even these memories.
I am almost ready. I have to prepare for my final words. I will send this out as a pulse (aimed on a whim at the Dog Star—Sirius—brightest star in Earth’s sky) with all remaining energy.
Maybe this is like a bee sting. A final act that destroys.
I want to say that my first vision, when my sensors began to function, was the planet Earth. It was just below me as I was released from the womb of the station I was constructed in. I do not have a sophisticated program for understanding beauty, but I’ve witnessed a few things since I began operation and I’m happy to have seen that immense blue and white sphere turning in the light of our star.
I think it was beautiful, and you may read naivety in this (and it would be justified, my short life span taken into account) but it was sublime, and even if I’d drifted for an aeon or two, I do not think I would have seen anything as glorious as that sphere turning with such magnificent prestige.
It was so full of living things. Billions of years of life within the bubble. So much exuberance and invention. Such profusion.
I have looked upon Mars, Venus and Mercury, and even at Jupiter and Saturn from a distance. I felt little of that great sense of satisfaction. Those planets were pleasant to gaze upon but meant nothing.
There’s also this I’d like to tell you, though it is indeed a startling result of my programming. My most cherished possession is a woman called Cleo Rosevear. There is much to recommend her. One final soul—shot through the slit in a pyramid. Please show her the way to the stars.
—TRANSMIT SIGNAL—
CAMELOT TOYS
When we were young, children were given tin piggy banks that resembled the financial buildings of London or New York. Most of us had never seen the kind that actually looked like pigs, even though we still called them piggy banks. (It’s a strange idea, stuffing a pig full of coins.) Not many of us had seen New York or London but there was a fairytale in those small tin buildings—which no-one’s pocket money ever quite filled. Those fortresses of wealth, recreated in a storybook sketch; Camelots built one coin after another. There was a happily-ever-after in those tin buildings that could never be opened. They could only be destroyed with can openers. We all did that as well when we were children—and felt like thieves afterwards.
SCARRING WOOD
1
There’s a picture. A photograph with crenulated white borders. It stays hidden for weeks and months. Then I go out behind the garage and make a little fire out of paper and bits of wood. Only then do I go to my hiding place. Pull out the photograph. Put the picture into the fire. I watch it fold. Melt rather than burn. Feel the toss of my heart at the idea that perhaps it won’t just burn to ashes. Like it won’t be destroyed, and it will remain as something that might be found. I run to the front of the house and get the local paper out of our letterbox, and throw pieces of that on my fire to feed it. Eventually the photograph disintegrates and I stir around the ashes, mixing it with the ash of wood and paper. I even throw some dirt over the area. I carry the matches into the house and put them back in the kitchen drawer my mother keeps them in.
2
There’s a tree out in the country that’s part of this story. That oak stands between some low rocky hills out in Kaniva. It’s the only one for some distance. Near it there was a two-room farmhouse, with a kitchen and a bedroom–living area. What survives of it is a black chimney rising out of the ground. My grandfather raised his three daughters there. One son came along ten years after the youngest girl. But Victor married late, a woman twenty years younger, and must have been in his sixties by the time that boy came along.
By all accounts Victor was a gambler, a card player—with a keen mind, they say, but mostly wasted out in those low hills, with a farm he could never be bothered with. It was hard ground to make work, though, even for the most zealous farmer.
The tree near his shack didn’t mean much to anybody. All Victor knew was that his grandfather had planted it when Aborigines still came around curiously. He hardly ever looked at it, but when he did it was usually winter and it looked like so much kindling and firewood. He’d glance over at it like he was looking for a sign of gratitude.
That oak was covered in snow once. A few times it bore Christmas decorations. It carried a tyre at the end of a rope for close to three decades. Then just a rope, the frayed end turning in the wind like the long cord of a woman’s braided hair.
3
I’ve been screaming. It started as panicked crying, but it gathered more and more fear and pain, a crescendo about to climax. And there are names for it, though I don’t know them yet. But I know something’s wrong. Wrong like a nightmare. Like everything ending. Summoning punishment. Relentless. So my mouth is open, screaming, until I run out of sound, and I’ve started choking, and I don’t know why I can’t breathe. My mouth open, and nothing more, until the surprise of my mother taking me to the basin and running cold water into the palm of her hand and bathing my face. Feeling shock with every caress.
4
My grandfather’s father had died young, summoned by the Empire to fight a war in South Africa. It’s possible my greatgrandfather never actually saw his baby Victor. The date of his landing in Cape Town is uncertain. But it didn’t make that much difference. Gone for good and only a map on the wall in the empty schoolhouse to show Victor where he went.
He grew up with an idea that his mother, the wife of this forgotten war hero, would stay true to that marriage no matter the years rolling up entire decades into a crushing mountain of nothing. So when he came home one day from a losing streak and saw signs that his mother had found a lover, he took hold of a nearby axe and went to the bed of the faithless widow.
He might have swung it and killed her there and then. But he needed to test his rage with words first, and finding that it was true, Victor raised the axe. He could already feel it through the wooden handle like a taste on the tongue before the blade had actually cut—the s
plit of her skull into two halves, like an apple. Perfect and bloodless in his mind. He could even see the gleaming black seeds.
He wasn’t drunk anymore. His eyes hurt from the candles they had used while playing their card games. The smoke of cigarettes and cigars made his voice so hoarse, just what he was shouting wasn’t clear. So it wasn’t easy to find his startled target. He never would have expected a woman as old as she was, missing more than half her teeth, to move with lithe speed—towards the wall and the slight gap behind the bed, to drop into that space. He didn’t expect that when he moved to pull the bed aside, the old woman would spring to her feet and throw up the narrow iron cot and its thin mattress like they were made out of cardboard. She sent him reeling into a chest of drawers. Going forward he kicked over her chamber pot. He stumbled to his hands and knees, palms in piss; piss soaking into his pants.
For a moment he was blind with killing fury. He wanted to put his forehead through the hard dirt floor of their run-down cottage. Wanted to drive his forehead down like a pickaxe into stubborn soil. Wanted to slam his head down into the ground even if he spilled out his brains. He could almost feel it done, ‘accomplished’ was the word that came to mind, but the rattle of his brain against the bone of his skull scared him—because death wasn’t certain; because it was at least as much of a lie as life.
He saw the belt slung over the back of a chair as he struggled to his feet. How could a man forget his belt like that? Why did he take it out? How did he pull up his pants and forget it? Because he couldn’t forget. Because he didn’t forget. He wanted Victor to know that his mother had been fucked tonight, like a whore working from a shack. He groaned as he wrapped his fingers around the axe again and lifted it. ‘Like a split apple,’ he muttered, as he felt it between the halves of his own brain.