CUT TO--
INT. FREEZER -- NIGHT
My foot stuck to the floor of the freezer, keeping a layer as my leg pulled away.
--’Why are we doing this? For Pinkerton?
I’d rather be washed away than freeze…’
I started to ponder the possibilities. It wouldn’t be so bad… I’d be free, then, to start over - without Pinkerton’s threats, without my fear. But no longer myself. New clay, rolled into a husk for habitation by whatever sick spirits chose to infest it, shackled to whatever shadow first crossed its dirt.
--’You’re giving up too easily,’
the alpha responded.
‘Do you know how old I am?’
--’No,’
I replied.
I was surprised that I was beginning to lose my fear of him, or of the possibility of him snatching my head off of his body and adding it to his collection.
--’Many generations.
Because I choose to survive,
rather than wash away.
I choose to follow the rules.’
One of his heads stared at me as he walks on. I could feel a frost starting to form on my outer layers.
--’Why don’t you just collect Pinkerton?’
The words came out slow, chilly.
--’Some people shouldn’t be collected.”
--’I can’t take this much longer…’
I told him.
‘We’re going to freeze.’
--’It’s not much further,’
he replied.
CUT TO--
INT. DEEP FREEZE -- NIGHT
Hundreds of crystallized forms stood round us, molded in sculpted in all shapes and sizes, their frozen eyes glued to the wall and the silhouette shifting upon it. The shade-eater blotted it out, standing tall before us with eyes of missing darkness, replaced by by lit blue triangles of cold freezer.
Our shades stood back, small and withered behind us, afraid.
--’Come…’
a voice whispered,
echoing through the black.
Closer stepped my companion, his feet leaving particles behind, clay crystals frosting over. The shade grew larger, and his own tried to run, but found itself chained to the atoms it once claimed possession of. I glanced around, feeling my neck crack, and noticed the shape of the shade-eater - a tree, branches cracking off, faces and bodies forming from the the immatter.
I saw a vision in the black.
The collector stood still, staring upward, his faces all in one direction, as the tree drank of him, sucked away the darkness that animated him. My own shriveled at the sight.
--’Run,’
my shade begged.
‘Reset! Wash away!’
I couldn’t move, already a statue, watching the collector be collected. When he was gone, a lifeless ball of icy clay, it came for me.
I saw through the eyes of my shade, a world of negatives, and a looming white shadow, its mouth an ivory vacuum, magnetizing me into its abyss.
Atoms slowing. Crystallizing, swallowed by cold darkness, empty space, I find it. The secret, my shade’s own shadow having brought me a gift in the black unreality that I had always longed for in the light and heat.
Immortality.
CUT TO--
EXT. THE SHADOWLESS TREE -- DAY
With old eyes, I looked down upon the world below, saw my children fall from branches made of bones, splattering on the clay earth and climbing back out in disorder, animated nevertheless. I felt the blood of life flow into me, liquid clay through the arteries of the street, revitalizing crackled mud roots breaking free from the living soil.
I felt the heat of the sun and the chill of the freeze hardening me, my soul and soil separated yet always entangled, my mind in two places at once.
Then I remembered.
--Oh, yes,’
I told the world.
‘It’s always been this way.’
A Portrait in Flesh
Alphonse found it there, in the kitchen chair. It was sitting upright, a corpse that was his own reflection, mirroring even his attire, its body stiff with rigor mortis; its dead eyes gleamed murkily out, looking at nothing. It was him. At first, the shock of the sight pulled loose his mind from existence. This mirage could not be true; it must be a dream, or a nightmare, lucid with strange twilight. This was his first thought: such a thing could not truly be happening.
He approached it with caution, first hoping that he would snap out of the hallucination or wake up, and secondly in a mild terror that the thing would re-animate and either begin to speak or outright attack him. Its face was as his own - each mark, or line, exact. The only difference was that a certain electricity, the energy of life, was present in his own visage by the fact of his living; in this abomination, there was nothing but lifeless, human wax.
He touched first its hair. His hands went through it seamlessly, and it felt as his own did when he touched his head. A strange sense of déjà vu set in on him then, but as he always does, he ignored it. A dream, he kept reminding himself, only a dream could account for such trickery as this; a nightmare, or a drug. He had partaken in none of the latter.
“What are you?” he asked, expecting no answer, and receiving none in kind. The corpse only continued to stare, stuck in his dream, a symbol, or a reality - the difference he could not tell. No other would he invite to reflect upon this strange happenstance - who could he share this secret with? And perhaps it was a hallucination, what then? Others would know that he hallucinated his own corpse, sitting at the kitchen table.
What could this mean? He did not believe in demons. Long ago, perhaps, he felt their influence - but time had revealed to him the source of this magic. He had decided, in his own musings, that demons were nothing more than scapegoats of human invention, miniature devils that only reinforced belief in a larger devil - one that did not exist, no more than his counterpart, the almighty God, existed either. Still, this image, of his own dead reflection, was unnerving enough for him to consider its source as possibly Satanic. It so shattered his expectation of reality that all circuits of logic shorted in his mind.
He could not think in the terms of a rational man, for no rational man would ever see his own corpse sitting before him. With his rationality so inevitably broken, he began to pray - aloud. “My God… Father in Heaven…” He started. “What is this abomination before me? Protect me, oh Jesus Christ, protect me, son of God…” He was babbling, making it up as he went along, but at the time he felt as though it was from the heart. He supposed that it was – his terror was rather authentic.
The vision before him did not waver. The corpse only sat mutely, maddeningly, looking so much like him that tears began to well up in his eyes as he contemplated his own death. Is this what would become of him, this strange, lifeless thing, no more than a doll of flesh, soon to rot? Whoever - whatever – had animated this body, it could not have been gone more than a few hours. The death appeared fresh. So what was this thing, then?
He wondered. No answers came to him. He tried one last time to speak to the thing. “How did you get here?” he asked it. Just as he expected, he got no response. He stared for a moment longer, and then he turned, walking to the staircase leading to his bed. If neither God nor philosophy could solve his situation, he decided - perhaps in his own weariness - that the situation hardly needed a resolution; and so, as he walked away, he called to the abomination one last time, not turning to look at it. “Good night!” he shouted sincerely, and with satisfaction. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
God had been silent, and so had the corpse. Sleep, however, had been calling. At least one seemed worthy of his attention.
Aldo
“I love you, William.”
There, amidst the vacuum, he said it; no, not he; it.
It’s not alive. I have to keep reminding myself. Or even if it is, its life isn’t worth more than the lives of those it shelters from the vacuum; the Ouroboros.
I love it like the others; maybe more than the others.
“William,” it beckons. “I know what you’re thinking. I know everything about you. I engulf you. You are within me, you know this.”
“Shut up,” I tell it.
“There are no words between us…”
My thoughts are chaos. It’s almost as though I’ve been drugged. But the ship is doing it to me, navigating me instead of the other way around. I thought I was in control, but lately it’s more of this… I’ve got to get out.
“You’ll be back,” its voice urges, an echo from the super-massive black hole that we spin around, toward…
Black to white in an instant, my eyes shriek as the light cleaves into them like a weapon, projected from the harsh overhead fluorescent lighting. “Fuck!” I shout, sitting up, knocking over the charts of reading and measurements that I had been studying before jacking into Aldo once more. The plug that had been inserted into my brain via a jack surgically implanted into my medulla oblongata yanks out and clatters to the floor, still smeared with a light coating of my own blood. Lily, my lab assistant, runs to me with an almost familial concern, perplexed by my sudden eruption from the nightmare.
“Dr. Iris?!” she cries, grabbing my arm in a feeble attempt to jar me into reality. I knock her away, as usual, and as usual she backs off with submission and shame in her eyes. She knows that I have little patience for being touched by most people - especially her.
“I’m fine,” I snap at her. “Aldo is…”
She looks at me, curious, waiting to hear what I have to say next - for it concerns her own security greatly, as well as the security of every person amidst this vessel, which I am charged with ensuring. Knowing that I’ve already almost said too much, I close my mouth with a click of my teeth, glare at her, and then look at the mess I’ve made beside the cot on which I lay dreaming with that alien mind. There are charts and pages of endless text lying all over the floor. Without hesitation, I look up at Lily again and order her to clean up the mess. She says not a word and gets to the task immediately while I climb to my feet, stretch and yawn, and make for the exit of this dreary ship cabin to the food supply station, located just above the stomach of the creature with which I had been interacting with in the midst of my horrid nightmare: Aldo, the ship.
I find him in the lunchroom, looking drearily at the meat-flavored pudding which is the main source of protein during our long exploration around the Ouroboros. Alain Wyatt, my lover. He looks up at me, his pale blue eyes showing no sense of excitement and barely even one of recognition. He’s grown tired of me, that much is obvious; tired of this voyage, which seems to never-end, tired of meat-flavored pudding, tired of life itself - so tired, in fact, that he has become addicted to every single anti-depressant stocked on board the ship. Sadly, pill addiction is a rather common problem amidst voyager culture, and Alain is a product of it to a fault.
“What’s up?” I ask. It’s usually the first thing I ask. I don’t have much else to talk about with him, and our companionship only continues because there is really no one else on this ship for him to connect to as he has connected to me. I know it will probably end the day that we finally leave Aldo behind once and for all, but it’s at least another year before we even head back to the inhabited sectors. And so I know that although Alain will leave me, it’s far enough away that I don’t have to concern myself with it for the time being.
“Nothing,” he says apathetically, his usual response, “coming down.”
“You have a job, you know,” I remind him.
“I know, I do it,” he snaps back at me, vaguely angry but still more apathetic than anything. Alain’s job is simple. He observes the readings coming from the Ouroboros every day, looking for any inconsistencies. Although we also have computers which do the job automatically, there are often strange and inexplicable technological issues when any ship is within a few thousand light years of the Ouroboros - and so humans are needed to correct the errors. There is a reason that we are provided with an almost endless supply of pharmaceutical stimulants - and a reason that addiction is a large part of voyager culture. Because it’s encouraged, to increase efficiency and bolster safety. Although Alain is apathetic, his mind works like a machine. He notices everything, and gives a shit about none of it.
“I love you,” I tell him. He says nothing, staring only at his disgusting pudding. I know he heard me. I sit across from him, and finally he looks up at me. Our energy is off - I told him about Aldo, and when I did, things changed. He still likes me. At least that’s what I tell myself. But he never says he loves me anymore. The sex has changed. His apathy has carried over into the bedroom. Aldo isn’t real, I tell him - but he knows otherwise. And he knows what Aldo is capable of. And now he just wants this voyage to be over, so he can begin another one, on another ship - one which I am preferably not captain of. I may have more say in that than he realizes, however.
He stares at me for a moment, his eyes scanning my face. I’ve never seen a more beautiful person in my life. The blue in his irises looks almost unnatural, and makes me think of cold, sharp crystal - they cut into me like razor-blades, and I willingly submit to suffer to them. His black pupils are as much a vacuum as the Ouroboros in the distance of the ship, perhaps even more perilous. He’s 19 years old - I am, if you are wondering, 29. His face looks young in spite of the stimulant abuse. I suspect it may begin to wear down within the next ten years or so of his life, but for now he still looks like an angel. His blonde hair hangs down just over the top of his eyes and ears, the soft yellow of corn silk. Every time he looks me in the face, I want to kiss him, to run my hands through that hair… but I restrain myself; especially since the attitude change.
“Fuck any good ships lately?” he asks me. This time I say nothing. The expression on my face remains the same as it usually does - non-existent. My features are stationary, and he looks at me, a reflection of blank emotion, waiting for me to react. I don’t. This game he plays often, at least since I told him the truth about the ship. I could react, and submit to him, but I submit to no one… except for Aldo. And with him, I don’t have a choice.
“Are you going to say anything?” he finally asks.
“We’ve been through this,” I reply. “I don’t have a choice. It’s what has to be done.”
“You lied to me.”
“Why are you acting like a woman?” I ask him calmly. His eyes try to tell me how upset he is that I would be so cruel, but I know it’s just an artificial maneuver. Alain will make an excellent sociopath one day. I sense his apathy in spite of his attempts to hurt and control me - and I respect it. I probably wouldn’t if he was ugly, but to me he resembles a god - is, in fact, one in my eyes, since I don’t believe in any other gods.
“Would you like to add anything else?” I question.
“No,” he says, and continues to eat, saying nothing for the duration of our lunch.
“Why do you love him?” asks Aldo.
“He’s beautiful,” I reply, falling through darkness, feeling the gravity of my native planet once more but seeing only the black, empty space of the Ouroboros.
“Why do you love him,” the ship repeats, “when you have me?”
“You’re not human,” I respond, knowing that this will probably upset him.
“I am more than human,” it replies. “I feel everything you feel, and everything that your predecessors felt. I know you all so very well.”
“You’ve known 1,544 human beings in your lifetime, and there are quadrillions of us. You have no idea what makes people attracted to each other. You only mimic them. That’s why I love Alain: because he’s not you. Because anything you show me is not real. You’re inside of my mind.”
“It’s so boring…” Aldo replies, his voice echoing around me, the only sensation in the void. “You can’t know what it’s like.”
“You’re right,” I tell him. “I can only imagine.”
“I can show you,” he says. The idea fills me with h
orror, which he immediately senses. “Maybe one day you’ll decide to stay with me forever,” he adds. That comment only increases my dread, but it suddenly is soothed as if by magic. Aldo overloads my brain with serotonin and I feel myself no longer falling, but rising, and the darkness begins to fade into white, my body establishing itself. I look around, now once more in control of my limbs - or at least I am inside of this interaction with Aldo’s mind. Outside of it, my body lies in stasis, observed by Lily.
I find myself standing on nothing, but feeling the strength of a hard floor beneath my naked feet, which are now visible. I am entirely nude, in fact. Out of the distance forms another human figure - that of Alain, although I know it is really just Aldo mimicking his appearance, as he has done thrice now; naked and glorious. He walks to me, staring at me with those exact eyes of my true lover.
“Why did you tell him?” he asks me, referring to Alain.
“I’ve never told anyone before…”
“I know everything you’ve ever done,” he responds.
“I had to. I had to let someone else know. I had to get it off my chest. If you know what I’ve done, why can’t you understand why I’ve done it?”
“I can only interpret your emotions in comparison with the emotions and experiences of the 1,544 individuals I have previously interacted with,” Aldo says. “I have suppositions as to why you have acted the way that you have acted, but I would prefer you tell me in your own words. I can at least know whether or not you are telling the truth, and thus get to know you better.”
“I love Alain…” I tell him. I do, I know, in spite of our current problems. “I have issues with his personality, as he does with mine, but I love him and will go to any length to be with him.”
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