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Ch. 7 pt I

Upon examination, the room originally reminded Shuhp Yee of a penthouse. The floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto Majt now might as well belong to a cell in the deepest dankest prison. It is late as he looks through them after an unknown number of glimpses being locked away. The smoke of violence is everywhere. Fingers gone. Upu and Naht-do dead. So is Soya. So nothing matters, and with that all else ceased to matter. The cell is quiet. All he can hear is his own breathing and the purr of life outside the cell. The Grotto sun is streaming through the dense mauve clouds casting its typical rose glow over the space. There is a stone butcherblock and a kitchen to prepare his own meals. In the chilling unit is the ingredients for blood soup. It's all he can eat since before being imprisoned. And he knows it won’t be long before time takes care of the pain of living without Soya.

He is okay being tidally-locked to Soya and happy to follow her legacy even into his own death but he feels a weight now that seems to want to define the rest of his life.

If he does the opposite, it represents Soya's final wishes.

Leave it alone.

But it is his work also, a way to honor their life together and a guarantee her life’s work, reduce and protect, lives on.

Through the window of his cell is the stunning vista of life dangling from Grotto’s Capital City, glowing its famous sparkling pink. Life bustling under its transparisteel canopy while a storm front approaches. Violent stripes of beige, red and purples hide the tiny blob of light that is the nearest star. The star is a medium-sized yellow, one-hundred and eighty-million lengths away. It marks a glimpse by illuminating the first of the moon's eight parts, the part that looks like a hunk of redmoss-bread floating in thick reddish blue glue. As the glimpse progresses, each part of the broken moon becomes illuminated. When the eighth part emerges from the funk the Upu call an atmosphere it is almost night again. And night is pitch dark and the longest portion of a glimpse.

With the storm the star disappears yet again into night and he stands thinking about Soya and wondering would she really have just trashed all their work together. Would she really not have gone through with what looks to be everything but will likely result in yet another failed experiment anyway. Forced to rely on the magic of the make believe tech supplied by a cook.

Soya was impressed, Uh’ was certain the reconfiguring atoms was some sort of Naht-do trick he couldn’t figure out yet. Using it bolstered the slave. Made him bold. His mind wanders to the idea the slave might have poisoned them. But why her alone? He should have been killed also. That broth. Her medicine, the only difference in their diet.

“I can’t. My stomach.”

He knows her mind better than his own, but nothing comes. Should he, or should he just let it go. Soya, the great thinker, is dead; the world should mourn and move on. The Upu manage hundreds of cities, all built out of Grotto to point up into this thick poisonous atmosphere. The pressure outside is intense, and on the brown rocky surface, threatening volcanoes abound, as do several oceans of turbulent ammonia. The air always smells a little like sulphur. Not that Shuhp would know specifically. To him, it is just air. Slightly poisoned. But good old normal air.

When the Upu were below the surface, the air was cleaner in the caves of their ancestors living among the fields of red-moss, because of those fields. Now the fields the Upu depended on were artificial and needed so much fuel to keep running. So much that the world was almost hollow from digging. Red-moss grows wherever it likes but soon it won’t be on Grotto, ever again. It’s a weed, but without it, there is no biodiversity and no Upu. No longer confined to their existence in tunnels of earth and rock. But this made metals fleeting and much needed in maintaining their cities, connected still to those earthen tunnels flowing into the ground. Tunnels that are still manipulated for resources to support the species as they remain smack dab in the middle of a single, perfect layer of atmosphere. With technology they could push higher and one glimpse they will be forced to, but from their origin to here it’s hard to imagine the past and how this species even came to be where they are.

The simple answer is red-moss.

Every Upu knows cultivating it made the Upu thrive. The lack of it is what made killing the Naht-do inevitable. Even their world was being mined hollow now also, minus all the little home grown terrorist attacks that made the endeavor too dangerous. And now this. He doubts any launches are happening now. Those on Nahtdo are stranded.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He focuses his eyes on the conveyances that dot the sky. A constable-vehicle veers out of the sparse traffic and shoots diagonally towards the University’s admin complex landing area lights and siren blaring. Flickering white and red announce its intent. He can see an Elder security force geared up inside. He’s seen it before. Usually on a recording. And to offer points to make things more efficient.

The vehicle dips down into the clouds directly below.

If the ground plate were transparent he would see the white fog that obscures it. The surface is hidden beneath it and he finds himself thinking of the abyss and the great foamy poisonous waters. His mind floats to images of it and he conjures them and he lives there in his mind tasting the ammonia on his lips and feeling the sting of it. His eyes already flowing tears.

Upu long ago would suicide like this. It used to be a cultural tradition to expose oneself to the planet. It symbolizes death and the soul and the maybe of tomorrow, but the logic of tomorrow spoils it at every turn, because there is never such a thing. Nature is infinite, things morph. Ice to water, water to steam, steam to water. It's circular. But a dead Upu is just slowly decomposing matter. Food? Material? Maybe both, but for him, the death of Soya is a bone-aching sorrow and proof the magic of life yields garbage.

There is no morphing into something beautiful at the end. Unless one counts the happiness of the bacteria that happens upon the carcass. He doesn't like to think of the body of his owner as dead tissue and inert chemicals, food for lesser creatures, the theories she commissioned revolutionized the world. Her most significant contribution was to spatial folding, as important as their bone serum that allowed the replacing of limbs and fusing machinery with the nervous systems. Revolutionized limb regeneration. Revolutionized medicine. Revolutionized death. She was a hero to her people and heroes do not die. Her life will forever be a chapter in the Upu history books. A chapter that may have ended, but endings only lead to new beginnings.

He conjures a memory of holding her hand and as is the case when he reflects, he can feel her fingers gripping his, but he cannot delude himself for long and quickly feels them cool and loosen. Maybe she is not gone, because she will always live in his mind, but that promises to remind him of the pain. It would be better to push her from there so he can live at peace with her death. But he cannot fathom a moment when that might be possible.

She is gone. All he has are memories of the words they spoke to one another, places visited and things they did, food they ate, shared colleagues and passion for their work. All may be painful, but he prefers to dwell. Involuntarily his mind turns to the math of her. She is there in the Grotto servers waiting, maybe not “her” but a version.

It took mere moments to rework the security protocols the Collection Complex may have tried to offer as restraint to him. When he returns to work it will be to fine tune the abstract math, taking what theoretically was and making it real. When he thinks of his work, the large lump in his chest, that feels like his heart has swollen too big for its enclosure, loosens.

Every single character represents a hope that Soya will live again.

All it takes is execution, and he will shatter reality, and bring tomorrow into today.

Maths of Everything was the title of her first dissertation, the one that made her famous.

Thoughts on Connectivity, came next.

Both were the keystone to his work and as he thinks about changes he needs to make, and for the first time since his owner took her last breath, he smiles. Together, they believed math and chemistry were the beginnings to everything and everything has kept him imprisoned his entire life, kept his soul trapped. With this new idea, maybe he can free them both.

He makes his way to the wall directly in front of a lone security recorder. He sits on a stool in front of the wall. His computation device is simple and completely undetectable. He early on rerouted the security camera to reverse a display, the only element he was missing. For Uh’ there has only ever been a truer way to feel free then through work. And he does feel free as he moves his hand and selects the input drive he wishes to work from and feels the machine activate throughout his body like a hum. Not unpleasant, but too much of, leaves him feeling sick. He navigates it using an internal input device. Soya’s liquid bone at work, fusing mind and machine. The security team in charge of monitoring has worked night and day to fix the camera outage, unsure why sometimes it works when others it doesn’t. He works at night to offer additional cover. And so far since his capture he has accomplished much.

It takes a lot of power to crunch the numbers he is working with and feels the results course through his body. The camera depicts his selections, bathing the wall in the light from his discoveries. At the end of his work is a green blinking cursor. With a few clicks and slew of commands, the project, he hopes to consume the rest of his life with, completes.

Now before him are two paths, one for those that walk in the light and another built for those wishing concealment, he provides both options. He types some more, goes back a few lines to make corrections then scrolls forward once more.