“Okay, so, I can read the script here,” Nathan said briskly, turning his head in every direction to take in the new look of the place. “But a lot of it doesn’t make any sense. Actually, almost none of it makes any sense. I was able to read the signage at the doors, but none of this is coming through. I think I might have to puzzle some of it out before the power kicks in.” He paused. “By which I mean the power I picked up in the first Interlife, the translation power. Not electricity. Probably these machines are run off of electricity? I mean, that would make sense, but I could imagine they’re running off of… something else?”
He ran his fingers along the artwork on the floor, marveling at it on the basis of it being astonishingly beautiful and completely alien.
The irony of it was that it was not, in fact, completely alien. The yawning chasms opening down into the deep blueness from the colors that ran all the way to oranges above, where he could see the diorama continuing up the walls and all the way up to the ceiling, were something he could have seen pictures of on the internet during his life on Earth, had he happened to look. The sulfurous vents which gouted out gasses in ranges of yellows and greens and which pyramidal stacks of spiny discs swayed around, with entire ecosystems living on and amidst their spines, he could have seen through the camera attached to the deep sea diver he’d declined to accompany on a trip into the Pacific.
The deep sea floor was indeed an alien place, but it was not so alien that he could not have seen it. The technology had existed, and in his place of employment, he could have availed himself of the opportunities to use them; but it would have required schmoozing with people who were, as he would have phrased it, just the fucking worst.
Letters in the alien script wound its way through the murals that made up the background of the diorama—and diorama it was, Nathan suddenly realized in a way that completely sidetracked his thoughts. A moment later, he felt a deep embarrassment as he saw that where the couches had been was unpainted, and that the artwork had clearly intended to incorporate those couches… which were now gone.
“Hey Saucer,” he said, coughing awkwardly and unhooking his feet to drift to the side and study the edge between the floor mural and the gray splotch where the seating had once been. “I don’t suppose you got a full-resolution scan of the couches before you ate them? Because uh. They were part of the art installation… and there’s some writing that got cut off.”
There was no response from his assistant, and he sighed and redirected his attention to what he could do rather than what he couldn’t. He might not have been able, at that moment, to get a better view of the information he had, but there was no reason to suppose he needed that in order to learn more.
“So, everyone is on a couch, and they’re all facing inside. These can’t swivel, but maybe there’s something different about the central station and it’ll be able to, which would mean it’s probably the captain or whatever. Is there…” He shrugged and looked down at the rungs he had been using as footholds and handholds. “Saucer, can you give me a renewed overlay of warning indicators on holds that I shouldn’t use, please? Thank you,” he added after a moment as the request was fulfilled.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
He ghosted forwards in the emptiness and silence, fingers loosely holding the next set of rungs, at which point he stopped with a realization.
“There’s no sound!” Nathan exclaimed. “That’s why I know we’re in a vacuum! Sound isn’t happening the way it should!”
His outburst was followed by a moment of embarrassment as he reflexively looked around, checking to make sure that nobody saw him, which was even more embarrassing given that he was in a space station that was, to every indication he had, completely abandoned except for himself and Saucer. Sighing, he shook his head and then a moment later shook it again in a better mood.
“Well, that was an a-ha that was completely unrelated to what I was doing. And also totally superfluous, but I do feel better knowing how I knew. Okay.”
He continued on his measured pace, successfully reminding himself that trying to move fast was tantamount to guaranteeing—sooner rather than later—a slow, drifting death alone in the darkness, whereas a habit of moving slowly was a habit of remaining safe and secure in an environment that was absolutely going to try to kill him repeatedly.
“You know, I’ve heard people say that the deep ocean is actually more inhospitable than space,” he wondered aloud to himself. “I wonder if that’s actually true? I mean, in space there’s no gravity, and I hear that’s bad for peoples’ health. I wonder if it’s going to be bad for mine? I mean, hopefully when I… die… wow, that’s a weird thing to say, hopefully when I die I’ll have any problems fixed, but I was looking forward to living for more than a few hours this time. And there’s the resourcing problem and the heat problem? I mean, I read somewhere—”
He interrupted his train of thought yet again, diverting himself from half-remembered imaginings of a mixture of social media posts, science fiction novels, and pop-science coffee-table books. This time, it was because he’d arrived at his destination of the moment and, forearmed by his intent to find it, he discovered that there was a slim line tracing a ten-foot-wide circle in the center of the room which included both parts of the captain’s station.
Though captain’s station it wasn’t, not quite. He studied the words as they fizzed and fuzzed in his brain, jarring against each other as he tried to intuit their meaning. There was just enough context to give him the sense of the structure of a sentence, or rather a title, and he was able to recognize the words that had been on the seven doors he’d found. More than that, there was, well, artwork, and it raced around the lettering as though it were translating from script into iconography.
“Some sort of title, some sort of directionality, something like upwards but not actually up because I thought that was the… yeah the next one is up, North, Warp, Weft, South, Shuttle, Comb, and then some sort of… something, and then…” The extremely amateur linguist’s eyes flickered down, towards the planet. “And then space,” he said softly, and everything in his head coalesced in a rush of meaning, understanding, and migraine-tier headache.