FLIGHT

Aircraft are the closest we have come to imitating God’s creation. The biplane, the jet engine, and now—the space shuttle—all have had a body and two wings, just as She intended. Our efforts to design a craft with better thrust-weight ratio have all been in vain, failures in the face of Her proven design.

The pilot comes closer to what She wrought from nothing than anyone else. He dons the craft, entombs himself within alloy, wields every flight surface like an additional limb, moving them on instinct, enabling him to reach further than any other.

Perhaps we were never meant to spread our wings. Unlike birds that migrate in flocks, the pilot flies alone. The pilot always hungers to fly higher, above and beyond. Without the tether of family, he is doomed to burn in the fires of the Sun.

- from “Principles of Flight Dynamics [2 ed.]” by Dirac Arcil

ALICE

The grass beneath the ship whipped and danced as its twin ramjets groaned, warming to over a thousand degrees. The air bristled with static as its electrical grid came online. An array of navigation and landing lights blinked to life, starting from the rear, wrapping around both port and starboard before converging at the bow, below the windshield. The sweep wings unlatched and unfolded, draping the clearing in a triangular shadow. A high-pitched whine split the air as the ramjets injected pure oxygen into the combustion pipeline. Gas spat out of one thruster; then the other; before purple tongues of flame burned out of both. The VTOL thrusters beneath the wings and hull swivelled and glowed, thawing the flaps and ailerons. It was a colossal, industrial ship—one built to endure the harsh conditions of deep space. Still, its brutalist structure was beautiful to me. It was humanity’s swan song given form.

“Oracle—”

He spun towards me, hovering inches away from my nose.

“You can hear me perfectly well through the noise,” I muttered.

“That’s not true—I’m more human than you think.” He had softened slightly over the years.

“Well, you were the one that started this racket. All I asked you to do was to turn on the engines, not run the full preflight checklist.”

“Sorry. I thought you were planning a little trip.”

The ear-splitting whine of the ramjets died down and the flames sputtered out. As the engines spun down to idle, all that remained was a steady, deep hum that thrummed in my chest.

“The beast. It’s the one I saw. The iron chariot.” You finally spoke in a voice thin and hollow.

“It’s an ark, not a beast nor a chariot.”

“An ark?”

“I suppose you’ve never heard of one. Let’s board.”

“Can we?”

“Of course. Oracle, lower the lift.”

“No, I mean… Should we board? Is it really okay for me to step foot inside? Even if you call it an ark, to me it’s… inhuman. Divine, in a way. I don’t understand why it looks the way it does, or why it spits fire, but… it clearly holds immense power.”

“Does that scare you?”

“Yes. It was built to join the stars. I can tell just by looking at it. It is not for tourists to ogle at. I’m afraid it might whisk me away the moment I step into it.”

I grasped your hand and guided you towards the small, round platform that had lowered from the ship’s hull and onto the bluegrass. “Does this planet mean so much to you that you fear leaving it?”

“No. I have no love for this planet,” you said, your voice strained, as though it were something you desperately wished to believe. “But I seem to bring bad luck wherever I go. Maybe I should stay here.”

I stepped onto the platform and pulled you towards me nonetheless. Oracle beeped, commanding it to ascend. “Then, allow me, the pilot of this ship, to pronounce you a worthy passenger. Having single-handedly seeded this planet with life”—Oracle somersaulted in protest—“there is not a soul alive that can veto my decision. Welcome aboard.”

What a farce. How pretentious of me, behaving like I am anything more than just an empty husk of a girl, playing my role like a puppet. I do not remember volunteering to pilot an ark. I do not remember volunteering to seed this planet with life. I simply did as I was told. What else could I have done, alone on a strange planet?

We rose into the ship’s warm, dark hull. The platform sealed the hatch beneath us, silencing the wind. Oracle was right. They will need Mobius eventually. I made them, but they will unravel on their own. You are but the first casualty to arrive at my door.

*

“This is the cockpit.” The cluttered, irregularly shaped walls muffled my voice, silencing any potential echo.

“This? All of it? Is this where you… fly this thing?” You stood awestruck at the constellations of lights and switches that covered every inch of the walls.

“Yes. With a bit of help from Oracle.” Oracle turned away, but said nothing.

“Can I sit down?” Your eyes beamed, wide as saucers.

“Sure.”

You lowered yourself into the seat as though it were made of glass. For a few minutes, all I could hear was the hum of the ramjet engines idling and waiting for your input. You did not touch the controls; instead, you sat and stared at them, burning each button, display and lever into your mind. Or perhaps you were staring at them dumbfounded. I could not tell. Either way, the ship was at your disposal; though I would have stopped you if you somehow managed to lift it into the air.

“So… this ship—it flies like a bird, right?”

“No… it can move backwards and hover too.”

“So like a hummingbird, then.”

“I suppose. But a thousand times faster.”

“And this stick, it lets you… roll?”

“That’s right. You can see the ailerons tilt from here if you stretch your neck a little. Try pushing the stick to the sides.”

You whipped your head around to look at both wings. “Is that really all it takes? It doesn’t seem like they tilt much in response.”

“The effect is far more pronounced when moving in the air. It doesn’t take much to roll a ship.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“I see. And if I want to, um, roll my ship to point up—”

“To pitch up, you mean?”

“Yes.” You pulled back on the stick. “Wow… it’s no different, just that they’re both tilted in the same direction. And this—what’s this?” You pointed to a pair of bulky handgrips attached to two short levers that sat on grooves.

“Oh… those are the throttle levers. They power the engines. You push them forward to increase thrust.”

“I see… and I assume there’s one for each engine?”

“Yes, but you generally want them to provide equal thrust, so there’s a pin that locks them together so you can move them in sync. Do you see the detent along the groove, just past where they’re at?”

“Yes. What’s that?”

“That’s the idle detent. If you push them past idle, the engines start to produce actual thrust and we might start moving, albeit slowly.”

You gently pushed them forward, your hand wrapping around the handgrips naturally as though they had been shaped to fit you. Your fingers deftly avoided the buttons and knobs scattered across the grip as you gently pushed forward. The hum of the engines grew and warped as they gained power.

“Stop.” You obeyed immediately, pushing them back to zero.

“Ah… sorry! Sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I wasn’t going to push them past idle.”

“I know. Maybe we should move on. Follow me.” You reluctantly stood up and together we walked down the claustrophobic corridor.

This was the first time I had ever seen anybody other than me sit at the controls of this ship. I had always admired this cockpit, despite how cramped it was, an interface between man and machine. It was hideously complex, with enough switches and levers to occupy two pilots, let alone one—but I had learned to operate it fluently, like a fifth limb. While it was safer to let Oracle handle the controls, having every aileron, rudder and engine under absolute control was my drug.

The pilot’s seat arms anyone that sits on it with authority, but the halo it granted you seemed unusually strong. You seemed comfortable in it, despite your inexperience. I beckoned you to follow and guided you through cramped corridors. “This is the cryogenic chamber,” I said, arriving in a chilly, sterile room, with a single human-sized pod.

“This pod… you sleep in it?” Your face drew a blank, seemingly trying to process the idea.

“To be accurate, it freezes me. Think of it as hibernation. The pod is cooled to a terminally low temperature; that’s the most uncomfortable part of the process, since it kills me. While that’s happening, my blood is slowly replaced with a liquid that does not crystallise when frozen—without it, my frozen blood would shred my cell tissue from the inside. Once in this… ‘corpsicle’ state, as some call it, I can be preserved for a long, long time. The thawing process is a bit more complicated, but it’s really just doing what I just mentioned in reverse. Cold sleep feels like an instant, but may span thousands of years. Asleep, or dead. Whichever term you prefer.”

“...So death means nothing to you, then.”

“I suppose not. It’s transient.”

“That’s inhuman.”

“Why? To me, death is antonymous to life. Is it not human to try and go beyond?”

“...I don’t know. I know this is normal to you, but to me—”

“Sorry. I’m not trying to argue. But go on.”

“...If there’s one thing I can say, it’s that life is only labelled as such because it ends in death.”

I wanted to move on, afraid of overstepping my boundaries, but I wished to know what drove you to think that way. Anyone who lived as long as I did would have given the nature of life considerable thought, and yet what you said had never occurred to me.

“Now that seems absurd to me.” I crossed my arms.

“It’s not. Suppose you were born today—if so, what were you yesterday?”

“...Is this a question about souls? I know you lived at a chapel, but I—”

“No. I don’t care about that. This has nothing to do with souls.”

“Well, if I hadn’t been born yet, I suppose I would call myself unborn. Devoid of life. Dead.”

“Right? Because that’s what we are by default. Dead.”

“By ‘we’, I assume you are referring to us. Humans. The ones that are living. You can’t include the dead.”

“No, I’m talking about all of us.” Your eyes narrowed slightly, and for a moment I felt the weight of the title you were forced to bear. “The ones that lived and the ones that are yet to be.”

Them too? I was confused. “The only ones that exist are those that currently live.”

“No. We are made of ashes and return to ashes. The constituent parts of all life that has been, is, and is yet to be, already exists. By default, we are the gravel in the soil; the leaves in the breeze; the water trapped in ice and the water that flows in the creek.

“Three groups, then: those that lived, those that are alive, and those that are yet to live. What if we only had one—the living?” You paused, unsure if you should continue, but I nodded, curious, and you resumed. “Eternal life, essentially. There would then be no need to label life. You could, I suppose, use the word as a way to differentiate us from soil and water—to separate us, the living, from our surroundings—but that’s not what these pods are about, are they? They don’t give life to ash. They preserve the living, preventing them from turning to ash. Cold sleep blurs the line between life and death, where life is a candle and death is to extinguish it. Without the latter, there is no need to term the former. They go together hand in hand.”

“But they’re still opposites, are they not?”

“Yes… I suppose they are. But it’s a big leap from that to concluding that it is human to surpass death. You can only draw a line between life and death when both exist, and to erase that is… inhuman. Well, that’s the only word I can think of. Perhaps there’s a better label for it. But it certainly isn’t human.”

I mulled over your words as I conducted the rest of the tour half-heartedly. You seemed a little worried that you had spoken too much, but I assured you it was no big deal. As we explored each room, I told you about my life: of the day I woke up and of the events that had transpired since. It became clear to you that our lives were intertwined right from the beginning—I was the pilot of the ship that dropped you on this planet, and I was the one who had shown your clan tools of iron. I was the one who had played God and orchestrated the growth of the city you briefly called home, and I was the one who left before you showed up. I was to blame for your tragedies, and the guilt ripped my heart to shreds. Despite this, you never once rebuked me or even raised your voice. You listened like a saint, passing no judgement.

We finished a lap around the ship and returned to the bridge, where I slumped into the pilot’s seat. I gripped the flight stick, its firm weight easing my mind. “What do you think?” I asked, looking up at you.

“It’s… a lot to take in. This is a magnificent ship. Can it really fly?”

“Of course. You saw it yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but that was so long ago.”

“Let me show you what it’s like from the inside, then,” I said, excited to show Mobius off to your eager eyes. I strapped myself into the seat and reached around the cramped cockpit. Right to left sweep. The main generators were already spinning, so I held a switch to test the FLCS relay. It blinked green. The engine, already idle, meant I could skip the electrical start-up checklist.

“You need not bother with the start-up,” Oracle beeped next to me.

“Just checking.”

“You find this fun, do you?”

I blushed slightly as I continued my sweep. Engine feed and air source to NORM. JFS at IDLE. I moved to the left panel and flicked open the drive clutch. The JFS sparked, feeding fuel into the ramjets. The RPM needle on my instrumentation climbed steadily as the engines spooled to life, vibrating the hull.

“The radios?” Oracle quizzed.

“No need. Nobody’s listening, after all,” I replied to his displeasure.

“I suppose you’ll be skipping the radar, too,” he said just as I did exactly that. I then aligned the INS to the horizon. The attitude and bearing instruments turned on, indicating the sky and the ground in blue and red respectively. I gripped the throttle and pushed forward steadily, bringing the thrust into VTOL range.

“It’s so loud,” you said, scrambling for a seat as the hull shook and screamed.

“It’s fine. Sound doesn’t travel in space.”

“Space? Are you bringing us there?”

I reached above my head and moved a lever. Pure oxygen hissed into the cockpit. “Yes. To show you Concord from above.” The ship lurched as it finally rose at an angle from the ground, its nose pitching towards the sky. The throttle weighed heavy in my hand as I pushed it further, past military power, igniting the afterburners.

The ship leapt into the air, the sudden thrust like a kick from behind. Its engines howled. The clouds whipped past the windshield. We traced a clean arc: a lone star in a starless sky, up, piercing the cloud layer and into the ozone, through the deep blue and towards the moon, purple vapour trailing from the afterburners. I could feel the texture of the wind through the force feedback shaking the stick and rudders. This is it. My domain. The blood began to drain from my eyes. Just as the world lost its colour, we broke free of the atmosphere—and before us lay space, vast and empty, pitch dark and absolute.