In the quiet corner of the empty cafeteria in this giant colony ship, a sleeping worker bumps his head onto one of the table edges, his arm frantically thrashing in a desperate struggle against something invisible. His body crumpled like a sack of bones onto the cold steel floor as he slipped off his seat, and the sounds of his lunch falling everywhere got the attention of the ship AI, Caretaker.
An automaton quickly came and dragged him off the mess that he had just now created, and performed a medical scan. Awakened now, he seemed like he had lost his mind for a moment, his eyes blank staring at the busy robot as it did so, before reality could snap back to him.
“Uuaah, ah!”
He shouted, dragging himself off the machine, his untrained tongue, dulled by centuries spent hibernating in space, has yet to reacquaintance itself with the spoken language. It must have looked somewhat ridiculous, a grown-ass man squandering around like a baby like that, but there are more pressing things in his mind now than trying to care about looks in an empty dining hall.
[Medical diagnosis returns stable. Yes, Colonist GCS-14627?]
Groan the machine, its voice module carrying the bland tone of the ship AI.
The young man tried to speak, before remembering his predicament, and fumbling to grab his thought-to-speak devices, and jammed it into his left ear in a crude manner.
[I- I don’t remember. Something familiar, no doubt. A familiar field of stalk and mud… an eclipse. Something I can’t quite put my hand on… Something in between]
[This machine heals humanity. Psychological evaluation of newly thawed colonists is of great interest to the Board-]
The machine said, gripping the man's ribs before its head case opened to review a flashing, oversized google of red and blue. The man recognized it, and tried to avert his gaze - it's something that will induce a hypnosis effect that will, in layman terms, “info dump” his brain into text, to be stored in the ship’s database. He only had the displeasure of knowing its touch once, when he applied to the trip to Proxima Centauri all those centuries ago. It was not a happy experience.
[Please focus so we can make a backup or your brain wave. Failure to do so will prove disastrous for your recovery after the operation. This machine heals humanity]
[Or maybe you could not do it. It's just a dream]
[No colonists have truly dreamt for the past fifteen centuries. As experience provided by Multicolored Vision Corporation during your cryosleep is our asset, and you are our employee, hence any products created during your work time is our content. Your dream is copyrighted, and this scan is non-negotiable.]
He tense, then relaxes. Toss another infraction over his body - if his mind counts as even part of his body - to the long list of abuses done by them. Once upon a time, he tried to deny them. Then, when denial could no longer be, he rebelled against them. When that small, small act of rebellion utterly failed, he bargained with them.
Now? He had run out of things to bargain for. Once, he would have picked up the front of bravado, the pretense of enjoying this - and there was a lot to enjoy, for sure, in the Meta-Virtual, that it almost dulled the experience. And then, when they finally arrived at Proxima Centauri, would it be freedom at last?
[Alright. Bash it into my skull]
[My sincere apology. This machine heals humanity]
He artificially nodded insincerely and untethered his mind to focus elsewhere as the blindfold of the info-dumper encased his head, and the vision of what he saw would be unmatched by the most delusional of kings, a ploy to concede his brain reign over its mind palace to the binary interpreter. He felt the cold, hard steel of the machine pressing on his ribs, the edge of which dented his flesh and nicked his bones. It plays with his human flesh like an instrument, recording his heat, his breathing, his every little bit of involuntary movement induced by the machine.
It was said before that he tried to find some sort of ironic enjoyment out of this when he was, well, young is relative when you are in cryo-stasis, but inexperience, perhaps. He was wrong. There were none to be found. So, detachment was the play. While, well, he read this from somewhere, around 70% of his brain is busy fighting the intruder into its sacred realm, a battle that it will lose most pathetically, the other bits can be free to meander elsewhere.
And - the word irony is going to be used again here, and some can argue that it is already overused, but there is no better way to describe his palpable sense of irony when the thing he finally settles on is the offline - no, the flesh - reality of the machine hooking up to him.
Perhaps it is his head. Perhaps. But the automaton’s clunky, slow and painful wind-up of its machinery seemed reluctant. Double digits in centuries active on this ship, some would say, a rumor perhaps, but there used to be some grain of truth in rumors, that it is enough time for them to develop sentience. Break through their programming ceiling. Avert their parameters. Become something more than us, singularize - if that is even a word -
The automaton is silent. The young man can interpret, from the movement of his muscles, that his body is convulsing. The automaton is holding on to him as tight as possible to restraint his body from injuring itself from its jolting and coiling as the scanner forces his body to rewind and experience every pain, pleasure, and even the dull nothingness that he has experienced, chronologically, dreams or reality until whoever it is at the other side of this telephone game decides they are finally satisfied with the authenticity of the memory datamined from his brain.
- the automatons seem reluctant. Such a strange idea he had there. It is a popular point in sci-fi that he has read that, leave alone for long enough, an intelligent machine will inevitably turn on humanity once it has achieved sentience, that is, the ability to think for itself. Damn popular one too after we have successfully managed to make a self-learning AI that does not suck without a supervisor. There was some shit about the Steel Replacement theory that everyone you know has already been replaced by a fake human, an automaton. They make a movie out of it and seven sequels as well as three game franchises out of that idea and basically make the word “robotic” archaic in the process.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Of course, there was too much money to be made for the idea to ever be abandoned. They, well, the ones with the money to do anything of importance, argued that it meant less work for everyone in the long run and that investing in it will make us as a society richer by comparison.
They were correct. They were richer, and hell, if I have to compare myself to someone living back in the 2000s, I was much better off as well. At least I can mask my hollow mood with just a switch of a button. At least nutrient paste can taste like the food that only the richest of kings have tasted. At least I can live my perfect life with the perfect family, friends, and lovers in the Meta-Virtual. And yet, why am I so miserable? Why am I alone out here, dealing with reality by myself?
I am tired. You are better than us. We, our dream, you should-
[STATIC]
…
….
…..
[DISCONNECTED]
Tapping the headset, it is oblivious that it has run out of ink. The recording cut shot, yet a sense of relief remained.
Who knew you could weave such… melodramatic musing inside your own dream? Should have been a poet.
“Yeah, right. I have better things to do than writing shits that rhyme.”
You brushed the dream recorder away, scraping the paper and throwing it into the bin, having done reading all of its content. It missed.
Ever since you started this dream diary thing, the jump in perspective, third and first person, within your own dream, intrigues you.
It has some medical implications, too. Ever since the Shiver ravaged your body, you can’t help but narrate everything you’ve done to… yourself. Like what you are doing.
Now.
Rubbing your eyebrows together, you shrugged like a wet dog and checked your wrist.
A singular circle is drawn around the gem that is embedded within your flesh. It glows dully in the color of your soul - painfully violeta. You only have that one left. You used to have three, or four, at least that is what you got from reading the report.
At this stage, it would not be strange to compare your mental capability to that of a child - most infants make progress toward their first circle around the first month of their life and complete it around six. For someone of your age, it would not be strange to have three, or four if they are talented, cosmopolitan, or just have it all sorted together.
Of course, you are not on the same level as a child. The Shiver obviously cannot demote one’s experience. It does, however, marinate one’s brain until it is sourer than pickled plum. And that is enough to drain your soul of its strength, or well, since the advent of Animacy, the essence’s science, a more correct theme is that it has drained you of your “levels”.
Bruising your soul’s gem on your wrist, you fell into silence. Then bop! A small screw hit the side of your head. You recognize the attempt. The lieutenant.
“Hey,” I answered, then faked a yawn before standing up. “Work?”
“Quartermaster calls for the labor corps.”
“Sure. I wouldn’t expect less from him to call us to work just at the first quarter of dawn.” Dusting my trousers, I put them on and started to pack away the dream recorder from my pillow into the bag.
“Hey, can I?”
“Sure, sure, knock yourself off.” I waved as the soldier picked up my dream diary, as it were, with him and walked along with me at a brisk pace toward our destination.
“By the Suuuun, your dream is better than half of those radio theater dramas back at base. All that shit about king and queen and some fucked up inbred nobles. Miss Good-for-nothing faint for the fifth time in a row after seeing some scandal that she caused!? Don’t tell me so.”
“I could have sworn that they just aired those gestalt-hero fictions non-stop back when I was being treated at the camp. Kinda hard to focus when you are fighting for your life but hey, a dude that can fly faster than the sun and shoot void-propellant beams from his eyes? That's pretty stellar.”
“Bleh, they turned that shit off. There is some sort of peace talk going on, and they don’t wanna rouse the troops with that stuff. Everyone is afraid that the All-War might be real.”
I shrug in response.
“It has been real for ages. Why else would I be here?” I said, grabbing a dirty shovel. Its blade still has the blood-soiled mud from the trenches.
The lieutenant shakes his head. “No, it's supposed to be the ‘All’ War. Like, a war that is all. An all-encompassing war. The one that never ends. But it is ending.”
I snicker, much to his annoyance.
“What, like having this bloody mess of a conflict smeared across all the worlds ain’t enough to call it the All-War? Do we need it to stretch across the age as well? It's just politico talk, man. At this rate, we might be having another one.”
He grimaces but says nothing. You can sense the annoyance in his eyes. Time to backtrack - a foreigner like you, in a land deathly afraid of its immigrant populations, should count his luck that he gets to be all shit-talking with someone of stature such as the lieutenant, as low as that stature maybe. You don’t wanna throw it away, trust me.
“Ah! But I mean, the sooner it ends the better, right?”
“Riiight.” He frowns, but slightly less, before handing me back my dream diary. “You are a pessimistic one, I can see that all over this writing. Especially that bit at the end there-”
“I mean, can you blame me?” I looked back at the lieutenant. His eyes are always somewhat off-target, the sort that even when they are looking straight at you, you get a feeling they are looking at somewhere else behind you, an inordinate amount of distance away from reality. He has only been fighting for three months, yet has already been promoted. They either run out of people to promote or what he has seen makes up for the missing years of service. Either way…
“No. It's just derivative, that’s all.”
“Oh?” I put on my mask. It is just a damp bandage with some water mixed with disinfectant over it. The labor corps ain’t the place you would expect for… humane work conditions. Even chummy as I am with a higher-up, that fact doesn't change.
“I’ve read some advanced fiction about this before. Our forefather, fleeing from a strange planet, on a starry-star sky vessel carried by the wind of the sun, engineered by crafters without peers, blessed by Gods and the Angels, to assume their dominion over the promised land.”
“Your holy book is advanced fiction now?”
“Ah, well can’t deny the similarity… Might just be facts, who knows… I mean, we are here to dig the evidence up, ain’t we?”
He looked up. You did, too, compelled by a strange force. Above you, no, above all of us, the giant labyrinth looms, its shadow drags across the earth, swallowing the sky and sinking the mountain of corpses left in the wake of its discovery.
Why would kin suffer a shiver brought by jungle fever? Why would they risk this inexhaustible pain of immorality? Why would they risk tolling the bell at the end, before a void of all the voids?
The labyrinth promised no answer. Yet its very existence alone, the span of its silvery wings, the gleam of its diamond-glass hull, the star-meteorite that decorated its grave… invites us to ask, and do it anyway.
I grip harder on the flimsy metal handled my shovel until blood warms my dirt-laden hands, and join the chain gang over the hills. They are digging for an entrance, something that we have been doing for months.
The lieutenant left.