PAIN & PROGRAMMING
part_01_broken_machines
// Now //
They were cowards. They were sightless. They were weak.
No, they were none of those things. They were broken. Malfunctioning. She both understood them yet could not fathom their choice to leave.
Mara watched dozens of figures stalk away from their settlement — away from Mara’s home — across the grass fields spanning the miles beyond their known world. None of them spoke, made a sound. They just put one step in front of the other.
Like a cosmic intersection, dozens of silent meteors pinged into the sky from the other direction, drawing Mara’s attention from her fellow miners abandoning her crew. Not that meteor showers were uncommon on their moon. She’d witnessed hundreds during her service on Colony Aveline 17.
“You seen Kase?” Babajide asked from behind her.
Mara didn’t look over her shoulder. The tears descending from the sky were more interesting to her. “If I had, he’d still be arguing with me about joining them.” She pointed toward the departing figures, a good way off now.
“See any interesting clouds up there today?” Jide asked, his attempt to distract her from his previous question poorly veiled.
“Just another meteor shower.”
He stepped next to her.
Mara punched his arm as hard as she could — nearly knocking him over — and walked to the other end of the porch. This side of the house faced the opposite way from the grass fields. She dropped into one of the four wooden rocking chairs, looking out over a vast rocky expanse.
While the other way teemed with life, this was all stone and chasms. Fewer than forty meters from the porch was a sheer cliff face that plummeted more than one and a half kilometers. This was her favorite spot in the settlement.
Through the screen door behind her, Mara heard a heavier wooden door squeak open and thud shut. A clatter of metal tools on a workbench.
“Back from the depot,” Kase called.
Jide eased into the chair next to her. “Try to be civil?” He kept his voice low.
Mara continued to stare out over the cliff. Be quiet. That’s what they wanted. Avoid the truth. Never talk about what the real issue was. The real issue was three hw-years old, and they always expected silence. Sure, Jide only wanted the best for their crew, wanted to keep things “civil.” That was noble, considering they were stranded together on this moon. But she’d felt silenced for long enough.
“Kase!” She felt more edge to her voice than she intended. But she kept it raised. “Let’s talk.”
Pause. “Probably for the best.” His voice sounded closer now, just inside the screen door.
“Mara…” Jide reached for the arm of her chair.
An explosion filled the surrounding air. Deafening. In the same moment, a wave of energy hit Mara in the chest, bending her wooden chair backward, threatening to dump her.
When she lowered the arm she shielded herself with, she saw a mountain of smoke and dust rising to the sky from the plateaus beyond her chasm. A wall of that dust and smoke barreled toward their home like a rainless thunderstorm.
As the thick dust enveloped them, Mara squinted her eyes to focus on its origin. A meteor. It had impacted no more than five kilometers away.
She no longer remembered what she wanted to say to Kase. She needed to get to that meteor.
*****
// One Year Ago //
Mara hurried through the street, struggling to keep up with the crowd of miners making their way to the launch yard. At some point last night, the humans from their colony constructed this perimeter with guarded barricades around the tarmac, a sight she wouldn’t have believed if not for seeing it now herself. She’d been about to descend in the mine for her shift when she first heard the rumors of this taking place. That’s when she’d noticed the lack of humans around her area of the settlement.
On the other side of the gates, dozens of humans scrambled back and forth, some of them directing others where to place crates and flats of equipment, tools, and mined resources. All things that had been part of her life the last thirty years. It was now being loaded onto the nine remaining ships on the tarmac.
The humans were leaving for good.
<><><>
part_02_the_problem_with_programming
// Now //
The dust settled with a silence that made Kase uncomfortable. The screen door had not prevented much of it from invading their small home. He reached out to let some of it cling to his hand. A collection of tiniest pebbles and shards of stone. How different had that stone fallen merely moments before, hurled from the sky. Violent, destructive. Now, its touch on the ground was barely perceptible.
Kase peered through the screen door to see Mara making her way to the cliff side. Jide followed her, keeping his distance. The falling dust wasn’t the only thing making Kase uncomfortable.
He did truly feel terrible that he and Mara were at such odds. Everything came down to the fact that she wouldn’t move on from this life, and not only that, but she wouldn’t let him move on either. Same with Jide. Kase had spoken to him privately on a number of occasions, more and more recently, about wanting to leave, see what else was on this barely inhabited rock. Follow the hundreds of other colony members who had left in the past year. Jide wanted out just as badly as Kase. Poor man. He simply couldn’t shake the compulsion to keep the peace between the three of them. Just as he was programmed to.
As Kase stepped onto the porch, he wiped a hand across the illuminated round core in the middle of his chest. He felt the grime come off. These cores, and their circuitry of instruction, were the problems. The computer chips inside them giving Kase, Jide, and Mara their directives--their purpose. They were the problem.
Jide stood midway between Kase and Mara. Mara was right at the cliff’s edge, where she often sat for hours. Kase walked next to their foreman. Well, former foreman. Jide’s own core still glowed yellow, denoting that position, however. For the man’s own sake, Kase wished he could rip the core from his chest, and he’d still be fine. Why couldn’t they all do that?
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Everything’d be much simpler,” he muttered.
Jide looked at him. Kase shook his head, dismissing the unverbalized question.
“This unfortunately won’t make anything simple,” the man said.
“This meteor will be like all the others. I already know she wants to go mine it. You’ll give in, and we’ll all three be making our way there tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t give in.”
“Just doing you’re…job. I know. Like her. But it’s been a year now, and seems like everyone else has been able to move on.”
“I’ve said a hundred times that I understand and agree. I wish we could do something.”
“We can leave. We can leave.”
Jide laughed out loud. “If it were just like that, you could leave. But you haven’t. Why? Because it’s not that simple. Like I’ve told you before, don’t pin any of this on me. If we don’t three go, we don’t go, and that’s the way it is.”
Kase fought off another urge to rip out his own core. “We’re the last ones left.”
“I figured.”
“Sten at the depot headed out in the group earlier today. Told me whatever he had left in the shop was mine. He was only taking what he could carry. We’re all that’s left.”
“When the colony officially shut down a year ago, we knew this would be inevitable. We’ve had nothing to do. Not everybody was going to just hang around forever.”
“I just didn’t think I’d be one of the ones who did.” Kase relaxed the fists he hadn’t known were clenched. “Because of Mara.”
“Careful.” Jide’s voice held the edge of a supervisor again. Kase almost missed it.
“I know it’s not fair to say. And I hate being like this, but I am. She thinks I don’t understand what it’s like for her, but I do. I start every day fighting the innate instructions in my core. It takes effort a lot of willpower to defy them, but I do. And she could too.”
“You’re telling me like I don’t do it too.” Jide turned back toward the house. “You both wear me out. You can tell her that you won’t help mine the meteor.” He hesitated for a moment. “I feel bad for her in a way, I admit, that I can’t feel for you. I’m…sorry.”
“I do too,” Kase said.
Jide returned to the house, leaving Kase to an inevitable argument with Mara. They didn’t used to fight, find themselves at odds over everything. Truthfully, they weren’t at odds over everything — just the most important thing.
<><><>
part_03_rage_and_regret
// One Year Ago //
“Mara!” Jide’s voice cut through the chaos.
She whirled to see him pressing closer to the nearest gate with a few dozen other miners. His usually stoic face betrayed clear confusion. Even as a foreman, he’d evidently not been warned about the humans’ departure either. Kase stood next to him but didn’t look her way. The taller man jostled with the growing crowd, trying his best to see over everything and see what was happening on the other side of the recently built concrete slabs and bars.
Mara wiggled her way through the multiple dozens of miners joining the primary street connected to the launch yard. They all wanted to know the same thing: what was happening to them. Most of the human’s infrastructure was being loaded into the ships, so how much room could be left for more than three hundred miners?
“How long have they been working on this?” Mara demanded as soon as she was close enough for Jide to hear her.
“On this disassembly? Since just after sundown last night. That’s why overnight shift was cancelled, apparently. To give them time while we were charging. But how long has the departure been planned? Who knows. The execution we’re seeing seems like a mature plan.”
Mara felt an emptiness inside her. What about their work? The colony had hardly reached its potential nor had it exhausted all the resources in this area specifically. She didn’t think other settlements had cleaned their sites dry either. In fact, it seemed like every new branch of underground they explored produced more and more riches.
“Kase, no!” Jide’s voice pulled Mara from her thoughts.
She saw Kase push deeper into the throng of miners, right up to the gate. Mara couldn’t see his face, but she imagined the level of rage exuding from his eyes. She’d seen that rage plenty of times over the course of their thirty years together. She thought she even heard his voice carrying over all the shouting. Pleading.
“They’re leaving us,” Jide yelled into her ear. What an obvious observation.
“We don’t necessarily know that,” Mara offered.
“I haven’t known how to tell you and Kase for weeks. They’ve been leaving - dozens of ships over the last few months. None of them have come back. I keep asking, and they keep making excuses. Now I see why.”
She didn’t know what to say. If it were true, what was clear to her was that the humans’ offworlding strategy had started a while ago. The miners weren’t seeing the beginning of it -- they were seeing the end.
Mara stood taller, craning over the heads in front of her and catching a glimpse of Kase screaming at a guard. He grabbed the human with both hands. Had she ever seen a miner touch a human before? Was that prohibited?
Wanting to keep Kase from doing something he wouldn’t be able to take back later, Mara surged deeper into the crowd, Jide calling after her.
Kase often lost his temper with Jide and Mara, but they were his crewmates -- he could “speak his mind” with them. That might not go over well with the humans, though. As Mara squeezed through another line of miners, it didn’t look like it was going well. Two other guards stepped beside the original one, now all leaning into Kase’s space. The tall miner didn’t back down.
He never did.
She pushed through the last line and fell into her crewmate. He wheeled around, not knowing it was her initially. Their eyes met, and she barely recognized him: those orbs were dark and distant. They were equal parts furious and terrified. Kase was as lost as he was angry.
“Kase, come back with us,” Mara said as Jide put a hand on Kase’s shoulder.
She knew he wouldn’t listen because he never listened. Even Jide had trouble getting through to him when Kase was this far gone. He tore away from Jide’s grasp, shoved into the three guards, and ignited a frenzy. In the jostling, Mara went to the ground in a heap, fighting not to accidentally get trampled.
When she crawled back to her feet, Kase was already on the other side of the gate. The sound of a bell tone rang throughout the tarmac and surrounding area, and Mara started. An alarm. They were going to terminate Kase as their last act on this moon.
*****
// Now //
Kase’s argument with Mara wasn’t as long and drawn out as previous ones. Maybe it’s because they’ve used up everything they have to say.
How many times could he tell her that he no longer wanted to mine this moon like he was programmed? That he no longer wanted to adhere to the will of their overseers who had left them an entire year before.
He would not join her if she tried to mine that meteor, and she should honestly forget about it, herself. He told her as much.
Kase turned and walked back to the house even slower than he’d seen Jide minutes before. Why did every fight with Mara have to end with him feeling like the villain? Maybe he was.
No. He wouldn’t allow himself to start believing that. It was an easy way to remain in this settlement until their cores fizzled out. An existence he refused to imagine.
As he reached for the screen door, he felt Mara’s eyes drilling into him, but he didn’t turn around. If he saw her eyes, he’d be crossing that chasm first thing in the morning and hating himself every second of it. And he had spent his last day hating himself.
Kase’s workshop, attached to the side of the house, welcomed him like nowhere else on this now mostly-barren rock. It felt alive in a way that not even he felt now. Alive with a purpose. Even though, technically he did have a purpose, just not one he accepted any longer.
Sitting down in front of the glowing screens on his desk, he typed a string of code and executed it. Symbols and figures danced before his eyes. This had been his purpose for the better part of three months. This was what he’d traded every last of his meaningless credits at the dead settlement depot attempting.
He would discover a way to rewrite their programming. The lines of symbols stopped and returned to a blank, hopeless, lifeless screen. But it wouldn’t be today.
The box of core chips he’d purchased earlier sat one a table nearby. Sten had all but given them away to him, clearing out most of his stock. The man was trekking out on his own and had little use for core chips or credits. Kase would be forever grateful.
These final fifty chips gave him a hope, however thin of a shred it was.
He hummed a long, sustained note, harmonizing with a whir of noise he heard emitting from one of his machines. He was about to do something, and he didn’t like himself for it. Wasn’t full on hate. But he disliked himself for sure.
The small silver sphere rested where he’d nearly used it twice before. It was no thicker than the width of his thumb. He picked it up and tossed it from one hand to the other and back again.
Kase crossed the small hallway to Mara’s storage room. This was where she still kept all of her mining equipment. She’d no doubtedly be using this same equipment tomorrow morning. Kase stepped over to her backpack of essentials. He reached just inside the zipper and pried open a false flap he’d created a few months back. The sphere fit in it with precision.
Some days, Kase believed Mara was delusional and intentionally stubborn. But he knew she was neither of those things. She was broken. Malfunctioning.
He completely understood why--the strings of code which were programmed throughout her very existence--and yet, with the inescapable desires coursing through him, he could not understand her at all.
<><><>
To be continued in part_04_asymmetrical_solitude...