The patient is not terminal, but cannot be cured. “Regenerative techniques don’t work,” they’d said. “Her brain is rewriting itself.”
This hospital is bright and sunny and open-air. Lush, too. Vines creep up the pillars and hang from the overarching trellis. Lilies bloom in defiance of the season, and the air is always warm and fresh. Leaves spill from hanging pots and creep along the floor.
She floats there in the middle of the room. Smiling, brown in loose-fitting, silky wellness wear. Her hair is a cloud about her head.
“Calla,” Lambent checks her name readout. “How are we feeling today?”
----------------------------------------
It’s said in the old time when worlds first coalesced Jupiter reached into the far beyond and brought water-ice to a hot, young Earth. That the world-king’s gravity defended the rocky inner planets from asteroidal violence and other horrors.
Earth was rare even among goldilocks water-worlds. The development of thinking entities is a fragile thing. Countless factors in perfect balance, countless cataclysms could shatter that perfect, tenuous growth.
Across a sea of stars, across billions of years Lambent has been there to see it only once.
Sol entered its final phase of life, consuming the inner worlds and spewing radiation and plasma. Something strange happened then, an interaction between Sol’s swansong and the Jovian magnetosphere. Some matter permutation within the metallic hydrogen core of the world. Odd entities formed from exotic states of matter rose, born from fire and plasma and lightning.
Life beyond the wildest human imaginings. It is here, in the upper reaches of the old gas giant, that Lambent keeps vigil.
----------------------------------------
Calla smiles, sunny as the mid-morning. “You must be Lambent!” At a thought she rotates to see him.
She is in control of her face, her voicebox, and little else. Her arms are twisted in an odd configuration. Strange angles at her joints, and her legs are twined tightly around each other. Hips tilted, shoulders tensed. At intervals she twists and shudders, folded up in some strange monument to musculoskeletal pain.
Neurodegenerative, they said. Her muscles locked as tightly as the bone.
“Yeah.” He hesitates. “How’s the pain?”
“I don’t know what they have me on,” she circles the medical field. “Wheeeeew!”
“Are you still good to be interviewed?” He takes a seat.
She laughed. Like tinkling bells. Like windchimes or the upper reaches of a xylophone. “We’re fine. Ask your questions. Get your slice-of-life feel-good article.”
Her wrist twists. It takes him a moment to understand that, bent up behind her back as it is, that this is an invitation to start. He will need to get used to her body language.
He clears his throat and begins.
----------------------------------------
His gelatinous friend does not come. For a long time nothing does.
The upper reaches of Jupiter are colder than below. Calmer. Sol pulses a dull ruby-red. Just once. Sunspots swirl across its surface, and its magnetic field contracts slightly.
He watches unblinking. Not wanting to miss a single moment. So focused is his attention that he does not notice the jelly’s approach.
It’s small. Young. Glittering. Its membranes are still pink around the edges, and it sparkles a pale orange with curiosity.
He looks away from the dying star and holds an arm out invitingly. The jelly hesitates, contracts. Dims hesitantly. And then it drops back into the Jovian depths.
Lambent turns his attention back to Sol.
----------------------------------------
“How are your legs?” he asks.
She chuckles. “They move as one.” To demonstrate, she tilts them side to side. Her calves are folded back against her thighs. “It’s my tail, I guess.”
“Like a mermaid.”
“A mermaid!” The idea seems to delight her. She twists awkwardly, circling the medical field again. “Siren of the seas! Hear me sing! Watch out or I’ll lure you to your death!” The shape of her is twisted, contorted, uncomfortable. But there’s an odd grace to the way she moves, courtesy of the medical field.
He can almost see it.
Lambent laughs. “You’re luring me, for sure.” He walks up under the field, looking at the light sparkle in topaz eyes. Opens his mouth, and forgets what he’s about to ask. She’s grinning, she’s going to live the next hundred years disabled and in pain and she’s grinning like the sun itself.
“So uh,” the mermaid says, “how do we start?”
----------------------------------------
The jelly returns with a few others. Lambent has never been sure how social they are. He’s seen them in groups of only one or two.
There’s a lot he doesn’t know about them. There’s a lot he will never know.
It’s near imperceptible but the poles of the sun seem to squeeze together for a bit. Just for a moment. The magnetic field shudders, vibrates like a massive blob of gel.
“Wake me when the new day dawns,” Lambent sings quietly to himself. “Together we will ride the sun.”
Somewhere far below, he can hear the thunder. The song of Jupiter continues, unknowing. Unthinking. The storm churns as it always has. A few more jellies approach, rising on the scant updrafts.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
He hums the next line - he can never quite remember what it is. An old song from when he was human. No - he’s still human, in every way that matters. A song from when he could die.
Sol shudders again, and then once more. It squeezes down, like a child bearing down on a tangerine. Dims slightly, widens about the middle.
And then it bursts. Plasma spews out in all directions.
He sees it before the shockwave comes. It takes ten minutes for light to reach the planet, give or take a few. The bright, casting the world into a sharp, violent relief. His body, a blot across the daytime sky. The jellies surrounding him, pale shadows against the clouds.
And then it’s gone, for the moment. He knows what’s just happened, even if it hasn’t reached them yet.
The jellies surround him, by now. Everywhere, timid red-brown little speckles. They huddle together, membranes tight. Browning old jellies, at the edge of their reproductive cycle. Young pinkish jellies. Strong, young clear jellies, sick cloudy ones, all still, floating around him in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.
“We,” Lambent sings, “fly into them one by one. One by one.”
----------------------------------------
Lambent is in a great mood.
Calla is a great interview subject. She’s fun, she’s funny, she’s witty and positive. “To cap off this interview,” he says, “the medical calculations have finished. Doc’s ready to deliver prognosis and treatment.”
“Can’t be cured, they tell me,” she says. “I’d shrug, but I’d get stuck like that.”
“Maybe it’s got something for you. I know some like it to be a private moment-”
She surprises him. “Wake me when the new day dawns! Together we will ride the sun.”
He laughs. “What, what’s that?”
This time she does shrug. “It’s a really old song. About how we’ll get there someday. She floats up on her back, and somehow though it’s day he knows she’s looking at distant stars. “There’s nothing we can’t figure out, with enough time.”
“We?”
“Humanity,” she swims back to face him. “Oh no!”
He reaches up to help her unclench her shoulders, but it doesn’t quite work. The muscles are locked together, tight as a cramp.
“Don’t worry about it,” she shakes him away. “Let’s see what doc has for me.” She shakes her head for a moment, as if to shake away any shadow of fear.
On a hunch, he reaches up and grabs her hand, and she squeezes it as only someone with her disability can. It’s turning his metacarpals into paste, but he doesn’t pull away.
“Doc, what’s going to happen to me?”
----------------------------------------
The shockwave hits Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
A thousand thousand tons of superheated plasma crashes into the planet. The sound alone is enough to nearly shatter Lambent’s physical form. Sol screams as it dies.
The planet howls. Jupiter fights the oncoming radiation with the fury of an angry god. It’s shielded by the strongest planetary magnetosphere in the system. Aurorae flood, blinding bright, from the poles. Blinding flares of rainbow light, blue and purple and ultraviolet streak across the sky. Visible even against the dying sun.
The worst of it deflects off into space, but even what’s come through blasts him backwards. Boiling hydrogen shoots past in streams, geysers forming out of the pressurized fluid morass far below.
In this instant Lambent feels a good fifth of the Jovian biosphere die.
The armored crystalline feeders shatter. All of them, on the daylight side of the planet. The polyp colonies won’t be far behind, clinging to bare fragments of pulverized ice. Floater balloons shred instantly in all but the deepest layers of the planet.
The jellies were made for storms. They survive. Shaken, but alive. There’s more, now. He hadn’t noticed, but they’ve come to watch together, huddling close. As far as the eye can see, glittering speckles like a field of infinite stars.
And then the day fades. The sun grows redder and redder. The sky shifts to void, the galaxy appears under the dimming midday sun.
It’s a spark, barely a candle-flame in the sky. The sea of jellies ripplies with the wind, with the churning Jovian morass.
And then it’s gone.
“Wake me when the new day dawns…”
----------------------------------------
The doc-unit lights up beside Calla’s nameplate. “Regenerative therapy has been unsuccessful,” it says. “Your motor cortex continues to strengthen the aberrant connections, even once they’ve been corrected.”
“I know,” Calla says. Her voice is strong and clear, but she squeezes Lambent’s hand nonetheless, maybe subconsciously. Bears down on it. He does not gasp with the pain.
“Self-guided therapy has also been ineffective. There are no new treatments.” The doc-unit’s voice softens. “I’ll selectively sever your spine. Surgically remove the muscular connections. The pain and the spasms will be gone.”
“She’ll never move again,” Lambent says. Maybe in protest, maybe as clarification. He’s not sure. The hand around his tightens further still.
“We’re going to release you,” the doc says gently. “There’s nothing more this facility can do for you.”
There’s a pause, and it flashes a soft green. “I’m sorry.”
Calla doesn’t respond at first. Lambent looks up, not sure what to say.
Her face is a dull ruddy-red. It’s visible even with her complexion. She lets out a quiet, strangled sound, crushes his hand a little more. And then she releases him.
“Calla, I,” he tries.
She turns away. Lets out a sound like a long, drawn out grunt. Like she’s been punched in the solar plexus. Like she’s too twisted up to breathe.
Like someone too broken to cry.
“I’m sorry, I, uh,”
There’s no further response.
“I, um, if you need anything, you have my contact information.” Lambent feels lame. Like he’s giving out his resume. “I know we don’t know each other all that well, it’s just…”
He realizes he’s spoiling the silence. Blathering like an idiot. Lambent shuts up. He backs away.
Before he leaves he hears it. It’s quiet, in a voice that sounds like shattered windchimes and squashed xylophone keys.
“Together we’ll ride the sun…”
----------------------------------------
It’s dark.
It’s said that at the birth of this star system, at the formation of planets Jupiter’s gravity shielded the newborn Earth from rogue planetoids and impacts. That the enormous guardian-world allowed a fledgling water-and-carbon biosphere to thrive.
Life finds a way. Even without the sun, Jupiter’s poles are lit with lightning and captured ions. One last gift from the dead star. One that will feed the Jovian denizens for possibly decades more.
The internal temperature of the planet is over thirty thousand degrees centigrade. The heat will radiate, and eventually the planet will freeze. But it will take time.
The jellies dissipate soberly. Their luminescence is dimmed. Their tendrils curled up. They drift lower, to live off the energy of the storms, until even those cool and slow.
He summons his old friend to watch beside him. The emulated jelly understands what’s happened, because he understands it. But beyond that, its thoughts are opaque, and its emotions are strange and alien. It speckles purple, and then green.
They watch together until the aurora fades.
“...fly into them one by one…”