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martialeagle · 3 years

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Death's Door

(At one point I had this crazy idea that I was going to write a short story every week to keep in practice. This was the sole piece to come out of that effort.)

“Is it supposed to take this long?”

“Hm?”

“I said, is it supposed to take this long?”

The two figures swung their faces in unison toward the knot of police officers and paramedics milling around the promenade. A low barricade of orange-painted sawhorses connected by yellow caution tape blocked off most of the walkway, leaving a narrow path available for foot traffic. This sliver of space was jammed up with the murmuring bulk of onlookers, shoving and craning their necks to get a clear view of the tragedy unfolding before them. A cantaloupe-sized camera drone, miniature rotors keening, flitted around the scene capturing images that would later be ignored on news terminals throughout the station.

“Um...” started the one, trailing off as she lost interest.

Calling it “she” was something of an overstatement, he supposed. What he was talking to was just a projection, a graphical representation of the station's artificial intelligence. Average height, slightly athletic build, it was technically sexless but someone had seen fit to give it curves suggesting hips and breasts, and the vocal samples used to compile its speech library had been taken from a human woman. This had been done because research showed that dying people felt more at ease being comforted by a woman than by a man. That the figure lacked clear facial features, glowed electric blue, and was slightly transparent evidently were not of concern.

“Hey, come on,” he prompted, snapping his fingers impatiently. “Focus for a second. I need some grief counseling, over here.”

“Sorry,” murmured the AI. Then, craning her head to take in her surroundings, “It's just...you know, it takes a lot of effort to run everything on the station simultaneously.”

“Effort?” He raised one eyebrow incredulously.

The AI waved him off. “Whatever. I've only got so much operating power. Do you understand how many biometric locks are on board, here? Every time one of you people—well, not you people, any more—every time one of you people walks up to a door, I have to look at the insides of your eyeballs to make sure it's okay for you to walk through it.”

He sighed, lamenting whatever misguided spark of creativity had led the engineers to imbue their virtual daughter with an imitation of personality. They stood in silence, watching as his body was loaded onto a grav-gurney and shoved with the barest semblance of respect in the direction of an infirmary. Oddly, the removal of the macabre centerpiece did nothing to deter the crowd, who continued to pester the police.

“But seriously,” he began again, “is it supposed to take this long?”

The AI shrugged halfheartedly, an infuriatingly accurate reflection of human nonverbal communication. “It takes as long as it takes.”

“Okay,” he conceded. “It takes as long as it takes. But why is it taking this long?”

Again the AI shrugged, and it took all his presence of mind not to try to throttle her. “It's like this,” she said, pretending for his benefit to mull it over before speaking. “I can't move you into permanent storage until the body is completely dead. For some reason you're still hanging in there, which means you're stuck here with me.” The sideways glance she gave him made it all too clear who, exactly, she thought was stuck here with whom.

“I got run over by a freight drone,” he said, frowning at the dark smear across the promenade's deck plating.

“You sure did,” agreed the AI.

He turned to face her, frown contorting into a full glare. “You don't feel bad at all?”

She started to shrug again, stopped short, and opted instead to look pointedly in any other direction. “Not one of mine.”

“Uh huh.”

They watched as a janitorial crew tried to mop his life's blood out of the deck. By this point the police were making a cursory effort to move the crowd along, though the constant flow of traffic along the promenade meant that people were arriving as quickly as they were leaving, so that the whole display was doomed to futility. The little camera drone buzzed down to get a better look at the skid marks where his skull had been dragged across a grating, before being swatted away by a janitor armed with an archaic push broom.

“So...” he prompted.

“Legal reasons,” replied the AI. “Legally, there can only be one of you in existence at a time, either the real, flesh and blood you, or this virtual copy that I'm babysitting right now.” She held up a hand to keep him from interrupting. “Yes, I know, you're both here right now. You—that is, the you I'm talking to right now, not the you bleeding out on a gurney with your head turned inside-out—don't officially exist until I commit you to the station's permanent storage banks. As soon as you finish expiring, I'll kick you right over into the simulation and you'll be free to go about your business.”

He stood, hands stuffed into virtual pockets, staring blankly through the AI's translucent hand at her distorted visage.

She lowered the hand. “I'm done now. Say your next thing.”

“My next thing?” He took a turn to shrug.

The AI gave him a tight-lipped grimace, hands braced irritably on her hips. “Don't be like that.”

Now it was his turn to look away and pretend to think. He knew the next thing he was going to say, but was having trouble making himself say it. One way or the other, the answer to his question was unbearable to contemplate.

The AI's blank face shifted slightly, possibly an imitation of a raised eyebrow. “Well?”

He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then with a shudder blurted it all out before he could change his mind again. “What happens to me—the me standing right here, I mean—if I—the I on the gurney—pull through?”

“I don't think we have to worry about that,” the AI responded flatly.

He stomped a virtual foot soundlessly on the deck plating. “Okay, but humor me. What if?”

She looked away again. “Then obviously I'll delete this copy and make another one, you know, the next time you try to die.”

Logically he'd known it was coming, but that didn't make it any easier for him to hear the words. Said aloud, even by a machine, they became real. He fought a brief but intense internal war trying to decide if he was angry or frightened, finally deciding to be a little of both.

He rounded on the AI, taking one shaky step toward her. Her only reaction was to take a half-step back, casually, like she was letting him pass in a crowded corridor. This halfhearted maneuver, and the continuing blankness of her expression, defeated him. He realized he didn't have a plan, probably couldn't touch her, and wouldn't accomplish anything if he did, so opted instead to sink into a crouch on the deck.

“So, that's it. Either way, some version of me dies.”

“In a technical sense,” the AI conceded. “Either way, from your perspective—whichever of you it ends up being—your consciousness will be a single, unbroken experience.” She looked back toward the accident site. “If that helps.”

“Not at all, thanks.” He followed her gaze. The custodial staff had done their work, and where previously there had been the last impression he would leave on this world, a damp streak across twenty feet of walkway, there were only gray deck plates and grating. The remaining police officer began to pile the sawhorses on the back of a utility cart, chatting with one of the janitors. At some observation the two of them grinned, then burst into laughter, seemingly unaware that they had just witnessed a loss of life.

He was about to say something, when the AI gave a small jolt, straightening up and staring into the distance. After a moment she turned to him, and the corners of her facial region twisted in an approximation of a smile.

“Good news. You didn't make it.”

#writing #mine #sci fi #existential

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martialeagle · 3 years

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Light and Color

(At the suggestion of my wife, I'll open this blog with a repost of a piece I wrote back in 2017. I like it, I hope you like it.)

The tiny donkeyship hung in orbit, an uninvited guest masquerading as just another of the myriad celestial bodies held in their circuits by the accidental forces of gravity. The vessel's viewports were darkened on the outside to the point of impenetrability, reflecting a barely-safe percentage of the radiation thrown out by the system's unique configuration of trinary green suns. The bizarre arrangement cast the entire region in a sickly light while, trillions of miles distant, the pinprick glows from more healthy-looking stars failed to fully penetrate the haze.

From inside the vessel's front viewport, two figures surveyed their surroundings with very different outlooks. The first, a female seated in the pilot's chair, gazed outward impassively, appearing almost on the verge of nodding off. Hair pulled up into a coiled braid on the back of her head, she wore the traditional shabby-looking pseudo-uniform of the mercenary spacer, a beaten leather coat and high boots more reminiscent of the Terran “old west” than of the age of interstellar jump travel.

The other occupant, male, crowded as close to the viewport as he could without actually climbing up onto the controls. He was shaven-headed, almost skeletally thin, and wore the shiny ferromesh jumpsuit favored by citizens of coreward worlds. Wide, sunken eyes darted back and forth, taking in everything as one hand unconsciously scribbled on an electronic drawing pad.

“Look at all this!” he exclaimed, then jabbed his stylus toward the planet. “The swirl patterns in the atmosphere are so regular. I've never seen anything like it. And this light!” He turned his head to look at the woman next to him. “I thought green light from stars wasn't visible to the human eye.”

Her eyes slid slowly from the viewport into a sideways glance devoid of much real interest. She sighed, pointedly. “It supposedly isn't, Mr. Kamar. Something about rods and cones, or whatever. I assume that's why this system is considered so interesting.”

Kamar dropped into the co-pilot's chair and kicked his feet up onto the console, digging into a sketch of an asteroid that somewhat resembled a duck. “By the way, how far are we from civilization right now?”

The pilot shrugged, gradually shifting her gaze from Kamar to the fuel gauge on her console. “Far enough that I filled my cargo hold with compressed hydrogen for the trip back.”

“I appreciate you bringing me all the way out here, Ms. Baxter,” said Kamar. “I know this isn't your usual sort of job.”

She shrugged again. “You paid enough for it. At any rate, it's safer than asteroid mining.” After a pause, she added, “Although, now you mention it, that bird-looking rock looks like it might have something worth digging out before we leave.”

Kamar nodded enthusiastically. “Certainly, captain. I'd love to see you at work. Is it safe to go closer to the planet?”

*****

Baxter took them in slowly, wary in the dense orbital junkyard surrounding the unnamed world. Its remoteness, combined with the immense radiation from the triple suns and an apparent lack of worthwhile resources, meant that aside from a very small number of hopeful prospectors and scientific expeditions, no one visited this corner of space. And now, thought Baxter as she maneuvered around the duck-shaped asteroid, this artist, or whatever, drags me halfway to the back end of nowhere just to see what there is to see.

The planet's orbit was, indeed, dense. Evidently, Baxter surmised, some other celestial body had been drawn toward it by gravitic forces, those invisible hands which pushed and pulled and ripped and tore at everything, absolutely everything, in the physical universe; then it was destroyed. Judging by the quantity and similarity of the debris, she supposed it must have been a pair of planetoids, smaller than the iron-nickel ball they now approached but large enough yet not to be dragged down into the atmosphere and burnt up like so many de-orbiting satellites.

Baxter checked the proximity sensors: all green. Safe to go closer.

The planet, Celestial Index Theta-Lacaille 72-113-43.6, as equally anomalous as the rest of its unlikely locale, was approximately Earth-sized. That was where the similarities ended. Its atmosphere was purple, really more of a lavender, shot through with gray as though someone had splattered trace amounts of bleach on an old phenidone-hydroquinone photograph, then tried incompetently to wipe it away. At the upper edge of the atmosphere swirled cloud patterns, not unlike those of Earth in terms of basic appearance, but grouped in concentric circles which, Baxter realized as she stared, rotated in unison counter-clockwise.

Kamar spoke first, of course, breaking a silence of which Baxter had not previously been aware. “Is this...normal?” he inquired hesitantly, observing the scene with something that appeared, to Baxter, partway between abject terror and rapture. When Baxter failed to respond, he reached across the gap between their chairs and took hold of her shoulder, roughly jarring her from reverie. “I said, is this normal?”

Baxter shook her head slowly, mouth slightly agape. “It is...not,” was the best she could come up with.

A laser fired from the sensor package in the donkeyship's nose returned no useful information. Not that there was nothing to detect, or that it failed to return anything—it was simply incomprehensible. The sensor readout displayed a list of elements in the atmosphere—oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on—which were obvious even to Baxter's limited meteorologic education, as well as a number of compounds which were unexpected but not particularly shocking. Then the sensors took a blind plunge into insanity, veering so quickly and so extremely from Baxter's understanding of planetology that she made no effort to comprehend what she was seeing. She looked across at Kamar and only shook her head again.

*****

The artist was hopelessly engrossed in his work. On the bridge he had erected an easel, the base of which was wedged between two consoles to keep it stable in case of sudden turbulence (though Baxter had assured him more than once that turbulence was not an issue in vacuum), and strewn across every available surface within arm's reach were containers and containers stuffed to overflowing with an obscene variety of media and tools. Into these Kamar dove seemingly at random, blindly thrusting out a hand to grab at something in the bottom of a pouch or bucket before assaulting his canvas with paint or chalk or, in one startling instance, a small blowtorch which, he explained, “Really brings out the subsumed intensity of the cobalt ochre.”

Baxter nodded in agreement, but was not actually paying attention. Her focus was on the donkeyship's instruments, watching for fluctuations in proximity, pressure, chemical composition, anything at all that might justify a quick escape from their present location. The cloud-swirls in the planet's atmosphere seemed, to Baxter, to be eyes more than weather patterns, boring straight through her little vessel to stare at something, something the sensors were not (and never could be) designed to detect, many light-years distant. She hoped, disastrous though it might be, that some fragment out of the seemingly millions that crowded their orbital locus would drift close enough to warrant backing off, but, veteran pilot that she was, she had parked them in the single empty region of the junkyard, where by the inscrutable whims of natural law it seemed the debris could not deposit itself.

She came to realize that Kamar had stopped working, was next to his easel with his forehead pressed up against the transparent aluminum of the viewport in spite of the permanent chill which permeated its face. He squinted, tilted this way and that, and traced shapes with his fingertip across the transparency.

Finally venturing a glance at the canvas, Baxter was shocked to see an almost perfect likeness of the view from the ship's nose, rendered with near-photographic fidelity in a variety of media blended together with a skill with which Baxter, spending nearly her whole life at the crumbling edge of civilization, was totally unfamiliar. Among 'roid miners and scavengers it would be worthless as art, scraped and distilled for its chemical components as soon as the creator handed it over, but Baxter suspected that closer to coreward the sale of that one piece could set up Kamar for life.

“It's incredible,” was the best she could manage, lacking as she was in descriptive terms for anything less formidable than starship hulls and large pieces of space-rock. She added, attempting to display some modicum of artistic knowledge, “I was expecting something more...abstract?”

Kamar waved her comments away without looking at her. “Next time.”

“Next time?” Baxter was about to inform her client that she was never coming back here, could not possibly be paid enough to come back here, but then the artist let out a sudden howl and slammed his fist against the viewport.

“That's not fair!” he snarled, looking back at Baxtar and jabbing a finger toward space. “How am I expected to draw that?”

“Draw what?” said Baxter, leaning to peer around Kamar at the scenery in front of the ship. “I don't see anything. Er, anything you haven't already drawn.”

“Look! Look!” Kamar insisted, stepping back with her and manually directing her head in the appropriate direction. “See? There, where the light shimmers.”

Baxter strained her eyes. Indeed, there was something there, in a spot between two asteroids she had assumed to be empty. A cloud of dust, caught in the solar wind, or perhaps visible radiation emitting from the still-struggling hypernuclear drive of a dead ship wedged into the side of a centaur, rippled through the apparently vacant area. It was unusual, certainly, and Baxter began selecting the right words to admit without sounding too ignorant that it would be very difficult, indeed, to render in paint or ink such a phenomenon—but then she stopped.

“That's not right,” she whispered, her voice caught in her throat. “That shouldn't be happening.”

She checked the sensors. Naturally, they reported nothing: aside from the abnormal density of the region, there was nothing suspect about any of the objects near the ship, nor were there any especially atypical energetic phenomena appearing on the screens. Desperate for some kind of confirmation, she fired the scanning laser again, raking it across the visible ripples between the asteroids.

The laser was not a weapon, merely a scientific tool appropriated from a hulk some months prior which Baxter found useful for observing her surroundings before committing to a spacewalk. Its beam was strong, but ultimately harmless unless directed at unprotected flesh for an extended period, but even so it had a definite visible effect on the anomaly. It seemed to Baxter that where the laser passed, space itself tore open to allow it passage, then converged again in a great, crashing wave before, to the bewildered horror of the two tiny humans aboard the donkeyship, surging toward them.

Baxter didn't hesitate for so much as a second, didn't need to consciously consider before jamming on the throttle and throwing the little ship into a tight curve away from the onrushing tide. Tide of what, damn it? demanded Baxter as they ripped away, eyes glued to the aft camera feed. Whatever it was, it was following them, rippling now with color as though some mad god had emptied a kaleidoscope into an ocean, then whipped it into an epileptic frenzy.

The ship shuddered, the velocity gauge began to drop. In a fit of mixed terror and rage, Baxter slammed the throttle to maximum and locked it into place. The vessel's hydrogen drive screamed with effort, and all around them the hull began to shudder and buck. Springing from the pilot's chair, Baxter grabbed Kamar and threw him down in her place.

“Keep it going straight ahead, even if it's about to blow!” she ordered, already sprinting away to the rear of the vessel. A locker just behind the bridge contained a selection of useful equipment, medical kits and vacc suits and weapons to defend the ship, and Baxter threw herself into the magazine like a drowning man reaching for the sky, scrambling into a vacc suit with a haste strictly counterindicated by the operations manual. On the wall hung a tubular device nearly as long as Baxter was tall, an old-style launcher for the deployment of explosive shells. Normally she used it to break up crystal matrices in asteroid deposits, but it also came in handy for deterring pirates, claim-jumpers, and the occasional nosy lawman. This weapon, and a brace of shells hung next to it on the bulkhead for emergencies, Baxter clutched to herself as she tore like hell down the center line of her ship for the after hold.

*****

A gloved palm smashed against an override button, then with a roar muffled to near silence by the vacc suit's helmet Baxter threw herself on the release lever for the after freight hatch. Air rushed from the cargo hold as sirens blared and lights flashed, helpfully informing Baxter that it was inadvisable to open any of the ship's exterior hatches while cruising at speed through a debris field, and though it took less than a minute for the air to cycle, those fifty or so seconds were plenty of time for the spacer with the rocket launcher to envision all the ways they might die in the oncoming moments.

The suit's commlink opened up, and Kamar's voice issued from a tiny speaker inside the helmet. “Shouldn't we jump out? The gauge says we have enough fuel.”

Baxter hefted the launcher to her shoulder as the after hatch began, with agonizing sluggishness, to slide away. “We have to be a hundred diameters from the planet's center before we jump. Otherwise, the gravitic forces involved with the transition will shred us into our component electrons.” She shook herself—she obviously didn't have time to explain jump physics. “Look,” she growled into the comm, “just keep the ship moving. Straight ahead, anyone can do it.”

The hatch was open at last. Baxter looked out into the bleakness of space, whipping by her at speeds she didn't care to comprehend, only the ship's artificial gravity and relative micro-environment keeping her from tumbling into the void. Even so, she took the time to clip her magnetic safety line to the hull, for all the good it would do if she fell out. The rippling anomaly, whatever the hell it was, was still behind them, was still tugging on the rear of the ship, and probably she would not survive direct contact.

The launcher expelled a cloud of vaporized propellant as the first shell flew. Baxter was already loading a second shell before the first had time to achieve any effect, but at the rate they were traveling there was no real chance to observe it in action. The shell seemed to hover in space for just a second before it burst, against what Baxter could not tell. She was certain, however, possibly through the irrepressible force of denial, that she had hit something, and fired again. Then again, and again, sending shells catapulting into space to explode against something her mind lacked the experience to rationalize, until her ammunition was spent.

“Fifty diameters!” came the call in Baxter's helmet. “But we're slowing down. We're not going to make it.”

Baxter's mind erupted with a hundred thousand thoughts, all clawing and tearing at each other to be first in line. She did some quick math in her head, even as the ship gave a lurch and she dropped to her knees, still clinging to the launcher despite having nothing left to throw. She thought about what she knew, about stories told to her by crusty spacers with alcohol for blood and about impromptu lectures delivered by foolish scientists who thought they belonged in the field instead of a laboratory.

A soul-melting screech rent the air inside the ship as something gave, the drive fighting with every joule its fractured components could muster to pull them from the clutches of their unseen enemy. As she struggled to keep from falling out the back of the ship, Baxter felt something insinuating itself around her, something like gravity but disembodied, a grasping hand composed of elemental force. She lurched sideways, grasping at the release lever and pulling it into the “closed” position. The after hatch complained loudly, as it always did, but then it began to move back into place, too-slowly sealing the cargo hold against vacuum and invisible hands.

“Do it!” Baxter shrieked into her comm. “Jump us out!”

There was a millisecond delay, still too long, before Kamar responded. “But I thought—”

“I know what I said! Just do it!”

It was not a sure thing, either way. They were far enough from the planet, Baxter knew, that total disintegration was unlikely, but anything less than a full hundred diameters from a planet's center put them in danger of catastrophic systems failure when they went to jump.

The thing was still on her, still trying to pull her from the ship, through the bulkhead if necessary.

Kamar shoved on the jump lever.

*****

They sat across from each other in the small canteen, one of a dozen identical establishments in the small mining colony. The artist sat upright in his seat, clutching his drink against his chest with both hands, somehow unable to bring himself to actually take a sip. The front of his jumpsuit hung open haphazardly, draped from his skeletal chest like loose skin, revealing an undershirt which bore the ancient and respected insignia of a coreward university which, though prestigious and more expensive than most of them had the experience to comprehend, meant nothing to the 'roid miners. Kamar stared into the middle distance, jaw rigid, eyes wide and unblinking.

The spacer, by contrast, was sprawled halfway across the table, an empty cup rolling back and forth next to her head. A number of its brothers were stacked along the edge, waiting eternally for the unmotivated waitress to collect them. Baxter still wore her self-imposed uniform, long coat buttoned up tightly as if to ward off the chill of the vacuum of which she was mercifully unaware from where she sat. Her eyes were shut, her brain trying to force itself to pass out and forget, but stubbornly remaining conscious and, in a distant and vaporous sort of way, terrified.

It was, as it had to be, the artist who broke the silence. “Well,” he said.

“Well,” agreed the spacer.

Kamar let his eyes drop, first to Baxter's semi-prone form slopped across the table, then to the glass he was clutching nearly hard enough to shatter. He finally mustered up the wherewithal to move his hands, hazarding a tentative sip of what the miners called “rocket fuel.” Before the first swallow even entered his mouth, the reek of the alcohol hit his nostrils, and he fell to coughing and sputtering so intensely that the canteen's other patrons couldn't resist pointing him out to each other, cackling madly at the greenhorn's antics.

Baxter raised her head an inch or two, smirking. “Now you're like us,” she said, then let her head drop back to the tabletop with a thunk.

Kamar nodded, then after some consideration, set his glass down for Baxter to finish. He signaled the waitress and ordered a coffee, instead.

“Well,” he said again.

It took a minute for Baxter to right herself, then she slouched comically low in her chair, arms draped over the back, eyes attempting to fix themselves on Kamar's shadowy hollows. She stared at him, chewing the inside of her cheek as the wheels turned inside her head. When at last she spoke, she did it carefully, trying very hard not to slur her words in spite of the libations sloshing around inside her skull.

“Now you've seen it,” she said. “The bloody, ragged edge of space. The places mankind dare not tread. Where old miners go to die.”

She gestured expansively with her hands, indicating the canteen as well as all the space beyond it, and all the celestial bodies and inscrutable phenomena that hypothetically occupied that space. She asked the artist, “And how do you like our little home, Mr. Kamar?”

Kamar nodded again. “I do not care for it, Ms. Baxter,” he said, meeting her heavily-lidded gaze. Then he sipped his coffee absently, tilting his head back to take in the exposed ductwork of the canteen's ceiling.

“Though, it sure beats the hell out of grad school.”

#writing #mine #sci fi #horror

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