I have tried many times before.
Try to get the words out from between my lips.
Fail.
This seems like as good a time as any to give it a final shot.
Open my mouth to speak.
Drift on in silence.
I hadn’t understood before.
It had never crossed my mind.
Arcspace is tiny. It is so, so incredibly small. Reach out a finger and you have crossed it. And it is not black and empty; it is simply too dense for sense to penetrate.
It’s this universe – this cold place in which I will die and die and die and die and die again – that is empty.
Some time later.
When my skin was hot and my heart was cold and all things were failing and it hurt to breathe
Something blacker than black blocked out the stars.
Chapter 55
Iwoke, and wasn’t suffocating.
This was unexpected enough that for a moment I doubted my senses.
Quan ships have a certain quality that is immediately distinct from any imaginations of the afterlife.
The air has a smell like the edge of a thunderstorm, but is almost painfully, throat-scratchingly dry, being pumped in only for those rare occasions when organics visit. The gravity is usually lighter than humans find comfortable, if it is even dialled in for anything other than accelerational consistency.
No panels flash; no lights shine except temporary globes dragged in for organic eyes. Rather, interface ports line every other panel, above and below, and access grilles through which endless scuttling maintenance drones, extensions of the ship’s conscious mind, busy themselves about the vessel. This is not to say that quan vessels are entirely without adornment. Though there are some mainframes that have no interest whatsoever in anything resembling art, others have embraced the idea, unleashing units with varying parameters of dexterity, observation, predictive power, sensory power, etc., with the sole order of finding a way to express in a non-binary visual or auditory form what they consider the highest priority memories in their databanks.
The results have ranged from the stunningly banal – dry-as-dust encyclopaedic descriptions marred with the footnote:This would be more accurately expressed mathematically– to the extraordinary, sculptures of twisted glass and symphonies of rippling, gut-churning sound as the separated consciousnesses of the mainframe seek to answer a question as old as minds themselves:What matters?If there is only so long to live before heat decays to cold, and so much energy with which to travel, to see, to think:What do we believe is important?
And as a footnote to that question, its lingering conclusion:And who do we think we are?
The interior of the room I opened my eyes in was clearly of this nature, for every wall had been lightly laser-carved with a thousand dancing shapes, ranging from spirals of DNA through to a glorious abstract impression of the retina of an animal’s eye. There was something familiar about it, something striking in the question it was trying to solve, though as the fog of my thoughts receded into the dull, throbbing headache of post-oxygen deprivation, I could not put my finger on what.
There was no furniture, except for the Pilot’s chair, and I woke on the floor.
Someone had cut through my survival suit to get the helmet off, leaving a ragged line of torn mesh around my throat. I blinked, and blinked again, and slowly coalesced the creature that hovered above me into what appeared, for all I could tell, to be an oversized metal amphibian. Qis skin was a bright crystalline green, qis optical inputs were either side of a snout-like head, qe had four limbs ending each in six fingers, and a hard shell on qis back that was clearly formed with a biophilic aesthetic in mind, but still had to be a high-efficiency solar converter. I tried to sit up to take a better look at qim, and qe belched: “You will feel dreadful and then you will feel worse. Please remain still for a few moments more.”
Qis efforts towards anthropomorphic incarnation had not extended as far as mobilising qis jaw, which I suspected hid a panoplyof delicate chemical sensors rather than a dynamic speaker unit, but qe gently pushed me back down in a way that suggested some understanding of organic anatomy, maybe even some weak concept of bedside manner.
I tried to ask where I was, and my first attempt was like the cracking of broken metal.
The quan beside me hopped over to a wall unit, extended a hand. A nozzle emerged from the laser-carved wall; discharged water into the sealed hollow of qis palm. Qe turned back to me, held the liquid up to my lips, supported my head as I drank, eased me back down.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You are very welcome.”
Qe was speaking Assembly Adjumiri. The realisation was not a punch, so much as a slow-drifting question that rose less with the warmth of comfort than a shimmering of unease. “Maolcas? The Nitashi I was with?”
