“Pause,” Iris said, but the pulse had already vanished. He turned slowly, keeping his breath soft and level, only to see that he was still alone. Beads of condensation raced down tall, sloping walls, occasionally falling to the metal floor—a steady rhythm. Nothing more.
Human error. You’re not accustomed to being completely alone. It’s making you jumpy.
This much was true. Iris took another deep breath and wiped his palms dry on his robes. “Then we are safe?”
Safety is relative.There was a prickle of laughter to VIFAI’s response. If there had been any real danger, Iris’s companion would alert him in due time. The map, then. He allowed the thrill of exploration to bloom once more.
“There has to be a hydroponics here or maybe even a greenhouse, or an orchard, or something where they would have grown edible plants,” Iris mused out loud. “If I were designing a ship, I would put it all on the middle floor, close to the centre. Safer that way. If there was ever a hull breach, the food source would remain protected. Then again, I don’t know anything about designing generation ships.” As he walked about the room, Iris hummed to himself under his breath, flitting between his ideas about greenhouses and orchards.
“Meanwhile,” he asked VIFAI, “could you please find some information on our companions? I’d like to know more about who it is I’m sharing this space with.” Continuing to studythe map he saw several long rooms adjoined by thin corridors, sprawled cross the third floor. A promising configuration. The oddly shaped rooms would do well as nurseries, but not much could be concluded from the map alone. Reaching for another sandwich from within his robes, Iris asked VIFAI, “Please, switch this to an interactive map for the deck floor. I want to go explore these spaces here.” He pointed to the rectangular rooms on the map and took a ravenous bite from his sandwich. Meat was one of several flavours that Iris often forgot he enjoyed until the delicacy was in front of him again. Even lab grown, meat triggered some distant and primal part of him, stirring the drive to consume, towant. It would do him good to exercise caution as to how much he indulged.
Sandwich in hand, Iris ducked into a previously unexplored corridor in the opposite direction of already known space. Here, the floor lay lush and untouched. No heavy footprints had flattened the pillows of vibrant, emerald moss. No engineers had come through here. Noparticularengineer, for certain. The projected map was leading Iris towards the nearest staircase to the third deck. All corridors on this side of the ship were wider, so wide that two Irises could walk side by side without touching the walls with their outstretched arms. The ceilings disappeared into the dark, with only twisting, naked air roots trailing downwards to suggest at their existence at all. Beneath his feet, remnants of a moving walkway peered out from beneath the moss. Iris nudged it with a bare toe a few times in an attempt to wake it, but the thing had been dead a long time, and he moved on.
From the long shadows cast by shattered lights along the walls, an open maw of a wide doorway beckoned Iris to explore farther in. As he hesitated by the opening, a wave of cool air fluttered his robes, sending the small hairs on the back of hisneck upright. An ethereal flickering advanced from the pitch black towards him, painting a path of a faint blue glow.
Wrong way,VIFAI warned.
Iris ignored it. The floor below his right foot pulsed exactly once and sent a ripple down the glowing path, as if to affirm that he was to follow.
“We’re exploring, remember?” Iris shook himself off, the drive for exploration overpowering any reasonable caution. “You did say we wererelativelysafe.”
VIFAI chimed hesitantly and added nothing more on the matter. It watched in silence as Iris first took one and then another step over the threshold and into the darkened room. Some time ago, the cramped space beyond the doorway could have served as a living room. Now it was nothing but a tomb with the remnants of a coffee table in the middle of the room, overgrown with blossoming wisteria. A couch, half eaten by shrubs and fuzzy moss, sat to the right of it, and on it shone a half-buried skeleton with a single round hole in its temple. Strands of bioluminescent fungi twisted along its stripped leg bones and pulsed with light along the pelvis.
The ancient bones threatened to turn to dust as Iris ran a hand along them. In their unyielding drive for survival, vines had pried the ribcage open, each individual rib splayed like the great wings of a bird. Brilliant, purple flowers sprouted from the wide-open mouth—the wisteria had wrapped itself around the spine and pushed its way through the eye sockets. There were cracks all along the bones where the vine claimed victory over flesh, where the wounding stems had squeezed and squeezed until the radii splintered. An ancient, rusted pistol lay by the skeleton’s side. Now completely dysfunctional, having served its owner a final time. Of all the simple ways to go, this one, by far, was Iris’s least favourite.
“How sad,” he said. Once the muscles and the tendons had rotted away, the skeleton’s fingers had relaxed, lying flat on the worn fabric of the couch. Were they once clenched, digging into the cushions in fear before the decision had been made? Or was there only desperation and yearning for the relief that was to come in the impending nothingness?
No, there was always fear. Iris knew this, had witnessed it time and again as people gasped for their last breaths, as they fought to keep the inevitable away. Time and again, all he could do was bear witness. He knelt by the couch and lay his hand atop the bony remains. He gently brushed long strands of mycelium aside, silently apologizing to the fungi for disrupting their habitat. It was strange to find them on bone, something providing next to no sustenance. But everything aboard theNicaeahad been strange so far, and with blossoming dread, Iris slowly began to understand he had only scratched the surface of this strangeness.
“I’m sorry, my friend, if you had to die alone,” Iris intoned in his habitual cadence for prayer. “I’m sorry if you felt pain, if you were abandoned. It will bring you little solace, but flowers have made your body theirs, and moss has made a bed for you. And now I, a Vessel of the Light, have gazed upon your last remaining form so I can carry your memory with me until my own body is claimed by moss and flowers when that time comes. I guide you back to the Light, and it welcomes you back. My friend, your journey is complete, and you may rest now.” Iris stroked the skeleton’s hand twice and rose to his feet. “In your end, you knew what it was to be the cosmos.”
There must have been a period of time between when the passengers had perished and when the greenery took over. There must have been a time in its voyage when the ship was truly dead and silent, piloted by no one, a home to no one. What had it been like, in that lonely silence?
With nothing more to add, Iris retreated to the corridor. He gave the door a nudge to close, but it had been stuck ajar for decades, if not centuries, and his efforts did little.
What are you doing?
VIFAI wouldn’t understand. “Giving them a little privacy,” Iris grunted through clenched teeth and pushed as hard as he could on the door. His bare feet lost traction on the floor, his shoulder sliding along the metal as the lichen scraped away, his robes losing threads where the harsh metal met silk. The door had yet to close. With a huff, Iris pushed back from the door and eyed it with growing disdain. Then, he took a few steps back and got a running start. Shoulder first, he ran into the door with all the force he had in him. A little creak, and the metal slid shut.
“Finally.” Iris rubbed his bruised shoulder and started down the corridor again. He sensed VIFAI’s motions in the back of his consciousness, like a phantom itch he would never be able to scratch out of existence.
You really feel for them,it said at last.
“I’ve extended the same compassion I would extend anyone else,” Iris said and ran his outstretched palm along the wall, feeling the imperfections in the lichen. The faint prickling at his fingertips lulled him back into a trained calm.
Your brain chemistry indicates differently.VIFAI had picked the worst time to be functioning optimally.Your heart rate and endocrine response suggest you are experiencing distress.
Iris rolled his eyes. “Can you sound any less human?”
A mild shock of electric laughter radiated a warm glow through his brain stem.
You relate to them.
Iris paused, one foot suspended in the air. VIFAI already had access to his thoughts, his brain and body chemistry, and all his memories. He wondered if some part of VIFAI’s memoryhad been damaged during their youth or if it was deliberately choosing to forget. Did AI constructs ever forget? Could they? Iris could ask. He could also just let the thought linger so VIFAI could pick up on it, like it picked up on every other thought and flutter of emotion that crossed Iris’s consciousness. “Doesn’t everyone?” Iris asked, partly to himself, partly to the artificial voice in his brain. “Can’t everyone imagine an unrelenting pain they would want to end, at any cost?”
VIFAI said nothing.
“Maybe notyou, but people,” Iris added.
