STARFARER
A Short Story
By
Jeremy Reimer
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Starfarer
Copyright © 2012 by Jeremy Reimer
Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
*****
STARFARER
*****
Nobody told Angie that she would dream.
They warned her about the cold, about how her legs would feel stiff when she woke up, about the many days before she could eat again. But they never mentioned dreaming while in stasis. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
She saw herself floating in a giant ocean on a world with purple skies and mountains that would move when she wasn’t looking at them. She saw lazy octopi sail past on parachutes.
She saw her husband smiling at her.
He reached out his hand for her and she reached back, longing for his embrace. Then the ground rumbled and cracked open between them. A chasm ripped the earth in two as if it were a piece of paper. Rumbling sounds filled her ears, louder and louder, as her husband was pulled away from her.
The red sun began to blink. Her skin cracked and crumbled under the intense, throbbing heat.
She was thrown violently to the ground.
Suddenly she was awake, coughing, in a pool of water and her own vomit. Sirens were ringing all around her and emergency lights were flashing.
Her head felt like a brick. She tried to move, but her legs were like rubber.
She spat and screamed and pounded her fists on the floor in frustration. What was happening? Why couldn’t she move?
Remember your training, she thought to herself. What is the first thing you do in an emergency?
She strained to look upwards, towards the wall. Oxygen masks. Where were the oxygen masks? She rubbed her eyes with a wet hand to try and clear her blurred vision. The masks were there, on the wall, but she couldn’t reach them. They just dangled there, taunting her, as the ship continued to shake and the klaxons continued to blare.
Then she heard a long straining noise, like bending sheet metal, followed by a loud crack. She was jolted off the floor and started floating towards the ceiling as the artificial gravity faded away. She flailed her arms wildly and somehow managed to grab hold of one of the masks as she drifted by.
Secure your own mask before assisting others.
Her heart was beating wildly as she fastened the mask to her face and tightened the straps. Wind whipped at her sticky hair as the cabin pressure leaked out into space. How long would the oxygen from the masks last? Ten minutes? Five? She couldn’t remember.
She had to find her husband and wake him. Damn the mission planners for putting him in a separate stasis section, just because he was on the command crew! Why couldn’t they have been together?
It was only a few floors away, but up and down had ceased to exist and Angie was already in a panic. Fortunately her arms still worked, and her legs were no longer a liability in zero gravity.
She slowly pulled her way up the ladder to the next floor. The wind was dying down now, but she felt the cold. Ice crystals were forming on her hair and face.
She pushed open the hatch separating the floors and climbed through.
The floor was gone. The rest of the ship was gone. The ladder, like everything else, had been ripped apart and ended in twisted, jagged metal. Outside was the blackness of space. In the distance was the other half of the sleeper ship Nova Cosmos, pockmarked by holes and explosions, slowly drifting farther and farther away.
Angie cried out, but her voice traveled no further than the confines of her oxygen mask. She imagined her husband on the other part of the ship, falling away from her, increasing the distance between them every second that passed. Her heart pounded in fear.
Not knowing what else to do, she jumped.
The ship exploded in a silent flash of light. Angie covered her eyes. The world went black.
*****
They said she wouldn’t dream.
Was she dreaming?
She must have had a horrible nightmare. Angie remembered dreaming that the ship was being torn in two, and leaping into the darkness of space to try and reach the other side. She shivered at the memory. At least she was safe in her stasis coffin. She turned over and tried to go back to sleep.
Wait a moment.
How am I able to move?
Why is it so warm?
Her eyes opened. She was in a coffin, all right, but it wasn’t her stasis pod. The inside of her pod had been covered in written instructions and diagrams to help her acclimatize once she woke up. This container was completely bare. She touched the walls, expecting to feel cold metal.
Instead she felt a strange rubbery substance, warm to her touch.
The top of the coffin was clear glass. She pressed against it and it opened with a mechanical hiss. The noise startled her.
Cautiously, she poked her head out of the top of the pod and looked around.
She was in an empty, white room. The walls were bare, save for a few oddly-shaped sockets and small glass displays.
There was no gravity, so she was able to carefully float out of her coffin and drift around the small room. Despite the warmth in the room, she found herself shivering.
“Hello?” she called out. “Is anybody there?”
The only sound she heard was a steady hum of distant machinery.
She drifted towards one of the displays and tapped it. The screen was blank.
She sighed. Her stomach was making growling noises and she had a splitting headache. She looked down: she was still wearing the thin white cotton underclothes she had on while she had been in stasis. At least she could breathe, although she had no idea what had happened to her oxygen mask.
Where was she?
The room had only one feature that looked like it could be an exit, a thin octagonal outline about two meters in diameter on the wall opposite from her coffin. Ostensibly it was on the ceiling, but such distinctions were largely meaningless in zero gravity.
She drifted up to the door and inspected it. There were no visible controls anywhere near the outline that could serve as a control. She pushed gently on the center of the octagon, causing her to drift back towards her coffin again.
The octagon lit up and emitted a soft chime. Angie stared at it.
Stylized images appeared on the screen. She saw a solid green silhouette of her former ship, the Nova Cosmos, drift across the display from the left side. Then a much larger red ship, a design she did not recognize, appeared from the right. As the two ships approached, the red vessel tried to veer out of the way, but it was too late. They impacted, and the Nova Cosmos was torn in half.
Angie felt her stomach churning. She remembered this part.
The image zoomed in, highlighting the wreck as it was consumed by explosions. A small green stick figure escaped the blasts. Small red triangles floated up and surrounded the figure, then brought it into the red ship.
The red ship. The destroyer. That’s where she was now.
A sob caught in her throat.
*****
She tried tapping the octagon-shaped display many times after that, but it did not communicate again. She was getting thirsty and her stomach was making angry noises.
She tried to slee
p, but her hunger kept her awake. She cried. Her tears floated off in wobbly drops that she quickly grabbed from the air, not wanting to waste a single drop of water.
Angie was floating listlessly in her coffin when the robot entered. It came through a circular opening in the floor, a small hole that she swore hadn’t been there before.
The robot was made of a smooth, dull metal, about thirty centimeters across. It moved by firing bursts of compressed air through tiny jets on its sides. It was holding something that looked like a glass bottle in its metal claws.
It beeped.
“Is that water?” Angie asked the robot.
It beeped again, more insistently this time.
She reached out and the robot opened its claws. The bottle drifted into her hands.
She fumbled awkwardly with it, trying to figure out how to open the top. Finally she hit a recessed button on the side and water spurted out, making a giant glob in front of her face. She drank it up greedily.
“Thanks,” she said, in between gasps. She wiped her mouth. “Can you tell me anything about this ship? Did any of my crew-mates survive the explosion? Did you rescue anyone else?”
The robot beeped sadly.
“What about this ship?” Angie asked. “Where is the Captain?”
The only reply was another sad beep.
She shook her head and sighed. “Can you take me to see anyone?”
In response, the robot whirred and extended a small cylinder from the top of its head. The cylinder lit up in a multitude of colors and began projecting a hologram above the robot.
The hologram coalesced into the shape of a small, squid-like creature, about half a meter tall.
Two of its tentacles were much larger and more muscular than the others, and they allowed the squid to stand up and face Angie directly. Two round, limpid eyes stared at her.
The squid spoke. “Lloyrnid,” it said languorously. A white rectangle appeared above its head. Inside the rectangle, a stylized green tentacle pointed towards the creature. “Lloyrnid,” it repeated as the tentacle flashed.
“Hello Lloyrnid. I’m Angie,” she said, pointing to herself.
“Aaaannjeeee,” the squid said.
*****
Over the next few days, Angie continued trying to communicate with the holographic figure. She mimed the act of eating to the squid, and when it shook its head slowly back and forth she initially thought it was refusing her. A short while later, however, the robot returned with a small metal container containing long strips of what looked and smelled like seaweed. She cautiously nibbled a bit and discovered, to her surprise, that it was tasty and filling. Later, she had to mime the other side of the digestive system. The robot flashed its lights a few times and a small, vacuum-assisted waste receptacle appeared in the floor.
Slowly she was able to build up a small vocabulary. She learned the words for space ship, stars, and planets. Lloyrnid was able to explain, using words and pictograms, about how his people had been wandering between the stars for a very long time.
She repeatedly tried to ask about the rest of her crew, but the squid would just nod repeatedly, a gesture she now knew indicated a negative answer. She sometimes broke down in tears after this, at which point the robot would leave the room.
Learning the alien’s language was slow and difficult. Angie had always done well with languages at school, but the squid’s basic grammar structures didn’t easily map to anything she knew. Nouns were the easiest to learn, but verbs were more subtle and had more forms and variations than she was used to. She tried to teach Lloyrnid her language, but he would just nod and return to instructing her.
Angie found it hard to measure time passing, but it seemed like many weeks had gone by. After the initial shock and curiosity, she found herself getting bored. The hologram-producing robot would only visit her for a few hours at a time, and she could never predict when its next visit would be.
She continually asked if she could leave the room. Lloyrnid would pause, as if uncertain, but then would nod slowly.
There was one word that she wanted to learn more than anything else, but so far had been unable to figure out.
The word was: Why?
Angie woke up from another bad dream when a loud crack rang out. She rubbed her eyes and looked around. A large hole, about two meters in diameter, had appeared in the floor.
Cautiously, she floated over to inspect it. The hole was a larger version of the aperture that normally admitted the robot. She called out for Lloyrnid, but there was no answer.
Slowly, she pulled herself through the hole and down through the tunnel beyond. The walls were smooth and transparent, showing a vast network of pipes and wires just outside the tube.
As she continued through the tunnel, the pipes beyond opened up to reveal a much larger space outside. It was difficult to judge the scale, but it looked easily larger than the Nova Cosmos. Hundreds of other tubes and beams criss-crossed the open space. In the distance, she thought she saw more small robots moving about.
The tube opened up into another small room, this one about half the size of the one she had been in. Multiple tubes connected it to other parts of the ship, but the only open door was the one she had just come through.
She looked back, and the door snapped closed.
A loud clang made Angie jump. It was coming from the far wall. She instinctively backed away, but curiosity overcame her, and she tried to peer around to see what was on the other side.
It was a larger version of the hologram robot, carrying a metal object that looked like an oversized hammer.
“Lloyrnid!” she yelled. “Is that you? Are you there?”
The only response was an even more insistent hammering. Dents began to appear in the wall. Angie started to panic.
She turned around and tried to reopen the door behind her. It had vanished without a trace. Frantically, she searched around looking for buttons or control pads.
“Open!” she screamed, using the alien’s language. “Door, open!”
The outline of the door reappeared and slid open. Angie rushed through and scrambled back up the tube to her room. She moved with such haste that she flew through the air and bounced off the ceiling. The door behind her disappeared.
She rubbed the back of her head where it had hit the ceiling, then looked around the room. The alien’s robot and hologram were sitting on the floor, waiting for her.
“Angie, don’t go outside,” Lloyrnid said, nodding vigorously. “Stay in the room.”
“What? Why?” Angie replied automatically in English. When the alien did not respond, she tried again using what few words she knew in his tongue: “You talk to me!”
Lloyrnid’s hologram shuffled back and forth on its invisible pedestal. “Don’t go out,” it repeated. “Danger out there. No air.”
Angie sighed. “I want to see,” she said.
“No. Danger. Don’t go out.”
“Then talk to me. Talk to me about yourself. Tell me more about the ship. Don’t leave!”
Lloyrnid’s face suddenly looked sad. “I will tell you,” it said.
*****
Lloyrnid started to tell the story of his people. It was slow going, and Angie would repeatedly stop him to ask the meaning of certain words. The alien would pause, flash some explanatory pictograms above its head until Angie was satisfied, then continue on.
The squid-like creature that addressed her was Lloyrnid’s original form, back when its species still lived on its original home planet. Angie wasn’t clear on how long ago it was, but it was at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. It was a small, swampy world, orbiting close to a red dwarf star.
The squids were genderless amphibians, switching sex as necessary and mating in the water. Much of their early technology had been concentrated on building shelters from the unyielding environment.
When their civilization developed roc
kets, they found space to be a cold and hostile place. They built robot ships to go in their stead, to explore their solar system and beyond. Sometimes they would stow caches of digitally preserved memories on board the giant ships, as a way of sending part of themselves to places they could not visit in person. While they were still confined to the waters and swamps of their home world, the squids yearned to walk among the stars.
Then one day they discovered a way to scan and duplicate their entire brain patterns, down to the last neuron, and store them in the massive computers on board their starships.
They became the Starfarers.
*****
“So you… uploaded yourself into this ship?”