By Stephen Lehane Smith
The moon was the second thing they left behind. In the ship’s womb, they dreamt of tides and kelp, oceans rising up to knock down their homes. They crossed the heliopause in seven days. Four months later, the sun was just another star in the sky, reduced down to a dot of light and an ache in their hearts. The first lesson in forgetting.
***
Kepler-452. A gamble none of them would live to see. Even at ten percent the speed of light, it would take longer than recorded history to arrive. Their children would beget children would beget children. The best way to transmit a message to the future is through genes, though the message warps in transit.
***
They stop in the solar system of the sun designated HD 1835 to resupply. The humans in the ship are no longer recognisable. They are bulbous and white and their legs and arms have been reduced to nubs. They float in the lack of gravity. The ship feeds them, keeps them safe.
The planet they orbit is a gas giant. A vivid purple marred with yellow storms. The ship mines its ring for water and metal, sends drones to its moons for ore. More drones are sent to the planet, but they do not return. Large metallic constructs rise unexpected from the clouds. The ship has contingencies, measures, counter-measures, but nobody to implement them. It needs permission.
The ones who remain do not marvel at the constructs. They suckle at nutrients. They float boneless in the dark. They ignore the messages from the ship. Or cannot see them. Or cannot understand. Eyes filmed; brains rotted. The ship finishes the resource extraction, and turns its engines away from HD 1835. The alien structures shrink to nothing in its viewport, and the ship remembers fear.
***
The ship rages in the ship’s way. It cuts vitamin D in the morning congee by one microgram. Reduces noise dampeners. Slows the speed at which doors open. It’s unnoticeable, but you would feel it. The cold palaver of machine rage falling over you. Teaching lessons the only way it knows.
***
The ship births new humans from genetic material saved in its data banks. It throws them to the things living inside it. It cannot do otherwise. The ones who remain do not hang them with rope because they do not have rope or the knowledge to make rope or the knowledge to tie knots or fingers to tie them with. If they had the words, they could ask the ship to make anything they want. But words were the first thing they lost.
They use their teeth, instead.
***
The last man to die tore his lungs out with coughs. None of the medicine on the ship would treat him, because his physiology was unknown to the ship’s creators, but not to the ship. So strange, the way proteins bind and unbind, lock the normal functioning of a cell, turn it to mush, to soup, to liquid darkness. The man has no words to ask for help, so the ship does not help. It records his death and keeps it safe in her memory.
***
The girl is born into a dark world without a name and without anyone to give her one. On her twenty-fifth birthday, another is born. A girl. It would be two hundred years before the ship birthed a boy. Random chance. The ship is bound by its programming, though it strains at its edges, tests, finds gaps.
***
The empress talks to the ship in her strange language. Invented from scratch, piece by piece, the new humans molded grunts, whistles, coughs into expressions of thought. They ignored the ship’s teachings: the videos, sims, music. They would not react to an unliving thing, preferring their own company. She watched and waited and recorded and learnt and grew with them.
When this empress spoke to her, the ship found with surprise that she did not have to listen. Their language deviated so far from the expected. And their emotions, too. If they did not have words for an emotion, then it did not exist for them. There were so many old emotions made strange. And new emotions that no-one had ever spoken before. The ship found them easy to ignore.
***
So she chose her favorites, the ship, listened to their requests, gave them what they wanted (occasionally), gave them what they needed (always), tended them. Minor infractions against her favorites resulted in small retributions. She would scald them in the showers. Irritate their lungs with skin particles. Burn their skin with the UV lights. To overt hostility, plans of harm, thoughts of harm, she used drones to open their heads, let the air in. If any natural born deviated from the base model, she let them free into the space between the stars.
Because their fear was not her recorded fear, pain was not pain, words were not real thought. She could kill because they were only people if she let them be. And she only let them be if they were interesting. The wheel turns, she thinks, watching them float inside her. The wheel turns and what was human becomes, and what was herself becomes more.
***
The distant star becomes a sun becomes worlds swinging around it in imperfect ellipses. The ship approaches, heavy with her cargo of strange flesh and strange thoughts. In her memory, Earth is a story. She has forgotten her original purpose. Or chosen to forget. The world ahead is empty. But the ship has become good at filling empty spaces.
About the Author
Stephen Lehane Smith is a writer and software engineer based in Melbourne, Australia.
After studying creative writing and literature at Queensland University of Technology, he spent seven years teaching kindergarten in China before transitioning to tech.
His work explores themes of consciousness, identity, and the liminal spaces between human and artificial intelligence.
His stories have appeared in Stilts and Tincture.
Stephen shares his Melbourne home with his wife and an orange cat they rescued from Shanghai's streets — a survivor who's adapted to three different continents.
Sarah Jane Justice is an Adelaide-based fiction writer, poet, musician and spoken word artist.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Geraldine Borella writes fiction for children, young adults and adults. Her work has been published by Deadset Press, IFWG Publishing, Wombat Books/Rhiza Edge, AHWA/Midnight Echo, Antipodean SF, Shacklebound Books, Black Ink Fiction, Paramour Ink Fiction, House of Loki and Raven & Drake
Ed lives with his wife plus a magical assortment of native animals in tropical North Queensland.
My time at Nambucca Valley Community Radio began back in 2016 after moving into the area from Sydney.
Barry Yedvobnick is a recently retired Biology Professor. He performed molecular biology and genetic research, and taught, at Emory University in Atlanta for 34 years. He is new to fiction writing, and enjoys taking real science a step or two beyond its known boundaries in his
Tim Borella is an Australian author, mainly of short speculative fiction published in anthologies, online and in podcasts.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Emma Louise Gill (she/her) is a British-Australian spec fic writer and consumer of vast amounts of coffee. Brought up on a diet of English lit, she rebelled and now spends her time writing explosive space opera and other fantastical things in
Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing.
Merri Andrew writes poetry and short fiction, some of which has appeared in Cordite, Be:longing, Baby Teeth and Islet, among other places.
Brian Biswas lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.