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Amaterasu: I Am Here, and So Are You
“Look, look, look! Right there! That’s the hidden message!”
Once more, Amaterasu sighed and pretended to care.
She couldn’t help thinking that, after narrowly avoiding death by imploding spaceship and then by asphyxiation in deep space, there must be better things to do now than wander empty corridors in search of nothing. It felt vaguely ungrateful.
This corridor, for instance: both of them had passed through it a dozen times. Columns lined both sides, a monument to the Classical trappings of the previous occupants, if not to their good taste.
“That,” said her… well, not “friend”, exactly, but “colleague” felt too chilly, so… she’d go with “companion” for now. “That is the secret message! Look at the carvings on top. Look at the metal disk stuck through the side. That means something.”
Amaterasu wiped her face down. “It’s just decoration.”
“Weirdly specific decoration. See the rounded boltel structure near the top, just before the square abacus? Under all that cornicing? I know my columns, but those aren’t cheery little decorations. Those are Bow-and-Tell markings.”
“Some expert. How come you can’t translate it, then?”
“What? I recognized it, didn’t I? Anyway, languages ain’t my thing.”
“‘Aren’t’ my thing,” corrected Amaterasu hopelessly. “Let it go. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. The rest of this place, for a start.”
In truth, they hadn’t. The space station wasn’t big by her standards, and they’d run out of surprises hours ago.
Within minutes of docking while trying not to breathe too much smoke, the two of them had walked every square inch of the “shore”, or the airlocks where old spaceships used to dock and deliver goods. All empty, save for theirs, which had been contained behind emergency slider doors; the reinforced windows of these had long since turned grey with the smoke trapped inside.
From the “shore”, they’d called and heard no one. Not a soul had walked in, not a Tannoy crackled, not an alarm blared or a squadron burst in to hold them up.
So they’d gone into the “forest”, a labyrinth of corridors and warehouses size enough for ships. No one there, though a few crates of untouched ready meals and protein shakes remained. Enough to see them through several months, and probably enough to sink a small battleship.
They were covered for food, at least. Amaterasu let out a breath.
Onwards they’d walked, venturing into the “cave”, or dormitory. This had been an explosion of carvings and statues and beeping machines still running after… Well, she hadn’t a clue. Decades, likely. Or centuries. Some of the proto-beds still had Velcro straps, for pity’s sake.
Now? Vent shafts rumbled overhead. Pipes gurgled. Lights burst into life whenever they entered a room. Every place warmed them, every breath was fresh, every wall panel and computer monitor winked at them as though in greeting, and when they’d found the auxiliary generators chugging away down below, she’d fancied the things had come straight out of the box, they were that clean. The place was alive and happy and full of stories. What they lacked were actual people.
Now, she gave her friend – companion – a nervous glance.
“I’m gonna find out what that means,” Melissa said.
Amaterasu groaned. She knew those tones. When her companion spoke like that, it meant someone somewhere would soon have to get dustpan and brush ready. If they were lucky.
“Let’s focus on the here and now, shall we?” she said bravely. Failing to get a response, she added, “Melissa?”
“Oh, all right.” Yet as soon as they moved into the darker chamber, Melissa took out a handheld Confabulator.
Amaterasu wrinkled her nose at it. “Pocket calculators,” she muttered. “Looks like something I’d tile my bathroom with.”
“You should get one of these. There are restaurants of options on these things.”
Restaurants, Amaterasu thought grimly. Like menus, but bigger. “A mind chip is best for me, thanks. None of that primitive hunk-of-junk stuff. You should get an implant. With all the wireless databases they keep adding to the web, you can get an answer as soon as you’ve thought up the question. Doesn’t require cluttering up your pockets, either.”
“Fine, fine. Unless you get disconnected.” Melissa tapped the screen on her incomprehensible, primitive excuse of a device. “Anyway, it’s cheating to download the answers directly into your head. Why not work for it? The whole point of talking is to surprise people.”
No reply. None that Amaterasu could fairly give. Out here, there was no signal on the mind chip. It basically relied on being close to civilization.
Out here, there were thousands of space stations. Thousands of electronic islands, all scattered across the boondocks of the solar system. Most of them had been pariahs of civilization from birth. The rest had fallen behind when the solar winds had changed course and society moved elsewhere.
Grimly, she wondered how many would still have human life on them. Well, how many would have human life that wasn’t stuck in a cryogenic freezer. This particular one spoke of a vogue for the ancient ways, which was the usual response – in her experience – to civilizations which turned their noses up at the modern ways.
Snobs, she thought. Ungrateful, hypocritical snobs.
Part of her was glad this place was dead. She didn’t fancy explaining herself at the best of times. Certainly not to the sort of people who believed the Golden Age – Probably a trademarked phrase by now, she thought – had occurred around the same time some bloke with sticks had only just figured out the world was a ball shape.
All that was left on this “island” in the sea of space? A “village”. Specifically, the labs.
She and Melissa poked their heads through various automatic doors. White hospital-like rooms struck their senses. Disinfectant stung the air and made their eyes water. Fiddly little metal tools invoked the great dentists-slash-torturers of the ages. Uncomfortably, she noticed the syringes and vials so prominent on many of the worktops.
“Medical facility?” Amaterasu murmured.
“I think it’s a biology lab. Look, they got Petri dishes.”
“And embryo vats. Yes, I do have eyes, thanks.”
None of the computer banks were on. Somehow, she found this a relief. Although it would’ve made more sense to look for clues here…?
No. Her heart wasn’t in it. She moved further down the corridor. Melissa’s skipping steps hurried after her.
“Where are you going?” said Melissa.
“Retracing our steps.”
“What, again?”
“I’ll feel better once I’ve memorized this layout.”
“Why? We’ll use it when we need it. Relax, ‘Doc’. We’re the only ones here. On this island of mystery amid a sea of woes… This is kinda like Robinson Crusoe, don’t you think?”
If there’s no one here, then we need to explain why everything’s in such good shape. No sign of a struggle. No bodies, either. No manual systems operational: everything’s either automated or standard. So… examine the facts… See the bigger picture… See the forest for the trees…
“I told you not to call me ‘Doc’,” she said coolly.
“Doc” brought the whole assuming arrogance of her name to mind. Doctor of Science honoris causa, Amaterasu Vanessa Rubric Copgraves. Anyone wanting to annoy her only had to recite the whole thing. Too often, the dratted name sounded like a pompous title from the bad old days of – she almost spat – “nobility”. Like one of those famous lords or ladies who were rich enough to lock themselves away in their drawing rooms, mixing chemicals and inventing history by accident.
In her heart, she felt this was utterly undemocratic. She even refused to use scientific terms derived from their names, once she remembered which terms were which.
“So…” she said aloud. “What’s likely…?”
“Who lived here?” said Melissa, hurrying alongside her; Amaterasu at a walk could tax most people at a jog. “Imagine their ghosts walking down the corridors. The spirits of physicists strolling through the shadows.”
“Unless they did anything dangerous,” snapped Amaterasu, “then who they were is hardly relevant now, is it?”
“But surely you’re thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the communication room needs maintenance. The generator’s working fine, so why that’s not, I can’t tell.”
“It’ll keep. We’ve been at this for hours. Why don’t you savour it while we’re here? We’re cast adrift in someone else’s history.”
“This place is odd, granted.” She scanned the doors flashing by as they passed. “Worst-case scenario: biological contamination from the labs did this place in. But the decontamination systems are fully operational, just like everything else. And still no bodies. That doesn’t add up. Oh well, at least it suggests we’re in the clear – Wait.”
Just in case, she flicked a few switches on her way past. Door locks clicked again, though since she’d done this dozens of times already, it wasn’t so much locking as confirming they were locked. She relaxed after the last click.
“Aw,” said Melissa. “You’ve got no romance in your soul. Don’t you wanna explore the place?”
“I’d rather not stumble across some mutant microbes, thanks.”
“So paranoid! Look, I’ve seen stations like this before. They’re usually harmless scientific research outposts. We’ll be completely safe. The Hotaru Space Station alone was a triumph!”
“The what?”
“Hotaru Space Station. You know! The one with Professor Sapphro’s team. Your college buddy Kohaku… I think… had a panic attack, and you talked her out of it and told her she’d manage just fine.”
“I don’t remember,” lied Amaterasu.
“Anyway, I think you’re being jumpy. That’s my point.”
“And I think you’re being too trusting. You don’t know the first thing about this place. Why’s it so well-kept? What kind of technology are we talking about here? How soon can we repair those communication systems? That’s my point. That’s what you should be focusing on.”
Upon reaching a T-junction, they stopped. Suddenly silent, she could hear her friend’s breathing.
Breathing hard.
A gentle pat on the back: Amaterasu never felt happy giving anything else. Even this much seemed unprofessional.
“Keep talking to me, Melissa,” she said, not unkindly.
For her reward, she got to meet Melissa’s face. “Pale” wasn’t the worst of it.
“We’ll find a way out of here,” whispered Melissa. “Right?”
“They’ll probably start looking for us now,” said Amaterasu, pushing far too much bravado through her tones. “We did send the distress signal before the ship went kaboom, eh?”
Her sad attempt at a gag died as it had lived. For a scientist, Melissa had spent an awful lot of time chatting to other people, and buying them drinks, and laughing at their best jokes. College, university, out in the field: whatever had stuck in her teens had refused to be shed, even long after Amaterasu had finally admitted to herself that she, her best fr– companion, was an overgrown child.
“Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s go back. We’ll work out the rationing system and then start tomorrow. No point making things harder for ourselves, right?”
One week passed.
Much to her disgust, she could only tell because of Melissa’s Confabulator device. Merely acknowledging its usefulness filled her with shame. But then her mind chip was still dead. She kept reminding herself of these things through sheer pragmatic insistence, despite her pride’s protests.
The ready meals were primitive garbage, nourishing and highly tailored to human physiology while being completely, utterly retch-worthy. Melissa wolfed the things down, at least whenever the two of them ate together; so long as she could cheerfully talk her mouth off while stuffing her face, she’d even swallow raw soil. Occasionally, Amaterasu wished she could be so easily distracted from her own food.
Melissa slept soundly on the Velcro beds. Amaterasu had to will herself to sleep. Melissa loved wandering off and talking to herself about the secret message in the column. Amaterasu kept checking the security room’s camera display to make sure her… companion was OK. After a while, she spent more and more hours a day in Melissa’s company. Nothing of the situation seemed to bother the woman. She wished she had such confidence.
Melissa avoided the labs, though, whereas Amaterasu kept going through them. Once, she found piles of paper in a cupboard, and discovered that the taps were still working. Otherwise, she wandered through them wondering what had happened. Even the security disks only went back a couple of decades, and all of the footage was empty of humans. Except for them two, obviously.
Up till now, she’d avoided talking about the creeping dread inside her. They only had enough food between them for months, assuming they lasted that long.
One of them could always… make it easier for the other…
Anxiously, Amaterasu dismissed the thought. Food shortage or not, Melissa only thrived in company. She needed to see another face most of all, even if it was a furrowed, put-upon face.
Then, on the eighth day:
“I found bottles!” said Melissa.
Amaterasu sat down on the plush chairs, bracing herself for a breakfast of what tasted like barf.
“Hm?” she said.
“I rummaged around the private quarters, and there were bottles behind one of the beds.”
“Huh. Clearly, someone wasn’t coping.” Amaterasu watched her friend’s face.
“They were empty. Anyway, they don’t look like medicinal bottles.”
Clean over her head. Amaterasu took a mouthful and then ordered her tongue to put up with it. She hummed with fake interest.
“Well, in the old days, whenever someone got shipwrecked and ended up alone on an island, they’d write a message in a bottle and then throw it out to sea, hoping – just hoping – someone might pick it up and come find them.”
“Uh huh.” Oh god. Vitamins and minerals and proteins and carbs. Part of a nutritionally balanced pukefest.
“How about we do the same?”
“Yeah.” This place must date back to the Rego-Classical Age at best, judging from this stuff. Just swallow and bear it. Just swallow and bear it.
“Yeah, I think we should! So long as communications are down, what have we got to lose? Stranger things have happened. And… well, it’s kind of exciting, don’t you think? Like that old song. I’ll send an SOS to the world…”
“Right, right.” Wonder if that bottle guy had more stuff stashed away somewhere. One of us might need it, near the finish.
Then her brain caught up with her ears.
“What?” she said.
“I said we could send a bottle –”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m serious! It’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it?”
“Melissa, that plan would’ve been crazy even on the seas of Earth. One little bottle against enough water to cover two-thirds of the planet? No chance. You might as well write ‘false hope’ on the label and be done with it.”
“But if we do nothing, that guarantees no one’ll find anything.”
“And we’re in space. It’s not ‘the ocean, but a bit bigger’. Think of our solar system. We could compress all civilized planets and moons – no, just compress all the planets and moons anyway – and next to all the space contained from one Oort limit to the other, the result wouldn’t even be a rounding error. Melissa, you’re being utterly ludicrous.”
They continued their breakfasts in silence. And, on one side at least, with complete disgust.
It’s your fault we’re out here in the first place.
Amaterasu didn’t dare say that aloud. Whatever relationship existed between them wouldn’t survive the impact.
Unfortunately, she had the wheedling sort of mind which used the truth as a cattle prod on her thoughts. It was true, at that.
The original plan, out here on the margins of the solar system, so close to the limit of space travel itself, was not the work of carefully scientific deliberation. It was a childish bit of romantic claptrap. Right here on the Oort limit, about as far as space travellers could go before they had to contend with the light-years between stars. And no one really had to contend with any of those because, short of a miracle, faster-than-light travel – heck, reasonably-close-to-light-speed travel – was a pipe dream. Hollow, hard, and in some contexts utterly full of crap.
They’d wanted to leave a time capsule.
Not one of those “school project” ones, with archaeologically useless junk. No, she’d be smarter than that. Diaries. Video footage. Photographs. Holographic childhood memories. Records of day-to-day life, ready for scholarly inspection.
She’d needed a lot of persuading. Showing her own stuff to Melissa alone… she’d felt naked. Even now, she burned across her face and refused to look opposite, not at her companion’s eye.
But in a way, the revelation had to be made. The quality of the material needed checking, and she’d trust no one else. Besides, Melissa and she had spent their lives together, and if Melissa had any self-awareness behind that happy-go-lucky façade, then she hid it commendably well.
Most of all… Well, for all of “Doc’s” titles, Amaterasu was fully aware she’d pass out of history with virtually nothing left behind. You didn’t get fame for being slow and steady. Slapdash and stupid, perhaps, hence whoever had designed the spaceship with such an ailing shield system and a poor excuse for an evacuation shuttle.
Not for the first time, she wondered why Melissa had suggested the time capsule. She’d shown Amaterasu her history. Did she want to leave a mark too? After all, she didn’t have a title like “Doctor of Science”. And in this hyper-competitive world…
Ha. That was a joke. Hyper-competitive. No, just a more intensive form of pure luck.
Which had thwarted them.
The micrometeorites had penetrated their shield, and even their hull. Within minutes the ship had self-destructed. Thank goodness she’d been twitchy enough to check the security monitors every five minutes.
Of course, that had left them stranded in a shoddy evacuation shuttle in one of the most barren parts of the solar system. That had been Melissa’s choice: to go somewhere so rarely frequented. The fewer people came this way, the better they could preserve the message for so many years.
Thwarted by luck.
Amaterasu popped the last mouthful in. She chewed as though grinding glass between her teeth.
Thwarted by luck. In a pitiless universe.
No…
A universe like that wouldn’t let them survive for months on end. One of them would have to go. It was only pragmatism.
So was it better to go now, and maximize the food for Melissa? Or delay it in case rescue came?
Amaterasu swallowed what felt like a fistful of grit. “I’ll have another look at the communication system. It’s strange, though. Everything’s where it should be, but I can’t get the thing on. Perhaps the problem’s at the power source, but I’d have to check the last of the wiring.”
“Pity we can’t do Morse code in space.” Melissa shrugged. “SOS, IWB, V7 –”
“I’m sorry?”
“You know, the old emergency messages. Nine bits of code, and they can translate into so many messages. SOS is just one of those interpretations.”
“IWB?”
“Er… I Want Bravery?”
“V7?”
“I dunno. They’re random codes, not acronyms.”
“Not like SOS. ‘Save Our Souls,’ right?”
“Actually, SOS is just another code. ‘Save Our Souls’ was a back-formation.”
“Ha. An after-the-fact bit of baloney, you mean.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“Uh huh. Anything else you’d want to send? A ‘Get Well Soon’ card, maybe?”
“Don’t be like that.” Then Melissa beamed at her. “There’s always one important message.”
“What’s that?”
Yet it was several seconds of lip-chewing and ceiling-staring before Melissa replied: “I am here, and so are you.”
Amaterasu snorted. “Last part’s not much good if someone doesn’t read it.”
“That’s why it’s a message. There must always be someone to read it, even if it’s only the sender.”
“It’s nonsense. What else are you cooking up in that brain of yours?”
“I’m just thinking. What would Robinson Crusoe do?”
At this, Amaterasu rocked forwards and stood up straight as a flagpole. “That primitive hack-rag? Please. Imperialistic stupidity at its finest. And the ending is so much macho bilge.”
“It’s an inspiring story! Man against the elements! Civilization against the wilderness! Crusoe was just a guy, and through sheer faith and grit, he did all those amazing things on his own! Like we’re doing!”
Amaterasu didn’t even think. Her finger pointed at Melissa without waiting for instructions. Her brain had to breathe deeply just to catch up.
“We are not ‘faithing and gritting’ our way through this. This isn’t a self-indulgent fantasy. This is real life. We’re just doing what even the meanest animals do: surviving. No point dressing it up. It’d be an insult to dress it up. Understand?”
Melissa stared at her.
On her way out, it occurred to Amaterasu that this wasn’t the best way to end a conversation. But Melissa’s overheated brain had chosen this rarely frequented part of the solar system to begin with. She only ever seemed to think about her corner of the world. She didn’t think about months and food supplies and stress. Heck, even in civilization, she’d barely thought beyond the city limits.
Well, she was overdue a reality check.
Robinson Crusoe! As if anyone anywhere who got stranded on an island, or “island”, could only ever be compared to this one frankly uninspiring name! As if all the millions and millions of other unfortunates were just copycats. As though Crusoe had invented being stranded. As though anyone else – this time, she spat – didn’t matter.
She spent the rest of the day glowering at the tangle of wires in the communication room. Nothing was accomplished.
Despite her protesting stomach, she went to bed without eating. One could only take so many insults from wakefulness to sleep.
One month passed.
It was going badly.
Amaterasu had tangles in her hair, which kept falling into her eyes whenever she leaned forwards. What she smelled like, she dreaded to think; the hygiene module had given up about three days ago. Her skin felt like clingy slime.
Despite checking the communication room, the generators, and anything in the place that looked remotely electronic, she couldn’t get so much as a radio to work. According to all her experience, they should have worked. At this point, she was just checking and re-checking endlessly, in the increasingly desperate hope that she might have missed the one little thing that’d make it all better.
She was skipping meals every other day too. Melissa had scolded her for it every time, but… they were a crate down. A whole crate. For weeks, she’d half-believed this one alone would’ve lasted forever. It wasn’t as if they had many more to get through.
And all around them, the silence of the void. Waiting. With infinite patience.
Now she had pains in her stomach.
“I told you not to skip those meals.” Melissa’s Confabulator scanned the exposed belly while Amaterasu tried not to breathe out. “And I can tell you’re trying not to breathe out. I do have medical training, you know.”
“Sorry.” But she could imagine the lower ribs pressing through when she did breathe.
Melissa lowered her device. “You can put your shirt down now, Miss Prude. Well, in my medical opinion, what we have here is a case of hunger pangs brought on by excessive silliness.”
“Sorry.”
“You know there’s a risk of malnourishment if you don’t eat the right amount. Why do you do it?”
Best to say nothing. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I have NO intention whatsoever of disillusioning you.
Fortunately, Melissa had long since learned not to press the point. “At least the cure’s easy enough to apply. Also, you can thank this ‘hunk of junk’ for being so useful, please.”
“All right, all right, so it’s not totally a waste of space.” Amaterasu climbed off the seat and followed her out the door. “Why’s that disk thing sticking out of it, though?”
“I took it from that column. You know? The one with the secret message.”
“What are you doing?”
“Cryptanalysis! My specialty!” Melissa coughed. “Apart from medicine and biology, of course.”
“I thought you couldn’t translate languages?”
“I can’t. It’s proving a bit tricky. But they haven’t made a code I couldn’t crack.”
They walked down the corridor to the dormitory – the “cave” – in silence. Only when they were on their ever-familiar seats did Melissa add:
“That settles it. I’m sending out that bottle.”
Amaterasu moaned. “Not this again.”
“I need it.”
“Rubbish. You need food, water, oxygen, and the right atmospheric temperatures and pressures. Anything else is optional.”
“I need people around me! People! Someone I can talk to and be surprised by and learn so much about! Someone I can trust!”
Amaterasu closed her eyes tight. She counted to ten. More than once, she wondered if Melissa was doing this deliberately, perhaps as some sort of punishment.
She opened them again. “Don’t worry. The life-support systems here are working fine. I’ve searched this place top-to-bottom for dangers and found nothing. We can last a few more months.”
“I don’t want to be looked after by machines!”
“Decent quality machines. Give them some credit.”
Melissa wiped her face down and fidgeted. To Amaterasu’s surprise, Melissa then shot forwards and leaned closer.
“Have you ever read Walker’s essay on semiotics?” said Melissa urgently.
A grunt. Not that there was anything wrong with taking an interest in literature, but Amaterasu had given it up early for a reason.
“Assume the answer is no,” she said, trying to inject as much irritability as possible into her droning tones.
“Walker divided up information into two sorts: the knowledge, which science gives in facts and truths, and the news.”
“That’s like the six ‘o’ clock, ten ‘o’ clock sort?” Hastily, she regretted speaking; Melissa rarely scowled, but when she did, she saved up a lifetime of outrage and fury. “Sorry.”
“That’s like… Look, news is how it affects you. How it affects you in the moment. How you choose to respond to it. If you choose to respond to it. Does it matter to you as a person? Does it sound likely to you, and to you alone, no matter what anyone else says?”
“Listen, Melissa –”
“Is the sender someone you can trust? Can you put your faith in them?”
“Please.”
“That’s why science fails to appreciate art. Art is the message AND the bottle.”
“Please, Melissa. Believe me. I’m doing the best I can.”
In the awkward pause, Amaterasu found nothing but complete incomprehension in Melissa’s eyes. She groaned and flopped along her seat, not looking at Melissa but at the computers guarding the far wall. Suddenly, going to bed early sounded like a brilliant plan.
“Are you all right?” Melissa’s voice drew closer.
“No.”
“Do you want another medical exam?”
“No.” Amaterasu felt herself going red just thinking about the last one.
Perhaps the pause had been thoughtful. Not on Amaterasu’s side, at least: all her thoughts had evaporated into some dumb mist. Professionalism was a sad little voice calling through the wind.
A gentle hand patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll send that bottle. At least it’s something, yeah?”
“A negligible something,” she muttered.
“You’d be surprised.”
“I hope so.”
Another pause, in which all sorts of thoughts sneaked around: too obvious to be ignored but too discreet to be identified. After a while, she gave up trying to peer through the mist.
“You know,” said Melissa gently, “Walker made his point with an analogy.”
“That’s nice.”
“Two castaways on an island. Neither of them remembered anything about their past lives, but as the days dragged on, they found bottles washed up on the beach as regular as the sunrise and the sunset. Only the messages were weird. They were just facts, like ‘Water is H2O’ or ‘Concorde’s last flight was on Wednesday 26th November 2003’.”
“OK?”
“So they took it two different ways. One of them analysed the facts for any data they could study, cross-referencing the content to ensure it made sense as a whole. The other one didn’t like this. They said that the first one – who represented science – was missing the trees for the forest.”
A switch flicked on in Amaterasu’s head.
“What was important, the other one said, was the connection. Who sent the messages? Why did they matter? How foolish was it to take them as true and proceed from there? That castaway represented art.”
How strange. A moment ago, Amaterasu had been lying down through sheer lack of energy. Now she was lying down because she had to fight not to get up.
“Those bottles and those messages weren’t mere devices. They were connections between islands, islands with no other contact. Emotional connections –”
“Are you sending your bloody bottle,” snapped Amaterasu, “or aren’t you?”
A moment later, she heard heavy breathing. Later still, she heard footsteps, the whir of an automatic door, and then nothing.
Deep inside, she sensed the stress ebb away. Relief washed over her.
She slept where she’d fallen. Or at least tried to.
Thus, she skipped dinner.
She was hungry. She just believed she shouldn’t be. Or didn’t deserve to eat.
Sooner or later…
She’d have to do it.
Sooner…
Or…
Later.
Eleven months passed.
Despite her most pessimistic predictions, Amaterasu saw the crates last beyond those months. They were now on the last one. Her stomach kept hurting too, but she refused all medical exams, and not merely because pulling her shirt up over her stomach felt positively indecent, even in front of someone who’d also seen the insides of her holo-diary.
They’d salvaged what was left of the evacuation shuttle. Most of it was a burnt wreck. Sadly, no radio survived. They’d run out of things to do in the airlocks, corridors, and warehouses. Yoga exercises, jogging, self-defence training, measuring the walls when they were really desperate. Last thing they wanted to do was regress to children playing hide-and-go-seek.
They’d stopped going into the labs. Amaterasu could only take so much “hospital aesthetic”.
That just left the dormitory. Their “cave”.
Amaterasu tried not to think about it. They’d been alone together for so long, and still she refused to crack. Melissa needed her iron constitution to get through this. Melissa needed her to be strong.
And then the weirdest day had hit them.
“Bottles!” Melissa cheered and shook her awake. “Look, look! On the screen!”
“What?” Amaterasu winced against another lash from her stomach.
“We’ve got mail!”
Groggily, groaning, Amaterasu slumped out of her Velcro straps and hobbled over to the computer bank. Her tangles had to be brushed out of her face, and then she saw the screen.
“What the –?”
“There must be a hundred billion of the things! Come on, come on! I’m sucking them into the airlock now! It’s a shower of bottles!”
Amaterasu blinked. She blinked again, because the illusion hadn’t vanished the first time.
“This is a joke, right?” she said.
At once, she turned around and hobbled halfway to bed. Melissa grabbed her arm and tugged.
“Come on, come on! Our prayers have been answered! Come on!”
“It’s just a weird trick.”
“It’s real! Look, I’ll show you!”
Eventually, Amaterasu shrugged and let herself be dragged down the corridors. This was clearly a bad dream, after all. In real life, this didn’t happen. And hunger led to hallucinations. Why not?
Even when Melissa pressed her hand into the scanner and the airlock slid open and the mountain of bottles tumbled out, Amaterasu didn’t mind. Her subconscious surely knew about Melissa’s cryptanalytical skills, and the chances a primitive bio-security door lock had against them.
Melissa dived onto the pile, picking up random bottles. “Aw, there are so many! Which one should we pick first?”
“Just pick one and get it over with.” Amaterasu yawned. “And then I’m waking up.”
Melissa plucked one and tore out the message. She read it.
She frowned.
Again, she plucked one and tore out the message and read it. Again, she frowned.
“What?” she breathed.
“Oh?” said Amaterasu in as scathing a voice as her half-yawn could manage. “Were you expecting a birthday card?”
“They’re all…” Melissa plucked and plucked and plucked, and read and read and read, and scowled and scowled and scowled. The tinkle of bottles led to one tapping against Amaterasu’s shoe.
“They’re all what? Badly spelled?”
“Facts.” Melissa stared at her as a child might stare at a parent. “They’re all just… facts.”
To her own surprise, Amaterasu burst out laughing. She laughed until her ribs ached and her throat felt sore. She laughed until she staggered clutching her own belly. She laughed until she couldn’t so much as breathe, and then she almost guffawed trying to breathe in again, and kept breaking out into titters before finally meeting Melissa’s outrage coming towards her eyes.
“I remembered.” Amaterasu wiped her cheeks. “I remembered you talking. About those two Walker castaways. Oh my, this is priceless.”
“What is?” Melissa shot to her feet. “This isn’t a joke! Someone’s contacted us!”
“No, no. I know what this is. Tears you up, though, doesn’t it? The romantic image of the lone survivor, throwing their hopes out onto the cruel but mysterious sea. Seeking connection through sheer desperate luck. And you thought it would work.”
“I told you not to skip those meals. You’re raving!”
The last hints of laughter vanished from Amaterasu’s voice. “No, you were bloody raving. It was your dumb head-in-the-clouds that got us out here in the first place. You threw a useless bit of glass and paper out to vanish into nothing. Sort of ruins your day, doesn’t it, to get this back?”
Angrily, she threw herself round to totter her way to bed. Suddenly, the sooner this dream ended, the better.
She got one step before sheer tiredness hit her and she fell forwards. She didn’t even remember the thump. Just the blast of pain and the cry of someone’s panic before sweet darkness blanketed her and tucked her in and left her.
There was nothing left of her…
…until she opened her eyes.
On one of the benches. Surrounded by beeping machines. Looking up at Melissa’s wide eyes.
A burbling voice spoke. Amaterasu watched the lips move in silence.
Then the concerned voice became clear: “Thank goodness you’re OK! You’ve been out for hours! Don’t tell me you’ve been skipping sleep too!”
Months rolled on top of her. First, she’d skipped meals. Then she’d stopped even pretending to make her unruly long hair tame again. Then she’d skipped sleep.
All to fix a communication system that, by all rights, was fixed. Just not working.
She whimpered. The pain hadn’t stopped at her stomach. It burned her from scalp to soles. She didn’t dare move, in case agony exploded anywhere along her body.
One thought pushed its way out of her mouth. “What…?” she said weakly. “What the hell is going on?”
“You’ve been infected,” said Melissa, lowering her Confabulator.
“Infected?”
“You idiot. You weakened yourself. I warned you! You’ve made yourself an easy target.”
“But I remember. Those bottles. Hallucinations?”
“No. They’re covered in space debris, and I found fragments of Neo-Naissance warehouse crates among them. They’re flotsam. Leftovers from another station, maybe. I don’t know what kind of maddened mind would sit down and write that many facts for nothing, but I dread to think what happened to them.”
Amaterasu felt no surprise. Right now, sitting down to write a hundred billion facts sounded kind of relaxing. Repetitive, maybe, but wasn’t that the point of meditation? Or was it self-hypnosis?
“No one got those bottled messages but us. There must be hundreds of dead stations out here.” Melissa’s lip trembled.
Faint as her mind was, Amaterasu urged herself to raise her head, ignoring the shrieks of pain along her neck.
Weakly, she mumbled, “What?”
“We’ve only got one month left! What if we don’t make it? What if no one comes? What if no one even finds my bottled message?”
Too much effort: Amaterasu’s head hit the pillow again. She winced against the stabs.
I should’ve done it months ago. Selfish to have lasted this long…
Poor Melissa would have lasted longer if Amaterasu hadn’t gotten cold feet. Melissa could’ve escaped. Probably. She’d have enjoyed a longer life, at least.
Cruelty was her constant companion; Amaterasu tried to sleep, but her alertness defied death over and over. Too many bright lights, too many racing thoughts, too much noise and pain hammering away at her. Vaguely, she wondered if it was possible to hold her breath without chickening out and having to start all over again.
“Chin up,” she said bravely. “You’ve still. Got that message. To decipher. Right?”
Melissa’s facial contortions twitched towards a frown for a moment. “Sorry?”
“The column thing. With the disk in it. Figured it out yet?”
“Oh, that,” muttered Melissa. She raised a needle. “I cracked that days ago.”
Surprise held all else at bay.
“You did?” whispered Amaterasu.
“It’s not important.”
“I couldn’t get you! To shut up about it! Why’s it suddenly ‘not important’?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
“It mattered to you! Come on. Please. Tell me.”
Melissa’s face reddened. She raised the needle higher.
“What is it, Melissa?”
The flicker of a frown gave way to creeping disgust. “Nothing worthwhile. I thought it’d be something romantic or delightful. You know? Like those hidden love messages we used to find at school. Or like those family memories my grandmother used to bury.”
“To grow ‘fondness trees’. I do remember, thanks. So what?”
By now, the twisting disgust tugged so hard that Melissa jerked her head about for something safe to look at. “That hidden message… was nothing but a set of rushed blueprints. On how to make, and I quote, ‘an ultimate bioweapon’.”
When she glared at Amaterasu, the air shimmered between them. “That’s what they felt was worth preserving. That’s the best this place could do. The moment they thought they’d perish, they left nothing but their most selfish, nastiest, cruellest disease behind. That’s the sort of world we’re stuck in!”
Helpless in her pain, Amaterasu said nothing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much venom pulsing through the veins of that face.
The needle came down. Through sheer pain, Amaterasu didn’t even feel it.
Finally, the pain faded.
“Who can I trust?” Melissa ran a hand through her own overlong hair.
Amaterasu gritted her teeth. “Me?”
Melissa choked. “Obviously you. I meant anyone else?”
She teased a stray strand of hair out of Amaterasu’s eyes. So much relief swept through Amaterasu that she didn’t even protest. She felt alive again, back from the dead. Not for weeks had she felt so capable of leaping off the bed and striding forth.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered. “I’ll look at. The communication system. Again.”
Melissa chortled, suddenly weeping. “Course. I’d expect nothing less.”
For Amaterasu had to tell the universe: the two of them were here.
Not just to say SOS. To say their very existence mattered.
She slept.
Soundly.
Two days passed.
With a click, the screen flickered into life.
“It’s working,” said Melissa from her seat. “How d’you do that?”
“Sadly, I must admit to some humility here,” said Amaterasu, emerging from behind the console. “Luck did it. Still don’t know why this thing suddenly started working. All I know is the universe stuck a ‘kick me’ sign to my back.”
“What, you? ‘Doc’?” Melissa tried for a grin.
“I’m not much of a scientist,” lied Amaterasu out of sheer guilt.
“You’re crazy! Think of all those works you’ve done! The Heliogenerator Hypothesis, for starters!”
“Huh. Pity academic stuff doesn’t matter much out here. Unless it’s failed bioweapons.”
Melissa cracked her fingers. “OK. So… any requests?”
“Just an SOS will do, thanks.”
“Or an IWB. Or a V7.”
“Less of the chit-chat.”
“Ha. You haven’t changed much, have you? Still the gold-hearted softie deep down, am I right?”
Amaterasu resisted her own upcoming chuckle. “Send your bloody SOS already.”
“Aye aye, Captain!”
Fingers tapping on the keyboard. The click and tick of switches and displays. Flashing screens.
Carefully, Amaterasu eased her creaking, self-hating joints and muscles into the seat and let out a breath. At least she was eating properly again, though she was getting funny messages from her kidneys. Part of her wrestled with the idea of asking Melissa for another check-up.
“Um…” she began.
“Woo, I haven’t had this much fun in ages!” Melissa tapped the keys faster and faster. “Remember when we found that pack of cards? Oh, you were a demon at poker!”
“I do have the face for it, yes.”
“And the time we had a rummage through the labs, and you didn’t want to go into that one room because the light didn’t work?”
“It smelled funny,” lied Amaterasu. She wondered what Melissa was leading up to.
“Not forgetting – never forgetting! – the time we told each other all those crazy stories.”
“Well, you told most of them. I don’t have the imagination.” Amaterasu glared sidelong at her. “Where are you going with this, exactly?”
Still admiring the screen, Melissa smiled. “I’m just saying. If we don’t get out of here. Just in case. Look, I don’t suppose we could do those things again? I quite liked all that.”
“For a whole month?”
“We managed a year, didn’t we? A month should be a piece of cake. Hey, I’m picking up something!”
They fell silent; Amaterasu, opening her mouth to reply, closed it again.
On the screen, one glowing line oscillated.
Beep. Beep-beep-beep. Beep.
“That’s us!” Melissa rose off her seat to peer closer.
“Is it?”
“Yeah! It’s the lagan!”
Hastily, Amaterasu dredged her memory for clues. Lagan: she’d heard that term before.
Oh yes, all that maritime law stuff. She had to remember that Melissa had been on a lot of ships. It turned out there were all kinds of legal niceties surrounding shipwrecks; should a vessel, ship, or the like be destroyed accidentally, precious cargo could be deliberately thrown out with a buoy attached… or in this case, a “buoy” satellite. The cargo landed on a nearby moon or asteroid, and the satellite automatically went into orbit around it, broadcasting its exact coordinates. Handy, if anyone wanted to return and reclaim it later.
But… “What’s lagan got to do with us?”
“Don’t you remember? We threw it out just before the ship imploded! Our time capsule! It's still out there, waiting for us!”
“Or for whoever picks it up.” Amaterasu sighed and leaned back so far she was staring at the ceiling, at its mass of pipes and wires. “What a waste of time that was.”
“It’s not a waste of time.” Compassionate fingers hugged her one stray hand. “We are here, and so’s the world.”
Amaterasu fought to keep her legendary poker face in place. “You are full of sap, aren’t you?”
“And you’re just full of it, ain’tcha?” The fingers patted hers and then typing resumed. “Anyway, I’ve left the best news for last, because… wait for it… the signal’s coming towards us!”
Months and months of fear and confusion and mindless boredom wobbled, like a boulder perched atop a tiny stone. Amaterasu’s poker face twitched.
“Towards us?” She sat up straight.
“Yeah! The Security Peelers found it, and now they’re dragging it with them. They’ve found us!”
“My god.” Then Amaterasu cursed herself. She wasn’t being professional. She wasn’t being proper.
“Come on! If we hurry, we can greet their ship at the airlock! Let’s go!”
“Wait –” By the time she swivelled on the chair, Amaterasu hardly had time to see locks of hair whip round the doorframe.
She slumped.
A whole year.
Months eaten away.
Weeks half-slept through.
Days grinding down her mind.
Hours stretching her out until she’d almost screamed with the empty pain of waiting for nothing.
Only one thing had kept her going. And now they were minutes from salvation. She saw the displays. She knew what they meant.
All that was left was her, and Melissa, and the end of a chapter of their lives even she wouldn’t put in that time capsule. Some things could never be shared.
Sighing, she rose up and ambled out after the distant, frantic chatter of an excited voice looking for new faces. She owed Melissa.
She owed Melissa a lot.
There weren’t really a hundred billion bottles. In her last frame of mind, it had just seemed that many. But it was hard to remind herself of that when the things spread out around them like glittery, bubbly plains and hills. She’d wanted to jettison the lot, but Melissa had insisted on reading as many as she could. Like toys to her.
Now the two of them stood in the midst of it all, watching the airlock doors towering over them. Waiting.
Within that silence, Amaterasu shivered. She could feel the cold oblivion of the universe around her. Watching. Waiting too. With infinite patience.
It’d get her in the end. All of this was just a matter of time.
She swallowed. Under the silence, the sound echoed like a dropped stone.
“A bit disappointing,” she murmured. “They got the capsule before they got us. It’s like we’re only second-best.”
“Uh huh?” Melissa continued staring.
“To a box full of junk, I mean.”
A smile twitched on Melissa’s face. “I am here, and so are you.”
Amaterasu shrugged convincingly, but let nothing cross her own face. “Whatever that means.”
Her straining imagination conjured the sounds of metal meeting metal, clicking into place for the docking procedure. They’d sent an SOS to the world…
“I really am sorry this time,” Amaterasu said, hoping she sounded matter-of-fact.
Melissa looked at her. “What for?”
“For being a pain in the neck.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, god knows what you’d be like if you hadn’t been stuck here with me all this time –”
“Oh, come off it.” Yet a giggle jumped out of Melissa’s voice. “I wouldn’t have lasted this long.”
Was that the sound of the ship locking into place? Amaterasu licked her lips.
She’d tell her.
“Wait right there,” she said. “I won’t be a minute.”
Ignoring Melissa’s surprised grunt, Amaterasu hurried across to the corridor. In truth, she hadn’t been particularly imaginative when it came to hiding places. And there were that many bottles around anyway, who’d care about one off in the corridor, even if it was the only bottle standing up?
She hurried back and offered the bottle to her friend.
“What’s this?” Melissa eyed it warily. “It’s not something like ‘your favourite fact’, is it?”
Amaterasu caught her gaze.
“N-Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said Melissa. Smiling weakly, she took the bottle as though frightened of dropping it.
“It’s not a ‘favourite fact’. Before I, uh, ‘fixed’ the communication system, I took one of those and wrote my own little message. Didn’t have the mind chip to help me look up some good quotations, so I’m afraid that’s my own amateur work.”
Frowning, Melissa pulled the paper out and opened it up. She turned it upside-down and cocked her head from side to side.
“Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829.” She looked up. “Uh… thanks, I guess? Though I don’t know why you crossed it out.”
Amaterasu reached over, pulled out the paper, flipped it over, and handed it back. Blushing, Melissa read the actual message.
Her gasp broke through. She opened her mouth –
“I mean every word,” said Amaterasu. Neither of them broke eye contact. “And there’s no hidden message. What you see is what I mean.”
Melissa smiled, amid the tears. There was no pretence.
Amaterasu knew she’d finally thrown the right message out to sea. And against all the odds, she’d reached the right island.
Once more, Amaterasu sighed and pretended to care.
She couldn’t help thinking that, after narrowly avoiding death by imploding spaceship and then by asphyxiation in deep space, there must be better things to do now than wander empty corridors in search of nothing. It felt vaguely ungrateful.
This corridor, for instance: both of them had passed through it a dozen times. Columns lined both sides, a monument to the Classical trappings of the previous occupants, if not to their good taste.
“That,” said her… well, not “friend”, exactly, but “colleague” felt too chilly, so… she’d go with “companion” for now. “That is the secret message! Look at the carvings on top. Look at the metal disk stuck through the side. That means something.”
Amaterasu wiped her face down. “It’s just decoration.”
“Weirdly specific decoration. See the rounded boltel structure near the top, just before the square abacus? Under all that cornicing? I know my columns, but those aren’t cheery little decorations. Those are Bow-and-Tell markings.”
“Some expert. How come you can’t translate it, then?”
“What? I recognized it, didn’t I? Anyway, languages ain’t my thing.”
“‘Aren’t’ my thing,” corrected Amaterasu hopelessly. “Let it go. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. The rest of this place, for a start.”
In truth, they hadn’t. The space station wasn’t big by her standards, and they’d run out of surprises hours ago.
Within minutes of docking while trying not to breathe too much smoke, the two of them had walked every square inch of the “shore”, or the airlocks where old spaceships used to dock and deliver goods. All empty, save for theirs, which had been contained behind emergency slider doors; the reinforced windows of these had long since turned grey with the smoke trapped inside.
From the “shore”, they’d called and heard no one. Not a soul had walked in, not a Tannoy crackled, not an alarm blared or a squadron burst in to hold them up.
So they’d gone into the “forest”, a labyrinth of corridors and warehouses size enough for ships. No one there, though a few crates of untouched ready meals and protein shakes remained. Enough to see them through several months, and probably enough to sink a small battleship.
They were covered for food, at least. Amaterasu let out a breath.
Onwards they’d walked, venturing into the “cave”, or dormitory. This had been an explosion of carvings and statues and beeping machines still running after… Well, she hadn’t a clue. Decades, likely. Or centuries. Some of the proto-beds still had Velcro straps, for pity’s sake.
Now? Vent shafts rumbled overhead. Pipes gurgled. Lights burst into life whenever they entered a room. Every place warmed them, every breath was fresh, every wall panel and computer monitor winked at them as though in greeting, and when they’d found the auxiliary generators chugging away down below, she’d fancied the things had come straight out of the box, they were that clean. The place was alive and happy and full of stories. What they lacked were actual people.
Now, she gave her friend – companion – a nervous glance.
“I’m gonna find out what that means,” Melissa said.
Amaterasu groaned. She knew those tones. When her companion spoke like that, it meant someone somewhere would soon have to get dustpan and brush ready. If they were lucky.
“Let’s focus on the here and now, shall we?” she said bravely. Failing to get a response, she added, “Melissa?”
“Oh, all right.” Yet as soon as they moved into the darker chamber, Melissa took out a handheld Confabulator.
Amaterasu wrinkled her nose at it. “Pocket calculators,” she muttered. “Looks like something I’d tile my bathroom with.”
“You should get one of these. There are restaurants of options on these things.”
Restaurants, Amaterasu thought grimly. Like menus, but bigger. “A mind chip is best for me, thanks. None of that primitive hunk-of-junk stuff. You should get an implant. With all the wireless databases they keep adding to the web, you can get an answer as soon as you’ve thought up the question. Doesn’t require cluttering up your pockets, either.”
“Fine, fine. Unless you get disconnected.” Melissa tapped the screen on her incomprehensible, primitive excuse of a device. “Anyway, it’s cheating to download the answers directly into your head. Why not work for it? The whole point of talking is to surprise people.”
No reply. None that Amaterasu could fairly give. Out here, there was no signal on the mind chip. It basically relied on being close to civilization.
Out here, there were thousands of space stations. Thousands of electronic islands, all scattered across the boondocks of the solar system. Most of them had been pariahs of civilization from birth. The rest had fallen behind when the solar winds had changed course and society moved elsewhere.
Grimly, she wondered how many would still have human life on them. Well, how many would have human life that wasn’t stuck in a cryogenic freezer. This particular one spoke of a vogue for the ancient ways, which was the usual response – in her experience – to civilizations which turned their noses up at the modern ways.
Snobs, she thought. Ungrateful, hypocritical snobs.
Part of her was glad this place was dead. She didn’t fancy explaining herself at the best of times. Certainly not to the sort of people who believed the Golden Age – Probably a trademarked phrase by now, she thought – had occurred around the same time some bloke with sticks had only just figured out the world was a ball shape.
All that was left on this “island” in the sea of space? A “village”. Specifically, the labs.
She and Melissa poked their heads through various automatic doors. White hospital-like rooms struck their senses. Disinfectant stung the air and made their eyes water. Fiddly little metal tools invoked the great dentists-slash-torturers of the ages. Uncomfortably, she noticed the syringes and vials so prominent on many of the worktops.
“Medical facility?” Amaterasu murmured.
“I think it’s a biology lab. Look, they got Petri dishes.”
“And embryo vats. Yes, I do have eyes, thanks.”
None of the computer banks were on. Somehow, she found this a relief. Although it would’ve made more sense to look for clues here…?
No. Her heart wasn’t in it. She moved further down the corridor. Melissa’s skipping steps hurried after her.
“Where are you going?” said Melissa.
“Retracing our steps.”
“What, again?”
“I’ll feel better once I’ve memorized this layout.”
“Why? We’ll use it when we need it. Relax, ‘Doc’. We’re the only ones here. On this island of mystery amid a sea of woes… This is kinda like Robinson Crusoe, don’t you think?”
If there’s no one here, then we need to explain why everything’s in such good shape. No sign of a struggle. No bodies, either. No manual systems operational: everything’s either automated or standard. So… examine the facts… See the bigger picture… See the forest for the trees…
“I told you not to call me ‘Doc’,” she said coolly.
“Doc” brought the whole assuming arrogance of her name to mind. Doctor of Science honoris causa, Amaterasu Vanessa Rubric Copgraves. Anyone wanting to annoy her only had to recite the whole thing. Too often, the dratted name sounded like a pompous title from the bad old days of – she almost spat – “nobility”. Like one of those famous lords or ladies who were rich enough to lock themselves away in their drawing rooms, mixing chemicals and inventing history by accident.
In her heart, she felt this was utterly undemocratic. She even refused to use scientific terms derived from their names, once she remembered which terms were which.
“So…” she said aloud. “What’s likely…?”
“Who lived here?” said Melissa, hurrying alongside her; Amaterasu at a walk could tax most people at a jog. “Imagine their ghosts walking down the corridors. The spirits of physicists strolling through the shadows.”
“Unless they did anything dangerous,” snapped Amaterasu, “then who they were is hardly relevant now, is it?”
“But surely you’re thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the communication room needs maintenance. The generator’s working fine, so why that’s not, I can’t tell.”
“It’ll keep. We’ve been at this for hours. Why don’t you savour it while we’re here? We’re cast adrift in someone else’s history.”
“This place is odd, granted.” She scanned the doors flashing by as they passed. “Worst-case scenario: biological contamination from the labs did this place in. But the decontamination systems are fully operational, just like everything else. And still no bodies. That doesn’t add up. Oh well, at least it suggests we’re in the clear – Wait.”
Just in case, she flicked a few switches on her way past. Door locks clicked again, though since she’d done this dozens of times already, it wasn’t so much locking as confirming they were locked. She relaxed after the last click.
“Aw,” said Melissa. “You’ve got no romance in your soul. Don’t you wanna explore the place?”
“I’d rather not stumble across some mutant microbes, thanks.”
“So paranoid! Look, I’ve seen stations like this before. They’re usually harmless scientific research outposts. We’ll be completely safe. The Hotaru Space Station alone was a triumph!”
“The what?”
“Hotaru Space Station. You know! The one with Professor Sapphro’s team. Your college buddy Kohaku… I think… had a panic attack, and you talked her out of it and told her she’d manage just fine.”
“I don’t remember,” lied Amaterasu.
“Anyway, I think you’re being jumpy. That’s my point.”
“And I think you’re being too trusting. You don’t know the first thing about this place. Why’s it so well-kept? What kind of technology are we talking about here? How soon can we repair those communication systems? That’s my point. That’s what you should be focusing on.”
Upon reaching a T-junction, they stopped. Suddenly silent, she could hear her friend’s breathing.
Breathing hard.
A gentle pat on the back: Amaterasu never felt happy giving anything else. Even this much seemed unprofessional.
“Keep talking to me, Melissa,” she said, not unkindly.
For her reward, she got to meet Melissa’s face. “Pale” wasn’t the worst of it.
“We’ll find a way out of here,” whispered Melissa. “Right?”
“They’ll probably start looking for us now,” said Amaterasu, pushing far too much bravado through her tones. “We did send the distress signal before the ship went kaboom, eh?”
Her sad attempt at a gag died as it had lived. For a scientist, Melissa had spent an awful lot of time chatting to other people, and buying them drinks, and laughing at their best jokes. College, university, out in the field: whatever had stuck in her teens had refused to be shed, even long after Amaterasu had finally admitted to herself that she, her best fr– companion, was an overgrown child.
“Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s go back. We’ll work out the rationing system and then start tomorrow. No point making things harder for ourselves, right?”
One week passed.
Much to her disgust, she could only tell because of Melissa’s Confabulator device. Merely acknowledging its usefulness filled her with shame. But then her mind chip was still dead. She kept reminding herself of these things through sheer pragmatic insistence, despite her pride’s protests.
The ready meals were primitive garbage, nourishing and highly tailored to human physiology while being completely, utterly retch-worthy. Melissa wolfed the things down, at least whenever the two of them ate together; so long as she could cheerfully talk her mouth off while stuffing her face, she’d even swallow raw soil. Occasionally, Amaterasu wished she could be so easily distracted from her own food.
Melissa slept soundly on the Velcro beds. Amaterasu had to will herself to sleep. Melissa loved wandering off and talking to herself about the secret message in the column. Amaterasu kept checking the security room’s camera display to make sure her… companion was OK. After a while, she spent more and more hours a day in Melissa’s company. Nothing of the situation seemed to bother the woman. She wished she had such confidence.
Melissa avoided the labs, though, whereas Amaterasu kept going through them. Once, she found piles of paper in a cupboard, and discovered that the taps were still working. Otherwise, she wandered through them wondering what had happened. Even the security disks only went back a couple of decades, and all of the footage was empty of humans. Except for them two, obviously.
Up till now, she’d avoided talking about the creeping dread inside her. They only had enough food between them for months, assuming they lasted that long.
One of them could always… make it easier for the other…
Anxiously, Amaterasu dismissed the thought. Food shortage or not, Melissa only thrived in company. She needed to see another face most of all, even if it was a furrowed, put-upon face.
Then, on the eighth day:
“I found bottles!” said Melissa.
Amaterasu sat down on the plush chairs, bracing herself for a breakfast of what tasted like barf.
“Hm?” she said.
“I rummaged around the private quarters, and there were bottles behind one of the beds.”
“Huh. Clearly, someone wasn’t coping.” Amaterasu watched her friend’s face.
“They were empty. Anyway, they don’t look like medicinal bottles.”
Clean over her head. Amaterasu took a mouthful and then ordered her tongue to put up with it. She hummed with fake interest.
“Well, in the old days, whenever someone got shipwrecked and ended up alone on an island, they’d write a message in a bottle and then throw it out to sea, hoping – just hoping – someone might pick it up and come find them.”
“Uh huh.” Oh god. Vitamins and minerals and proteins and carbs. Part of a nutritionally balanced pukefest.
“How about we do the same?”
“Yeah.” This place must date back to the Rego-Classical Age at best, judging from this stuff. Just swallow and bear it. Just swallow and bear it.
“Yeah, I think we should! So long as communications are down, what have we got to lose? Stranger things have happened. And… well, it’s kind of exciting, don’t you think? Like that old song. I’ll send an SOS to the world…”
“Right, right.” Wonder if that bottle guy had more stuff stashed away somewhere. One of us might need it, near the finish.
Then her brain caught up with her ears.
“What?” she said.
“I said we could send a bottle –”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m serious! It’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it?”
“Melissa, that plan would’ve been crazy even on the seas of Earth. One little bottle against enough water to cover two-thirds of the planet? No chance. You might as well write ‘false hope’ on the label and be done with it.”
“But if we do nothing, that guarantees no one’ll find anything.”
“And we’re in space. It’s not ‘the ocean, but a bit bigger’. Think of our solar system. We could compress all civilized planets and moons – no, just compress all the planets and moons anyway – and next to all the space contained from one Oort limit to the other, the result wouldn’t even be a rounding error. Melissa, you’re being utterly ludicrous.”
They continued their breakfasts in silence. And, on one side at least, with complete disgust.
It’s your fault we’re out here in the first place.
Amaterasu didn’t dare say that aloud. Whatever relationship existed between them wouldn’t survive the impact.
Unfortunately, she had the wheedling sort of mind which used the truth as a cattle prod on her thoughts. It was true, at that.
The original plan, out here on the margins of the solar system, so close to the limit of space travel itself, was not the work of carefully scientific deliberation. It was a childish bit of romantic claptrap. Right here on the Oort limit, about as far as space travellers could go before they had to contend with the light-years between stars. And no one really had to contend with any of those because, short of a miracle, faster-than-light travel – heck, reasonably-close-to-light-speed travel – was a pipe dream. Hollow, hard, and in some contexts utterly full of crap.
They’d wanted to leave a time capsule.
Not one of those “school project” ones, with archaeologically useless junk. No, she’d be smarter than that. Diaries. Video footage. Photographs. Holographic childhood memories. Records of day-to-day life, ready for scholarly inspection.
She’d needed a lot of persuading. Showing her own stuff to Melissa alone… she’d felt naked. Even now, she burned across her face and refused to look opposite, not at her companion’s eye.
But in a way, the revelation had to be made. The quality of the material needed checking, and she’d trust no one else. Besides, Melissa and she had spent their lives together, and if Melissa had any self-awareness behind that happy-go-lucky façade, then she hid it commendably well.
Most of all… Well, for all of “Doc’s” titles, Amaterasu was fully aware she’d pass out of history with virtually nothing left behind. You didn’t get fame for being slow and steady. Slapdash and stupid, perhaps, hence whoever had designed the spaceship with such an ailing shield system and a poor excuse for an evacuation shuttle.
Not for the first time, she wondered why Melissa had suggested the time capsule. She’d shown Amaterasu her history. Did she want to leave a mark too? After all, she didn’t have a title like “Doctor of Science”. And in this hyper-competitive world…
Ha. That was a joke. Hyper-competitive. No, just a more intensive form of pure luck.
Which had thwarted them.
The micrometeorites had penetrated their shield, and even their hull. Within minutes the ship had self-destructed. Thank goodness she’d been twitchy enough to check the security monitors every five minutes.
Of course, that had left them stranded in a shoddy evacuation shuttle in one of the most barren parts of the solar system. That had been Melissa’s choice: to go somewhere so rarely frequented. The fewer people came this way, the better they could preserve the message for so many years.
Thwarted by luck.
Amaterasu popped the last mouthful in. She chewed as though grinding glass between her teeth.
Thwarted by luck. In a pitiless universe.
No…
A universe like that wouldn’t let them survive for months on end. One of them would have to go. It was only pragmatism.
So was it better to go now, and maximize the food for Melissa? Or delay it in case rescue came?
Amaterasu swallowed what felt like a fistful of grit. “I’ll have another look at the communication system. It’s strange, though. Everything’s where it should be, but I can’t get the thing on. Perhaps the problem’s at the power source, but I’d have to check the last of the wiring.”
“Pity we can’t do Morse code in space.” Melissa shrugged. “SOS, IWB, V7 –”
“I’m sorry?”
“You know, the old emergency messages. Nine bits of code, and they can translate into so many messages. SOS is just one of those interpretations.”
“IWB?”
“Er… I Want Bravery?”
“V7?”
“I dunno. They’re random codes, not acronyms.”
“Not like SOS. ‘Save Our Souls,’ right?”
“Actually, SOS is just another code. ‘Save Our Souls’ was a back-formation.”
“Ha. An after-the-fact bit of baloney, you mean.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“Uh huh. Anything else you’d want to send? A ‘Get Well Soon’ card, maybe?”
“Don’t be like that.” Then Melissa beamed at her. “There’s always one important message.”
“What’s that?”
Yet it was several seconds of lip-chewing and ceiling-staring before Melissa replied: “I am here, and so are you.”
Amaterasu snorted. “Last part’s not much good if someone doesn’t read it.”
“That’s why it’s a message. There must always be someone to read it, even if it’s only the sender.”
“It’s nonsense. What else are you cooking up in that brain of yours?”
“I’m just thinking. What would Robinson Crusoe do?”
At this, Amaterasu rocked forwards and stood up straight as a flagpole. “That primitive hack-rag? Please. Imperialistic stupidity at its finest. And the ending is so much macho bilge.”
“It’s an inspiring story! Man against the elements! Civilization against the wilderness! Crusoe was just a guy, and through sheer faith and grit, he did all those amazing things on his own! Like we’re doing!”
Amaterasu didn’t even think. Her finger pointed at Melissa without waiting for instructions. Her brain had to breathe deeply just to catch up.
“We are not ‘faithing and gritting’ our way through this. This isn’t a self-indulgent fantasy. This is real life. We’re just doing what even the meanest animals do: surviving. No point dressing it up. It’d be an insult to dress it up. Understand?”
Melissa stared at her.
On her way out, it occurred to Amaterasu that this wasn’t the best way to end a conversation. But Melissa’s overheated brain had chosen this rarely frequented part of the solar system to begin with. She only ever seemed to think about her corner of the world. She didn’t think about months and food supplies and stress. Heck, even in civilization, she’d barely thought beyond the city limits.
Well, she was overdue a reality check.
Robinson Crusoe! As if anyone anywhere who got stranded on an island, or “island”, could only ever be compared to this one frankly uninspiring name! As if all the millions and millions of other unfortunates were just copycats. As though Crusoe had invented being stranded. As though anyone else – this time, she spat – didn’t matter.
She spent the rest of the day glowering at the tangle of wires in the communication room. Nothing was accomplished.
Despite her protesting stomach, she went to bed without eating. One could only take so many insults from wakefulness to sleep.
One month passed.
It was going badly.
Amaterasu had tangles in her hair, which kept falling into her eyes whenever she leaned forwards. What she smelled like, she dreaded to think; the hygiene module had given up about three days ago. Her skin felt like clingy slime.
Despite checking the communication room, the generators, and anything in the place that looked remotely electronic, she couldn’t get so much as a radio to work. According to all her experience, they should have worked. At this point, she was just checking and re-checking endlessly, in the increasingly desperate hope that she might have missed the one little thing that’d make it all better.
She was skipping meals every other day too. Melissa had scolded her for it every time, but… they were a crate down. A whole crate. For weeks, she’d half-believed this one alone would’ve lasted forever. It wasn’t as if they had many more to get through.
And all around them, the silence of the void. Waiting. With infinite patience.
Now she had pains in her stomach.
“I told you not to skip those meals.” Melissa’s Confabulator scanned the exposed belly while Amaterasu tried not to breathe out. “And I can tell you’re trying not to breathe out. I do have medical training, you know.”
“Sorry.” But she could imagine the lower ribs pressing through when she did breathe.
Melissa lowered her device. “You can put your shirt down now, Miss Prude. Well, in my medical opinion, what we have here is a case of hunger pangs brought on by excessive silliness.”
“Sorry.”
“You know there’s a risk of malnourishment if you don’t eat the right amount. Why do you do it?”
Best to say nothing. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I have NO intention whatsoever of disillusioning you.
Fortunately, Melissa had long since learned not to press the point. “At least the cure’s easy enough to apply. Also, you can thank this ‘hunk of junk’ for being so useful, please.”
“All right, all right, so it’s not totally a waste of space.” Amaterasu climbed off the seat and followed her out the door. “Why’s that disk thing sticking out of it, though?”
“I took it from that column. You know? The one with the secret message.”
“What are you doing?”
“Cryptanalysis! My specialty!” Melissa coughed. “Apart from medicine and biology, of course.”
“I thought you couldn’t translate languages?”
“I can’t. It’s proving a bit tricky. But they haven’t made a code I couldn’t crack.”
They walked down the corridor to the dormitory – the “cave” – in silence. Only when they were on their ever-familiar seats did Melissa add:
“That settles it. I’m sending out that bottle.”
Amaterasu moaned. “Not this again.”
“I need it.”
“Rubbish. You need food, water, oxygen, and the right atmospheric temperatures and pressures. Anything else is optional.”
“I need people around me! People! Someone I can talk to and be surprised by and learn so much about! Someone I can trust!”
Amaterasu closed her eyes tight. She counted to ten. More than once, she wondered if Melissa was doing this deliberately, perhaps as some sort of punishment.
She opened them again. “Don’t worry. The life-support systems here are working fine. I’ve searched this place top-to-bottom for dangers and found nothing. We can last a few more months.”
“I don’t want to be looked after by machines!”
“Decent quality machines. Give them some credit.”
Melissa wiped her face down and fidgeted. To Amaterasu’s surprise, Melissa then shot forwards and leaned closer.
“Have you ever read Walker’s essay on semiotics?” said Melissa urgently.
A grunt. Not that there was anything wrong with taking an interest in literature, but Amaterasu had given it up early for a reason.
“Assume the answer is no,” she said, trying to inject as much irritability as possible into her droning tones.
“Walker divided up information into two sorts: the knowledge, which science gives in facts and truths, and the news.”
“That’s like the six ‘o’ clock, ten ‘o’ clock sort?” Hastily, she regretted speaking; Melissa rarely scowled, but when she did, she saved up a lifetime of outrage and fury. “Sorry.”
“That’s like… Look, news is how it affects you. How it affects you in the moment. How you choose to respond to it. If you choose to respond to it. Does it matter to you as a person? Does it sound likely to you, and to you alone, no matter what anyone else says?”
“Listen, Melissa –”
“Is the sender someone you can trust? Can you put your faith in them?”
“Please.”
“That’s why science fails to appreciate art. Art is the message AND the bottle.”
“Please, Melissa. Believe me. I’m doing the best I can.”
In the awkward pause, Amaterasu found nothing but complete incomprehension in Melissa’s eyes. She groaned and flopped along her seat, not looking at Melissa but at the computers guarding the far wall. Suddenly, going to bed early sounded like a brilliant plan.
“Are you all right?” Melissa’s voice drew closer.
“No.”
“Do you want another medical exam?”
“No.” Amaterasu felt herself going red just thinking about the last one.
Perhaps the pause had been thoughtful. Not on Amaterasu’s side, at least: all her thoughts had evaporated into some dumb mist. Professionalism was a sad little voice calling through the wind.
A gentle hand patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll send that bottle. At least it’s something, yeah?”
“A negligible something,” she muttered.
“You’d be surprised.”
“I hope so.”
Another pause, in which all sorts of thoughts sneaked around: too obvious to be ignored but too discreet to be identified. After a while, she gave up trying to peer through the mist.
“You know,” said Melissa gently, “Walker made his point with an analogy.”
“That’s nice.”
“Two castaways on an island. Neither of them remembered anything about their past lives, but as the days dragged on, they found bottles washed up on the beach as regular as the sunrise and the sunset. Only the messages were weird. They were just facts, like ‘Water is H2O’ or ‘Concorde’s last flight was on Wednesday 26th November 2003’.”
“OK?”
“So they took it two different ways. One of them analysed the facts for any data they could study, cross-referencing the content to ensure it made sense as a whole. The other one didn’t like this. They said that the first one – who represented science – was missing the trees for the forest.”
A switch flicked on in Amaterasu’s head.
“What was important, the other one said, was the connection. Who sent the messages? Why did they matter? How foolish was it to take them as true and proceed from there? That castaway represented art.”
How strange. A moment ago, Amaterasu had been lying down through sheer lack of energy. Now she was lying down because she had to fight not to get up.
“Those bottles and those messages weren’t mere devices. They were connections between islands, islands with no other contact. Emotional connections –”
“Are you sending your bloody bottle,” snapped Amaterasu, “or aren’t you?”
A moment later, she heard heavy breathing. Later still, she heard footsteps, the whir of an automatic door, and then nothing.
Deep inside, she sensed the stress ebb away. Relief washed over her.
She slept where she’d fallen. Or at least tried to.
Thus, she skipped dinner.
She was hungry. She just believed she shouldn’t be. Or didn’t deserve to eat.
Sooner or later…
She’d have to do it.
Sooner…
Or…
Later.
Eleven months passed.
Despite her most pessimistic predictions, Amaterasu saw the crates last beyond those months. They were now on the last one. Her stomach kept hurting too, but she refused all medical exams, and not merely because pulling her shirt up over her stomach felt positively indecent, even in front of someone who’d also seen the insides of her holo-diary.
They’d salvaged what was left of the evacuation shuttle. Most of it was a burnt wreck. Sadly, no radio survived. They’d run out of things to do in the airlocks, corridors, and warehouses. Yoga exercises, jogging, self-defence training, measuring the walls when they were really desperate. Last thing they wanted to do was regress to children playing hide-and-go-seek.
They’d stopped going into the labs. Amaterasu could only take so much “hospital aesthetic”.
That just left the dormitory. Their “cave”.
Amaterasu tried not to think about it. They’d been alone together for so long, and still she refused to crack. Melissa needed her iron constitution to get through this. Melissa needed her to be strong.
And then the weirdest day had hit them.
“Bottles!” Melissa cheered and shook her awake. “Look, look! On the screen!”
“What?” Amaterasu winced against another lash from her stomach.
“We’ve got mail!”
Groggily, groaning, Amaterasu slumped out of her Velcro straps and hobbled over to the computer bank. Her tangles had to be brushed out of her face, and then she saw the screen.
“What the –?”
“There must be a hundred billion of the things! Come on, come on! I’m sucking them into the airlock now! It’s a shower of bottles!”
Amaterasu blinked. She blinked again, because the illusion hadn’t vanished the first time.
“This is a joke, right?” she said.
At once, she turned around and hobbled halfway to bed. Melissa grabbed her arm and tugged.
“Come on, come on! Our prayers have been answered! Come on!”
“It’s just a weird trick.”
“It’s real! Look, I’ll show you!”
Eventually, Amaterasu shrugged and let herself be dragged down the corridors. This was clearly a bad dream, after all. In real life, this didn’t happen. And hunger led to hallucinations. Why not?
Even when Melissa pressed her hand into the scanner and the airlock slid open and the mountain of bottles tumbled out, Amaterasu didn’t mind. Her subconscious surely knew about Melissa’s cryptanalytical skills, and the chances a primitive bio-security door lock had against them.
Melissa dived onto the pile, picking up random bottles. “Aw, there are so many! Which one should we pick first?”
“Just pick one and get it over with.” Amaterasu yawned. “And then I’m waking up.”
Melissa plucked one and tore out the message. She read it.
She frowned.
Again, she plucked one and tore out the message and read it. Again, she frowned.
“What?” she breathed.
“Oh?” said Amaterasu in as scathing a voice as her half-yawn could manage. “Were you expecting a birthday card?”
“They’re all…” Melissa plucked and plucked and plucked, and read and read and read, and scowled and scowled and scowled. The tinkle of bottles led to one tapping against Amaterasu’s shoe.
“They’re all what? Badly spelled?”
“Facts.” Melissa stared at her as a child might stare at a parent. “They’re all just… facts.”
To her own surprise, Amaterasu burst out laughing. She laughed until her ribs ached and her throat felt sore. She laughed until she staggered clutching her own belly. She laughed until she couldn’t so much as breathe, and then she almost guffawed trying to breathe in again, and kept breaking out into titters before finally meeting Melissa’s outrage coming towards her eyes.
“I remembered.” Amaterasu wiped her cheeks. “I remembered you talking. About those two Walker castaways. Oh my, this is priceless.”
“What is?” Melissa shot to her feet. “This isn’t a joke! Someone’s contacted us!”
“No, no. I know what this is. Tears you up, though, doesn’t it? The romantic image of the lone survivor, throwing their hopes out onto the cruel but mysterious sea. Seeking connection through sheer desperate luck. And you thought it would work.”
“I told you not to skip those meals. You’re raving!”
The last hints of laughter vanished from Amaterasu’s voice. “No, you were bloody raving. It was your dumb head-in-the-clouds that got us out here in the first place. You threw a useless bit of glass and paper out to vanish into nothing. Sort of ruins your day, doesn’t it, to get this back?”
Angrily, she threw herself round to totter her way to bed. Suddenly, the sooner this dream ended, the better.
She got one step before sheer tiredness hit her and she fell forwards. She didn’t even remember the thump. Just the blast of pain and the cry of someone’s panic before sweet darkness blanketed her and tucked her in and left her.
There was nothing left of her…
…until she opened her eyes.
On one of the benches. Surrounded by beeping machines. Looking up at Melissa’s wide eyes.
A burbling voice spoke. Amaterasu watched the lips move in silence.
Then the concerned voice became clear: “Thank goodness you’re OK! You’ve been out for hours! Don’t tell me you’ve been skipping sleep too!”
Months rolled on top of her. First, she’d skipped meals. Then she’d stopped even pretending to make her unruly long hair tame again. Then she’d skipped sleep.
All to fix a communication system that, by all rights, was fixed. Just not working.
She whimpered. The pain hadn’t stopped at her stomach. It burned her from scalp to soles. She didn’t dare move, in case agony exploded anywhere along her body.
One thought pushed its way out of her mouth. “What…?” she said weakly. “What the hell is going on?”
“You’ve been infected,” said Melissa, lowering her Confabulator.
“Infected?”
“You idiot. You weakened yourself. I warned you! You’ve made yourself an easy target.”
“But I remember. Those bottles. Hallucinations?”
“No. They’re covered in space debris, and I found fragments of Neo-Naissance warehouse crates among them. They’re flotsam. Leftovers from another station, maybe. I don’t know what kind of maddened mind would sit down and write that many facts for nothing, but I dread to think what happened to them.”
Amaterasu felt no surprise. Right now, sitting down to write a hundred billion facts sounded kind of relaxing. Repetitive, maybe, but wasn’t that the point of meditation? Or was it self-hypnosis?
“No one got those bottled messages but us. There must be hundreds of dead stations out here.” Melissa’s lip trembled.
Faint as her mind was, Amaterasu urged herself to raise her head, ignoring the shrieks of pain along her neck.
Weakly, she mumbled, “What?”
“We’ve only got one month left! What if we don’t make it? What if no one comes? What if no one even finds my bottled message?”
Too much effort: Amaterasu’s head hit the pillow again. She winced against the stabs.
I should’ve done it months ago. Selfish to have lasted this long…
Poor Melissa would have lasted longer if Amaterasu hadn’t gotten cold feet. Melissa could’ve escaped. Probably. She’d have enjoyed a longer life, at least.
Cruelty was her constant companion; Amaterasu tried to sleep, but her alertness defied death over and over. Too many bright lights, too many racing thoughts, too much noise and pain hammering away at her. Vaguely, she wondered if it was possible to hold her breath without chickening out and having to start all over again.
“Chin up,” she said bravely. “You’ve still. Got that message. To decipher. Right?”
Melissa’s facial contortions twitched towards a frown for a moment. “Sorry?”
“The column thing. With the disk in it. Figured it out yet?”
“Oh, that,” muttered Melissa. She raised a needle. “I cracked that days ago.”
Surprise held all else at bay.
“You did?” whispered Amaterasu.
“It’s not important.”
“I couldn’t get you! To shut up about it! Why’s it suddenly ‘not important’?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
“It mattered to you! Come on. Please. Tell me.”
Melissa’s face reddened. She raised the needle higher.
“What is it, Melissa?”
The flicker of a frown gave way to creeping disgust. “Nothing worthwhile. I thought it’d be something romantic or delightful. You know? Like those hidden love messages we used to find at school. Or like those family memories my grandmother used to bury.”
“To grow ‘fondness trees’. I do remember, thanks. So what?”
By now, the twisting disgust tugged so hard that Melissa jerked her head about for something safe to look at. “That hidden message… was nothing but a set of rushed blueprints. On how to make, and I quote, ‘an ultimate bioweapon’.”
When she glared at Amaterasu, the air shimmered between them. “That’s what they felt was worth preserving. That’s the best this place could do. The moment they thought they’d perish, they left nothing but their most selfish, nastiest, cruellest disease behind. That’s the sort of world we’re stuck in!”
Helpless in her pain, Amaterasu said nothing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much venom pulsing through the veins of that face.
The needle came down. Through sheer pain, Amaterasu didn’t even feel it.
Finally, the pain faded.
“Who can I trust?” Melissa ran a hand through her own overlong hair.
Amaterasu gritted her teeth. “Me?”
Melissa choked. “Obviously you. I meant anyone else?”
She teased a stray strand of hair out of Amaterasu’s eyes. So much relief swept through Amaterasu that she didn’t even protest. She felt alive again, back from the dead. Not for weeks had she felt so capable of leaping off the bed and striding forth.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered. “I’ll look at. The communication system. Again.”
Melissa chortled, suddenly weeping. “Course. I’d expect nothing less.”
For Amaterasu had to tell the universe: the two of them were here.
Not just to say SOS. To say their very existence mattered.
She slept.
Soundly.
Two days passed.
With a click, the screen flickered into life.
“It’s working,” said Melissa from her seat. “How d’you do that?”
“Sadly, I must admit to some humility here,” said Amaterasu, emerging from behind the console. “Luck did it. Still don’t know why this thing suddenly started working. All I know is the universe stuck a ‘kick me’ sign to my back.”
“What, you? ‘Doc’?” Melissa tried for a grin.
“I’m not much of a scientist,” lied Amaterasu out of sheer guilt.
“You’re crazy! Think of all those works you’ve done! The Heliogenerator Hypothesis, for starters!”
“Huh. Pity academic stuff doesn’t matter much out here. Unless it’s failed bioweapons.”
Melissa cracked her fingers. “OK. So… any requests?”
“Just an SOS will do, thanks.”
“Or an IWB. Or a V7.”
“Less of the chit-chat.”
“Ha. You haven’t changed much, have you? Still the gold-hearted softie deep down, am I right?”
Amaterasu resisted her own upcoming chuckle. “Send your bloody SOS already.”
“Aye aye, Captain!”
Fingers tapping on the keyboard. The click and tick of switches and displays. Flashing screens.
Carefully, Amaterasu eased her creaking, self-hating joints and muscles into the seat and let out a breath. At least she was eating properly again, though she was getting funny messages from her kidneys. Part of her wrestled with the idea of asking Melissa for another check-up.
“Um…” she began.
“Woo, I haven’t had this much fun in ages!” Melissa tapped the keys faster and faster. “Remember when we found that pack of cards? Oh, you were a demon at poker!”
“I do have the face for it, yes.”
“And the time we had a rummage through the labs, and you didn’t want to go into that one room because the light didn’t work?”
“It smelled funny,” lied Amaterasu. She wondered what Melissa was leading up to.
“Not forgetting – never forgetting! – the time we told each other all those crazy stories.”
“Well, you told most of them. I don’t have the imagination.” Amaterasu glared sidelong at her. “Where are you going with this, exactly?”
Still admiring the screen, Melissa smiled. “I’m just saying. If we don’t get out of here. Just in case. Look, I don’t suppose we could do those things again? I quite liked all that.”
“For a whole month?”
“We managed a year, didn’t we? A month should be a piece of cake. Hey, I’m picking up something!”
They fell silent; Amaterasu, opening her mouth to reply, closed it again.
On the screen, one glowing line oscillated.
Beep. Beep-beep-beep. Beep.
“That’s us!” Melissa rose off her seat to peer closer.
“Is it?”
“Yeah! It’s the lagan!”
Hastily, Amaterasu dredged her memory for clues. Lagan: she’d heard that term before.
Oh yes, all that maritime law stuff. She had to remember that Melissa had been on a lot of ships. It turned out there were all kinds of legal niceties surrounding shipwrecks; should a vessel, ship, or the like be destroyed accidentally, precious cargo could be deliberately thrown out with a buoy attached… or in this case, a “buoy” satellite. The cargo landed on a nearby moon or asteroid, and the satellite automatically went into orbit around it, broadcasting its exact coordinates. Handy, if anyone wanted to return and reclaim it later.
But… “What’s lagan got to do with us?”
“Don’t you remember? We threw it out just before the ship imploded! Our time capsule! It's still out there, waiting for us!”
“Or for whoever picks it up.” Amaterasu sighed and leaned back so far she was staring at the ceiling, at its mass of pipes and wires. “What a waste of time that was.”
“It’s not a waste of time.” Compassionate fingers hugged her one stray hand. “We are here, and so’s the world.”
Amaterasu fought to keep her legendary poker face in place. “You are full of sap, aren’t you?”
“And you’re just full of it, ain’tcha?” The fingers patted hers and then typing resumed. “Anyway, I’ve left the best news for last, because… wait for it… the signal’s coming towards us!”
Months and months of fear and confusion and mindless boredom wobbled, like a boulder perched atop a tiny stone. Amaterasu’s poker face twitched.
“Towards us?” She sat up straight.
“Yeah! The Security Peelers found it, and now they’re dragging it with them. They’ve found us!”
“My god.” Then Amaterasu cursed herself. She wasn’t being professional. She wasn’t being proper.
“Come on! If we hurry, we can greet their ship at the airlock! Let’s go!”
“Wait –” By the time she swivelled on the chair, Amaterasu hardly had time to see locks of hair whip round the doorframe.
She slumped.
A whole year.
Months eaten away.
Weeks half-slept through.
Days grinding down her mind.
Hours stretching her out until she’d almost screamed with the empty pain of waiting for nothing.
Only one thing had kept her going. And now they were minutes from salvation. She saw the displays. She knew what they meant.
All that was left was her, and Melissa, and the end of a chapter of their lives even she wouldn’t put in that time capsule. Some things could never be shared.
Sighing, she rose up and ambled out after the distant, frantic chatter of an excited voice looking for new faces. She owed Melissa.
She owed Melissa a lot.
There weren’t really a hundred billion bottles. In her last frame of mind, it had just seemed that many. But it was hard to remind herself of that when the things spread out around them like glittery, bubbly plains and hills. She’d wanted to jettison the lot, but Melissa had insisted on reading as many as she could. Like toys to her.
Now the two of them stood in the midst of it all, watching the airlock doors towering over them. Waiting.
Within that silence, Amaterasu shivered. She could feel the cold oblivion of the universe around her. Watching. Waiting too. With infinite patience.
It’d get her in the end. All of this was just a matter of time.
She swallowed. Under the silence, the sound echoed like a dropped stone.
“A bit disappointing,” she murmured. “They got the capsule before they got us. It’s like we’re only second-best.”
“Uh huh?” Melissa continued staring.
“To a box full of junk, I mean.”
A smile twitched on Melissa’s face. “I am here, and so are you.”
Amaterasu shrugged convincingly, but let nothing cross her own face. “Whatever that means.”
Her straining imagination conjured the sounds of metal meeting metal, clicking into place for the docking procedure. They’d sent an SOS to the world…
“I really am sorry this time,” Amaterasu said, hoping she sounded matter-of-fact.
Melissa looked at her. “What for?”
“For being a pain in the neck.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, god knows what you’d be like if you hadn’t been stuck here with me all this time –”
“Oh, come off it.” Yet a giggle jumped out of Melissa’s voice. “I wouldn’t have lasted this long.”
Was that the sound of the ship locking into place? Amaterasu licked her lips.
She’d tell her.
“Wait right there,” she said. “I won’t be a minute.”
Ignoring Melissa’s surprised grunt, Amaterasu hurried across to the corridor. In truth, she hadn’t been particularly imaginative when it came to hiding places. And there were that many bottles around anyway, who’d care about one off in the corridor, even if it was the only bottle standing up?
She hurried back and offered the bottle to her friend.
“What’s this?” Melissa eyed it warily. “It’s not something like ‘your favourite fact’, is it?”
Amaterasu caught her gaze.
“N-Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said Melissa. Smiling weakly, she took the bottle as though frightened of dropping it.
“It’s not a ‘favourite fact’. Before I, uh, ‘fixed’ the communication system, I took one of those and wrote my own little message. Didn’t have the mind chip to help me look up some good quotations, so I’m afraid that’s my own amateur work.”
Frowning, Melissa pulled the paper out and opened it up. She turned it upside-down and cocked her head from side to side.
“Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829.” She looked up. “Uh… thanks, I guess? Though I don’t know why you crossed it out.”
Amaterasu reached over, pulled out the paper, flipped it over, and handed it back. Blushing, Melissa read the actual message.
Her gasp broke through. She opened her mouth –
“I mean every word,” said Amaterasu. Neither of them broke eye contact. “And there’s no hidden message. What you see is what I mean.”
Melissa smiled, amid the tears. There was no pretence.
Amaterasu knew she’d finally thrown the right message out to sea. And against all the odds, she’d reached the right island.
Carefully, Fenton eased his creaking joints and muscles into the seat and let out a breath.
"Wow."
“What? I recognized it, didn’t I? Anyway, languages ain’t my thing.”
“‘Aren’t’ my thing,” corrected Amaterasu hopelessly. “Let it go. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. The rest of this place, for a start.”
* "We've bigger things to worry about."
ahem
I'm finding it difficult to keep up with the narration here. It seems to jump between narration and Amaterasu's inner thoughts. About a third of the way through, it seems to settle into something more consistent.
I really don't get the ending though. Was there a bioweapon? Was Amata... I'm just going to call her Theresa. Was Theresa's condition due solely to starvation, or infection from the bioweapon? Also, I have no idea where all the notes in the bottles came from. Did Theresa put them in there to entertain Melissa? Did they actually - by some incredible coincidence - come from other space stations that were mentioned? Because my best guess as to what happened was that Theresa was trying to save Melissa by eating less, which weakened her immune system to the point that she was infected by the residues of the bioweapon that remained on the bottles after the infected crews of the other abandoned space stations realized they were infected and sent out messages, but they had heard the same factoid about Walker.
That's the most sense I can make of it all. Also, is that... shipping? Right there at the end? I'm honestly not sure whether Theresa is telling Melissa that she's into her, or that they're infected with a bioweapon and must not infect the rescue crew, or that she's hallucinating something?
Also, I'm like 70% sure that Theresa is human. It honestly took me a very long time to (mostly) rule out that she was an alien species.
So —
For starters, given my own level of expertise, which is about zilch, I’m not going to give you anything beyond impressions, since that’s all I feel entitled to do without talking through my hat.
The prose is nice. The two characters are clearly characterized, and they play relatively well off of each other. The plot is classic, stranded crew (or what's left of it) on an abandoned/deserted environment. It works pretty well, though I think maybe it could be packed into less words. Tends to drag a bit around the middle. My major gripe is with the ending, which is too happy, so to speak, and too vague. It’s like the major hurdles are resolved within a very short space of time: the radio is finally brought up, and, miracle, a ship is near, as well as the time capsule, and oh, there was a hidden message to pass between the two characters. It feels rushed, or contrived, and maybe I think you couldn’t squeeze a longer ending within the space constraints. But yet we‘re left with mystery, like what is this message (is it just “thanks for putting up with me!” or something else?) and what exactly caused the death of all people. So we’re sort of pushed forwards to the big reveal, and yet somehow left halfway into the ford.
That being said, kudos, author, for writing such an elaborate story in so short a period!
For starters, given my own level of expertise, which is about zilch, I’m not going to give you anything beyond impressions, since that’s all I feel entitled to do without talking through my hat.
The prose is nice. The two characters are clearly characterized, and they play relatively well off of each other. The plot is classic, stranded crew (or what's left of it) on an abandoned/deserted environment. It works pretty well, though I think maybe it could be packed into less words. Tends to drag a bit around the middle. My major gripe is with the ending, which is too happy, so to speak, and too vague. It’s like the major hurdles are resolved within a very short space of time: the radio is finally brought up, and, miracle, a ship is near, as well as the time capsule, and oh, there was a hidden message to pass between the two characters. It feels rushed, or contrived, and maybe I think you couldn’t squeeze a longer ending within the space constraints. But yet we‘re left with mystery, like what is this message (is it just “thanks for putting up with me!” or something else?) and what exactly caused the death of all people. So we’re sort of pushed forwards to the big reveal, and yet somehow left halfway into the ford.
That being said, kudos, author, for writing such an elaborate story in so short a period!
When I write a story:
One of my main jobs, I always think, is to anticipate a reader's questions and answer them in some subtle and/or clever way before said questions can even occur to said reader.
I bring that up here because my question right at the beginning was, "Who is Amaterasu talking to?" I didn't get even a partial answer to that question till the two words "Melissa said" in paragraph 19, so I spent the whole time before I got there wondering if her companion was male, female, human, alien, organic, robotic, or what.
This whole story is like that. I'm not given enough information to understand who's doing what where to whom. So I'll suggest thinking of your readers. What do they need to know and when do they need to know it? You then come up with a way of getting that info to them that isn't just dumping it out in a big block of text.
It's part of the Grand Adventure that is writing. :)
Mike
One of my main jobs, I always think, is to anticipate a reader's questions and answer them in some subtle and/or clever way before said questions can even occur to said reader.
I bring that up here because my question right at the beginning was, "Who is Amaterasu talking to?" I didn't get even a partial answer to that question till the two words "Melissa said" in paragraph 19, so I spent the whole time before I got there wondering if her companion was male, female, human, alien, organic, robotic, or what.
This whole story is like that. I'm not given enough information to understand who's doing what where to whom. So I'll suggest thinking of your readers. What do they need to know and when do they need to know it? You then come up with a way of getting that info to them that isn't just dumping it out in a big block of text.
It's part of the Grand Adventure that is writing. :)
Mike
I'm a little sorry to see this wash out in prelims; it's an ambitious story with some great interactions, and made the top half of my all-stories-but-mine voting. Still, I wanted to speak up and echo >>Baal Bunny, because the main thing keeping this from rising higher on my slate was my sense that in some ways I was perpetually struggling to catch up to the story. It definitely could use some more grounding to straighten out in the readers mind who is what.
I'd be careful in editing not to overcorrect and load this down with exposition, though. Probably the best thing you could do would be to give this to a prereader willing to go in blind and mark up line by line where they're confused, and just fix the spots they identify.
I'll also note that in naming parts of the spaceship the "forest" and "cave" and whatnot, I was half-expecting to see you dive more explicitly into metaphor and/or magical realism in a way that never really happened. Especially given the mythological name of the main character. Felt like an odd dangling thread.
Still, thanks for writing!
I'd be careful in editing not to overcorrect and load this down with exposition, though. Probably the best thing you could do would be to give this to a prereader willing to go in blind and mark up line by line where they're confused, and just fix the spots they identify.
I'll also note that in naming parts of the spaceship the "forest" and "cave" and whatnot, I was half-expecting to see you dive more explicitly into metaphor and/or magical realism in a way that never really happened. Especially given the mythological name of the main character. Felt like an odd dangling thread.
Still, thanks for writing!
G'day, mates. First-time contender here, and now the results are in, congrats to GaPJaxie for the well-deserved first place. Bonza!
I had planned to keep mum as a mystery contender, but what the hell; let's be polite and respond instead.
>>Fenton
Not sure about this comment. Is that a "wow, this is good" or a "wow, this is bad"? Hard to read at my end.
>>Hap
I'm not sure what you mean about the narration, as it seems no different to me from start to finish. Don't suppose I could request an example or two for help?
Regarding Amaterasu's "alien-ness": that's a hard criticism to interpret. I don't know if you put it there simply to toss ideas out, or as a subtle criticism of my characterization. A clarification would be welcome.
I agree with you about the ending, though you made a damn good guess all the same. But I did muddle it and I'm not happy with the result either. Truth is I was still tinkering with the bioweapon subplot right up to the end, which didn't do me no favours.
>>Monokeras
Oh, the message was supposed to be a mystery. It was meant to be a case of "you've read the story and got an idea about what these two are like; what's your take?", but it didn't mesh well with all the other mysteries floating around, which probs weakened it a tick.
The rest, though, is a legit critique. Last-minute tinkering is to blame. I was a bit fuzzy on the specs near the finish and failed to make them fit together properly.
Also, re: the draggy middle, it was meant to build character and suspense, but I think I did too much of the first and not enough of the second. Maybe introducing the bioweapon plot sooner and making it matter more would have worked.
Also also, re: everything else: Thanks! And "elaborate" I'm gonna take as a compliment.
>>Baal Bunny
I'm not gonna lie: I half-thought this comment was a wind-up at first. See, I did get your point for revealing Melissa's ID early on. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I did that beyond getting distracted by other story stuff. And I won't go to bat for the ending, which was a mess I spent too long trying to fix, especially the bioweapon subplot.
But I'm not sure the whole thing was THAT big a muddle.
I mean, it's not like I just wrote on the fly, without the reader in mind. The rest of your advice I swear I used beforehand, to give the readers the details as and when they seemed to be needed. I had the characters, setting, and events planned out and everything, right down to the topics for discussion every few hundred words. I was constantly asking myself what readers needed to know and when. Short of being a micromanager, I'm not sure just planning more is gonna help. That it's unclear throughout the entire fic is a bit much too much more than I can take. Surely it wasn't that bad?
I do get the larger point that a bit of grounding, like horizon says and you seem to be saying, would be top stuff. I mean, I'll try harder, sure. I did reread it to get an idea of what seemed to make sense, and tinkered with the thing up until the end. But if that wasn't enough the first time round, I don't think "do it more next time" will work.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is either trying to be too complicated (esp. at the end) and-or trying to leave too many mysteries at once, which is why the ending didn't fit together properly. That's my best guess.
>>horizon
"an ambitious story with some great interactions": Aw man, can I frame this and hang it on my wall?
Same as I've said to the others: I see where you're coming from. Half of it was too much tinkering with the ending; the bioweapon thing was a clumsy last-minute addition to try and fit the abandoned station with Amaterasu's breakdown, but the result is it just cuts off at the end. The other half I think was leaving too many mysteries floating. Cos I knew the solutions to them, I just assumed I'd left enough clues for readers to figure them out too (Hap seemed to nail it, for example), and the message at the end was meant as some meat to chew over afterwards.
The naming of the station's main parts was just to make clear the parallel between being trapped on an island in the sea and being trapped on the station in space. It really wasn't much more than that. Also, I'm not really sure a proofreader is practical for such a tight time schedule.
The grounding thing I definitely will remember for next time. That's my takeaway from all this.
TO ALL: Ta for the feedback, and hope to cross paths with you again next writeoff! Toodle-oo!
I had planned to keep mum as a mystery contender, but what the hell; let's be polite and respond instead.
>>Fenton
Not sure about this comment. Is that a "wow, this is good" or a "wow, this is bad"? Hard to read at my end.
>>Hap
I'm not sure what you mean about the narration, as it seems no different to me from start to finish. Don't suppose I could request an example or two for help?
Regarding Amaterasu's "alien-ness": that's a hard criticism to interpret. I don't know if you put it there simply to toss ideas out, or as a subtle criticism of my characterization. A clarification would be welcome.
I agree with you about the ending, though you made a damn good guess all the same. But I did muddle it and I'm not happy with the result either. Truth is I was still tinkering with the bioweapon subplot right up to the end, which didn't do me no favours.
>>Monokeras
Oh, the message was supposed to be a mystery. It was meant to be a case of "you've read the story and got an idea about what these two are like; what's your take?", but it didn't mesh well with all the other mysteries floating around, which probs weakened it a tick.
The rest, though, is a legit critique. Last-minute tinkering is to blame. I was a bit fuzzy on the specs near the finish and failed to make them fit together properly.
Also, re: the draggy middle, it was meant to build character and suspense, but I think I did too much of the first and not enough of the second. Maybe introducing the bioweapon plot sooner and making it matter more would have worked.
Also also, re: everything else: Thanks! And "elaborate" I'm gonna take as a compliment.
>>Baal Bunny
I'm not gonna lie: I half-thought this comment was a wind-up at first. See, I did get your point for revealing Melissa's ID early on. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I did that beyond getting distracted by other story stuff. And I won't go to bat for the ending, which was a mess I spent too long trying to fix, especially the bioweapon subplot.
But I'm not sure the whole thing was THAT big a muddle.
I mean, it's not like I just wrote on the fly, without the reader in mind. The rest of your advice I swear I used beforehand, to give the readers the details as and when they seemed to be needed. I had the characters, setting, and events planned out and everything, right down to the topics for discussion every few hundred words. I was constantly asking myself what readers needed to know and when. Short of being a micromanager, I'm not sure just planning more is gonna help. That it's unclear throughout the entire fic is a bit much too much more than I can take. Surely it wasn't that bad?
I do get the larger point that a bit of grounding, like horizon says and you seem to be saying, would be top stuff. I mean, I'll try harder, sure. I did reread it to get an idea of what seemed to make sense, and tinkered with the thing up until the end. But if that wasn't enough the first time round, I don't think "do it more next time" will work.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is either trying to be too complicated (esp. at the end) and-or trying to leave too many mysteries at once, which is why the ending didn't fit together properly. That's my best guess.
>>horizon
"an ambitious story with some great interactions": Aw man, can I frame this and hang it on my wall?
Same as I've said to the others: I see where you're coming from. Half of it was too much tinkering with the ending; the bioweapon thing was a clumsy last-minute addition to try and fit the abandoned station with Amaterasu's breakdown, but the result is it just cuts off at the end. The other half I think was leaving too many mysteries floating. Cos I knew the solutions to them, I just assumed I'd left enough clues for readers to figure them out too (Hap seemed to nail it, for example), and the message at the end was meant as some meat to chew over afterwards.
The naming of the station's main parts was just to make clear the parallel between being trapped on an island in the sea and being trapped on the station in space. It really wasn't much more than that. Also, I'm not really sure a proofreader is practical for such a tight time schedule.
The grounding thing I definitely will remember for next time. That's my takeaway from all this.
TO ALL: Ta for the feedback, and hope to cross paths with you again next writeoff! Toodle-oo!
>>BlueChameleonVI
One thing to take from this is that it's pretty essential to get another viewpoint whenever you have some sort of mystery. The author already knows the solution, so he has no idea how effective the clues he's leaving will be to a reader. of course, he's not operating completely blind, as he can make reasonable assumptions of what readers will pick up, but on the more subtle parts, that's very hard to gauge.
Proofreading really depends on your schedule. If you're working right up to the deadline, then of course you don't have room for it, but I posted earlier in the thread about being available for feedback on the Discord server. I would have been happy to help.
One thing to take from this is that it's pretty essential to get another viewpoint whenever you have some sort of mystery. The author already knows the solution, so he has no idea how effective the clues he's leaving will be to a reader. of course, he's not operating completely blind, as he can make reasonable assumptions of what readers will pick up, but on the more subtle parts, that's very hard to gauge.
Proofreading really depends on your schedule. If you're working right up to the deadline, then of course you don't have room for it, but I posted earlier in the thread about being available for feedback on the Discord server. I would have been happy to help.
>>Pascoite
That makes sense, especially the part about the subtle clues making it harder to predict what'll land and what'll miss. Plus, I had more than one mystery on the go. That's basically open season for people a-hunting for clues and connections.
On this occasion, yeah, I was working right up to the finish, and I overlooked most of the comments anyway. I did find your comment just now, though (>>Pascoite), so I'll bear that in mind next time. Cheers!
That makes sense, especially the part about the subtle clues making it harder to predict what'll land and what'll miss. Plus, I had more than one mystery on the go. That's basically open season for people a-hunting for clues and connections.
On this occasion, yeah, I was working right up to the finish, and I overlooked most of the comments anyway. I did find your comment just now, though (>>Pascoite), so I'll bear that in mind next time. Cheers!
>>BlueChameleonVI
This was a "wow, this is some good stuff" comment. And just like >>horizon; this should have passed the prelims. I intended to come back with a longer and detailed review but I didn't have find the time at the moment (I didn't even find the time to even read all the entries)
This was a "wow, this is some good stuff" comment. And just like >>horizon; this should have passed the prelims. I intended to come back with a longer and detailed review but I didn't have find the time at the moment (I didn't even find the time to even read all the entries)
>>Fenton
Sweet of you to say so! No worries, though. So long as I know what you mean, it's all OK. Anyway, there's always a next time when I can try my luck and make it to finals. Am I right, or am I right?
Sweet of you to say so! No worries, though. So long as I know what you mean, it's all OK. Anyway, there's always a next time when I can try my luck and make it to finals. Am I right, or am I right?