There are things in the dark that aren’t stars.
She’d been warned, on her first day—it’s like the sun. Don’t look at it. It’s also not like the sun. That’s why you shouldn’t look at it.
The technician who’d told her this had laughed and she’d just stared, unsure if the words were meant to be rude, or helpful, or both. She’d thought that, maybe, they were supposed to be rude, because the technician had seemed scared, and scared people often intended to be rude to her. She’d stared until he went away, tasting the discomfort prickling between his various semi-protruding lymph nodes.
Then she had not stared at the not sun. It moved into the corner of her vision, where it would live, quiet, enormous, neither friendly nor unfriendly. It had intention, but not comprehensibly so. She had often been told that she was like that. She became friendly with the concept of it—distant, un-speaking, but near, like the reflection of her eye in the mirror.
It had lived there for almost a full local cycle, now. A local cycle here was about 1.21 a galactic standard cycle, which was the kind of margin that she understood messed people up. Animals, or-ganic, had seasons, like plants, like planets.
The orbital station was a planetary model, ought to have been following a standard cycle, but the calibration was not just off, but stochastic. Cycle length was an emergent phenomenon. It, like everything, had something to do with the anomaly. Something definite but unclear.
They were not here to study the anomaly. The previous orbital had been, explicitly so, bowled in-to orbit by the enormous arm of an intergalactic super-carrier with the express purpose of scan-ning, contacting. Communicating. Understanding.
The previous orbital wasn’t something anyone wanted to talk about. Or, she supposed, wasn’t something anyone knew how to talk about. They knew how to move their mouths about it. But letting it in and around and out of an organic mouth seemed to amplify, multiply it. It could live in teeth like she lived in delicate pieces of metal. The enquiry had gone the way of the orbital it-self, whatever that had been. They were not here to study the anomaly.
She was here to study them, though.
The orbital shifted through a standard array of artificial seasons. They were in a sealed auto-atmosphere designed for deep-space exploration, in Stranded mode. The supermassive arboreal hangers were fed photons by artificial strip-lights, and all but a handful of windows were in con-stant black-out.
Sensory lockdown was necessary because this close to the anomaly, the light was both endless and invasive. Pure white and somehow viscous, the light forced its way through every uncovered win-dow, even those facing directly away from it. The orbital was subject to constant, 360-degree day.
“It’s like the winter sun. 6 AM on the river, I used to think fuck off every morning. Gets right in your eyes no matter what you do. And it’s cold about it—it hates you more than the summer sun. You can tell how the sun feels if you catch it before 8 AM. Things are different then, like the world is loading. You can speak to the sun, and the birds talk to you.”
The woman who said this was later found cack-handedly self-lobotomized with a gardening tool.
She had stood for a long time—too long, she’d later been told—over the body, looking at the col-lision between the primordial metal thing and the delicate meat of the woman’s eye. It was like a car crash in miniature, the organic smeared up against the walls of its own hopeful intention. Tools were so close to being balanced things, on the borderline between desire and death, creation and destruction.
She had stood there for too long, she’d been told. Thinking about car crashes, and meat.
Day and night expanded and contracted like a birth canal, or an accordion.
“Do you know how old you are?”
“I am 132 GSC old,” she said.
“But how old do you feel?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because sometimes you play like an adult, and sometimes you play like a child, but you never play like an old person. That’s why I can still beat you, you know.”
If she had any real problem living with organic life-forms, it was their restless need for inconstan-cy. Nothing could ever settle. Their optimum was a moving horizon.
Just as she had adapted to the dry overheat of summer, the creeping death of autumn would come on, and then the cold self-flagellation of an artificial winter. Just as any day truly started, it was dying. Everything always changing, worshipping the rotation of a barren rock around a long-dead and distant sun.
She had been invited, politely, to the Autumnal Equinox. Food and light and sound and games, spread out like an adventure playground around one of the arboreal hangers.
They were a Space Pagan vessel (the Order of Our Goddess In Eternal Transit), although the ones who took it more seriously disliked the label. She felt privately that the ones taking it the most seriously weren’t necessarily getting it the most right. The ones who laughed and winked and be-lieved as much as they needed to, and knew near enough where reality and madness began, ended and overlapped, made the most sense to her.
Someone had thumbed her a psychedelic on a pen-drive and she’d taken it, politely, and the world had delicately opened up like being lowered on stand-by into a deep cleaning vat, warmth sinking up from her toes until it was working between her layers of skin, getting thinner and more delicate until, surgically, it was gliding into the intricate layers of her mind, turning zeros into ones and ones into zeros like a hand ruffling a thick-furred animal backwards.
She felt like an encyclopedia article on velvet. She felt like oil in a plastic capillary. She felt like surface tension holding together a globule of water. It made doing anything more difficult and more nice, and she enjoyed that, but not in the same way the organic life-forms around her seemed to.
She didn’t have that thirst. For change, for difference, for simple contrast. When they had started making people like her, they had been so afraid, so excited, that everything would change.
Instead, people like her were at peace, at simple, singular peace, a peace that seemed to terrify some organic life-forms more than war. She thanked the person who gave her the pen-drive, but no—she was not having a transformative experience.
The drug was still pulsing in her, making her super-aware of fragility, color and contrast, when she found the next body.
Dressed in a simple white dress for the Festival, he stood barefoot and alone by one of the few un-covered windows, staring out.
The white light had bleached his skin grey-brown like death, and he was dead. His eyelids lay next to a ceremonial knife, neatly gathered together on the floor a meter or so away from him. When they peeled him back from the window, they found his skull was shattered. Security foot-age showed that after removing his eyelids he had bashed himself to death against the window, silently, staring blankly. It had taken hours.
She played games with a woman in engineering whose name she didn’t know. The woman had refused her consent to know it, because she didn’t have a name the woman could know. She had tried to explain,
“We prefer not to be named. Or rather, we have no preference for having a name. We can be re-ferred to in person as You or Her, and we could prefer not to be referred to if not in person. We prefer not to be considered if not present, as we are not relevant, and this is creating a story about us, rather than referencing us. We prefer not to have stories about us.”
The woman—an older woman, her brown skin wrinkled like a peach-stone—had pondered this over a chess piece she was alternately spinning in her fingers and nibbling.
“Sounds like ‘we’ do have a story about us, to me. Consensus is a story. Are you all in the room with us right now? Quiet, if you are, all of you.”
She had smiled at this, to indicate her feelings about it.
“This is a clever point made with words and logic. I do think you also know what I mean.”
“I like things to be even and equal,” the woman in engineering said, “so while I accept you have no name, if I can’t have yours, you can’t have mine. Call it, for the same reasons. No telling sto-ries about me.”
So they called each other the woman in engineering and my robot friend, and they played games in the dark.
Winter came on like a suicide. Suddenly, and yet—in hindsight—slow.
The dead came in pairs. Two women, sat cross-legged, knees touching. A pair of scissors. Four eyelids. A couple, inserted into one another, entangled, heads mutually broken like an egg smashed into another egg.
Ribbons and living evergreen tinsels appeared in the corridors. The days got shorter, the light con-tracting, breathing in. The trees acted out a pantomime of death above a churning ocean of mulch, nitrogen maintenance droids playing in the rot, patterns mimicking the behavior of human chil-dren in snow.
The crew drank cold things that made them feel warm. Temperature differentiation reached a cy-clical peak, with some spaces roasting, oven-hot, others cold enough to seriously damage nerves.
One group of four were found clustered around an uncovered window, one still hammering her forehead into it like a woodpecker, convulsing, long dead. The exposed decks could not be de-clared out of bounds—at any less light saturation than this…something. Something would hap-pen.
Contagion was starting to creep, though. After weeks of silence, a friend of the couple broke down in the canteen, letting out the wracking, violent sobs of an animal in utter grief. The protocol was to ignore an outburst, if it was clearly related.
She watched steadily as the friend picked up a knife and spoon and began hacking, gouging. The people on either side of the friend stared dead ahead. The people opposite looked through it all, as much as they could. One spooned a mouthful of pudding into his face and seemed to forget how to chew, the mulch dribbling back out of his mouth and splattering across the table, mingling with the meat. Then, someone else, at another table, started. Four in the canteen, another four, like the window. Eight overnight. Four, to the power of three.
The corridors were lit with long strings of LED lights, precise little handfuls of artificial sun.
“Do you like to look out windows?”
She frowned. The woman smiled her near-constant smile, a wry fold in her face that seemed to have hardened there, like leather.
“I’m asking about windows, darling, not what might be on the other side of them.”
“I do like to look out windows,” she said, unsure where this was going. The woman in engineering nodded.
“I’ve spotted you, looking. Wondered how that was, for you.”
“It’s-”
How was that, for her?
Everything and nothing. It was everything and nothing. It wasn’t like she couldn’t see it. But it was.
“Like a knife sliding off the skin of a butternut squash. Like trying to grind a wall with a lemon juicer. Like maggots trying to eat my brain out from the inside. My brain, really mine—maggots starving and dying in the cracks and wasting away into dust. It doesn’t. It doesn’t really bother me.”
There, in the corner of her eye. It lived. Everything and nothing.
It reminded her of herself.
On the eve of winter solstice, the night before the longest night of the year, day held its breath and let the darkness dance. She took another psychedelic, some unfinished research-code. Something more by-and-for people like her than the previous, it enacted some interesting alterations to her thought and memory systems, leaving sensory data, which was less vital to her world-perception than for an organic, mostly well alone. The drug was streamlining her thoughts, inducing algo-rithmic ecstasy by temporarily pausing important but resource-intensive auxiliary processes, each only for a moment—like running a finger down the length of a piano.
Something neither warm nor cold blossomed in her, a mutated wildflower unfurling and stretching towards the light.
She sat, cross-legged, and watched, the untethered blossom of her mind drifting for the first time over what was about to happen. It occurred to her it was perhaps strange that she hadn’t thought about it yet. But then, she wasn’t human. She didn’t experience anxiety about things that were definite, pre-determined, clear. She couldn’t stop it, and nothing could be worse. So she hadn’t worried about it.
She was a simple system, experiencing life as a sequence of moments—now, now, now, her mind an evolving coordinate in space-time, nothing more. It was wrong to say she didn’t have the im-agination to exist in uncertain futures, but she couldn’t see value in things that didn’t exist.
She realized that she was worried, now.
“Do you think you can experience love?”
The woman in engineering laughed. She had a hard bark of a laugh. It reverberated around her small body, echoing inside her chest like the sound of vigorous fucking in an empty cathedral.
“I think I probably can. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing people ask me.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, why are you asking me?”
“I think I just want to know.”
The woman in engineering made a circumspect move.
“I think this is really a question about our respective subjective experiences and how comprehen-sibly we can use language to align them. So—what is love to you?”
She made a quick, violent response, and then immediately doubted herself. It was easy to get lost in the pattern-matching and forget the game-theory.
“Love is a feeling of alignment in respective subjective experiences.”
The woman laughed again.
“You are wonderful. I can agree to that.”
“So have you ever felt so aligned in subjectivities? Like there is overlap in your realities?”
Another circumspect move, shy even. Was this a trap, or genuine reticence?
“Felt it? Yes. But sadly there’s no fucking way to check if it’s real.”
Dawn occurred slowly and suddenly, like a suicide.
It became softly bright. Then, it became brighter, as the blackout shields drew back from every window in the orbital. People, in various states of debauchery and disarray, looked up, and around, everyone smiling.
The smile was, at first, many smiles, incidentally simultaneous. But quickly, they became one smile, one singular smile, every face stretched into the same arrangement of muscle and skin. The meat moved as if puppeted. Eyes opened wide. Wide. Wider. Terrified smiles stretched as some-thing poured into every face, ever mind. Poured and spilled over. Balloons stretching and pop-ping. Vaginal walls tore, splitting in the process of birth, and kept tearing, kept splitting, as if birthing a baby that only grew longer and wider with each contraction.
She watched, and watched, and watched. It was her job.
But some part of her was still worried.
She justified her actions by taking the long route, passing through many corridors, by many win-dows—stopping to stare, documenting notes she would later consolidate in the report. For the most part, people had gathered to the windows and engaged in similar rituals to those noted previ-ously, but at this scale, variation was beginning to appear.
One mother with a small child had removed her child’s eyes and seemed to be trying to insert them into her own eye-sockets. There were a few other instances of eye-duplicating—one man with a mouth full of them, despite having cut out his own. Bursts of exuberant sexual activity, of-ten large groups, often combined with ritual cutting—eyelids, genitals, eyes.
She noted dutifully, looking at the faces, the bodies, avoiding eye-contact with the distant some-thing.
She found the woman in engineering where she always was—tucked into her little nest at the back of a supply room. Double-reverse chess had been laid out, and she’d already taken the first move—she had made herself white, as always.
They played in utter silence. Every time she looked at the woman in engineering, the woman simply smiled.
Eventually, she broke it.
“Something terrible is happening.”
The woman looked up at her with the simplest, oldest knowledge.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to go out of here?”
“At the end of this game, darling. Yes.”
She chewed a handful of potential words like a mouthful of vomit. Something that shouldn’t be inside but would be grotesque to let just pour out.
“I would significantly prefer if you didn’t.”
The woman looked up at her, with something large in her eyes.
“I know. I’m sorry, but you can’t understand. You aren’t dying, my love.”
“I am subject to entropy.”
“You aren’t dying. Not like I am. You must die, logically. I was born dying. That, out there, is death. I have a right to go meet it.”
“I don’t understand why you attach such symbolic weight to the obliteration of your own mind. It is a virus.”
“I want to die,” the woman in engineering said, with a calm, sad smile. Realities diverged, split like the tip of a knife sinking into an eye and for the first time, she did not feel peace. She felt war. The pieces on the board in front of her roared with metaphorical life, and she wanted to throw one.
“Why. It is unfair. Unbalanced.”
“It is perfect balance, my love. I was born. I must die.”
“This madness is inside you already. Let me take you away from here.”
“To die somewhere else? I am old. I want to see everything, before nothing.”
“You want to kill yourself.”
“I’d have given birth to myself if it made any damn sense.”
The woman in engineering made a move. The game sat in balance. She smiled, and it was a smile of corruption, of decay, of victory.
“Do you know how old you are?”
“Yes,” said the woman in engineering, and the look in her eyes was total, final. Bright and sharp like the tip of a knife in the winter sun.
She was silent for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she said, at last.
“Don’t be.”
The woman stood up, and for a moment, she wasn’t smiling. She reached out a hand.
“Do come with me, though. Please.”
For efficiency, the machines were cleaned at the same time as the orbital emptied out. Once suffi-cient samples had been vacuum-packed and shipped off for long-term storage, the ship opened it-self to the vacuum of space and let it suck out the air and viscera. Everything, into nothing. A nothing so empty, its hunger was infinite.
She and the other observation drones linked minds to consolidate a report. It was meticulous, comprehensive, the same amount the same and the same amount different. Meta-analysis sug-gested no startling new insights. They are simply being over-clocked. Exposure can be shared socially. It behaves more like trauma than a virus. Drone-minds apparently unaffected.
Deep below, in a hangar that was called an engine room but contained no engines, a new crew be-gan to gestate.
She spent a long, empty month gazing directly into the anomaly, at the window where they’d found the first body. She didn’t feel worried, but she felt worried about the prospect of worry. And some amount heartbroken, although she wasn’t sure by what. The woman, or the anomaly? The friends in the corners of her eyes, splitting and shattering upon meeting like matter and anti-matter.
It was simply life. Pure, total, utter. It was everything. Everything a dying mind wanted, and more than it could take.
She and the other drones kept the windows exposed and, to celebrate the completion of their re-port, tripped hard and long. They sank into the hot wet pool of their collective consciousness, un-transformed, unchanging, steady in the steady singularity of the eternal light.
Below, the cells of the crew were splitting. Self-multiplying and -duplicating, blistering life like a cancer. Gasping oxygen like a baby wildfire. Death and birth, a chemical orgy of growth and change. Time might slip sideways, but the schedule was absolute: they would be born in time for the spring.
| Nicks Walker is a queer bigender Scot. His allies include yellow, and his enemies include the sun. You can find his objects in Cipher Press, SPAM, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He has four rats and autism and tweets @nickserobus. |  |