Chapter 3 #4
“We’re exploring, remember?” Iris shook himself off, the drive for exploration overpowering any reasonable caution. “You did say we were relatively safe.”
VIFAI chimed hesitantly and added nothing more on the matter.
It watched in silence as Iris first took one and then another step over the threshold and into the darkened room.
Some time ago, the cramped space beyond the doorway could have served as a living room.
Now it was nothing but a tomb with the remnants of a coffee table in the middle of the room, overgrown with blossoming wisteria.
A couch, half eaten by shrubs and fuzzy moss, sat to the right of it, and on it shone a half-buried skeleton with a single round hole in its temple.
Strands of bioluminescent fungi twisted along its stripped leg bones and pulsed with light along the pelvis.
The ancient bones threatened to turn to dust as Iris ran a hand along them.
In their unyielding drive for survival, vines had pried the ribcage open, each individual rib splayed like the great wings of a bird.
Brilliant, purple flowers sprouted from the wide-open mouth—the wisteria had wrapped itself around the spine and pushed its way through the eye sockets.
There were cracks all along the bones where the vine claimed victory over flesh, where the wounding stems had squeezed and squeezed until the radii splintered.
An ancient, rusted pistol lay by the skeleton’s side.
Now completely dysfunctional, having served its owner a final time.
Of all the simple ways to go, this one, by far, was Iris’s least favourite.
“How sad,” he said. Once the muscles and the tendons had rotted away, the skeleton’s fingers had relaxed, lying flat on the worn fabric of the couch.
Were they once clenched, digging into the cushions in fear before the decision had been made?
Or was there only desperation and yearning for the relief that was to come in the impending nothingness?
No, there was always fear. Iris knew this, had witnessed it time and again as people gasped for their last breaths, as they fought to keep the inevitable away.
Time and again, all he could do was bear witness.
He knelt by the couch and lay his hand atop the bony remains.
He gently brushed long strands of mycelium aside, silently apologizing to the fungi for disrupting their habitat.
It was strange to find them on bone, something providing next to no sustenance.
But everything aboard the Nicaea had been strange so far, and with blossoming dread, Iris slowly began to understand he had only scratched the surface of this strangeness.
“I’m sorry, my friend, if you had to die alone,” Iris intoned in his habitual cadence for prayer.
“I’m sorry if you felt pain, if you were abandoned.
It will bring you little solace, but flowers have made your body theirs, and moss has made a bed for you.
And now I, a Vessel of the Light, have gazed upon your last remaining form so I can carry your memory with me until my own body is claimed by moss and flowers when that time comes.
I guide you back to the Light, and it welcomes you back.
My friend, your journey is complete, and you may rest now.
” Iris stroked the skeleton’s hand twice and rose to his feet.
“In your end, you knew what it was to be the cosmos.”
There must have been a period of time between when the passengers had perished and when the greenery took over. There must have been a time in its voyage when the ship was truly dead and silent, piloted by no one, a home to no one. What had it been like, in that lonely silence?
With nothing more to add, Iris retreated to the corridor. He gave the door a nudge to close, but it had been stuck ajar for decades, if not centuries, and his efforts did little.
What are you doing?
VIFAI wouldn’t understand. “Giving them a little privacy,” Iris grunted through clenched teeth and pushed as hard as he could on the door.
His bare feet lost traction on the floor, his shoulder sliding along the metal as the lichen scraped away, his robes losing threads where the harsh metal met silk.
The door had yet to close. With a huff, Iris pushed back from the door and eyed it with growing disdain.
Then, he took a few steps back and got a running start.
Shoulder first, he ran into the door with all the force he had in him.
A little creak, and the metal slid shut.
“Finally.” Iris rubbed his bruised shoulder and started down the corridor again. He sensed VIFAI’s motions in the back of his consciousness, like a phantom itch he would never be able to scratch out of existence.
You really feel for them, it said at last.
“I’ve extended the same compassion I would extend anyone else,” Iris said and ran his outstretched palm along the wall, feeling the imperfections in the lichen. The faint prickling at his fingertips lulled him back into a trained calm.
Your brain chemistry indicates differently. VIFAI had picked the worst time to be functioning optimally. Your heart rate and endocrine response suggest you are experiencing distress.
Iris rolled his eyes. “Can you sound any less human?”
A mild shock of electric laughter radiated a warm glow through his brain stem.
You relate to them.
Iris paused, one foot suspended in the air.
VIFAI already had access to his thoughts, his brain and body chemistry, and all his memories.
He wondered if some part of VIFAI’s memory had been damaged during their youth or if it was deliberately choosing to forget.
Did AI constructs ever forget? Could they?
Iris could ask. He could also just let the thought linger so VIFAI could pick up on it, like it picked up on every other thought and flutter of emotion that crossed Iris’s consciousness.
“Doesn’t everyone?” Iris asked, partly to himself, partly to the artificial voice in his brain.
“Can’t everyone imagine an unrelenting pain they would want to end, at any cost? ”
VIFAI said nothing.
“Maybe not you, but people,” Iris added.
Without so much as a jolt of electricity, VIFAI retaliated by disappearing.
For a second, the hefty presence of a secondary, inorganic consciousness was lost. A gaping chasm within his mind yawned open, a raw sore left by a missing tooth.
Iris couldn’t help but fixate on it, run his thoughts over it like he would obsessively pick at a scab.
But there was an allure there too, a calling of a void that would take him indiscriminately, welcome him, give him a home when nothing else would.
He could get lost in it; cast aside the world he knew if the void embraced him.
Iris was already falling into that dark solitude when VIFAI returned.
Take the next right, it said firmly, and Iris decided to not further explain his feelings towards the dead passenger in the cabin. Instead, he took a committed right towards a dark stairwell.
Uniform, sterile, smooth metal lined the steps and walls.
Nature had failed to make the stairwell its domain.
Peppered with tiny holes, the stairwells prevented any soil or moisture from settling long enough that roots could take hold.
Unlike the corridors and communal spaces on the first deck that were once furnished with elaborate planters to add greenery to the space, the stairwells were designed with only function in mind.
Moss ended along a rigid line at the first step.
Not a single tendril of it contaminated the otherwise stripped, gleaming metal.
Iris winced at the jolt of cold shooting from the balls of his feet up his calves when he first stepped into the stairwell.
Hiking up his robes, he jogged up the stairs, skipping one at a time, to the third deck.
A part of the landing was missing there, and he hopped over the gap and into the attached hallway, gliding a little on the once-again mossy floor.
Cool, dry air met him, instantly piercing through his sweat-drenched robes and sending waves of shivers through his body.
Cracked overhead paneling flickered on and off with dim lights as Iris passed beneath.
The vines were sparse here as well, starved of both light and warmth.
Still, it was a testament to what nature was willing to endure to survive.
“Can you read out what you’ve found on our scholars?” Iris asked as he ducked under hanging wires, his steps now slow and calculated. The wires were most likely dead, but this wasn’t a worthy gamble.
Whom would you like to know about first?
Iris took a few careful steps around an exposed wire that had fallen through the cracks in the ceiling and dangled concerningly close to the floor. “Tell me about Ishtan, please.”
Dr. Ishtan Ora, VIFAI sang in a crackling voice, head of the Archaeology Department over at Sychi.
He’s been working for so long. Seriously, he’s been publishing for longer than you’ve been alive.
The university wants him out within the next few years though, to make room for someone more innovative.
“Innovative? In archaeology?”
I know. Anyway, he never married, although he tried four times. Tough luck. He’s allergic to shellfish. Oh! He has some original artifacts from that one ship that docked at P’Ilani. You should ask him about those. He’s super proud. He’s kind of a generation ship fanatic.
“Where did you get all this?” Iris asked, bending around another dangling wire.
Here and there. Socials mostly. Now, Dr. Riyu Alo is interesting.
“Oh?”
Oh indeed. No wonder you like her. She was raised Catholic but fell out when her grandmother passed away.