Hell Ship

Explorer/Jak

So many lost civilisations; too many.

This has become my duty, and my obsession; as we travel, I fish for scraps of information about lost worlds and collate it and archive it all.

I am a machine and hence I take great relish in the meticulous storing and cataloguing and cross-referencing of this data; for as far as the computing part of me is concerned, it is merely data.

My machine-mind is however merged with the mind of an Olaran who is clearly filled with horror at the scale of these tragic losses; and his anguish perturbs me.

Sometimes the information I garner is random, the noises and imprints left by any technological culture, though such echoes in space-broadcast dramas and poems and factual films and radio messages between spaceships or planets-can be highly illuminating. Other times, however, the information is found in the form of compressed datacaches intended to be last messages from dying civilisations desperate to be remembered somehow. Such data may be technical or astronomical or military or historical or all of these; but sometimes more personal messages are also inscribed in this way.

The collation of these archives keeps my mind active. I am lonely much of the time. Jak is not such very good company. Not compared to Albinia.

He is better than he was. For after our departure from that second universe, Jak fell into despair. And then came the madness. And after the madness, came despair again. Now he is merely sad; and occasionally he even talks to me.

I have made a list of the universes which we have travelled through, both the live ones and the dead ones. Jak refuses to let me tell him how many there are. But he does, obsessively, read through my archives of lost civilisations. Occasionally we discuss what he finds there; not often though. Not often enough.

There is now, in my opinion, no doubt about the validity of my theory that the dead universes we encounter are the trail left by the Death Ship; corpses scattered in its bloody wake. No other explanation will suffice; and datacaches have been found in all but a very few of these wasted universes.

There are very many of them; I have had to rebuild my archive in order to accommodate all the data.

How long has the Death Ship been destroying realities in this way? I can make no estimate.

What weapon is it using? I do not know.

Will we ever find the Death Ship, and defeat it? I can make no prediction.

But for a period of time that is larger than the lifespan of any Olaran, we have hunted this rogue vessel. We have journeyed onwards through the many living universes, searching each, one by one, with painstaking care, in the vain hope of stumbling upon our prey.

After one thousand years had elapsed, I explained to Jak that we were wasting our time; there were far too many universes. He agreed. And yet still we continued.

But finally I spotted a pattern; and it dawned on me that the Dreaded were observing a loose chronological cycle. Every ninety-three years by our calendar-though occasionally a hundred and ten and sometimes a hundred and fifty years-the Death Ship would return to the sector in space where we first encountered them. And then it would use the weapon that enables the Dreaded to destroy a universe as easily as an Olaran kills a dangerous and reluctant-to-trade alien. And then they would pass into the next universe.

Their pattern betrayed them. And it encouraged me to formulate a cosmological hypothesis. For it is clear there is only one place connecting the many universes; and my belief is that this was the point of origin of all the universes. And so I call it the Source.

Yet knowing this was no help, not at first anyway. For when we rift, we have no means of ascertaining how far we have travelled, or in which direction. So finding the Source again in a new and strange universe is no easy task; it can take two hundred years or more of mapping stars, until our point of origin is reached once more.

The only certain test is that when the rest of the universe has evaporated-well, then the Source is all that is left. We find it by fleeing the onset of nothingness.

But by then, of course, it is too late.

And even when we have located it, the Source can move; that was a shock also.

Or perhaps it’s the universe that moves, and the Source that remains; no matter. The point is we have wasted many years seeking and pursuing the Death Ship through the multiverses. And we have wasted just as many years staying put and waiting at the Source for its return. Neither strategy has worked for us.

But I think I have now devised a star-mapping methodology that allows us to find the Source in good time, and remain there. And I am sure that I can detect it if the Source moves; and then we will move with it.

It took me approximately ninety thousand years to devise and perfect this approach. And we are now concealed behind a gas giant close to the Source in a universe with many recent traces of the Dreaded. Each fresh datacache I intercept confirms me in the belief that they are here. And, sooner of later, they will want to make their escape from this universe. And instead, they will encounter our wrath.

We have waited almost sixty years in this place for the ship to appear. On four separate occasions, the Source has moved, and we have moved with it. And each time it moves, the gas giant and its star also move with it. They are wrapped up, somehow, in the coils of this gateway to the universes.

There is life on the gas giant; not sentient, but life nonetheless. How strange it is for life to be evolving in such a place; rifting through space at the whim of the cosmological origin. This region of space is a speck of dust in the storm of all realities; and yet life still births here!

I cannot help but think: How stubborn is life! And how mysterious. For as a creature who knows its own artificer, I always marvel at the existence of organic life. From a purely technical point of view, it is incompetently engineered and badly designed and, in its sentient forms, all too often annoying. And yet-it awes me.

I have sent robots to explore the gas giant. I have mapped the geography of its roving clouds, and analysed the chemistry of its atmosphere, which merges at its lower levels with the fluid interior of the planet. I have studied the biology of its many microscopic life forms. And I have even named the planet-I call it Kraxos. I have named the sun too-I call it Albinia. Yes, a sentimental touch, but I allow myself a few. I have counted all the atoms in the sun. I have named all the microbes who are the dominant life form on Kraxos; and continue to do so, even though they have a two month life span and new microbes are constantly being formed from a process of cell fission.

It has indeed been a long and tedious wait; and Jak has, without question, been a poor companion, devoid of conversational artistry and even basic courtesy. Hence my obsessive data-analysing.

But we are, thanks to my careful preparations, ready in every way for the battle to come.

Jak, however, cannot endure very much longer. He is not cut out to be the human half of a machine/mind symbiosis. My thoughts overwhelm him; he drowns daily on data. I hope his wait will soon be over.

Furthermore Jak!

What is it?

Are you sane and functional?

Just about.

We have work to do. A ship approaches.

Is it the one?

It is an interstellar ship that flies with black sails powered by the invisible matter between the stars, and a helicoid marking on its hull.

So it’s the one.

We may not survive this encounter.

I truly hope we do not.

One hundred thousand years it has been, since Albinia possessed me. We have lived together in one body all this time and Is this a soliloquy? Get ready for battle, spaceship! Prime the missiles. Prepare the un-matter bombs. Check all the I have done all that. We have been here for approximately sixty years; what do you think I have been doing with my time?

We’re ready?

We’re ready. The ship approaches. We will destroy it this time. Our lives will end. I just have this one thing I wanted to say.

What?

That despite your long brooding silences and ceaseless melancholy, your company has not been entirely unendurable.

I love you too metal-brain.

I didn’t say-wait! It’s closing in. No more talking!

The battle will soon commence.

Sai-ias

The new one was angry and resentful.

“You must accept,” I told her, “the way things are.”

“I accept nothing!” she screamed. She was a four legged predator of the plain, with sharp teeth and a tail like a whisk that was larger than her body. She had ugly, barnacled skin, and her voice was a rasping obscenity. She was, I could easily guess, accustomed to being the dominant species, and she treated me as if I were one of her anal parasites.

“Fight! Fight those grass-eating scum! Rip our enemies to pieces! Eat their poisoned flesh! That’s what I shall do, when I have the chance!” she ranted.

“You will never have the chance,” I told her.

“Don’t be so sure. I’m not like the rest of you shameful cowards! I will fight, and I will win!” she raged.

“No,” I said. “Acceptance is all. The Ka’un cannot be defeated.

“Believe me,” I added, bitterly, “we have tried.”

Jak/Explorer

I am ready. My mind is now fully merged once more with the mind of Explorer. I exist in many places; in the missiles we carry, in the concealed flying-bombs that orbit these planets, in our drone craft, in the matter traps that cordon off the entire stellar system. I am no longer Olaran; I am a killing machine.

Less talk, please Jak. Let’s commence to kill this parent-fucker.

First missiles have been fired.

Feel them fly. Ah! Feel them fly!