Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 11 - TAMA (4)
The colossal iron gate was a silent, unyielding judgement carved into the face of the planet. I stood before it, a solitary man with a simple directive, the weight of a cosmic choice anchored to me like a second layer of gravity. The rust-hued dust swirled around my shoes, a reminder of the vast, desolate cemetery I was trespassing on.
The woman stepped forward, her feet gently touching upon the alien soil. She stopped before the imposing structure, her semi-transparent form a stark, silent counterpoint to the monolithic finality of the door. She didn't speak. She didn't gesture or command. She simply… was. Her presence alone was enough.
The great gears of the ancient seal turned obediently. They roared and creaked in protest, but opened regardless. With a deep, resonant hum that vibrated through the soles of my shoes and up into my jawbone, the colossal slab of iron began to slowly unhinge. Like a great gaping maw, they split open. It took an entire two or three minutes of grinding and screeching, but the entrance had given way, and through it lied the destiny of a forgotten species.
The opening left behind was a perfect, rectangular archway, leading into a darkness so profound it seemed to drink the very light of the pale sky.
The woman held her position, a silent sentinel at the threshold. She didn't take any further steps. She didn't beckon. She merely turned her head, her all-seeing white eyes fixating on me with an expression that was both a question and a release. Her part was over.
"What's wrong? Aren't you going to go in?" I asked. The idea of stepping into the belly of that monolith without her spectral guidance as a shield was a stomach churning prospect.
"This is as far as I can go," she stated, her voice devoid of emotion, a simple recitation of a predetermined boundary. Her role was fulfilled. She had armed me and delivered me to the final trial.
"I thought you said you'd support my decisions," I protested, shaking my head, a fresh wave of anger and desperation flooding my veins. "You promised you would fight with me." My accusation sounded pathetic, the desperate cry of a child abandoned by a guardian.
A flicker of something ancient and unreadable passed across her features. "And so I shall," she replied, her serene expression unbroken. She raised a single, translucent finger and pointed. Not at the terrifying maw of the opening, but at my chest, at the small, silver clip I had affixed to my tie, the one I had completely forgotten about. The source of the invisible warmth that shielded me from the elements.
"That is enough," she said, her tone a statement of absolute fact. "The energies contained within that small device are more than sufficient to even the odds. They can level mountains and rewrite the laws of physics within a very localised radius. I could have armed you with a ship made of singing light and a sword of pure star-stuff, but it would have been for nothing." Her form seemed to ripple, a distortion in the air itself. "This is an argument, Noah -- a refutation. There will be no grand battles here. No armies to lead, no dragons to slay. It is a contest of will. Of conviction; my children will ask you to accept the union, again and again. You cannot physically fight the union, you can only prevent it. You don't need my power. You need to simply not lose your will to fight."
The mind-bending power she described, condensed into something no bigger than a paperclip, was a concept so vast, so abstract, it was meaningless as a point of reference. My mind skipped over it, snagging on the simpler, more brutal implications of her words. "I get it," I nodded. "It's all on me then," my voice was flat. "My conviction against a nascent god."
"Indeed," she confirmed, her gaze unwavering. "Your will, however fleeting and however flawed, is the only thing that matters here. This is the path you chose, Captain. And a path not staked with one's own life is merely an opinion." Her spectral smile returned, a thin, sad curve of her lips. "But, should you choose to stand in the way of this birth… and should your conviction fail…" she paused, letting the dreadful possibility hang in the silent, rust-scented air. "...if you lose, then I will enforce your decision. I will honour your will, even if it means wiping the slate clean and preventing this union myself."
It was the ultimate safety net, but nothing more. I still had to make the choice, and I would pay the price of failure.
I glanced from her ethereal face to the impenetrable darkness of the doorway. The path alone would be mine, and mine alone. All the help I could ever need was clipped to my chest, an impossible power I didn't even know how to use, and all the backup I could ever need was watching from the shadows of the past.
With a final, slow nod of acknowledgement that felt more like a capitulation, I turned and faced the void. I took a single, hesitant step, crossing the threshold from the pale, windswept plain into the absolute, starless black. The cold, sterile air of the tunnel swallowed me whole, and the world of light and wind was gone. I was on my own.
.
.
.
The darkness didn't recede. It simply… ended.
One breath, I was inhaling the sterile, metallic cold of an alien tomb, the next, my lungs were filled with the familiar, stale scent of recycled office air and the faint, burnt-caramel aroma of cheap coffee from the break room down the hall.
Light, not the pale, anaemic glow of a distant sun, but the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent hum of overhead ceiling panels, assaulted my eyes. My desk, a scarred battlefield of chipped laminate and ring-stained coffee mugs, was solid beneath my forearms. My fingers, not clenched into a fist of determination, were resting on a stack of glossy paper. 'Q3 Projections - Reconciliation & Mitigation Strategies'. The banal title was like a punchline to a cosmic joke I didn't remember hearing.
"Noah?"
Her voice. Not the synthesised, emotion-neutral cadence of Calliope, nor the ancient, resonant tones of a spectral goddess. It was a human voice. A hesitant, familiar, slightly nasal voice that I hadn't realised I remembered with such perfect, painful clarity.
I blinked. Slowly. The image swam into focus. Clarissa. Her face was a metre away from mine. A mask of mild concern creasing the corners of her eyes. She was wearing that same grey cardigan she always wore, the one that was slightly too big for her shoulders. Behind her, on the office wall, was the motivational poster I'd stared at a thousand times -- a picture of a lone rock climber on a precipice with the word 'PRESEVERANCE' stencilled underneath in a bland, corporate-approved font.
"You okay there, bud?" She asked again, leaning forward slightly. "You just… blanked out for a second. Completely zoned."
"I… what?" The words that came out of my throat felt foreign, thin, stripped of the authority I had been trying so hard to fake. I was just a guy again. The guy from before.
"You've been staring at that report like it's written in some dead language for a while now," she said, a small, nervous smile playing on her lips. "Rough night?" She sighed and nodded. "Yeah, I know that feeling. Honestly, I'd rather be in bed right now, watching boring mid-day dramas, but we gotta make a living, right?"
A night. It was a strange sentiment, I hadn't thought about mundane late nights in the past nine or ten days; it felt like I'd lived a lifetime since my last 'night'. The SV-Eclipse. Turn Seven. Astellion. The crash. The rovers… Calliope. The ghost woman and her impossible machine children. The whole sprawling, terrifying narrative… was it all a daydream? A particularly vivid, stress-induced hallucination brought on by staring at Q3 reports for too long? The sheer mundanity of my current situation made the other one seem like a ludicrous fantasy. The dust of Astellion, the feel of the alien soil under my boots -- they felt more real, more immediate, than the cheap, prickly fabric of my work shirt.
My eyes darted around the cubicle farm, a beige-and-steel canyon of silent desperation. The clatter of keyboards, the distant ring of an office phone, the low murmur of a conversation about server downtime. It was the inane soundtrack of my old life. The sound of a life I had, apparently, never left.
I tried to respond, to find some plausible lie, but my body refused to cooperate. My hands, still clumsy with a phantom weight they no longer carried, moved. They swept across the desk with a jerk, sending the teetering stack of reports scattering to the floor in a messy, papery avalanche. Pages fluttered down around my feet, a blizzard of corporate irrelevance.
"Oh! Shit…" the curse burst from me, a loud and sharp slap in the quiet office. A few heads popped up over the neighbouring cubicle walls like prairie dogs sensing a predator.
"Whoa, easy there," Clarissa said, a gentle, amused laugh escaping her. She dropped gracefully down, her fingers brushing against mine as we both reached out to gather the scattered projections as if this was some office meet-cute. "It's just paper. We can print more."
Her touch. Out of everything so far, it was the most disorienting thing of all. The warmth of her fingers against the back of my hand. The slight, calloused feel of her skin. It wasn't the cold, otherworldly touch of the ghostly woman. It was real. I could feel the faint tremor in her hand, the specific temperature of her skin. The sensation grounded me so forcefully in this moment, in this office, that the memories of the spaceship began to feel thin and watery, like a dream faintly remembered upon waking.
"I, er… I'm fine," I managed to say, my voice hoarse. I stared at our hands, still touching amidst the fallen reports. My brain was screaming: 'This is real. This has always been reality, what are you doing, Noah?' But a deeper, quieter part of me, the part that was the Captain of a crashed spaceship, whispered back: 'is it? Or is this the dream?'
Her touch lingered for a beat longer than necessary, a simple, human gesture of concern that in my old life would have sent a pathetic thrill through my chest. Now, it just felt… off. A ghost wearing a familiar skin. Her fingers pulled away, and the loss of their warmth was jarring.
She straightened up, holding a messy stack of the gathered reports, her eyes still fixed on me with that concerned, slightly questioning glance. She was pretty, in the quiet, unassuming way I remembered. Not the kind of beauty that would turn heads or be the talk of the office, but the kind you could get a coffee with on a Tuesday and feel like it was a victory. She was… safe, for a lack of a better word. A prize that not many sought after. She was the embodiment of a mundane life. A life I thought I had moved on from.
"Hey, Lee, you're staging a revolt without me?" A new voice sliced through my spiralling confusion, a wave of familiar, casual irreverence. A heavy hand clapped down on my shoulder, the weight and warmth undeniably real. I flinched, startled, my gaze snapping up from the scattered reports to the man standing over me.
He was a guy. Average height, a bit of a paunch straining the buttons of a short-sleeved dress shirt, a tired smile playing on his face. His hair was thinning on the top, combed over in a valiant but losing battle. I knew him too. I knew the exact pattern of the coffee stain on his tie, the faint smell of spearmint gum that always seemed to follow him. He was… he was… my mind stuttered, a corrupted data file. Harold? No, Jackson? Harry? The name sat on the tip of my tongue, a phantom limb I couldn't move. We've shared beers after a tough quarter. We'd complained about management. We were colleagues, not friends. But at this moment, he felt like an old acquaintance I hadn't seen in a lifetime.
"Got a problem with the quarterly projections, Noah?" the man asked, using the other name -- my old corporate life's name -- as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He nudged a stray page with the tip of his scuffed shoe. "Or are you just taking a stand against corporate malaise in general? I support it. Solidarity." He gave me a small nudge on my shoulder.
Clarissa straightened up, smoothing down her grey cardigan as she clutched the rescued stack of papers to her chest. She rolled her eyes, but the gesture was fond, a familiar office dance. "He was having a moment, Harry. I think the caffeine finally wore off," she glanced over to the old watch on her wrist, the one I remembered her telling me was from her grandfather. Even the old scuff marks were there. "Can't blame him, it's past 2PM already."
Harry. That was it. Harry. The name clicked into place with a resounding clunk, and a wave of disorientation so profound washed over me. Harry from Accounting. He had a kid who played soccer. His wife was trying to get him to renovate the basement. All these pointless, irrelevant details surged back to the surface of my mind, a flood of mundane trivia that felt more alien than the schematics of the SV-Eclipse.
"Ah, the classic caffeine-deficiency collapse," Harry chuckled, oblivious to the existential crisis unfolding inches from him. "Tell me about it. I'm running on fumes and sheer spite for Anderson's new deadline initiative. Apparently, we're 'optimising our delivery timelines'. Which, translated from corporate-bullshit, means we're all working through the weekend. Did you get that memo, Clarissa?"
Clarissa sighed, a dramatic, put-upon sound that was so familiar it made my chest ache. "Don't even get me started. I've got three client decks to redraft because the client's nephew -- who is, I quote, 'a visionary with an eye for branding' -- decided our font choice was 'too aggressive'. Can you believe it? Aggressive font."
I was still in a stupor, surrounded by the meaningless detritus of a dead-end office job, listening to a conversation about deadlines and typography. It was the most profoundly ordinary interaction I had ever experienced. And every fibre of my being couldn't tell if this was a dream or reality. I was going insane.
My gaze fixed on Clarissa. Her earnest complaint, the way she tucked a stray strand of mousy brown hair behind her ear, the small crease of concentration between her eyebrows -- it was perfect. A perfect, flawless reproduction of a thousand similar moments. 'Is this the dream?' a voice in my head, a cynical captain's voice, demanded. 'Or is that?' My life on a rusty planet, the terror of falling through the sky, the cool logic of Calliope's voice… had that been the real thing, and this was the dream my mind retreated to after the stun beam from the rover had severed my consciousness? Was I in a coma, floating in some med-bay of the new Eclipse under the ghostly woman's watch? Or was this the stark reality, and the captaincy, the ship, the AI, the ghosts and gods… was it all a desperate, elaborate fantasy my mind had constructed to escape the crushing weight of mediocrity? If I was a sensible man -- which I prided myself to be -- logically this was all real. All that fantasy about being a ship captain and deciding on the fate of nascent gods sounded like a fairy tale.
This is real.
Harry kept talking, his voice a droning, meaningless beat. "Honestly, if I have to look at one more PowerPoint slide with a smiling, diverse group of stock-photo models pointing at a rising graph, I'm going to staple my own forehead to the whiteboard," he said with a righteous indignation. "Just to make a statement."
Clarissa laughed, a real, genuine laugh. Not the small, nervous chuckle she'd given me, but a full-throated, slightly-too-loud office laugh. It echoed in the beige confines of the cubicle farm, a sound that I had once found endearing. Now it just felt… hollow.
My fingers, still holding the rest of the scattered reports, felt the cheap, glossy paper. I remembered the rough, alien texture of Astellion's soil, the way the dust coated everything, a fine, red powder that tasted of minerals and ancient silence. I remembered the bitter, chemical paste of a nutrient bar, a meal I had eaten with only a floating, glowing cube for company. And then I remembered the stale, lukewarm coffee in my favourite mug on my desk. This too seemed just as real as the nutrient bar.
Clarissa touched my arm again. "Noah? Seriously, you're really spacing out. You sure you're okay?"
"I…" my words caught in my throat, stumbling. "Sorry, I think I need some fresh air," I managed to complete my sentence. The words felt strange and clumsy on my tongue, a foreign language I was struggling to remember. I pushed myself from the desk, my movements stiff and disconnected.
"Sure thing, boss," Harry said, clapping me on the shoulder again, the gesture a friendly anchor in a storm I was the only one feeling. "Just don't take too long. Anderson wants the consolidated figures by three, and you know how he gets," he rolled his eyes and made a funny face.
He and Clarissa watched me with mild, concerned expressions, their faces a portrait of normalcy that made my skin crawl. I couldn't stand another second of their worried, mundane stares. I mumbled something incoherent and stumbled away, leaving the relative safety of my cubicle and heading down the familiar, carpeted corridor.
Each step was an act of conscious will. The building was exactly as I remembered. The worn, oatmeal-coloured carpet, the scuff marks on the baseboards from a decade of rolling office chairs, the flickering fluorescent light above the water cooler that no one ever bothered to fix. It was all too real. The sheer, unremarkable consistency of it was the most compelling evidence that this was, in fact, reality. A dream, I reasoned, a fantasy conjured by a stressed-out mind, would be more interesting. It wouldn't remember the precise way the fire door had a slight squeak, or the faint smell of mildew coming from the HVAC vent on the third floor landing. A dream wouldn't bother with such mundane, soul-grinding details.
I bypassed the elevator, my body moving on an old, ingrained instinct. I took the stairs up, two at a time, the rhythmic thud of my feet on the concrete steps a frantic, percussive beat against the building's silent circulatory system. Past the second floor, the third, the fourth… until I reached the final, unmarked door at the top of the stairwell.
The door to the roof. It had been my reliable refuge since the very first day I started working here. I remembered ending up here after getting lost on the fourth floor back then. It was Anderson, a senior, who helped me get back down.
It was painted a utilitarian, chipped grey, a heavy slab of metal that was supposed to be alarmed and locked. But it wasn't. It was jammed, warped in its frame by decades of heat and cold, just as I remembered. I fumbled in my pocket, my fingers closing around the familiar shape of my keys. My thumb found the small, flat metal key I used for my filing cabinet, the one with the slightly bent tip. I positioned the key into the tiny gap between the door and the frame, just above the handle. I remembered the trick, the small, precise shimmying motion required to gently pull the latch free. I jiggled the key, applying a little upward pressure, just as I had a hundred times before. There was a familiar scrape, a groan of protesting metal, and then a loud, satisfying click. The door popped open a fraction of an inch.
The fact that the shimmy still worked, that the door responded to my specific, localised knowledge, sealed it. This was real. A simulation, a hallucination… would it have the patience to encode such a trivial, specific piece of information into its architecture? It seemed unlikely. I was starting to be convinced.
I pushed the heavy door open and stepped out onto the familiar, comforting, polluted embrace of the 21st century city.
The wind hit me, a steady, slightly grimy breeze that carried the distinct symphony of urban life: the distant rumble of traffic, the faint wail of a siren, the indistinct murmur of a million souls living out their lives. I was on the flat, tarred roof of my office building, the same one I'd escaped to dozens of times before. The vents hummed their monotonous tune, and the big, loud air conditioning units rumbled like snoring beasts.
I made my way over to the edge, my hands resting on the safety railing, and looked out.
The city sprawled before me, a concrete jungle of glass and steel, a monument to human ambition and utter conformity. It was exactly, depressingly, beautifully, my city. I could see the park a few blocks away, a tiny patch of green in the grey expanse. I could see the old, art deco courthouse with its weathered copper spire, the office tower my ex-girlfriend worked in, the bridge my commute took me over every single morning. Each sight was a perfect, detailed snapshot of my old, dead life.
.
.
.
The day continued without my input. My brief, rooftop sanctuary was invaded by the buzzing insistence of my phone. A calendar reminder: Mandatory Dep. Sync - Q3 Strategy - Conf. Rm 4. Of course. There was no escaping the droning, beige-and-steel river of corporate entropy.
The conference room was a perfect diorama of soul-wasting convention. The air was thick with the scent of stale coffee and the faint, synthetic sweetness of a vanilla-scented air freshener struggling and failing the mask the room's inherent lack of oxygen… or life. Anderson, our department head and a man whose charisma had been surgically removed at birth, was holding court at the head of a long, laminate table, pointing a lasered clicker at a projection screen filled with impenetrable charts.
"...and as you can see from this slide, the synergy between our cross-platform engagement metrics and the client-facing deliverables presents a key leverage for Q4. We need to circle back, ideate some action items, and really lean in on maximising our bandwidth to optimise these projections…"
His words were a familiar, meaningless drone, the background hum of a life I had tried to forget. My focus, such as it was, drifted away from the screen and settled on the surface of the table. It was a landscape of forgotten ambitions, strewn with the tools of a modern office worker. There was a half-empty can of some aggressively-branded energy drink, a sweating glass of water with a single, sad lemon wedged sliding down the side, a disposable coffee cup stained with lipstick. a carton of juice from the cafeteria. The detritus of people trying, and failing, to stay awake.
My own eyes landed on the plain, clear plastic cup in front of me, filled with lukewarm water from the pitcher. Bubbles clung to the side of the plastic, a tiny, captive universe. My gaze landed on its curved, distorted surface, and I saw my own reflection staring back. It was me. The tired, slightly slack-jawed man from the cubicle. No hint of the Captain of a spaceship, just an average worker in an average office. The man who had a harmless crush on the woman in the grey cardigan. The man who was a C-grade at best. The face was correct, but something was wrong with it.
I leaned in closer, my curiosity overriding the soporific effects of Anderson's presentation. There, in the warped, funhouse reflection of the clear plastic cup, pinned to the collar of my reflected shirt, was a glint of silver.
The silver clip.
The memory of its impossible weight, of the warmth it had spread through my body, of the promise of cosmic power it held, came rushing back with the force of sobriety. "The energies contained within that small device are more than sufficient to even the odds." The ghostly woman's words echoed in the hollows of my mind.
My breathing momentarily paused. A single, frantic beat against the steady, monotonous drone of the meeting. My free hand shot down to my chest, my fingers fumbling with the knot of my boring blue tie. I traced the fabric, the slightly rough texture of it against my fingertips. There was nothing. Only the cheap, synthetic weave of the tie. No clip. No small, impossibly dense object of unknown power. I felt the smooth expanse of the polyester, the way it bunched slightly at the collar. The clip was gone. Had never been there.
"What?" My head snapped back to the cup. I stared, unblinking, into the distorted reflection. It was still there. A small, perfectly rectangular bar of solid, polished silver, fixed to the reflected tie. A glitch. A bug in the code of this perfect, mundane recreation. It was an artifact from another reality, a data point that didn't belong.
It was proof.
That world -- the ship, the crash, Calliope, the ghostly woman on her planet of rust -- wasn't a dream. This was. I wasn't having a mental breakdown. I was trapped.
Anderson's voice cut through my reverie like a dull razor. Every eye in the room swiveled to me. I could feel their gazes, the weight of their mundane expectations. They were waiting for a cog in the machine to offer a cog-like response. I didn't care for any of that at this moment. My heart was hammering against my ribs, a wild, frantic drum solo against the monotonous rhythm of the office. I was the only person in this room who knew the truth. The only person who knew this entire existence, this entire world, was a lie.
I looked from Anderson's expectant face, down to the glitching reflection in the water cup. My world, my life, my existence, was nothing more than a prison, but now I had the key.
And then my world shattered.
The moment the truth of the silver clip was locked into place, the universe stuttered. The hum of the air condition, the drone of Anderson's voice, the faint, vanilla scent -- it all froze into a single, fractured tableau. Then, the world outside the conference room window, the boring, grey, 21st century city, flared with a brilliant, impossible light. Not the sunrise., This was a sterile, white light, the light of a server room rebooting.
Across the expanse of glass, the words appeared, seared into the sky in a crisp, monospaced font that seemed to hang in the very fabric of reality.
[SIMULATION FAILED]
It was followed by a cascade of gibberish, an endless string of technical computer error codes.
[THREAD EXCEPTION AT 0x7FF6B8F45412: ACCESS VIOLATION WRITING LOCATION 0x0000000000000010... HEAP CORRUPTION DETECTED... ATTEMPTING MEMORY DUMP TO CORE_LOG_77B4A... ]
[SIMULATION FAILED: PARADOX DETECTED in SUBSTRATE_ID: "21st_C_Terra_Variant_C"]
[CAUSE: INCONSISTENCY RECOGNITION BY SUBJECT LEE, NOAH (Designate: Captain)]
[ERROR: FOREIGN_ARTIFACT_SIGNATURE (ID: LHS-01) UNRESOLVED]
[ACTION: INITIATING MEMORY_FLUSH… FAILED. ABORT. ABORT. DECRY…]
The cracks started at the corners of the window, splintering through the projected cityscape with the sharp, crystalline sound of shattering glass. They weren't the cracks in the window, but in the simulation itself. The blue sky, the drab office buildings, the clouds -- they were a facade, a painted backdrop, and now it was being torn to pieces. Like it was being torn asunder by a petulant child who had grown tired of playing make-believe. The cracks spread like lightning, each a new fissure revealing not the structure of the building, but a searing, white nothingness beyond.
Clarissa, Harry, Anderson -- they were screaming, but their voices were corrupted, distorted, like a malfunctioning audio file, their mouths gaping in silent, pixelated agony. And then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over.
The light vanished. The darkness returned.
My consciousness blinked back into existence like a faulty neon sign. I wasn't in the conference room anymore. I wasn't on the roof. I wasn't in the office either. I was on my back, the cold, hard floor pressing against my spine. The air was thick with the taste of ozone and ancient dust, so sharp it burned my lungs with every ragged breath, even through the silver clip's protective bubble.
I pushed myself up, my muscles screaming in protest. I was in a place that was the polar opposite of the clean, beige box I had just escaped. This was a maze of technology. Jagged walls of grimy, scarred metal surrounded me on all sides, rising up to a ceiling lost in shadow. Exposed conduits and thick bundles of colour-coded cables snaked across the walls and ceilings like metallic arteries, some glowing with a faint, intermittent pulse of dim light. The air hummed, not with the familiar, gentle vibration of an office building, but with the low, guttural acoustics of a massive, ancient machine. It was a claustrophobic, techno-nightmare.
This… This was definitely real. I was back on Astellion, in the belly of the great metal leviathan.