Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 19 - Intermission (2)
The bridge of the SV-Eclipse II wasn't a place you entered so much as dissolved into. The familiar clang of boot heels on steel was gone, replaced by smooth taps as my feet met the deck of obsidian-like glass. The wall to the ceiling was a seamless, pearlescent space that felt like the inside of an oyster. I sat in the command chair, a throne of plush black material that confirmed perfectly to my form. The rest of the bridge was as pristine and alien as my brief memories of it, a masterpiece of non-euclidian geometry that still made my brain feel like it was trying to solve a puzzle it wasn't equipped for. At the front of the bridge, bathed in the cool, ethereal glow of a holographic starmap, stood Tama. She hadn't moved a millimetre since I'd arrived from my chambers, an unmoving gargoyle of obsidian and amber light staring into the impossible vista of stars ahead from the panoramic viewports.
At any time, anything could become something else. If I wanted the entire front of the bridge to be a window to the outside, it would become so. If I wanted to change the shape of the bridge, it would obey. This ship conformed and changed to whatever I wanted at the time. It wasn't that the space was actually being reconstructed at will, more so that with the help of projectors, holograms and reflective surfaces, this was achieved. In the grand scheme of it, it was more smoke and mirrors, a parlour trick, than anything else, but it felt like magic. Though, according to Tama the bridge can actually be manipulated physically if I wanted, it'd just take a bit longer. This ship was, after all, of SilentArchitect design.
The silence stretched, thick and heavy, broken only by the faint, almost subliminal hum of a ship that was holding the fabric of spacetime in its thrall. We had been travelling for… a day, maybe two? I guess it's 'cycles' now. I had lost track. Here, on this vessel, travel was an absence of sensation. No juddering lurch of the Fold Drive engaging, no tense countdown, no stomach-dropping pull into the unknown. One star system simply bled into another, the vast view outside the continuous, unbroken window of the bridge shifting as smoothly as a video game loading a new map. Tau Ceti Prime was our destination, and it felt less like a journey and more like a simple fact of location, one was getting closer with every non-passing second.
My mind kept playing Tiberius's messages, the raw, undiluted grief they contained. A ghost was calling, and I had to answer. I had to. Because a part of me that I hadn't even known existed still resonated with the feeling of family; my mind screamed at me, it was a familial duty, it was something more than the sheer, animalistic survival instincts I relied on on Astellion.
I broke the silence. My voice, when it finally came out, was quiet. "Tama. I need to write to him." I wasn't particularly looking for her permission, it was a simple need to confess.
She didn't turn around, but her reply was immediate, her serene voice resonating directly from the comms in my chair rather than her physical form. "Acknowledged, Captain."
I tested my elbows on the smooth, unbroken arms of the command chair, my mind racing. How do you start a conversation that's been three years in the making? A conversation between two strangers who were supposed to be family.
With a simple thought, I initiated the interface. In my previous world, or even on the previous SV-Eclipse for that matter, this would have been a process of clicking an icon, opening a program, a dozen clumsy steps between me and my goal. Here -- on the SV-Eclipse II -- there was only intent. I simply wanted to send a message, and the ship obliged. A small, holographic screen shimmered into existence in the air before me, a soft blue rectangle of light hovering about a foot from my face. It was a simple, clean interface, minimalist to the point there wasn't even a thing to type on. Three fields: Recipient, subject, and a large, empty space for the host of the message. Already filled in were the details.
Recipient:Tiberius Lee.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, a phantom panel of light that just projected itself into existence above my thighs. The keys made a soft, pleasant chime as my thoughts wavered over them, trying to form the first letter of the word. I sighed. What could I possibly say?
[ Dear Uncle Tiberius, ]
My thumb froze. No. 'Dear' sounded too formal, too distant. But 'hi'? 'Hey'? What did you say to the relative of the man whose life you'd replaced?
My mind conjured the image of him, a composite sketch built from the stray memories and my own desperate imagination. An older man, with tired eyes, hands calloused not from piloting but from tinkering with engines in a dusty private hangar. A man who's kept a little ship named the Wanderer running out of sheer, stubborn love for a sister's memory. I could smell him, a faint ghost of engine grease and cheap, stale coffee. I could feel the weight of three years of unanswered questions sitting on his shoulders. It was an unfair spectre, a fiction my brain was inventing to make the task easier, but it was all I had.
I just wanted to type something simple.
[ It was the ship. I'm alive. I'm coming home. Sorry. ]
The temptation was immense. It was clean and efficient. It was everything a simple message should be. But it was also a lie of omission, a cold, corporate answer to a profoundly human question.
My fingers danced over the phantom keys, the ghostly chime of each key-press was a tiny, damning confession of my ineptitude.
[ Dear Uncle Tiberius,
Apologies for the extended silence. I was… indisposed. -Noah ]
I read it back. Indisposed. The word was a murky stain of corporate understatement. A lie so bland it was an insult to the truth. It was the kind of word you used in a memo why the quarterly report was late, not why you'd been silent for three whole years while your family thought you were atomised dust between stars. I scowled and deleted it with a sharp flick of the wrist. The blue letters vanished back into the ether.
My second attempt was a little more honest, but no better.
[ Uncle Tiberius, I know you must be angry. You have every right to be. Something went wrong with the Fold Drive. I'm alive. On my way to Tau Ceti.
Will explain everything. - Noah ]
This, too, felt wrong. It was too blunt. Too transactional. It was a status update, not a message from a nephew to the man who had held him as a baby. It answered the what but completely ignored the why, the suffocating pressure of all those unanswered pleas that piled up in Tiberius's inbox. I deleted this one with a wave of irritation.
I leaned back in the command chair, rubbing my temples with the heels of my hands. The holographic display shimmered before me, a blank canvas of my failure. I tried one more, a desperate rambling mess that came out closer to the truth.
[ Look, Tiberius… I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. My ship, the SV-Eclipse, we weren't just lost. We were taken. Hijacked. Flung somewhere I still can't find on any star map. It's… been a nightmare. I crashed. I thought I was going to die. For a long, long time, there was no way to send a message. No way to get a message out. I wasn't ignoring you. I promise. I just… couldn't.
I'm on my way home. Please, just wait.
-N ]
I stared at the last word. "-N". I'd written it without even thinking. A tiny, intimate piece of familiarity I had no right to. This wasn't my family. I was an impostor, a ghost wearing a dead man's clothes. Deleting that message felt like a small act of mercy to the memory of the real Noah, a way of not sullying his final words with my own fraudulent existence.
Finally, with a heavy sigh that drained the last of my energy, I accepted the inevitable. No perfect words existed. There wasn't an elegant way to bridge a chasm of three years of unimaginable trauma. There was only the brutal, inadequate truth.
I took a deep breath and started again.
[ Uncle Tiberius,
Please, read this and know that I am alive. I'm so sorry. For everything. For three years of you thinking I was dead.
It wasn't because I didn't want to answer. Or because I didn't care. I need you to believe that. I physically couldn't. The ship was sabotaged. We were thrown into an uncharted system. It… crashed. I've been stranded on an uninhabited planet ever since.
I'm finally on my way home now. It's a long story, and typing it into a message feels cheap and wrong. I need to tell you what happened in person.
I'm on my way to Tau Ceti Prime now. To explain everything in person. I'll tell you the whole story. All of it. I owe you that.
See you soon.
- Noah ]
I reread it one last time. It wasn't eloquent. It was clumsy and raw and offered more questions than answers. But it was honest. More importantly, it was apologetic. With a final, decisive thought, I commanded the interface. A small, green bar flashed for a microsecond at the bottom of the holographic screen.
[ Message sent. ]
A profound, hollow emptiness descended upon me the moment the message was gone. It was out of my hands now, a single message pod launched into the void. I had locked the ghost. All I had left to do was wait for it to poke back.
The moment my message vanished, a tiny red indicator began to flash on the holographic interface. Not a slow, patient pulse, but a rapid, immediate notification. Incoming message. My breath hitched. It couldn't be. Not already. Maybe it was an automated guild receipt, a message bounced back due to an incorrect address. But as I focused my intent on the indicator, the text resolved with a stark simplicity that was more brutal than a thousand-page rant.
From: Tiberius Lee
[ Okay. Just come home soon. ]
Just that. A world of swallowed emotions contained within a single line. It was the response of a man who had spent three years screaming into a void and had now finally heard a faint echo, but was too exhausted, too drained of hope to do anything more than acknowledge its existence.
I let out a long, slow breath I hadn't realised I'd been holding, slumping back into the perfectly conforming chair. "Yeah. Okay." The word hung in the sterile, silent air of the bridge.
My mind began to pace back and forth within the confines of my skull. Now what was I supposed to do? I'd sent the message, but the army of questions was still marching its way towards me. I was about to walk into a room with a man who believed he was seeing a ghost, and all I had was a collection of stories so insane they belonged in a fantasy novel, not a tearful family reunion.
"Right," I sighed. "That part worked, now I just have to… I don't know, figure out the rest."
I finally addressed the obsidian statue at the front of the bridge. My voice was weary, searching. "Tama… what do I even say to him? How do I… how do I even begin to explain any of this? When I sit down in front of him, face-to-face?"
For a long moment, Tama didn't move. Her gaze remained locked on the swirling cosmic nebulae that painted the vast, panoramic viewport. When she finally spoke, her voice was the same placid, reasoning tone she used to calculate Fold coordinates. "You could simply tell him the entire story, from beginning to end. I, for one, do not believe my retrieval from the old machines was an embarrassing affair."
I scoffed, a defeated sound. "The entire story? Right. Hey Uncle Tiberius, funny story. The day before the ship got hijacked, I was actually a mildly depressed office worker from the 21st century, and the universe basically downloaded my consciousness into this body, which originally belonged to another guy who also happened to be me, but not really. Also, I made a deal with a ghost lady who helped me kill a giant robot god, and my ship's AI is now a newborn deity who could probably blink your star system out of existence if she had a bad day. So, how have you been for the last three years?" I threw my hand up in frustration. "He'd think I was lying to him, that I was some kind of government agent who killed his nephew and stole his identity."
Her orange irises, the only part of her that seemed alive, finally shifted, swivelling slightly in my direction without her head moving. She was deliberating. "The addition of your temporal-paradoxical origin introduces an unnecessary variable to the equation. The probability of a position outcome -- acceptance and reunion -- decreases by a factor of 92.3 percent when factoring in that specific detail." She paused. "Also I would not destroy a star system without reason, just because I was having a bad day." Another pause, "... If you were to die however…"
I almost choked on my own spit. "Let's not go there. Anyway, Ninety-two points three percent? You calculated that?"
"To the third decimal place," she confirmed calmly. "It falls under the umbrella of 'psychological impact assessment'." Her gaze drifted back to the stars. "The narrative is more robust without the explanation of your temporal-paradoxical arrival. The core facts are more than staggering enough. In some jurisdictions, you could be declared non compos mentis. Your Guild pilot's licence would be permanently and irrevocably revoked on grounds of certified insanity. And your uncle would likely have you put under psychiatric observation for the rest of your natural life."
A weary chuckle escaped my throat. I could see it happen. "Fine," I conceded, dragging my hand down my face. "No Earth. No dimension-hopping. That's… that's probably for the best. Keep the madness to a manageable level," I replied as such, but I wasn't so sure. It was very likely the guilt alone would make me confess halfway through my story.
I started over, building a new story in my mind. A revised, sanitised version that was just believable enough. One that fits within the known, if bizarre, laws of the universe. "Okay. New story. During a Fold Jump, a catastrophic system failure -- sabotage -- tossed the SV-Eclipse into uncharted, off-the-grid coordinates. Primary and secondary comms were completely destroyed. The Fold Drive was a write-off." I paused, the memory of that grinding, terrifying silence after the crash surfacing. I still had minor PTSD from that. "Crash-landed. On a completely unknown, uncharted rock. No rescue. No way to call for help. Three years."
I let the timeline hang in the air. "I survived," I continued, the narrative taking shape. "With the help of Calliope -- the ship's operational intelligence." Using her old name felt important now. An anchor for a story I needed to make believable. "And four maintenance rovers. We managed to patch the ship together. Barely. Just enough to make it back to a known shipping lane." I looked at Tama. Even though her back was still to me. "That's it. That's the story. A simple case of being catastrophically ship-wrecked."
The story sounded flimsy. A series of unlikely survival tales patched together with dumb luck. But it was better than the alternative.
"Yeah, guess we'll have to make do with that," I affirmed to myself with a nod. I'd also have to leave out the spectral progenitors of a dead race, the old machines, and the upgraded Eclipse. Aurora's warning echoes in my mind. You now travel with a living embodiment of one of those artifacts, Captain. You are a walking signpost to a power the most powerful players in this galaxy would commit genocides to possess. Her words were chilling in context. Telling anyone, even family, that my AI companion was a newborn god woven from the threads of a millions-of-year-old history would definitely paint a target not just on my back, but on the backs of everyone I cared about. Heck, if Aurora was even half-right, then the entire colony I was headed to might end up disappearing if those 'powerful players' found out.
"That's about it, I guess…" Now, all I had to do was act it out, and pray it was convincing enough for a man who already lost too much.
.
.
.
The non-time of travel ended with the same silent, imperceptible grace it had begun. There wasn't any lurch, no sudden shift in the viewport's cosmic display. Simply, the tapestry of distant unknown stars became denser, clearer, then resolved itself into a familiar neighbourhood I had only ever glimpsed through loading screens and artist renditions. Tau Ceti was no longer a pinpoint of light on a holographic display; it was a sun. A stable, brilliant G-type star, yellow and warm, a beacon of sanity after the chaotic giants and hostile red dwarfs of the deep uncharted zones.
And around it, the view changed. The infinite, velvet-dark of space was gone, replaced by… presence. The feeling of being home. Here, the void was not empty; it was crowded. Clean, while-hulled freighters, their running lights blinking in disciplined patterns, piled the well-worn space-lanes like a sword of industrious bees. Tiny, darting courier ships zipped between them, their engines leaving fleeting, glittering trails. In the distance, the skeletal framework of a Way-Station glimmered, a commercial and industrial hub no smaller than an actual city, docking gantries extended like welcoming arms. The traffic was controlled. Ordered. This was civilisation. It was the highway, a space highway. We had left the abandoned back roads and merged into the interstate.
Then, through it all, a planet swam into view. Tau Ceti Prime. I had only ever seen artist illustrations of it back when I was still just a corporate drone. Even when I saw it through recordings of it on the hologram projector on the bridge, it didn't really stick to me. None of them, not a single one, did it justice. The holo-vids from the Guild Recruitment ads that Tama pulled up were flat, muted, and sterile. This was alive.
It didn't just hang in space; it blossomed. The predominant colour, the one that caught my breath was a shade of blue so vibrant, so rich and deep, it felt less like the reflections of a star and more like a liquid, luminous entity of its own. An ocean. A global ocean that covered the vast majority of the planet's surface, a single, word-spanning sea. And painted across that perfect azure congas were continents. Not the dusty, ochre wastelands of Astellion. These continents were… gentle. Sweeping arcs of deep emerald, softened by wisps of pearlescent white clouds that clung to mountain ranges. It looked like an artist's rendering, an impossible paradise conceived to sell me something. It was the very image of a habitable world, the dream every space nerd chased.
But what took my gaze and held it, what truly made this world feel real and worn-in were the signs of life upon it. They weren't grand or monstrous, but they were undeniable. On the dark side of the planet, where the sun's light gave way to the velvet of night, I could see them. A constellation of landborn stars. Cities. They weren't sprawling, chaotic metropolises that blotted out the ground beneath, but right, concentrated networks of warm, golden light, mapped out in geometric grids that hugged the coastlines of the emerald masses. From here, they looked like glowing circuit boards wretched onto the surface of a gem. Between them, fainter, moving pinpricks of light traversed the dark oceans -- the running lights of night-sailing vessels, the beacons of off-shore platforms. This wasn't a new, raw world being tamed; it was a mature, settled one. A world that had been lived in, loved in, for generations. This place had its own heartbeat.
I felt small, which was saying something considering I had just spent the last three years feeling incredibly small. On Astellion, I was a pest under the heel of a dead god. On the surface of Turn Seven, I was a single, insignificant big scurrying across to fix my ship. Here, adrift in this quiet and orderly traffic, I was a real nobody in a ghost ship, returning to a home I never knew.
"It's… busier than I expected," I finally said, breaking my awestruck silence.
"The orbital traffic density for a core outer-rim colony of this age is well within standard deviance," Tama replied, her back still to me. She was a statue, an observation deck made of polished black and amber light. "A system's prosperity can be reasonably inferred from the health of its import/export manifest and orbital processing capacity. Tau Ceti Prime is classified as Tier-3, primarily resource-agricultural with a secondary light-manufacturing economy. Stable."
Yeah, I had no idea what any of that meant. Every time she talked, for an idiot like me it was just a jumble of word salad. "You're going to have to educate me on how this galaxy operates later. I'm still trying to figure out what the Imperial Conversation is."
"The Imperial Convocation is the nominal legislative body of the Milky Way galaxy," Tama's calm voice cut through the silence of the bridge, as even and dispassionate as an encyclopedia entry. "Composed of appointed Councilors from various stellar regions, its primary function is to—"
I raised a hand, cutting her off before she could get into a tangent on what was sure to be a multi-volume treatise on galactic civics. My focus was on the single, blue-white planet swelling in the viewport. "Stop. Stop," I insisted. "I appreciate the lecture, I really do. But Tama, we need to focus on the problem at hand. Right here. Right now. My uncle. What's waiting for me down there isn't an abstract political debate; it's three years of grieving, packed into a single man."
"Understood," she replied with the patience of a saint, her tone unchanged, yet somehow now laser-focused on my specific issue. "Your concern regarding the psychological state of Tiberius Lee and the optimal conversational strategy for a successful reintroduction."
"Right. Exactly that," I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. I was still unconvinced whether I should omit facts or just tell him the truth outright. With the latter, I'd at least feel a lot better, even if it meant dashing some old timer's hopes. "The problem at hand. I'm about to commit emotional fraud on an old man who thought I was space dust for three years. How do I do that without having a complete mental breakdown? For either of us?"
"Captain," she began, her tone shifting subtly from the simple information processing to that of a seasoned crisis negotiator. "You are approaching this from a false premise. Your objective is to manage the emotional state of your uncle. This is an impossible task. You are dealing with too many uncontrolled variables: a three-year-old grief response, potential shock, and your own incomplete knowledge of the reason for you being here." She paused, letting the clinical summary hang in the air. "Therefore, any attempt to explain the full, granular truth would be a significant error. You would be attempting to articulate a narrative of events -- a sabotage, a crash in an unknown system, a three-year-survival, your own temporal-paradoxical event -- that you yourself do not possess in its entirety. You would be presenting fragmented data to a person whose primary emotional processing will be locked on the simple, miraculous fact of your survival."
She tilted her head, the faintest, most inscrutable gesture. "The result would not be clarity, but confusion. Your fractured account would conflict with your own memories as you recount it. He would sense this inconsistency, interpret it not as trauma, but as deception. You would unintentionally create mistrust at the very moment you need to build a foundation of reassurance. The act of explaining would become more damaging than the silence you are attempting to break."
Her logic was cold and sterile, a scalpel precisely carving away at the messy, human elements I was wrestling with. And yet, there was a subtext I could now read, a layer beneath her perfect, utilitarian prose. She wasn't just advising me on tactical communication; she was giving me the permission to lie.
"The most optimal and efficient route," she concluded, "is a controlled disclosure. Offer him a summary, the sanitised version of survival you formulated. That is the core fact he needs to process. Everything else… the details, the lingering trauma, the specific temporal-paradoxical mechanics of your arrival… those can be withheld. You need not invent falsehoods; you must simply practice informational restraint until you have had sufficient time to acquire a more complete understanding of both the events that transpired and the social dynamics you are re-entering."
She was making it easy. She was wrapping the act of omission in a neat package of tactical logic. "Informational restraint… huh." It wasn't lying. It wasn't deceit. It was just… waiting. A strategy. She was building me an off-ramp, a logical pathway that bypassed the ugly swamp of moral uncertainty. And gods help me, I felt a sense of relief. "Yeah…" I nodded. There wasn't much to debate; rather, I wanted to go along with her idea. For my own sanity. "Alright, Tama. I'll do as you say."
I breathed a sigh of relief.
My eyes continued staring out onto the wide, panoramic viewport at all the blinking lights and the distant Way-Station orbiting Tau Ceti Prime. My mind was getting numb. I didn't want to think about it anymore, so I just latched onto the pretty little dots in the distance. "It's beautiful." I leaned forward in my chair, the soft material groaning inaudibly, my elbows resting on my knees. My hands hung limb between them. I was trying to absorb it, to imprint this single, impossible frame on my mind forever. The emerald continents, the sapphire oceans, the golden constellation of cities -- my brain could barely process the data. It was too perfect. Too… real.
I just wanted to distract myself, but the ghost of a sensation fluttered in my chest, a memory so vivid and out of place it was like a sudden drop in the cabin pressure. It wasn't my memory. It was his. The original Noah's. It was a feeling of coming home, the specific, mundane comfort of seeing the familiar skyline of a star system you'd flown a dozen times, the relief of knowing there was a hot meal and a bunk waiting for you down on that well-lit rock. And underneath that, a phantom of my own past asserted itself. I remembered staring at a screen in my cubicle. A pixelated image of a celestial body, an artist's interpretation of what life outside of Earth would look like in a thousand years. Tau Ceti Prime. A podcast played in my headphones, some nerdy astronomer droning on about atmospheric composition, potential for life, the likelihood of tidal locking. I'd sipped at my lukewarm, vending-machine coffee, the fluorescent lights of the office humming their monotone dirge, and I had dreamed. I had dreamed of this exact view, this impossible vista, with the desperate yearning of a man trapped in a grey-box life.
Now, it was outside my window.
A small, involuntary gasp escaped my lips. It wasn't the view of the starship captain assessing a destination. It was the awe of a 21st century man finally touching the face of a god he'd only ever worshipped through blurry images and speculative podcasts.
"Do you think she'd like this?" I asked the quiet bridge, my voice barely a whisper, thick with a wistful melancholy. The name came to my lips unbidden, a relic from a life already a universe away. "Clarissa, I mean." The question hung in the air, foolish and intensely personal. I wasn't really asking for Tama's opinion. I was speaking to a ghost, a memory from a life that was quickly becoming a blurred haze at the back of my mind.
The silence from Tama was longer than usual. It wasn't the near-instantaneous data retrieval I was used to. It was a weighty, deliberate pause, heavy with an absence I couldn't quite define. It was… considered. A quiet contemplation from a being who didn't need to contemplate anything. When she finally spoke, her serene, logical tone was the same as it always was, yet it carried a subtle, almost imperceptible quality I couldn't name. "I couldn't possibly know what a 21st century corporate accountant would think of this view, Captain. Even with all their technology and knowledge, the Silent Architects never reached the realm of time travel." The answer was a technical masterpiece. It wasn't a refusal to engage, but a statement of objective impossibility, rooted in the temporal and experiential gulf between her and Clarissa.
And it sounded, for all the world, like the perfectly civilised, slightly cool, and utterly airtight response of a girlfriend listening to her new boyfriend muse about the view he once shared with someone else.
"Right," I replied. "I guess I was just feeling a bit nostalgic. Of course you couldn't. Silly question." I nodded. "Anyway, guess I'm home now… where this is."