Touched

(Dmitri’s Story)

Eyes wide open. A pitch black space. A claustrophobic sense of deep, dripping enclosure, even though the suffocating walls and ceiling could not be seen with a naked eye. The silence of a near pure vacuum. A coldness that would suffer the warmest heart to break into a thousand frozen shards. A death space. A voided landscape, small and bound and tethered, but a landscape in which a breath could be heard if the prey and the predator listened with absolute conviction. A breath from a warm body. A shift in the patterns of darkness as vapour formed and dissipated quite unnaturally in the vacuum of deep space.

A sudden shattering. Valentina leapt up from her hiding place behind a twisted bulkhead and ran through these smothered corridors and halls like a maniac ghost, clad in flowing scarlet laces and pink shaded mag-boots. She moved through the orbital’s voided spaces with an assured grace and ease, breathing in the vacuum by the lungful, laughing as she ran, darting to the left and to the right and switching into impossible vertical vectors at will. As she moved, a shift in the ambient darkness revealed her in fleeting pulses of bright colour. Behind her, wearing his favourite wolf mask, Yuri howled as he gallumphed and capered and clawed at Valentina’s always just out of reach trailing laces. One of their favourite games. Krasnaya Shapochka - Little Red Riding Hood. A passing of moments in this terminal world of dreams.

Home. Ikh Ubezhishche Pod Kholmon. Old Russian. A language that gave shape to the ragged memories that could still haunt Valentina and Yuri’s waking dreams, even in the midst of their game runnings. Mother Russia was long gone now. Worlds away. A phantom from the ape imaginarium. These days, Valentina and Yuri vocalised using the common tongue, that being Humanos, a much more comprehensive way to express the multi-dimensional binary states used by the machinery that kept them both literally and metaphorically fed and watered, like exhibits in a truly desperate zoo.

Home. Translated into Humanos the name became Their Haven Under the Hill, a reference in either language to an ancient piece of sea-born poetry. Their Haven Under the Hill had once been a colonial disk-ship, but was now parked up as an orbital station in an emergency holding position. She was clearly a derelict. She sat quietly in a slowly decaying orbit around the twin blue moons of Okeanos, named as Anytos and Sykeus by the now long departed crew, the moons christened in honour of the offspring of the once mighty Titans. Okeanos was the outermost of six planets, most of them gas giants, circling a red sun, 714 Shklovsky Titany. Their Haven Under the Hill was one of the last of the old world, dead world, colony expeditions. Within the confines of fading orbital technology and decaying flight systems, and bound by the orbital’s ever greater physical decrepitude, brought on by the relentless passing of Okeanos time, Valentina and Yuri had, like their titanic hosts and forebears, themselves become almost superhuman.

Valentina spun on her heels as she skipped over a fallen control panel. Beneath her feet the guts of ancient fibre wiring and luminal connectors spilled across the gratings, floating upwards through the void in Valentina’s improbable gravitational wake. A second later those same entrails were flattened under the heavy tread of Yuri’s left mag-boot. He was close now. Valentina was looking directly at her slavering pursuer, having spun round to face her would be, tongue lolling, lupine lover. In Valentina’s turning she slowed and reached out to Yuri with both arms. She threw her head back and howled, joining with the pack, pulling her leaping alpha male into a passionate embrace. Together Valentina and Yuri melded, becoming one entwined creature that flowed into the vacuum, drifting fiercely as they burrowed into each other amid the folds and the creases of their splintered world. A look. Reflected wolf eyes. Fierce and proud and deadly and devoted. A deep kiss. A moment inalienably shared. Bliss.

A sudden second shattering. A jolt. Red-shift. A spike in the gravitational field as the disk-ship experienced a brief and sudden burst of acceleration before compensating thrusters tried to repair the positional effects of their sudden orbital decay. Audible alarms. The weightless suddenly gaining substantial mass. Falling. Superstructure debris and broken peripherals digging into skin. Eyes wide again. That primeval ape shudder. A basic fear unleashed but gathered quickly back within a soul’s protection. A reckoning. The response. Two souls snapping back into a familiar groove.

Around the twisted lovers, the decking and the walls and the bare metal desolation faded to a squared off, bright green sterility. Valentina and Yuri lay together in that bare space upon a forgiving rubber-like exercise floor, stick figures in black outline, dotted with reference points. Around them the walls and ceiling flashed and pulsed the alarm, and then the bare space transformed once again, drifting like smoke and mist parting in grey winter dawn obscurity on a light breeze to reveal a control room, bright and functioning and warm. Valentina and Yuri now sat on a curved, upholstered bench in the middle of the control room, still wearing their previous hunting attire, holding hands quietly now as the onboard systems cascaded data flows across the control room display walls. Yuri’s wolf mask lay discarded on the control room floor.

“Such a shame...”, whispered Valentina, squeezing Yuri’s hand a little tighter. “...but later, zvezda moya, later.” She turned her attention to the scrolling data walls. “Have you spotted anything unusual, anything we don’t already know?”, she asked. Valentina’s attention switched rapidly to a display showing data about cryopods and life support systems. “The book is safe, isn’t it?” Valentina’s heart skipped a beat. “The book is safe?”, she asked again, a hint of panic rising in her voice.

The book. A fragment. Passages snatched back from oblivion. Ever since the abandoning, in those long rotations around 714 Shklovsky Titany, the orbital’s data substrates and deep data storage had suffered badly. In an attempt to build inherent redundancy into the fabric of the vessel, these data repositories were embedded in walls and floors and spars and scaffold and beam. The aim had been to carry a pretty reasonable sum of human knowledge out to the new worlds, and have capacity to manage all of the new data that would be needed to assure survival. Radiation, extreme cold, the violence of vacuum ingress, orbital stresses and the increasingly erratic powerdowns of the core reactor, all of these repeating cycles of decay were taking their toll. In the normal run of things, orbital systems were designed with extreme tolerances, but those tolerances were intended to apply to a functioning system, protected within a reasonably operational shielding field. Long distance orbital systems were meant to be manned and maintained. Their Haven Under the Hill had been deteriorating for centuries. The orbital was at least six hundred years beyond sight or touch of the last socket wrench being applied anywhere upon its now shabby carcass.

The fatal leaving by the human crew occured when the living pulled their own plugs and abandoned their sleeping colonists to decay and dust. The living crew finally succumbed to an utterly compelling sense of loss and despair, a cascade of hopelessness that had built up slowly across generations of inbreeding and psychosis on the slow, sub-light journey along the spiral arm of the Milky Way, a volume of space that Earth had fleetingly looked upon as its interstellar backyard. At first, in those early years after exodus, the orbital’s onboard automation had managed well enough, but as random specks of ballistic dust and rock and solar flares did their inevitable thing, so those systems started to fail. Of fifteen hundred sleeping colonists originally abandoned to the will of cruel Titan gods, there were now only two extant souls left aboard the orbiting disk-ship.

The orbital comprised a central hub, with four outer quadrants connected to that central disk by four main axial spars. Two of those spars now hung at oblique angles to the orbital’s original plane, trailing the bones of their former structures down towards the twin moons. The remaining quadrants were blasted and pot-holed and blackened, and with that physical destruction came the loss of huge amounts of data storage. All that remained in any sort of operational state now, apart from the declining core reactor, was one part of a single central hub deck, powered by the intermittent output of the main reactor with backup augmentation through miniature life support field-effect generators embedded deep within the cryopods of those last two survivors of the Russian colonial mission to 714 Shklovsky Titany.

Yuri breathed out deeply and leaned his head on Valentina’s shoulder. “No, the book is safe. We pushed the plain text into one of the cryo maintenance tables, remember? The book will be safe long after we’re gone, kotyonok.” Yuri let out a long sigh. Plain text. The last power spike but one had wiped out the remaining font caches. A significant number of their remaining, local sector storage arrays had failed. Viable systems existed now only within twenty metres of the cryopods. There was barely enough processing capacity to maintain holographics. Yuri watched minimally formatted machine font scroll across the display walls. Random characters flashed and disappeared and flashed back into light as they traversed forever dark pixels. Reactor status. Power outputs. Sector minimals, most of them red or zeroed.

Raising his head from Valentina’s shoulder he traced lines on the screens with his right hand. “You see that stream. Core Burn. She’s dropped output again. Four percent. That’s the largest drop, I think… thirty-two percent maximum now. Another five or six percent and we’ll lose what’s left of our orbital stability. Just a question of time then. We burn up or we melt down. She’s dying, Vala, one way or another.”

Yuri moved his hand and pointed to another wall section. “Drag coefficients. The trailings are starting to hit Sykeus’s gravity pull. See there…”, he continued slowly and softly, pointing to a cascading set of numbers. “Almost unmeasurable. But that’s the thing. Almost. That drag number will tick up by thousandths, and then by hundredths, and then… It’s always been a matter of time, Vala, just a matter of time. Even if the reactor somehow keeps going, we’ll slowly get pulled down anyway.”

“I know”, she replied. They had been through this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Reactor skips were becoming more frequent. The old girl, Their Haven Under The Hill, was, as with all physical things, passing beyond the knowing world of men. She was schlerotic and forgetful and immobile. Valentina sometimes thought of the two human constructs as the last fully functioning neurons in a ship shaped mind already lost to the ravages of dementia. “It’s just so sad, for all of us, us and them. What seemed like forever is over, almost over, anyway.”

Valentina wanted to see the book. She ached to see the book. She suddenly wanted to hear the words read out loud, or at least what remained of them. The book was a sub-set, a saved scrap from the library aboard the orbital. The book contained snippets of other, older texts, the only context being that they were saved. With the final font caches and formats lost, the book was now a stream of consciousness, apart from one small sub-file stored in one of Valentina’s own sub-routines. It had been a fair trade. She lost tears of happiness as a sub-function of her emotional construct, gaining in that function’s place the simple beauty of her favourite passage from what she and Yuri called The Book of Angel.

Valentina shifted in her seat, sitting up straight and looking directly into Yuri’s eyes with a deep and earnest intensity. “I feel them, Yuri. I really do”, she said softly. “They’re out there. Watching us. Always they’re watching us… it’s like the book says… it’s like the trees...”

Yuri pulled back a little, his body language becoming abruptly clear and formally stiff. “No, Vala, please, not again.” The edge underlying his vocalisation was harder now. “There’s no one out there. There’s no one anywhere, not now. We must face this, Vala. We must!”

Yuri felt wretched. His beloved Valentina, who had always been such a free spirit, was slowly being crushed by the weight of their inevitable fate. Yuri had an advantage, if advantage was the best way to describe how he felt about these matters. Yuri had spent five years of military service in the Svez-K, the Russian off-world Commando. He had learned to accept. He understood duty in its many aspects. His original inclusion on this far-flung colonial mission had been, in part at least, a fresh start for him after his time in the military, but his presence aboard Their Haven Under the Hill was also a company insurance policy. He was here to serve and to protect. Yuri remained to this day a part of the industrial-military combine that had built and planned and dreamed of the colonies. He was trained to function to the last, even when knowing that the end was close. He firmly believed in finding the best of endings for those in his care.

Valentina looked at her lover, her own face set just as hard and fierce as Yuri’s. “No, Yuri, it’s you who’s not facing things. You’re so matter of fact, so logical. If you can’t see it or touch it or smell it, then it can’t exist, but look at us, Yuri, look at how we live. You’ve got to see how that changes everything, surely? We’re not real, well, only half real. If we can exist then why can’t they? I feel them. In my heart. In my head. Those eyes. A hand hovering over me, fingers tracing my outline. They, it, I don’t know what it is, but I know, I know it wants to touch me, but it never seems to make the connection.” Valentina frowned and shook her head, “Or maybe I can’t touch it?”

Valentina felt her heart racing. She stepped back from Yuri and closed her eyes, willing her digital self towards calmness. Valentina slowly regained a little of her composure and jabbed her finger at Yuri’s chest. She felt more in control now, but she was still determined to make her point. “I know you don’t feel this, Yuri, my love, I know you’re hard-wired, you are a soldier, my wolf, my man, and I love you for all those things, but you’ve got to trust me, Yuri, you’ve got to believe!”

Yuri sat on the bench in the middle of the control room. He could, if he so wished it, unilaterally snap them both out of the hologram in an instant, but he hesitated. That would be harsh and unfeeling. He felt cold. He was confused and he was scared, but he knew this much to be true; he loved this woman. Yuri’s hearing was military grade acute. In this digitised space he could hear Valentina’s tears as they slid down her cheeks. He saw and felt every inch of her passion. It drained him when she flipped like this. He felt utterly spent and alone and broken. He felt as though he might really be seven or eight hundred physical years old. He felt weary in his binary bones. Instead of shutting the conversation down, however, he too took a moment to calm himself before he responded.

“I believe in you, kotyonok”, he said softly, looking up at her as she stood above him, her arms crossed tightly across her chest, the red lace of her dress hanging limply against the backdrop of cascading blue data. Her emotional state was manifest in the salty tracks crossing her cheeks and in the glistening of her sad eyes. Yuri had no doubt that Valentina believed what she was saying. “Truly, my love, I believe in you, but I know there’s nobody out there. There’s no one left to be out there, Vala. No one at all.”

A third sudden shattering. This time it was not Yuri who was closing down the vision. Valentina stood in front of him, her eyes pleading with him for a moment, but then she snapped her red lace body out of their shared world. All descended to black night. A tenth of a second or less. Walls and screens and a body blinking out of existence. Yuri opened his eyes wide. A pitch black space. A claustrophobic sense of deep, dripping enclosure. The silence of a near pure vacuum. A coldness that would suffer the warmest heart to break into a thousand frozen shards. A death space. A voided landscape, small and bound and tethered, but in which a breath could be heard if the prey and the predator listened with absolute conviction.

*

A seeker. A simple human shape wrapped in folds of machinery and steam venting pipework. A spherical metal cradle within which a single padded seat was connected to the outside world by a series of umbilicals and cables. The steampunk venting came from cooling systems that transfered the processing heat from the core computational modules to the air space outside of the cradle, a space where wall mounted extractor fans sucked the hot vapours from the room. Sat on that seat, amidships and strapped in for safety, there was one single human figure. There were no screens or controls or lights or panels. Just a single seated human figure wearing a skull lattice, upon which diamond pricks of light flashed randomly. The figure appeared to be sleeping, as if in the embrace of some fantastic, cybernetic dream catcher.

First year undergraduates adopted studiously bored poses. They were all freshers, out of their depth, catapulted into a world that made no sense. They sat now in a small tutorial room, surrounded by an array of screens, status monitors and information radiators, looking down into a lab space through a wall-sized, plate glass window. Around them cascades of data and telemetry and video and Tri-D models played out weird and apparently disjointed commentaries. Behind them, directing the visuals and the audio, their tutor, one Professor Charles Marius Lacondamine, maintained a running description of events.

“...this”, he said loudly, pointing to a flat screen monitor, “is what the primitives would have experienced. Please note the two-dimensional aspects not just of the visual, but also of the characters and the narrative. Immersion is, with augmentation, a totality. What we see here, however, is shallow. It lacks any depth. The data stream is thin and gammy, to coin a phrase. I hope this helps in providing a little context. You have chosen to study and to advance the boundaries of real-world tele-presence. You are, and I hope you will remain for many years, the shining lights in the galactic journey of a creature that we are tentatively calling Homo-Machina.”

Within the embrace of the cradle, the operator, one Dmitri Brennisteinn, post-graduate research fellow at post-Apparat convened Yale-Oxbridge, flexed his neural muscles a little further. His technique was getting better. He could navigate extreme pathways with ever increasing ease. Those first days in the cradle, when the projections spiralled every which way and left him in a crumpled and vomit covered heap on the floor, were now under control, at least for the most part. Dmitri could leap across the voids, touching worlds and habitats at will, all the way back to Mercury Station. He could navigate systems entry points and he could converse after a fashion with the machines that ran the systems that kept souls alive. He could, when the latency permitted, touch a mind with a feather, and those souls so touched would stop and lose their trains of thought and maybe shiver. Dmitri was the grave-walker. For the most part, the proletariat of the post-Apparat systems were oblivious to such fantastical research and to Dmitri-the-ghost in particular.

The students in the room adjoining the lab listened and watched, utterly fascinated in spite of their professed and artificially cultured boredom. Professor Lacondamine, a tubby older gentleman, quite bald apart from a ring of thin white hair circling his head just above his ears, was now well into his short but efficient presentational stride. “... as I was saying, the primitive construct was based on a passive, two-dimensional receiving of data. The ancients, even when they cracked early Tri-D and holo techniques still viewed the presentational aspects of these methods and techniques as essentially an entertainment or as a marginally interactive information layer.”

As Professor Lacondamine delved ever deeper into the subject matter, so his voice tended to gain in pitch and speed. “We can skip through some of the history, for now, at least, in as much as saying that true immersives accelerated research and have continued to do so through all subsequent phases of development. Those phases can be broadly categorised, even allowing for the almost ruinous dislocations of the Apparat-Dirigisme conflict. There were the many and varied attempts to complete the quest for artificial intelligence. As a species we tried upload a human mind into complex hybrid states. We made some progress with the cybernetic augmentation of the human form. Most, if not all of these quests have proved to be unsatisfactory, with the exception of some elements of basic augmentation. We have, not to make too blunt a point of it, walked down a series of scientific, computational and genetic blind alleys.

“And that, of course, has been found to be a common narrative across a wide spectrum of human activity these last centuries. When one thinks about the attempts to expand the human state, be that consciousness, form or physical presence, a pattern emerges, which we will study in some depth during this first term, ladies and gentlemen.”

The professor paused for a moment, keen to let the direction of travel sink in with this new batch of students. He could not yet tell who would or would not shine. He took a sip of cold water from a glass on his desk and then continued with his lecture.

“Yes, a pattern emerges. We have tried to become computers. We have failed. We now understand that we live in symbiosis with the machines. We cannot become as they are, and, vice versa, they cannot become apes. The urge for humankind to expand beyond our boundaries, firstly beyond our home planet and then beyond our solar system, have been equally frustrating. Distance and time and the limitations of the Standard Model, not to mention the fragility of the human psyche, have largely proven insurmountable. The colony ships sent out in the first great wave of manned deep space exploration, that’s nearly two-hundred documented launches, just think on that moment, two-hundred, well, we lost every single one of them. You would expect, statistically that one or two might have sent a signal back to say that they had arrived somewhere. We heard not a sausage, though. Never a word from beyond the Oort Cloud. Even if it took a hundred years for the first signal to get back to us, we would most certainly have heard something by now.

“It’s not all doom and gloom, however…”, he continued, feeling that the preamble was done with and that the meat of the subject should be nicely tenderised by now. “Not all doom and gloom.” Professor Lacondamine stepped over to the large plate glass window and gestured towards the cradle. “This, ladies and gentlemen, this is what all of the fuss will, one day, be about.”

After watching Dmitri Brennisteinn’s total inactivity for a few moments, the class finished with some desultory Q&A. The group filed out of the tutorial room, the students already lost in games of kiss and chase and superficial highs. This particular session was a preliminary, a briefing, a mere formality, as they prepared for the long haul of their full seven standard year graduate shift. They too, if they could hack the cradle and the pathways revealed therein, would learn to mind-travel. They too would learn to skip across the void and hold a world or a mind or a machine within their mental grasp and make of that something entirely new. One day. Of that professor Lacondamine was certain.

*

Dmitri Brennisteinn was already worlds away. Left alone now, and deep within the machine trance, he closed down a number of demonstration strands that he had been running for the student class, letting his mind recede across the desolation of the solar system, until all points upon his neural lattice flashed in perfect synchronisation. He achieved unity. He reached the focal point, where parallel streams of thought could converge into one mind-bending beam of conscious projection. His inert body twitched as he brought his mental operating systems into alignment. This was his particular post-graduate, career-defining wonder. This was actually what the fuss would be all about.

The cradle acted as an amplification concentrator. Out on the Earth’s surface, out in the dark night, an array of dishes and antennae and projectors took the coordinated signals from Dmitri’s brain and fired them in a quantum stream to an orbiting research array, which in turn fired Dmitri’s thoughts out beyond light and time. Dmitri could think an action and a linked photon on an obscure rock on the dark side of Venus would jump. The trick was in finding those parallel quantum objects, both within his head space, which contained the seeds of the universe, and in the vast expanse of possibilities that formed time and space and matter. The next trick in the magical canon was to find a group of things and move from the subatomic level to the primevally physical realm. As far as Dmitri knew, no one apart from him had yet made that connection. No one as yet understood that all of time and all possible things could exist within a single expanded human mindspace. It was just a question of imagination, and, fundamentally, of letting that imagination run free, which seemed to Dmitri to be a problem for so many run-of-the-mill graduands and establishment-bound professors these days, Professor Lacondamine included.

With the students gone and the lab quiet, Dmitri found peace at last. He scanned his local thought-space. The lab was sealed, and Dmitri felt sublime. He was alone with his own personal drug of choice - the cradle. He thought about securing the doors, and the locking system engaged. There would be no ingress by cleaning systems, and no proverbial plugs unsocketed. Dmitri cared little for campus life now. He focused. He folded skeins of space. He tracked coordinates and systems. He followed a long-forgotten flight path, skipping over the vast ages and distances travelled by generations of pioneers in just a matter of seconds. And there she was, his darling world, his darling girl, and the creatures within her. Brennisteinn opened his mind and touched once again Ikh Ubezhishche Pod Kholmon.

Dmitri felt a sense of matched excitement and dread every time he hooked up with Their Haven Under The Hill. A day in Dmitri time could, it seemed, be years or decades in Okeanos time. The quantum relationship between his thought and far-distant sub-atomics was direct, but appeared to be subject to some aspect of relativistic time distortion that he had yet to fathom. Thought projection in local solar systems worked in pretty much real-time, but the distortion across light-years seemed to fluctuate wildly in terms of linear temporal progression. Every linking with Their Haven Under the Hill revealed yet another level of disintegration. It was, he felt, a little like returning after an absence to watch a favourite Tri-D soap opera and realise that it had fallen into that inevitable decay that came when the series and the actors stretched the art-form’s gossamer veneer one degree too thinly.

As he folded space and touched the link points that gave him access to the orbital, Dmitri could see that the envelope within which his lovelies existed had shrunk yet again. He noted this, marking it initially as another degree of degradation, but then, as the cradle’s super-massive quantum computational arrays crunched the numbers and filled in the sub-atomic gaps to give him a thought-visual interpretation of the far-world, he realised that this was a catastrophic shift. Dmitri noted with mounting horror that the boundaries of his beloved’s’ existence was now measured in less than twenty metres cubed. They were down to the holodeck and their life support power sources. The core reactor looked fatally compromised. Processing power aboard the orbital and any corresponding access to complex systems and data were hovering just above critical red lines.

Dmitri circled for a moment or two, establishing the weird strings and the filament links that hooked up nanoparticles and thoughts. Once the links solidified, it took no more than a second or two of systems interrogation, even across such vast distances, for Dmitri to link into the orbital’s operational subnets and establish a more detailed mental visual. He cross-referenced data and correlated views and themes and memes based on the experiential files logged by the entity constructs. Those constructs, Valentina and Yuri, were, as yet, oblique and doubly shadowed. Dmitri set a series of standard, multi-faceted queries running over the quantum links. Orbital degradations. Gravitational wells. Power generation curves. Deterministic equations and statistical probabilities. And there, in the deep, dark confines of their personal data repositories, he found his beloved faery folk.

Dmitri shuddered involuntarily. He could feel their cold suffocation. He also experienced that exhilarating immediacy that came with the seeking, and found that his excitement was equally matched by the feelings of utter horror and recoil experienced by those who were sought. Like worms buried in a deep fissure, sensing that a predator’s tongue was ragging the tunnels and the by-ways of a dank, fungal underworld, Dmitri could sense his loved ones shrink back from his mental touch. He knew, in his heart, that if he could, just once, feel mental skin on mental skin, then he might make a permanent connection before the orbital sank into oblivion. In that process there might even be a salvation, but as yet, that final direct communication eluded him. Dmitri let fly the wings of his despair. In all of his searching, in each and every fold of space that he had yet ventured, he had found no answering presence, except here. All that he had ever found of life and presence and vitality beyond his own existence was a derelict relic of past human vanity.

Dmitri flexed his mental muscles again, pulling every joule, every kilowatt, every Yottawatt of power that he could from the cradle, amassing a Type One Kardashev luminosity in his mind’s eye, and in doing so Dmitri pushed his mental fingers beyond the watching space. One touch. One caress. One atom shared. He was a God and they were his creatures to save. He let his fingers feel for her presence. He dug ever deeper into the black pit of tunnels in the cryopod memory substrates. She, the primeval creature beyond the simulation, cowered in that darkness, abject, simpering and utterly petrified. Dmitri ran his hand over what he thought might be the shape of her but he felt her shrink and scuttle and crawl away from his deep and yearning touch.

*

Three minds. A quantum state of simultaneous conjoining and separation, each mind being locked into a machine that carried thoughts on a whim of computational integrity. Aboard Their Haven Under The Hill, as the power curves dropped away, so the digital worlds inhabited by the avatars of the sleeping colonists, Yuri Radek and Valentina Bulganin, grew ever smaller. The cowering tunnel beasts and the dancing lovers slowly merged together as horizons dimmed, until, with a last spark, the visual spaces fell into utter darkness.

“Yuri? Yuri, can you hear me, Yuri?” Valentina curled herself up into a foetal ball, hugging her knees to her chest, feeling the weight of the galaxy bearing down on her thin, skeletal frame.

A crackle. Static. Old school. Radio waves. Local transmission. Power saving.

“Yes, kotyonok, yes I’m still here. It’s just so…” Valentina heard Yuri sob for the very first time in all of these centuries. “I’m so scared, Vala. Not of, you know, not that. It’s the letting go, the losing, losing you, my love.”

Valentina pictured their remaining moments in her thought-space. As the orbital systems failed, there would be a moment when the cryopods would attempt to eject, to find a place of safety out here so that they could set up beacons and wait in vain for rescue. If the hub’s core systems were too damaged then they would fail to eject and the pods would ride with the rest of the orbital to obliteration on the first of Okeanos’s twin moons, Sykeus. Either way, she and Yuri would be separated forever.

“Yuri, my darling, before the end, one more time, my love, shall I read it?”

Silence. Not even static. Valentina read the passage from the Book of Angel, the passage that she had saved for her dying day. As she read out loud she thought of the watcher, and how she had so wanted to touch that hand, and yet had been so scared of the revelation that would come with that touch. Now that all was said and done, she did not feel afraid anymore. It was enough for her to know that she, that they, were not alone.

“Our story, Yuri...”, she began not knowing whether he could still hear her radio transmission, “For you, Yuri, one last time…

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,—’Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of tomorrow’s just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ’I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’ … But you, my darling Angel, could raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"

*

Taken from the personal memoir of Professor Charles Marius Lacondamine; ‘The reason for Dmitri Brennisteinn’s mental collapse remained a mystery throughout the short and confused years that remained to him. We found him one morning in a completely catatonic state, slumped in the cradle of a now discontinued, experimental thought-space machine located in the basement of the School of Neuro-Astrophysics on the Yangees campus of post-Apparat Yale-Oxbridge University. Although tests showed an unusually high level of neural activity throughout Brennisteinn’s remaining years, he had, sadly become locked into a state of permanent and almost totally uncommunicative psychosis, a state in which he seemed to be always looking just beyond any person or thing that might be in his physical presence. I did hear from one of the Psychology faculty Readers that Brennisteinn did occasionally quote one verse from some obscure poem. I never did look it up to see who wrote it, or, indeed, when it was written. Brennisteinn’s illness caused the School to expend considerable effort in identifying lessons to be learned and to determine a new direction for our research. I think it sufficient to say, in closing this stage of the account of my academic life, that Dmitri Brennisteinn had potential. It was such a shame that we lost him at such a tender age. I have transcribed the verse that he sometimes quoted from an original note left me by a colleague from the Psychology group at Yale-Oxbridge. For Dmitri Brennisteinn. In memoriam.’

“And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!”

Excerpts taken from: “Tess of the D’urbervilles” by Thomas Hardy, & “Break, break, break” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Next Chapter: Muckers