Chapter 4- Life as We Do Not Know It

The atheist in her was unimpressed. She gaped at them.

“Gonna be a bit difficult to find something that doesn’t exist.”

“Well, let’s not be hasty,” Fuse mocked.

“Don’t tell me you’re some cult disguised as a circus or something,” Sola pleaded. She glanced at the group.

“We respect religious freedom, of course,” said Optic. “But that has nothing to do with our mission.”

She frowned.

“And how does looking for god not impact my religious freedom?”

“Him?” asked U.

“Her?”

“It,” Gnarl corrected.

“Oh that’s much better then,” said Sola.

“You seem to be equating god with religion. Is that something all humans do?” asked Optic.

“…Yes?”

“Well then yank those two apart,” said U. “Cause we’re not lookin for some crazy ghost. It’s the solid deal for us. There’s been talk of it comin back to our universe and we’re on our way to find it.”

Sola began to pace from the central drum to the right drum and back again.

“So you’re telling me that you all believe god is real and that is has returned to the universe for the end of days or something? You really want me to go along with that shit?”

“The end of…what? No, what?” Fuse plunked down on the ground.

“What the hell does any of that mean? It’s back from outside so we’re following the Signs to look for it. Easy as that. Now are you in or what?

Sola stopped pacing and stared at all of them again. She realized that staring was ninety-five percent of her interaction with them.

“I don’t have much of a choice do I?”

“Not really,” Gnarl smiled.

“Great,” she said and ran both hands over her face. “Great.”

…

They filed out of the tent back under the stars. The Ringleaders had ordered them to get some rest before they moved out to their next location. They had not explained for Sola’s benefit. She got the distinct feeling they were tired of explaining. At the mention of getting some rest, the two conceptual incarnations had laughed. She guessed this had something to do with their lack of a need to rest. As far as she knew, she might be the only one who needed to rest at all. Her body, previously bolstered by adrenaline and fear, was draining out. Her head felt like a kettle drum. She needed a wide variety of comforts that were absent aboard an asteroid circus in deep space. As the rest of the troupe members took the elevator underneath the tree to their living quarters, she stopped the Ringleaders outside of the tent entrance.

“I’m taking this one step at a time. And it ain’t easy. But if I’m going to be staying with you, humans have needs. Adequate food, water and sleep being the first three.”

Optic moved past her.

“We know. A tiresome species. So desperate. Kingilnwipfar will provide you with everything your species needs.”

“Sally,” Gnarl corrected it.

“Whatever.”

“I hope that she will,” said Sola. “Or there’s gonna be trouble.”

Optic emitted a sigh of digust.

“There’s already been trouble, human. More than you know or think.”

“I’m sure I’ll learn,” she replied in a reluctant voice.

“Of course you will,” said Optic with the air of speaking to a child. He bumped his hat. The blue screen, the link to Sally, appeared.

“Can you look after the sub-ethic?” he asked.

“I’ll do what I can,” Sally said kindly.

“Excellent,” he replied and switched the screen off.

“Then up to the Flush-Pad with you,” said Gnarl.

“Can’t you guys give it a less creepy name?” she asked.

“No,” they replied together.

…

The tumbling darkness was a replaced by a horizon full of broken buildings and crumbling streets. The planetoid was larger than the asteroid by far and covered entirely in the extraterrestrial version of urban decay. It had an atmosphere but no colored sky. The ground vibrated underneath her feet. Dim lights shone from the ramshackle buildings. Stacks of machines whispered in the back-alleys of ruined houses. Rubble was everywhere, broken structures and uneven lumps sticking out at odd angles from hive-like mounds that extended into the charred blank above. Sola stepped over a pile of stones.

“Sally?” she asked out loud.

“Yes?” a voice asked in her mind. Sola winced. The voice was far less abrasive than the last voice she had heard in her head. It was quiet and definitively aware of the frailty inherent in the normally disconnected human brain.

“So, I guess I’m staying with you. On your surface. Somehow,” said Sola struggling to keep her thoughts coherent.

“Real sorry about the mess,” said Sally. “We’ll try and make do.”

Sola looked around at the “mess”. It was more like the aftermath of a war.

“There really isn’t ..well…anything about humans in my memory-system,” the planet confessed. “So you’ll have to let me know the specifics of what you’ll need.”

“Let’s start with somewhere to stay,” Sola said, leaping over another pile of rubble. “Do you have any intact structures that might be suited for human living? Something that isn’t too alien?”

The air vibrated along with the ground.

“There’s a residential hall about a subcycle away. Just follow the pathway you’re on.”

“Is that like….a minute? A day? A year?”

“Oh,” Sally laughed. “You’ll have to forgive me. How do they count time on …Earth was it?”

Sola trudged on heavy feet down the broken street.

“Yes, Earth,” she sighed, feeling relief at the kindness of the planet compared to the threadbare welcome to the universe she’d received from everyone else except Klo. “By days, I guess. The planet goes around our sun in twenty-four hours. That whole cycle is one day.”

“I’m not sure how to correlate that,” said the planet. Her uncertainty rippled through the air.

“We’ll play it out. Gotta start somewhere,” said Sola.

“Well, hm,” said Sally. “Your planet was smaller. Rocky. A cozy place, if a little boring. From what I remember.”

“Not a bad description,” said Sola half smilng.

“And your star was on the smaller end of average, based on the Chiteet Spectrum. Does your species require sleep?”

“Yep. Mostly while we aren’t facing the sun.”

Sola’s stomach fluttered. Something inside her felt unworthy of being the spokeswoman for all of humanity.

“I don’t know much about the sleeping habits of sub-ethics. But I do know that some sleep an average of five to nine subcycles before their first augmentations.”

“We sleep about eight.”

“On the higher end.”

“Guess so,” said Sola, kicking aside a stone. “Seems like you might call a subcycle a little under what we call an hour. How many…um…subcycles did your species sleep? Before they created you.”

“I’m not sure I know,” said Sally and her wind whistled. “Hard to remember. But it couldn’t have been too far off from that. Meaning we’ve got a place to start.”

“So if a subcycle is almost an hour, what would you call the smallest unit of time you use?”

“Well, you’d start with a microcyle. Then betacycle. Sub, as we’ve said. Then metacycle. Then a full cycle.”

“Seconds, minutes, hours, days, then months,” said Sola, nodding.

“Sounds about right,” said Sally. “By your relative count, a microcycle would two seconds. A betacycle would be one minute, and a subcycle fifty minutes. But many species lose track of counting their planetary days upon being sufficiently advanced so a metacycle would be about twenty-seven earth days. Bit of of a jump. Then a cycle is a little under an earth year.”

They spent the rest of the walk discussing relative time, building a scale on which Sola could cope. At the end of the subcycle Sola reached the bottom of the building. She was disappointed to find that it was no different than any of the other mounds that surrounded it. It was the size of large skyscraper and cracked on the outside. With a weary foot, Sola kicked the circular door open. Inside, the building was intricate and hexagonal. She wandered through the segmented tunnels which led to large rooms full of round furniture, structures that looked like upended tables and chairs. Everything seemed to be stone or metal. The lack of anything familiar tugged on her mind. Somewhere near the back half of the building, she found a small room with three empty holes looking out onto the space-scape outside. One of the chairs, roundish with a pudgy back, looked human enough for her to collapse into it. She unzipped her jacket and threw it on the floor. There were globs of lights glowing dim red on the ceiling. Away from the Ringleaders and the noise of the troupe, far away from her cell, she felt almost comfortable for the first time. Her eyes were stone, her limbs were heavy as stars.

“You’re alright,” she murmured to the planet in her mind.

“I try,” the planet replied.

…

Life among Triangulum was hardly life at all. The first and most difficult thing about adjusting to a cosmic existence was the lack of time distinction. Without regular intervals of day and night, time passed in a disconcerting line. It was like a river that had broken free of its dam. There were no methods to distinguish between past and future except the present and that, Sola found, had grown quickly unreliable. The only way to tell for sure was through physical sensation- hunger, thirst, and sleep became her clocks. Scale, as it was, (of time or of anything) turned out to another large problem between them. On her own planet, Sola had known enough to survive. She had possessed a baseline understanding of what life required to survive or not survive because there were very few types of life. For instance, she knew not to eat metal or live on top of an active volcano because those traits were not common to anything on Earth. This certainty had vanished in her new life with Sally. The planet understood nothing about human tolerances or requirements for survival. With so many species and worlds in the universe, there was an infinite amount of variety for these requirements to take and Sally knew little to none of the ones for humans.

“Many sapients absorb starlight through cellulose-based orifices on their skin,” Sally had once explained when she’d accidently lowered the amount of oxygen in her atmosphere to asphyxiation levels.

“I’m sure they do but we don’t,” Sola gasped from the floor. The scale situation even extended to food. Despite having moderate medical training, Sola had had no idea how to describe what a human diet consisted of. It would have been easy to describe it to another human; animal flesh, vegetative matter, fruit, sugar, fat. To a living planet that had no need to eat and had never been to Earth, it was complete gibberish. At least, for Sola’s sake, the supply was no problem. She’d discovered that on her first day when she’d been forced to ask Sally how exactly it was that a lifeless planetoid was going to feed her. Her friend (her first real friend, she noted) had led her to another building nearby full of tall pods, gunmetal blue and cracked open in the center with a pillar in their hollow insides.

“Contentment pods,” she’d explained. “Able to tell exactly what would bring the occupant maximum contentment and then construct it from the atomic level.”

“Alright,” said Sola and she had approached the nearest one with a cautious eye. She stuck her head into the opening over the old round pillar.

“Um…how about a steak? Rare, definitely, with a side-salad.”

A buzz and a hum. A twinkle of green light above her. She stepped back then leapt back as a spray of green liquid shot out of a hole in the top of the organ-like cylinder and solidified on the ground in front of her into, of all things, a confused silver-back gorilla. It breathed deep and began to inspect Sola with its yellow eyes. She stepped back slowly.

“Sally…Buddy?”

“This is meat on your world, right?” she asked. “Your mind was clear on that.”

“Well…yes. Technically. But I can’t exactly eat it like this.”

It was only after several tries (and partial rescues on Sally’s behalf) that the pods stopped producing leather shoes, algae and rotten carrots, all things that Sola could consume but only theoretically. Very theoretically. The contentment pods, after even more cajoling, brought forth a rudimentary shower where she bathed and washed her clothes. It wasn’t necessary but it was welcome. Sometimes she’d sit on the piles of rubble and gaze off into space, talking to Sally about life on Earth. During one of their conversations, Sally tried to explain more about WIKs.

“Most intelligent species eventually reach a crossroads in their development,” she said to Sola, who lay staring at the nearby tent. “They can withdraw from society when they peak or they can become a WIK.”

“How do they all become one? I don’t get it.”

“A species that chooses this route will often hollow out their world and fill the space with a network of mechanical systems and uplink ports. Their whole planet becomes hybridized, part object, part machine. They upload their minds into the systems and leave their bodies behind. These disembodied minds will fuse together and become the cells for a hive-mind. Your cells are discreet units of protein. Ours are the minds that created us.

“I follow,” said Sola, not following at all.

“This new hivemind will then restructure the planet even further, adding engines and weapons. The planet becomes a single living thing. In that way, we are the products of billions of minds coming together as one.”

The Tent remained silent most of the time but Sola never found this a problem. The farther away the Ringleaders were, the less she had to worry. Because of this, Sally was her only source of information about where they actually going or what they were doing. All she could glean was that they were sincerely searching for some being that they all believed was god, or, at least, called itself god and that it had been gone for a long time. When pressed, she’d change the subject which led Sola to believe that she either didn’t know, or refused to say, anything further. Despite her personality quirks, the planet itself was kinder and quieter than Sola could have hoped. She had been skittish about meeting anymore alien life after her encounters with the Ringleaders but Sally proved to be a welcome source of comfort. She reminded Sola of the people she liked most back home; easy and thoughtful, the sad crowd, the ones that never got what they deserved and never complained. How she had ended up with a group like Triangulum, Sola dreaded to think. It was either desperation or blackmail, she decided. It was just the heavy feeling in her atmosphere like the pressure of an ocean-mind.

“Why don’t we just jet off? Why go with these idiots? You don’t seem to like them anymore than I do,” Sola had asked.

“There isn’t a choice, Sola,” Sally said and didn’t explain. “And there isn’t for you, either. But I wish there was. For both of us.”

Initially, Sola thought that Sally’s reluctance was because she was afraid of the wrath of the Ringleaders. It had been about one full month before she discovered that there was another, less mysterious reason that Sally stayed. The other was that her systems lacked the capability to enter and exit something that she called Spookspace. That was what the Eye was for, the strange white oval device she had seen nearby Sally upon her arrival. Sola, despite having never been to space, had known enough to wonder about how intelligent species had superseded the speed of light. Her answer had come at the end of the metacycle (as evidence by, of all things, her menstrual cycle) when, without an explanation, she was awoken by claws raking inside of her skull. Swearing through gritted teeth, she’d fallen to the ground and curled into a ball. Outside, she saw that space had vanished and been replaced by pulsing red walls and gnashing darkness. There were teeth in the night, and hands, and eyes, and the beating of trillion hearts, pumping blood that was space through veins of time. Dim, angular creatures that scuttled like crabs along the inside walls of the arteries, filled her thoughts, swaying and dancing in the empty space above Sally’s sky. The feeling of Outside, visceral gloom, bodily terror, kept her huddled on the ground for seeming subcycles until they moved back into real space.

“Holy……dear sweet…..WHAT?” she’d wheezed getting to her feet.

Sally was apologetic to the point of neurosis.

“Sorry! So so sorry! Yes. We had to make a quick jump through a couple arteries.”

Sola’s heart gradually slowed.

“Arteries?”

“I know. A bit of a squeeze.”

“I didn’t know the Universe had….arteries,” Sola sputtered.

“It’s alive,” said Sally. “Of course it has arteries.”

“And all those creatures?”

“Antibodies. Other organelles. We call them the System. Nothing to worry about.”

Sola placed her hands delicately on the sides of the chair.

“So to get around space we cut into the flesh of the universe and travel through its organs.”

“How else would you do it?”

From then on, Sola hid in the basement of her building whenever they entered Spookspace. It became part of her routine like so many strange things; seeing groups of ships traveling through clusters of nebulae, eating green meat and drinking stale water, wandering over Sally’s surface and counting the stars until she was asleep. It became a comfort to her, one of her few out in the wild, as the other idiosyncrasies of planet life dropped like leaves to her feet, leaving the odd in its wake. From Sally’s rubble she watched the billions of stars and pinwheeling galaxies, the presence of beings in their ships made of love and captured death, the light and the fury, the abyss and the heart of cosmic conundrums that no other human had ever beheld. She missed her planet; she hated her planet. She burned to return to her planet. To stop. Then, after two metacycles, they did