Week 37 - We Us; All the Lost and Forgotten Little Ones

We Us; All the Lost and Forgotten Little Ones

Matthew Ryan Fischer

For a moment it seemed as if he was floating. For a moment. Forever. For a moment, suspended in the air. Suspended in space. There was no future and there had been no past. It was just a stationary moment, lost and overlooked, slipped away from all the rest. It was his moment. Him. A sole soul. Not a piece, not a part, but a man, whole and complete. Slipping through the ether. A lost and lonely thing, a soul, floating and forgotten. He defied gravity. He defied logic. He defied reality. Just for a moment. Just for a moment.

Then he fell.

He was falling. Anxiety overwhelmed. Fear kicked in. Fight-or-flight, but there was nothing to fight and he didn’t know how to achieve flight. So instead he fell. His arms flailed with nothing to catch onto. Shortness of breath. This was something. It meant something. He had done this.

He fell, slow then faster. He was speeding up. He was going to come crashing down. He opened his mouth to scream.

And then he woke up.

Eyes wide, mouth open, but he didn’t make a sound. He was standing. He had been standing anyway. Not falling. But he was startled when he woke and he lost his balance, and then he really did slip and fall.

Jules. Julian. Jules. That wasn’t quite right. But he wasn’t thinking about his name.

Jules caught this breath. It had been a dream. A memory, but a dream. He had been ten or maybe twelve and he fell from a tree house. He landed on a wooden fence post that pierced his side. The fence had broken and he had tumbled to the ground and blacked out when his head bounced against the hard earth. He remembered waking up scared. There were people looking down and staring at him. His friends. His brothers. They looked scared. That scared him even more.

He hadn’t done any major damage, but he had come close. He had to have the splinters and the shards removed, and had been stitched up. He remembered the aches. He remembered having to sit still. He hated sitting still. He had always hated sitting still.

That was so long ago. Why was he dreaming about that? He instinctively touched his side and felt for the scar. It was so long ago. It seemed like forever.

Slowly the fog of sleep faded away and his cognizance returned. That was when Julian realized he had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.

Command Pilot Webber had been having a most pleasant dream. Up until the moment the alarm when off inside his head. Then his fight-or-flight instinct kicked in and he was suddenly awake. There was no actual alarm or blinking light, there was no need. He was linked into the computer, so even when he was asleep, he was aware. He opened his eyes and forgot all about whatever it was he had been dreaming about. He was momentarily foggy and a little sick to his stomach. Coming out of cryo was like that. He was well trained and prepared, but his body never felt quite right. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but that was how it happened to him. The brain trust could tell him it was all in his imagination, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about their opinion. He knew what was happening inside his gut and in the back of his head. Cryo gave him the willies, but it was all a part of the job. He worried about what it was doing to his body, even though everyone assured him there was nothing to it. Oddly enough, as much as he worried about what he could feel in his gut, he hardly ever worried about the electronics in his body and in his brain. Coincidentally, the nanobots in his brain didn’t give him a second thought either.

Webber’s first instinct was to run to a commcenter. An old habit left over from a previous generation of tech. He already knew what was going on, even if he didn’t realize it yet. He knew. He just didn’t know he knew yet. The tech inside him made sure he knew before he was woken up. He still wasn’t used to how this new generation worked. Old habits and old training and he felt obsolete enough every day. All he had to do was stop and realize what his brain already processed, but he wasn’t thinking a hundred percent straight quite yet. He cleared his mind with a quick Namaste and the thoughts came hither, but it still didn’t make sense. Webber decided he better double-check and went to the nearest commlink.

Webber still wasn’t happy with what he knew even once he had confirmed and reconfirmed it. By then Commander Myers and Kirby the engineer had appeared as well.

“It looks like Earth,” he told them as they arrived.

“That doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t any ELPs in this vicinity.”

“No, I didn’t mean Earth-like. I mean, it looks like Earth. Just like Earth.”

Webber was right. It did.

No ship was supposed to be there. Not yet. Not right now. It wasn’t on the schedule. There were no transports, no shipments coming in or out, no customers or tours to be given. There wasn’t supposed to be a ship arriving. At first the Masters thought it might have been an interested party, arriving too soon, but they quickly dispelled that notion. The ship was alien, human. There was nothing human about the Masters or the Makers, despite cursory appearances. The planet below was far too human though. That could be a problem. Depending on the ship and who was on it and what they were capable of. The Masters were divided. They stood on the observation deck and watched. Then they squabbled and debated and finally watched some more. They were slow to resolution, slower to action. They preferred when work was completed on time and according to plan and they didn’t have to make any changes. They would have much preferred to sit and drink and let the Makers make and their Servers serve. That was always a much more enjoyable plan. Then when the planet was finished they could sell it for a tremendous profit and they could begin the process again.

But not here. Not now. Now and here, there was a ship, infiltrating their space and ruining their perfectly calculated schedule. It was frustrating really. No one appreciated how difficult it was to build a world from the ground up. Planets were like a fine piece of art – delicate and fragile. They required the perfect balance of a billion different things. Even when there was a proper blueprint. Even when there was a proper moment to build around. There were so many things to get right. And most often the smallest things would go wrong and ruin the entire thing. A little sliver of this or that. A broken ripple in space-time. Sometimes the terraforming didn’t stick. Sometimes the planet collapsed under its gravity. Gravity was a terribly difficult trick to get right. Gravity and atmosphere and the precise and proper distance from a satellite sun. Some planets could burn. Others would freeze. The occasional one would go spinning off its axis and fly into deep space for no reason whatsoever.

It was a cruel and fickle business, real estate. Even when they could get it right, even when a million and one things all lined up perfectly, there were customers that couldn’t come through on their end. Some people only thought they wanted a world to look after. Many only thought they could afford it. There were so many built that ended up going to waste. It could be tough, but when it went correctly, the profits were immense.

Things had been behind schedule already, and then now this ship had come out of seemingly nowhere. The Masters watched and debated, but then the ship and its inhabitants took it upon themselves to land and investigate things. That was extra annoying. Not only was their arrival going to throw the schedule off, but now they were down on the planet traipsing around. No telling what trouble they were going to get into now. No respect for the schedule. No respect at all. The Masters were not pleased at all.

It was raining. Webber didn’t seem to notice or care. He was preoccupied, looking into the mirror image of his face on another man.

“He looks just like you.”

“Yes,” mumbled Webber. He didn’t know how else to answer. It was very very surreal. It was not at all what he had expected when they had detected a living being and decided to investigate. He really had not expected to find himself on the surface of this Earth that was not Earth.

“Just like you...”

What am I doing here? Me, him. Either of us. Both of us. This is not at all what was supposed to happen today. I was asleep, having a very nice dream. He couldn’t remember what it was about, but he knew it was nice. I was having a very very nice dream. Maybe I still am. Maybe this is the dream. Things like this happened in dreams, he supposed.

Webber waited for the nanoprocessing to kick and a wake him up. That didn’t happen. Then he waited for it to make some sense of things for him. That didn’t happen either.

“This is a great big clusterfuck,” announced Commander Myers.

“Why Commander, I didn’t know you cared,” retorted Kirby.

Webber kept quiet, despite the fact that his mouth still hung open. He just looked at the name across from him – the window reflection of his face.

He had a million questions. A million thoughts, all racing through his mind. Unfortunately, just as he was about to begin asking them, that was the same moment that death rained down from above; the Masters had finally arrived at a decision.