🚀The Dark Age: Philip wakes up
Hello, friends!
A little treat today: An excerpt from the currently-in-progress fourth draft of The Dark Age!
This is Philip's first log entry after waking unexpectedly from hibernation, an unknown number of years into his hundreds-of-years-long journey.
Excerpt
Long into the night, always hours after I'd gone to bed, Fran would lift the covers and slide in behind me. Like a refueling ship docking with a barge adrift at sea. One arm would slip beneath my neck and hook back over my shoulder; the other would cinch me around the middle like a barrel band. She squeezed out all the space between our bodies. The board of her belly against my spine. Her thighs like thick tree roots cradling my legs. Her breath a warm bourbon perfume upon my neck.
You're safe with me, my little spoon, she'd rasp in her throaty chanteuse growl, then chuckle softly as she immediately crashed into sleep.
Little spoon. Not because that's what I wanted or needed to be. No, I wasn't one of those outwardly hard men who turned to jelly behind closed doors. Fran was fucking with me, there on the edge of sleep just daring me to push back. It would give her an excuse to take charge, and she loved to take charge. Not just in bed; anywhere. It was hard-coded in her DNA. On a road trip, she'd take the all-night shift while you slept in the passenger seat. She was the boulder that threw cool shade over you on a blistering day. If you were dangling from a bridge by your fingers, Fran was the rope of muscle that coiled to haul you safely back.
Don't get me wrong, though. None of this meant Fran gave a shit about anybody. Not even me.
•••
It is goddamned dark. I can feel the dark crawling up the corridors, trying to seep in through the windows. All I want to do is switch on a light, but I can't even do that. Like everything else on Argus, the electricals—even the fucking banker's lamp on the desk in my quarters—are tethered to Audrey's systems. So much as plug in an air freshener cartridge, it gets logged. A small piece of data to be sure, hardly an eyelash, but there's no such thing as invisible data. Ask me how I know. Once a byte gets logged, it can be found. Some coffee-jacked analyst in Data & Research can't sleep one night, decides to earn a few points tracking anomalies in Audrey's barrage of minute-by-minute reports, and the next thing you know, I'm caught.
If they catch me, no question they'll put me back in the box.
And I am not going back into the box.
Not for a long, long time. Maybe not ever.
Maybe I'll die before I go back in.
•••
The agency doesn't call it a box, but the crew sure as hell did. It didn't escape any of us that the hibernation pods were casket-shaped. And the more we learned about how they worked, the more accurate the name seemed.
What was it Walter called the hibernation stage?
Hardly sleep, he'd said. _I much prefer 'suspension of life'. Yes, it's still an imperfect term, but substantially more accurate. _
John had challenged him on that. _Yeah, but what's 'life'? How do you define it? _
Unsurprisingly, Walter had been prepared for the question. He was prepared for every question.
_ I wouldn't expect to have to explain this to a biologist, but so be it. Life is the unrepressed continuation of an organism's multitudinous and collective functions and activities. All of your functions and activities, Mr. Lim, will be very much repressed. Suspended, you might call them. Not sleep, not life, not death. Each of us will exist, in a way, out of time itself. Like a movie, if you will, paused, waiting for an audience to reanimate us._
There had been rumors that, when the box was tested, the test subjects dreamed. They weren't supposed to dream, that was the story.
Look, we knew that TK YEARS in hibernation would be hard enough. We knew what it would do to our bodies, knew that physical therapy would keep us in orbit around our destination for a full year, minimum, to bulk our shriveled bodies back to normal. To ready us for the stresses of dropping into atmosphere on a new world. We'd wake up with bones like sparrows.
We knew we'd leave behind everyone we ever knew, everyone we loved, skip right over a dozen generations of their offspring. We'd Rip van Winkle our way right into the history books, if we even survived.
We knew all that, and we signed up anyway.
The rumors? I can confirm the rumors.
Yes, you fucking dream.
Who would have signed up if we'd known we'd bring our worst nightmares with us?
•••
The bed in my quarters is large enough for two bodies. The quilt is a geometric representation of the history of women in flight, every square depicting a pilot Fran knew by heart. TK NAME. TK NAME. TK NAME. She commissioned it, of course, and had the artist leave the last square blank. That's where Fran's story would go, once she'd made history as the woman who piloted farther than every other pilot who ever flew, all their flights, combined.
Except Fran isn't here. She was scrubbed so late in the process that nobody had time to downgrade me to a smaller cabin, or send Fran's things back to her. I'm here in a room she decorated with her trophies: A propeller from TK HISTORIC FLIGHT mounted above the bed. A pair of TK PILOT's goggles. TK PILOT's scarf and jacket. Two closets. Two sinks. Two reading chairs, two lamps fashioned from old TK PLANE running lights.
Even those lights I can't turn on.
The reading chair that was supposed to be Fran's, that's where I am now. It's nearest the porthole. Argus's exterior lights do very little to beat back all of the blackness outside, but they throw just enough of a glow through the glass to turn my cabin gauzy. There's just enough light that I can keep it together. But only just.
My mind swivels like a lighthouse beacon, lazily illuminating glimpses of my dreams in the box.
It's just them, over and over again. The same day on endless loop.
Fran, on her back in the hospital bed, knees parted. Spit flecking my skin as she screams at me. Her muscles gone so taut she appears to have no body fat at all, just a thready, leathery, animated corpse in the process of giving birth.
Worse, though, is the child, who is born, again and again, as I try to escape. Heat radiates from her tiny body, like I've wandered too close to a boiler about to erupt.
The girl, born with a full head of flaxen hair, tiny fingers already balled into ferocious fists, is featureless, her face smooth and blank and pale as an egg. I can't fill in her features because I've never seen her face.
That's my daughter, who was born the same day I left Earth on this ship.
•••
So.
No lights. No flushing the toilets. No opening the refrigerators. Don't take food from the weight-sensitive pantry shelves. Don't breathe too close to the ambient sensors. Don't do a single thing to alert Mission Control to my present status.
I'm not supposed to be awake. Not now, not for a very, very long time.
If they find out I am, they'll wake someone else. Walter, probably, or Laila, to wrestle me back into the box.
I'll do anything to stay out of the box.
•••
Without realizing it, I curl up on the familiar side of the bed. My side.
I can't sleep. I don't really want to, if I'm honest. I'm a little terrified of what I'll see. If the dreams have followed me here from the box, then I don't want to sleep ever again.
That can be arranged, I hear Fran whisper. Words she often spoke in bed when I asked her to take off her flight suit.
Wide awake, alone on this cavernous ship, barreling into the very definition of nothingness, it hits me, hard: Fran was right about me all along. Saw something in me that I didn't, I think. Knew that when she turned over in the night, I'd push my body backward, searching for her warmth. Her safety.
But not tonight. Not tonight, and not any night ever again.
The ship is a black sea. I am a castaway on this bed-shaped island.
What good is a little spoon without its big spoon?
Fran knew me better than I knew myself. She was my big spoon, she sniffed it out and made it so, and I don't know what to do with that information except file it away to never think about it again.
===== —Save to personal datapad? Yes —Error: Network connection not detected —Warning: File not backed up to Argus databank —Warning: File saved locally only
Here endeth the excerpt!
Writing is going slowly, but well. I think this time through I'm zeroing in on Philip's voice, and slicing away some unnecessary cruft from the story.
Let me know what you think! And in the meantime, have a terrific November week.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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