The Ark yearned onward in the distance, afloat without destination. At its seams, mixed gases rushed against the vacuum of infinite space. The fragile container carrying all I have known. I put my hand against the cold window, the air stinging with familiarity. Through the canyons between my porcelain fingers, I look out at lazy stars clinging to a vast sail, the Ark, now among them, faded slowly from recognition. I fall away.
At first I barely noticed a pulsing green light tinting the room behind me. “Return Home?” Queried the monitor. My ship the Goldfinch, named for musings of ghosts from the distant past, had just retreated from the grasping voids echoing across the Ark. The previous owner of the Goldfinch was a Surveyor, tasked with sampling distant systems to feed the lumbering Ark aching in its suspension. It is vessel forced into reality by the minds of men long dead. We prolong its life as it enables ours against the wanting void. The Surveyors are each exiled to distant systems until returning with a bounty of resources wrestled from primitives that know not yet how to use them.They say that the Goldfinch returned without its owner, its signal picked up motionlessly trailing the Ark. Feeling curious, I stepped inside as the engines inhaled with croaked breath. The Goldfinch suddenly lurched forward, spilling out of the Ark, released.
“Hello.”
It flashed on the screen timidly. I turned towards it as prompts appeared requiring the input of some basic information. As it learned of my genome and habitual preferences, the Goldfinch adjusted and hummed a half step ahead of my activities around it. The Surveyor faded and I took his place. As the symphony of meters, dials, and indicators played across the cockpit, a route slowly assembled itself. The destination was a small satellite planet third from the system’s star. The blue and green dot turned and twisted until it filled the window of the cockpit. I pressed against the Goldfinch’s window, hurtling through space alongside the dot now revealed to be a gyrating orb of colored layers. The orb slowly revealed its encrusted surface as the cloaking distance of space diminished. A volatile blue shrouds most of the crust. Its ebb indexing the movement of celestial bodies. Prodding clumsily above the retreating blue, other colors emerge wrestling across stretched borders. At the edge of this precipice the Inhabitants molded their lives upon scabs of gray.
I have never seen anything so captivating.
The Goldfinch descended through the wispy layers of white. The orb and now the world around me, rushed forward multiplying in size. As the Goldfinch approached its undulating blue surface, walls of white erupted, driven apart by the ships charging momentum. I cut the engines and with a slight plop, the Goldfinch embedded itself within the pulling waves, swaying along, carried among the currents. The seams hissed as the outside air rushed into the sterile interior, the ship’s artificial air overtaken by the misty breeze surfing the surface. I started to breathe deeply.
A strange and heavy air filled my lungs. The air felt trapped inside me. The broiling cold sapped what warmth I had left. Light wisps emerge from my mouth not unlike the clouds I just descended through, moving upwards to rejoin its friends in the sky.I stepped outside and froze at the marvel that lay before me. The blue blanket stretched across. It appeared like a living sheet, breathing and moving beneath me. A light crackle filled the air every time the water pulled at the Goldfinch’s surface. In the distance, pale pyramids of gray and white pushed towards space beyond. As I watched the tectonic forms thrusting through the planet’s blue surface, I felt myself move with the will of the waves, ebbing slowly in every direction. In the corner of my eye, figures moved among the deep blue beneath me, against the currents. Life, struggling against the liquid matter, unable to escape the medium within which they are suspended. I felt privileged in this moment. My own fragility is free from the forces that surround it. Though, I realize that I, too, am vulnerable to the unfamiliar mass of blue that surrounds me.
I retreat into my shell.
The Goldfinch hummed into life. The engines pushed mightily against the blue once again. Aiming towards the rocky geometry, I became captured by its magnificence as the blue sped beneath me. The wrinkled pyramids grew slowly revealing a vast distance between themselves and me. Flatland grew and stretched. Near the boundary where solid ground emerged from the vast blue, shimmering prisms clustered together. A cacophony of sound hit me as I floated within my vessel. Looking out below, lines carved through the blocks. Upon these flat lines of varied width, I saw small colorful vessels, machine-like, move along them.
I was not alone.
How small they seemed, flowing in and out of prismatic mountains they build in their own vision. Some premonition of order pushes these Inhabitants away from the chaos boiling in blue. In this edge land, the Inhabitants reform the ground around them. Their enclaves thrusts upward from an organization detract from the unpredictable flow of the sea. Upon this rock hurtling through the vast expanse, the Inhabitants are bound by their inability to dictate their complete surroundings, by their inability to dominate Nature. Their desires remain at the whim of this spinning sphere. The reaching stones they build remain embedded in overlapping layers, pushing against each other for a chance to breathe free under the stars. Crossed lines documenting their patterns of escape. The Inhabitants have dictated their own patterns of existence, defying the unpredictable order pressed upon them by their world.
On either side of me, flat shapes showed the assertiveness with which the Inhabitants territorialized the natural ground. Cruising above these flatlands, I saw the brown scars emanating from where the Inhabitants grew. Just as the entropic blue waters threatened the Inhabitants’ survival, they too, push the green growths of the forest to escape higher towards the foot of the growing peaks. Twisting veins of water crawled across the land, unassisted by the strength and scale of the sea, became discolored by the Inhabitants’ vengeance. As if held hostage against its home, these channels are bound and guided by the Inhabitants’ will, appendages severed by parasitic bite.As the Goldfinch moved onward and landed on a cliff, everything I saw now stretched before me in the vast expanse. The air smelled of serene silence. I descended from the Goldfinch. My boots left deep marks as I trekked to the edge of the peak. The sky darkened as the sun hurried behind the horizon and the moon began to glow. In the distance, the once gleaming towers were now encrusted with small gleaming stars. Beyond, the blue expanse faded into a deep black, almost one with the darkening sky.
I became paralyzed in my own thoughts.
The Inhabitants’ lives contrast that of mine back on the Ark. We have never known the substance of water, the strangeness of mixed air, and the rough dirt surface. We are not grounded. We live in a confined, sterile environment programmed to suit our needs as the Occupants of Space. Our physical construct, the Ark, is data-driven and adapted itself according to those that live within it like a morphing glove snug around a population of thousands. Our metamorphic environment conforms to our needs. The towering structures of the Inhabitants’ built environment confounds me. The extreme density to which the Inhabitants compact themselves together on this planet leaves me to believe that they are in control of their own Architecture. They are at liberty to choose, to construct, to design.I stood bracing against the numbing surroundings. I looked up into the sky and imagined the Ark from which I came.I realize now why the original owner of the Goldfinch, the Surveyor, never returned. Embroiled in this world tugging at the edge of survival, I have never felt so alive.
home....