Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 14 - TAMA (7)
The floor bucked and heaved, a solid ground made treacherous by the titan's awakening. My boots slipped, screeching against the metal as I struggled to keep my footing. That singular, burning red eye. A malevolent ruby the size of a ground vehicle, remained locked onto me. There was intelligence in that light, but it was a senile, furious thing, the glint of a mind that had forgotten more than I could ever learn.
The tremors subsided, leaving only the shuddering vibration of a failing power core reverberating through the titan's frame. Then, it moved.
The basso-profondo command boomed through the floor again, more forceful this time. It wasn't a request. It wasn't a negotiation. It was the warning from a tyrannical king, a final, irrevocable verdict. The ghost in the god-machine was done with words. This couldn't even be called an impasse, we were no longer on speaking terms.
And frankly, I was tired of being moved.
I stood my ground, a ludicrously small figure standing against a god-shaped, history-forming tsunami. I braced myself, planting my feet firmly on the shaking deck. "No," I said, my tone final. I wasn't yelling. I didn't have to. The sheer certainty in my voice was more powerful than any shout. "I refuse to turn back. You're not getting it, and I'm done talking."
I gestured vaguely with my thumb over my shoulders towards the path I had taken. "It seems like neither of us are going to listen to each other; we've exhausted all methods of dialogue, so I'm just going to do whatever I want from here on out. I'll find her myself -- with or without your permission." My words were the final stake into their long dead hearts, a planting of my flag of intent.
For a long, terrifying moment, the only response was the low, guttural hum of its failing systems and the faint crackle of electricity arcing across its rusted joints. The great head was still angled towards me, one beam of sanguine light a silent, terrifying judge. The dead air stretched, with the ancient weight of an entire species' history.
Then, a final, decisive answer came, not as words, but as raw, emotional rage.
The sound was no longer a vibration in the floor; it was a physical force, a concussive blast of sonic fury that threw me backwards. My feet left the ground, and I landed hard, sprawling in the rust-red dust, the impact knocking the breath from my lungs. Stars momentarily exploding behind my eyes.
Through the pain and disorientation, I saw it. The titan's colossal, skeletal left arm frame, its fingered gauntlet the size of a small shuttle, began to move. The joints, corroded into solid masses, screamed with the high-pitched screech of tearing metal as a surge of emergency power, a last-ditch expenditure of eons of stored energy, forced them into motion. It was a monstrous, unnatural movement, the dead animated by a furious, decaying will. A last stand.
The arm rose, trailing sparks and a shower of red-orange rust. A shadow the size of a bus fell over me. Its immense metal hand balled into a fist -- a rusty wrecking ball of rage -- and began to descend. It didn't have any finesse to it, no elegant swat of a god-like hand. It was a blunt, clumsy, but overwhelmingly powerful effort. There was no grand battle, no exchange of wits and convictions, just the simple tantrum of an overwhelmingly destructive titan. It was going to crush me. To erase my existence in a single, brutal motion, to reduce my stubborn conviction to a messy smear on the floor of this tomb.
Even these gods, with all the wisdom in the universe, are still beholden the oldest biological imperative: violence.
This was it. This was the end of my journey. There was no running. There was no hiding. I raised my arm to cover my head, but it was a futile, useless gesture. I lay there in the dust, looking up through the gaps of my fingers at the descending slab of my imminent death, and for a bizarre second, I thought only about my suit. It was about to be ruined. I had truly lost my mind.
I shut my eyes. Pathetic.
But the impact never came. Instead, a deep, resonant chime sounded in the air, a single, pure bell-tone that was impossibly clear amidst the cacophony of grinding metal. A wave tangible, cool energy washed over me, pushing the choking dust away in a shimmering sphere.
My eyes snapped open.
An invisible barrier had materialised around me, a perfect sphere of force centred around my chest. Its surface shimmered a faint, lattice of interlocking hexagonal shapes. The titan's colossal fist, a descending instrument of annihilation, was frozen mere metres away, held immobile by an unseen, inviolable force.
With a sound like a mountain being split asunder, not the sound of crushing, but of being pulverised, the arm of the ancient god began to fail. First the immense fingers, each the size of thick steel girders, cracked and splintered, shattering under a pressure they were never designed to withstand. Rivets and bolts, ancient and rusted, shot off like bullets, ricocheting off the chasmal metal walls with sharp, metallic pings. The giant fist, once an unstoppable crushing mass of mechanical death, began to crumple from its own inertia. The aging metal no longer being able to hold out, twisted in on itself.
The shield, this impossible power gifted to me by the progenitors of the old machines, held firm. A calm, stoic defender against the brute force of a dying world. The shield pulsed once, a soft, silent beat of blue-silver light.
A silent, concussive blast erupted from its epicentre. It was an invisible wave of pure force, a detonation of pure physics. A feedback. A counter-punch. The shield didn't just repel the arm; it annihilated it. The immense, metallic limb, a monument to a forgotten era of engineering, was flung backwards as if it weighed nothing. The titan's colossal frame, already compromised by age, was thrown with horrifying ease. An ignoble death; it was an undignified, scrap heap-esque crash. The massive, rust-eaten torso was lifted from the ground and sent flying across the cavernous space by the invisible, psychic force of the small silver clip attached to my tie. It was a tumbling hulk of iron and decay. It hit the far, steel wall of the with a seismic impact that shook the very foundations of the labyrinth. The sound was deafening, a world-ending clash of metal against metal that echoed for eternity.
The dust, thrown into roiling, chaotic clouds by the impact, was driven away by another pulse of force from the shield. When it cleared, the scene was one of absolute devastation and unparalleled destruction.
The titan lay where it had fallen, its back broken against the wall. Its head was twisted at an obscene angle, its one red eye shattered into a million glittering, inert fragments. Its own remaining arm was now little more than a twisted, mangled stump of shredded metal, a pathetic reminder of its once-grand scale. It was dead. Again.
The blue shield around me dissolved, shrinking back into the small, silver clip, its mission accomplished. I was left standing in the sudden, echoing silence of a god's lonely mausoleum. The only sounds were my own ragged breathing and the soft, metallic pings of cooling debris.
The ghostly woman's words echoed in my mind. "That is enough. The energies contained within that small device are more than sufficient to even the odds."
I thought I understood what she meant then, but looking at the steaming, broken remains of the mechanical titan, I truly got the picture. The old machines were formidable. They were ancient and vast and possessed a power that could hijack starships and shatter minds across light-years. But against me, against the technology of their progenitors, they were nothing more than a stubborn but obsolete machine trying to stop a flood with just a bucket.
My gaze remained locked on the steaming ruins of the titan. For a long, surreal minute, I allowed myself to feel it. A cold, fierce surge of something I could only describe as triumph. It was a foolish, human emotion, but in the face of such overwhelming cosmic indifference, it was the only one that made sense. I couldn't have even imagined it when I was just Noah, the middle manager. Of course, it was nothing that epic; all that happened was that I finished off the final spasms of a mechanism that had already died, long before my species even knew fire.
I turned. My task wasn't complete. My path lay deeper, down past the corpse of this mechanical god. I took a single, determined step forward, the scuff only boot on the dusty, metal floor was a declaration of intent.
That was a mistake.
A new sound started behind me. A low, grinding scrape, so faint it was almost subliminal. It was the sound of an immovable object, forced to move one last time. My blood ran cold. I froze, my body tensing, every instinct screaming that the fight wasn't over. A second phase. A trick ending. A berserk mode.
I turned back, slowly. The titan was still. Its colossal body remained a mangled heap against the wall. But the red light from its shattered eye socket remained burning with a dim, gasping ember. Conviction, it seemed, was not just on my side. They too held a strange, mechanical resolve of their own. They too had a goal they needed to accomplish at all costs.
Then it moved.
It was a motion born of pure, absolute refusal to give up. A final act of sheer will. The colossal upper torso, broken and bent, began to drag itself forward, pulling its mangled corpse. The metals sparked, circuitry burst into embers, the forward light -- the singular red, accusing light -- dwindled to a flickering pulse. Still fixed solely on me. The scrape was continuous now, the agonising sound of fractured metal being dragged against the unyielding metal decks. It had no legs, one busted arm, and a body that was little more than scrap. Yet the gears turned. It desperately crawled. It crawled with the slow, torturous determination of a creature that had forgotten how to die.
YOU… CANNOT… GO…>
It wasn't fighting anymore. The sight was so profoundly, fundamentally sad it eclipsed all the terror I had felt. It was a king who had lost his kingdom, a general who had no more army, crawling through the mud to challenge a usurper with only his dying gasp as a weapon. A single, accusatory red light, the spark of its corrupted memory core, remained fixed on me, a dying ember of pure, spiteful purpose.
Its broken body heaved, another grinding lurch forward. The crimson light flared, one final, defiant explosion of its failing power. It wasn't a physical blast. I instinctively knew what was about to happen; the final trump card.
It didn't even possess enough power to finish its sentence. Yet, with its dying light it cast one last Hail Mary. A word resonated in my mind, a Japanese word that fit the titan's final act. 道連れ -- 'michizure'. To take me down with it.
The world simply… dissolved.
The cold, metallic cavernous space was gone. The scent of rust and decay was replaced by something achingly familiar, the unique blend of stale air, hot electronics, and the faint, cloying hint of plastic I had previously associated with life support systems.
I was standing on the bridge of the old SV-Eclipse.
It was the bridge as I had first known it. That day which was now a faint blur in my mind, came rushing back to me. The day that I woke up screaming; the day everything began. A flying brick's command centre, a claustrophobic nightmare of chunky, gunmetal grey consoles covered in grimy fingerprints, each panel studded with clumsy, oversized buttons and outdated, flickering CRT monitors. Wires were bundled together with cheap zip-ties, sagging from the ceiling. The command chair, a cracked, worn-out piece of grey vinyl, was positioned just off-centre, offering a compromised view of a reinforced viewport. It was ugly. It was cheap. Even though it hadn't been that long, it was… the most nostalgic thing I had ever seen. I wanted this to be real, even though I knew it wasn't.
I didn't even know how long it had been since I was aboard the old SV-Eclipse. Had it been weeks? Months? Years? My long quest down the depths of the old machine's tomb confused my sense of the passage of time. Logically it shouldn't have been that long; since I was still human I needed to eat to sustain myself, but I hadn't felt the pangs of hunger. It was probably just another feature of this silver clip -- this mysterious, advanced technology that could slay gods -- theoretically it could keep me from starving myself. If that was the case then, all bets were off -- I could've been wandering down in this nightmare labyrinth for years between lucid moments and simulations.
This was probably the final simulation. For a god-machine teetering on the brink of total system failure, this small, confined space was all it could muster. The simulation was frayed at the edges, a poorly rendered copy of a memory it barely had the chance to observe. There were glitches. The numbers on the monitors stuttered and jumped. The light from the flickering screens cast shadows that weren't quite right, moving in jerky, unnatural intervals. The starfield visible through the main viewport -- the same window I once spent eight hours staring out of on the first day -- was nothing more than a grainy, static image that looped every few seconds. A placeholder image from a dying operating system.
My eyes scanned the room, my heart pounding a slow, heavy rhythm against my chest. My breath caught. I wasn't alone. Floating silently by the command chair was a familiar cubic form. A small, sturdy grey drone, with a single, circular red lens. The Class-IV mobile peripheral and emergency data repository. 'Lighthouse'.
Calliope.
A weary sigh escaped my lips, a sound of pure exhaustion that seemed to sap what little strength I had left. I wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't angry. I felt a strange calmness; perhaps I was just tired. So cosmically tired of this pointless, looping charade. My gaze swept past the glitching starfield and the stuttering readouts on the consoles, and settled on the little grey drone. They'd gone through my memories, my human sentiments, now they've resorted to cheap tricks.
I didn't even address the unseen architect behind this flawed fabrication. I just stated the facts, my voice flat, a calm recitation of a simple, chronological error.
"You got it wrong again," I said, my words directed at the silent room, at the failing intelligence trying to trap me in a memory it could no longer replicate correctly. My finger lifted, pointing at both the little flying drone and the Eclipse. "This ship, the old Eclipse, was a flying garbage truck. You got the ambiance correct, but you missed one small detail. Calliope, she wasn't in that drone at this time."
I sighed. "Calliope was the Eclipse's main onboard AI; the only reason she became portable was because her mainframe was about to be atomised when this very ship became a smoking crater on the surface of your planet." I let out a short, bitter laugh. "You're showing me a corrupted save file with severe chronological errors."
I let my arm drop, the accusation hanging in the recycled, filtered air of the simulation. For a moment, the only response was the hum of the phantom machines and the stutter of a glitching starfield. The little grey drone, Calliope's prison in this farce, remained motionless, a silent sentinel at the edge of my vision.
Then, she moved. A soft, almost inaudible whir of internal gyros, a shift in the light as its holographic lens powered on. The drone floated towards me, its path a smooth, direct line across the warped metal grating of the simulated bridge. It stopped a few metres away, its single, unblinking lens regarding me with an impartial, mechanical gaze.
And then, she spoke. "Good morning, Captain. I was not expecting you to be on the bridge at this hour. All systems report nominal. Is there something I can assist you with?" The sound of her voice hit me like a solid weight against my chest. It was the same. Exactly the same. The clear, synthesised, emotionally neutral cadence, engineered for maximum clarity and minimum psychological strain. A carefully modulated instrument of logic and data delivery. It wasn't the raw, corrupted chorus of mismatched voices from the rovers, nor was it the ancient, resonant thunder of the titan. It was her. My Calliope.
It felt like a hairline fracture forming on my heart. My breath hitched in my throat, a sharp, sudden gasp that was half pain, half disbelief. My hand, acting on its own volition, rose to my chest, my fingers closing protectively over the cool, dense metal of the silver clip. The one anchor I had to a reality that wasn't this. It was my last barrier. My only shield against the overwhelming tidal wave of a nostalgia I never knew I had.
"Calliope…" I breathed her name, the sound barely a whisper. I shook my head slowly, trying to clear it, to focus on the logical impossibility before me. "God… I'd almost forgotten what you sounded like." The admission was a raw, unguarded thing, a crack in the armour of cynicism I had so carefully constructed around my heart since all this began. It was the honest truth of a man who had been wandering alone in a nightmare for what felt like an eternity. A man who had forgotten the sound of his own friend's voice. A man who had forgotten the radiance of his North Star.
A brief, almost imperceptible pause followed my statement, a microsecond of processing. The drone, her Lighthouse peripheral body, tilted slightly, a gesture of querying analysis. "Query: your statement is illogical. My vocal frequency and modulation parameters have remained consistent within a 0.001% variance since my activation. The probability of you 'forgetting' them is statistically negligible," she stated, her tone the same calm, professional, disembodied voice of a ship's AI responding to a bizarre system query from its captain. "Are you experiencing auditory hallucinations? If so I recommend we schedule a full medical and psych-evaluation upon our arrival at dock."
I let out a dry chuckle. Yeah, I already knew she wasn't real, but for a moment I wanted to trick myself into thinking she was. Because it'd be comforting. A small, warm, reprieve in my great journey. Alas, I couldn't reconcile this Calliope with the real one. This was an echo, a ghost in a ghost's machine, programmed with enough data to imitate her with chilling accuracy. But the imitation, no matter how flawed, was more painful than any physical attack the dying titan could have mustered.
The question hung in the glitching, recycled air of the mock bridge, a desperate key trying to find a lock that wasn't there. I stared at the hovering cube, my hand still pressed against the solid warmth of the silver clip. I asked her a question, born from a desperate, emotional gamble: "do you remember our conversation? The one about souls and nutrient bars?" I chuckled wryly, continuing, "we crash landed on Turn Seven… I mean, Astellion and I had to survive on those emergency nutrient bars. I said back then that those god-awful bars lacked soul, to which you simply told me I was suffering from a case of 'hedonic deficit'."
It was such a specific, absurd detail, a tiny moment of shared vulnerability on the surface of a dead world. Of course, I knew this simulated version of Calliope wouldn't know what I was talking about. I just wanted an excuse to talk to her for a bit longer.
For a handful of seconds that stretched agonisingly long, the drone was silent. A flicker of dim, static light crossed her lens, the digital equivalent of a thoughtful frown. The faint whir of its internal processors was the only sound. The glitching starfield out the viewport seemed to hold its breath. The stuttering loop freezing on a single frame of corrupted data.
The response came with the crisp, finality of a server returning a 404 error. "Negative, Captain," the synthesized, eerily familiar voice stated. "I have no record of any such conversation or event in my active or archived logs. Query term 'soul' returns only philosophical archives, no personal interactions. Query term 'nutrient bar' returns inventory manifests and consumption schedules, no contextual dialogue entries."
A couldn't help but laugh. "Of course you don't," I said, shaking my head, the bitterness of it tasting like copper on my tongue. "That's fine, I didn't expect you to." I looked from the impassive drone to the crumbling, imperfect facsimile of the bridge around us. "That conversation was…" I paused, the words a physical weight on my tongue. "It wasn't an official log entry. That wasn't corporate data to be filed and archived. That was just us. It was just the mundane, inane conversation between a man having a mental breakdown and a calculator who couldn't grasp the shape of a soul. And you… you don't have a record of 'us'."
My laughter died in the sterile, recycled air, leaving behind a cold, hollow void. This imitation of Calliope, this digital puppet dangling from the strings of a senile god, had done the one thing it was never supposed to. It reminded me, with excruciating clarity, exactly what was at stake. The sheer wrongness of her presence, her sterile, logical denial of our shared history, was the confirmation I needed.
I shook my head slowly, a final, weary dismissal of this entire charade. My eyes no longer seeing the drone, but the ancient, dying embers controlling it. "You're wasting what little you have left," I said, my voice a low, monotone statement of fact. "You're just showing me what I'm fighting for. What each bloody step I've taken leads to." I tightened my grip on the silver clip. I wasn't just promising the dead god at the helm of this rotten reality; I was promising myself. Promising her. "I'm coming to get you back, Calliope," I said to the empty bridge, to the little hovering facsimile. "No matter what it takes. No matter how long I have to continue. No matter what I have to break."
A soft, resonant chime sounded, a single, perfect bell-tone that echoed with a power far greater than the glitching simulation could contain. It was the same sound as before. The call to action. From the silver clip, a wave of light expanded. The bridge of the Eclipse, this cheap, fabricated dream, held its breath for a nanosecond.
Then, it shattered.
The cracked gunmetal consoles didn't just break; they dissolved, exploding into clouds of shimmering, white code. The glow of the CRT monitors fractured into a kaleidoscope or meaningless symbols. The familiar starfield buckled and warped, revealing the searing, raw static of reality breaking through. The floor, the walls, the very air, all dissolved into a blinding, white, digital shriek. The universe was admitting defeat.
Through the violent unraveling of the simulation, one thing remained clear for a final, agonising second. The Lighthouse peripheral, the ghost of Calliope, hovered untouched in the centre of the chaos. It didn't flicker. It didn't break apart. It resisted deletion. Its lens was fixed on me, a silent, impassive observer as its world disintegrated.
In its final moments, it spoke again.
Not in the calm, neutral AI tone, but with something else threaded beneath it. Something softer, a resonance I hadn't heard before. It wasn't the cold logic of the simulation, nor the corrupted voices. It was something… familiar.
"I'll be waiting… Captain." The moment the last syllable formed, the white noise consumed everything. The world, and the drone with it, was gone.
.
.
.
My return to reality was less a jolt and more of a gentle, disorienting fade-in. Different from before. Previously, waking up from these simulations was like breaking the surface tension of the water after drowning; this time it felt like waking up peacefully after a long sleep. I was on my feet, my body swaying slightly as if I were a ship finally regaining its equilibrium after a violent storm. The acrid stench of ozone and hot metal filled my lungs, but it was thin, less oppressive than before. The chaotic, grinding sounds of the dying factory above were gone, replaced by a profound, resonant silence.
I was deeper. Much deeper.
I blinked, my eyes slowly adjusting to the light. This wasn't another nightmare realm of collapsing architecture and twisted nonsensical design. The cavernous, mechanical hellscape was gone. I was standing in a hallway, simple and uncluttered. For the first time since I'd stepped through the great iron gate, the architecture made sense.
The floor beneath my boots was a smooth, polished slab of grey concrete, segmented by clean expansion joints. The walls were constructed of immense, interlocking plates of a dark, burnished metal, their seams so precise they were nearly invisible. The space was brightly lit, not by the chaotic strobing of dying conduits, but by long, recessed strips of cool, white light that ran the length of the high ceiling. The entire passage was cast in an even illumination, pleasant to the eye. There were no invisible clutters, no tangled wires, no decay. It was a place built with a clear purpose, a structure that spoke not of madness, but focus.
This was likely the inner sanctum of the old machines. The data core. The central processing unit. Even if everything else were to fall apart, this place alone needed to be maintained… and here is probably where Calliope is being kept.
"Calliope…" My mind replayed the simulation's final moment. The drone hanging in the roaring white void. Its final, impossible words. A simple statement from a friend to her captain. The old machines had the schematics, the vocal patterns, the technical data. But they could never have faked that.
That was definitely Calliope.