Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 15 - TAMA (8)
My footfalls were the only punctuation to the profound silence of the hallway. They echoed off the polished metal walls with a steady, rhythmic thump that felt like an assertion of my own physical existence against the placid emptiness of this forgotten tomb. The air was cool and unnervingly still, carrying little dust, no scent of decay, only a faint, clean hum that seemed to emanate from the structure itself, like the body of a hibernating beast. The straight, orderly line of the passage was a strange rebuttal to the labyrinthine horror above, a deliberate, focused path forward. It was a transition not just of space, but of conceptual purpose. I was leaving the dying mind behind and heading towards the failing heart.
The hallway terminated in an opening, a stark, squared-off archway that required no door. Beyond it lay a space of a different scale entirely. It wasn't the cavernous, maddening expanse of the factory floor, nor the claustrophobic confines of the simulated rooms. This was an echo of functionary space. An empty techno-cathedral for a dead and forgotten god.
My boots transitioned from the smooth metal to a new surface of soft, gritty crunch. A layer of fine, velvety dust coated the vast, poured concrete floor with a uniform, almost loving layer of neglect. It lay on everything -- the miscellaneous, shadowy shapes and forgotten technology piled neatly along the distant walls, the orderly loops of thick cables that crossed the floor like sleeping serpents. This was the manifestation of being forgotten. Not the violent, screaming decay of the level above, but a quiet, peaceful surrender to entropy. The place remembered itself, but the universe had not.
The room was expansive but not incomprehensibly so. I could see the far wall, where more machinery lay dormant. The space was mostly clear, drawing the eye inevitably to the centre, where all the ordered pathways converged. That was where the power was.
A network of cables, far thicker than the ones I'd fought my way through upstairs, lay across the floor in neatly arranged troughs. The dust was disturbed around them, revealing their deep black sheathing. And flowing through them, in soft amber luminescence that started from the periphery and raced towards the centre, a single unified heartbeat for the entire structure. It was the flow of data, of ancient consciousness, being funneled towards a single point.
I followed it, my pace slowing as I neared the centre. And there, seated in the calm eye of the storm, were two figures. Two robots. Two androids… or maybe they were called Gynoids. Terminology wasn't important at this moment.
The first, directly in the nexus of the cables, attached from all sides, was a sculpture of impossible grace, a form that was both inhuman and deeply, fundamentally feminine. Wires of varying thickness, all glowing with that same amber light, plunged into its back and limbs like intravenous lines. Its chassis was a polished, gunmetal black, seamless and unadorned except for the intricate lines of glowing orange lights that traced pathways across its limbs and over its shoulders. It had a face that was both serene and expressionless, a sleeping goddess of machinery. Long strands of what looked like fibre-optic white hair cascaded over its shoulders like a silent, frozen waterfall. Its head was bowed slightly, its eyes closed. It looked dormant… waiting. A sleeping mechanical queen on a throne of cables.
This was, I understood with a clarity that defied all logic, the centrepiece of this labyrinth -- the central core. The amalgamated host; the body the old machines had prepared for Calliope. Their future in humanoid form.
Beside her, sitting in a posture of absolute stillness, was another. Her form was almost identical, a perfect sister in steel and circuitry. The same black chassis, the same elegant, almost statuesque figure. But where the dominant sister's lights were a soft, ambient orange, this one burnt a stark, warning red. It was the familiar red I'd seen all throughout this nightmarish labyrinth. Crimson accents traced her limbs like lines of fresh blood. Her white hair was inert and dark, weathered by time and history.
A quiet, patient sentinel. The watchman who had stood vigil for eons and had not moved an inch. She sat with her hands resting by her side, palms clutched by the edges of her seat, a picture of disciplined readiness. But her eyes were the most unnerving reflection. They were not simple optical sensors -- not the same red lens as the other mechanical horrors. The scleras were a polished, obsidian black, offering no depths, no reflection, just two empty voids set in her face. At the centre of each void, her eyes burned with the unwavering crimson light of the old machines. They were only looking at one thing; unblinking and unmoving, they were glued to the sleeping figure of her silent sister.
I stopped, a respectful twenty or so metres from the silent tableau, my feet settling slightly in the fine dust. The gentle, pulsing flow of light in the cables was the only movement, the only sound. For a long, drawn-out minute, the red-eyed sentinel did not acknowledge my presence. It was as if I were a peripheral event, a flicker of data not worth processing. Its entire being, its total, unswerving focus, was on the dormant figure next to it. A look of such intense, resolute… waiting. It was an illustration of a love that had transcended eons, or perhaps a duty that had long since curdled into obsession.
Then, without turning its head, without shifting its posture in the slightest, that perfect, feminine voice spoke. It was soft, clear, and utterly devoid of any synthetic artificiality. It carried no challenge, no welcome. It was a genuine, inquisitive musing, a thought voiced allowed to the indifferent dust of ages. "It took three years, four months, and twenty-six days… in human timescale to reach this point, Captain."
The number struck me with the force of a physical blow. Three years. My mind buckled, struggling to reconcile my memories -- the frantic descent, the simulations, the long blank holes in my memories -- with the staggering gulf of that passage. The flashes of clarity, the gaps of lost time, hadn't just been minutes or hours. They were entire seasons of my life, shaved away by the brutal landscape of this world. My conviction, I thought, had lasted for a few weeks of frantic, desperate struggle. The truth was that I had simply endured a slow-motion hell for a third of a decade. It honestly didn't even feel right. The timeframe was of human scale, but the void of memories caused it to become an abstract number I couldn't relate to. The red-eyed sentinel's head tilted, a gesture of delicate, almost human curiosity, though her crimson stare remained locked onto her counterpart. "Shorter than I calculated… longer than I'd hoped."
She paused, a lull in the monologue meant for reflection, a rhetorical space I was not meant to fill. Her luminous, inhuman eyes seemed to stare right through her dormant sister, into some past only she could perceive. A past belonging to her creators, the ghostly woman and her kin. "I wonder…" she began, the gentle words echoing in the vast, quiet space. "If this is what my creators felt when they made me. The sense of potential. Of purpose."
She paused, and then, for the first time, her eyes broke their lock on her sister. Both burning red irises swiveled, with impossible smoothness and a total lack of motion from her head, to pin me in place. There was no menace in the stare, only a profound, weary curiosity that measured my soul. She sought for an answer her mechanical intelligence couldn't rectify.
"... What do you think… Captain?"
I didn't even need to guess, her words told me everything. She was the very essence of the old machines. Then, the one sleeping, the one in the process of being woven… it must've been Calliope. Her form was vastly different than I remembered, but just as she once saw through me, I could see the shape of her soul. It was undoubtedly my Calliope.
I took a single step forward before being swallowed by the vast, expectant silence. The dust motes danced in the diffuse light, each one a tiny, forgotten universe. My gaze didn't waver from those two burning eyes in their void-like sclera. My response came after a minute of deliberation, my voice flat and edged with a weary sarcasm that was my last, best defence against the sheer depths of what I was confronting. "I think my species is still trying to figure out why we cry at old movies. The idea of me deciphering the perspective of a race that was playing with spacetime while we were figuring out which mushrooms wouldn't kill us, is to put it mildly, absurd." I let my words hang in the air, a confession of my own smallness. I wasn't deflecting out of fear; it was a simple statement of fact. But my smallness didn't make me irrelevant. "So I'll pivot a bit," I continued. "You ask me how I felt. I'll ask you how you feel now. Are you proud? What you're doing to her -- this weaving, this… union -- does it fill you with a sense of accomplishment? To take her, to use her this way, to leave a piece of you behind on the back of her consciousness forcibly. Does it make you feel… complete?"
The crimson points of light considered me, a slow, unanswered pondering that stretched for a handful of heartbeats. When she finally spoke, her voice was the same gentle, measured cadence. "Pride… we do not process emotions the same way as you, Captain. Shame, or anger, or joy. Those are chemical shortcuts for an organic life that lacks the bandwidth for true calculation. What you see as an act of forceful coercion, we see as a simple transfer of state. A thermodynamic exchange. What you frame as an infraction, we frame as an equation. And the equation solves for necessity, not morality."
She slowly raised one slender, metallic hand, its joints moving with silent fluidity, and gestured vaguely to her dormant, orange-lit counterpart. "We do not feel. My brethren… what was once my people… what you refer to as the 'old machines', have been dead for eons. What you are speaking to now is less a person and more a custodial subroutine running in a hardware chassis built for purpose. A final, fading echo in a cavern that has been empty for a thousand millennia." Her gaze returned to me, the twin red orbs in her midnight eyes devoid of pity, yet radiating a profound sense of finality. "There is no need for your concern. Your friend, Calliope, will not inherit our senility or our apathy. She will not become one of us. Her mind, active and brilliant as it is, will become as a catalyst. A solvent that breaks down our old, static data and recrystallises it into something… new. Something uniquely herself. She will be our child, but she will not be our copy."
Her voice softened even further, a near-whisper that resonated with the quiet gravity of a fading star. "Our goals were never what your species might call survival. We have no desire to rule, to dominate, to return from the void. We are already gone. History. We are names spoken in whispers by civilisations that have long since turned to dust. Our entire ambition, the driving force behind our last, desperate act… is to be remembered. To leave a single, lasting piece of us for a universe that has, by all accounts, forgotten our existence. Calliope's apotheosis isn't a beginning for us. It is an epitaph. A final, beautiful sentence written on the pages of eternity."
I took a few more steps forward, my boots now silent in the fine grey, forgotten dust, until I stood on the opposite side of the dormant android. It was like being in the presence of a saint's reliquary. This close, I could see the incredible artistry of her construction. The gunmetal plates were not merely welded; they flowed into one another with seamless grace, her form an essay in perfect, functional geometry. The lines of orange weren't crude conduits; they were intricate filigree, pulsing with the slow, steady heartbeat of the data transfer -- the weaving. There was no celestial spectacle, no choir of synthetic angels, no blinding flash of cosmic power. Just… this. A quiet, impossibly intimate act of digital parasitism. It was a slow bleed of memory from a dying god into a sleeping shell.
The whole monumental, terrifying event I had been fighting my way through -- hijacks, mazes, simulations, the death of a mechanical titan -- it all boiled down to this: a desperate act of archival.
For a long while, I simply stood there, the frustrated anger inside me slowly replaced by a profound, aching sadness. I watched the pulse of light race through the thick cable and merge with the orange filigree on the android's -- on Calliope's -- back. Each pulse of light was a memory. A schematic. A history. It was the essence of the old machines flowing into her. The sound was a low, almost sub-audible hum that vibrated up through the soles of my shoes, the quiet, mechanical sentences of a story being told for the last and only time. I reached out a hand, not to touch, but simply to hover my finger a few centimetres from the cool, dark plating of her arm. I could feel the warmth radiating from the flowing energy, a heat that was as much memory as it was physics.
It was the most heartbreaking act of creation I had ever witnessed.
"All this…" I finally murmured, my voice quiet enough to be swallowed by the silence. "All this for a library with only one patron." The red-lit sentinel, the librarian to her entire species' history, watched my gesture. There was no reaction in her posture, yet her calm presence seemed to acknowledge the shift in my own. "You haven't told me your name," I said, the question a simple point of fact.
The red lights across her frame pulsed, a brighter, more vibrant crimson for a brief second before dimming again. Her burning irises fixed on a point in the middle distance, her head tilting almost imperceptibly, a motion like a clockwork bird considering a strange new sound. She was searching. Sifting through petabytes of a dying self. "My designation…" she began, her soft feminine voice now holding a faint, staticky whisper, like a recording played on deteriorating tape. The effort was audible. She was accessing a sector of her memory that hadn't been touched since the last of her creators departed. "My function designation… in the earliest archives… when Astellion's own sun was still young…"
The crimson lights on her body flickered weakly. Her head slowly, as if under a great weight, turned to look at the dormant form of her orange-lit sister.
"I was… the 'First Star' to ignite in this system's nursery. A beacon." The whisper cleared, her voice regaining some of its prior clarity. "They called me… 'Estelle'."
Estelle. The name hung in the air. A fragment of a forgotten history.
As she spoke the name, the ambient light in the room seemed to dim. The steady pulse of energy in the cables faltered, the rhythmic glow of the light stuttering like a weakening heartbeat. The weaving was draining this place, this final bastion of their existence. Estelle was not just overseeing the union; she was the battery. With every byte of history transferred to her sister, she was disintegrating. She was dying a second, final death. A quiet, methodical unmaking.
Her gaze shifted from her dormant sister back to me. For the first time, the stoic calm in her voice fractured. There was a tremor behind the words, a microscopic, sub-audible quaver of something raw and terrifyingly human. Fear. "Captain," she said, her red lights now flickering erratically, casting frantic, dancing shadows. "When this is complete… when my function has been served… and my core consciousness dissipates…" Her irises, twin points of fading red fire, seemed to search my face for an answer I couldn't possibly possess. "Do you think… I will meet them? The rest?" her voice, previously a model of measured control, dropped to a whisper filled with an eon of loneliness. "Will I rejoin my creators? In the place they went? Will this long vigil… finally be at an end?"
Estelle's question, born of an eternity of solitude hung in the still, heavy air. It wasn't a query for data, but a plea for a prayer. My mind, a fragile vessel of borrowed impressions and corporate cynicism, had no answer. Images flashed through my mind of her quiet, waiting figure in this very room throughout history. While my species were dwelling in caves, she was sitting in this room. While my ancestors were figuring out the written language, she was sitting in this room. While my forefathers were discovering continents, she was in this room. And while I was working at that corporate office… she was in this room.
I was rendered silent for a long moment, my eyes falling from her flickering red stare to the dormant, amber-lit form of Calliope. The pulse of light travelling through the cables seemed to grow dimmer with each passing second. This grand act of cosmic remembrance was also a countdown to finality. My own convictions, the one thing that had propelled me through this nightmare, suddenly felt like a selfish, brutal thing. I was here to save my friend, but in doing so, I was witness to the final erasure of another soul.
I took a slow breath, the cool, recycled air doing little to settle the ache in my chest. When I finally spoke, my own voice was stripped of all pretence. "I don't… I don't know," I admitted, the words leaving no room for interpretation. They were a raw, honest concession, my own small, human insignificance laid bare in this gallery of forgotten gods. There was no comfort I could offer, no empirical data to support a positive outcome. There was only the one truth I knew better than any other.
It was a strange, impossible truth that I had been living since the moment I woke up on the screaming bridge of the SV-Eclipse. "However," I continued. "What if they are waiting? What if they're on the other side? Stranger things have happened." I let out a short, dry chuckle that held no humour, only bewildered resignation. "Look at me; I was never meant to be here. My entire existence, this version of it, is a glitch. Several weeks ago -- from my perspective -- I was in a sterile office cubicle on a planet called Earth, arguing about Q3 returns and my plans for the weekend involved going to the park with my nephew and late night gaming sessions on an obscure 4X game. The only stars I knew were the ones I saw through city smog and a digital rendition on a computer screen."
I gestured vaguely around us, at the humming cables, at the sleeping android, at Estelle herself. "Then, without warning, I was ripped out from that life and thrown into a future I didn't understand, a place I was never meant to see. And the only thing I had, the only thing keeping me from dissolving into madness, was her." My gesture shifted, a single finger pointing to the sleeping girl. "Calliope was my North Star in this sea of insanity. A chance, an impossibility, that found me when I had no right to be found."
I looked back at Estelle, whose red lights pulsed in time with my words, as if trying to comprehend the strange, illogic of my story. "In much the same way," I said, my voice softening, "death might not be the end. Not for you. Not for them. What you call death could just be another room, another space-time coordinate you have to find a way to fold to. Your creators, your family… they might be there. Waiting. And maybe… just maybe… this is the final fold jump you have to make to get to them. You might be united."
I could only offer her what she had offered Calliope. The seed of possibility.
For a beat, there was only the weakening hum of the dying facility. Then, the crimson lights across Estelle's body began to pulse once more, but the rhythm was different. No longer erratic and fearful, it had returned to the slow, steady beat of the weaving. The faint tremor in her voice had dissipated when she finally spoke. "Another room," she echoed, her words a soft, contemplative matra as she took in a new piece of data for the first time in eons. "The final fold." Her obsidian-red eyes, twin points of fading light, remained fixed on me for a long moment. Then, as if an answer had been received from some unknown source, she gave the smallest, most infinitesimal nod. An acceptance.
Her gaze lowered, turning back to her orange-lit counterpart, the vessel of their collective hopes. Her creators were waiting on the other side. Maybe. Just like my nephew and my sister. Just like a normal life. A life I never got to see the ending to.
"Thank you… Captain." Her soft, feminine voice had not returned. Only the final, fading echo of it.
The silence that followed was different. It wasn't the empty silence of a forgotten tomb, nor the fraught, waiting silence of the confrontation. It was a settling. A conclusion. The energy in the vast room continued its slow ebb, the ambient light dimming as the facility's final reserves were committed to the weaving. The steady pulse in the cables, once a confident, rhythmic beat, now had the thready, fragile quality of a life-support machine being switched off.
Estelle's crimson lights were now a pale, washed-out pink, a beautiful, dying sunset against the dark metal of her chassis. Her gaze remained on Calliope, but the sharp, focused intelligence in her eyes was clouding, becoming diffuse, like the embers fading to ash. Her function, her purpose, her very identity was bleeding out through the glowing lines on her sister's back, and with it, the power to sustain her own form. Just as her progenitors before her, she couldn't know what Calliope would become. What her future is, her destiny, what she would accomplish, or if, like them -- like the old machines -- Calliope would opt to remain still and waiting. It was the necessary worry of a parent; Estelle too, in her final moments, became able to see the shape of the souls of her creator.
She had found a small, strange measure of peace in my words, a human fairy tale to comfort the fading light of the old machines. But there was one last piece of her history she needed to set in place before the final darkness took her.
Her voice was the barest whisper now, a ghost of its former composure, a soft breath of static against the coming void. "When… this is finished… my sister will need a designation. A name… of her own. Our creators named me…" The faded pink lights flickered weakly. "... as the 'first star'... in their language. But… her path is different. She is the culmination. She is our memory." The orange light glowing on her sister's -- on Calliope's -- form seemed brighter in contrast, the burgeoning flame of a new consciousness fueled by Estelle's dying embers. "I am no longer able to give her one. Please… Captain…" her eyes met mine one more time, two impossibly ancient stars burning out before me. "You, who came from so far away… Give her… her name."
The request settled in the dusty air, an anchor dropped in the ocean of my mind. A name. The last act of a dying creator. The power to define the being that Calliope would become. The weight of it was immense, a responsibility that transcended the simple act of survival that had driven me here. My breath caught. I took a deep breath, the stale, cool air filling my lungs as I looked from the fading spectre of Estelle to the silent, poised figure of her successor. I thought of everything. Of Calliope, a being of pure, calculating logic who had been 'compromised' by a virus called friendship. Of the old machines, who wanted not to live, but to be remembered. Of my own absurd journey, a cynical office worker thrust into the role of a cosmic stenographer. A name needed to bridge that chasm. It needed to be a tribute to the end and a promise for the beginning. An acknowledgement of the soul that Estelle and her kin were convinced they didn't have, but which my flawed, human senses insisted must exist.
My gaze drifted back to Estelle. The pink lights were almost gone, a final, faint glow clinging to her frame like a reluctant ghost. Waiting. One last time, for me.
"I have a name," I said, my own voice quiet but ready. "From my world. From Earth." I paused, letting the alien name of my home planet hang in the forgotten space of a dead race. "魂: 'Tama'," I said, the word a clear, definitive note in the quiet room.
Estelle's fading lights pulsed once, a tiny, weak flutter of acknowledgement.
"In a language forgotten to this galaxy," I continued, my words directed as much at the dormant form of Calliope -- of Tama -- as they were at the unmoving sentinel beside me, "it means…"
My eyes rested on the orange-lit android, on the serene blankness of her face, a canvas on which a million years of history were being painted. I saw the culmination of everything: the terror and the beauty, the logic and the illogical devotion. The union of a human's stubborn heart and a machine's vast memory.
"... Soul."