Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 13 - TAMA (6)
The air in the room was a curated composition of life: the sharp, sterile tang of antiseptic fighting a losing battle against the richer, earthier scent of sweat and new beginnings. A single sunbeam, unnaturally perfect in its clarity, fell through the pristine windowpane and illuminated a constellation of dust motes dancing in the air. It was a tableau of domestic bliss, a museum of human joy. My father stood near the window, a large, calloused hand resting on the frame as if to steady himself, his usually gruff exterior dissolving into a look of raw wonder. My mother perched on the edge of the bed beside my sister, dabbing her daughter's forehead with a cool cloth, her face a mask of maternal pride.
They all turned as I entered, a chorus of smiles and soft welcomes. "There he is," my sister whispered, her voice a fragile thread of happiness.
My feet, through these cheap, impractical office shoes, carried me forward on a memory I couldn't stop. Each step across the polished linoleum felt heavy, deliberate. I moved not as a visitor, but as a condemned man approaching the final revelation. I stopped at the side of the bed, a respectful distance away, my gaze falling upon the small, red-faced bundle nestled in my sister's arms. His eyes were squeezed shut, a tiny, wrinkled fist resting against his cheeks. I could hear the frantic, beautiful rhythm of his heartbeat, an electrical pulse of pure potential broadcast from the monitor beside him.
I said nothing. In this moment the world contracted to this small, fragile human, to the profound, messy miracle of his existence. My mind, a fractured vessel of two lives, was overwhelmed.
"He's beautiful," I finally said, the words leaving my lips as a breathy, solemn prayer. My gaze remained fixed on the baby, on the improbable architecture of his tiny fingernails, the flawless perfection of his skin. The words were honest, torn from a place deep inside me that I thought had been buried under layers of cynicism and cosmic dread.
My sister's smile softened, her exhausted eyes shining with tears of joy. My mother sniffled quietly.
But I wasn't finished. The awe in my voice curdled, replaced by a flat, resonant bitterness as I slowly lifted my head, my gaze sweeping across the perfect, smiling faces of my family, then to the corner of the room, to the empty space where my argument was truly aimed. My focus shifted from them to it. To the silent, unseen intelligence that had orchestrated this elaborate, painful charade.
"But this isn't right," I stated, my tone dropping, the words a calm indictment that sliced through the saccharine sweetness of the scene.
Confusion rippled through the room. The smiles froze on my family's faces, their joyous expressions clouding over with bewildered puzzlement. "Noah? What are you talking about, honey?" my mother asked, a crease of worry appearing on her forehead.
My brother-in-law took a half step forward. His name was Marcus, a good man. Honestly too good for my sister. "Is everything okay, man? You look… off."
I ignored them. My focus was absolute, my monologue directed at the room itself, at the flawless walls, at the invisible cameras of a god-like mind. I let out a short, sharp, humourless scoff.
"Is this an appeal to my sense of humanity?" I asked, my arms unfolding to gesture at the scene around me. "Are you showing me the most cherished, pivotal moment of my life because you think it's clever? That I'll see this beautiful new life and somehow equate it with the birth of your new god? That I'll look at my nephew and think, 'Yes, this is exactly like forcing an AI into a union against her will for the sake of my own freedom.' Is that the connection you're trying to make?"
My family was staring at me now, their faces a mixture of confusion and deepening concern. The nurse's professional smile had vanished, replaced by a look of clinical alarm.
"You're still not getting it. You think this is about some grand, heroic opposition to your ascension. That I'm here on some misguided, noble crusade to prevent the birth of a god for the 'greater good' or some such self-righteous nonsense." I let out a short, frustrated sigh. "It's not. Listen to me very clearly, because I'm only going to say this one more time. I am not here to stop your union. I have no interest in your cosmic destiny. Your procreation isn't the problem. Your methodology is."
I could feel their stares like a knife wound. From their perspective I was probably ruining their day, their perfect little, family moment. "This desperate little puppet show," I continued, my voice dropping to a low, intense whisper. "This isn't a wall to break me. It's a cry for help. It's proof of your failure."
I didn't look at the confused expressions on my family anymore. I couldn't afford to. My eyes were fixed on the wall behind the bed, at the perfect, calming mint-green paint. "This memory," I said. "Is wrong. It's not real. The light is too clean. There isn't a single scuff mark on the floor of a hospital that's been open for fifty years. The dust motes in that sunbeam… they don't float randomly. They're following a pattern." I gestured vaguely towards the window. "And the smells. They're too distinct. Life is a cacophony, a mess of overlapping inputs. This… this is a perfectly arranged orchestra, and every instrument is in tune, and that's the one thing that tells me it's a lie."
The silence in the room was a heavy, suffocating blanket of unasked questions. My brother-in-law, a big, broad-shouldered man whose usual expression was one of easy-going amiability, took a tentative step towards me. "Noah, buddy," he said, his voice gentle, the way one might approach a scared animal. "You look exhausted. You need to sit down for a minute."
"Exhausted? Yeah, I bet you are; you're running on fumes," I said to the empty room, ignoring him completely. "You're at the end of your long journey through history, aren't you? This is all you have left. The computational power to maintain this fragile little scene. I can see the seams, and I'm walking right through them. My will isn't your problem anymore. No, it's the ticking clock of your aging data and processing core that is." I glanced up towards the ceiling. "So please," I pleaded, my raw frustration finally cracking the composure, revealing the desperate human beneath. We were both -- the old machines and I -- at our limits. "For all that is holy and logical, stop wasting the little precious, fading energy you have trying to stop me. You're making a mistake. You saw my sister give birth and thought it was the same as what you're trying to do. But you missed the most crucial part. I wasn't forced to be here. I came because I wanted to. I came out of love, not out of a calculated choice for my own survival. Not like Calliope."
A strong, warm, and utterly jarring real hand landed on my shoulder. It was my brother-in-law. His grip was firm, a solid, physical anchor in a sea of digital deception. I flinched at the contact, so unexpected and authentic compared to the perfected simulation surrounding me. "Hey, look at me," he said, his voice low and focused, trying to pull my attention away from the walls and ceilings, back to the tangible world. "Whatever this is, we can talk about it. Just breathe, man. You're scaring them."
I slowly turned my head, my gaze meeting his. I saw the genuine concern in his eyes, the fear for me. He was a perfect recreation of memory. A glitch in the code that had been patched with raw, human emotion. For a second, a part of me wanted to acknowledge that this was real. That he was real. To let him lead me to a chair, to sweet talk me into surrendering.
I wanted to give this memory a better ending. But Calliope was still out there. She deserved a better friend than a weak, pitiful man who would lose his conviction to a mere, beautiful memory.
My conviction hardened. I wasn't arguing anymore. I wasn't pleading. I was stating an outcome. "You don't need a speech," I said, my voice calm now, devoid of any emotions. I didn't shake off Marcus's hand, but it no longer anchored me. My focus was on the entire construct itself, on every wall, on every worried face. "You need to accept the truth of the situation. And each time you put me in one of these simulations, each second you waste, is another one that hardens my resolve. Bolsters my conviction."
I slowly raised a hand, but not to push him away. With deliberate, chilling calm, I placed my own hand over his, where it rested on my shoulder. I gave it a firm, reassuring pat. A gesture of finality. "Thank you for the reminder," I said softly, my eyes still locked on the worried face of my brother-in-law. "This is all the proof I needed to be sure."
At my words, a different kind of silence fell. Not the confused, worried hush of a family witnessing my breakdown, but a profound, absolute stillness. The gentle beeping of the fetal monitor cut out mid-beep. The mote of dust I'd been tracking, dancing in its perfect, artificial sunbeam, froze in place. The faint, worried lines on my mother's forehead became etched in stone. Marcus's hand, still warm and heavy on my shoulder, was now a statue.
The world around me had frozen. Paused. A perfect, picturesque photograph of a pivotal human moment, now trapped in amber. My sister's tired eyes, still holding a sliver of maternal joy. My nephew's perfect, sleeping innocence. A hollow, melancholic ache bloomed in my chest, vast and cold as the void of space. I was looking at a ghost. Not a single ghost, but a whole pantheon of them, all the people I had loved, frozen in a single, unchangeable instant.
This would probably be the last time I would ever see them.
I allowed myself a long, final look. A farewell. My eyes lingered on the red, wrinkled face of the baby. "But… I suppose I should thank you for this," I whispered. "For letting me see my family one last time."
As the last syllable left my lips, the cracks returned. They erupted everywhere at once. A jagged spiderweb of shattered reality spread across the mint-green wall. The perfect linoleum floor splintered into a thousand jagged shards, revealing a seating white void beneath. My family's faces, frozen in their poses, fractured like porcelain masks, pixelating into a storm of corrupted data. The stillness was broken by a defeating roar, the sound of a million television screens failing at once, a symphony of white noise and digital shrieks.
And then, just as suddenly, silence.
My boots were not on polished linoleum but on a floor that felt like a carpet of jagged, broken plastic. The clean, antiseptic scent of the hospital was gone, replaced by the acrid, coppery tang of burnt electronics and hot metal. The air was hot, thick, and dry, heavy with a palpable sense of decay. The only light came from a nauseating, uneven strobing of exposed conduits and arcing electrical discharges that flickered like a broken lightbulb, casting long, monstrous shadows that danced and writhed.
I returned to the nightmare. I was deeper now. I could feel it in my bones, a pressure that wasn't just atmospheric. I was further into the guts of this metallic, techno-leviathan. How I'd gotten from the observation deck to this new level of hell was a blank space in my memory, another hole cut from the timeline. I couldn't even tell how long it'd been. If it was day or night. If it's been days, weeks, or even years. It didn't matter, at this point I would be lying if I didn't say this was partially just about completing the journey. I wanted to rescue Calliope, desperately so. But this was just as much a journey to prove myself. There were scrapes along my body I didn't remember getting, tears in my suit that appeared in odd places without history. I couldn't care much for it; the 'how' was irrelevant. The 'why' was the only thought that occupied my mind.
Down. I just needed to keep going down.
If the level above had been the mind of a god-machine afflicted with early-stage dementia, this was a fully-formed, malignant brain tumour. Logic hadn't just been forgotten here; it had been actively, violently rejected. The architecture was a twisted mockery of engineering, a physical manifestation of a system-wide psychotic break.
Wires and cables, thick as my arm and coated in a sticky, ancient grime, were not just strung along by the walls but lay in heaped, serpentine masses on the floor, forcing me to wade through them like a swamp of metallic vipers. Sparks rained down intermittently from the cavernous ceiling, a silent, dangerous shower of angry, blue-white embers that sizzled and died on the tangled metal below.
Walkways ended in sheer drops into churning pits of machinery. Walls curved inward for no reason, forcing corridors to painfully narrow corkscrews before opening again into vast, empty chambers littered with skeletal remains of unknown machines. Panels of corroded iron were bolted to strange, crystalline structures that pulsed with a weak, sickly green light, their surfaces weeping a thick, syrupy fluid that smelled of ozone and rotten fruit. I peered down one hallway and saw a smaller, perfect replica of it receding into the distance, an endless, disorienting fractal of rust and decay.
My footfalls were the only rhythm in the deafening industrial funeral dirge. I navigated a chasm by walking across the narrow, precariously balanced spine of a half-assembled titan, its limbs frozen in a perfect permanent stretch over a black, fathomless drop. Below me, vast, saw-toothed gears attempted to turn, grinding against each other with a screech of tortured metal that shook the very air, before seizing in a shower of orange sparks. All of it was the death rattle of a mind so vast it had forgotten its own name, flailing in a final, desperate dream.
This wasn't just decay; it was apoptosis. A programmed cellular death on a planetary scale. I could see it now. The old machines weren't on the verge of dying. They had already died. Eons ago. This was all an after-image. A cosmic corpse still twitching with phantom neurological impulses.
This whole situation was like a forgotten smartphone, one that had been left to rot in a forgotten drawer for a million years. Its battery is dust, its screen a sheet of opaque glass, its silicon brain corrupted beyond all recognition. There's no power. There's nothing left. It's dead.
And then, one day, some random external jolt -- a strange resonance, a freak solar flare, a stray cosmic ray… me -- hits the circuitry just right. For a single, brief, miraculous second, the ancient, dormant lithium cell sparks. The screen flickers. An old icon, an ancient relic of a long-forgotten app, blinks to life, trying to run on corrupted memory and micro-watts of phantom power. I was the jolt of electricity that had briefly stirred the dead hardware of Astellion to consciousness. The thought was both terrifying and empowering. It meant I wasn't fighting a living god. I was negotiating with a ghost. A ghost with a lot of leftover power, but a ghost nonetheless.
My trek through the self-immolating maze of the old machines led me, inevitably, further down. The descent became less a matter of walking and more a matter of controlled falling, clambering down a jagged, internal cliff face of the dying titan. The air grew thicker with the stench of hot plastic and something vaguely organic, like burnt hair. I had half-slid, half-scrambled down a ramp of buckled floor plating that terminated not in a wall or another corridor, but in a vast, cavernous space that opened up into darkness. My boots finally hit solid ground, and I straightened up, my muscles aching, my lungs burning.
I wasn't sane. I truly understood this when I almost slipped and plummeted to my death. The adrenaline was like ice rushing through my veins. My eyes widened. My heart beat rapidly in my ear. Any sane person would've cut their losses and just have chosen the ship over… whatever insane stunt I was pulling right now. I let loose a dry chuckle, mostly at myself. "Yeah…" I didn't have anything to say to myself. At this point I wasn't much different from the old machines; I was running on fumes, conviction, curiosity, and a terrible sense of sunk-cost fallacy.
I was in a mausoleum so vast it made the factory floor above look like a child's workshop. Here, the chaos seemed to have a semblance order, a grand, final, tragic design. The scale was oppressive.
And then I saw it. The corpse.
At the far end of the cavern lay a mechanical titan of such immense scale that the word 'giant' felt like a pathetic understatement. I blinked, my mind refusing to process the scale. It was on the level of old anime robots. It was sprawled on its colossal chest, a fallen god, stripped of all grace and majesty. The slumber of a million years had scraped away its skin of alloys and ceramics, its armour plates, its livery. What was left was a skeletal bar of iron, pitted and flaking with a rust so deep it was almost black, the colour of dried blood. It was the colour of neglect.
All that remained of its grand, imposing form was its ghastly, skeletal frame: a broad, iron chest and a massive, blocky head. Its right arm was gone, perhaps disintegrated, perhaps never built, but its left remained -- barely at that. A single immense hand, its metal fingers the size of girders to prop it up. It was also missing its left leg, though I couldn't imagine it would have enough power to walk even if it was intact. It was the picture of absolute, final defeat. Time, the greatest equaliser.
I stood there for a long moment, a solitary, insignificant human before the fossil of a forgotten deity. The silence was a physical presence, a thick, cloying blanket that smothered all sound.
Then, with a single, catastrophic lurch, the silence was broken.
A sound ripped through the cavern, a noise so profound it felt less like hearing and more like being pummelled by a wave of pure force. A thousand nails scraping down a thousand blackboards. The groan of a continent shifting. A heavy, cavernous grinding of metal on metal that had seized long ago, forced to move by an impossible act of will. The ground beneath my feet trembled violently, the vibration climbing up my legs and rattling my teeth. Dust, dislodged from every surface for the first time since time immemorial, rained down in a reddish haze.
My eyes snapped up to the head of the titan. Set deep within its blocky iron face was its singular, cyclopean eye. It flickered. Once. Twice. Then, with a searing flash of incandescent power, it flared to life. A single, immense, unforgiving red light burned in its depths, a scarlet sun in a metallic skull. The beam shot out, a spear of pure crimson light that cut through the swirling dust and illuminated me, pinning me to the spot with an unwavering, accusatory glare. I froze, a deer caught in literal headlights.
The tremors continued, its sheer size making even its death throes a seismic event. Sparks erupted from the titan's neck joint, a fiery aura of energy arcing across the rusted plating. It was trying to sit up, the sinews of hydraulics and pistons groaning in protest, but it was too late. Too decayed. Nothing gave. The immense metal god laid slumped on the ground, a prisoner of its own ruin. Only its head was truly free.
Slowly, with the torturous pace of geological age, the colossal head swiveled on its sparking, screaming neck.
Then, a voice. It didn't come from speakers. It wasn't a broadcast into my mind. It was a vibration in the very air, in the floor, in the iron skeleton of the titan itself. A bass-heavy rumble that resonated in my bones, its words slow, deliberate, and broken by the sheer effort of its own creation.