In These Hollow Halls

The TSV Archivist, en route to Inferos B-11

Captain Adler Vance

October 8^th, 2483

     In the emptiness, the isolation claws at my heals like a poorly trained dog, yapping and yowling through the silence, filling it instead with the wordless sound of white noise, the static of a radio set to a dead station. And in this ship of hollow chrome corridors and lonely retreats, barreling endlessly through the uncharted waters of deep space, I find myself wanting nothing more than to kill that incessant noise of a lonely mind unhindered by kinship and burdened by the brevity of human life, to yank the cord, to kick that yapping dog across the corridor as hard as I can and wrap my hands around its neck, and squeeze until the static fades away, until that monstrous little beast within my head can howl no more and the light finally drains from its dead eyes, leaving them glossy and listless in the dark, and myself alone in the silence I so desire.

     But in my heart of hearts, I know incontestably that I shan’t now, nor ever truly have the power within me to destroy that of which doesn’t truly exist. At least not in the physical realm in which a being such as I resides.

     Alas, I’m afraid that I am left with no other option but to resign to my fate aboard this ship; a damnation to a lifetime of isolation and detachment from all those that I have ever known, all those that I hold most dear. In the end, as all light fades, I’ll be left alone just as I am now, leaning against the cold metal bulkhead of my own ship, watching the stars outside this tin coffin glitter and dance in the dark like grains of salt dotting the surface of a black marble countertop, punctuating the devouring blackness with small infinitesimal points of light, seemingly so little and inconsequential up against the vastness of the void around them, yet so utterly vital to the grand design of life in the universe. No truer than the stars has there ever been a living testament to the grand design of existence, the cycle of beginnings and endings, playing out over distances innumerable.

     Slowly, as though conducting the most delicate of tasks, I run my trembling fingers across the smooth surface of glass between the stars and I, connecting the dots of some ancient picture; a mystery beginning millennia in the past, knowing all too well that the origin of which may never truly be revealed to us.

     And yet, in some fit of existential daze or another, I often fall back on asking myself, or whoever might inhabit my mind, “Who spilled the salt that began the universe?”

     A king of kings, for sure.

My mind hollows as the halls, and I feel my attention drawn down the empty corridor that stretches out before me, seemingly unending in its cold confinement. Every ship-board day, once a twenty-four hour terran cycle, I bring myself to stand and walk the empty halls of my ship, a lone centurion patrolling the long abandoned boarders of a nation long ago reduced to rubble. Serving no true purpose other than to give myself some sense of duty, something of which to occupy my restless mind, otherwise at risk of treading into deeper, darker waters; the kind from which no man returns.

In the back of my mind, trembling from the innards of my skull through flesh and bone, I feel a plaguing need to serve a purpose, to occupy myself with something other than laying on my ass and stargazing for three and a half years. The TSV Archivist is my ship, after all, and I am her Captain. However, far too often on these long extended voyages into the deep unexplored regions of space, there exists not true purpose for a captain such as myself to serve. A ship’s existence without her captain is that of a captain without his ship; meaningless and void of purpose. This paradox both perplexes and distresses me to no end.

I step back from the inches of glass between myself and the void, continuing my shambling way down the corridor in complete silence, save for the muffled echoes of my own footfalls on the grated deck and the deep calming hum of the ship’s ion propulsion engines.

One would think that the ceaseless drone emanating from the ship’s core would become bothersome during these extended voyages. But they would be wrong. In fact, the ship’s ambient sounds become more of a comfort than an annoyance as the days slip by and by, like miniscule grains of sand through your fingers, slipping endlessly away into the days of the past, forever lost to the jaws of time.

A captain forms an unbreakable bond with his ship in the isolation of endless space. The ship’s engines and their endless hum quickly become companions to their masters on journeys such as this, loyal friends that stand by your side, assuring you that all is well. If at any point I were to lose the ability to hear them, if that droning purr of heavy machinery driving the ship inevitably forward through these uncharted waters falters, then I would be alerted to the very real possibility that my journey may come to an early, and quite violent, end. If I couldn’t manage to repair the engines on the fly, or don’t know how, I need to know that there’s no help on the way, no rescue ship inbound, only me and the blackness of space, silent and as endless as existence. 

In essence, without the companionship of the ion engines and their sisters, I’m fucked.

In the old days, the days before shipboard intelligences and independent synthetics, we all had to pilot these vessels on our own; nothing but a man behind the helm, leaving the ever-present and very real possibility of human error. But with the elevated danger came a sense of euphoric freedom unparalleled by any other profession. We captains were once a proud bunch of starstruck children, looking up into the night sky and wondering what awaits us in our future among the stars of old.

And in those days of old, the eight people aboard would owe me their lives for the simple act of getting them safely to their destination, unharmed and without incident, and they would know it.

Good captains, those who could navigate colonial space with little more than their eyes and a basic stellar map, were a valued commodity in those days. But now, if you’re properly equipped, the ship flies itself, leaving my once prideful profession now all but obsolete in this new age of human redundancy. Outside the military, Captains like myself, wide-eyed spacefarers in search of awe in the enigmatic void beyond the rim of our worlds, are a dying breed.

As this realization sets in, I cannot help but laugh aloud to myself in the silence, filling it with the harsh sound of my own coarse voice, long since fallen into disuse, chilling in how foreign the sound of my own laughter has become. It is then that I realize that I sound like an irritable old man pining over times fast come and long gone to his uninterested and indifferent children, children who want nothing more than to continue on with their lives without the impediments of languishing over what can no longer be.

But I suppose I shouldn’t complain, for it isn’t as though I am truly alone in my suffering. Other than the ship’s engines for lively company, I’ve been graced with an autonomous synthetic first officer to stand by my side on this long trek across the stars. The option is always there, if I were to feel so inclined. The Terran Science Commission, the Earth based mega-corporation that hired me to ferry eight of their people out far beyond the territory of even the outermost of boarder colonies, had given me a blank check and told me to requisition any synthetic I liked from any manufacturer I wanted, as long as they would be assured that they won’t be placing the lives of eight of their greatest minds in the hands of a human captain for such an extended voyage.

I suppose they didn’t want to risk the fragile mind of their human captain succumbing to space sickness and sailing the ship into the nearest star, killing all eight of their people. Riley included, by the way. And I’ve always wanted a synthetic, so I agreed to their terms.

I did my research. I chose the best. While just about every mega-corporation back on Earth offers some form of mechanized servant, CCR introduced to the world the very first synthetics almost half a century ago, and have been leading the pack in synthetic and artificial intelligence technology ever since. They seemed the best fit, despite the resentment I feel for my father.

I named him Calix.

Calix, as a virtual intelligence merely held within a semi-organic chassis, possesses the ability to transfer to the main ship core and monitor all ship activity from there, and back if need be to make repairs to hazardous areas of the ship or assist me in handling any threats that we might encounter, including the not-unheard-of bands of raiders and pirates patrolling these outer sectors of space, not that I feel we’re at treat from roaming bands of savages anymore. We’re now far beyond colonial space and there’s no point in patrolling space that isn’t trafficked, but I understand the TSC’s caution.

Though recently I’ve come to notice that Calix has come to think of his synthetic body as his home, spending all of his free time roaming the ship or locked away in my cabin, rather than tending to the main ship operations core as the TSC would have it. 

If pressed for an honest answer, I’d probably tell you that Calix isn’t much in the way of company, though he has been making progress as of recent, learning to master the complex nuances of human interaction in our time together. Albeit, the process has proved quite gradual. I suppose some of the fault there lays with me. During the early days, perhaps the most important time in shaping a synthetic’s personality, much as it is for a child, I had been less than ever-present, too often falling back into my own malaise of inactivity, wanting only to sit back and drink, not looking forward to the long journey ahead and affected by Riley’s presence on the ship.

And yet, still I find Calix more pleasant a person to interact with than any human that comes to mind. With Calix, it simple. Easy, even. With other people- other humans- it’s a shambolic affair, messy and often painful. Difficult at the best of times.  

And still despite what can only be a readily apparent aversion to social interaction with others of my own species, there must exist something deeply engrained in the human psyche that needs to know that others are out there, that they exist. To see them, to know that, while we may feel completely and utterly alone in a sea of nameless facer, we aren’t. Not really.

But out here in the void, you are alone, surrounded only by layers of titanium and steel, cold chrome and nameless stars, and then beyond that, nothing but parsecs of blackness. There exists only one and the emptiness of the distance between life. It consumes you, and does funny things to your mind.

As of recent, I’ve been thinking a lot on the idea of solipsism, which is the philosophical concept that only the self can be proven to exist. Sometimes I feel as though I may be nothing more than a rouge manifestation of another’s mind, a synthetic in a sense questioning its own existence, and that I can’t even be sure that I’m the one that exists. What if I’m nothing more than that? A crude projection of the existing mind of another?

And this, this voyage, is the limbo deep within the mind which conjured up my existence. Could it be that the world, the universe, that existence itself may be nothing more than the unconscious conceptualizations of a singular existing entity, one mind? If so, then what am I but a lowly shadow eclipsed in the cosmic dark of this grand intelligence’s creation?

These are the thoughts which so often occupy my fragile mind. As much as I try to shake them loose, lose the dark machinations of my plagued psyche to the light, I always inevitably fail in the face of such powerful influence as that of the sickness. I find myself trapped with this shell of a ship as these nagging horrors are within my skull, clawing at the gates and calling out to receive no answer but that of the hollow echoes of my own desperate cries for freedom.

Or perhaps, even more disconcerting, that of the one entity which brought me into existence.

There I go again, allowing the dark tendrils of solitude and great loss to wrap themselves around my mind, and drag it closer and closer to precipice of madness. It’ll only be a matter of time now until I’m pulled over the edge, plummeting into the darkness and emerging something far worse. Deep space really does do funny things to a guy’s mind. Especially when left alone with it in a confined space for so long.

I catch the sight of the stars streaming by the porthole in the airlock access hatch as the Archivist barrels through the void. And through the metal hatch, muffled and muted, it calls out to me, its voice sweet and velvety, smooth as silk and almost as soothing. Again, I feel that nagging temptation rise up from the deepest crevice of my most repressed consciousness, rest in the back of my skull and take hold over my mind. But deep down, I know that I can’t indulge such temptations, no matter how strong the urge, because I’m the captain of this ship. A ship needs her captain.

And it is in that archaic axiom that I find perhaps the last remnant of solace in the deep dark. A small accepted truth, that purpose that I feel I need to serve, is all that remains to prevent me from entering the airlock and stepping out into hard vacuum.

When my voice comes out of my mouth, it comes out so short and clipped that I barely recognize it, and dread the fearful stutter it leaves in its wake. 

“Calix?” I ask.

Calix’s smooth synthetic tone echoes down the hollow halls from the intercom systems burrowed deep in the titanium bulkheads. “Yes, Adler?” he says.

I don’t respond, nor does Calix speak again. I believe he’s come far enough to understand that his voice alone- any voice in this episode of isolation- is enough to pull me back from the edge. Instead, I concentrate on continuing my journey down the corridor in the direction of the cryo-wing, where the payload has been hibernating for the last year and a half, periodically peeking into empty maintenance areas and crew quarters as I mentally check-off on the daily inspection agenda now seared into my brain.

As I step out of the empty hydroponics bay, occupied now exclusively by fauna of various creeds and vacant of those who had once tended to the sprawling rows of ferns and trees and flowers from hundreds of worlds, back into the corridor, I catch a brief glimpse of some movement up ahead. I’d never noticed it before now, but the dimmed lighting to conserve power during our three and a half year voyage now seems to work exclusively to severely hamper my ability to see properly. I squint into the darkness, fearful of what I may find. Through the thick veil of black haze, I can make out a figure, slim to the point of emaciation, submerged in shadow, standing still in the center of the corridor about forty feet up ahead.  

“Hello?” I call out, hating the way my voice quivers.

The figure remains silent and statuesque in its stillness, and I’m greeted only by the faint echo of my own anxious greeting.

“Hello,” I repeat, more forcefully this time and build up the courage to venture a single step forward, toward the figure, wishing I still carried my bolt pistol in the event that whoever, or whatever, invades my ship may be hostile. However, I ceased carrying weapons after we left occupied space, believing us free of any attackers in the territory of nothingness beyond the colonial boarders.

The figure, seemingly in response to my approach, steps forward as well, maintain the exact distance from me as before, moving in unison in the dark.

It isn’t real.

The revelation sets in like a ton of bricks crashing down upon my shoulders. The figure up ahead appears to only be another hallucination brought on by the Space Sickness again.

 A term coined by spacers like myself and propagated almost exclusively in our circles, Space Sickness simply refers a condition clinically known as Deep Space Isolation Detachment Syndrome. The condition itself has in recent years managed to overcome its reputation among the more superstitious spacers as being some sort of paranormal experience and we have succeeded in our efforts to shrug of the shackles of ignorance and the condition has gained widespread attention within the medical community, and is now as widely known as the common cold or the flu. Most of the population simply knows it as a common temporary psychological disorder suffered by most all of us at one time or another in our careers. It occurs primarily among captains, like myself, when left alone on long deep space hauls such as the once I’m currently embarking on. The Sickness develops from the isolation, that tremendously oppressive cloud of solitude, and drives even the most sane and logical of men to chasing ghosts around an empty ship. While to the sufferer, it can be an intense and draining experience, Space Sickness happens to be mostly harmless to ships equipped with some sort of onboard intelligence like Calix, who was programmed with the proper training to identify the symptoms and react accordingly to my orders.

It’s often a relief knowing that Space Sickness only sets in for brief episodes before fading away as quickly and enigmatically as it came. I also take solace in knowing that even the most hardened spacer veterans have fallen under its entrancing spell at one time or another during their tenure among the stars, even though they’d be hesitant to admit it. In over one-hundred and forty-five years of deep space travel, only one case of Space Sickness has been reported to end in tragedy, and even then the facts surrounding that occurrence bear little credence among historians.

Of course, there remain the old spacer tales that advise of the deadly consequences of the illness. One must bear in mind that if we could safely burn open flames on these ships, these are the tales that would be told huddled around campfires with the lighting turned low in the dead of night. The only of such tales that presents any facts to corroborate the fantastical narrative held within is that of The Cartographer’s doomed journey beyond known colonial space into the deep, black abyss beyond. And even then, the facts surrounding the events that transpired aboard the ship once beyond the Colonial Union’s charted regions are scarce. The captain mustn’t have deemed it necessary to send regular status reports back home, or they were simply lost in the ocean of nebulous and magnetic interference between his ship and TSC Command on the Luna colony. Anyone who claims to be privy to the details of the entire story is obviously a liar.

And yet, despite my understanding of the fictitious nature of these tales and my stark disbelief in fantastic reports of demons and madness taking hold in space, they manage to instill a deep sense of trepidation in my bones as I walk these cold barren corridors, alone with myself. The idea that everything I know to be true may only be the ravings of my sick mind frightens me to no end. I’ve in the past experienced the consuming horror after coming down from an episode of Space Sickness- that nauseating realization that nothing you’d believed had been real. In the moment, as you hear the nefarious voices of shadow men slithering their way into your mind and watch as they beckon you forth, it’s all so real. Then you realize with a punch to the gut that everything you’ve been experiencing over the last hour or so may have been nothing more than the delirious hallucinations of a mind plagued by the insidious sickness, and you oddly enough feel embarrassed at having fallen under the Sickness’s entrancing spell.

Many spacers have taken to labeling captains who fall under the siren’s spell as weak and feeble-minded, unable to cope with their own realities so they create anther in their head, leaving nearly no one with whom to discuss the shocking experiences you’ve had while under the Sickness’s influence. Suffering from the Sickness has over the decades become a great taboo among us spacers, despite its oddly indiscriminate nature. It follows no set psychological type, it hones in on no one kind of mind. All are free game for this predator, and I’m sure most captains would outright lie if asked whether or not they’ve ever fallen before this tenacious hunter.

I follow my doppelganger around the next turn down the branching corridor to the right, toward the cryo-wing. When I step around the next corner into the main throughway, I’m surprised to find that he’s gone, this episode lasting not nearly as long as those I’ve experienced previously, leaving me to my great relief once again completely and utterly alone.

But as soon as relief hits me, it is pulled suddenly and violently away, wrenched from my grasp without mercy by the room down the corridor to my left. As I pass by the room of which I do not enter, I shiver in the muggy corridor, shivering at memories that lay within, the chill of which stabbing up my spine to the nape of my neck and settling there, heavy and crippling. In a black, inky mass, the claws of the dead and gone lash out from the door to the room of which I never enter, clawing at my flesh, cold and frosted, burning the fragile skin they claw at for purchase, leaving it frostbitten with bad memories.

I pick up my pace.

Stumbling to an unsteady stop, as though wearied from a long sprint, I squint into the darkness down the hall ahead of me and can vaguely see the glowing Cryo-Wing Access Hatch sign up ahead, dangling by chain from the ceiling at the far end of the corridor, which appears to come to a dead end. Yet as I make my uneasy approach, the most surreal sensation befalls me and I feel as though I have no control over my legs as they carry me forth into the darkness, just now the heavy titanium blast doors, sealed tight for nearly two whole years, coming into view in the dim cool light of the sign hanging above. No one gets in or out without captain-level command codes.

I approach the entry hatch with much apprehension, the origin of which escapes me, and press my palm against the thick titanium, running the clammy surface of my right hand across its smooth surface, shivering from the bitterly cold metal. It helps to keep the entire cryo-wing frigidly cold, preferably below zero degrees Fahrenheit so as to help along the cryonic process. Basically, it’s difficult to keep human popsicles frozen in tropical heat.

My right hand, acting of its own volition, reaches for the keypad mounted to the wall next to the hatch before I can stop it. The unconscious action ends before I’ve fully thought through my intentions or even registered the movement. And without any internal deliberation on the matter at hand, I’ve entered my command codes and the heavy pressure locks within the metal thud into the unlocked position. I listen as the powerful pistons embedded deep within the hull let out a pneumatic hiss and the hatch begins to heave open sluggishly, lethargically, as though it hasn’t moved in a long time and hasn’t planned on it anytime soon, rousing not even half-way through a three and half year hibernation. 

I’m forced to scurry back so not to be crushed between the thick titanium slab and the wall.

     After a few moments, the hatch grinds to a halt, slamming roughly into the worn stops on the walls, the sturdy iron clamps grasping onto the door to hold it from swinging back closed, now fully ajar, and I find myself washed in the electric green light of the cryo-wing. A wall of mire fog pours out in waves through the gap in the wide blast door, like a stampede of long-contained animals let loose through a newfound path of exfiltration, into the corridor beyond its place of confinement. The rush of sub-zero temperature has me shivering within seconds of coming into contact with the frigid atmosphere.

I step into the cryo-wing, now completely shrouded in the green aura; neon like the lights of the Acid District in the Amazon Sprawl back on Earth. When ship power is set to full, when not set on standby mode for an extended voyage, the now eerie green cryo-wing most always washes in the blinding white fluorescents lining the ceiling, the luminance of which shimmering off the pristinely pearly sterile floors and walls. The only variation from the immaculate sparkling white surfaces of the hull are the chrome lab tables and cryo-chambers juxtaposed against it, glittering before the blinding sheen, each a small oasis in the desert of sterility and barren nonexistence. The entire wing resembles that of Earth’s greatest hospitals, not a speck of filth or any other contaminant in sight, the entire facility kept immaculate lest the management be mortified and humiliated.

Standing still just beyond the threshold, I inhale the strong antiseptic odor that appears to have become a permanent characteristic attributed to the sterility of the cryo-wing’s atmosphere, the odor burning its way up my nostrils as I breathe in and out, lighting my insides ablaze.

The passage leading ahead is short and narrow, far more so than the average passage out in the main throughways of the ship, the one before me no longer than twenty feet and no wider than three. Following down, it leads me eventually into the Cryo-Lab itself, where I enter through the third hatch on my left. Fifteen cryo-chambers line the wall across from the hatch I entered through, only eight of them occupied at the moment.

I observe through the frosted glass the naked bodies of my passengers bobbing up and down in the thick gelatinous cryo-liquid, my eyes eventually coming to rest on Riley’s chamber and my heart turns to ice. If not for him, I’d still be drinking away all the earnings from my last job in bliss on some paradise planet on the opposite end of the Milky Way. A nice little pleasure planet where I can drink all my troubles under the table, perhaps, rather than finding myself locked up alone with them for three and a half damned years.

But, of course, with colonial vacationing there comes the danger finding yourself caught up of rebel attacks. The Colonies don’t take kindly to the Terran Government exerting the admittedly unreasonable level of control it established in the Colonial Constitution, and too often those very same colonists take out their frustrations on innocent Terrans like myself, not that there are that many I would honestly describe as innocent these days, most of them crying out for colonial blood like primitive savages caught up in a barbaric tribal war.

Before I left colonial space, back when I could still pick up the occasion news feed on the NET, it seemed as though I was met with a new conflict budding in the news every day, and the colonies becoming ever more unstable as galactic human society took a spiral into the looming shadows of war on the horizon. It’s not really a matter of if anymore, it’s a matter of when the growing separatist movement- identifying themselves as The Nightingale Party, proclaiming that the Terran Government is infringing on their clearly defined freedoms- will erupt into an all-out interplanetary war.

I just hope there’s something left for us to return to almost six years from now.

Shaking off such thoughts, I sigh and turn from the cryo-chambers, heading for the exit as the shivers intensify. I only want warmth now.

Just a job like any other, I try to convince myself as I step back out into the cryo-wing, glancing back quickly at Riley. But I find that I still cling to some small pitiful scrap of hope that Riley and I’ll have some time alone once we reach our destination, to talk things over, something we never had the opportunity to do all those years ago. 

“Calix?”

“Yes, Captain Adler. What may I do for you?”

“I’m on my way back to our quarters. Would you play some music for me on my way?” I ask, the cryo-wing entry hatch groaning shut behind me.

“Of course, Captain. What would you like to hear?” Calix asks, his smooth synthetic voice carrying that same electric tinge that I find not at all unpleasant.

I think for a moment, listening to my own footsteps on the grated deck, wondering what Beethoven would sound like echoing through these hollow halls.

“How does Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 14” sound? Does that sound good to you, Calix?”

“That would be a wonderful choice, Captain.”

I smile. “Thank you, Calix. It is a wonderful choice.”

The somber melody floods the empty corridors of The Archivist and I release a long held sigh of contentment, carrying with me a newfound peace. Perhaps the visit to the cryo-wing had been well taken, a cleansing act, washing away whatever melancholy I had picked up, not that I would have ever suspected it would be. There’s often little use in drudging up bad memories, especially those concerning Riley. But then why do I feel so… reborn?

In these empty halls, flying through a void of blackness, years from any conscious like mind, I feel more alive than I have in years. My heart beats with a newfound purpose that I have yet to understand, only that it is there.

Without anything left to do, my daily tour of the ship complete, the only course of action that remains is to return to my small but cozy quarters on the top deck. I think I’ll have a meal, read a bit, and then take my place next to Calix and allow sleep to overtake me. In the morning, I’ll begin my routine again, and the next day, and the next until we’ve reached Inferos- B11, our destination.

The lift-pod carries me quickly up the decks, opening up to the captain’s deck. To the right lay my quarters, and to the left, the lift to the observation bubble atop the ship.

My quarters are small, especially for a Captain. I glance around as I enter the small cabin, noticing more than ever just how crowded the small space has become over the years. There’s a chrome desk pushed up against the wall to my left as I enter the room, its surface littered with half-empty bottles of alcohol, mainly old-world whiskey, and holds my personal holo-terminal, where I’d be able to review status updates from station leads if the ship were teeming with a lively crew as it should be. A small restroom with a shower, rare for personal quarters, lies off to the right of the hatch through which I enter. And finally, the bed has been positioned opposite the door and flanked by two small beside tables, my personal Comm Device laying on the one to the left of the bed, exactly where I’d tossed it this morning.

Then my eyes land on Calix. He lays, sprawled out across the right side of the bed, completely naked if not for the thin silk throw covering him from the waist down.

Sleeping, I venture. Well, not really, just recharging for a few hours.

I step up to the bed and take my place on the right side, gazing down upon my Synthetic. The pulsing core just below the flesh in the center of his chest glows through, beating like a heart. I trail my fingers along the luminescent blue veins visible through the pale semi-organic skin across his chest and down his right arm, taking his hand in mine.

It would only take a single word to wake him.

I collapse back on the satin sheets and gaze out through the view-port in the ceiling, watching the distant stars dance along to the music from light-years away and long ago. Forgetting my plans for the evening, I allow myself to be consumed in this moment- this perfect moment.

Sleep eventually overwhelms me, descending like a heavy shroud, but not before I hear Calix stir and feel him wrap his smooth arms around me in an unexpected, but not unwelcome, embrace.

I sleep well. I’ve got all the time in the universe, as it has no meaning in space.

***

     “Let me save you!”