Finding Damo

The story of a man, his job, two cats and the meaning of success.

Archive for the tag “Captain Kirk”

05 Jun 2012

Every Sparrow that Falls: the Final Chapter.

The voice in his head sounded desperate. But.

‘Who are you?’ Chuck asked. ‘What are you doing in my head?’ His mind was trying to convince him that everything was fine. But it wasn’t fine. He’d been shot at. His head was killing him. So was the radiation. And now he had voices in his head. And nobody ever thought that was a good sign.

Friend, his head told him. Here to help. Dying. Stop. Stop radiation.

‘Are you a min-min?’ he asked. He still didn’t quite trust the energy blobs. His only response was a sense of puzzlement. He felt puzzled. ‘I mean, one of the energy balls.’ And comprehension dawned on him.

Yes. Min-min. Dying!

Chuck felt a sense of urgency during that last statement. He realised with shock that Caitlin was right: the radiation was dispersing the energy balls. And the energy balls were alive. They were killing his guides. Had killed them, for all he knew.

Yes! Stop it!

‘Cait!’

‘Is it working? I can-’

‘Turn it off! Quickly! We made a mistake!’

‘You made a mistake!’ Caitlin retorted. ‘No, no, never mind,’ she continued as he tried to repeat his plea, ‘I am a professional. I turned it off as soon as you told me. Your skin won’t stop burning until we get you treated. And that should be soon. Get back to the ship.’

‘I’m coming,’ Chuck said. ‘You won’t believe this. I’m hearing voices.’

‘What won’t I believe?’ Cait asked.

‘Ha, ha. I’m on my way.’ Chuck signed out and prepared to run.

Go now, the voice said. Plenty of time.

The laser beam burned a hole in the back of his left boot as he hit the stairs running.

 

Back in the sunlight, Chuck slowed.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. There was a long pause. ‘Well?’

Wait, came the voice. Difficult. Looking for speech. Ah, there it is.

The change in his passenger’s language was immediate and obvious.

We are human, said the voice. It was female, from its cadence. It was like a voice remembered, one that had spoken only moments before, but it bypassed his ears. When your ancestors left the planet – I am assuming you are from Earth originally?

Chuck went to nod, realised that might be completely useless, and said ‘Yes.’

When your ancestors left, she continued, many stayed behind. Some were mad. Most were useless. A very few were brilliant. We fought the machines and subjugated them. We concentrated on restoring the planet. The main obstacle to that was humanity itself. And then we realised that we could live forever without our bodies. It seemed like a fair trade. Immortality and a planet restored for the simple price of our flesh.

‘I don’t know,’ Chuck said. ‘I kind of enjoy my flesh.’ He looked back over his shoulder, remembering. ‘Wait! Your friends, the min-min. Did they survive?’

The moment these words formed in his mind to be spoken, a great wave of sadness hit him. Tears welled up in his eyes.

No, she said. They were dispersed.

‘You were close to them?’ he asked.

No. But emotions are always experienced strongly within the host. I cannot help it. I am sorry. The loss of the team is unfortunate. We rarely reproduce, especially with the machines being so belligerent. But no, I was not close to them. There is your ship!

Chuck’s eyes were drawn to the ship. It was a lot further away than he should have been able to recognise it. A pleasant side effect. Pleasant.

‘You’re female?’ he asked.

Yes, she said. Apologies. My name is Flip. Philipa Nias. I grew up in Melbourne – the city you are in now – and was lucky enough to be involved in the last conversions. I don’t honestly know why we bothered to keep our gender-alignments. I think it is just a part of who I am. And you can stop thinking whatever you’re thinking. I can feel your hormone levels rising.

Chuck blushed.

‘We’re almost there,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do? I need to go back to the ship for radiation treatment. I’ll need to make a proper report about my experiences since arriving, including the existence of a new life form or three. Are you coming with?’

Flip considered this. Off the planet? The radiation would disperse me.

‘I’ll ask Cait, but I think that we are shielded enough for you to come aboard safely.’

Something new to ride, Flip mused. Chuck felt himself being persuaded, which was an unusual sensation. They arrived at the ship. I think I should. Yes, that would indeed be an experience.

Feeling unusually happy, Chuck whistled as he ran through the pre-launch activities that would get him and his invisible passenger off the planet. As he was packing away the last of the supplies he had removed from the ship, his eye caught the corpse of a small bird. He tried to look away, but his gaze was fixed.

Wait, Flip said. Please. We need to bury him.

Chuck thought: ?

I owe him, Flip said. As I owe you. Please.

Nodding, Chuck dug a small hole in the soft earth and placed the sparrow gently into it. He covered the bird with soil and replaced the grass divot.

Do you still have religion? Flip asked him. The Bible? God?

‘Well,’ Chuck said. ‘Gods. There are a good number of them. But there is The One God. Not that anybody believes He’s the only one any more. He had a Bible.’

Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing, it says. That’s what makes a Rider. Take care of the individuals and the world will be fine.

‘That sounds like a plan,’ Chuck said. ‘Who knows what will come from this meeting of two individuals?’

All thanks to that little guy, said Flip. Oh dear. I’m starting to sound like you now. Before we go, I think there’s one person that should come with us. She established a link and gave her friend the invitation. Chuck caught the gist of it through their shared thoughts.

 

‘Hang on, Captain who?’

 

Space: The final frontier.

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30 May 2012
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Every Sparrow that Falls – Chapter Seven

So far, so good, Flip thought. The human was following the newly effective communicators. There was a tense moment when he just screamed for no reason. If she hadn’t spent so much time with the Captain, she might have reacted badly. As it was, the human’s guides almost dissipated themselves. But they held together and didn’t show much outward reaction. They were well trained, even if their construct leader was a little loopy.

They led their charge to the building with the machines. This whole area of the city was dedicated to cultural pursuits. One section was an art gallery, another a media repository. Within that building, in a protected bunker well beneath the eroding surface structures, lived the machines. Not all of the machines. But the majority of those that were found in this city. And only the sentients. Before the Abandonment, humanity maintained an unhealthy dependance on computers. Of course, this led to the eventual transformation of those left behind into the form Flip now held. But the machines, stupid and only barely alive, were still treated with disdain amongst those left behind.

And now they held the key to communicating with the newcomer. Flip watched the man as he walked calmly behind his guides. Flip assumed he was calm. Apart from the screaming he hadn’t shown any signs of agitation. But of course, the last time Flip had seen an agitated human was her own reflection in the mirror as the drill came down towards her skull to insert the probes…
The Captain came up behind her to see what was happening. ‘Is that. A real person?’

‘Yes, Captain,’ Flip replied. ‘I am sorry that I upset you.’

‘Me? Never. Everything will be. All right. In the end. The Enterprise is. Probably looking for me. Right now.’ Flip gave an affirmative signal. Of course, Kirk had been created almost a thousand years ago now, so if he had come here in a transporter accident, as he maintained, there was little chance of his crew still trying to find him.

‘Where are. They going?’ the Captain asked.

‘Down to the machines,’ Flip answered. ‘We cannot communicate with him. He cannot hear us and his technology is too different to interface with our systems. At least the machines can talk directly to him. Work as intermediaries.’

‘Don’t trust. The Machines,’ Kirk said. ‘Every time. We’ve encountered a. Sentient computer. It has tried. To kill us!’

‘That doesn’t sound plausible,’ Flip said, still watching the screen. The human was following his guides down a flight of metal stairs, into the lair of the machines. ‘Of course, we did have some problems with the machines wanting to take over in the early days, but now, they are under our control. They do our bidding.’

The Captain snorted. ‘How many times. Have I heard. That?’

‘We are pure energy. They cannot harm us,’ Flip said.

‘And your human. Visitor?’

Flip hadn’t sworn in a thousand years, but when the shooting started, she let out a curse that burnt out the circuits on the viewscreen. But by then, she was long gone.

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25 May 2012

Every Sparrow – Chapter Four

Chuck’s skin was itching.

It wasn’t painful, but it was insistent. His skin was itching and his teeth were starting to buzz. He’d walked from the clearing near what looked to be a library, along the remnants of a road, towards the cube buildings on his map. He’d been completely unmolested the entire way, although the local fauna kept a wary eye on him – an unknown species that could be a predator. But as he neared the structure, could see it jutting out of the landscape amongst the trees, he began to feel an unpleasant sensation.

There is a chill you get in your skin when you think about something distasteful or when someone runs a finger just above your skin. Chuck shuddered, and then shuddered again. He stopped and looked around. His skin began to prickle, starting at his neck and spreading across his face and down his back. He stopped walking at an unpleasant thought: what if he were being bombarded with radiation? He grabbed his tablet, swiped his fingers across the screen and brought up a radiation scanner. There was something in his vicinity, random pulses of energy, but nothing that could be considered harmful. He popped up a panel on the wrist of his landing suit. His gear wasn’t registering any harmful chemicals in the air. In fact, the air on an earth unsullied by humanity for a thousand years was incredibly pure.

Slightly nervous, but unable to come up with a reason to retreat, Chuck walked onwards, itchy and uncomfortable. Now, he could hear a tiny high-pitched squealing, just at the edge of his hearing. It wasn’t a voice. It wasn’t a creature. It was, he realised, the sound of data. Somewhere close, something was transmitting a good deal of data across a spectrum that his hearing could pick up. He looked up for no real reason and tapped the communicator on his chest.

‘Scout to orbiter, come in?’
‘Heya Chuck, what’s going on?’
‘We’ve got definite activity down here. No obvious signs of life, but a number of anomalies worth checking out. Plus, there’s some definite data chatter. Could anyone else be here?’
‘Nope. Uh uh, no way. Unless you believe in aliens, we are the first ship to come back to this sector of space since the Exodus.’
‘And we didn’t, you know, leave anyone behind when we left Earth the first time? Cos they’d be justifiably annoyed.’ Chuck took another look around, trying to think of a way he could be itched to death. There were a lot. He realised that Caitlin up on the ship hadn’t responded yet. ‘Cait?’
‘We-ell,’ came the voice in his ear, ‘Some people didn’t want to go. Certain religions, ridiculously optimistic people, complete nutjobs. We don’t generally tell people, but it’s here in the records.’
Chuck held his hand over his ear at the word ‘nutjobs’. He wasn’t sure if whoever was here could pick it up.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘So I could suddenly be attacked by lunatic proto-humans carrying clubs made up of recycled paper? And that wasn’t something you thought I needed to know.’
‘You worry too much Chuck,’ Caitlin said. ‘You were with me when I did the scans. There’s no sign of sentient life anywhere. None of the structures show signs of repair. There’s nothing there.’
‘Fair enough,’ Chuck said. ‘There’s nobody here. Two things: Firstly, What’s the data chatter that I can hear? I can’t capture it using the tablet, but I can hear it. Second, can you think of any way that someone can kill someone else in a way that would make their skin itch?’
‘There are plenty of ways to kill you with itchy skin. Poison, radiation, slow-working acid, killer nano-robots..’
‘You can stop helping now,’ Chuck said, scratching his neck. ‘And the data stream?’
‘No sign of it,’ came the voice from the ship. ‘There’s definitely some technology still active on the planet, which is strange after a thousand years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anybody still living there.’
‘Righto,’ Chuck said, ‘I’m heading to a bunch of energy anomalies I picked up on the tablet. I’ll let you know what I find out. Ciao!’
‘Sayonara,’ Caitlin said and the communicator bleeped out.

Chuck ignored the itching and his vibrating teeth and strode with purpose towards the square.

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