What is time. What has time to do with me. I’ve slept adrift in the blank depths of the cosmos. Time has no meaning here. I sense in the far reaches of my being that at one point time was everything. Now it is nothing. What is time to the dead and crumbling. The passing of dust into matter back to dust once more. On and on at scales so grand and so minute as to be virtually meaningless to me – to me or to us. Am I me or are we us now. I was man, then dead, now reborn as an other. A collective – a hive mind? No, still singular but fractured. As though the dust motes falling from my body retained the essence of me and thought, action and will.
Aboard the decrepit vessel there was once a man and his trusty educational bot. They survived tragedy, insanity and isolation for many decades together. That was until the human man’s body began to degrade and fail him. As a last ditch measure the edu bot laid that old withered man gently down into a med pod and with manual over ride after manual over ride poured billions of Nano bots into his body. Over the passage of centuries the limp desiccated body shifted and writhed as treatment after treatment flooded his organs and tissues to replace him with inorganic machine based life. To the wonderment of only the vaguest stars in the sky he awoke with a sputtered gasp. He promptly fell into the icy frost grip of despair.
For millenia this thing walked the crumbling halls of his ship looking for a sign of where he was or what he is. All the while dropping parts of himself about the vessel. Living, replicating, intelligent specks of himself that fed upon the ship and in turn reshaping, rebuilding it in his image. Every exhalation, bowel movement or cough delivered more of himself unto the ship, bringing it closer to himself. Unbeknownst to this fragile mind. The wandering lost soul was expanding his consciousness at a geometric rate.
It was a cool Thursday morning in autumn when the machine made man felt the ship shudder under his feet. What had he been thinking about? Direction, aim, trajectory – the answer was on the tip of his tongue but would not come. Lifting his arms up as though gliding on the air current and turning in a downward spiral to his right, he was immediately swept from his feet and pulled to the left wall in a steep bank as though the ship were in a suicide dive. Scared witless he screamed out and the vessel righted itself immediately. Thinking aloud to do a similar move but upwards and to the left, he felt his feet lift from the ground as he came to rest upon the lower right portion of the hallway floor.
Was it centuries, millenia or merely decades before the man come ship found itself seeking out and transporting itself through wormholes. Dimensions, time, the fabric of space itself was no obstacle for the amalgam once known as Kelvin. In the blink of an eye, the flash of a dying star, the waves of disrupted gravity Kelvin crossed both the known and the unknowable.
What is time to something that belongs to the ice cold dread of the depths of space, that which lingers in the interstitial spaces between things.
Somewhere a beacon is triggered as a momentous build up of energy cackles out of the ether. With a blast of improbable energy a lone signal careens off through the galaxy, bouncing off of signal repeaters and dishes until an analog bulb of rusty orange pops to life on a decades old communications terminal on a science vessel named The Dirty Starling.
Part Six: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
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