I didn’t do any work on my illustrated children’s book this year at all. Last year in Year One of the Covid-19 pandemic I took my rough notes and wrote the story out in full, and then also rewrote it two more times, along with a few character sketches, but then I’ve just left it sitting untouched. Mind you, I did then go and write a full book of short stories in its stead. Now however I feel like I should resurrect the project for 2022. Alas, in the few golden months I had since both of my kids were attending in person school I tackled home diy projects to improve or finish off rooms in the house, rather than devote myself to an illustrated childrens book. I haven’t drawn by hand in a very long time, and I haven’t painted in watercolours or acrylics in nearly the same amount of time. I think I’m nervous about the artwork being terrible, more so than the story not being entertaining. But wave #5 and the end of Year Two of the pandemic are nearly upon us all. Part of me is still chasing the high from actually writing a full book of interconnected short stories set mostly out in space, along with some non-fiction autobiographical stuff mixed in. Funny how a lot has happened while nothing has happened. A very strange feeling. I think what I’m missing is, I used to come and work/write every day from 12-2pm while my kids napped, and then the youngest gave up naps, and I had to resort to working at night and then I dropped off my writing habits because I was focused on the paid work for my day job, and my brain was a tad fried from several weeks where I wrote 5 or 6 thousand words over some very productive days, week after week. Not always that many, but I know my cognitive skills dipped on any day that I wrote more than 3,500 words at once. A fugue state, brain fog, brain fart, mom brain, synapse fatigue or what have you. Odd feeling, that. Oh yeah, and I devoted more time to wood working, and I scaled back my sculpting too this year. Perhaps a more rounded dabbling in all of my hobbies will make for a better choice next year. Glad I am alive and well enough to consciously make that decision.
Tag: artiste
In regards to my previous post about 3d rendering.
I might be behind the eight ball here in terms of knowing about how to turn illustrations of uniquely shaped bottles into fully fledged 3d objects using Photoshop, but learning that work flow and then being able to chuck that stuff into Dimension and creating realistic looking mock ups is astounding. So glad I came across this stuff. No longer do I need to slave away drawing every bend of light or using finicky meshes. No no no, now you can draw up your custom bottle in illustrator, render the 3d shape in photoshop, with separate outer glass, inner liquid fill, cap and cork, plus add your various labels and tie that shit up with a fucking bow in Dimension with lighting effects, camera perspective matching to your background. Dear lord, it’s a game changer! I for one am pumped about what this could do for my beverage, and packaged goods clientele. Mind blown. I am tickled pink. Pleased as punch. Until next time.
Also – side note. I wrote a book of short stories available on Kindle, and kindle unlimited for $.99 USD. The Company – A series of interconnected space short stories by Mark Holyome. Available in 11 markets worldwide.
Having some fun messing around with 3d rendering.
So over the last few years I have doodled some faux beer brands for shits & giggles to keep busy and sane. Well now I am able to render them most realistically and in about 1/10th of the time my old method took me. Which makes me both happy and excited for the future of my graphic design business. Mock ups won’t eat up endless hours of my day anymore. Wah whooh!
Some samples with and without lighting effects and/or surface effects:
“I think it’s kind of messed up that they came all this way…
Exposed themselves to us but then said nothing. They just hung there, two miles up and motionless. Like some kind of blockade. Not against us, but to keep a third party away from making landfall or making contact. It was very strange. One day the sky is clear, then the next an armada of massive ships turn up, of all sorts of different designs and such. Just hanging out, they disrupt our satellites and telecommunications, the internet and casually gun down a countless number of other ships trying to come down here to us. Now we have know idea if either party had hostile intentions, or were being benevolent toward us. We intercepted enormous quantities of encrypted chatter and messages, but those will take decades to break. The languages were like nothing we’ve ever dreamed of. They stuck around, up there for fifty one months and then fled as quickly as they came. All we now know is that we are not alone in the universe, but that we are essentially powerless against them. In their wake they left the atmosphere cleaner, and the area around the earth free of debris and all that space junk. Several million new stars had become visible to us, just with the naked eye. But beyond those astounding revelations, we have yet learned nothing new. Life goes on.”
The harsh crunch of gravel on sand underfoot reverberates through my jumpsuit…
Inside my helmet my breath comes in fast and ragged. I am sweating profusely under the brilliant shine of the triad of suns high overhead. We all struggle to keep our heart rates down, and our blood oxygen levels nominal. This scorching hot planet hangs with a red tinged sky. This horrid environment has little cloud cover, and is rocky, sand covered and almost entirely barren. The few scattered pieces of scrub brush are either a deep bruised purple or a sickly mustard infused brown. Through our helmets we can’t tell you what they smell like, but according to instrumentation we know they give of carbon monoxide and a mixture of cyanide and ammonia also. The team of scouts are being buffeted by a gale force wind. The rust coloured dust flies up hot as embers burning us through our environmental protection suits, clattering off our helmets and masks like white hot metal shavings. If we stand still for more than a couple of heart beats the soles of our boots begin to melt. The three suns range from a deep angry red to a near purple of absolute cosmic violence. In the distance of the horizon a herd of wild wandels can be seen racing hither and yonder. The tell tale sign of their presence are the mansteroud dust clouds that they kick up as they run. The uv blasted fines hang in the air, listing miles up into the stratosphere. The native beasts have to run everywhere in order to find food and to survive the intense heat once they venture out of their deep cave warrens. After our landing party had encountered them initially we determined them to not be a threat to us. The four legged over sized dog-bears had long thick tubular ‘hairs’ that they use to dissipate heat and keep cool. Tastiest beasts I’ve ever had the pleasure of finding on a back water planet. Not that we needed it, but the deep underwater aquifer that their warrens attach too allows the wandels to retain gallons of fresh water in a bladder under their bellies. Located in the only spot they can shade them from the over bearing sun light and oppressive heat. But we aren’t here to eat wandels, we’re here to find a rogue AI that has attempted to go off grid with her new found best friend. A crippled Pengar with only five limbs instead of six. Tiny miscreant of a thing. But a more brilliant ship wright and mechanic you will never encounter. Seems the Pengar named Errabor has developed a close relationship with our rogue AI Katayna, and we’ve been employed to locate them for the Company black ops sub contractor, one Mr. Boreck Kartcher. We’ve been paid handsomely, and I do not believe it was out of charity, but because he expects a good many of my fire team to die in the process. With great risk comes great financial reward.
Our first major clue to their whereabouts came from one of the tight beam communications repeaters that get sent off across the galaxy to try to maintain contact between every known quadrant of intelligent space. A random black box transponder ping from a supposedly decommissioned Falcon Heavy-Class star hopper went straight to the top of my in box marked most urgent. The second clue was the destroyed anti poaching gun platform that orbits this world being nearly obliterated by a head on collision with something super colossal. Put those together and we have a pretty good lead on our rogue elements. Scanning for life forms doesn’t really help us out, due to the protected wandels, sorry conservationists we ate two of them. Didn’t read the sign on the way down. Our bad. Plus the spec’s we got on Katayna says she isn’t classically defined as ‘alive’ , so much as sentient, and homicidal towards humanity. Hence the exorbitant pay we recieved for tracking her down and possibly bringing her back to Mr Kartcher.
PART THREE The Company: Sisters in Arms
The deep space exploration beacon floated…
Around in the vast expanse of nothingness that made up the majority of the dark and empty cosmos. Its many rows of small green and blue and amber indicator lights blinking steadily in the near perfect darkness as the large autonomous bulk drifted aimlessly along its course. The beacon, a long lost science tool several centuries out of main stream use, was various shades of a drab grey with only a few pops of bright orange and yellow painted onto the many metal panels and facets of its exterior. Weathered and worn, battered by debris, ice and the increasingly less common collision. With four massive booms with the now defunct sun light catching solar panels reaching out from the central body, like the dead arms of a desiccated witch, with gnarled and withered fingers at the ends. Between those four gangly booms are four matching but tattered solar sails which haven’t billowed with the energy of light particles in quite some time. Hanging limp, like a lifeless flag with no energy with which to fill them. Those ghastly witches fingers were actually the clumps of gathered sensors and radar dishes and the tight beam radio antennas. The unmanned science beacon had been gathering vast stores of near worthless data for many many decades now. With the satellites battery drawing so few amps, and the solar panels gathering next to no power the beacon is nearing the end of its life cycle. That is until an unexpected blip of the dimmest and softest glow of light became visible in the near endless ocean of black. Ever so slowly the dim pinprick of light grew to that of a grain of sand, a pea, a fat blueberry, then a grape, and with the sudden increase in light the sails ballooned full and the solar panels tattered as they were began to pull in and store energy. The jump in size from a grape to a melon to a gigantic mass of flaming gas was extraordinary. Near instantaneous compared to the many lifetimes it had spent careening through the farthest reaches of space with nary a hint of anything besides radiation and microwaves. As the beacon gathered up momentum and incredible speed it sent off one last tight beam of interesting information before plunging deep into the gravity well of a massive new star, and melting away into its constituent molecules and then atoms. Not even a whiff of smoke to denote the centuries old satellites passing. The ignominy of it all.
“Oh… Jorec we have something substantial coming in via the old tight beam network. Doesn’t appear to be the same old shit as before. Want to give it a look over?” Says Jaz the junior science officer on duty. Jaz has been one of three people in charge of monitoring the science decks tight beam communications system. Now that it is several centuries out of date, with it having been decades since they had anything worth looking at, it was primed to be dealt with by fresh out of the academy science grads. Archiving data and doing maintenance on non essential programs and hardware. Perfect for busy work and the day care of green horns. The slightly senior science officer, named Jorec looked up from his interface where he was storing old data clusters on physical hard drives. “Oh really? Wow – huh. Would you look at that. Must have seen something way out there, the file size alone is insane compared to the last, what, four thousand nearly identical recorded info dumps. Strange eh? Usually the signal decays to the point of the data being a corrupted useless tranche of absolute garbage. But this one, this one looks to have managed to catch all of the working repeaters to get back here.” Typing in a few short commands on his hand held tablet Jorec looks deeper into the incoming stream of information. “Wow man, the lag on this is atrocious. Like billions of light years. How did this ever get to us in such good condition? I don’t know of any overriding command codes that would trigger all of our deep space repeaters to function at top notch quality. The power consumption alone would be astronomical. We’re talking enough juice to power three Torus stations for a thousand years a piece. Holy shit Jaz, this could get interesting. Might be our ticket out of here early!” Says Jorec standing up from his chair. Turning around in the cramped room, switching the scrolling text from his personal lab view screen to the large central monitor hanging from the wall in the claustrophobic room as the data really begins to stream passed their eyes in lines of green code on a black background. “Oh – fuck. Call the CO, call the Captain, call the Admiral… call every fucking one!” Shouts Jorec in a frenzy. His face flushed red, as the veins in his neck and forehead nearly jump out of his body. Intermingled among the lines of code from the farthest reaching sensor arrays is an SOS, of human origin. From an area of space that no human has ever been recorded going to, or being from before. Accompanied by a very weak biometric life sign. Life for Jorec and Jaz was about to turn upside down, with them planted up to their knees in feces, while they are in the wrong orientation.
PART ONE of The Company: A Call To The Void
Overview of March
Bit of a strange month as you all can imagine. I didn’t do anywhere near as much writing, but I turned to sculpting and painting for a spell. Needed to do something less mentally taxing, since a lot of my waking hours have been spent in one form or another worrying about the global pandemic COVID-19 / Coronavirus. But, I did do a few bits of writing once a story caught my eye, and I turned to a subject that I know well. Being socially isolated, feeling lonely, stir crazy and just being desperate to talk to someone. All things I had a fair bit of experience with in my last year of High School, then working a full calendar year prior to college, my initial Sheridan college experience, then later on, as a freelancer working from home. But I’m more introverted than ever, so it doesn’t bother me as much now that I’m into my forties. With age comes some sort of wisdom I suppose. Ha. Plus I felt as though that twenty one chapters to my interconnected series was enough, and i didn’t want to write anything too topical, so I had to sit, wait and ruminate on a few ideas I had jotted down in the last few weeks, and let those ideas percolate through my brain. I decided to use the same universe, but all new characters, a new ship, and I steered clear of the large scale war building up in the background, that I tried to cover in one or two extra stories, but ultimately gave up on. I’m not good with writing scenes of that scale. I prefer to have two or three characters who do most of the talking, maybe one peripheral character to add exposition, if i don’t feel as though I have set the plot up well enough. But yeah, character heavy, dialogue and only a little bit of action, even if it tends towards large sweeping events that kill lots of people. Broad strokes here people, I’m aiming for quick, decisive broad strokes. I also like the format of trying to stay between six hundred and three thousand words. Short fiction. Evocative, if missing a few pieces of finer detail around the edges. Keep the story moving, if that’s what it calls for. Though I do like to linger in the quiet spaces between major events. Hurry up and wait, right? Something huge is on the horizon, but you have to wade through the usual tedium of your every day life to get there. The stuff often behind the scenes in a major movie. Boring to watch, but interesting to explore in writing. Since most of us read in isolation, or to ourselves even in public. Anyway, to those who have read any of my stuff, thanks! To those who might find it in the coming months, thank you too! I wish you all the best during these awkward and trying times. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope to keep writing more until we make it on to the other side.
“Congratulations Kelvin, you’ve failed in absolutely…
Spectacular fashion”, chimes the uppity education bot sitting behind me in the science departments largest lab. The robust orange cube like unit was typically used to tutor grad students during their first rotations aboard a science vessel, but I had it dumb things down for me so that I could try to figure out what had happened to my ships crew. About a year ago while I was crawling between the inner and outer hull plates of this ship, all seven hundred members of the crew just up and died simultaneously. At some point during the fifty two hours I was under radio silence, something catastrophic happened. Something that was not readily apparent upon my return. I admit, I took to denial and burying my head in the sand for a while afterwards, but one evening while floating in the commissary with my eyes shut and a gale force wind was blowing in my face I had an epiphany. Now, I’m just a mid level technician. I do a bunch of general tasks associated with small engines, electrical and mill work. But my forte is that I don’t mind isolation, small confined spaces or hard laborious tasks. The ‘epiphany’, as such was that I needed to gain access to as many of the ships systems as I could using the integrated biological over rides. In a moment of clarity while gathering up the deceased, I decided that storing the dead crew in our largest airlock cargo hold might be useful. And after using the ai enhanced scrubbers and cleaners to drag the bodies to one such location, disrobe them and store the associated ID tags and key cards on the right wrists of each of the dead. I made a point of having officers, or as high up the chain of command for each department set aside at the head of each enormous pile of bodies. I had a plan. An unpleasant plan at that, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
It took quite some doing to gain entry to all of the other departments but a little bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of free time meant I could figure out how to do it. So with the help of a reciprocating saw and the right hands of every department head and their personal ID cards, I had a chance to figure out how everything turned to shit on me.
“Kelvin, I do not understand how you failed to account for so many variables when preparing the simulations and models. Your ineptitude should have disqualified you from serving on a science vessel.” Quips the EDU bot again, disrupting my deep thought. “Fuck you Ed. I’ve told you repeatedly, I’m not a part of the science team, I’m a mechanical technician, I maintain the ships closed systems between the double hulls. I’m more of a spelunker than anything else. And, by the way – fuck you.” I curse at the beaten up orange bot. It has been seated in front of me in the lab for the last three hours as I attempt to run simulations on what could kill several hundred people without leaving a mark on them. “Apologies Kelvin, I was built to tutor grad student level science majors, and their speech patterns and repeated turns of phrase are logged and reused according to my learning algorithms. I assure you, my ‘personality’ is purely unintentional.” The units lights blink and glow softly as if showing some kind of contrition. I think it’s more a case of me going slowly insane, rather than the EDU bot gaining sentience. “Well, thank you, I suppose. Do you know anything about what happened? Have any additional insights I can add to these simulations we’re running?” I ask it again, hoping for a better answer. “We both know that I am unable to do your homework and/or assignments for you Kelvin. That is cheating and outside my operational parameters.” With a hum and the whirl of internal fans, the EDU bot continues to sit still doing very little to help me figure things out. “Tell you what Ed, I’m going aft to grab a helping hand from one of the science officers, I’ll be back shortly and I’d just love it if you could put any new information we uncover into layman’s terms for me. Could you do that for me, huh?” Sitting across from one another at the lab table, ED visibly grows taller in response. “Oh, yes. That is something I can do. Shame you don’t know any of my hot button commands, we could do so much more if you knew them.” Chirps the bot, as it’s head and neck extends out of the cube base where the tank tracks are mounted. “Why are you telling me this now! We’ve been at this for months, with little to no new knowledge uncovered. Jesus. Maybe lead with that info next time!” Rising out of my chair, visibly angry, face going red, veins in my forehead and neck throbbing. “Apologies Kelvin, I assumed you knew. All EDU bots have an extensive list of hot button commands for analysis and a laundry list of practical science related tasks we are capable of performing.” Answers the bot quietly. “Ok well, riddle me this Ed. After I return from the aft airlock with a severed hand and appropriate ID card to over ride the login commands on the research decks work terminal, could you direct me to where I would find those commands. Like a document, book, binder or app located somewhere on this ship? Do you think you could do that for he, huh?” Looking at the bot from behind the desk, I walk out the door and head aft of the ship. From behind me I can hear Ed nearly shout in the affirmative.
Walking down the spotlessly clean halls with their brilliant white lights, it can be easy to imagine that on a vessel this size that you are merely out of view of others and not entirely alone. Thinking about the mysterious deaths of the crew has brought a new vigor to my daily life. Though morbid, it has allowed me to channel my efforts into something constructive. While I still fulfill my assigned duties, it seems as though without any additional wear and tear from a crew that I can go longer and longer between maintenance checks. I wired the duty logs to ping my wrist biometrics when something pops up. So now that I have down time I figured I’d try to have some answers ready when the mission ends in another two and a half years. Turning the corner at the last T junction on the ship I come face to face with a massive set of atmosphere rated titanium double doors. Looking at a hand written sign posted on the door I can find the helping hand I’m after without having to dally among the dead. Smell isn’t really an issue, neither is decay. I keep the airlock in vacuum ninety nine percent of the time. After I dehydrated the bodies, I used the coldness of space to flash freeze them all in place. Locating the senior science deck officer, I pressurize the airlock. With a loud clunk I can hear the air tanks pumping oxygen back into the cargo hold within. As the doors glide open, the dimness of the space within takes over. Near the front of the room is a small table with a reciprocating saw, a charging station, cloth bags and box of masks and goggles. Picking up the PPE and saw I wander down the aisles to find the appropriate body. Kneeling down beside her, I set about gathering up the helpful hand. Having done something similar to myself only a year or so ago, I feel a strange sort of kinship with the lifeless body. Picking up the hand I place it gently in the beige cloth bag and head back to my work station. Keeping everything orderly and in it’s place. With a soft goodbye I close the airlock doors and depressurize the cargo hold. With a soft hiss the air returns to the tanks and the rooms temperature drops to below freezing.
“Welcome back Kelvin. And who do we have here?” The bot crawls over to me at the lead science officers work station. I run her ID card through the input, and when the login prompt comes alive I place the severed right hand, with it’s manicured metallic flecked green nails on the biological scan pad. A brief pause, and then the screen jumps with streams of data, and unintelligible code. “Whoa, holy shit. Looks like we might be able to get some answers after all. So Ed, where do I go, and what do I need to do?” Standing beside the EDU bot at the terminal, a previously undisclosed view screen flips out of the bots belly, and a blue schematic and a list of directions appears. “You may take this tablet with you, go grab the command codes and the command key and we can go over the new directives step by step.” Looking down at the schematic i feel a sudden sense of dread and fear trickle down my spine. Oh fuck no, I do not want to go back there. Not now, not ever. Why did they have to keep the command keys down in the sanitation department. Stored right next door to the waste containment canisters and that mother fucking thresher unit. Yeah, the one that took my arm off at the fucking elbow. “God damn it.” I shout. Ed pulls back several paces. “Is there an issue Kelvin?” He nearly whispers the question to me, either that or my ears are ringing from shouting at the top of my lungs in the lab. I can’t even clearly recall just how it happened either. I know I was drinking, and thought I’d have an adventure down in the bowels of the ship. I came out of the service tunnels I had been exploring and entered into a cavernous room with these massive steel tanks, they extended upwards like sixty or seventy meters. The tops disappeared in the dimness of the rafters. I was looking up, and up and up at one of the largest canisters, and fell backwards into something sharp. And immediately knew I had fucked up. My jumpsuit got caught and these exposed gears pulled my arm into the mix and then jammed. I had to use a miniaturized saws all strapped to my harness to cut my arm free at the elbow. Screaming and shrieking along with the tool as it cut through bones, muscle and sinew. Then in a foul daze I crawled to the medical bay and holed up in one of the few pristine white medical pods with automated surgery technology. Carrying my own arm, or what was left of it with me in my teeth, after I somehow managed to pry it out of the gears. God, that was a waking nightmare. The thought of going back down there for this fucking key is really giving me cause to pause.
Sitting on my bunk staring blankly at the Jean-Luc Picard quote etched into the bulkhead over my doorway I breath in sharply, and exhale in a long slow whistle. Steeling myself for all of the feelings I fear might paralyze me as I venture down below decks to the sanitation department and the waste storage canisters. Dressed in my dirty red jumpsuit, I dress in my work gear. Adding my various harnesses, links, hooks and carabiners. No real need for them, but that crushing hug from the tight fitting gear makes me feel complete, and thus comfortable. Rising to stand, I kiss my finger tips and press the pads of my fingers to the roughly etched proverb. Hoping against hope that I will come back unscathed and still in one piece.
Walking the three kilometer stretch between my crew quarters and the sanitation decks below. I follow the winding path, that winds and rises and leads me along gangways, gantries, stair cases and finally a large service power lift. The tablet has been invaluable in getting me down below with the most straight forward route. After about thirty minutes I’m looking at the brown signage that denotes the sanitation sector. Looking around I am amazed at how spotlessly clean the waste reclamation processors are. You could eat off of every surface down here. Following the schematic I realize I am only ten meters from where I found calamity as a drunken fool. Still quite taken by the sheer size of everything down here. Across the hexagonal room, flanked by several waste containment canisters is the storage lock up. A beaten brown steel safe with no discernible locking mechanism. As I get within a meter of the unit the tablet chimes, a green light flashes suddenly, and the doors unlatch and pop open silently. I am met by a strong citrus scent, the stringent cleaning agents sting the inside of my nostrils. Inside hanging among some goggles, a couple of canvas aprons, rubber boots and several buckets of industrial cleaners is a sizable black and yellow hand held unit. It has the words BOTKEY stenciled in white spray painted on it. A matching icon on the tablet is rotating 360 degrees in an isometric view. Looking around, as though something or someone might burst out of a corner and toss me bodily into the thresher unit, I hesitantly grab a hold of the BOTKEY and gingerly close the doors. With an anticlimactic shrug, i turn back to the hallway to walk up to the science lab. Looking over my shoulder at the thresher unit as i pass, i can see a tiny streak of red down the front of a bent guard plate. With a laconic smirk i say aloud “Not today mother fucker.” And promptly slip on a tile transition and fall flat on my ass, bumping my tailbone in the process. “Ok, you got me! I’ll just get the fuck out of here now!” Punching the communicator at my wrist i call up Ed to let it know to meet me at the science officers terminal post haste.
“Thank you Kelvin, I am now able to interpret, analyze and utilize the data from the ships sensor arrays to answer your queries. What would you like to do first?” The timbre of Ed’s voice has dropped with the operational parameters being edited. The unit is standing taller than before, and several extra data screen and ports have materialized on the bots cubic chest cavity. Rubbing my sore tailbone I say “Ok, Ed. Well… if you could take a look over the sensor data and see if the cause for all of the crew deaths was either internal or external. That makes for a great start. Can you give me a sense of how much data you have to sift through?” Standing shoulder to shoulder with the EDU bot at the dimly lit terminal on the work station underneath massive video monitors. Ed is currently plugged in using a hard line direct into the ships data banks. With a deep boom Ed says “There is approximately six thousand teraflops of data from the external sensor arrays. It could take anywhere between seventy two weeks and three hundred weeks to find the pertinent data sub sets…” blurts the EDU bot unit. “Well… shit. What if you look at the data just before I logged the second crew death aboard this vessel?” I offer in rebuttal. “That would narrow things down quite considerably. Might I ask why only at the time of the second death logged?” “The first death aboard was my best friend Keith. The second death logged would be the first of the seven hundred crew that died all together. Thanks.” I say gruffly. Turning away to sniff back the worrisome threat of a tear. Not sure why I care so much about getting emotional around Ed the tutor bot. A brief pause, then “Kelvin, this ship experienced a catastrophic dose of GCR from a localized supernova. Traveling at a speed of C.99 the speed of light there was no warning possible and they all received many times the allowable Sieverts/Rems of cosmic radiation. How you managed to survive is beyond my ability to compute.” Ed disengages from the terminal and rolls back across the room to the well lit work tables. Standing there dumbfounded I follow behind him. Out of the dimness by the huge wall monitors showing massive streams of code and data, towards the low hanging spot lights, and the lighted table top surface. “Jesus. GCR huh? Damn. Microwaved their brains in a nanosecond. God damn.” A lone tear wells up and threatens to pull more out of my eye. Hanging on the surface of my eye like a ten tonne weight. With a snap of my fingers. “The bladder!, it was the water bladder. I had to contort myself to get around it, underneath it. Practically in it to fix a wiring issue under the bridge. I was hidden behind eighty thousand gallons of plain water. It protected me, by fluke. God damn.” With a beep and a blinking series of lights Ed does a few calculations and concurs with my hypothesis. Millions of miles from anywhere, the answer provides little comfort to me. “Hey Ed, I think I saw some psychiatric protocols in that menu that would allow us to chat without me having to ask any task related questions. You feel like a conversational upgrade or what?” With a series of blinks and beeps I have my answer.
PART TWO of The Company: The Chronicles of Kelvin
You know, I’ve been down into
The deepest depths of the ocean on a year long solo mission, I’ve been left stranded on a rocky out cropping of an island somewhere in the south Pacific for what I later learned was nearly three years, and now I work hauling minerals and ore for The Company out in deep space on an immense refinery freighter. Do you know what these three things all have in common? Isolation, misery and a total lack of any kind of quality amenities. Put those locations together with a vivid and increasing sense of impending doom and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. You know it’s kind of funny how we always assumed that our salvation would come in the form of a generational colony starship that could shuttle humanity off deep into the cosmos. But, as a species, humans we aren’t very well equipped to deal with the dread and despair associated with the isolation that accompanies deep space exploration, and trans generational travel. It takes a certain type of psychopathy to be able to deal with those particular stressors found during extreme cases of isolation. I for one, am just the right kind of crazy to pursue those types of careers where these issues are present. I’m as close to a recluse as you can get. Like a full on level ninety nine introvert. Nothing makes me happier than to spend time alone working on all sorts of shit. I also have little concern over tight spaces, like those found in the void between a star ships double hulls. To perform such pleasures required of me during regular maintenance I get to play BDSM dress up in various harnesses and tight fitting gear over top of my jumpsuit and poke around in these labyrinthine crawl spaces that criss cross these massive vessels in a lattice work of dead ends, bolt holes and conduits full of cabling and pipes. Deep, dark and for the most part endured in entire radio silence. The captain of my last vessel said that when his ship runs out of coolant they will ask me for a blood transfusion so that my life blood could keep the transport running ice cold. My nick name is Zero K, the K is for Kelvin. People who don’t like me much call me absolute zero, but eh, fuck them. I enjoy hard labour away from crowds of people. I’m the guy who volunteers for shite details so I can work off peak hours, and all alone. Or at least with minimal supervision. I have one friend. An angry, short & hirsute fella who doesn’t know how to speak in anything other than a yell, or monotone. We usually sit in silence and drink until one of us slinks off to bed without saying good bye or goodnight. A lot of guttural grunts and groans pass between us as a kind of idiosyncratic language. He’s great. Likes the same beer, works similar shifts doing the same work as I do. We have matching burns and scars. We’d have made an excellent couple if either of us were gay. Well, you know we would have if he hadn’t of gotten killed during an ammonia leak from a pierced pipe. What do you know, done in by a random sharp edge on our industrial strength PPE. You see, technically we’re considered to be inside the ship, even if we are actually between the inner and outer hull plates where all the majestic inner workings of the ship are contained. That means we don’t qualify for the over the head fully encased respirators with individual environmental controls. We just get an over the mouth and nose mask with change out pads for dust, debris and moderate airborne contaminants. He stood no chance against that leak. It blew aerosolized ammonia right over his face at point blank range. Hell, at 8 PPM, that shit kills, let alone a full jet stream dumped over the back of your head. After that I filed down every hook, link and carabiner on my tattered, dusty red jumpsuit. No point in repeating the sins of my only friend. Crawling in there after him and having to drag his cold lifeless body through the darkest reaches of the ship was not something I ever wish to do again. As it would happen, I would never have to. As all of them, the whole crew that is, all seven hundred of them just up and died while I was doing maintenance on the main bus panel wiring underneath the bridge several months ago. A fucking dick of a job too. The sort of job that requires about sixteen hours of crawling, bending and twisting to contort my body through the minimum sized access ports that are located around a massive water bladder just to get to the appropriate junction, then only needs forty minutes of upkeep performed on it. Like, what a piece of shit. Then you guessed it, another sixteen hours to extricate myself. All told – with food breaks, sleep and an abominable amount of crawling, that job was fifty two hours on. I went in and everything was hunky dory, I come out to a ghost ship with nothing but the dead bodies of the crew laying around. Mysteriously, with no known reason that was readily apparent. And just like that, I find myself in isolation again. For what it’s worth, our course through the stars was predetermined, and we will come home after our five year mission is completed. I have enough resources for seven hundred people over a five year term, so I shall not starve, nor will I be dehydrated. I just have to remain sane, and do my scheduled tasks, and pray. In the sage words of the twentieth century philosopher Jean-Luc Picard “You can do everything right and still lose. This is not a personal failing, but a fact of life.” I read that quote every day at the start and end of each shift. I have it etched into the bulkhead over my bunk in my crew quarters. Really makes you think – huh.
The loud hum of the air vent is echoing deep in my ears as I float, eyes closed, with the gale force breeze blowing into my face. The ship as a whole gets very quiet these days, and the loudness of the moving air makes me forget the ominous lack of activity aboard. I can almost imagine the sound of passing cars, birds or the far off indistinct muffle of an overhead conversation. When you spend years alone you learn to developed methods of finding inner peace and forgetting the banal repetition of your average day. My current trick is to crank up the lights, close my eyes tightly, and bury my face in the central air vent in the commissary. It moves the most air, and offers me enough room to just float in place while my imagination runs wild. Auditory hallucinations abound. Sometimes I can even feel the sensation of my communicator buzzing or hear an alarm sound. As I while away my time, face buried in the vent, the ship continues to perform the vast majority of it’s automated tasks. I keep to my work schedule, and eat the same things on the same decks as before. I know all too well the dangers of getting trapped somewhere strange by myself. That is not something I wish to repeat. I made a tough decision that weekend, and I still have the scars and emotional baggage associated with my extrication. Crawling three kilometers through the bowels of the ship to reattach my left arm at the elbow in the med-bay medical pods is not something I will likely ever forget. The trail of blood was gone by the time I felt well enough to leave that pristine white pod. The ai infused scrubbers had removed all trace of my nightmare. I kept the scar so that I know it really happened and I didn’t just dream it up. I do that a lot these days. I leave notes and etchings and drawings so that I remember having been there, and not run around the whole ship thinking I’m not actually here alone. When I am. Entirely alone. Isolated. With another three years and eight months left to go. In the cool cacophonous hum of the air vent I almost feel normal.
******
And for something different in these odd times, you can listen to me narrate this short story.
Spending some down time sculpting
Like I said in a previous post, I have pulled back from my writing so that I can continue to dabble in clay. I just like the visceral feel of tacky clay under my finger nails. Watching something grow from a wire armature into a fully realized piece with some detailing on top for good measure. I put nearly 44,000 words to paper in the first six weeks of 2020, and only one full sculpt. So now I’ll do that for a bit instead. Below you can see the bulk of my hard work over the last several years. Enjoy.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
You must be logged in to post a comment.