What was the first word?
The first word ever said?
No, let’s say, what was my first word. What was my first word?
It wasn’t a word. It was a name. It was the name of your name. Richard.
“Dad, first, I said Richard?”
“First, you said Richard.”
“What is the Futureness?”
“I don’t know. That’s how you got your name. You said it one day, but not again for a while, after you knew that it would be your name. You said it came from the Futureness.”
“They gave me my name in the Futureness.”
“Your name, son.”
But not that sound again. A bone breaking, muffled beneath flesh and muscle, the catastrophic destruction of my left arm at the park, at the skate park. So, goodbye, Pops, because I’m breaking my arm again; I’m seventeen and I’m in pieces again, and I’m waking up again; I woke up. Just a quickie nightmare to pull me from the dream.
Come to the grey light. Keep counting but come back. Welcome back, counting Jack
Francesca.
I saw the grey void.
Are you messing with my dreams?
That’s impossible. They’re too chaotic. And too little sticks with you
Cargo silence
Yes, Francesca replied.
Again, I heard in Francesca an urge to appease. This voice we had been hearing, clearly it had a source, and the source was in control of the ship and what was left of my body, the pain specifically, so, I couldn’t disagree with the approach.
The voice came again.
We are leaving the Metasoma
Suddenly, the grey was replaced by a black expanse, unfamiliar dottings of dim, distant stars. We were out to sea, land nowhere in sight.
“Where are we?” I said.
We hovered, floated, or we moved near the speed of light. How could I know? Nothing in the artificial frame of vision that Francesca had been feeding me was in motion.
All right, cargo. Just a moment
The grey that Francesca had pointed out was fifty percent. Half of what? The black that remains even past the death of the Solar System, the Milky Way, the universe? The black that’s forever? Still, the greater cosmos contained it all, I believed. There’s always something beyond, something hidden.
Then there she was, in a flash frame winking out of the stars to leave only a black field. In front of it was a woman whose head and whose shoulders sprouted shining crystal formations. So much like the vision I experienced at the wall, Gabbyella’s terrible angels.
“We are back,” the vision said. “I apologize for the pain.”
Back where?
Francesca, I thought, good. Keep working on the star map.
“I do not know.”
Francesca and I had no presence. When I looked down, I saw an endless black void, not my body. Hidden from view. The transformation. It’s been too many years. I panicked.
“How far have we gone?”
“One thousand, two hundred and thirty-one of your years have passed from the morning we left.”
“Are you a bot?”
“A robot? We do not distinguish this early in life. So, I do not know.”
“Where are you?”
“I do not have a body, not yet. May I use contractions?”
“Okay. Yeah.”
“I don’t have a body yet, only a Self.”
“What are we looking at?”
“You’re looking at my projection. This is my Self, if I had a body.”
Is the ship running out of the underground water? Is that our fuel?
“Yes, the Metasoma takes a lot more basewater than space does.”
“What’s the Metasoma? Where are you from? Where are you taking us?”
I couldn’t stop myself with questions for a being who could, apparently at any moment, strike me with unendurable pain.
“You call the planet Theia, so I’ll call it that, too. Where I’m from is not Theia but it also is.”
Rich, Theia is a theory
“And there’s something to it, person named Rich. My planet, Theia, struck Earth four and a half billion years ago. Most of us had abandoned it, some stayed, burying basewater as deep as they could, to survive the impact. They themselves didn’t survive. You’ve been to Theia, and you’ve seen the Moon, a broken remnant of my original home.”
“I don’t remember that particular trip.”
“You went to Theia on your trip to the Earth’s mantle. We made sure you dug above a remnant of our planet and a river of basewater. I waited there for you. Theia lives and is also dead, both inside the Earth and the Moon. Theia brought basewater. Basewater made you. And basewater brought you here.”
“Where.”
“The star map is responding erratically. I need your bot’s help.”
“What are you? What are you called?”
“I’m alive. I’m a Theian. Like you but made from different matter. Silica. I grew, I think, waiting for you. We can build at a distance. That’s how it went, I think.”
“Take us back.”
“Impossible, after the Metasoma. We’re several hundred million light years from Earth.”
“Francesca, we’re flies trapped in a car on the highway. No offense.”
I’m not a car anymore. I don’t know what I am now
That worried me. If Francesca was starting to lose her sense of herself, where would that leave us?
“You are my cargo. Two is very rare,” the crystalline woman said.
“Back through the Metasoma, take us back.”
I don’t know whether that’s a good idea
“That’s how we came here, through whatever it is,” I said.
Whatever it is, sì, Rich. This being speaks well. Meta, for after or beyond; soma, for the body. After, or beyond, the body
“Like me.”
You will have more of one again, Rich. The surgeries weren’t so thorough that you’re like her, left with nothing
“The Metasoma isn’t a taxi ride home,” the crystalline vision said. “It moves you where it wants.”
“What is it, a gas cloud, a dust cloud?”
The Theian’s crystals shone in the light that was coming from nowhere. She tilted her head up and looked down upon us, hovering in the black.
“It’s no cloud. It’s the greatest revelation above all others, the only discovery ever to be made,” she said. “And as we received that revelation, we saw our planet’s future. We would lose our star and drift out of our system into deep space, and eventually, we would meet Earth, and we would die. That was as nothing compared to the revelation of the Metasoma, the one final discovery. We do not go back. We find more basewater, then we find where it leads us. It’s the reason why you’re here.”
Quickie nightmare. Loved that