The settlements were a collection of houses stacked several high along the outside edge of the Disc, providing a wall and a border for the world of Olorun. The dense, hill-laden jungle named Aja (Syn’s home) thrived in the center of the ring.
Blip twisted up in the air, peering down the metal corridor lined with doors. “I know. But that’s what’s weird. The rooms stop at 97. There is no 99. This is the last room on the thirteenth level here.”
Syn looked back from where they had walked and counted off the doors, reading the numbers above the access panels. “91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.” She pointed at the one ahead of them. “97. Okay. Did we hear him wrong?”
“You could’ve. I didn’t. He said J1302-99.”
“Maybe it’s not a room.”
“What else works according to that numbering?”
“It’s not 99. 97 is the only room here. It’s the last one. And we’ve never explored here.”
“Let’s open it up.”
From down the hall, Eku walked—a large shape emerging from the darkened corridor into the blue light of the floorstrips activated by Syns presence.
“Eku!” Syn shouted, running to wrap her arms around the tiger’s neck. She pulled back and looked at her hand and then at the cat’s neck. “Oops! I got some orange paint on you.”
“She’s an orange cat. Won’t make a difference,” Blip said.
Syn dabbed another finger into the small pot of orange paint in her hand and tapped her finger across her forehead leaving nine dots above her eyebrow from left to the right. “There. We both have paint.” She smiled and held up her finger to the tiger. “Look we found somewhere new.” She leaned over and in a hushed, dramatic tone, she breathed out, “And a mystery.”
Syn stood up and walked to room 97. “It always surprises me when we come to a place that’s new.” She nodded at the orange mark. “These are everywhere.” Their first explorations throughout the ship were panic-infused creeps fearful of what might jump out at them. When it became clear that they would be crawling over the ship for years, Syn had found some paint to mark their progress. Those little dabs of paint now felt pervasive. Few doors remained unmarked.
“We’ve almost explored the entire Disc. We would’ve gotten to this spot sooner or later, whether that bot had said it or not.”
“Doesn’t it worry you?”
Blip looked sideways as the access panel slid open and revealed a digital interface array. “Step closer. It’s out of power.”
Syn took a couple of steps, glancing between her fingertips and then out across the railing to the sweep of the Disc. As she stepped within a meter of the access panel, it lit up with its common green interface.
“Thanks.” Blip sent over a quick command line, requesting the door to open. “And what do you mean?”
Syn stepped back from the access panel, and it went dark, eliciting a muffled grunt of irritation from Blip. “What will happen when we run out of places to explore? What happens when every wall has an orange mark?” She looked around, gripping the edge of the rail and staring out at the Disc.
“None of this will be new ever again. We’ll be locked in without any place to explore. Maybe we should just let this door stay shut. Maybe we should plan to leave one mystery and always keep it a mystery. At least then we’ll always know that there’s something we don’t know, something that we haven’t explored.” She spun on Blip. “I’m scared of the same old thing day after day after day. What happens then?”
Blip sighed. “Breathe.”
Syn took a deep breath and snarled, “That’s good. It doesn’t change the fact that your twin is the only thing new we’ve really encountered. I know what’s going to happen when we open that door.”
“He’s not my twin, and I don’t. That’s why I was trying to open it.”
“We’re going to discover the same boring room with the same white and grey acoustic panels on the wall with the leftover clothes and half-eaten meals, and maybe, somewhere, a screen will be left on to some children’s show, and Barney the purple dinosaur will be singing as we enter. That’s it! How do I know that? Because that’s the same thing we’ve encountered everywhere else. If it isn’t Barney, it’s some band or TV commentary or documentary about Earth. Oh, and don’t forget the dead bodies. They’ll be sprawled out somewhere in the most uncomfortable positions. But that’s it! Nothing new! Nothing amazing! TV, food, death, and gray walls. Olorun’s great legacy.” Her voice had reached a level of pitch he hadn’t heard for a while, and the last few words clipped out in a panicked state.
“You’re having an anxiety attack. It’s going to be okay.” He floated close, moving within an inch of her. Not close enough to touch but close enough to be able to if she wanted it.
“Blip? Don’t you get it? It’s over! That bot was the last great mystery, and once we solve that, it’s over! We will live the same day over and over and over. Like that movie…Ground…Grounder Day!”
“Groundhog Day?”
“Yes! Except we’re not trying to get anything right! We can do the day perfect, but we’re stuck.”
“It’s going to be fine.”
“How do you know that? How can you say that?”
Blip sighed and started, “I—”
“Don’t sigh. I’m not your problem.” She spun around and began to walk the other way.
“This was your idea! I said I could do this without you! Are you okay with me checking this out on my own? I can ask Olorun to open the door!” Blip shouted after her.
“Of course you can. You always can.” Syn turned on her heels and pointed. “But that’s not what’s going to happen. You don’t get to talk to the ship when you’re not happy with me.”
Blip floated back, “Not happy with you? What are you talking about?”
“I’m not freaking out. I just can’t get why you’re not!”
“Wait— did you hear yourself? I didn’t say…” Blip moved in close and began to count, his voice deep. “Twenty. Nineteen.” With each number, his voice hushed a bit more.
“You know what I mean. I’m not getting the words right,” she said, seemingly oblivious to what he was doing.
“Sixteen. Fifteen.”
Syn took a deep breath.
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
“I’ll open your door. But some point is coming…” She nudged past him and walked to the door, the floor light sparking up as she passed and the access panel now glowing orange. “Some point is coming when we won’t get to open a door and experience anything new.”
“Four. Three. Two.”
She tapped her fingers on the panel, throwing in the same code Blip had started. She looked back over her shoulder, “And doesn’t that scare you? Like you’re some fish stuck in some can, and you’re never going to get out.”
In a whisper, he said, “One.” Blip gave a sound like a sigh himself after a pause. "Please stand here so I can open it?"
Syn sighed, shaking the brief panic free, and pulled the makeshift spear closer. "I've been waiting for you." Syn nudged the floating robot, "Besides, I thought you could do anything."
Blip's eyes went narrow, "I have great big memory banks, but I can’t keep it all up inside me. There are a few things that I get on info drip from Olorun. She’s the one that has all the info." Blip faked a cough.
She hated when he talked about the ship as if it were alive. It creeped her out. He didn’t do it often, but occasionally, he would throw out a line like that and make her anxious—to think they were crawling around inside a living thing. Maybe it was even the thought that if Olorun was alive, then what did she know of Syn? Had she been watching everything? Is she watching now?
She stepped forward. The panel lit up. "I’m here. Shut up and open the door."
The lights on the door flashed green.
Syn smiled, "Nice."
Blip made a metallic sound like a grunt.
Syn rolled her eyes, "Fine. You can say it."
In a deep voice, Blip d
eclared, "Open sesame!"
Syn sneered, “Welcome to Olorun. Now let’s see the last great mystery.”
The inner gears of the door ground to life, clunking over and over. The split in the door widened, and Syn bent back into a defensive stance, her arms pulled tight, gripping the makeshift spear tighter. Only darkness lay ahead. And then, a smell familiar and stomach-churning rolled out—undisturbed, unfiltered, stale air. Syn coughed and pulled out a stain-spotted yellow cloth, wrapping it around her mouth.
Eku crouched and growled—a deep, rumbling sound.
She coughed again, forcing herself not to gag, swallowing the bile back down. After a moment, Syn whispered, as if facing a tomb, "Light please."
This room had apparently not been opened since the Madness had swept through the ship and everyone died. In the center of the room lay a body, face down, clothed in the deep purple wear of the science crew. A few thin strands of blonde hair lay against the skull. Something, perhaps a rodent, had torn away at what was left, leaving only the brilliant white of skull. Most of what was left was hardened flesh and bone. All muscle and meat had been ripped off and digested by something small enough to get into these nearly impenetrable suites.
“Her name was Agan’ja. She was thirty-five and worked as a botanist in the soil farms,” Blip said, cross-referencing some database from Olorun with what he picked up about the room.
The room felt frozen. The newly-entered light illuminated the thick particles of dust kicked up by Syn’s steps. No sound. Nothing. Now she did wish for the childish songs of Barney. Anything to break the sense of entombment.
“Remember that old movie The Mummy?” Syn asked.
“Which one? Fraser, Karloff, Cruise, or Wolfhard?” Blip had moved into the kitchen, but she could still his green glow through the slit in the doorway.
Eku walked through the living room sniffing at every chair, corner, and wall—undisturbed by the corpse in the entranceway.
Syn paused and thought through the options. “All of them. This is the disturbing of the crypt. The thing you’re not to do. And then…” She smacked her spearpoint hard against the door to the kitchen and shouted, “And then the Mummy gets you!”
Blip spun in the air, his body shifting from green to red in alarm. In a moment, his shell drained of color back to porcelain white. “Not funny.”
“Pretty funny.”
“There’s nothing here.”
Eku seemed to growl in assent.
Syn walked through the hallway into the back bedroom. Everything in the suite was undisturbed. Books on shelves. No food out. Compared to most places they had searched, this one seemed oddly prepared to be left alone for all time—everything perfectly cleaned and arranged. “Maybe.”
The bed was made with a green and yellow striped comforter. A normal decor choice on this side of the Disc. Syn had identified different groupings of style and taste of those that were here before—some were gaudy in their color choices, some were muted, some relished old cultural patterns. Some had clung to more recent, subtler choices. But the styles never varied much from their neighbor.
Syn walked into the bathroom and gasped. She was presented with an elaborate series of mirrors. Before her stood a large, full-bodied mirror with angled panes on all sides. She could see herself from nearly every angle. “Lights,” she whispered, and the bulbous glamour lights around the edges lit up.
“Ouch,” she grunted, closing her eyes as they adjusted to the brightness. When she opened them, the effect was dizzying. More than just five Syns surrounded her. A hundred copies of her receded back through the corridors of the mirrors—a hundred Syns all standing at attention. The orange dots across her forehead reflected back and seemed to float before her. She moved her hand in the air and watched the copies all echo the movement in perfect synchronicity. Yet, was there a delay? Would she have known if one had refused? Perhaps, twenty copies back, that one didn’t respond as fast, she wondered. A Syn that was not completely Syn. Just a bit out of step. Out of rhythm.
Or maybe instead, she imagined, she was peering into the past and was seeing all the Syns that she had been before. Young Syn, stepping out of the crèche and exploring Olorun the first time. Curious Syn next—always looking in every door and every room without much thought. But that extinguished fast. Curious Syn was the first to die. Oh, she kept a token of curiosity to remember her, but the Curious Syn would never survive the wilds of Olorun. After that had come Sad Syn, then Angry Syn, and then Hopeless Syn and then one after another—none of them capable of doing the job that needed to be done. Survival required that those parts of her, those echoes of who she was now, be cut off and thrown away with no precision. She was standing because none of those others could. She was the survivor that had been birthed in their passing.
Beside her, Eku stood and growled, snapping her attention back to the now.
“Ya, girl. Just me. Nothing to worry about.” She tapped the mirror with the point of her spear before turning away. “They’re just me. They’re not real. They can’t hurt you.”
Before exiting the bathroom, she examined the counter and opened up a wooden jewelry box. Inside were a variety of beaded necklaces. She picked one up that was carved from wood and decorated in a variety of blue designs. She slipped it over her neck to join the others. She searched through the box and found a small orange tiger carved from some soft stone. “Look Eku, it’s you.” Syn clipped the pendant to the end of the most recent necklace to join her collection. “There, that way you’re always with me even when you’re not.”
She turned back to the living room, and Eku padded after. “Nothing here. This wasn’t where the other bot meant.”
As she came around the couch, her foot snagged, and she stumbled, catching her balance after a couple steps before falling to the ground. “What the?” Behind her, half under the couch, was the shattered shell of a vacuum bot.
Blip floated in. “Are you okay?”
She pulled the bot out and picked it up. “I have discovered a remarkable thing.” She held up the vacuum bot. “A broken bot.” She held her arms out straight and let the heavy construction drop to the group with a loud clang as its plastic pieces shattered, spraying across the room. “Just like every other bot on this ship.”
She walked over to Blip and leaned in, pressing her nose against his white surface. “Know what?”
Blip floated without response or expression. With as mechanical a response as he could muster, he replied, “What?”
“Just like you will one day.” She stepped back and pushed him away. “And you’re going to leave me all alone.”
She walked back to the entrance and kicked the corpse’s skull, detaching it from its spine. It rolled across the floor before stopping against a table leg. “This was stupid. A waste of time. We should be opening that bot up. Or going back to the needle or something.”
“I’m sorry,” Blip said.
Syn stared at him. An unusual response for him. “What for?”
“I’m sorry we didn’t find anything new.”
She glanced down at the necklace and fingered the orange tiger pendant. “Oh, but we did. See?”
“That’s very pretty,” Blip said.
Syn grinned, “See. I knew you liked tigers.”
“That’s not what I—” Blip started, floating after her.
Syn stepped to the door as it slid open and interrupted him, “We’ve got a long ride back home. Theater’s on the way, and I want to watch a movie. You can choose. Come spend time with me or go talk to your girlfriend Olorun.”
With that, she stepped outside and breathed, “Lights off,” dropping the apartment into pitch blackness, leaving Blip floating alone. The door behind her to the outside shut with a strained hiss, cutting off the sound of her receding footsteps.
5
Through the Forest
“Think, now, if the accomplished whole be Heaven,
How wonderful the anxious years of slow
And hazard
ous achievement—a destiny for Gods.”
—Yorùbá Creation Myth
Syn had fallen asleep during the last minutes of the film and woke when Blip nudged her.
They moved in quiet from the Theater to her tree. She wanted to talk with Blip, quiz him more on the recent strange events, but instead she just squeaked out, “Stay with me until I fall asleep. I don’t want to be alone.”
Blip gave a single nod of agreement but chose to not respond.
From the darkness of the forest, from the false night created by the dimming of the sunstrips, walked a dark shadow. Syn froze. As it approached, she relaxed. Eku. The tiger. Her tiger.
She wrapped her arms around its neck and buried her face in its fur. Eku’s flesh was warm, its body rose and fell with its steady breathing, and deep inside, like from a hidden furnace, the slight start of the rumbling that would be a purr began.
So, with Eku by her side, she chose to walk. She wanted to step through the jungle with the power of Eku beside her. She wanted to be in her tree. Yet, she also just wanted to take her time. She craved shelter and sleep and the lull of a long walk.
It was only a few kilometers. Syn could see her tree peaking up over the other trees. It was enormous and seemed to stretch forever. It was the one sight that was visible wherever they stood on the Disc. From the other side of the Disc, looking up, she could see the small green dot that was the tree’s top, and it was still visible against the mass of the rest of Aja. There was so much green in the jungle preserve, but her tree was somehow greener. It was darker, and it called to her. She felt like she should’ve named it Lighthouse. She could see it from great distances and was pulled to it over and over.
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