Chapter 22

  Isaac

  Isaac Milton had too much to do. Too many tasks demanded his attention, or so he imagined, and each of them seemed both important and time-consuming. There was, for example, the AI he was clearly expected to program and activate. There was the defense matrix around his station to configure. There were telescopes to learn how to operate, there was an entire planet to observe and study below, and there were five other moons–‘other’ in this context meaning ‘existent.’ He had no view of one moon, to be fair, as it was diametrically opposite his own station. Then there was this matter of doors, and how to find them, and how to start collecting them on his platform. And then there was the fact that he had not yet had time to satisfactorily study and interact with Charlie. Just how smart was he? How much did he know? And was he, maybe, female like Callie? And speaking of females, what was going on with the others? Apparently Heidi was fighting something? That sounded serious.

  And then there was the matter of the ghosts in his station. Or perhaps the ghost; it might be just one. He heard voices, whispers, not audibly but in his mind. He thought they were trying to tell him to configure something. Well this station was up to its portholes in Potentially Configurable Equipment. Sometimes things in his station moved on their own. Tools fell from shelves on the other side of the room. Small devices powered up. Sometimes objects or areas became uncomfortably warm, or cool. It was like the work of a determined but fairly ineffectual poltergeist. It had creeped him out initially, but after the first day, he no longer felt personally threatened by these developments. Whatever was going on, he didn’t seem to be in any danger from it.

  Curiosity compelled him to try to discover what it was the ghost wanted him to configure. He had thus begun a project on the most obvious answer: the AI. He had learned that the floating cube on which he first appeared was in fact a single enormous computer of staggering complexity and power. It would run the station, get everything ship-shape, and be the brain of an AI supposedly under his authority. It had a name: ARKO, which looked to Isaac like an acronym, although he didn’t know what it stood for. ARKO counted itself among the many things on his station which could be configured.

  It had occurred to Isaac that the ghosts were some kind of meta-physical manifestation or echo of the AI itself seeking to live again, and that once reactivated it would initiate some doomsday device that Isaac himself would then be required to shut down, resulting in a confrontation between himself and the sinister force he had unwittingly loosed on the world. Possibly he would have to die heroically.

  He didn’t really believe this, or any of the other drastic worst-case scenarios which came to mind, which was why he spent most of his first full day onboard the Void Station attempting to configure and reactivate ARKO. He wore a sleek black and silver jumpsuit for this task, drifting around his station with the artificial gravity disabled because why the heck would he want fake gravity when he could float around everywhere?

  The task was surprisingly easy. Isaac Milton knew next to nothing of coding, or programming, or whatever technological wizardry produced advanced computer programs back on Earth. But the Void Station, as he had told Heidi, ran on sci-fi rules. This meant that activating something was usually as easy as flipping a switch. It also meant that certain consoles had big red buttons resting ominously under plastic shielding. And he knew with a science-fiction nerd’s certainty that once he got ARKO up and running it would take care of pretty much all the mundane functions and upkeep of the station, leaving him free to explore. And it could probably answer a lot of his questions.

  It was like a puzzle, one which he partially made up as he went along. He activated the core processors by flipping breaker-like switches hidden behind the cold-storage unit. He started warming up the plastic neural tissue sorting grid. He located the arc-wave array and set it to receive incoming signals from registered sources. He made sure the laser turret systems were operating on automatic detection and filtering life signs so they wouldn’t shoot anything living. He located the primary ARKO memory core and fiddled around with the settings. He stared with suspicion at a lampshade resting innocuously upon a book titled Why do the Moons of Ardia Exhibit Standard Gravitational Fields?

  He had no idea what he was doing.

  So he configured the settings, unaware of what “ARKOpmSRC[dat.0/default.5]:” meant, and whether it would be wise to leave it at .5 or set it down to 0. (He compromised on this by turning it to .8) He changed most of the settings randomly, wondering what the worst that could happen might be and ably supplying himself with possible answers derived from his vast knowledge of 20 th -century pulp sci-fi novels.

  The ghosts redoubled their efforts to get his attention. When making a sandwich for himself in the kitchen, he got the sensation of being watched. The glass of milk which he had extracted from some kind of Star-Trek food materializer fell when his back was turned, spilling across the white plastic counter. This could have been a malfunction in the artificial gravity, but he doubted it. He sighed and located some towels. When he returned to clean up the mess, he saw that the milk ran with swirls of color: blood-red, sky-blue, orange-orange (ha ha), which mingled with the slowly-spreading milk as though drops of food-coloring had been mixed in.

  Charlie (meadowlark form!) hopped onto the counter to investigate. He prodded the outer edges of the spilled milk, chirping in indignation at this outrage. “Yeah, no joke,” Isaac agreed. But he lowered the towel and watched.

  The colors moved with intent; this was clear. They curled and straightened even when the milk puddle had come to rest without draining over the edge of the counter. They formed shapes; the shapes bent. Static electricity crackled over Isaac, which he knew was bad news in a space station. Charlie twittered in fear.

  The colored symbols came to rest. Isaac automatically raised his phone and took a few pictures from different angles. Four. Four distinct symbols, fairly complex, made of spikes and curved lines. They might have been abstract renderings of something, or pictograms, or words in a complex language. He hadn’t yet seen anything like this on the station.

  Isaac reached out with the towel and wiped part of them away. He waited to see whether they would reform. They did not. He checked the rest of the milk to see if it had all changed colors. It had not. Thank goodness.

  “I, uh, don’t understand,” he said, in case the ghosts were listening. “I can’t read that.” Could they understand him?

  A knife on the counter, which he had used to make the sandwich, rotated. It turned like the needle of a compass. It gave Isaac an idea. He searched the kitchen for something small and metallic that had an obvious front end. At this time he discovered his ability to create temporary objects using the ceramic hexagon.

  This new skill distracted him for a while. He could make anything! Well, not anything . His attempts to create complex items met with failure, though he had hopes that he could figure it out. But he could make a wrench, a toothbrush, a footstool, a glass of milk, a plastic bird that looked like Charlie, and a mirror. All of it formed from a silvery mist that flowed from the hexagon, and all of it dissipated to mist once he stopped thinking about it. From the mist they were born and to the mist they returned. He couldn’t actually drink the milk. Or he could, but he could feel it turn back to cool mist in his stomach, which was a strange sensation and not very filling.

  He found that he had limited reserves of mist. He could tell, after a long session of experimentation, that he couldn’t create as much material as he could before. Did it have to recharge? A close examination of the ceramic hexagon revealed no obvious way of measuring its creative potential. The six symbols glowed faintly, same as ever. He concluded that it probably had to recharge. It would be pretty overpowered if he could just keep making anything he needed at any time.

  Overpowered? A voice whispered in the back of his head. For what? A few days ago, he would have unthinkingly assumed this was his own thought rising to the surface from the murky depths of his subconscious. Now he was not so sure. The ghost? Whatever the source, the question made him uneasy.

  Obviously, something was expected of the six of them. Obviously, they had been dropped into some narrative that had been prepared for them. They were supposed to be here; they were supposed to do something. It was like a game of Pathfinder. Which meant, of course, danger. Risk. The possibility of getting one’s throat torn out by a bullet from a thundering silver revolver. He didn’t like that thought at all. Especially since, as he had told Eric, he was pretty sure he had already used his one extra life. If he understood correctly, somewhere on Earth still lay the dead body of Isaac Milton, himself. It would have been cleaned off the street by now. Maybe it was in a morgue. Maybe people had come to cry over it.

  Dwayne? The thought made him shudder, and it seemed that gravity moved beneath him. He gripped the counter. Dwayne would probably…

  Probably what? He had no idea. Something entirely better than anything Isaac could think of. That was the thing about Dwayne. Eric had seen Dwayne with Leah. That meant they were fine, right? Right. Of course. What could possibly happen to Dwayne, anyway? God loved Dwayne Hartman.

  Isaac shook himself free of such needless introspection. Back to business. He imagined a large compass into being. A compass ought to be useless here on the station, especially if its needle was just tin, which it was. A white tin pointer on a swivel in a circular plastic box. Simple.

  He watched it for a moment. The needle did not move. When he shook it into a different position, there it remained.

  “Okay,” he said to the kitchen, and to the alert meadowlark watching from the sink. “I still don’t know if you can hear me, or even understand me, whoever you are. So I guess…I mean, I think we need to try to establish a line of communication, right?” He waited. Nothing happened.

  “So…uh, if you can hear me, then can you, like, move the needle?” He attempted to demonstrate this visually by pointing at himself and then at the compass in his hand. He felt like an idiot, and his face flushed with heat. No one was watching, he reminded himself. But that wasn’t true, exactly. Charlie was watching, and for all he knew, Charlie was more intelligent than himself. And maybe ghosts were watching.

  The compass in his hand became warm, uncomfortably warm. But the needle didn’t move. Then the compass vibrated. The hairs all over Isaac’s body stood on end from static electricity, and he knew he would be in for a shock the next time he touched something. But still, no movement from the needle.

  He almost laughed. Was his ghost an idiot? Could it not figure out how to move a needle? Maybe it had limited powers. Maybe it could knock over a glass of milk, but could not move something as small as the needle. Maybe it didn’t understand what he’d asked. Or maybe there were like five ghosts and they were all arguing and wrestling around and shouting at each other in the ethereal realm beyond his own mortal perceptions.

  But then, finally, the needle moved. It spun, slowly at first, then faster until it became a blur and the compass quivered in his palm.

  “Okay…” said Isaac. What next? “If you can understand me, stop the needle so it points at me.”

  The needle slowed down and came to rest pointing at Isaac.

  “Now at Charlie. That’s the bird.”

  After a delay of several seconds, the needle crept around until it aimed at Charlie. Isaac felt a rush of exultation at his own cleverness. The ghost could understand him! And now they could communicate, though inefficiently.

  But what next? Maybe a compass wasn’t the best means of communication after all. Maybe he should set up, like, a Ouija board? That might work. Wasn’t that how one normally communicated with ghosts? The thought struck him as funny, but it also made him a little nervous.

  Charlie warbled at him. He sounded just like a meadowlark from back home. “What?” asked Isaac. Then he saw the needle had shifted. It aimed, rock-steady, to his left. Directly into a wall. He left the remains of the spilled milk and walked carefully to the nearest door in that direction, keeping his attention on the needle.

  Eventually, though it took a half hour, he found what the ghost wanted him to find. Part of the delay was because of the compass’s inability to show elevation. Most of the delay lay in the fact that his target was on the exterior of the Void Station. Which meant that he had to find his spacesuit–and yes, he had a spacesuit. And it was awesome. It was sleek, flexible, matte black with mesh fibers and detail work in purple and blue. He maintained his full range of motion while wearing it. Even the gloves hardly restricted his fingers. He could almost play the piano in them. The helmet fit his head perfectly, and the faceplate was black and reflective from the outside. From inside, once the suit powered on, displays appeared before him, not as though written on the faceplate two inches in front of his eyes but as though hovering in the air at arm’s reach. He soon discovered that he could interact with these displays physically. Haptic feedback systems made him feel a slight pressure when he touched the projected glowing menus and dials, as though they were real and required a minor effort to move. He ignored most of the menus, checking only “Vitals” and “Basic Functions.” Both seemed good. Everything was in English, though the text was digitized and futuristic. Naturally . The suit had tried and failed to connect with ARKO, and it appeared that most of its functions were offline as a result. Which was too bad, because “Armament” and “Spatial Distortion Field,” among others, made his pulse race.

  He was so distracted by his new gift that he forgot about the compass and the ghosts. A spare helmet crashing to the floor from its hook, an unlikely accident, reminded him. He put the helmet back, checked it for damage, and wished he knew where the ghosts were watching from so that he could give them a stern look for breaking his stuff.

  “After this,” he said out loud, “I’ll work out a better way of communicating.” He sealed the room, spent a minute fiddling with the touchpad by the airlock, and then with a hiss and a whoosh he was gazing into the blackness of space.

  In that moment, as he looked out into the star-dusted void through the window of a circular airlock blinking with lights, his whole life compressed into a single instant. He was a child, watching and re-watching old space movies until he knew every line, every gesture made by the actors, the exact timing of the alarm sirens. He was a slightly older child, out in a field looking at stars, consulting with a star-chart he’d printed out and didn’t know how to use, unaware that he’d printed a southern-hemisphere chart, getting frustrated. He was in a bright, dusty playground, explaining to a wide-eyed Jimothy about how it felt like to be in zero-gravity, and how astronauts could suck floating globlets of juice right out of the air like a whale shark eating jellyfish. And now he remembered: Jimothy had painted this once. This exact scene that he saw, was seeing right now. A wave of déjà vu washed over him, put him off-balance. But it didn’t matter that he was off balance, because “down” had ceased to be a thing for him. He was weightless; he could fly; he was a speck in the interstitial sea of nothingness that embraced and connected all the mind-numbing vastness of existence.

  He shivered as he looked out of the airlock into the starry black of space. It was a shudder of sheer delight. This–he had always wanted this. He knew he was smiling a big stupid grin, and he blinked tears out of his eyes because he couldn’t wipe them with his fingers. But that didn’t matter, because no one could see his face. From the outside he was just some badass astronaut with a faceless black visor, about to go on a spacewalk because the space ghosts were telling him to.

  He laughed, and he heard his laugh reproduced by the helmet, its uncomfortably accurate reproduction of his voice flecked with slight static. (Somehow he knew that the faint distortion in his audio feed was intentional, added for effect.) Charlie, now an eagle, swooped out into the darkness of space, where he had no trouble soaring in graceful arcs despite the lack of wind or gravity.

  With a slight kick of his feet, Isaac drifted out into the darkness. He slowly cleared the airlock, then realized he didn’t know how to steer. He wasn’t worried, though. “Uh, computer,” he said, and felt the vibrations of his voice being transmitted through the helmet. “Mute external…uh, speakers.” A green symbol appeared in the corner of his vision within arm’s reach. It turned red, lingered for a moment, then vanished. Isaac remembered that here in a vacuum his external speakers were meaningless.

  “ARKO?” he asked experimentally.

  ARKO: Offline , the helmet responded. The words appeared in pale blue letters at the bottom of his vision.

  He had turned sideways in relation to the airlock, and still coasted away from the station at a steady drift. “Computer,” he said, “stabilize.” And just like that, with a slight sensation of pressure at his elbows and back, he became perfectly still with relation to the Void Station.

  “Right. How much oxygen do I have left?” He had noticed, in putting on the suit, that it had a small tank strapped to the back. It hadn’t looked like much.

  99%

  Estimated duration remaining: 00:04:32

  Four and a half hours? That was less time than astronauts had for their spacewalks, but he supposed that was just a tradeoff for the streamlined suit. It still seemed like a lot. No way he’d be out here for four hours!

  He worried about whether he’d be able to recreate the compass that had been guiding him, and his fears were justified. The ceramic coaster was still around his neck, inside the suit.

  This puzzled him for a minute, but again he became distracted by the sights around him and the exhilaration of no-gravity. The planet caught his eye, the one his station and the others’ moons were orbiting. Blue and green and white. Now that he got a clearer look…were those square lakes? They marked a green plain, placed in an almost-but-not-quite grid formation. What the heck? He wanted to go to his telescopes and take a closer look.

  A small rock tapped his visor, jarring him from these thoughts. This alarmed him at first, for his mind went to the dangers of space debris that could come hurtling past an orbital station at a relative five-thousand miles per hour. But the rock in question moved slowly, a fist-sized chunk of boring grey rock. It rotated in the air as it spun lazily away from his visor. Then it slowed to a stop, and ever-so-gradually moved back toward Isaac. He watched it come, and did not flinch when it again lightly tapped his visor.

  Then he understood. The ghost! He seemed to be an impatient one. But how to navigate without the compass…

  The answer, of course, was right in front of him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Use the rock. Take me there.” He didn’t know whether the ghost could now hear him. But the rock began to gently accelerate alongside the exterior of the station.

  “Computer,” he said, already longing for the time when he could instead say a name as quick and cool as “ARKO,” “show me how to steer this thing.”

  Piloting tutorial commencing.

  It took about three minutes. He could activate two joystick-like holograms within easy reach, and then, though they were but projections on the inside of his visor, steer himself with his hands as though he were piloting a larger machine. The joysticks could be customized to take many forms, but he left it at default for the moment. A secondary, more subtle means of piloting his suit involved activating delicate sensors in his gloves that would propel him about with only slight movements of his fingers.

  But his ghost was impatient, so instead of messing about with the finer details of locomotion, he grabbed hold of the joysticks, canceled the tutorial, and followed the rock.

  The Void Station looked cool from the outside. It was not all sleek and shiny and clean like the interior. Parts of the station had exposed circuitry and wiring, not plated in the pale paneling that covered large swaths of the station. There were satellite dishes, antennae, viewing windows, portholes, and strange bulky protrusions all scattered around the tangled mass of the station. The part of the station with the cube platform was slowly revolving toward him.

  He became increasingly adventurous in his maneuvering as he followed the drifting rock. Spaceflight came naturally to him, apparently. By the time the rock stopped moving, he was able to spin around in any direction and steady himself again with only minimal disorientation. Even without the sensors inside the visor, he never lost track of the relative positions of things. He’d always been good with directions, after all.

  The rock had come to a stop near a nested set of satellite dishes. The dishes, made of a white plastic material, were all divided into a series of intersecting rings. Many of the rings had gaps in them. They looked like a puzzle to be solved. The rock drifted toward a control panel next to these dishes, struck the panel, and then glanced off at an oblique angle. It spun away into the darkness, apparently no longer under ghostly possession.

  A thick layer of clear glassy material covered the control panel. The switches and dials beneath were visible, but he could not touch them. A sign above the panel read: “Void Moon–Icarus–communications array.” He gazed at this for a moment before it hit him. His moon! He did have a moon! Or he was supposed to?

  Maybe the functional operation of a communications array could assist in the unraveling of this mystery. He could not access the panel, but a black screen nearby looked promising. He tapped it, and it blinked to life at the touch of his glove. “Computer,” he said, thinking that he probably didn’t need to say ‘computer’ every time, “open the Void Moon communications array control panel.”

  The screen blinked to life and displayed a brief message in green text: ARKO authorization required.

  “Override?”

  Override accepted.

  But nothing happened.

  The screen flashed again. Error: unable to connect to ARKO terminal.

  Hmm. “Maybe,” he said for the benefit of his ghostly listeners, “I need to get ARKO running first. That’s probably a good idea.”

  Static electricity sparked on the metal around the console, as if in frustration.

  Isaac took a long look at the control panel. Maybe he would find therein a clue as to the identity of these ghosts. Why would they want him to activate this array? Did they want him to reestablish contact with his missing moon? Were they not ghosts at all, but the manifestations of powerful psions on the lost moon, seeking his attention and aid? Were they ghosts indeed, but vengeful ones that wanted the lost moon found so that retribution could be exacted and/or justice applied? Was he being distracted, perhaps led on a wild goose chase to prevent him from getting ARKO online? Were enemy forces massing, even now, in preparation to assault a space station the defenses of which were known to be mostly inactive? Or maybe—

  Something on the control panel cut his speculations short. He pressed a hand up against the glass, accidentally pushing himself out away from the station. He steered himself back and inspected what had startled him. “Activate CHIME,” it read, there beside a simple on/off switch. And, next to it, “Trans-lunar frequency jammer.” And there, “House relay system,” which showed a hexagon, and “Skywater patch.”

  “Take a screenshot,” he said absently as he read. The image froze for a fraction of a second before sliding down into a storage icon at the bottom of his vision. “Skywater?” he said. “What’s–”

  His visor interrupted him by projecting a small pulsing arrow into his view. It pointed up, to his right, and slightly forward. Skywater door , it read beside the arrow.

  A door? “Locate Skywater City,” he said.

  Error: unable to connect to ARKO

  “Distance to Skywater door.”

  3,734 ft.

  Feet? “Meters.”

  1,138

  “Um. Leagues.”

  .2357

  “Leagues to the tenth place.”

  .2357323232

  “Cubits!”

  2489

  “Awesome.”

  He reached out for the steering controls and they appeared in the air. He closed his hands on the two joysticks, marveling at how he felt the pressure as though they were real. “Deactivate HUD,” he said. There hadn’t been a lot of clutter in his vision, just the arrow, the joysticks, and a few numbers at the bottom. But it all went away. His black-gloved hands grasped at solid nothing in front of him. “HUD back on,” he said. “Plot course to Skywater door.” A green line appeared. “Autopilot?” But ARKO was required for the autopilot function.

  He steered himself away from the Void Station at an angle away from the blue planet, up into the stars and to the nearby debris. Perhaps…was that debris the remains of his moon? That would suck.

  He asked the computer about his fuel reserves and received a confusing message in reply:

  Void Station fuel reserves: ---

  “Spacesuit fuel reserves.”

  Void Suit: fuel not found.

  “Fuel not found?”

  Void Suit: fuel not found.

  And yet here he was, moving through space. He could feel himself changing direction, speeding up and slowing down with the pressure he exerted on the joysticks. Something was moving him. He tried to get a feel for where the thrusters were, where the propelling force was coming from. But he couldn’t tell. Maybe it was a glitch. He just moved.

  The green line took him to a gray asteroid, roughly the size of his old house in Pikeston. It was rocky and pock-marked, a chunky agglomerate of stone and gravel. It rotated at a stately pace. A door came into view as he rounded this asteroid, a sleek silvery arch through which he saw the star-speckled blackness of space beyond.

  Something flashed through the darkness behind the door–something brilliant, white, huge, winged. At first he assumed it was Charlie. Then he grasped the scope of what he saw, and he was sure Charlie had never been the size of a pterodactyl before. He remembered having glimpsed something like this when he first arrived. How had he been stupid enough to just fly out here, defenseless, when he knew that something was out here? It had been a Real Bad Move, now that he thought about it.

  The creature, which looked generically birdlike yet simultaneously unlike any bird Isaac had ever seen, came to rest on a chunk of rock some distance away. Perspective played tricks on Isaac. Just how far away was that creature? He’d at first thought of a pterosaur, but was it actually the size of an airplane? A zeppelin? He had no reference save for distant featureless rocks.

  The white bird-creature flapped a wing, and every space-rock in sight ceased movement entirely. All at once, the slow movement of the field of debris became a still image. A lurching vertigo afflicted Isaac; his brain stalled as he tried to process the pause in his vision.

  And then the bird opened its eyes, and its eyes were like the sun itself. Isaac cried out reflexively. His visor darkened in an instant to adjust to the sudden change in illumination, with the result that nothing was visible but two glowing eyes in the midst of absolute darkness. This was worse, much worse. And still he did not know how far they were, and this instilled him with a cold, visceral, inexplicable dread.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  He couldn’t help looking at the eyes: unblinking, full of light, fathomless light, rainbows of color of such brilliance that no color existed at all, visual music at a pitch no one could hear, data distilled to such raw fragments that no computer could process it, light so simply itself that no eye could see it.

  Darkness. Someone screaming. Pain.

  Darkness: eyes closed.

  Someone screaming: himself, in his own helmet. Loud. He stopped.

  Pain: his eyes, his brain.

  “Introducing anesthetic,” said a soft, featureless voice in his left ear. Hello, anesthetic, he thought, I’m Isaac. The air he breathed gained a minty flavor. That voice was so boring. What voice would he give to ARKO? A posh British accent? Naw, too cliché. Maybe an Australian outback drawl. Steve Irwin. That would be hilarious. Or perhaps Stephen Hawking?

  Then he remembered why he’d been screaming, and why his head hurt. Or he partly remembered. He remembered the general idea. Eyes. Light. He recalled enough to realize that he really, really didn’t want to remember any of the details.

  “What the hell,” he muttered, not even ashamed at his perhaps-borderline swearing. “Computer, what was that?” But apparently that was a question for ARKO.

  He could see again out of his visor. Everything looked normal. There was the blue planet, there were the asteroids and various debris. They were all moving again. He remembered that moment of stillness and shivered.

  And there, not ten feet away to his left, was the sleek silver arch, a gateway gleaming in the starlight. His visor labeled it in green text: “Skywater.” He approached, coasted lightly through the void to touch the door. Its only feature was a black panel affixed to one side.

  EE: Are you available for conversation?

  The words appeared in the lower right of his field of vision in a little box labeled CHIME.

  IM: Whoa. I wonder what that’s about.

  He had spoken that out loud, not intending to send it as a message.

  IM: Oh. Um, deactivate voice?

  IM: Deactivate voice to text.

  VS: Error: unable to connect to ARKO.

  IM: Yeah, yeah.

  IM: What does “VS” stand for?

  VS: Void Suit—model 17.1

  IM: How did you know to put quotation marks around “VS?”

  VS: Error: unable to connect to ARKO.

  IM: You did it again!

  EE: Is this a bad time?

  IM: No, no, it’s fine. I’m not texting is all; I’m just speaking into my spacesuit.

  EE: It has better grammar and punctuation than you.

  EE: What is ARKO?

  IM: Some kind of supercomputer I need to, uh, “configure.”

  IM: There, see? It did it again!

  IM: How does it know?

  IM: Void Suit, define ARKO.

  VS: Error: unable to connect to ARKO.

  IM: Ahem.

  EE: Did you just say “ahem?”

  IM: No, I just cleared my throat.

  IM: I “cleared” my throat.

  IM: Cleared.

  IM: “Cleared.”

  IM: You seeing this?

  EE: Yes. “Weird.”

  IM: Wait, wait, one more.

  IM: ...

  EE: I am still waiting, Isaac.

  IM: ...

  EE: Though I must admit I am now harboring doubts concerning the usefulness of this conversation.

  IM: Did you see that?!

  EE: The ellipses? Yes.

  IM: HOW?

  EE: Very strange. I’ll try again later, shall I?

  IM: No, I’m good now. This place is just crazy.

  EE: It is indeed. In fact, it is on this subject that I wanted to speak to you.

  IM: Craziness?

  EE: Specifically as it relates to our current environment. Our moons.

  IM: Right. I don’t have one. A moon, I mean.

  EE: But we are all in the same place, correct? Broadly speaking.

  IM: Correct! You guys all have moons that are in synchronous, equidistant orbit around a planet. My station is in a field of like asteroids and debris and stuff where my moon ought to be, or maybe was.

  IM: Your moons are about 3,000 kilometers in circumference

  IM: And Ardia, the planet, is around 10,000, which is about as much as the real Moon back on Earth

  IM: Which raises questions about gravity and stuff, but whatever

  IM: The planet and moons are inside like this shell of stars, and I don’t know if anything’s beyond them.

  IM: The distance from Ardia to the stars at the edge of this little universe is about the same as from Earth to the Moon

  IM: Around 400,000 kilometers.

  EE: I was not asking for all the statistics.

  IM: Don’t you think it’s interesting? To know the sizes and distances?

  EE: You sound like Kate.

  EE: What about this Bright World?

  IM: It’s way far out, close to the Empyrean. That’s where the stars are. It and the Dark World orbit perpendicularly to our moons.

  EE: Perpendicularly?

  IM: Imagine a 3D Cartesian coordinate system with Ardia in the center. If the moons orbit on the XZ plane, then the Bright World orbits on the YZ plane and the Dark World orbits on the XY plane.

  EE: I understand.

  EE: I think.

  EE: I am impressed. You really do sound like Kate.

  IM: Which moon is yours? Maybe I can see it!

  IM: One of the moons is directly opposite me across the planet, so I can’t see that one.

  IM: I don’t know whose moon is whose, but I’m pretty sure I will once I get ARKO up and running.

  EE: Sisyphus, the Garden Moon. It is probably white from a distance.

  IM: Zoom.

  IM: Maximum magnification.

  IM: Whoa, not that much. Back up.

  IM: Like, 70%?

  IM: Look, see how it did the number for 70? And the % sign?

  IM: Seventy. 70. Percent. %.

  EE: Truly your suit’s transcriptive powers know no bounds.

  IM: Yeah I think I see your moon.

  IM: I’m in space!

  EE: I know.

  IM: No, I mean I’m actually in a spacesuit, outside my station, in space, right now.

  EE: Oh.

  EE: Okay, that is pretty cool.

  EE: What does my moon look like?

  IM: Well, it’s like you said. White. That’s about–no wait. Yeah, it’s shaped weird. It’s not perfectly round.

  IM: Increase zoom 10%.

  IM: Looks like a huge mountain!

  IM: If you can call it that, when it covers like a quarter of your whole moon.

  EE: Ah.

  EE: Yes, it seems I need to climb that mountain and make a flower grow.

  IM: A flower?

  EE: Because my moon, the Garden Moon, is covered in endless winter. Yes, like Narnia.

  IM: Like Narn–oh, come on.

  EE: And I need to make the flower bloom on top of that mountain. They say it is impossible.

  IM: Well...is it?

  EE: I haven’t been there yet. But my moon is named Sisyphus.

  EE: You know what that means, correct?

  IM: Yeah, I think so.

  EE: And your moon is named Icarus?

  IM: Yeah. Or, like, it was, maybe?

  EE: Eric’s moon is named Pyrrhus.

  IM: Yeah, okay, I get it. Like in “pyrrhic victory,” right?

  IM: It really does have better spelling than me.

  IM: But yeah, like, ominous.

  EE: I do not know how to say this with accuracy, but we find ourselves in some kind of story. Do you agree?

  ?

  IM: I do. You’re right. From what I can tell, though we haven’t been here long, each of us has like some kind of theme. Like mine is “space.” So: space station, “Void Moon,” whatever. And my symbol is a cube because that represents three-dimensional space. And it’s all because I love space and science-fiction and stuff. Kate has like a fairy-tale palace or whatever because she loves fairy tales. And her thing is “sky?” Don’t know what that means.

  EE: Right.

  IM: So what are you asking, exactly?

  EE: I want to hear what you think. Your viewpoint on all of this.

  IM: ...okay?

  EE: I value your insight on the topic of story and narrative.

  IM: Wha–I mea...really?

  EE: Really. I do actually read your book suggestions, Isaac.

  EE: Most of them.

  IM: Hmm. Well, okay. So it’s obvious that this place has been prepared for us specifically. There are six of us, six moons. We each match our moon. I have a piano on my space station, because I play piano. I bet you’ve got a lot of books, a garden, something related to dance?

  EE: Correct.

  IM: Maybe like opera singers prancing around everywhere?

  EE: There would be nothing wrong with that.

  IM: It would be hilarious if there were actual musical numbers happening all the time on your moon.

  EE: Moving on...

  IM: Yeah. So that means that either someone or something prepared this world for us ahead of time, somehow knowing we would come...

  EE: Or?

  ?

  IM: Or, like, it was spontaneously generated when we arrived? Seeded, like a randomized videogame at the start, using presets based on ourselves.

  EE: We did not arrive simultaneously. Jimothy and I were first, then you and Kate. And when you arrived, you could see that all the moons were present, correct?

  IM: Yeah, I see. I saw Heidi’s weird moon before she got here. Maybe it happened while we were in the Museum? That place has definitely got something to do with it. Did you know Kate’s been going there in her sleep for years? That’s why she answers her phone at all hours of the day and night–because she can do it there. Also CHIME works there, and here. There are settings for CHIME on my station.

  EE: It was you who introduced all of us to CHIME.

  IM: Right, but I just like randomly found it online. Or maybe it was like in an email or something...

  IM: Huh.

  IM: Anyway, that place is full of doors, and doors are clearly a theme here.

  IM: Oh yeah! And there’s that Dark Man. Maybe he’s behind all of this.

  EE: The Dark Man?

  IM: He’s like the caretaker of the Museum or whatever. Curator? Custodian, maybe?

  EE: So what is your guess as to what happens next?

  IM: Well sounds like you’ve already got a quest.

  EE: This is not a game.

  IM: Like, but, really though? Are you sure?

  EE: You think that each of us has some manner of quest, likely based on our respective settings and inclinations?

  EE: I do not like the idea that we have become pawns in some pre-arranged narrative.

  IM: Characters in a story!

  IM: I just remembered what we were talking about, me and Jacob. Jacob Hollow, he’s this guy I met before I died. He said he was like a character from a story, like escaped into the real world or something. Maybe he meant something like that.

  EE: Before you what?

  IM: Died. I got shot.

  EE: I don’t understand.

  EE: Clarify.

  EE: Are you okay?

  IM: I, yeah I’m fine. So is Kate. You know, because...wait, did she not tell you? Has nobody told you?

  EE: Tell me.

  IM: Oh, wow. So both Kate and I, we, like...we died. On Earth. Like, right now, somewhere on Earth, our bodies are...there. Um, dead. I think. But for both of us, our angels got us out, like took away our souls or whatever, to the Museum. So I mean, Kate can explain this better than I can. Provided she’s not using speech-to-text software like me, ha ha. But you also have like another body, I think. On Earth. But yours is still alive. I mean, hopefully.

  EE: Is this another joke, Isaac? If you are joking about Kate dying I will find a way to your space station and kill you for real.

  IM: I’m serious! Ask Kate! Or maybe don’t because I think she took it kind-of hard. Um, because...

  IM: Anyway, Jacob told me I had a “role to play.” Heh. He said something about me being the one to figure everything out. Now that I think about it, it seems like he sort-of knew what was going to happen. Except about Black.

  EE: Hmm. I got the same impression from Amelia and Elmer.

  IM: Who?

  EE: They did seem like characters.

  EE: Right out of a book.

  IM: Yes! That’s how Jacob was! And especially Black. Abraham Black, that’s the guy that shot me.

  IM: Also, here’s a mystery: I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to have a moon, or maybe I had one at some point, but something happened to it.

  EE: Perhaps that is your quest.

  IM: Heidi is fighting something, because she fights.

  EE: Eric is in a futuristic cityscape.

  IM: Right, ‘cause he’s a badass.

  EE: I wish I knew about Jimothy.

  IM: Oh, he’s fine.

  EE: ?

  IM: I talked to him earlier. Sent a drone. He has my old phone. I don’t need it with all my computers and stuff.

  EE: So.

  IM: Oh...

  EE: You confirmed that Jimothy is fine.

  IM: Yeah, sorry.

  EE: And you DID NOT TELL ANY OF US?

  IM: I was gonna patch him into the group chat, but he didn’t want that. I think he was bummed about something and just wanted some alone time.

  EE: I respect your decision to acquiesce to his request.

  IM: Thank you.

  EE: But you are wrong.

  IM: Oh.

  EE: Jimothy needs to process externally. He needs to talk to people, Isaac, to work through all the thoughts that stack up in his mind. If something did happen to him, he needs someone to be there with him.

  IM: Well, he’s got Hazel...

  IM: Fine. Yeah, his old number should work. I forgot to change the text color, though, so it’ll be, you know, purple, until he changes it.

  EE: You entered this narrative with Kate?

  IM: Yeah, I guess. First time meeting her was in like a weirdo dream world. So yeah, sounds about right.

  IM: I thought I was dead, you know.

  IM: At first.

  EE: A revelatory psychological experience, no doubt.

  IM: Wow, just laugh it up, okay? I literally died. The last thing I felt was...cold. And the pain of it. And then...I thought...I woke up and I thought I was going to see Him.

  IM: Nice caps, VS.

  IM: Doing that Thing I Always Do in Text.

  IM: Heh.

  EE: I am sorry, Isaac. I did not mean to make light of a traumatic experience.

  ?

  EE: Well, I did. But that is what I am apologizing for.

  IM: Don’t worry about it.

  EE: So was Kate okay?

  IM: Yeah, she’s fine. I think. Like, I’ve never met her before, so who knows.

  IM: She’s pretty cool though.

  EE: She is.

  IM: Remember what she said about Skywater? Of course you do. I’m here with what I’m pretty sure is a door, and it’s labeled “Skywater.”

  EE: I found mine too. We should all meet up there soon.

  IM: Ok, cool. I’ll just take a look.

  IM: Wait. What’s that?

  ?

  IM: Zoom. Yeah, target.

  IM: Wait, “target?” With...what, “weapons systems?!”

  VS: Error: unable to connect to ARKO.

  IM: No, don’t target.

  IM: “Dark World?” That doesn’t sound good.

  EE: What is it?

  IM: Um, something just breached the Void Station’s security perimeter. A ship from the Dark World. Hostile, apparently?

  IM: This could be bad. I don’t have ARKO up yet!

  EE: Well.

  EE: Good luck.

  IM: Wow, thanks. Okay, you too. Bye.

  IM: End transmission.

  The intruding vessel was evil. That was clear at a glance. If the things he suspected about this world were true, then certain tropes should hold true. He already found himself making assumptions about how things worked here. They worked the way things did in the science fiction stories he liked. And that ship, with its jagged, spiky outline, its black exterior, its red glow and the narrow, angled cockpit lights that looked like fierce eyes, was the Bad Guy. The reason why his defensive lasers could be set to target more than just space debris.

  He needed to get back to his station. He forgot for a moment how to control his suit. He simply reached out for the Void Station, futuristic and beautiful and awesome, as if that would help. And it did. Something shifted, a change shuddered through him, and he was back in the airlock. He stumbled with the sudden reassertion of gravity and flailed around in confusion. Then he remembered Charlie, who could teleport him. Right. He didn’t see the bird around, which seemed odd, but he put that out of his mind. He also put away the thoughts it dredged up of another bird, even bigger and brighter.

  He ran for the nearest control panel.