“To shed no tears. To set man free. For that reason do I draw my sword!“ — opening credits to Icarus Clone, popular anime.

2080

Somewhere far, far east of the Solar System

The ship translated from one part of the universe to another. It blinked into being — black against blacker void, shaped in the manner of a dart with striations — and hung, backlit by light from an alien sun.

The lines pulsed. Once, to bring machinery online, or perhaps better, alive. Inside its oval center, the lone occupant’s brain waves distorted. From perfect flats, rising, cresting, surging to valleys.

They drew breath.

A coughing, half-interrupted noise bounced against the walls of the spaceship.

“Long he flew/

and long he knew.”

The words were desperate, perhaps even insane.

____

Sylvesteri Hekkenninen applied his will through the Implant, and the controls lit up. A hologram threw open a model of the star-system, which he removed, an official voice began to declaim a bunch of blablala ‘bout the need for scouts such as he, which he allowed, not that he cared about any of that, but you could get lonely in the black between stars.

A human voice was thing he had taken for granted once.

“News?”

“As of 2077, there have been no new news, as set by the parameters you yourself implemented—“ “Yes, yes,” he interrupted.

Had he set the parameters? When?

“Status of current system?”

“This system was divined back in 2040. In 2050, several forerunners working in the Homing Office suggested it be investigated, though a low priority. As of 2058, when traces of Field-fluctuations were detected in parts of the system, a high priority.”

“Details?”

Him and the hologram went back, so it knew the drill. The solar system narrowed, zooming in on one planet in particular.

The orb had one brown side, one dark. Ah.

“Tidally locked?”

“Tidal lock confirmed. The distance between Earth and the planet designated as XZLALD-1334 makes it close to impossible to tell, but an approximate guess was that the trace was detected on its dark side.”

“Onwards! To the dark side of the moon!”

“Sylvesteri, that is not a moon.”

“Hah!”

______

The spaceship, equipped with Field and a forerunner specialising in spatials, was fast. Yet, Sylvesteri mused, space too is vast.

The creators of the Travelogues had factored that vastness in two ways. One, by a special Field-dependent technique, and by…a particular choosing of its pilots.

“Hit the somatic. I want to fly.”

“Are you certain? Protocol forbids extracorporeal exit beyond the first half-hour after system-entry.”

“How long since entry?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Sylvesteri shrugged. He was light years from the Solar System, and were he to be injured now, it wouldn’t matter. He’d die alone in the dark, but he’d be doing so on his feet.

He pretended to think about it. But really, his mind was made up.

“Activate.”

Sylvesteri stared through the transmuted cockpit, out into the dark—

and then he hung there. Floating.

He turned around. The matte black dart followed him and in it, a body rested.

He gazed down on his limbs. In his mind they were whole, and so it was in the projection. The mind had conquered his faulty matter. He pulled the lower section of his body up in a arc, grabbing his toes with his hands, and flipped around.

His breath came in gaps, and his eyes burned. It always was like this. He was confined to a chair — had been confined for the majority of his life — and so, when the Administrator came to him with an offer, he took it.

After all, who do you send on a one-way journey into the dark between stars? You send cripples who can’t walk.

“Distance?”

There was no air to bring the sound of his voice back to the ship, but then, air wasn’t the medium through which he spoke.

“Measured as the protocols you have installed recon such things, perhaps six hours.”

“Perhaps?”

“There is a asteroid field in the middle.”

“Oh, sweet.”

Sylvesteri blinked, and so did the ship. The dark remained as it did. He blinked. Darkness again. And again. And again.

On the fifteenth jump, he saw something. A grey blur, the size of his thumb. A planet, seen from an incomprehensible distance.

_____

Four hours, a series of planets growing increasingly larger and something he thought to be a comet — or was it an asteroid? — Sylvesteri paused.

His path was blocked.

The object eclipsed his sight, spinning on an axis that granted it the appearance of a pear, albeit a grey-colored one.

Its many siblings rotated to same tune, a dance of waltz to gravity’s beat.

“Well, fuck. You weren’t kidding.”

“I do not joke, Sylvesteri Hekkenninen.”

“You say that, but…”

He scratched what little hair he had left.

“Do the thing.”

The hologram hadn’t been programmed to sigh; Hekkenninen had added that.

A thin red line snuck around the asteroid in front of him, curving sharply to the left, inching down before zigzagging through parts unknown.

Hekkenninen pushed with his mind and flew past the celestial orb, following the marked path. On occasion, he stopped, touching the rough stone.

“Will I be able to walk?”

“More. You will walk on a road no human has ever trod. The things you will see, Mr Hekkenninen. Even I, who hold an arcology in my mind, cannot conceive of the things you will see.”

“And if I don’t accept?”

“Then you will not remember this conversation.”

He put his hand in an indentation on the hovering rock. The Administrator had spoken in truth. Sylvesteri had visited worlds untouched by any humans. To think he would have missed that, missed out what he was doing…all for a conversation. But then, in his dotage, he knew that the world rotated on such small intimate conversations.

The fingers of his hand splayed, touching the radial corners of the hole.

He looked down on his legs, the long hale ones he only possessed in his mind.

If he had not accepted…but he had.

Hekkenninen shook his head, dispelling the gloom.

He flew through the asteroid-field and eventually, at its terminus, saw the planet. The sight… His mind had taken to cadence and rhyme, to tonality and the strange, strange songs that could be made out on the edges of a pilot’s hearing.

I have come so far/

Come from distant star.

As promised: one side dark, the other light. Crusted brown flakes covered the entirety of the grey marble.

Hekkenninen cleared his throat. With solemn voice, he did so intone:”By the power vested in me, granted through the auspices of the Federated Earth, I name this planetoid…”

“…Crusted Flake.”

“That is not the official designation.”

“Well, when the paper pushers back on Earth get here, they can change the name to whatever they like! Begin log 00001: Crusted Flake.”

The dart stopped — and Hekkenninen descended in the form of a ray of light. The first flight of the Travelogues had suffered a eighty percent mortality rate. Hekkenninen could have told them, as anyone with the slightest sense given to ants, that landing on foreigns planets and anomalies was a sure recipe for disaster.

The few reports that made their way back had been fragmented, their speakers insane, or tired, or void-depressed. Rumor had it that the Travelogues were just a bureaucratic stamp away from dissolution.

Hekkenninen burst through the atmosphere, the dense sea of clouds and landed in a forest with bone-white trees, the branches grasping for the sky. They looked like benevolent believers, standing in a land covered forever in the shadows.

A red path begun through the forest and up. Through his Implant, and partially helped by the auxiliary intelligence of his ship, he could see through the twilight land.

He placed a finger against his lips, the ancient warding for silence. Hekkenninen might be an invalid, and if he was honest, a bit mad, but he wasn’t stupid. Even before the Burning Web Incident, he had changed the protocols of his ship. The hologram was never, ever to speak while he was on a foreign world.

He levitated slowly through the white forest, through air that had never seen sunlight. You never knew what the Host had left in their journey towards Earth.

He reached a hand through the bark of the tree. Soft, mushy.

He dived down for the forest floor, peering through ground, searching, failing to find life.

Come to think of it, why were the trees white? There was no light here, right? Shouldn’t they be black, to absorb the light better?

He swam up and through the ground, hovering as the path demanded. A series of burning notes hung before him.

“This is a the triangulated spot from which the Field activity was detected. The accuracy of this calculation is quite high, though the ‘zone’ where it originated cannot be determined with any form of certainty.”

Hekkenninen sighed. How long would he have to spend here? A month? A year? This better not be another Shorefoam. That world had been a miscalculation and he had spent the better part of a year searching for the proverbial needle.

“I suggest a twenty kilometer search-zone, with an aerial focus. More to come.”

Hekkenninen’s feet went through the top of one tree. A purple lichen clung desperately to its top. There should have been more life here; though on the dark side of Crusted Flake, evolution would created animals adapted for an endless twilight. That there wasn’t…suggested something.

He gazed up at the clouds.

Better get cracking.

______

He almost shouted. Nothing.

He had walked through trees. Gone down to the mantle itself, bathing in the heart of a world. He gone up, to that boundary where the air thinned, and where, had he been human, death would have come for him. Looked down on that ocean of white clouds, tinted grey in the sunless atmosphere.

Nothing.

This was the fourth ‘planet’ he had been to. Shorefoam had been a dub. Nightcross was ruined, albeit the date of destruction suggested that the Host had passed when dinosaurs rose from protean mud, which helped the brainiacs back home.

Scar Tissue…that one world he had avoided. In the file back home, it probably said something about homocidal tendencies and antisocial urges, but Hekkenninen was no fool. Some fights were lost from the beginning.

A v-shaped form, the color of a tongue. The dart held its distance. Hekkenninen flew through the dark of space, a grin on his pitted face. This would never grow old.

He was close enough to make out gigantic lines on the flesh-smudge when it wobbled. The airless void inhibited movement, shifted the perspective, made what was small large, and large small.

But when…when something attempted to push through what he would call ‘scar tissue’, the entire object moved. A thing as vast as a moon shouldn’t be able to do that, Field or not.

As he retreated, he had to. One last look, back.

An arc, extending up. Another arc, descending down. A rampart bulging against the skin.

A smile.

Hekkenninen shivered. Even the memory was enough. He had called it in, designating the zone as ‘white’. The designation given to the Burning Web.

Some of the other members of the Travelogue went their entires lives— short that they were— and found nothing. No alien remnants. No former sites left behind by the Host.

Hekkenninen passed through another tree. In a sense he’d already lucked out. Nightcross, that ancient installation of tortured metal had been a find. The scientists back home had said as much. It’s just…that it had been so boring. He had let the ship do as much scanning as possible, only passing through the stygian metal, trying and ultimately failing, to divine the purpose behind the x-shaped platform.

He descended, stopping beneath a cloud. The white forest went up to a series of mountains in the west, from which rivers originated. Those blue veins delineated the forest into… perhaps seven sections.

He drew with his hands, painting a sentence.

A reply came.

“Possible,” it read.

Hekkenninen stared in the directions of the mountains. Technically speaking, they were out of the radius.

Then, he had gone through the allotted area he was supposed to measure.

He glanced down at the seven rivers. If the measurement was correct, and someone had employed a Field nearby…and if he had been unable to find anything…

It could be that whatever had employed the Field had withered away. A person, or a construct whose body simply had been rendered unto dust. He gazed at a mountain-top, the prow of which cut through clouds.

Let’s say something or someone had used a Field in this region. Suppose their body is gone. Or, atleast not here. Where did they come from?

He wrote a question with shimmering fingertips.

Got another reply. “Inconclusive,”.

Uncertain whether the Field-acitivity had been a teleport or something similar.

Sylvesteri Hekkenninen flew towards the mountains on a hunch. It was a desperate gambit, but then, he had left the Solar System for a chance to merely walk. He knew a thing or two about desperation.

He hung before a mountainous wall stretched beyond the confines of his vision, dabbing queries in luminous paint.

One answer came from the ship.

He waited. Scanning, scanning / til motors are fanning / how long til the bitter end /

Another reply came.

/til a pilot must click send!

Then another. A third. Hekkenninen waited. When he had lost his legs… he lost much more than mere limbs. Love, though that had just been his own fault, in his own way.

The pilots are gone from the Earth/ they travel ages on uncomfortable berth/

Great things, he had lost, as small things. But he had gained, too. Patience for one.

/they will never come back/

The messages came fast, even furious. Hekkenninen shrugged. Either his hunch would be correct, or he’d have to find another world. It’d burn him, but there were other worlds.

/for they are lost in the black.

A final message.

Hekkenninen rolled his shoulders and swam through the rock. He went through strata, through granite and vast cathedrals of crystal in blue and red, deeper— til he bounced off something.

Two borders. The outer one thicker than the inner one, creating a horisontal river. A shield. A shield…!

Mindful of the lessons taught to all pilots, he sent a mote of his projection towards the barrier.

The mayfly melted like the dew of morning.

Huh.

He sent fives motes, each dense like a basketball and— they disintegrated, slowly.

He looked down on his hand. Shrugged.

Hekkenninen reached out to draw a message, but his fingertips remained dull and mundane. That…was worrying.

He remained so, for minutes. Then, he put his hand against the barrier.

The sensation — it wasn’t pain, not yet — grated on his senses, uncomfortable and dry.

In moments, that jarring notion intensified, becoming actual pain.

He withdrew his hand. The barrier wasn’t of the Host. Nor was it human. Neither employed shields like that.

____

Hekkenninen reappeared in space, close enough to touch the transmuted metal that made up the windowpane of his ship.

“…I repeat, I’ve found it.”

Breath that created no air, made no fog, came out of his mouth.

“I have found an alien civilisation with extant Field technology.”