SLATE

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

I am the raw nerve endings of flayed skin. A genetic experiment born in unending scream.

The alarm throws a three-punch combination at my skull.

Vibrations burrow under flesh. Lay their eggs in the marrow of my bones.

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

Light splinters. Needles stab into sockets.

My face twists like a broken beer can. I shrink back.

Think.

Mid-sized room. The smell of grease and cold metal. Smooth clay. Onyx omnisphere.

Odd.

A fighter?

No. Too much cubage. Too much comfort. A cruiser, ranger, or...

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

There. Barely alive and already I have an nemesis.

The vibration crashes through my body.

Wet hells, the pain.

My fledgling consciousness is hammered from cold protein jelly into a warm leg of piss.

I’m no butcher, but really shouldn’t be feeling my brain sloshing against the walls of my skull.

The sound is deep and loud, as though it might split soundless space by force of will.

Notes of expectation and dread are by design.

It is to be sounded only once and never again.

I should be clothed in awe. Then again, I should be clothed in, well, clothes.

By solar law, the klaxon sound is hard-coded into metal, and not relayed through the ship's veins.

A relic, as far as basic design, of the wars of the planet…earth.

It is an raid siren, a storm warning, a foghorn and a call to war.

Now, it is a cry from an ancient past. It reaches into my present, jerks my nape like a drill-master, and shouts into my brain.

It tells me I’m fragged.

A torrent of information floods over me like a pressurizing cabin.

Historiographic prints and designs. Ship specs — three things hard-coded. The precise verbiage of solar stats and regs.

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

The combination finishes with an uppercut to the gut.

I lurch, vomiting a stomachful of black crunk, wishing I could do the same for defective knowledge mods.

Charming. What in the wet hells did I eat?

Bioanimatic nanoslurry —patented and trademarked — for everything that’s worth.

Frag juice for the long nap.

Equal parts keeping-you-alive and turning-you-to-slag yourself.

The spurts of knowledge do not come with any warmth of familiarity.

I’m the winner of some back-planet, brain-eating competition or who-the-frag-knows.

And the pounding in my head — I reck they yanked the cord before halfway and now it’s spilling like a broken shit-pipe into the drink-tank.

It isn’t just how; it's what. It’s knowings that I should not know. That I can’t unknow.

I manage to avoid stepping into the puddle of former stomach.

I’m calling it a win for now.

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

Dead. Black. Realms..

Red lights team up with the wake-clock from hell but out of step. My world is swallowed in red like I am doused in blood.

Pricks of light follow my blind gaze — warnings from the ship's controls.

I try to penetrate their meaning, without risking another red blast.

What was I…?

Covered in black slag, a hand to my head gives some small relief.

My only viewing is the gaps between fingers.

Slag, that’s it.

Getting out of the space-coffin was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

And the only thing.

But there was something else. It slips away like trying to retrieve a dream upon waking.

I grasp at the information that passes in vomiting spurts.

Three things, hard-coded.

I remember.

That is how you know the Solarin is serious: we make it out of Iron Age metal and bolt it to the ship’s spine.

No clay-nano-quanix slag. Cold steel. A rusted blade thrust in the arse of our collective unconscious.

An artifact from before everything went to shit.

“Mark me,” it says. “Mark me you great hairless solarin.”

And I do.

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

By jaw and fist, I cling to ephemeral purpose.

Frag your wet black heart.

A few squelching steps. A blind grasp, finding the release mechanism popping instinctively.

Detachable, in an environment where loose objects are missiles.

I lean into walls of sound like dull reality, receiving perverse pleasure from the promise of imminent violence.

I mark you, herald of a new age, for death.

Hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg…hhhrrrnnggg!

There is a satisfying give as the flared mouthpiece bends, soft under a good strike.

It is soft or I am strong.

“Black. Wet. Slagging. Dead. Void.” I scream obscenity as I hit. “Take. it. Take. It. Back.”

The heavy blows issue from raw instinct. From lives on a cruel grindstone of existence — the beat of rage on an anvil of betrayal.

Something swirls inside.

First knowledge, now...

But it is the knowledge that names these phenomena "feelings".

And I will cram feelings down the cold monster’s throat with a steel chaser.

Thwack! Clang! Clang!

The metal bends and tears. The dome sputters on the ground and spins. And I am into the soft insides of moving parts that snap and burst until they aren’t moving parts anymore.

The glisten of salt illuminates my excess.

Sweat — another gut punch that lands inside.

It sweats — my body.

But if it sweats then it is not mine.

The last sound is of a dying animal. A final rasping breath of broken metal.

But the spilled knowings remain in me.

I strike my knees on a broken spring.

A shaking seizes my hands and the fire suppressor becomes hard to hold, shuddering to the floor.

My hand finds a smooth metal dome, as panting breaths yank my ribs.

“Not your fault.” I pat the metal. “You were made to sound in ears.”

The alarm has a single dedicated purpose. Hard-coded in metal by every law and treaty of rin.

It is a warning and a fagile hope.

It sounds with the purpose of all the scattered remnants of humanity — the end of our wandering. A place to set down our Arks.

A home.

The voice blares over the ship's coms.

“Warning. Proximity alert.”

I open my eyes.

NOTHING

“Humph.” The word reverbs through the Scribe’s jowls.

The Scribe covers his nose with a spider-like hand that enfolds his skull, creasing his smooth scalp.

The motion buckles the ambulator under glorious folds of caloric weight — his reward for his frequent excursions into hell — the lower levels.

The Scribe is far from the Hemisphere, where the Eschalon lives without the inhibitions that are the exclusive property of numbers.

It is not for a number to ask why the Scribe has come much less the Eye.

“Deepest apologies, Lord scribe. I bleached and scoured, fumed and doused...” The number is not to look at the Scribe, it knew. “They do not burn clean. They are factories that belch non-stop.”

“I say. A poet!” The scribe waves his hand, which hums with a squad of microdrones. Cosmetic mites crawl over his skin, zapping dead skin particles. “I find a poet picking through the arsehole of flamin

“Forgive me, Lord scribe.” He bows feebly. “I am not instructed in…in Lords.”

“Instructed! Indeed, why would you be?” Returns the Scribe.

The number touches its forehead with thumb and finger.

“He searches.” A long engineered finger taps the Scribes forehead in irritation.

“And protects.” The number bows low.

It is not just ritual; now it is sacriment.

The golden Eye looms above. One of a thousand such Eyes of the High Archon. Extensions of his senses, never sleeping and never awake. But numbers are not equipped to bear under the searching gaze, which sees all, and the number jerks its head to the ground.

“Yes, yes.” The Scribe looks nervously at the eye, through a peripheral viewing drone. “I banish it and cleanse the memory. You are most fortunate it has not happened.”

Disgust still wraps the Scribe’s face, working against drones that push back lips to pick gristle from teeth.

The sanitized memory still buzzes like a gnat in the scribe’s eyes.

The number’s nose twitches. The scribe has turned off the smell. Therefore, what the number smells must be something else.

A stench not for weak stomachs.

The wall of body odor and waste does not move for Scribes nor even for the Eye of the High God Archon.

It would then be stronger than both if it existed. But fortunately it does not.

The salt of forbidden sweat. The methane of reclaimed waste. The ammonia of meat dangling between life and death.

The vat sloshes eagerly, crunking with gurgling sounds and forcing gas pockets to burst into upon the air.

Nothing is wasted on the ship.

“They just let them hang? Free like that?” The scribe asked.

Black sludge throbs through tubes from bat-like creatures in their clusters of bone and skin to the bubbling vat. Humans trapped in cages of rib and skull, gouged with pits and lines. Stunted limbs, where they jut from the clutch, are folded, chicken-like.

“As you say, Lord scribe.” The number looked around at the free bodies, twitching against their feeding and neural links, weeping sores on their brittle skin. The number repeated the word, glancing towards the Scribe as though sighting the Scribe would reveal its meaning. “Free.”

“And what is their crime — their disobedience?” The Scribe asked.

“You know, my Lord.” There was no use in being surprised at the question yet waves of shock almost toppled the poor number. Scribes always know the answers to the questions they ask. It is their right to ask and the number must answer. He shivered the reply. “The great shame, my Lord — excretion.”