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Micro-fiction 040 – Cosmic Hall (Post-apocalypse series)

The last human in the universe finds there’s more to life than living when she plunges to her death from her starfighter.

Cosmic Hall

The year is 3020. Pýri’s starfighter hurtled from the deathmatch, the final confrontation between the last fleet of the human race, and the combined forces of five star systems aligned now against their former allies. The blackened hull of Pýri’s nimble fighter had endured weeks of combat and now spun erratically into a meteor storm, the short wings torn, the propulsion units spluttering. In her helmet Pýri’s eyes were darkened too by the deaths of her comrades, and of those many she had sent to join them. She battled with the controls to keep the fighter upright. The dots on her ship’s holoscope showed the foes overhauling the fleet, and the largest dot, at the centre, the shattered great Battleship Módir that had dominated the stars for the last few centuries of Human Otherworld alliances, was approached by relentless clusters of the enemy.

Pýri fought the sickness in her stomach. The sudden bursts of light behind her were not signs of plasma fire, but the huge conflagration of her comrades. She shouted at her comms,

“Can anyone hear me?” She roared, her starfighter breaking up from the back, struck by hundreds tiny meteors, “is anyone else here?” the cabin lurched and shook.

She looked down at the now juddering holoscope. The largest dot had disappeared.

“Come on!” She refused to give in to despair: Resilience had been a lifelong nickname – she wore it with pride, now as always. She looked up for a moment, as tiny rocks continued to pelt the cracked windshield.

“Right!” As she fought with the steering controls she flicked a hand to her chest, pressing three sensors, replacing the star fighter’s failing holoscope with a small one of her own. The size of a clenched fist it floated in front of her, a transparent blue sphere.

“Location.” Pýri hammered her palm back on to the steering controls, but now directed her instructions at her sphere, abandoning the frantic instrumentation of her cockpit.

Her sphere turned, showing her as a red dot with planets and rocks nearby.

“Compute nearest landing.” The cabin lurched again.

“Compute nearest landin!” She shouted, her eyes flickering from the windshield to the holoscope.

“None.” The words were clear.

“No, look again.” Pýri ground her teeth.

“None.” The words blinked again.

“Look again!” Pýri bellowed. “What the…” She watched strange symbols float across the holosphere, dissolving into its core.

“Don’t you give up on me too!” She shouted at her sphere, which rotated, and she saw the symbols re-emerge, shifting into words she could understand, just three, one after another in some sort of emergency protocol.

“Down.”

“Drop.”

“Now.”

Pýri’s Starfighter halted abruptly. The back ripped away.

“Down.”

“Drop.”

“Now.”

She breathed out hard and closed her eyes. Mentally she crossed her fingers, and pressed the quaintly mechanical ejection lever on her seat. The floor fell away from the fighter. She dropped downwards. She half opened her eyes and looked up, watching her craft disintegrate, smashed to pieces by the meteor storm.

“What the Hell am I doing here?”

“Wait!” The holosphere at her chest responded.

“What?” She glared, panicking, at the holosphere. “When did you start answering back?”

“Wait!”

She plummeted. The emergency shute had failed to activate. The retrorockets in the chair had fired up but made no difference to her rapid downward motion. A tiny rock cracked into her helmet, whiplashing her head back.

“Be still!”

She realised that she should not fall like this. She expected to drift. The darkness around her was striped with the rapid flow of rocks and distant stars.

“What’s the fuck is happening?” Her composure was close to fraying beyond her resilience.

“Wait!”

She realised her passage was a steady drop, no acceleration, no deviation. She dared herself to look down.

“Oh?”

Below her a huge rock seemed to rise up to meet her.

“Prepare!” The sphere flashed the words.

“Oh shit!” Pýri scrunched her legs into her body and surrendered to the inevitable.

A moment passed, and she landed.

The impact was soft, and she bounded up slightly, before landing again, this time on her side. She opened her eyes almost immediately with her face flat against a cold floor, her helmet a few feet from her. Through her groggy vision she saw a small landing area, with a mirage effect just above the ground. And above, in the agorophobic mantle of endless darkness, the stars blinked back at her.

“Air?” She coughed loudly, “what the on earth is this?” She pushed herself out of the restraints of the toppled seat, its retrorockets petering out, and felt the agony of her back and hips.

“Final destination.” her holosphere flickered in front of her, the sensors on her spacesuit undamaged. She picked up her helmet, cracked but still functioning, and her now filthy spacesuit which she brushed down out of habit. But then she looked across and saw something unexpected.

“Oh, my–– What is––?.” A huge, sculpted arch, as tall as a mountain, like the entrance to an ancient cathedral, bathed in a warm internal glow reared from the ground and met the endless night above. She remembered the stories of her folk, the ancient myths of her youth, that had survived the destruction of the earth, and the expanding diaspora across the stars.

She took a step forward, but felt a profound pain in her right leg, and had to adjust her stride.

She looked down at the holosphere, puzzled by its apparent lack of response. She headed for the arch, and, dwarfed by its magnificence, moved on, her eyes not yet used to the pale light suffusing whatever lay beyond.

“What do you think it is?” The holosphere shifted into life.

So now it’s developed a personality. Pýri said to herself, aloud “Valhalla.”

“That’s a good guess, but your gods no longer exist, if they ever did.”

“I should be dead. And you should not be talking.” Her eyes grew accustomed to the strange glow, and now she could see further along the length of the massive structure.

“I am not talking. But I’m able to communicate this way.” The sphere spun through the words.

“So you’re not my holosphere? Perhaps I really am dead, and this is where we go.”

“I’m not, and you’re not, so it isn’t.”

Pýri took a few more paces and realised the arches of the front were repeated all the way down a vast hall, with colonnades fading into the space above, so the stars and the planets could be seen swirling slowly in clusters of galaxies.

“This is, ah, a dream?” She then saw the huge statues that lined the hall, each one made of liquid black stone, leaning forward on a plinth one hundred times the size of Pýri.

“They look like they’ve lost something, or drained of life.”

“They have lost everything. They have lost their spirit.”

“Really? Spirit?”

“These are the gods of earth, their existence denied for millennia, and without approval there is nothing to bind their essential selves to their worshipped forms.”

“So, even if that made any sense, what are they doing here?”

“This is the last resting place of your earth.”

“What? But earth imploded a thousand years ago.”

“Of course, but its energy survived, the spirits of those of your race, and the ancient one’s once worshipped, who themselves had created the world on which they could live, if only they could be followed by others who could worship them.”

“Are you saying that earth collapsed because non-one believed in these gods any more.”

“That is what some believe.”

“So every planet that dies has a hall like this?”

“Let’s say, every cluster of life-forms, whose co-existence depends on a beneficial eco-system descends into nothing once the interdependences of life are removed, or denied. And that nothing-ness manifests as an appropriate place.”

“I’m not convinced this isn’t just a death dream.”

“Ah, in a way it is, but it’s more than that.”

“So why am I here? Where are the others, all the millions, billions who’ve reached the same point in their history?”

“You are the last…”

“Of?”

“…your kind.”

Pýri took several short breaths in, and limped on, past the first of the great statues, towards the next melting god, one whose eyes drooped from his head, keeling forward at an angle that surely should have toppled him from the plinth. All the way down, the statues were arranged in various degrees of distress.

“So why do you care?” She spoke quietly.

“I don’t ‘care’, I maintain balance.”

“So if humans die, then your balance is disturbed. And if other life-forms disappear from the universe, balance is disturbed too.”

“Exactly so.”

“Why does it matter?”

“That is not a meaningful question.”

“You mean you don’t want to answer it.”

“I mean it misses the point. You humans, in common with many other sentient species, have an over-developed sense of self-importance. You worry about yourselves, your families, your people, your planet, but at the species level continuity is what matters, that and the unelectable desire to grow.”

“You mean, like striving, or progressing?”

“In a way. On your planet, the sun rising, brought growth, lifted life from seeds, trees surging upwards, a bio-imperative not just to survive, but to increase.”

“But now we are at an end.”

“You are the last.”

“Well I’m not a tree, if there’s only one of me, then our species is at an end.”

“Not necessarily. You see these statues, these husks of once great Gods? What made them great was a force outside themselves, the recognition of their followers, acknowledgement of their existence.”

“So humans can survive ‘philosophically’? That’s not the same, as actually living. It doesn’t help your requirement for balance.”

Pýri noticed that they had walked much further than she had realised, and she stopped to look back.

“I can’t see the beginning any more, just light.”

“But you can see forwards, can you not?”

Pýri peered the other way, and saw the giant statues, and the columns. She looked down at the holosphere and realised it had disappeared.

“There is no need for that any more.” A kind voice had emerged next to Pýri, and she wondered if it had been there all the time.

“Yes, all along, it takes a while to adjust.” the voice came from a disturbance in the air, as though a body occupied the space next to her, but could not be detected in this place, or time and space.

“How did you do that?”

“Is that the right question?” The voice somehow seemed to smile.

“I suppose not. So much else is strange. Wrong. Different.” Pýri noticed that she had been walking more fluidly, and looked down at her right leg.

“It’s not there.” She stretched out her arms. “Nor are…”

“But you don’t feel any different do you, your essential self is still in tact?”

“I suppose so––“ She faltered. They had arrived at a raised platform in the centre of the hall. A small sign is carved at one end.

“Go, take a look.” The kind voice urged her forward.

“But this––“  Pýri felt a prickly heat as she saw a body, laid out on the platform. “That’s me. Still in my spacesuit.”

“Indeed, you are the last of your kind. This hall is in your honour.”

“But I still live, at least, that’s how I feel.” I still feel alive. I still live.

“Yes, you exist both there, and here; you are here, and not there. This duality is essential to existence, but you have spent your life seeing only the one part of it, as have all your kind.”

Pýri gazed at the statues lining the great hall. She realised that she could see them all at once, from one end to the other, and their forms have merged with the darkness and the stars above, she is able to encompass their forms, to be both contained in the lifeless physical form before her, and in the unrestrained incarnation that sees and feels all. She peers into the gloomy cores of the statues and breathes into them, she opens her eyes to the bright glow of the hall and the utter darkness of the empty skies, and sees both with the eyes of the gods, her own eyes, and those of billions more.

She reads the tiny carved message on the platform by her body, and smiles:

“Everything is Nothing. And nothing truly…

[ends]

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2020 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.


More Tales

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.