Codes and Flukes, No. 2
Posted on February 28th, 2021 by D'bryn Zoë

After depositing the toppling Scott Ammora into his quarters Zoë returned to her own, her synthehol buzz long burned off. She didn’t know why but sobering up before sleeping always gave her an hour’s worth of extra energy. Could get some reading in, take another chunk out of The Instigation Braid or Zen, or even crack open the first volume of that Siniotian graphic novel series, Lions of Arcturus. High fantasy, however enthralling, always conked her out the fastest.

Or, she could see what the Light had in store for her.

No surprises tonight, no premature memory-infusions before unclasping its pendant container. Zoë absorbed the half-existence of the Light: its weightlessness, its utter smoothness that defied touch. She breathed, closed her eyes, and it began:

=Λ=

She is a young human man.

Jonas Lamb. Marine. Second Lieutenant.

She is dying.

The stars wrap around her; the cold crawls through her veins; her body is stopping; the shapes; the white [No,] the colorlessness; the geometry; the letting-go.

Her penultimate thoughts are drenched in confusion, terror, a sensation of wrongness: ‘This is not how it’s supposed to go. This is not how it’s supposed to end. I’m supposed to grow old. I’m supposed to have a home and a family. I never got to tell Dzaniq how I felt.’

Her ultimate thoughts are, ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ [Shit.]

The last image in her memory is a Federation starship of a class she does not recognize. It is firing into the unshielded disc of another Federation starship. There is a blossom of flame.

Minutes ago she herself was on a starship, before someone in a uniform not unlike her own fired the photon torpedo that chewed open the hull, spilling her and her fellow crew into the great nothing.

‘This is not how it’s supposed to go.’

=Λ=

The Light fell from her palm, hitting the carpet with neither sound nor bounce. Zoë gazed around her cabin, searching for whatever banal and functional meaning its dimensions once had. Her body buzzed as if broadcasting static. Her heart surged rapid pumps of blood to her head, the vessels of which drummed in her ears. Breath came short and stuttering.

Zoë whispered, as if to test her mouth, lungs, and capacity for language: ‘I’m alive.’ She pawed her body in frantic affirmations of existence: her shoulder, her abdomen, her thighs, her neck, her face. ‘I’m alive.’

A brief fermata, then the heaving, unmitigated sobbing. She crumpled to the floor and wept for an untold stretch of time, until she crawled, utterly spent, into her bed for a long and deep sleep.