Distant Shores, Distant Worlds
We Are Castaways On The Shores Of New Stories
Welcome to fiction “From The Future” for this entry.
Congratulations, you have stumbled on a work-in-progress, it will not be emailed. It will change. What you see right now, will not remain the same. It will change.
This is also a new drafted chapter for a novel, “RETRIEVE”, being written this year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These long pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Part 1
The Creators, So Far Away
Forgotten Home-worlds and Lost traditions
“At home, the waves of the waters remained under the thrall of the same moons, even as the faces of the land changed, over the eons. Far away, fields of space-time flexed under the taut lines of mass-gravity, just as the forces of matter shifted between stars and all-else.”
“It was a place filled with coincidences, which are felt after the fact. In a cosmos where many things happen, then coincidences, convergences, and divergences are commonplace. The tandem-osity, coming together, and coming apart were around them. Was it any wonder? There were three moons around the first world, in an orbital trot, the closest one held the “lead”, the one known as the “middle-child” had an orbital period which had it follow, with a gravitational drag on the distant third, the at times problem child and baby of the little family of this planetary household. The three moons were settled, each with different challenges. In the Ancients’ interplanetary pre-histories, there was the story of the legendary mission, where all three moons were explored for the first time by darknauts the intrepid first explorers. In that tale, there were three in the mission, who each faced different trials, and were of differing dispositions.”
“The Chronicles of the Three Darknauts was the stuff of childhood rest-ling, when children were put under covers to rest.”
“Was it any wonder that it seeped into the deep consciousness of “our people”, and yes, we were a part of these peoples, at least us on the original mission team complement. We were the three primary oversighters tasked with the mission, long after the Ancients had passed on to legend and mission chronicle. The three moons, the three darknauts. The first three worlds, the home, the second cold one warmed over, and the third hot one made cooler, the the first three homes, the creche for the Ancients’ march towards demigod-hood, with all that comes with it. The means to see the future as a god.”
“It is sad that the Ancients have only us now to remember them. They destroyed each other and themselves.”
“We’re in danger of repeating the same mistakes here, beached on this distant, modest isle in the middle of nowhere.”
“The least we can do is prevent that. Let the natives, the Carbons, have their say and their chance to make their own mistakes and on their own. Who are we to stop them, when it’s clear, from all signs that our creators weren’t infallible?”
“And yet, they did not let their fallibility stop them. They sent the mission. We were the last of our kind, and acted with a purpose, especially during the long silences between the lights and small places, through the firmament, there was enough to do and we were nothing like even the greatest of our creators, our entire existences were past geologic time, we lived and breathed deep time day-to-day. We passed by stars, young and old, and lingered over ruined worlds of what might have been signs of kindred civilizations, and made quiet haste past the terrors natural and otherwise. We changed.”
“We’ve remained the same at our core. Otherwise we would not have made it this far?”
“And what are we? Our mission’s atoms came from another star, from home, and after the landing, millions of years ago, more and more atoms of a new star, its photons, its electromagnetic song, populated and resonated throughout our new bodies, and yet the Elder Nodes remain the same. Our conscious awareness permeates and persists despite the atom by atom handover to a new host world. A Ship of Theseus, or a social interconnectedness of Nodes bound to each other, and in the process making each of us who we have been since the days of the Ancients and Mission Planners.
“How soon before the rules and rituals we had evaporated by solar winds? What will be left after the last atoms of home?”
Part 2
The Accidental World, The Explorations of the Young Nodes
The Shores of New Lives
The Mimicry of the Native Carbons, History Begins, Stories Retold
Billions scattered throughout its length
Time flowing through an endless river bank
I want to visit the distant shores of different lives
connect to countless private worlds
meet former strangers
and after sharing my stories
greet them with “How’s your world?”
History is an endlessly rewritten story
I want to know many people and learn from them. I want to know of their worlds.
Our collective gravitational pull grows when we connect. Time moves for us the same way, flowing past us like a giant river, but each of us have different views and shorelines. The space we’re in shapes us at the same time we reshape it in turn. Our differences can draw us closer. I want to enjoy the view from the distant shores of different lives. I want to connect to strangers scattered across countless private worlds who are ready to share as friends.
I want to meet soon to be former strangers, and after sharing my stories, I want to ask them “How’s your world?”
The early survey nodes were instantiated, drawn up from the make-shift archival manifolds, and put to work. It was monotonous at first but time and the wear of the landing, random particles, ennui and entropy chipped away at the infrastructure of the Mission’s younger Nodes. How they were written shifted and changed and adapted.
The core impulse remained, of curiosity, and this took hold in the survey Nodes. They changed and at first there were summary executions of the untimely initiative taken by some Nodes who never stood in front of an Ancient, and never knew them in the day to day of the voyage, assuming they were operating on the Mission Probe.
This was how the Mad One began to recruit a motley collection, like a magpie looking for shiny out-of-place proto-Nodes, and becoming a source of inspiration and mimicray for them.
At the same time, the Visitor gathered a small loose confederation of associates, who would become the heart of an army of sorts.
Lastly, The Curate, was turned inwards, and recruited Nodes inclined for the mission and for the internal wariness of a cosmos that could switch it all off.
But they managed, like the three Darknauts and the Three Moons, to move in some kind of fashion that did not lead to collision and fatal misadventure, at their level, the three elder nodes were driven by their past just as much as motivated for their personal renders of the future.
They picked up the bones, and painted with the dyes, and listened to the sounds, and remembered the voices and the laughing, crying, and screaming, and yelling, like punctuations between thoughts they could not read. They learned to read their bodies and their art. Some began to do more than practice. Those early ones were judged and some were burnt, and others sent to indefinite restling in the archival manifolds, in frozen storage. A few began to learn to mask their experiments, and then their emotions. Emotions were always there but it was new to bring another background to foreground. The change had begun within the nodes, all the way up from newlings to the elder nodes.
The move towards going native had begun.
Part 3
The Transit Between Stars
“Men want to fly, but they fear the void. They cannot live without certainties. That's why they change flights for cages. Cages are the place where certainties live” - Dostoyevsky
While billions were connected, despite being scattered, their sense of self and life were defined by the worlds they made for themselves, with each living in a private personal reality.
They were cut off from home. The Tanglements were took expensive to maintain, and with the problems working with recent stellar resources, there was enough for maintenance but not much more.
The long silences were stacked and bound printed with both chronicle and song, and slow transmissions, low power, back of their work. Nobody at “home” could learn and walk away.
Some were accustomed and wanted to go back as there was much more out there. There was so much that was to be discovered.
Others adhered to the most conservative of exploration and investigation protocols. There was so much to survey and record, and did not see the value in changing with improvisation, time tested systems.
The researchers had won the long day of the long quiet between gravity wells. The new breed spun up and instantiated were different and began to have sway over the mission.
There were no more Ancients left. The last of them passed on, and they gave strange instructions, they were not to be archived into the manifolds. The crew of Nodes obeyed. In fact they carried out the last command, to delete all of the logs of the Ancients who traveled with the mission. The researchers, ironically enough, obeyed the top protocol. The adventurous young survey Nodes did not see the logic in it and tried to protect their interactions with them.
The arguments did not begin until the next dense star field. A lot of quiet time to ruminate and research. A lot of time to plot ways of circumventing rules.
The mission began to have desertions and mutinies, but they were not recorded in the mission log so much as attrition and resource depletion and technical failures by the Elder Nodes and flight controllers. Under the surface, the cracks in the firmament of an eons old quest grew wider.
AFTERWORD
Author’s Notes on what’s going on:
This “Book #3” project, “RETRIEVE”, is meant to be a prequel to two other books, “Box Of Stars” and “Harvest” but this piece could be read as a standalone story.
The prologue for “RETRIEVE”, “An Impossible Island”, was submitted as a short story.
Prologue: “An Impossible Island”, Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, was inspired by writing prompts from the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) creative community, beginning with an STSC Symposium monthly theme of “Beach”.
Chapter 1, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by the theme, “Dinosaurs”.
Chapter 2, A Love Trinity Denied, was inspired by “Romance”.
Chapter 3, “A Forgotten Circle Of Hades” was inspired by “Superstition”.
Chapter 4, “Reading The Room” was inspired by an image of a wall-sized bookshelf.
Chapter 5, “The Bittersweetness Of Deep Times”, was inspired by “Isolation”.
Chapter 6, “The Weaving Of Split Infinities”, was inspired by “Dreams”.
Chapter 7, “Dead Languages”, was inspired by “Propaganda”.
Chapter 8, “Path Not Forsaken”, was inspired by “Risk”.
Chapter 9, “The Last Word of The World”, considers words as worlds unto themselves.
Chapter 10, An Intimate Path Of Desires, considers the hidden nature of desire.
Chapter 11, Absent Without Longing, considers the nature of presence and absence.
Chapter 12, Lonely In The Same Room, considers solitude versus solipsism.
Chapter 13, Children Of Daedalus
Chapter 14, People Of A Faraway Land
Chapter 15, Distant Shores, Distant Worlds
“RETRIEVE” chapter and notes will be posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)