Day Four/Five – Trias/Spaceship Errand - 21st August 2449
Answers, Without Question
“Do I want to ask what it was I ate at that dinner of sort?” I asked.
“No,” Rinca said, “but it shouldn't bother your digestive track. It's molecular make-up is similar to squid.”
We had a quiet dinner with Luska in his wooden hut and said our goodbyes with more bear hugs. We moved quickly back to the shuttle where the other two crew members were waiting for us. The shuttle was loaded with several clear containers, some filled with purple bugs that looked like bottle caps and other containers held bushes of green foliage.
Those samples are thin. No No No, things exist seven times in seven ways and here the seventh is erased. Out of the corner of my eye the containers with the foliage looked empty, and my stomach did feel queasy. When I turned and looked though, each was filled as before.
Lift off was simple and the captain let me sit near the window. As we gathered height I felt uneasy in my gut again and my eyes twisted. The thoughts from my optical nerve started to sparkle and haze my vision. Those concrete buildings weren't there before.
The village was gone and the buildings had turned into towers with lights beeping and zooming off them. I looked harder. The buildings faded and the trees and cabins were there as before. Just like the foliage. The medicine is gone, medicine absorbed through the liver and the liver is good. The trees are dead, the trees never existed. The trees grow high. The towers were there, the liver let them through.
Soon I was back on board the Errand. Familiar ground, not ground, ground over space I shouldn't be in space, I remembered. With the drug wearing off I was becoming anxious again. A few crew members met us at the hatch to help unload the cargo. I could still see it was there and wasn't there. Restero told you, time meddling. Yes Yes Yes. Those things existed now but before there had been buildings in there place. Your thoughts have more meaning in space. Seven meanings, and my thoughts droned on inside my head. They weren't normally this bad, I think I was withdrawing from my normal medication too.
“Ostra,” said the captain, “show Troy to his quarters and prepare him for the shifting.”
“How long til the Shifting?” Ostra a male crew member asked.
The Captain pushed the golden button on his chest, “Fifteen minutes and counting til Shifting. Begin Shifting procedures.”
“Ostra nodded, his small head at the Captain who turned and went back to the cargo.
“This was,” Ostra said to me, and I followed him down many a short hall, staring at the back of his head. He was the same height as me and his dark hair was chiselled in a perfect way across his neck., the rest was slicked to the side. 1950s prep in a purple onsy, I thought. He took me into one of the small rooms me and Rinca had entered earlier that I now assumed to be an elevator of a kind.
“Deck 18, Red Section,” he said. The doors to the room quickly opened again, and it was impossible to know how many decks we had travelled and whether we had gone up or down or right or left. More short corridors, the occasional lit screen. Finally we stopped at a metal door that said 7G, Ostra walked into the room which had a small bed of sorts, purple regulation of course, but bigger and with more sheets than the one in the medical alcove. There was also a desk with a screen, which was blank at the moment and my iPod sat next to it. Ostra was standing there letting me take it all in. His eyes were brown, and he made me think he looked like me but neater.
“What's Shifting?” I asked him.
He paused a long while, thinking, before answering, so I stared at the floor and thought about the way he looked, little and awkward, but I bet he was muscular under that purple, I bet he had a dancers body. I was to anxious to look him in the eyes. He looked only a little older than me.
“Shifting is the term we use when we use our Faster than light drive. It's a kind of way of warping space. The hard part isn't moving faster than light, we kind of just make giant jumps. The drive is more about reducing the relative time lag. Eisteins theory of relativity...”
“Ok,” I said, “I get it. How do I have to get ready.”
“You don't really, you can lay down or stand, it doesn't really matter. To you it'll seem suddenly we're here and then we're they're. You may not notice even if you open a view side on your wall,” he said, noting my puzzlement, “It opens the view port, or window of your wall, you have a space view in this section.”
“Oh, Ok.
“The only thing you can't do it use electronic devices, not that you'd be able to, everything is shut down. Shifting and electronics don't mix, which is why I have to ask if it is ok if I shut down in here?”
“Shut down?” I asked.
“I can go into the hall way if you prefer?”
“How can you shut down?”
“I'm an android,” Ostra said, “did the Captain not tell you?”
No, the captain did not, the captain has not told me much, the computer has not told me much. I know nothing of where we are, what we're doing. There are seven people watching. No one is watching. Watching. The paranoid twistings of seven sevens. I chanted the seven sevens and Ostra just looked at me.
“It's fine,” I said, “You better be quick about it, it must be time to shift soon.”
Ostra sat on the end of my bed and closed his eyes and stopped moving. Seconds later the lights went out. Then it felt like someone reached inside my head and pulled at my brain. It didn't hurt but it seemed like I was stuck and staring at Ostra for hours, days almost, but I had no thoughts, only the sense of time passing. It stopped and the lights came on.
“Shifting complete,” the computers voice rang over the loud speaker.
Ostra didn't move so I went up and poked him.
“Hello,” I said, “Hello.”
An android, not moving. I wonder if androids have bits. Do they choose their sexes or are they assigned? I wonder how they think. How many layers of thoughts and calculations must it have, seven times seven times seven times seven times seven, and I couldn't stop that thought for a while, it repeated and repeated. My body filled with adrenaline and anxiety over took me. I braced my hand against Ostra to steady myself and tried to breathe. My anxiety pills. I had them in my bag but are they in this room. Ostra's eyes opened. I felt more anxious now he was awake, or on, or whatever it's called. Anxious because I had realised an attraction I had for him. Pills, Pills, Pills. The thoughts were changing but still churning out over and over. My head was overloading and I swear so much time had passed and I was just staring in the dark. I fell onto the bed and tried to breathe.
“Medical to deck 18 cabin 7G,” Ostra said. He'd called someone with his golden button and he kneeled next to my bed and reached for my hand, I pulled it away. I was so anxious in that moment, I was thinking do androids have sex dreams, and I had my own dreams of him. This was all too much at that point. Doctor Symms entered then and gave me a shot. The thoughts grew thin and I felt calm. This shot was tastier. Different than the other, similar, but more calming. I reached out for Ostra's hand.
“I researched that drug you told me about and discovered one of my plants could be used to synthesise benzodiazepine, so I added it to the shot,” said Dr Symms, “I suggest you sleep now and I'll get the computer to run some scans.”
I let go of Ostra's hand and sat up. “There was so much time doctor. There were not thoughts, but during the Shifting, I felt the hours pass into days. I couldn't move or speak or think, but I'm calm now. I'm calm now.”
Dr Symms didn't give anything away and just told me to lie down and sleep. So I did.
Ostra came to visit the next day. I don't think I was confined to my quarters but I'd got the computer to play my ipod and charge it wirelessly somehow, so I hid and listened to my music. The doctor came and gave me another shot, so my thoughts were tiny and I just sat and listened to music.
The door had a bell, Doctor Symms hadn't used it but Ostra did. I didn't know what the ding was at first but when it was made again I took a guess and said enter. The door opened and Ostra was standing there.
“I hope it was alright for me to visit?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “come sit.”
I left the music playing and Ostra commented on it, calling it retro, and I suppose it was to him, but I didn't want to get into a general conversation with him right now. He had shown me some kindness, and he didn't seemed to be linked to the main computer who wouldn't answer my questions, and even in my calm state I wanted to know answers.
“What was World War Three about?” I asked.
“Idealisms,” he said.
“Yes, but what ideals?” this was the question that worried me, worried me enough that I wanted an answer while I was artificially calm and could take it in and think about it later.
“I don't know if I can answer that question. There are regulations about giving out cheat sheets to past timers.”
I side step the main issue for now, but I wouldn't let go of it so easily.
“So there have been others from the past? I'm not the first?”
“Not the first, not even the first on this ship,” Ostra said, and he looked up at me and tried to catch my eyes from where he sat on my bed. I caught his gaze, I didn't know how human an android could be but questions seem to flow from the eyes, I learnt that from listening when I had been put in hospital once. The other patients always answered with their eyes first.
“But you are the most interesting,” he said.
He was flirting, and the thoughts I had had slowly appeared one by one like clouds at the top of my mind. It might be nice to kiss an android.
“What happened to the others,” I asked, I needed answers right now not comfort, that I had learnt to live without.
“They got sent back,” he said, “you're only the third.”
“Thankyou Ostra,” I said, and reached out my hand. He reached out with his and I caught his gaze again, “But I need to know about the World War.”
He seemed to breathe out, almost sigh, I wondered if he gained power or energy of some kind from the air, or if it was a mere tactic his body did to make him appear more human, to give him time to calculate what he could tell me.
“At the time it wasn't called a war, it was called the Great Conversion, and you wouldn't of survived it. It was after your time. You'll be safe if they send you back.”
His hand began to get wandering fingers and went up my arm to my elbow, my shoulder, my neck. Next thing I new, we were closer, we were kissing and the chemicals made me calm, made me euphoric, made it all feel nice.
Then I knew, androids do have bits, very realistic bits indeed.
