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4215 Fre 41 (Memoirs and Reflections | by Aubsoluone Jikro 89th)
A sister. The cold flesh. Birthed and on the table glowing in an effusive, self-contained bulbous cobweb of light, pulsating white, then blue, white, then blue ... This is the first memory of life. The decanter spilling her across the table, she breathes and tries to understand life, immediately she is a cold wet slimy puppet; in days a beautiful baby; in months a crawling sentient being; and in years a fellow worker in the hull, a friend.
She grows and learns to know and understand like I the laws of our very finite world: the size of only 10,500 cabinets interconnected like tunnels or stitched together with walls beat open to form small quarters - sleeping rooms, mess rooms, equipment access closets ...
We are here floating to our lineage's death. Marooned in a seemingly infinite vacuum of space.
2945 Jyr 33 (Recollections of the meteor field incident | Eschenon Rik 1st)
My age is 23 years and 17 months, I believe. There should be others here to talk with and help with my duties in the hull, but I am alone. I am literate but could not gauge the degree of my intellectual achievements good or bad having no living, non-artificial intellectual peer to compare myself to. I can read at a rate of 3,000 words a minute and can record approximately 1,000 words every five minutes, or 200 words a minute on average. None of the literature I've read in the library affirms my reading and writing capabilities as either success or failure in an intellectual endeavor.
I only have one endeavor in life. To activate the embryo cells and begin decanting members of my genetic family and race and preserve what little I remember of the spoken language and culture from my brief three years of contact with living members of my genetic family and race.
The ship was traveling through what I now believe to be a meteor field. Comm system was the first to be disabled by impact and if there were any transmissions they were not recorded in the library. I have already consumed the entirety of the library. I have memorized nearly on quarter of it as well. There are no traces of any trasmission.
(The written literature in the library's hull was of one differing from my family's spoken tongue. The remaining two drones on board were programmed to speak my native tongue, so I spoke that bastardized perhaps with the vocabulary I absorbed most through reading rather than dim, shallow interactive with the emotionless, persona-less machines.)
It was one of 10,000 cells, each the size of 1/40 of our home planet's moon, in network of self-sustained micro-orbitals. 10,000 feet from my head, is the curved wall of the main reactor, a the concetric hollow of a large sphere dumping oxygen and nitrogen through the system, its center, our spinning hull, with it tunnels and rooms wrapped around the inside of the ring to produce gravity.
Based on the number of years that have passed, I can only assume that our cell was not only damaged but detached from the main ship and launched off into open space. I am at least tens of light years away from any solar system that would have any planets, and those planets would not be life-sustaining from my projections. The cell is traveling close to 60,000 kilometers per hour through natural momentum. Based on the design requirements of the cell, I believe that it may last from 500 to a maximum of 2,000 years. Of course that could be made drastically short by collision with a dense cloud of space dust or a meteor collision.
They say there is a time of trauma in everyone's life. Trauma always produces potent memories, and a young age can provide a level of persistent lucidity in recollection otherwise impossible in such a young age. For me that age was 3, and 1 month, I believe. I was considered slower than the others, my genetic siblings, sister and brothers and had not yet been trained in writing or reading. I was expected to be a laborer on the hull. The methren (our genetic aunts) followed us toddlers, three aged three there were. (We talked in a soft, rolling tongue in Illenish, a language that have developed in 2367 - a strangely accented derivative of Chinese with vocabulary heavily borrowed from Icelandic. The language developed over the years after China's RMT corporation bought and inhabited the island nation. Or so the articles from history I have access to so document. There is not a tremendous body of literature devoted to this cultural subject.)
I remember the methren Lucinia who adopted me spiritually. I remember her name from my deep love for her and my memories of watching her die. The walls of the escape vestibule crushing her body and eyes showing an expression of horror as the life was squeezed out of here. There was a millisecond expression of her mind shouting "I love you" before the frozen pupils evoked only the hollowed sign of death. And then she was entirely consumed, crushed and hidden behind folding metal walls.
The others had been hurled out of the damaged escape vestibule, thrown violently into the thick nitrogen gases of the reactor and splattered against the opposing wall, the kernel of the micro-orbital.
Everyone had died. I was the last human survivor on cell AF1416.
Were it not for AD4, I would have died there; drowning any logic or clear reasoning in tears and screaming fits as I stared out a small intact polymer window peering out into the reactor. I only remember clouds of blood and imagined my sisters and brothers alive in the spinning mist of dark red blood. I was deluded in my horror by hallucinations of other methren nearby holding my fragile body there in the bubble formed in the collapse.
I didn't realize a small crawl space with light trickling in immediately behind me until I heard a nursery song and a voice effecting a methren whose name I have forgotten:
"Rik, rik, trick a trick" It sang in a soft voice perfectly emulating the methren. I lay there and fell asleep for what seemed like a long time - for how long I cannot be sure. I cannot remember the dream exactly but I know I had vivid and fantastic dreams trying to comfort my traumatized mind. I do remember waking with the false illusion that I was crawling up a bunker ladder, a feat I had never really managed but tried and failed many times.
AD4 was singing again. Some nursery song about climbing and falling. "Be brave and climb." And then I crawled toward what I though was a methren singing to me; my eyes were still swollen from crying. The last memory I have was after coming into the full light of hallway into which I had been summoned; the horrific moment of realizing it was AD4 emulating the methren. I had convinced myself, wrongly, that the drone was going to kill me and throw me into the reactor with the rest; or at least crush me somehow. I erupted into fitful sobbing again and stared back at the faceless drone which floated back from me playing a soft nursery song to calm my troubled self.
From there I have no recollections until the age of 3 years and 10 months, I think, when AD4 had taught me basic writing, the alphabet, the concept of colors. It spoke in its affected robotic voice after failing to convince me of its humanness. I often wonder if I spoke to an outsider, they would confuse me for an android? There is no way of telling.
I am the third generation of the cell, we were commissioned as miners to be used in later parts of the main ship's voyage. Now I am only racing time to make others to live in the little amount of time left. 0 generations? 1 generation? 2 generations? 100 generations? 1,000 generations?
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