Monolith Cocktail Blog

The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued Opus

Dabbling over the decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukover and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer was an integral member of the MC team for a good few years, offering various reviews and conducting interviews).

Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to the list, sharing his grand opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation: starting with the Prologue and Part One proper, as it were. Andrew seeks inspiration from music and anything that chronicles the fantastical. And in Tennyson, he finds sentiment and solace.

Prologue

His father disappeared as a smouldering reek on the funeral pyre.

Crimson copper and sallow gold glowed brightly against the stark stillness of the night. Flames fluttered and flapped, occasionally leaping up to touch the sky.

His transformation into light was peaceful – a crackling, fire-pop peace.

After the fire had dissipated, once the fuel had been burnt down to ashes, the heat of the pyre cooled. Nothing was left of his father and the wooden pile. The charred ground took on a vaguely rectangular shape. There was no indentation of the man who once was.

As his son gazed into the faceless sky, so many thousands of silent coruscations blinked down at him.

A rheumatic finger pointed unsteadily.

‘–ero…’ [Proto-Celtic: eagle]

Another figure nodded.

‘…next to it, gal-s-ā…’ [swan]

An arm reached out and held him. The grip was firm.

‘…and your father, kruttā–’ [harp]

The youth turned round and observed the Elders who smiled coldly.

He looked away again.

Branches wavered along the tree line. A breeze had descended.

There was rain in the air.

“Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world”

From Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Violin

“Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream”

From Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Part 1

Ascending into eternity, desolate colours were filling the deepest hollows of his sleep. Gas clouds whorled and pillared into evanescent apparitions that appeared and disappeared, only to reappear altogether different, endlessly anomalous, and utterly alien.

Galaxies spiralled, contorting into moving mountains that hung in crownless majesty. Their unceasing conquest was considered admirable, so much so that ships were sent to join them on their grand campaigns. These malformations of nature inhabited a place on a spectrum far beyond humankind’s understanding of what constituted that which is natural, and that which is not.

Tenebrae cedunt luci: darkness gives way to light.

The sickening fluorescence gradually absorbed into his eyes. He woke up in the same semi-circular space that he always had. Its luminescence infiltrated his consciousness, splitting him open in a never-ending diorama of brightness.

Peering into the inanimate tenebrosity, he caught the briefest sight of himself in reflection. He saw a long-beard and white hair that veiled to assimilate with his spacesuit. It partly hid his angular face, under which was a cavernous mask.

Osteoporotic, his thoracic kyphosis slowed his movement onboard this vessel. His fingers spindled out to latch on to the edges of surfaces to counter his weightless balance.

The ship had maintained its acceleration into the deepest extremities of the universe. The compressor coils of its engines hummed silently. This indefinite acceleration had made a mockery of maps, pushing humankind into cosmic peripheries.

Before the existence of nuclear fusion, travelling a mere 1.3-light-seconds had been considered to be a scientific advancement. Space shuttles took 3-days to reach our closest natural satellite only 384,400-kilometres away. Early iterations of fusion-powered projection had moved humankind to within 365-days of the Oort cloud. Alpha Canis Majoris would be reached in 1,800-days. Approximately 4,000 sunrises would pass on a voyage to Delta Pavonis.

In this age, anti-proton-catalysed pulse propulsion brought men and women to the very fringes of the known universe in times equating to under half their lifespan.

The destination of this fleet was GN-z11, a distance insurmountable to their ancestors. They had set a trajectory that was further than anyone from Earth had ever travelled to. The light from GN-z11 was 13.4-billion light-years away; yet, the distance that had to be traversed was much further than that, approximating 64-billion light-years. One light-year is 9.4-billion kilometres, so a gargantuan 6×10²⁰ kilometres was being journeyed.

A voyage of this magnitude had one important caveat: those who embarked upon it would not be able to return home, for there would be nothing to return to. Humankind’s reign over Earth had come to an inevitable end. Humans had to extend their long limbs outwards in search of new conquests; they sought a contemporary kingdom.

Earth’s populace had launched great ships like this one in staggered succession. Hundreds travelled upwards to the unknown, each one having taken off behind the other in a sequential time-trial.

The first wave of ships that ascended were known as Pathfinders. These vessels would map the cosmos, informing their trailing compatriots of inhabitable places or forewarning danger.

The second wave of ships were mother ships – ‘mother’ in the most literal sense. Hundreds of thousands of children would be conceived onboard their towering decks. Their offspring would progress from childhood to adulthood and receive training in sub-disciplines to become pilots and soldiers, doctors and nurses, engineers, astrophysicists and heliophysicists.

The first Pathfinders had been captained by an artificial intelligence algorithm. But a series of disasters had led those in command of this colossal conquest to have each of these vessels inhabited by a man or woman. Known as Commodores, they were second-in-command to the AI.

These trailblazing ships were replenished with humans every 25-years. Small pods were dispatched from the mother ships, approaching velocities close to light-speed to rendezvous with their respective frontrunners. Each pod would deliver a new Commodore to replace the last.

This was a relay race of the ages. Every pod sent out was a life-sustaining baton. Each successful transfer was a victory for humankind in the fight for self-preservation.

The chest of the Old Man rose in breathless double time with the rhythmic thrum of the fusion engine.

He lifted a container from underneath the chair, unfastening the lock to remove a stick-like relic from inside it. As he lifted it up, a fine hair spindled down from its length. The hair eventually touched the gleaming white of the soft-padded seat, landing in weightless abandon. He remarked that it would have been equally unsubstantial on Earth.

The tips of his fingers pincered at the thread. This maladroit fumbling finally concluded with a wisp of it in his hand. He held it out in front of him; his eyes widened as he observed its organic beauty.

Hair, he thought. Strands of dead tissue growing from mammalian epidermis, hanging lifelessly from rooted follicles. In this blinding space, the fair-coloured strands of the stick-like relic appeared far from perished.

As his eyes tracked down the length of the relic, he eventually caught sight of his hand. It was scored and filled with broken lines. Age spots dotted on its dorsum. All these blemishes were enhanced by this infernal light. He hid his hand from view and moved his attention to what lay beyond the large window before him.

Lux facit tenebras. Light makes way for darkness.

As always and forever more, there was nothing to see except a characterless blackness. In aeternum.

He let the stick-like relic go so that it hovered gently beside him. A cloth that covered the separate box-shaped relic in the container was unravelled. He lifted it up carefully and eyed the depth of the infinite holes that were bored into its body. His eyes continued to track up the neck of the box relic to its fossil-like crown. The design was uniquely ornamental. Nothing compared to it on this ship.

As he leaned over to grasp the levitating long relic, a glint of reflected light in an adjacent window caught his attention. A small shuttle was approaching. Its thrusters had already started to brake silently. Many years had passed since the last one had docked. He smiled absently and continued to toy with the box and stick-like relics.

The pod approached the starboard side of his vessel. An automated gangway that would normally have connected these two craft did not reach out to it.

The inhabitant of the pod had traversed star systems to arrive at this point. Her radio transmissions had been met with silence. She sat waiting patiently for a connection. The exterior door of the much larger Pathfinder was within touching distance.

‘AURORA, I am ready to embark.’ She spoke confidently and steadily at the exterior convexity of the ship.

Nothing. Vacuity reigned.

AURORA, the acronym for the AUtomated Registered OpeRating Algorithm, captained the Pathfinder vessels. Each new Commodore would become acquainted with the operating system. Each had their own personalities. They would do all in their power to keep their human occupants breathing.

Her pod remained stationary.

‘Confirm command: embarkation.’

Silence was the reply. She detected impertinence.

Had the Pathfinder been compromised?

Her gloved hands slid across the air-tight door to feel for a potential opening. Her fists thumped dully against it.

‘You must pull the release lever’, a voice suddenly boomed into her headset.

The young Commodore was startled. A male voice? She had been trained to expect feminine tones from AURORA.

The lever was located at the base of the entranceway. She pulled it and the hatch opened.

After entering an antechamber, the internal air-lock lever was moved to a closed position. The pressure inside did not normalise as expected. She and everything around her continued to float.

A second door which led into the main body of the ship was opened. Using the wall grips, she hauled herself along a pitch-black passageway. It was as dark as the abyss outside. Pausing for a moment, she thought she could hear a high-pitched screeching sound. It seemed to be emanating from the end of the narrow passageway. As she got closer to the living quarters, the pitched heightened causing the hairs on her neck and arms to bristle.

Grappling with the wall grips, she manoeuvred down the passageway to locate its source, stopping abruptly. An emaciated and withered soul was levitating before her. He was wearing the same type of uniform as hers. She remarked internally that he must be over a hundred years old.

He held some form of relic – an organic box of sorts, as well as a longer relic made of the same material. They had a tokenistic quality. He was staring intently at her with blood-shot eyes; they were made even redder by periorbital pigmentation that served as a blackened mount to this thin-framed and frightfully hung portrait.

The young Commodore continued to scan her surroundings, moving youthfully through the labyrinthine spaceship, opening one hatch at a time. These vessels were meant to be cold, yet the heat she felt inside this one was immense.

‘Where is the Commodore of this ship?’, she enquired.

Her tone was not as confident as when she had barked at AURORA. She had taken on a feigned assuredness. Looking down at his worn identification badge, she could not determine its characters with certainty. It read: C—m–e –n T–o.

‘AURORA, where is the Commodore?!’, she enquired loudly, ignoring the apparitional figure next to her.

‘Please – please, you have travelled such a tremendous distance to be with me today. I must insist that you sit down. I shall prepare you a drink…’

‘Where is the–’

‘AURORA is currently rebooting’, the Old Man interrupted politely. ‘And this process will take some time. As such, she cannot answer you at the moment.’

He floated over to the culinary station.

‘Protocol stipulates that the Commodore assumes temporary command in such an event’, she dictated. ‘I shall ask you again – where is the Commodore?’

‘The impatience of youth’, he mused openly, sighing into a toothless smile. ‘I am the current Commodore, and as such, I am presently in command. And I only have one order for you… to please, sit down over here, and enjoy a cup of white tea with me.’

The young Commodore, sent ready in replacement, remained irresolute. She looked at him and thought that at least two generations must have passed for this man to be the age he was. Reluctantly, and under his playfully informal command, she made the decision to join him for tea, albeit on the far side of his malodorous living quarters.

*                      *                      *

Many years ago, a Commodore had decided that in to order to retain her sanity in this confined and cold place, she would do so by feeling the warmth and presence of something that could touch her soul. She requested that a relic, built an even longer time ago on Earth and handed down through her genetic line, be brought onboard this ship. It would remain with her as she carried out her 25-year mission, and this relic she would take with her in retirement.

On these Pathfinder ships, retired Commodores were unable to return to their respective mother ships that sailed behind them. The pods that had brought them here were long jettisoned. Their small fuel cells were such that they only had enough to transport them one-way.

Instead, in their autumn years, they were afforded a place in the lower decks of the vessel. Each brave spacefarers was gifted a private space in which they could live out the remainder of their lives in peace.

Shun Tito had taken over this vessel from a tall and ashen-haired Commodore. They had shaken hands and carried out the protocolised handover. The retired Commodore made her way to the lower decks. She took the relic with her.

The Pathfinder was now Tito’s for the next 25-years. He felt a great honour to have been given this role and quickly adapted to AURORA and her unique way of working.

It had been an eventless voyage in the first months. He had been alerted to minor malfunctions in the electrical system. AURORA’s algorithms had provided a prognostic summary. They were of low significance. Standard spacefaring issues. Something easily rectifiable.

When looking back in retrospect, Tito remarked that these herald events were the precursor to the near-fatal incident that occurred in his fifth month onboard the ship.

To this day, he remained unsure if it had been a divine intervention or sheer chance that had saved him.

A forceful electromagnetic storm had rocked him from sleep. Upon waking, the ship had been rendered powerless. AURORA was silent.

He remembered the survival principles of his training. An emergency protocol deviation would allow him to enter the lower decks of the vessel. He had quickly donned his anti-radiation suit and carefully descended the long ladder to locate the distribution board of the nuclear fusion-fuelled ship.

The system had been mostly intact, but its reset, and subsequent reawakening of AURORA, would take several hours. He made his way back to the bridge where he sat patiently.

A thought suddenly exploded in his head. The previous Commodore!

After making his second descent to the lower decks, he found the retirement deck. The communication system of the ship would remain ineffective until the reboot had finished. There was no way he could contact those who inhabited this deck.

Retired Commodores were to live out their lives in peace, the protocol stipulated. Post-retirement interruption was not compatible with this maxim.

Current Commodores, with the assistance of AURORA, were responsible for maintaining this peace.

Having secured his grip on the ladder, Tito used one hand to slowly thump at the thick door. Nothing echoed back in return.

The airlock which had previously sealed this section of the ship from the rest of its contents was unlocked. It required little effort in the absence of electricity and gravity to release the hatch.

Tito entered a dark room measuring five square metres. It opened up to reveal a small passageway with doors on each side. He entered the first door to his right. The name of the previous Commodore was emblazoned on it.

The photoreceptors of his shoulder torch which had been activated by the deepening darkness introduced a steady stream of revealing light. Tito reactively clambered back in horror.

There, circling in front of his glass visor, was the decomposing face of the previous Commodore. She hung in suspended weightlessness. A disappearing grimace revealed a partly moth-eaten mandible. Tendons and tissue unfurled in naked exodus. Her skin was departing.

Tito remembered that her white cap had remained aslant on her head. It was an act of silent protest. The body of the last Commodore continued to orbit as a putrefying satellite around the petrified Tito.

Failed attempts to secure the body had resulted in Tito manoeuvring awkwardly around this room. His shoulder struck the edge of a wall corner. He exited into another corridor. His fingers caught hold of the edge of the doorway and he pulled himself out.

Tito explored the multiple other rooms on this deck. Each contained skeletons of varying ages. They all levitated in disunity. He lamented that this was a truly macabre scene. These were not retirement quarters, but tombs. Mausoleums for those who had once manned this Pathfinder.

A frightened Tito sought refuse in one of these empty stellar sepulchres. His torchlight scanned the walls to look for sensors or apertures to point to a mechanism of death of these unfortunate spacemen.

Nothing.

All he could see were four plain walls with an air-tight entranceway.

Air-tight!

A cold wave of horror washed over him. The realisation that suffocation was the mode of death. A further nauseating wave struck him. His heart pulsed and jumped. This very room was his predestined resting place!

He clambered haphazardly up the ladder and back onto the bridge.

It was dark and cold. AURORA had still not been reactivated. Tito deliberated quickly. He would set himself a new mission: to commandeer the ship.

He refused to meet the same fate as those who preceded him. AURORA would be overridden. Disabled, destroyed if it had to be that way.

He spent hours reprogramming her algorithm, inserting innumerable stop sequences: blind ends in her maze of endlessly sinuous circuitry. Another hour would pass before the Pathfinder powered up again after its storm-imposed hiatus. This rare event of super-charged cosmic electromagnetism had been his salvation.

Yet the successful disablement of AURORA meant that a lifetime of functioning through algorithmic reliance would end abruptly, and albeit welcome, he would have to learn to live without her.

Tito set reminders as to when he should eat and drink. At times he gorged on his rations. There were other times when he almost starved.

Any injury sustained could be fatal. He took painful precautions to prevent this. His movements all but ceased on the vessel. He confined himself to his living quarters. Only on occasion would he venture to the bridge.

Months progressed to years.

Tito dropped the title of Commodore. Captain Shun Tito executed command of this vessel.

At first, he lived in relative comfort, and for the first time in his life, he felt warmth. Beta decay of tritium in the nuclear fusion engines produced helium-3. Although shadow shields around these great engines had absorbed most of its radiation, low-intensity ultraviolet light had started to seed into the compartments of this ship.

He designated safe areas after measuring the radioactivity on the ship; uncontrolled levels could quite easily shroud him in a blanket of cancerous death.

And so, Tito lived like this for many years. Yet, he felt a profound sense of isolation. It ate away at him slowly. AURORA and her systems had been designed to sustain their carbonised passengers. Without her mental stimulation and pseudo-intellectual interaction, he descended into a deep melancholy, and eventually, depression.

Andrew C. Kidd