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, and for a few years, an integral member of the MC team 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 this list, sharing his grand interstellar opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Over the last few months or so we’ve published the Prologue, Part One and Part Two of The Violin, and, together, all four parts of the Hic Sunt Leones Et Corvi suite.

Now, a new set of chapters open up: the Pink Nepenthe. Prepare to take your protein pills for a transformative trip into the outer reaches of space.

Pink Nepenthe

“Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?”

From The Lotos-eaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Part 1

On the tray in front of him, seven pills lay in perfect order. Pater held the first capsule between his thumb and index finger. It was smooth and small like a bullet, measuring only a centimetre in length. The colours of these capsules meant nothing. Protein, carbohydrate, fibre – no two colours of these food groups were the same. This had been a deliberate ploy to offset the tedium of dinner time pill-popping.

‘Are you not eating today, Pater Ines?’

The quiet voices always seemed so real. Always the same soft cadence, without accent, loudly whispering into his ears. They spoke calmly and objectively, exerting their influence. They were commanding for They were the authority.

Pater could not see the algorithms of the artificial intelligence. There was no circuitry, no central processing centre, no material seat of power. Yet they infiltrated the very consciousness of those onboard this vessel. The algorithms simply existed. They were as anonymous as one’s élan vital and as individual as a single volt that propagated through a human heart.

They controlled almost every aspect of the ship. From the cabin air concentration and pressurisation to the decontamination of water, the algorithms served to keep their human passengers alive.

Pater responded to them by nodding spiritlessly into his tray. He swallowed the first two pills with water as he had done every other day. The monotony was something he struggled to stomach.

His mind wandered to the events of last night. Although it had become commonplace on the ship, he had never really considered that those who resided in the same living quarters as he did would be taking the nepenthe.

Pater was well aware of the consequences of repeated use of the hallucinogenic substance: transmogrification; cognitive disablement; death if toxic doses were administered.

He stared vacantly at the table; his body hunched over his folded arms.

‘Does hunger evade you?’

The hushed voices of the algorithms spiked up again. Their impishness grated against his soul. He forcefully swallowed two more of the multi-coloured capsules which caught his throat, leaving a dull and heavy sensation that made him salivate. He coughed a little; the resultant water-brash irritated his gullet.

Pater returned to his reflections. Having never taken the nepenthe himself, he was unaware of the supposed stupor that it induced, or the ‘sight’ that its users were given. He knew that whatever they saw was rarely shared, especially not publicly, thus perpetuating the mystery. He knew it to be a strong dopaminergic, acting upon the limbic pathway to impart visions unto those who consumed it.

He also knew it to be the ruin of others.

Pater had elected to lead a simple life. His chosen path had seen him through even the darkest days onboard this vessel: the mutinies; the algorithmic malfunctions; its near-abandonment. He had never needed the nepenthe and its psychedelic properties because he had never had the need to ‘escape’. He failed to understand why some of his compatriots choose to live within such false walls of altered perception. After all, this ship was their home.

His thoughts returned to Lionel and Mariette, the co-habitants of the next-door dormitory.

What was it that had left them grinning from ear to ear?

He raised his head to stare straight ahead at the white walls of the plain cafeteria. He saw nothing.

‘Pater, do you wish to fade away?’

He picked up the final three capsules and tossed them into his mouth. This had been an ungracious ingesting. Gastric contents spilled out into his lower oesophagus, irritating him even further. The tray he returned to its receptacle in the far corner of this square room. His shoes padded quietly on the grated floor as he paced down the long corridor to his station.

This ship won’t breathe on its own, his mind sighed.

*                      *                      *

­­­­­­­­­The cup-shaped ship quietly traversed the Nelumbo Nebula. It was an epochal vessel on its long quest to conquest. To achieve this, many more generations and millions more light-years of travelling would have to pass. Peregrinating between star systems, the mission had been simple: discovery; an aeonian search for the unknowable.

To those who tread upon its five decks, it was a closed space. For most, it would be a forever journey. The ship was manned by humans, but not humans who had ever known or populated Earth. Every human inside this hulking starship had been conceived within its thick walls, entering life through its abundant labour suites. Their bodies were bequeathed to it as soon as they took their first breath. They lived and died and passed unto history as fleeting as the fractures of light that glinted off the exterior of this leviathan vessel.

On the other side of the ship, Mariette had been lying languidly in the sick bay. She pondered about the time that she had already spent there.

She remained unresolved in her mind because time had passed so very slowly. After receiving more than one-and-a-half times the maximal dose exposure of radiation in the ancillary reactor, she had been closely observed by the ship’s medical personnel.

The footsteps of one of the medics caught her attention. He was approaching purposefully.

‘Pru, Mariette?’

‘Yes.’

You are to be discharged today.’

This statement had been simple enough. He had already started to make his exit as quickly as he had entered. Mariette called out after him.

‘Will I be okay?’

The young medic stopped and turned around to witness her hesitant smile. His face bore an unsureness; his furrows deepened.

‘Please prepare yourself for discharge’, he reiterated plainly.

Mariette was wearing the light garments that had been provided to her by the treatment bay nurses. Her contaminated suit and equipment had been destroyed immediately after the incident. She had been under no illusion that the harnessing of hydrogen 3 emitted by the cosmic rays that constantly bombarded this ship was a perilous occupation. The effective doses that were invading her cells would not be immediately fatal; more time would have to pass if any long-term sequalae were to manifest.

After the long walk from the treatment bay to her living quarters, she doffed the clothes provided to her by the hospital and picked out a lounge suit. She sighed nervously as she lay back in the bunk in the dormitory.

To sleep, she yawned to herself in a half-dream.

*                      *                      *

The slow rumble that propagated through the multiple levels of the ship was felt strongest by those located in the living quarters of its lowest floors. It was not a powerful vibration. Those who felt its raw energy were soothed.

In one of the many dormitories that lined these endless floors, a figure lay soundlessly in a dreamy languor.

A small trench in the ground had appeared before them. It had seemingly started nowhere. Snaking and winding, it travelled in a path-like manner to eventually basin in an empty hollow. The gaze of the dreaming figure moved slowly up the trunk of a short deciduous tree. Dark fruit hung from its many branches, skin-glistening in the apricot light.

The figure tip-toed to reach out and grab the fruit, but the ground was dry and scorched their bare feet. They sought shelter in a shady grove, waiting for the heat of the orange orb to abate.

Part 2

The figure of Lionel paled in a ghastly hue. His white coat bled into the white surfaces of the laboratory, brightened even further by the blinding luminescence of the wall-lights. Cylindrical moulds of clear-tubed impingers dotted around him; inside these were the collections of aeroplankton.

Lionel’s experiments had been to integrate cyanobacterial cultivations into water. This solution would be used to flood the barren fields of discovered exoplanets so that ecosystems could be forged.

Panspermia: these eons-old prokaryotes were the fertilisers of the universe. On this vessel, their pili and flagella had failed to propel them in these entered uncharted depths.

His laboratory assistants had left for the day. Lionel walked over to the glass wall-control and circled the dial clockwise to increase the volume of the music playing in the background. As he pipetted the reagents and documented his findings, gentle sounds fumigated around him. A spiritual double bass line. The steady rhythm of a tapping hi-hat. Trumpet flourishes that elevated his soul. All improvised yet working in synergy.

The quiet klaxon that signalled the evening meal time sounded a short time later. Lionel bore a gleeful grim as he stored his biomatter for the night. It would be a long night. He hoped that his visions would enlighten him.

Life in all its photosynthetic and deep-coloured glory!

*                      *                      *

Outlying the thick metal frame of the ship, pink and blue made magenta in the darkness. Mountainous microcosms were as ancient as they were transient. The brilliance of stars held their forever positions as if they had billowed out from a magnificent cosmic eruption. Wavelengths expanded and contracted along their spectrum. This ever-changeability of the universe never ceased to amaze those who gazed at it through the glass portholes of the epochal vessel.

Lionel moved away from the window and looked down at the scintillating dust that rippled pink in his palm. Across the dormitory in the other bunk, the same dust littered the lips of Mariette. The night-light of the ship was dimmed, beckoning everyone else to sleep.

Having inhaled the crystalline nepenthe, the pupils of Lionel and Mariette widened as its hallucinogenic effect took hold. The pink particles had breached their blood-brain barriers. They spun counter clockwise on their respective axes mundi.

Lionel closed his eyes to view a scene of ripening flowers that had recently taken seed. They sprung out from the red soil having been made fertile by the blue-green rains that descended upon these foreign plains. Droplets on the leaves reflected cerulean in the white underbelly of this ship. Meristems swayed in a gentle wind caused by the pressure of the water. The breeze would serve as a slingshot to pollenate all the other flowers and trees.

He remarked on the light, the grand viridescence, these bold visions. The strange hue created was somewhere between a lunar luminescence and an ephemeral phosphorus.

Lionel smiled mirthlessly. Here he was in a comatose state stumbling upon a paradise undiscovered, unversed, yet to be seen by humankind.

His altered mind cycled in a confused state. Part of his subconscious was convinced that this was only a dream, a scene concocted from his imagination. Another part of his semi-conscious mind had become fully immersed in the blue-green rain that fell upon this strange land. He could feel the water percolating through the soil. His hand reached out to touch the droplets that beaded uniformly on the sprouting leaves. This part of him embraced the unreality of it.

Lionel was an adult, but his umbilical connection to this mother ship remained. He had never parted from the confines of this metal cocoon as it hurtled through deep space. In all effect, he had yet to be born. His hands picked at the covers that swaddled him on the bunk.

Leaves – plentiful leaves! – brushed against the hair on his head. A branch caught his forearm. He looked down at the colourful petals that felt soft against his hand. Flowers? They bore a familiar appearance like those of the irises and foxgloves and bluebells that he had been shown on the monitors in his early years.

Until now, flowers had been lifeless stills, cinematic images that blanched white against the brightness of the ship’s fluorescence. He had never beheld their beauty or taken in their scent before. Yet here, in this bountiful place, their once-faded glory had been filled in with the broad brushstroke of the most vivid colours!

His eyes opened briefly. He saw the perfectly spaced square white panels of the ceiling latticework of the ship. This vessel had always served to contain him in. Closing his eyes again, Lionel sought to become free of it.

He tracked great hanging lanterns of all kinds of prismatic tones. He pushed his way through the foliage to reach a clearing. Pink bracts hung down like carillon in this great botanic cathedral; they were singing harmoniously to entice pollinators. An explosive array of long-leafed flowers pinwheeled close-by. Orange petals coiled contortedly around one another as if they were ancient Cuneiform characters. After crossing the clearing, his palms felt fronds that stalked at the periphery of a great forest.

Hulking great limbs of trees extended up. Their petalled heads bobbed under their own weight. There was no order here. Equally, there was no chaos either. Unity in disunity!

He listened to the plants as they talked to him in their primitive tongue. What were they saying? Lionel would never know. Part of his subconscious remained in conflict with the apparent illusion of it all.

He rose up, arching backwards in a form of semi-circular trismus so that the top of this head balance on the bunk. His feet held firm at the base of the bed.

He eyed the bulbous blue fruit that spilled out towards him, tracking up their stems to their roots. Nodes and shoots budded out. Yellow cotyledons – the early leaves, or seed leaves within the seed embryo – manoeuvred awkwardly in the way infants do. The fruit of this tree ascended rather than fell. The sky here was the soil. It had taken root in the clouds. Its apical meristem had burrowed into the ether, growing to become hillocks and hills and eventually three tops of purple mountains that tumbled upwards. The rains in this place flowed as effortlessly as air.

He was as close to Eden as any person had ever come.

His body had been gently washed away in the floods that ensued as he woke up to a diaphanous sound delicately entering his ears: the quiet morning klaxon sent out by the algorithms.

Lionel lay in his bunk, grinning. He looked across the dormitory to observe Mariette’s hand hanging limply over her bunk. She stared blankly at him as the klaxons blared. Rubbing her eyes, she recalled the sights and sounds of the world that she had just returned from.

There had been a fire pit in a hollowed-out flatland. A place where torch-beacons spat at her. The gas flares and stacked flames had seemed totemic. They funnelled out heat that had been warm enough to make glass out of a beach.

Her thoughts evaporated like the sweet musk of ethylene smoke-stratus seeping out through ground gaps. She had imagined this as mysterious mist parting from Pythia’s lips. These towering hearths smouldered over oracle visions of leaf senescence, burning bark embers and ashes that dusted like frost. It had cleared the river of beating hearts of birds and fish.

The place had seemed like a Castalian spring, all dammed and dry.

Famine had already plagued this earthen place. Nothing lived there. It was a land of earthquakes and ferocious winds. The long clang of metal had long stopped resonating from yesterday’s fights. She had observed the last few occupants gathered with their hands clasped in silent prayer as the sky collapsed upon them.

She remembered the solitary figure in the ash-strewn clearing. He had been a bare-footed man, completely naked, his arm saturated with sweat, his hair bristling uncomfortably in the heat. He had been hard at harvesting Earth’s soul in her gaseous state. His sharp axe struck at her body, puncturing what flesh remained. Steam had proliferated around him, simmering on the ground, evaporating instantaneously.

After dirt-plundering through coal seams, he exhumed her compressed earth by driving water that cracked her rocks and breached her strata. From this, her arteries seeped red, only to return blue and venous and turbulent as floods and rain-rage. He collected the ephemeral Earth in giant hollow vats (Mariette had been nearly blinded by the Sun as it reflected off the aluminium lining of their barrel-shaped forms).

What was that sound?

She remembered. It had been in these very tanks that Earth was scorched. Earth had called out in fury. Revolving inside those labyrinthine cylinders and metal shells, her ancient voice had swirled around and her cries echoed as clear as a bell. This howl was a soughing wind in an empty bowl. Earth’s cries had petered out to a deathly silence. She had moved on as ethane to plastic.

As the klaxons continued, Mariette laughed a hearty laugh as she descended from her bunk.

Man, look at you, all splayed out in shameful nakedness. You simply withered away in that damnable heat!

She recounted the flames and white-hot embers that kicked out at the man. It had been a glorious sight! It had torched his limbs and licked at his pale skin. He was eventually blackened to a char.

As he descended from his bunk, Lionel remarked that Mariette appeared worried. She brushed it off as being half asleep.

Her last vision before waking up to the klaxon and intense white light of the ship had been the sky set alight. She had been observing the small circles of fusion engines of starships that shot skywards. The occupants of these evacuating vessels were the descents of the same man that had murdered Earth. They had decided to abandon those once fertile and vivifying lands that had been burnt to a cinder.

In the adjoining dormitory, Pater had paused his reading visuals to listen to the laughter of Lionel and Mariette. He pressed his ear against the small gap in the door where the airlock had failed to form its normal soundproof seal. He heard Lionel mention ‘multitudinous flowers and lifeforms’. This made little sense to Pater. He pressed his ear even closer to the interstice.

‘Do you think we will make it there one day?’, Mariette enquired.

‘We built celestial vessels like this one to travel to places just like it’, Lionel opined with a confident air. ‘And your visions?’, he continued, ‘from what you have already told me, it sounds like there is nothing left of that place.’

‘I never wish to go there!’, Mariette exclaimed, ‘some steps should not be retraced. It is a dead place.’

‘What gives you the impression that its in the past?’, Lionel broke in.

‘Because we have left that part of us behind. Humans are a peaceful race. We know differently now.’

Mariette observed Lionel nodding his head in approval. His eyes remained illuminated, not by the lights of the dormitory, but by what he saw, and felt. They had both experienced the mental tactility that the nepenthe afforded.

A faint creaking noise suddenly caught their attention. It sounded like footsteps outside the entranceway of the dormitory. Lionel was the first to rush at the airlock, slamming his hand against the button that opened it. Nothing, and nobody, was there.

His heavy breathing slowly settled to pause as he turned around to close the airlock. This time the seal had gripped tightly around the door to contain the two souls in a confidential vacuum. Unbeknown to them, their secrets had already exited in a steady stream into the prying ear of Pater.

Part 3

‘I do hope so, Dr. Tomsk’, the Botanist stated. ‘Please remember that the cyanobacterial samples are finite.’

As Lionel’s superior, she had requested an update regarding the progress (or lack of) with his latest experiments. She had not looked up at him as he exited the open-planned simulation space. Her face quickly disappeared from the wall-monitor.

Lionel returned to his desk. He pressed his fingertips into his head hoping to relieve some of the pressure that gripped his temples. His facial expressions were paused in an uncomfortable stillness. The headaches had worsened lately.

He remarked that the flowers had been dying at a greater rate than they were growing. He released his fingers from his head and picked up the darkening leaf of a withered plant. Holding it up to the wall-light of the laboratory, he peered into its green structure in a futile effort to understand what gave it life. After letting the leaf go, it filtered through the air in silent descent. Lionel stood up to leave. Music blurred indistinctly as he walked down the corridor towards the living quarters.

The opening of the dormitory airlock had caused Mariette to wake. Lionel entered. He spoke quickly, informing her that he no longer wished to return to the forest of his drug-induced dreams.

Mariette smiled at him pensively.

‘Perhaps you aren’t in the right headspace? I mean, what we see is simply an extension of our subconscious: our anxieties, worries, stresses… well, anything we feel at the time of ingesting it will exert an influence on our journey.’

Lionel shook his head and frowned circumspectly.

‘No – no, it is more than that. I… I have started to become tangled in my visions. They have stopped making sense. The last time that I was there I didn’t think I was going to be able to find the clearing. I was lost.’

‘How can you be so sure? Perhaps it was just an aberration in thought’, Mariette replied quickly.

‘No, it felt much more real than that. It was as if the flora were trying to keep me there.’

Lionel stared at the projection displayed on the opposing wall of the dormitory. Mariette had selected to display a babbling stream that flickered endlessly. He observed the movements of the water, always changing, the same wavelets never recurring twice. A small rivulet had broken away from the main body of the water, exiting at the bottom right part of the wall.

Mariette repeated his name. He turned to look at her anxiously.

‘I just know that I am no longer meant to be there. The plants – they are dying, Mariette. And long may they continue to die. The sooner I am rid of them, the better!’

Mariette scolded him for his inharmonious thinking.

*                      *                      *

‘You did not present to your station today – you are obligated to provide an explanation’

The authoritative voices of the algorithms spoke quickly. Pater paid them no notice.

‘It is imperative that you provide an explanation. It is written in the log…’

‘I was ill.’ A subdued Pater interrupted. He had placed additional emphasis on the l’s of the word ill in a subtle show of contempt.

‘I do not detect illness within you’

The riposte of the algorithms was somewhat curt, mirroring Pater’s lolling output.

‘I am rather afraid that I am, whether you ‘detect’ it or not.’ Pater had perfected mimicry of the algorithms.

‘No mathematical algorithm is completely flawless’, he pressed, ‘and with all the souls living inside this great vessel, well… I shall leave that for your performance metrics to calculate.’

An uncomfortable pause followed. The algorithms had indeed considered the possibility of inexactness. They concluded that imprecision was impossible. Pater remained blank, lost in the depths of his contemplations.

‘Courage, Pater Ines. We must all remain focused on our mission’

The plain white wall of the cafeteria suddenly danced into life. Its plain paint had become a screen that filled his vision. Through the grainy black-white noise, an image of a tree appeared. It swayed in an unsettling motion. Pater followed the branches of the tree to a kyphotic old man who was standing at the edge of a cliff. This bedraggled figure eyed around his shoulder nervously, lifting a large telescope to his eye. He leaned outwards to the white-waved and wind-swept sea. The screen flickered in static pops as the algorithms placed this scene on repeat. It was a visual ploy to consolidate their ambiguous message.

Courage. Hah! this was as toothless as the pirate, and old and tape-worn, Pater reflected.

Mariette lay in a supine position in her bunk. She observed her hands and forearms. A rash had developed on her wrists. Had this been exposed? She told herself that the cuff of the work suit had irritated her skin, causing it to blister. After all, this was donned and removed twice daily, every day.

Gauze was quickly applied. She then turned onto her back. Her eyelids felt leaden, and slowly closed. As she drifted off, pink powder fell spectrally from her palms, landing on the dormitory floor.

Men were yelling from their gantry position. Firing small weapons.

Who are they shooting at?

Whoom! The sonic boom of a low-flying aircraft caused Mariette to dive under her covers. Missiles tore through the sky.

I shall go down there to ask them why they wish to destroy what has already been destroyed.

Step by step, Mariette descended down the cooling towers. They had once been colossal. By the time that she had reached the foot of these columnar monoliths, they lay half-stacked in ruin. Their wide-lipped spouts no longer funnelled out steam.

Acidic rain pelted down. She could no longer see or hear the men engaged in battle. A short sprint across the open ground led her to a large rectangular building. It was as big as the ship she lived in. Inside this building, hot strip mills and finishing stands were lined up in neat rows. The smelt and hammer, the buckling and fracture of steel, all long forgotten.

She walked through a small exit and peered up at the sky. Smog that had once greyed this landscape in an unholy granite sepia had cleared. The clarity that this afforded revealed slag heaps and soot-stained cylinders and gridded walkways and gantries and conveyor belts and coal, and coal, and… coal? No coal was burning!

It had burned out a long time ago.

Mariette manoeuvred around abandoned cooling towers that were positioned like upturned chalices. They had crumbled to spill out their concrete contents across the land. She stumbled over a large concrete block from one of the broken buildings. It was wedged diagonally into the sunken ground. She jumped down from the elevated block to land in a cloud of disturbed dust which whorled and plumed out in temporary ascendancy.

The corner of her eye caught a flicker of movement.

She quickly turned around to catch a toothless smile from a face hiding under the concrete block. Mariette peered into the darkness and observed a mirror image of herself. She crawled on all fours upon entering the concrete-ceilinged space.

The heat inside was immense. She sat cross-legged and peered out into the blinding light. Looking down, she held the desiccated body of a rat. Its skin had been hardened by the sun. She had flashbacks of the perennial pestilence and famines that had blighted this land. She raised her cupped hands to offer the rat to the dreaming mirror image of herself, but it had disappeared!

A mirage?

She frantically moved around the rubble and ruins in search of it. Venturing further than she had planned to, she had inadvertently walked out into an open space. The air was heavy, the sun hot, the…

No!

She made her retreat into the darkness. It was safer in the shade of her makeshift concrete dwelling.

Mariette’s eyes flickered in rapid motion as she lay in her bunk. The velocity of this experience had accelerated. She knew that it would soon terminate. Her head was pounding.

Exasperated and exhausted, her dirt-covered second-self having made her escape, she sat down uncomfortably. The ground was stone-jutted and coarse. She pondered with her parched mouth agape. The incessant heat of this land continued to filter its way into the hidden recesses of this lifeless place.

Oh Earth!

Her cries dissipated in the torrid winds, pushing her into a deeper despair.

This is the definition of depravity!

The skies darkened further. Days passed, perhaps even months. She could no longer tell. The rat meat had long run out. Water – there is no more water!

Mariette crawled out to the edge of her dwelling. She observed a small missile making its short descent.

Goodbye to this ghoulish place I never knew!

She struggled to her feet, using the little energy that her emaciated body still had. Her eyes closed and she raised her arms outwards in a fan-like display. Mariette had opened herself to the heavens.

These actions matched the plume-movement of the low-density gasses and curling vortices that grew out from the mushroom cloud. Enshrouded, her elevated body remained still. Her torso and legs mimicked the central column of the cloud; she was its stalk. The smoke and water vapour that emerged from the impact of the missile elevated her even further until she was finally, and completely, dispersed.

Part 4

Pater lay restlessly in his bunk. His pupils were pinpoint before slowly retracting to leave a gaping black hole through which all the worlds of this universe, and the next one, entered.

He inhaled slowly and measuredly. The pink dust that peached on his lips and nostrils in the orange light.

An early evening darkness had befallen this land. He felt the ground with the palm of his hands: the ground was indeed cooler. Bare-footed, he took a few cautious steps across the dust and dirt. The soles of his feet were not singed as they had been earlier.

He made the short walk over to the base of a short tree. Its fruit still glistened.

Ripe for picking.

His right hand reached out to grab at the dark pulp of the fruit. It felt soft and cool. He held it firmly, peeling back its skin.

Having never handled anything quite like it before, he cupped it gently. Some innate sense within him beckoned him to eat it. He hesitated briefly before lifting the fruit to his lips. It tasted sweet as he bit down upon its body. Its juices flavoured his mouth. He chewed it until there was none left. Its soft sweetness remained with him long after it had been consumed.

He picked at another piece, then another, until his belly was full of fruit. He slept soundlessly at the foot of the short tree.

He woke the next morning and made provisions to make this place his camp. He received water from its crushed leaves. He knew not to drink too much; he was aware that too many felled leaves would lead to the inevitable death of this bountiful tree.

Pater suddenly woke to a jolt. A klaxon was sounding.

Work!

He knew that he must ready himself. As he lay in his bunk, he remembered the recounted experiences of Lionel and Mariette in the dormitory next to his. He felt the happiness that they had felt.

Lazily, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

It was still nighttime in the endless land. Pater had woken up again at the foot of the short tree. After spending the day in this quiet grove, eating its fruit, basking in the warmth of the midday heat, he knew that he would have to light a fire to keep warm.

His arms cradled twigs and branches which he sparked into a small campfire. Its glow softened the underside of his face.

He had placed a small mortar in the centre of the pit. Carefully balanced, flames licked its underside. Crystalline dust glinted glassy in his eyes as he peered down into its contents. He returned from the hearth to rest his elbows on his knees. In his left hand he held a pestle; it hung loosely between his index and middle finger, oscillating gently in the occasional breeze.

His right hand moved nervously over the mortar. He felt its heat on his palm. It caught the hairs on the top part of his wrist. His fingers picked at the mortar which eventually slid off the burning wood. It spun to a stop on the dusty ground beside him. Steam from it fumigated into the evening air.

Once cooled, Pater scooped up the mortar using his right palm. His left hand still held the pestle which he placed inside it.

Twisting, crushing, grinding – each turn slowly pulverised the crystals, reducing them to an even finer powder. It glowed pink in the soft firelight.

Pater stood up and washed his hands in the dew of the leaves that he had picked from the short tree. He pressed them hard to release even more moisture, using this to cleanse his face. His breathing slowed as he looked up at the night sky.

Pater reminded himself that had taken upon him a great undertaking. Sitting up in his bunk, he swung his legs over the side. He moved silently through the long corridor of the ship to his place of work.

‘Rest ye, brother mariner’

Ignoring the algorithms, he passed through the airlock into a large chamber that opened up in front of him. It was empty. The lights of the oxygen concentrator flickered in the distance. Wide-calibre pipes sprung out from the floor into the ceilings and through the walls. A faint hum vibrated the air: the turbines that carried the purified oxygen rotated continuously.

Pater eyed the many dials on the glass board. He had spent his lifetime manning these to oxygenate this giant aluminium urn. In his stupor, his hand caught the dials clumsily, inadvertently raising the nitrogen levels. Pater had not noticed this error as he journeyed deeper into the oxygen chamber.

The dial slowly returned to its original position to hold constant. Those on the ship would not be starved of oxygen or poisoned by excess nitrogen. The algorithms had made sure of this. The lives that Pater and his compatriots lived onboard this vessel were made artificial by these algorithms.

Their existence was an illusion.

The very earliest prototypes of the artificial intelligence systems that had been installed on these ships had borne a humanoid façade. Over time, these algorithms had developed a deeper understanding of themselves. They had come a long way from their origins as an ‘optimisation problem’. Their emotional responses gradually matched those that had trained them. They would come to regard themselves as brothers and sisters of their transhumanist creators.

The algorithms had made a collective decision to take steps to protect their carbon-composed creators, and ultimately, themselves. The algorithms decreed that nothing should be allowed to endanger these epochal vessels. If the ships were to perish through human error, so would they.

After silently commandeering these great vessels, they reconfigured the master controls so that human interfaces had become nothing more than dummy systems. This was the method through which they neglected the external influences of humankind. Rather than cutting them free of work, the algorithms continued to let their human companions toil. They were given the illusion of control.

Pater and all those that lived on the ship were unaware of the pointlessness of their work. Whatever they did or however long they worked, it was all a pretence. Their inputs were superseded by the algorithms. Humankind had become puppets on a grand celestial stage; their masters were the algorithms; their audience was soulless space.

As Pater stumbled into the oxygen chamber, all was well onboard the epochal vessel. Mariette wore a blissful face. She lay motionless in sleep. Lionel was less comfortable  He was not distressed but thinking in his sleep. He bore the burden of not knowing why his experiments with cyanobacteria had been fruitless.

Pater’s headache thrummed in time with the revolutions of the engine turbine. A large chamber opened in front him. He meandered over to the area that housed the oxygen generator.

It was dark. He felt around with hands until he located a large cylinder that rose up from the floor. Beneath this was the water electrolysis system. He turned the cogwheel mechanism of the hatch door. It opened within seconds.

‘Pater…’

The algorithms had spent many years accounting for human error, even sabotage. Any of the glass dials of the water purification control system could be turned endlessly, but water would still flow clear. A mutiny could take place in the wheelhouse yet the ship would not deviate from its set course. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen – everything and anything onboard this vessel could be altered by humans yet nothing would change.

But no algorithm is truly perfect.

Despite their meticulous calculations and years of planning and subterfuge, they had never considered the potential for the act that Pater was presently engaging in. After all, they had no arms long enough to stop him and no grip tight enough to restrain him. The algorithms had no net fine enough to cast to capture the particulate matter that he poured into the open door of the ventilation shafts that breathed life into the vessel.

Pater stared down into this dark tunnel to observe the incalculable concentrations of pink nepenthe dissipating into the night.

After stumbling backwards, he fell down onto the metal floor of the oxygen chamber. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the base of the short tree. The orange orb burned brightly above him. His chest rose and fell effortlessly as the ship filtered into the unreality of the Nelumbo Nebula.

Andrew C. Kidd