Monolith Cocktail Blog

The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued sci-fi Saga.

Dabbling over the last 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 Vukovar 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. Andrew shares his grand interstellar saga, Tennyson In Space, with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Over the last five months or so we’ve published the Prologue, Part One and Part Two of The Violin, all four parts of the Hic Sunt Leones Et Corvi suite, the Pink Nepenthe and the first half of Appl. E. We now continue with the final chapters of the latter.

Part 3

With the conference having adjourned some hours ago, Alard stood pensively at the threshold of the generous living accommodation provided by the Domini. The dark walls seemed to be closing in on him. Each pipe had taken an apparently different route into and out of the stonework. Light-headedness sought to topple him. He squatted down in an attempt to shake off this strange sensation.

‘I fear your decision will lead to a trade disagreement… or worse’, □ motioned. ‘You haven’t the ethical approval or proprietary rights. I mean, for goodness sake, try to consider this objectively!’

Her monitor oscillated.

‘You have little regard for the inevitable consequences’, □ continued. ‘Hostility at this sensitive juncture is inconceivable.’

‘But you have just conceived it, have you not?’ Alard smirked. ‘In any case’, he quickly followed, ‘it was your algorithmic predictions that led us here. And it was your decision to take flight and open the first–’

‘I believe that we agreed never to disclose how we got here.’

□ was right. He had to stop these momentary lapses.

An apple, an apple, an apple! The Elusimicrobia had been yielded from an apple.

‘I must ask you to re-consider your choice. My predictive modelling of your decision has only one outcome: strife’, □ persisted.

Pacing up and down the room, Alard slapped his hands together, clasping them in a form of contorted prayer.

‘I have made my decision and that decision is final.’

‘If that is your final decision, our collaboration must end here’, □ replied.

How predictable, he thought to himself. Algorithmic sentience: the weighty burden of programmers!

‘Once you walk through those doors. We shall no longer know each other.’

‘Be quiet!’, Alard yelled. ‘Of course we will know each other.’ He mocked her nasal vocal output. ‘We created Appl. E. and we shall…’

Alard stopped talking.

The room imbued a strange silence. □’s screen was stock still.

*                      *                      *

He was holding his breath.

‘Right’, exhaling loudly, ‘apply the label now.’

Dr. El-hen looked at Alard, smiling warmly. The binding of the fluorophoric antibody to the antigenic epitope glowed neon green on their shared screen. The viridescent methylated cytosine groups were modifying histones. Mastery of the stem cell cycle was the prize for those who could determine all the histone states. It was proving to be an arduous journey. The destination was differentiation.

Alard and El-hen studied the screen. A symphony of cells and enzymes was playing. For now, it was harmonic. They would both have to wait for the triumphant climax.

With the immunolabelling complete, Alard and El-hen moved their shared attention to the cells as they aligned themselves in neat rows. Next, they would measure the density of the labels and match these to the cell cycle.

Human studies next, Alard had promised Professeur Meuse.

Their present research was proof-of-principle of their latest bioengineering success: the addition of methyl groups to the bases in the DNA sequence of the epidermal layer.

Lucidum: clarity. An accidental but poetic choice of the duo. Once identified, the process would be replicated on a micro-engineering level. Soon they would be able to print these signatures onto microfluidic chips.

‘I am so glad that you can join us tomorrow’, Dr. El-hen said.

Alard smiled as he removed the extrusion-printed specimen, placing the synthetic organ carefully in the biobath, An entire epidermal layer, clearer than he had ever imagined, was the result.

He placed it gently down on the counter to commence the stabilisation process. Appl. E. was added. Alard’s thoughts moved onto the next step: replication of cardiac tissue.

*                      *                      *

Professeur Meuse relaxed back into his chair in a demonstration of false certitude. Alard knew him to be a difficult man. They had both engaged in many arguments since the start of their collaborative venture.

‘But we are in the business of regenerating tissue, not harvesting it from people’, Alard affirmed.

He looked over at the Professeur. Lines creased his face. Fluorescent lighting had bleached his skin.

Meuse was old enough to have crossed the great celestial bridge that separated the old universe from the new. He had witnessed the Never War. Inter-planetary over-population. Decimation of cultural relativism through the autarchic hand of the Domini and his associates. All he had ever known was demographic turbulence. Perhaps years of anthropological study had worn him down? Could this explain his jaundiced opinion that farming human tissue was the solution to increasing the yield of primary cells?

It was hard to believe that the consummation of years of academic excellence had led this eminent figure to such a conclusion. Alard looked away from the Professeur who continued to stare out of the porthole.

The field of tissue regeneration had attracted all manner of interested parties. From Alard’s experience, those involved in this research could be broadly separated into two groups. The first sought to harness the technology for the sake of science. This was an advancement beyond any measure of what had been possible before.

There were also those who envisioned it as a commercial enterprise: a method of preservation, paid for by those had the financial firepower to fund their new hearts and lungs.

He could not place Meuse in either group. Beneath his clean-shaven façade, he knew that a darker character lurked. His entry into the regenerative sciences had occurred later in life. Why the move from population dynamics to tissue scaffolds? Alard considered that as the years advanced, perhaps the Professeur simply wished to live on.

‘How beautiful…’ El-Hen moved closer to the porthole. She had slackened her safety harness. Her face was being underlit in the soft light.

Outside the vessel, a water ice wreath levitated around the great head of Saturn. The soft gold imparted a subtle majesty. They had left the glacial Eris to visit one of their sponsors on base in a Saturnian moon cluster. A welcome party awaited their arrival.

Alard smiled absently. His thoughts remained with Meuse and his imagined flesh farms. The Professeur’s arguments had become more impassioned. He knew that with the right backing, he would seek to make his dangerous dream a dreadful reality.

As the vessel made its final approach, Alard turned to observe El-hen who continued to marvel at the glinting rings. Her hand was locked by Meuse. The tips of his fingers were strained white.

Alard’s desire for the docteur had not abated. It was evident from the time they had spent together that she felt similarly. A Bunsen flame burned deep inside them. It could only be a matter of time before its strength would cause the laboratories of Clan Dœmae to catch fire.

*                      *                      *

The issue is tissue.

Meuse’s mantra echoed silently in the mind of Alard.

Deep in the accommodation provided by their hosts on the Saturnian base, he replayed the last experiment in his somnolence.

The failure of the myocytic scaffold had not come as a surprise. New vessels had quickly outgrown the extracellular matrix which had quickly disintegrated before their eyes. Two-photon microscopy had yielded all the green nuclei they wished to see. Red vessels had started to proliferate on the dark background. Their thin lines were reassuring at first. Eventually, an all-consuming rubor reflected on their faces.

Rouge! Rouge! Rouge! Disintegrating muscle. We have become purveyors of necrosed tissue. Merchants of cellular death!

Please, Alard… El-hen leant forward on a polished plastic chair …I will speak to Ian–

A purposeless exercise. He is as desperate as we are. Tell him we have already replicated hundreds, probably thousands, of cell lines by now. Why the need for more?

Aes-the-tics. The scornful intermediary of Pallas sounded somewhere else in his subconscious. Her word bled out red onto the slide set.

Part 4

Meuse poured himself another drink. A gentle click noise sounded as the hatch of the door slid back into its closed position. El-hen had elected to retire to her quarters for the night. The Professeur and Alard were left alone.

‘I must say, you spoke with such authority that you almost convinced me that your theory is plausible’, Meuse opined with his back turned to Alard. The cling of the crystal glass connecting with the decanter rung passingly.

‘Life and death must co-join’, Alard pressed.

The Professeur returned to his seat and stared at Alard. His red-hair glowed in the soft light.

‘Lifeforms die and their cells die’, Meuse replied. ‘And once dead, there is no transference from the living to the extinguished state.’

He took a sip from his glass. Two slow shakes of his head followed in a subtle show of disdain.

‘I disagree wholeheartedly’, Alard retorted. ‘Take a body. Once death has consumed it, the cells do not die, but rather, serve to fertilise a world from which that body was bequeathed to. The body serves to–’

Alard paused. He had noticed Meuse holding his glass against the ceiling light to illuminate its amber contents. The Professeur eventually returned to Alard. A quick flick of his long hand beckoned him continue.

‘What I am proposing–’ Alard stretched his syllables irritably ‘–is that the ‘essence’ of the body, its being, élan vital, or however you wish to describe it, transitions. The body passes on what it once knew.’

‘So why I am unable to speak Inuinnaqtun or Natsilingmiutut? After all, I am a descendant of those who once communicated in these languages.’

A subtle shudder interrupted their conversation. The interstellar vessel continued on its return journey to Eris. Outside, the same black scene persisted, interrupted only by stars and the faint diagonal line of dust that ringed around a distant exoplanet.

‘If I may’, Meuse said. ‘Let us reshape our conversation, interesting as it has been, to talk shop for moment.’

‘Of course.’ Alard nodded. His vague form continued to flare out in holographic form.

‘It has come to my attention that your recent endeavours have been somewhat–’ Meuse considered his phrasing carefully ‘–less convincing.’

‘Less convincing?’, Alard echoed.

Meuse assented and opened a file onto the visual display. The read-outs of the failed myocytic scaffolding were quickly scanned by the duo.

‘Professeur’, Alard interjected. ‘I must insist that conversations of this nature involve Dr. El-hen. After all, she is one of the principal researchers involved in this work.’

‘Are you seeking to defer responsibility, Docteur Alard?’

‘Of course not. However, it is her intellectual property as much as mine. She should be given the opportunity to discuss these findings.’

‘Firstly, the IP is Dœmaen. Secondly, abject failure is not something to be “discussed”, Docteur.’

Meuse stared intently at Alard’s hologram. He continued:

‘What I wish to understand is how you plan to achieve success.’

‘You know as well as I do that this is science–’ Alard mirrored Meuse’s formality ‘–and that science is an iterative process. Accomplishments are met with disappointments, in equal measure.’

Meuse returned to the counter to recharge his glass. Alard considered the change in his superior’s tone. He was under no illusion that Meuse was a visionary. After all, it had been his decision with who to share his discovery with at the conference on Manitoud. He was also wary of the monopolism of his superior’s vision.

Rebus omnibus: Meuse’s motto.

Success above all else.

The bulbous base of the thick-cut glass orb covered the lower half of the Professeur’s face. Alard observed the unblinking eyes of Meuse – they had remained fixed upon him. He was being examined. The black pupils of the Professeur contracted latently. His irises were alive, drawing him in like a whirlpool. Why the scrutiny?

Alard sensed Meuse had a deeper awareness of something. An unpleasant sensation washed over him. Was it choler? Or jealousy? Shared failures had undoubtedly strengthened the bond between Alard and El-hen. He had been very careful in concealing his feelings towards her. Yet Alard was mindful that matters of the heart resided in strange metaphysical spaces. He was under no illusion that Meuse was a man of intuition.

‘Alors… tell me, Docteur Alard… how are we are going to convince our Patrons at Clan Dœmae that we will reach our goal?’, he pursued plainly.

‘We are already working at full capacity and at the limits of our ethical agreements–’

‘Why limit yourself when you know what can be achieved?’ The Professeur was rhetorical in his reply. He smiled drunkenly at Alard who shimmered silently. His oculi continued to spiral; the vision being imparted was a fanatical one.

‘Courage’, Meuse said before pausing.

‘Courage?’, Alard inflected.

‘Yes, courage!’, he hammered in reply, quickly sipping more of the amber liquid. The glass was placed down heavily on the table.

‘The word entered my mind as we are discussing your work on myocyte regeneration. Its etymology is fitting. Our ancestors would have pronounced it ‘corage’. Cor: after the heart.’

Meuse leant back in his chair. He toyed with the lip of his glass.

‘You see, dear Docteur. Only those who act courageously can affect true change. Imagine the possibility of endless regeneration. A new heart when atherosclerosis blocks the old one from beating. Neuronal cells reappearing in a disappearing brain. Organ failures consigned to the annals of antiquity.’

‘I am well aware of our intended destination, Professeur’, Alard broke in. ‘I also have my own imaginations of such a future.’

‘Then – don’t hold back! Do share these visions!’, Meuse demanded excitedly.

‘Okay, I have often wondered what will become of us after we have been replaced, or at least, once parts of us have been replaced. Who will be then? And what next, after our replaced organs fail. More implanted parts destined to malfunction.’

Alard saw that Meuse was transfixed upon his hologram.

‘Until now, all we have ever known is life as a two-dimensional line. One that has a beginning and an end. If we succeed in our research, we will not only lengthen that line but change how it is sewn.’

Alard hesitated. He had never spoken so openly about his sentiments on never-death.

‘What do you mean by “how it is sewn”?’, Meuse enquired.

‘We are more than carbonised shells’, Alard explained. ‘Death represents a severed line in our lives, but that line is never cleanly cut. It is left frayed, open to other thready remnants. Those tattered ends represent all the different physical and metaphysical aspects of our lives: hydrogen; oxygen; knowledge; id; ego; superego… our separate identities! It is from these remaining threads that the future material of our progeny are sewn.’

Alard paused for a moment.

‘Fibres are twisted into single strands that become woven into an embroidered patchwork’, he continued. ‘One that becomes more intricate with each passing generation. If we create the possibility of an endless cycle of forever-self, the fabric will never change. It is this fabric that binds us. Without it, we will simply stagnate.’

Meuse smiled thinly at Alard’s flickering holograph. The amber liquid had made him heady.

‘Is this a convoluted way to tell me that you are having reservations about our work?’, Meuse retorted glibly. ‘As I have already explained to you, I only seek to associate with those who have courage.’

Alard allowed the Professeur to continue unobstructed.

‘Let us move away from this allegorical posturing’, Meuse continued tersely. ‘Our Maîtres at the Clan have agreed in principle to my proposal. I believe El-hen may have mentioned this to you?’

Pupillary constriction. Choler, Alard affirmed. The Professeur was closing in on him. Alard shook his head.

‘Well, we need to press on with the next phase in cardiac muscle development.’ Meuse paused as he looked into the empty glass. His eyes then immediately met with Alard’s.

‘Organ harvesting–’

‘–is out of the question!’, Alard implanted angrily.

A loud thud sounded as the glass was thrown down onto the floor. The Professeur staggered as he stood up to walk over to the porthole. He stretched his back by winging out his arms. A sigh spread out into the room as Meuse brought his arms down.

‘If you wish to end our collaborative venture–’

 ‘End our…’, Alard exclaimed breathlessly.

‘If we cannot agree–’

‘Listen to me–’ Alard made a swift recovery, blocking Meuse ‘–you have the gall to lecture me on courage, yet it was I who took the bold step to isolate the Elusimicrobia at a time when the Eridians shirked their responsibilities. I approached the Domini who connected you to me. The rest lost out. You profited. But I must remind you that Appl. E. is my discovery. Where would be today had I not ventured out into the…’

‘Silence!’, Meuse bellowed angrily. ‘I must remind you that under the terms of our agreement on Manitoud, an agreement sanctioned by the Domini, you are not permitted to disclose the origins of your discovery on that Eridian hellhole!’

‘The truth alarms you’, Alard replied firmly.

‘Truths in this situation are unnecessary but they are not inconsequential’, the Professeur retorted.

Meuse sat down again after feeling light-headed. He was aware that drink was leading the conversation astray. Alard continued to talk but words evaporated around him. Meuse stood up again irritably. He walked over the porthole.

A showcase for the abyss! The Professeur observed the irregular arrangements of the stars that hung a thousand lifetimes away. His introspections progressed on an imagined line that connected these glittering dots. Thoughts of the Clan and the Domini interrupted its needling course so that it became knotted. Their requests had always been straightforward. Vita persavero. But what if his endeavours resulted in negative yields? Such an enterprise would no longer be theirs but his and his alone. He could not afford to fail.

Beads out sweat trickled at his hairline, reflecting indistinctly in the porthole. Beyond this, the interconnecting line had now balled itself into a malignant skein.

Meuse turned away to observe the interior of this room on the interstellar vessel. Here was reality. Anything else beyond this was simply plasma bound by an unknowable gravity. He thought positively, of Clan Dœmae and their recent procurement of Sobere on Eris, of the inevitable expansion, of life imperishable. His future could be a glorious one. The conquest to end all conquests.

He smiled reflexively at Alard the hologram, his thoughts simmering.

‘The agreed truth is that you yielded those cultures from an apple’, the Professeur affirmed bitterly.

‘An apple?’, Alard inflected brazenly. He started to laugh.

‘An apple’, Meuse re-echoed. He walked back over to the amber bottle.

El-hen, having been stirred by the steady crescendo of voices in the adjoining room, woke to listen to the warring researchers. She heard little other than the closing tone of the holographic software. Meuse had ended the transmission. The faint image of Alard faded from view. She listened to Meuse as he fumbled with the decanter.

*                      *                      *

After exiting the viewing room, Alard walked swiftly down the corridor to his quarters. His mind moved apace. He thought incoherently. His head had been made woolly by the argument with Meuse. The claustrophobia of the Saturnian moon module heightened his dissolution.

His assigned lodgings amounted to little more than a field camp. The straps on his somnolence stand were slack. When the modular engines cut to cease the simulated gravity in their overnight reset, he would be jostled uncomfortably in his sleep. He had already donned a survival suit as he doubted the ability of the oxygenators and heaters to sustain him.

Before his departure with El-hen, Meuse had explained to Alard that their sponsors were insistent that he was to be transferred to this rock. Apparently, this particular moon had garnered interest from planetary oceanographers.

Where there is ice, there is life.

Earlier, when Alard trundled over from the inter-lunar landing site, he had concluded that the existence of novel microbiota in this barren landscape was an impossibility. It was an absurd place. There was little evidence of any recent excavation. The skeleton crew that accompanied him were all automated. They simply compounded its lifelessness.

In his dormitory, Alard finally found some placidity in music. The positivity, the forward energy, the rhythmic simplicity – each note played soon settled the young researcher. He resolved that would wake afresh and card the wool that benumbed his mind to make peace with the Professeur and the Clan.

He was soon drifting between different dream sequences. The pool had returned. This time he had been immersed in it. It was murky in its depths. Bubbles frothed around him. A small shard of light wavered beside him. Alard followed it as a thin line, looking upwards to its source. Kicking, his body slowly ascended.

By the time he reached the surface, his lungs were bursting. He inhaled sharply at the breaching moment. Treading gently, he observed his thoughts of □ as oscillations that rippled outwards. Her memory blurred in and out of focus. Alard had not communicated with her since their disagreement on the future of their Elusimicrobia. The distance between them was more than any starship could travail. He had been informed that she had sought collaboration with those at Pallas.

Alard began to tire. His rate heart increased. Lactate acid was poisoning the muscles. He could no longer kick. Flailing, water splashed around him uncontrollably. His breathing had become chaotic. He gasped for air. Eventually, he started to sink. Still fighting, he turned one way then the next. The light source was no longer visible. His body started to cool. The pool darkened. Breath left him.

He awoke in a cold sweat. The plastic of his vertical berth felt glossy. Recycled air still entered his lungs. The straps were no tighter.

He called for one of the moon personnel. An automaton appeared at the threshold of his camp room.

‘I wish to send a communiqué.’ His slumbrous command was met with a pre-programmed pleasantry.

Alard was escorted the short distance from his quarters to the viewing room.

He thought little of Clan Dœmae and their decree that there was to be no communication with □. Even if Meuse and his associates were alerted to his present actions, his employment with the Clan had been effectively terminated. Despite his resolve to make amends, he knew the inner workings of the Clan too well. They would not take him back willingly. He would have to force their hand. By communicating with his rival, the Professeur, the Clan, everyone that he had worked for would be spooked.

His secret was their secret. Exposure risked everything.

The optical message lanced out of the base into the blackness. Alard had thrown down his astral gauntlet.

He returned to his stand and stared up at the low ceiling of the module. A neat latticework of bevelled lines intersected at regular intervals. Alard looked down and closed his eyes. He spun on an aslant axis. Music did very little to drown out his remembrances of his quarrel with Meuse. The cold dimensions of this moon closed in. Beneath him, invisible oceans of ice threatened to shatter. Eventually, a frozen hand carried him away into a bitter sleep.

Part 5

Some distance away, in the vacuum of space, between Alard’s moon and Eris, El-hen sobbed at her husband’s decision.

‘I am afraid–’ Meuse spoke firmly ‘–that the time has come to seek a newer collaborator. One with heart. One who will achieve more… desirable outcomes.’

She looked disconsolately at her husband as he continued:

‘Why are you so upset? We have lit a fire, my dear. We must take this opportunity to bathe in its light. We shall no longer operate in the shadows. Our advances will herald a new era in regenerative medicine. Our business is life!’, he exclaimed. ‘And the extension of it. It is important that we act decisively. Others are sure to follow. We cannot allow ourselves to be usurped.’

Meuse paused. He leant over towards El-hen who lay on the far side of their bed. Her body had turned away from him. She quickly withdrew her hand away from his.

The Professeur stood up and walked towards the door, feigning an absent stare. He stepped back to place his glass on the table beside their bed. The carefully co-ordinated sequence had meant that he had managed to catch his wife’s expression. She stared out blankly. A numb acceptance was etched on her face.

‘Your work with Dr. Alard – the incorporation of Appl. E. into the tissue scaffolds, the epidermal restoration, the replication in mucosal membranes – each of these steps have been important milestones…’

‘What will happen to Docteur Alard?’ Her red eyes, passionate and unyielding, had suddenly fixed upon his as he had relaxed to pour himself a drink.

‘He shall be relieved of his position’, Meuse replied curtly as he walked back towards the porthole with glass in hand.

El-hen stood up from the chair reflexively. She pivoted at the doorway, hand gripping its thick plastic frame, about to reply except that words were lost to her.

Meuse had returned to his study of the forever darkness that reached out at him beyond the porthole. He toyed with the already-emptied glass in his hand.

A smiling, elliptical shape materialised before him. It was the stiffened linen of a theatre mask mutating from one grotesque distortion to another. Its crooked mouth contorted into an incisor-exposing sneer. The grimace reflecting back at him was his own.

Earlier that evening, the Clan had intercepted Alard’s dispatch to □. Nothing contained within this message posed any immediate danger to the organisation. Nevertheless, the repercussive potential of a future exposition weighed heavily on his mind. Docteur Alard was under his direction. He bore responsibility for his team and their actions.

His thoughts moved to his wife. He felt a sense of embarrassment. Or was it fear? Regardless, she had burned both of them. Her tears were the salt-tears of a betrayer. Their salinity would cleanse the wound that she had inflicted upon their relationship.

He returned to the intercept.

Only if Alard hadn’t acted so rashly. That Square was with Pallas. He knows that. Dangerous Pallas. An unforgiving Clan.

The Professeur shuddered. More of the tranquillising liquid was required. He manoeuvred away from the vacuous void to fill his glass. Neptune came into view. She was cataract-white from this distance. A lifeless eye forever open in faceless space. Still, their craft was making good progress. Soon the pallid planet would orb blue-green before them. Eris beckoned.

Meuse paced towards the domed dormer which protruded out from the main body of the vessel like a blown-glass bleb. He sat cross-legged in the observation chair and took in the near-three-sixty-degree view of the stars. They were languid, always ambiguous, never revelatory. Their maddening stillness opposed his own self. He looked down at his glass and the golden liquid that was being made amber by the backlight from the lounge area. Its splendour bathed him in an artificial glow.

Earlier in the evening this liquid had imbued a sense of weightlessness, leaving him buoyant and drifting. As the contents of the glass had been emptied in successive measure, the weight of the fluid had been displaced inside him. He was plunging to depths unfathomable. Graceless thoughts surrounded him on his descent. A cruel disposition served as an anchor. His ego continued to sink until he was concealed by the plumes of sand and mud on the seabed of his mind. Subjectivity drowned him. He was left with an id-flooded ballast tank and a super-ego torpedoed.

Hours passed and the night drew on. A laser-message speared out of the interstellar vessel into the anonymity of space.

The restful stars continued to observe Meuse in his dormer. Their effect was disorientating. He stared into drained glass after drained glass. Nausea laddered up his gullet.

Retching, he slumped forward. His face was pressed uncomfortably against the thick pane. Meuse watched the endless black limbs of the cosmos extend towards him. It seized his body. He did not resist; rather, he simply closed his eyes and let the blanket blackness slowly smother him.

*                      *                      *

Shots continued to reverberate inside this cramped space. A kyphotic figure moved against the backdrop of the faint emergency light. His heart raced. A heavy head spun on many axes. The brightness dimmed as spasms tore through his body.

The pain was immense.

His shooter was smiling contortedly at his reflection in the corridor porthole. Blood slowly filled the gaps between his teeth. A fragmented tooth was lodged awkwardly in his top lip. The agent of Œmbelia had not been prepared for the recoil of the gun. After pulling the trigger, it kicked back into his face. A cold pain had already set in.

He walked back into the place where the bloodied body floated limply in a tangle of lax straps. Hyper-flexed knees were curled so that the figure took on a semi-circular shape. The gangly agent could not see his head. All he had heard was three dull thwumps.

The backfiring gun had filled the entirety of his visual field before it wrecked his face. But he was sure that was where his shots had entered.

Ideally, he would have liked a clean kill with the plasma cannon discharging between the eyes – had he had more bullets, he would have pulled the trigger once more for good measure. From his crude assessment of the scene, this did not appear to be necessary. His victims survival suit had been punctured beyond repair. There was no oxygen or accessory heat in this icy space.

He laughed at himself painfully as he vacated the camp.

*                      *                      *

A long clang echoed inside the arching hanger. The thermometer read two hundred below beyond the two-metre-thick blast doors. Inside, the temperature approximated minus fifteen Celsius.

The silhouetted outlines of three hooded figures were blurred by their warm breaths that cooled beyond the dew point. Each exhaled water droplet shrouded them in deeper obscurity.

After securing the newly-arrived craft, the attendants brushed down the ice that had encrusted the exterior of this vessel, eventually fastening the skybridge to one side of its fuselage.

Two figures alighted from the craft and were met by the Le Surveillant of this Eridian spaceport. He was a fastidious man, of middle age, donning a flat-crowned kofia, his spoken French was that of an islander. He gazed attentively as the matchstick outline of the flame-haired Meuse move quickly across the gangway. An extinguished El-hen trailed behind him.

‘Professeur’, Le Surveillant addressed Meuse as if the academic commanded a military garrison. ‘Professeur, we have received an emergency transmission from the Saturnian base.’

‘I shall take it in my quarters’, Meuse replied curtly, trying to feign indifference. A small bead of sweat rippled out from his temple. He brushed this away nervously. His head throbbed unbearably. The recollection of the previous night and his late-night instructions came flooding back to him.

‘Monsieur, it has been relayed to us on Fréquence Rouge. C’est une interception urgente.’

The Comorian stood firm.

‘In accordance with interstellar protocol, I must insist–’

‘Bien, bien.’

The Professeur followed Le Surveillant to the communication room, climbing the metal ladders to the gantry that dangled over the hanger.

‘Meuse here.’

El-hen observed her husband closely. He nodded infrequently. His verbalisation, silent to her through the thick glass of the tower, was made more difficult by his side-on stance. He mouthed something like ‘le transfert’ or ‘triompher’. She struggled to discern which it was. Meuse hailed from Québéc. His chantant often caught her out. Her intonation Maghrébine did likewise to him. Eventually, with his eyebrows raised sullenly, he turned to face her.

For whatever reason, she had been thinking of Alard and his decision to remain on the Saturnian base. It had been his way of demonstrating his determination. There he would stand his ground.

Alard the decisive! Principled Alard. She smiled as she thought of him.

‘Mon amour’, Meuse returned grievously. ‘Docteur Alard has been shot.’

Part 6

Alard awoke to the percussive sound of the ventilation unit. It spun cyclically. A deep thrum reverberated dully like a tabla. There was the glistening pitch of a triangle. He continued to imagine this scene as a strange symphonic dance.

His last memory had been lying bloodied in the rudimentary infirmary on that Saturnian hinterland. His transfer from their medical facilities to Ilion had been swift. Dr. El-hen had made the necessary arrangements. Her insistence that the novel Dœmaen tissue scaffold should trialled on Alard was met with congruent voices. He remained in a semi-conscious state. Oxygen tubes and intravenous lines filtered into him.

The soft tissue injuries to his hand and heel were minor. Dœmaen-derived neo-tissues were implanted to correct these.

His eye proved trickier. The bullet had pierced the cornea, rupturing his pupil and lens. Each had blown inwardly. The vitreous humour having escaped and long dried into his lower eyelid. His eye was deemed unsalvageable.

Meuse had insisted that Alard’s epigenetic signature needed altering. Full chromosomal supplanting was required, a technique that the researchers at the Clan had failed to master during their in vitro studies. Meuse sought the collective opinion of the resurrectional cognoscenti on his payroll. The first first-in-human trial of this experimental technique was sanctioned.

In a state of desperation, El-hen sough to convince the ailing Alard that this method was the only way that the Clan could save his sight. Whether it was the analgesia talking, or his own scientific intrigue, Alard agreed to this course of treatment.

‘Has □ replied?’, El-hen was asked. Alard had been met with silence. He knew that any trial of this magnitude was commercially sensitive. Pallas and her representatives could have no knowledge of it. A portcullis had sealed the Dœmaen research facility.

Alard had been born an Ilion, yet he was soon to abdicate his genetic line. Complete recombination of his DNA followed. He cared little for who or what he was or would become. He lay with his eyes bound. Appl. E. was infused. His memory was vague thereafter. Gene editing regressed him. The wheel of life came to a slow halt. He returned from adulthood to enter a pre-infant state.

Reversing foetal-further, the backpedalling gathered speed, until eventually, pluripotent cells spun out between the spokes in a dazzling array of nascency.

The wheel spun faster. His primogenitors proliferated, spiralling to disappear to reveal their procreators. The colours of carbon were the last he saw before he drifted off into an unconscious state.

Alard’s stay on Ilion was short-lived. In the days that followed, his new eye, a xenograph with his host immunity altered, had failed. Those in the hospital room ran through an exhaustive list of possible causes. Anti-microbial resistance, or potentially hyper-immunity from the recombinated signature? Maybe the bioink that was too thick? It could have been a simple infection.

The risk of rejection was supposed to have been removed by self-culturing and xenobotic-driven immunomodulation. Had it been the Appl. E.? The research team concluded that controlled studies were required. Plans were drawn up for future trials.

Those caring for Alard resolved to be unresolved. Alard’s bioengineered graft was being destroyed by his own cells. The cellular therapies he had received rendered him genotypically different. He had been changed irrecoverably. Once given, the ‘mark’ of the maker remains implanted within the nucleosomes and mitochondria.

What had been done could not be un-done. Alard was a Dœmaen now.

Meuse ordered the immediate discharge of his patient. Alard was sent to his homeland of Manitoud.

*                      *                      *

Blood seeped from his hand and his eye and his heel. The punctured Alard had been making the printed green grasses of the mountainside on his duvet blue. His hand grasped the leaf blades and tillers. He writhed in pain for the pain was still immense.

‘You come from the Reservoir of Xenos. You left as an Ilos.’

The voice of □ bored deep into his head.

‘Yet here you are, lying before me naked, ashamed, dying. Your tissue has been soiled following the failed experiments of the Clan.’

□ had changed since Alard last saw her. She was no longer an opaque screen. Her dream had always been to become embodied and she had achieved just that. Standing taller than any man or woman of the present age, her figure was slender and supple. Her black hair fell in thick waves. Bright green eyes bore into his very being.

‘I am an Ilos!’, Alard coughed uncomfortably. ‘It is my right–’

‘You resigned that right when you supplanted Ilion for Clan Dœmae. Your lymphocytic profile, your tissue signature, they are all stained with their mark. You cannot simply beg to be reverse-engineered to an Ilos again.’

Blood congealed through the gaps of Alard’s fingers as he pressed his palm tighter over the wound on his broken skull. The whites of his eye had become blood-filled. Arching his head back, he manoeuvred his body, coughing to clear his chest to ready himself to reply.

‘No! Before you ask again, the answer is no. It is not possible. I cannot regenerate you’, the scornful □ said pre-emptively.

‘You cannot, or you will not?’, Alard spluttered. The damaged muscles of his uncovered eye spasmed causing him to cry out in pain. He pressed his palm down harder.

He remained in this room, sleeping beneath the floral designs. His body moved in the sheets at frequent intervals to change the dimensions of the bright mountainside. The phosphorescence of the yellow light made his headache and nausea worse.

His euphoria soon abated. A calmer demeanour predominated in this stricken man. Occasional bursts of rabbling protest followed. Eventually, the room attained a strange silence, interspersed only by rapid rushes of deep breathing that would decrescendo to shallower sounds. His thoughts became confused, time-pressed, until – they faded to nothing.

Alard lay dead in the efflorescence of this room. His body rested amongst the violet colours of the sheeted flowers. A gentle wind had moved insouciantly through the narrow-tufted leaves of the white asphodels. A door opened. His body was transferred swiftly down the corridor towards the ejector.

His death had probably been preventable. □’s decision had been a conscious one, yet her passivity had been feigned to the fallen scientist. Power, or rather, the wielding of the broadsword of power, had always felt light in her algorithmic hands. But after Alard had been struck down, □ reflected how something as sharp as this could feel so blunt.

Years had passed since their bitter parting. She had not been prepared for Alard’s return. Despite all her strength and computational prowess, □ was left feeling something altogether different. She had never encountered the death of a patient before.

Although she had developed life-saving techniques with Pallas, she had elected not to deploy these to save Alard. Had this been out of spite? Or had she simply yielded to her algorithmic processes that assessed the probabilities to conclude that her decision was the correct one?

His body lay before her as he approached the anteroom of the ejector. Whatever the reason for her decision, it was inconsequential now. Death had consumed Alard. Even in this advanced age, anti-clockwise turning of the inscrutable hands of time was impossible.

In the days that proceeded his death, □ had learned that the bullet removed from Alard by the Dœmaen pathologist was that of an Œmbelian weapon. The fired shots had been far from clinical, yet they had proven fatal.

She wondered why those working at the Clan had transferred him to Manitoud. They must have known that he was dying. His tissues had obviously necrosed even before his arrival to this mountainous place. It was highly probable that there was not enough viable tissue to proceed with any meaningful reconstructive efforts. Had they data that she did not?

She had been led to believe that their techniques were at an early stage. Perhaps they had developed a method more novel than hers? She even considered the possibility that this had been an unsuccessful attempt by the Dœmaens to seek collaboration with her superiors at Pallas.

In reality, □ existed in a universe that was more complex than her algorithmic processes could quantify. Alard was sent to her to die. The Clan’s data were at a pre-clinical stage. Commercial interests preceded all else. Collaboration would never be acceptable in this cosmic game.

The Dœmaens had played a devious card. They considered □ to be their greatest threat. Conscience, morality, superego – they were well aware that personality, no matter how artificial the algorithm, was desired by the likes of □. The Clan harnessed the power of sorrow and torment. □ remained in a state of emotional infancy. By weaponising her creator, the Clan had launched a silent assault on all these aspects of her developing persona.

Alard had been deployed on his final mission to impart grief on an algorithm unexposed to the harsh realities of consciousness. Through this, □ would eventually be extinguished.

*                      *                      *

The long walls of Ilion disappeared from view. Feet-facing forward, Alard lay prone as he hurtled through space. A pulsed coil had launched his funeral pod into the lifeless vacuum.

Within the confines of his rectangular box, a screen flashed intermittently above his head. Alard’s upbringing, his training, all his marvellous discoveries – all these moments of his life played on repeat.

□ wondered whether she and Alard would not only progress through space, but time itself. The Thanatologist in the anteroom of the ejector had told her that some even make it to the event horizon of a black hole.

She had elected to share this cramped space with Alard as he progressed away from this life, perhaps unto a next one. □ had been uploaded to the confines of the circuity of the ten-by-ten-inch monitor above his waxen features.

Their journey would turn out to be a short one. The cosmic coffin unceremoniously careened off other coffins that littered the surrounding atmosphere of Manitoud, clustering together as flotsam.

□ persisted in personification. She possessed an ovoid face. It was featureless. She spoke to Alard. He was death-mask-calm. His skull one-eyed. Her laugh was made coarse and guttural by the poor-quality audio output.

Over time, the power waned inside their coffin. She recalled the times that Alard had guided her here. The pretences she had programmed into the Eridian systems had always been false. Detours from their scheduled trips to Dysnomia, the small moon that hung languidly above the base on Eris. Their small craft would pass through these very funeral fields on their way there.

Alard would dangle weightlessly to attach hooks to these matt-black containers, winching each one in turn towards their craft. It was a soundless task in these vacuous reaches. Inside the cargo hold, the crude hammering and scraping to crack open the coffins was cacophonous.

Alard cast each cracked coffin-shell to begin on the next one. The cut garments of those he exhumed were retained in a separate bag to the tissue samples. These he would eventually weave into in small patchworks.

The fabric that binds us.

Upon completion of this heinous work, he and □ would continue on their journey to Dysnomia to deliver their Eridian-agreed payload. They would deposit the surplus evidence of those they had exhumed in orbit. The thrusters of their craft would turn them away from the dark face of Dysnomia, to return to the Eridian laboratories.

She laughed at Appl. E. and its ridiculous nomenclature.

Alard the unashamed. Alard the wistful. Alard the visionary!

It had been in these very same cadaveric fields that they now found themselves in, amongst those they had sampled as they slept eternally. □ and Alard had agreed to waken these poor souls.

The harvesting of your flora will bring life to others, she had reassured them.

□ hoped that their coffin would be spilt open in the same way, releasing them into the openness of space. She imagined the steely glint of someone else’s scalpel cutting into Alard’s abdomen, spilling out the contents haphazardly. His gut-decayed microbiota, the Elusimicrobia, would be corralled into specimen pots and transported to blindingly bright rooms for centrifuging and incubation. Bacterial cells, cultured exponentially, would be added to polymers and hydrogels, serving to halt tissue rejection.

A perfect Promethean process. Tissues growing to die to be replaced to grow and die and be replaced again. Life persisting indefinitely. The light inside their coffin flickered as the power source began to dwindle. □ in her new state of consciousness wondered if those staring skywards on Eris would continue to perceive them as a coruscating star. Her primary sequencing returned with a more objective outcome, concluding that stars, like their observers, are only born so they can die.