1. Captain Found Us a Ghost World
SHADRIM. IT WAS a grave of space, a planet of bones. It was the endless all and everything. Shadrim. When we discovered it, we found it full of ruins and corpses. Shadrim. When it discovered us, it was thinking. Shadrim. It had the grave thoughts. Thoughts that only the dead could or would want to think. Filtering through the entire planet.
When we found it, we were lost. It sent out beacons, psychic signals across the radio waves. Old Gray Mack thought it was perverse. We all laughed at his thoughts. Mack could fly the darkness like no one else. But he didn’t know anything about the human mind- the world between the waves.
When we landed, we saw the big, bronze skull-city-states; we saw the machines they had left behind. Large spider beasts. Evolved, transfigured. Machines with alien skin stuck to the grindbones, scuttling through those ruins and making the corpses dance. First time we saw that sight, we wanted to leave. Big alien bones with zombie skin still stuck on them, prancing around in nightmare waltzes. We ran like hell away from them. They didn’t follow. They stayed behind, dancing and staring with ghost eyes.
When we got back to the ship, it was dead. Buried in the ground with a grave on top. All that was left was ash and skeleton. A breathing thing that sustained us, gone and dead now. Like Manhome, itself.
Carit wept and Sunday Jay said a prayer in Pascal. It was the way Sunday Jay talked to the onboard systems. Through Pascal. Sure, it was an old language, but we are an old people, wandering the restless void of space and searching for ourselves in the reflection of the cosmos.
The next day, we found that dog that did our ship in. Giant machine thing that kept piecing itself together out of the ruins of the world around us. It was a sea of corpses and machinery. It looked at us with alien eyes, and Good Day just smiled at it and offered it a smoke.
Carit cursed it. Claimed it killed the ship and kept us trapped here. We couldn’t look at that alien thing, covered in ship blood and the strings of organic machinery. It kept trying to talk to us, talk to us over the radio sounds of the dead. It was so lonely.
But we couldn’t. Not now. Even though it promised us so much. Faster-than-light travel. Becoming transhuman. Existing beyond the realm of mortality. We couldn’t let it know how we felt. How it hurt us and stranded us in the depth of space. The Captain even went out and got the zox box and shocked it around. This machine seemed to love it. It squealed with delight and then asked us if we had anything yet for dinner.
Good Day stepped forward and told it we were all starving. The creature had a few nanokin whip us up some good stuff. It tasted all right, for alien metal food. And we thought, this giant postflesh spacecat couldn’t be all that bad. Sure it killed our ship, but that space trawler was dying anyway. Maybe it was a mercy killing.
Later that night, we slept under the frozen, purple light of 14 distant suns. They were moon-sized in the distance, spread across the sky and shouting out the light of the stars. The pull of this world was dizzying and complex. It weaved through the orbits of so many planets and suns. It was like a drunk, fractal nightmare of astronomical physics.
When we dreamed, we dreamed in ghost voices. We dreamed of ghost algebra on a ghost planet. This world, it spoke in our sleep and screamed in our waking hours through the radio towers broadcasting around us. The bones were restless, dancing. When the last hour of sleep washed away, we were greeted with the beating of techno drums and the dancing of the alien corpses.
And this time, they sang.
2. We Discuss Ghost Dreams
Spillgal was the first to do it. She just sat up like a white cat with black eyes, stretched out her tail and started talking. Her voice meandered at first, wandering over our heads. But then we realised what she was talking about, and we leaned in and listened.
Even that big A.I., that giant shipkiller corpse-monster, it bent the massive head down, dripping with columns and garbage and rotting, alien flesh, and listened. We had to filter out the screams of the dead in order to hear her properly.
Her voice was like static, noise in the broadcast of Shadrim. “I dreamt of endless space, and vacuum tubes. I dreamt of a doll without eyes and a lady without teeth. I dreamt that I licked the feet of secrets and they gave me bones to pay for a ship. I think I dreamt memories, but I can’t be sure. So many voices, lost in my head. Even as I am awake now, I am almost certain I am still dreaming.”
We talked about her dream for a bit, discussing its contents but coming to no conclusion. Whisper Kid went next, talking about smoke and a guy named ‘Kagaratz’. Each of us went in turn, and each dream was discussed, but without any answers. Finally, at the end, the Captain sat up and proclaimed that he would build us a new space ship, one to take us home.
The dead aliens scuttled away, screaming. Our dreams were a gift. They felt insulted that the Captain would not stay and experience more of them. The giant machine that was our host ticked his head to the side and sighed, getting the nanokin to make us a meal of tin and scraskin. It tasted worse than it looked, but we ate it.
After that, we were less welcome on the planet of the dead. Our host kept ignoring us and the broadcast screams of the lost world got so loud that we became just static and noise in the background. It was hard to think like that, but we had to. It was a learning process, a way of filtering ourselves out from the void that tried to swallow us.
3. Skullchic Finds Material
We scavenged the world for parts and pieces, but of course, we couldn’t go too far. There were a lot of alien machines, but we couldn’t make sense out of any of it. And our host wasn’t talking to us, anymore. He kept towering over us, watching and recording us with thousands of nanocams. We could see them scuttle about his massive body like living dust.
And the corpses—they were mad. They hung on the edge of our vision, running through the ruined city and howling in a dead tongue, their voices projected just barely above that load broadcast of ghost voices and ghost memories.
And we starved. Hunger laced through our veins, spilling over into our thoughts. All we dwelled on was the memory of food. Of great things like pancakes and waffles and syrup and strawberries and tomatoes. No vegetation was on this planet, nor any living meat we could kill and fry up.
In the hour of our greatest hunger, Skullgirl found some parts. At first, we weren’t sure what she had—it looked like some skeleton from an alien body, with a glowing, orange heart. But metallic, and carved with cold, foreign pictographs.
The Captain knew what it was, knew what to do with it.
He kissed her in joy and we all screamed. The voices got louder and that AI started to crumble into smaller pieces around us. We fitted each part in and assembled it right and proper. The Captain got Old Grey Mack to study the controls and then to figure out a way for us to interface with it.
Old Grey Mack was great at that sort of thing. He was a xenoarcheologist, a regular alien retrofitter. He could sew these things into the right pieces of his mind, find out exactly how their propulsion system differed from our ion drives. He was used to this sort of thing—rearranging his mind into alien shapes and geometry.
Soon, we had a working model up and running. Time for a test drive and then off to freedom.
4. We Gasp, We Sigh, We Say Goodbye
It was a rough-looking space vessel, made from the alien boneparts we found and some old stuff from our ship, strapped on so that Old Grey Mack could pilot it without a problem. More like a shambling, half-dead animal than a cruiser, it spun around the atmosphere and screamed as it flew in chaotic, messy lines. Our host watched, his body slinking into sludge parts, the air filtered with his nanodust. He tried to get the alien corpses to dance a goodbye dance, but he could not get them to come near us.