Once Upon a Phase Shift

Deep in space, there’s not much to do but look at the stars which, unblinking and cold, seem less like the fantastical pinpricks that they are when on the surface of a life-bearing planet. On our own it’s easy to forget that each of those motes of light is a star that could each harbor a world suitable for life, and that there may in fact be people not unlike ourselves out there in the void, searching the same as we.

It’s nice to think of things like that because it keeps your mind off of the bleak reality of home; down here, on the surface, green is scarce and blue even more, unless it’s the blue of the sky in which case it’s so stark and unforgiving as to be white at times.

Harsh and unyielding like the sun we orbit, gleaming stainless like the buildings that, millennia old, stand silent vigil, monoliths in the center of a vast expanse of nothingness.

That is the reality of our world. This unassuming ball of sand, dotted with oases and oceans and tall, whitecapped mountains, could hardly be of any value to anyone aside from a place to stop and rest during a long journey of months and galactic diameters.

Of course, such wonderings are pointless. We know that life exists out there. We know because every fifteen days a new ship arrives as one leaves, intergalactic travelers all searching not for signs of life, but for signs of hope. For some reason thousands of alien races have got it into their brains that our bland little rock has something important on it.

Important enough that just last week we watched two fleets battle it out for the rights to sit in far orbit and bombard the surface with rays of energy. Scanning the surface without setting foot on it, when what they’re looking for might not be on the ground at all, or if it is, shielded by whoever was arrogant enough to leave it here.

If we could kick them out of our solar system, we would. But our best ship can barely initiate faster than light velocity and only because we borrowed the technology from someone else. Sure, we might have gotten it eventually, but as things stand we’re lumbering idiots in a cosmos full of geniuses. Or idiots that got lucky. Take your pick.

Funny. You usually think that your planet will be the one doing the invading. Or, if you let the dreamers write the book, making contact. Actually, I would have preferred it that way, but you know how the universe is when it comes to personal preference.

I’m not a very important individual, even by Eden standards. I’m just some rocket jockey who makes his living fixing up broken motors and occasionally running out into one of the myriad number of ghost towers to collect loot for the scientists and scholars. Yeah. A treasure hunter, that’s what I am.

One among many, but whoever said a job required unique talents was either drunk or just plain stupid. As I see it, there are at least four thousand people ready and able to do any job that you can think of and at any given time you only need one of them. Of course, the number of people needed for a task increases with the complexity of it, so you end up using more than one, but you get the idea.

And besides, how do you expect one man to carry a three hundred pound piece of machinery from the fifty-seventh floor of a ghost tower to the storage depot where they sort out all the crap we bring back?

The people who go into ghost towers in search of treasure are called Reclaimers. In a sense we go in to reclaim the past and learn from it. One major problem exists, though: the towers are all populated by monsters, some natural, some created by whoever left the towers to begin with. Whole cities, all abandoned save for the machines and beasts, and we go in to take what we can.

The taller the tower the more powerful the creatures inside seem to become. Only the bravest and most skilled venture into the center of each city—everyone else sticks to the areas they can deal with. I’ve been inside a center spire only once, and nearly died.

Needless to say wars are fought over claims. Some cities are nearly devoid of anything useful; others have barely been touched and may have secrets that haven’t already been shared.

Addressing the problem of getting stronger to go in deeper, I hold my preferred weapon for close quarters, a finely crafted longsword, gleaming metal and dark leather in my hand. Energy gathers in the specially forged metal, designed to conduct power of all sorts. Flame gathers at the tip as I thrust it in a forward stab and—fizzles out. Skills like that are necessary to survive in the darkest heart of the ghost towers and I can’t even manage a spark.

I’m pathetic. It’s no wonder that I can’t venture too far into the greater spires…but beneath them is another story altogether. Not to brag but I’ve been deeper into the underspires than anyone else that I know of. Even so that’s as risky as going up, if not more; in the underspires you run the risk of cave-ins or things being stored there that have leaked out and poisoned the air.

It’s safer than getting eaten, though. As far as I’ve seen the deadliest beast in the underworld is a rune corpse, and those are easy enough to deal with in groups smaller than five. Any more than that and you might have some trouble.

Today is a day in which I have some engines to repair, so after putting the sword away I get into my coveralls and head for my beat up old trawler, a nice job with independent suspension on each of its three axles and a flatbed large enough to carry a tank (not that I’ve ever needed to). It’s new compared to some of the rusted-out hulks littering the wastelands, but still pretty banged up.

Sandstorms tend to have that effect, but with ultrasonic navigational beacons cutting through the dust and wind who needs to see out the windows? Coupled with the state of the art air filtration system and a crystal-electric power plant means that I also perform rescue duties from time to time, digging other people out of the howlers.

Yeah, not everybody knows the dangers of sandstorms, living as they do in their walled cities and looking down at them from skyscrapers younger than my trash pile of a vehicle. It’s tough to make a living here on Eden. A misnomer, perhaps, but we have undeniable proof that our planet wasn’t always a vast desert dotted by a few small forests and lakes hidden underground or in the remnants of impact craters.

We do what we can to survive here and most of us make it pretty well off. Those of us who can’t do for ourselves are helped by others and in return we give advice or experience to our helpers. It is the way of things here, and even the outsiders can understand this.

And although there are those who would rather take every last remaining resource for themselves they too refrain from acting on their desires. Eden holds something special that we cannot place exactly. A feeling, perhaps, that to interfere with the progress of time and destiny would be disastrous.

Now to me, it’s not so much who or what you are, it’s why you came here. In the case of the outsiders, the visitors from other worlds, it’s nearly always the same. You come either in search of what secret might be lurking in Eden’s past, or you come for sanctuary, hiding from the darkness creeping and growing ever larger.

I notice, sometimes, the underlying feeling of despair when I venture into a refugee camp full of beings strange and bizarre to me. Even so their emotions are all too human and quite understandable. Also I cannot help but notice that every night there seems to be one fewer star in the sky.

Incredible that such a vast universe could be so complacently ignorant to not even know what is wrought within it. I’ve heard the stories, of course everyone has, about whole solar systems being devoured with barely enough time for anyone to escape before the jaws of cessation close around them.

There’s something out there eating everything it can wrap its titanic maw around. I would imagine that by now it’s the size of a galaxy and getting bigger. Whatever science or magic may have made such a being is far beyond our knowledge. Maybe what they’re looking for here is that small glimmer of hope, that notion that all is not lost.

Every so often a new tale comes in, a tale about massive fleets numbering hundreds of thousands of ships managing to delay the eater and drive it back to the edges of the cosmos. Ultimately though they fail to destroy it or free the consumed from its grasp, and eventually they, too are devoured.

Some speculate that the eater, the thing destroying all life as we know it (which isn’t to say that it destroys; as far as we know whatever it eats becomes a part of itself) is in fact a single solitary entity no taller than your average human, only possessing power so great and terrible that he, she or it can add to itself at will.

I’m crazy enough to believe that there’s a ring of truth to the wild geese honking in the rundown bars at the edge of the city I live in, a city of broken souls. I’m only twenty myself, a fourth of the way dead for a human, and still I’ve heard many strange things coming from the mouths of soldiers and settlers alike.

One thing that bothers me is how our native tongue here on Eden seems to have become intergalactic standard for nearly every speaking race that we have encountered by virtue of their coming here.

Some have stayed, others have moved on in search of a planet more fitting for their kind. In the wake of it all we built spaceports for them to land their great ships, and orbiting stations capable of annihilating anything that threatens us. For the most part, at the least.

Here on the surface in the city of Bridge, which looks like a collection of odd shapes—boxes and pyramids and tubes and leaves, all thrown together in random array—we make what we can out of life and our skills. There’s a job for everyone and a chance to follow the path you want and not just the path you are given.

To me the real thing isn’t whether you’re human, alien, or somewhere in between. We of Eden accept all who are willing to make themselves a part of our society. I know some pretty seedy characters who despite being seedy know when to hide and when to call the bluff; pleasure girls who could disarm a soldier faster than he could blink and drug dealers who work orphanages to keep them off the streets and out of harm’s way.

I know magicians who heal with one hand and bribe with the other, and young women who sell their own mothers for profit just so they can have a home to themselves. Everyone has a path they follow, and I’m not so deluded as to think everyone that helps me isn’t doing so for his or her own gain.

There’s no such thing as a pure heart on Eden; the sands scrape away at the lies leaving only the bare, crystalline truth of what you are. Crossing the line between good and evil is easy and the line becomes often fuzzy and ambiguous.

But we already know that lesson. It’s the first one we learn. I bide my time heading into the city as I don’t really want to be fixing engines today, but that happens to be my job at the moment, preference be damned. (If I had my way I’d be at home with a pleasure droid letting a packet of Lightstorm fry my neurons into a euphoric haze.) It’s what I’m good at, though, aside from running around like a headless sandpiper underneath all the pipes and empty hallways.

It’s not much of a way to live but it keeps food on the table and bullets in my gun, which proves quite useful for dealing with the occasional rogue sentry drone floating about and zapping unwary Reclaimers.

You could say that my life is about sacrifice, but that’d be a lie because I haven’t sacrificed a thing for anyone in a long time. Not since seventeen years ago when my idiot father went underground in a newly-discovered temple, and came face to face with a giant drone which ended up disabled—after he converted all of his life into a force to shut the machine down and prevent it from killing his dive team.

How anyone comes about such an ability is beyond my ken, and for the life of me I don’t know what methods leads a man to learn such a thing to begin with. Maybe it was an act borne of desperation, but either way he’s dead.

No mention of my mother, you say? Well, that’s another story. One that I really don’t feel like writing down. The shop is a dusty room filled with equally dusty, dully gleaming metal workbenches and a lot of spare parts, lit by a few luminous panels, large rectangular LED panes casting a pale blue glimmer onto everything.

There are only three other people inside as I stride in and sign into the system to show that I’m there and only partially goofing off: my boss, Cameron, a female customer wearing a hydration suit, and scaly old Duncan. The lizard is already hard at work rebuilding a turbine, and I don’t want to fall behind him. My first job is a compressor for a T-Rack filtration module, and will take some time to fix.

It’s a boring job, but it beats going on adventures and facing death at every turn. Let someone else worry about that. I’ve got other things to do. Whatever people don’t like it can complain until their lungs explode; I’ll keep on my path and let them follow theirs.

I don’t need someone coming along and telling me I have an unfulfilled destiny. That would just be annoying and not to mention highly inconvenient. Diving into the underspires is safe. Saving the universe isn’t. Leave that part to the professionals and the grandeur-seeking fools with gold in their pockets and Spook Snot in their veins.

I’m no hero.