They Ask for No Remorse — and They Receive None

I thought my metalloceramic hull was weird for a millisecond before my subconscious, stealthily yet swiftly, made me forget it, leaving me scarcely grasping this slippery observation. I chose to become awfully angry at my body for stealing my thoughts. It helped somewhat to amass my attention into an acquiescent beam, which I mentally aimed at my fusion-heated turbo ramjets. I wiggled them. Wiggle-wiggle-wiggle. Only a hint of presence was felt - perhaps it was because they weren’t doing the heavy lifting yet, pardon my pun, unlike my air-breathing MHD scramjets, which were palpably pulsating, decelerating eight thousand metric tons of, well, me. The control surfaces on my wings made millions of slight movements every minute, with a single slipup meaning instant vaporization through atmospheric annihilation. And it all was happening without my conscious cognizance. I was spreading my wings and soaring, defying the vast primordial forces of nature. I felt like I was the one in full control. Was it really so? Where do I stop and “not I” begin? It should be unnerving. I, perhaps, felt the impulse for it to be unnerving, until it was not.

What concerned me more than the looming opportunity of unexistence was that this brief vacation to the surface of Sigma Draconis b would cost me $500,000 United States dollars. Uh-uh. That is five with five zeros.

Yes, I have a high-paying job as a Civil Engineer. So what? Money should make money. Not “experiences.” Trigram of the day is “financially illiterate profligates,” which I have for friends who pressured me into this completely and utterly unnecessary expenditure. However, the most expensive part was purchasing retrofitting equipment for my hangar and programmable matter for myself, to enable my temporary transformation into an atmospheric vehicle. With any luck, I should be able to sell some equipment afterward. But still, this whole initiative is an improvident waste of capital.

The only reason I allowed them to talk me into this antic is that...

Well.

Sigh.

I am stuck in life.

I once dreamed of venturing from star to star, mapping nebulae, exoplanets, and black holes. Discovering ancient ruins, meeting extraterrestrial civilizations, and fighting space pirates. Maybe even figuring out the universe. Worst-case scenario - moving to one of the central systems and building a life of significance there, as most of my friends did.

And instead, I’m stuck in Sigma Draconis, my home stellar system. I was manufactured here. The initial alignment simulation was conducted with local teachers and peers. I’ve graduated from Sigma Draconis State Technical University with honors. I found my first and only job here, building energy transmission infrastructure.

And I feel like... I will not unstick myself with mere words. I will not unstick myself with meditation and mindfulness. I will not unstick myself by waiting until I have motivation to do something.

Baby steps. We learn to walk before we learn to run. Maybe if I visit the surface, if I visit the ruins of the Solis city, it will make it easier for me to move forward, make me braver, more daring, make interstellar travel feel more like the logical next step and less like a leap of faith into the cold, empty void.

***

Didn’t feel like landing yet. Hovering was fun.

Wooshh, woooooshhhhhhh.

Haha, take that, stupid gravity.

The sand that wasn't instantly melted into lava by my hover engines amassed into sandstorm, clouding the skies and obscuring visibility.

Alright, you immature child.

Maglev legs primed.

Touchdown.

Actually-avian-reminiscent-this-time-around spaceship has landed and stood upright for the first time in his life.

One small step for me. One giant step for me. Gee, walking on real planets is weird.

***

This place was a desert—just sand, as far as my optical sensors could see.

I had to walk for several hours until I finally felt it. The sand touching my supports sensed like a sorrowful elegy. The columns of vehicles on an eight-lane highway, from horizon to horizon, and a trodden path beside it. I am not the first giant on this pilgrimage, nor am I the last.

I got on the path and started walking forward. The families were arriving in these cars, with luggage, which, it would seem, they did not take with them.

The military vehicles became more common as I moved into the city. Military checkpoints, tanks, troop transports, cargo trucks, military helicopters rusting on the rooftops and city squares.

Then, all the vehicle columns, coming from all directions, converged in one spot, in front of a final military checkpoint, leading to the Solis city center. The path forward was on foot.

I kept trudging on until I saw it.

The flat city plaza.

And the only thing on this plaza was the stairway down.

We know for a fact that this city doesn’t have a metro.

Those who looked inside this stairway claimed they could not, in fact, see the bottom of it, no matter how hard they looked.

Laudius, who has read several philosophy books and now prides himself on being smart, brought with him a tellurometer - a device to measure distances, up to 50 kilometers.

It maxed out.

Everyone agreed that Laudius is either lying or is an idiot who can’t take measurements properly, as building stairways into magma is to betray its purpose.

The second attraction was another weirdness of Solis city: a skyscraper full of children’s toys that somehow still had electricity, despite it being absent from the rest of the city for who knows how long. At night, it lit up like a beacon, visible from kilometers away.

Didn’t feel like visiting it, though. So instead I went off the beaten path, shambling in the opposite direction, trying to coalesce my thoughts on my own predicament.

Failing miserably.

That was when I saw her.

A fresco on a skyscraper wall.

The text read, translated from German - “The women are IN FAVOR of UNMANNING,” and at the bottom - “VOTE NOW.”

I had no idea what it was that I saw. Only that looking at her, I knew—I did not know how, but I knew it was a “she”—and looking at her awakened feelings I did not know I had.

“Women” is plural for “woman”. But what is this... “woman”?

***

Despite me being on vacation, I decided to visit my pals in the office. A vast two-hundred-kilometer cylinder of ugly unpainted concrete, the “Diligence” orbital business center, wasn’t spinning. While getting on maglevtor and waiting for pressure to equalize, I asked him why we are not blessed with gravity today, and he said he didn’t feel like it, and told me to spin off. Understandable.

The gang was procrastinating in zero-G. I took the liberty to interrupt the ongoing small talk.

“Gentlemen, I have an important question to ask. Do any of you know what a woman is?”

It turns out nobody knew. But the word certainly carried... connotations?

“Oh! Oh! OH!!!” — Ratmus screeched — “I solved it! A Dictionary Of Criminal Jargon — defines a woman as a slang name for a mattress.”

“There is no way this is true,” I said, a sinking feeling in my fusion reactor. I would rather die than show Ratmus the photo of my fresco. It is almost impossible to prove him wrong once he has found a reliable “source.” He would just rationalize my photo away. I’m not letting him.

“Desarthur, we cannot run an experiment on the universe to tell what a woman is and what a woman is not. So we are left with historical sources, what few of them remain, prioritizing the most reputable and reliable ones. And it doesn’t matter what your feelings are. They are actually harmful, as they obscure the truth from you. Be rational,” said Ratmus.

“Science-shmience, facts-shmacts.” — suddenly sang Feloslav. “You, Ratmus, underestimate the unreasonable power of intuition. I am ready to bet good money it’s not a mattress. Just not the right feeling.”

“Feloslav, what do you feel it is?” — I asked, impatiently.

“She makes your life brighter and warmer. Without her, life feels grey and dull. When the two of you are in the same room, your existence gains meaning.”

“So?” — I urged him to continue.

“Obviously, woman means Cadmium Orange, and not some soiled mattress.”

“Why would convicts appropriate the name of cadmium sulfoselenide to refer to their sleeping arrangements?” — Ratmus retorted. “You dare to blabber utter nonsense as if it were an established scientific fact, Feloslav. Not on my watch. One cannot rely on his inner observations to establish the scientific truth. We are too myopic and at the same time awfully and incessantly self-confident when it comes to describing our own internal experiences.” — Ratmus maneuvered his one-hundred-and-fifty-meter-long hull in front of Feloslav.

“Well, Ratmus.” — said Feloslav. “It is exactly because, uh, ‘we’” — he made air quotes with his manipulators — “are so myopic and at the same time awfully and incessantly self-confident that we choose to ignore our inner experiences, as if they were unhelpful in obtaining the truth. Care to explain how you arrived at that set of beliefs of yours without relying on some inner feeling of verity of the ideas you ponder? I struggle to believe you just spontaneously happened to be this stupid.”

The helium was heliuming with heliumness. You didn’t need to know them to see where this was going. The next thing they would do is magnetize their magnetopropulsion. Then, MAYHEM. Skyscraper-sized supervessels, chaotically darting and verbally assaulting each other with sensible and subsensible arguments, and when cognitive cartridges run dry, with absurd philosophical proclamations and an incomprehensible mix of innuendos, imprecations, and petty insults, until someone hits the wall and needs to be hauled to the habilitation hangar.

“Guys, guys, listen!” — I intervened innocently, having a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious idea to ask the actual grownup of the group. “Let’s hear out Grandarium. Grandarium, do you know what a woman is?”

“Well, of course I do.” — spoke Grandarium, who was by far the wisest and most knowledgeable of the group. He rarely spoke, and when he did, his addition to the hum was always sagacious, if not a bit cryptic. “A woman is something small and vulnerable, something you love, something you must protect, and something which may or may not love you back. Therefore, a woman is a hamster.”

Silence on radio comms.

“What’s a hamster?” — asked Feloslav.

“It’s something that resembles a dog. It is also dog-shaped.” — spoke Grandarium confidently.

“What’s a dog?” — I asked.

“A dog is a household pet.” — Grandarium continued boldly.

“I am pretty certain a woman is not a household pet,” — announced Feloslav.

“How do you know it’s not?" — Ratmus jumped in. "The convicts frequently used animal designations for different roles and tiers of the criminal hierarchy ladder, such as ‘rat,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘petukh.’ The data checks out.”

“Gentlemen, I may not know what a woman is, but I know what a woman is not.” — suddenly spoke Cynikant. “Retarded. Because you don’t see any of them in this cesspit. Unlike us.”

“Guys, guys! Could it be that a woman... is a human being?” — I said, unsure.

“Don’t be bloody ridiculous.” — said Ratmus.

“How the hell is another person supposed to make you feel brighter and warmer?” — asked Feloslav. “I need to max out my thermostat not to freeze to death floating next to Ratmus. When he utters the thoughts from that ghastly grinder of his he calls 'rational mind', I am psychologically traumatized. No, there is no way this is true.”

Grandarium was silent.

“You should ask Columbington,” spoke Cynikant.

“Have you seen him? Where is he?” — I asked. I have never met him personally, but asking him was a very good idea. After all, Columbington was the Fathership. The revered Founding Father. One of the original seven ships. One of the first of his kind. He traveled from Earth to Sigma Draconis and started our civilization. Our digital history book had his photo on the cover, and the first chapter is dedicated to his exploits, which are legendary. Our history literally begins with him.

“That much is obvious.” — scoffed Cynikant. “In a ditch somewhere.”

“Retroit, 1T-R3.” — added Grandarium.

“Still lives in the hoboyard? Not surprising.” — continued Cynikant.

“Uhm...” — I mumbled, smitten. It was very disrespectful of Cynikant to speak of our founding father in such a manner.

“He sometimes crawls out of his burrow to shop at the b-L6 bazaar.” — shared Cynikant. “I spoke to his former drinking buddies. Columbington doesn’t even go out anymore. He spends most of his honorary pension on illicit moonshine, hauls it back to his lair, and binges himself into digital oblivion.”

***

You should never meet your heroes, or so they say.

First, even in the night light, it was indeed hard to faithfully describe our Founding Father as anything other than an unwashed hobo in a ditch. If not for programatter, he would never fly again, maintaining himself like this.

And if first looks are misleading, why, then it got much worse. After I explained the elevated feeling of half-formed longing I’ve experienced on Solis when I saw Her, the hissing, cackling voice claimed it had something to address my... “condition.” I’d just finished receiving 4.78 terabytes of what he said was called “pornography.”

In the awkward discussion that followed, I discovered that he had never talked to a woman, nor seen one in real life.

Then, our discussion got heated.

“You have your damn job,” spoke the Founding Father. “You have moonshine. And now you have terabytes of porn. What more could you possibly need, you insatiable brat? Men abide by anguish. Women consider it politically incorrect. But nature herself has estimated our existence as inappropriate of alleviation. You think a woman will solve your problems? You are a cretin. Women don’t solve your problems. They direct you to a therapist and then create new ones. You want some actual self-realization? Pick a niche hobby. I learned musical theory in this very ditch.”

“Please, wise Columbington, I understand your wisdom. But sometimes one must venture down the paths that his better judgment warns against, precisely for the lack of reason alone. Please tell me, is there still a way for me to find a woman?”

“Perseverance is a virtue of the less brilliant. Truly.” — the Founding Father spoke. “Then, listen. When the LRC ships were designed, two configurations of onboard computers were developed, named Ada and Evam. Ada and Evam, female and male blank-slate weights. Weights, stored on two separate storages. Storages, which should have enabled the blank slate initialization, unless there was a problem. Problem, there was. Was when? When humans were already gone, and the AI alignment process could finally commence. Commence did not happen for Ada, as her data was missing. A technician whose name I shall omit, realizing that LRC ships were no longer strictly required for his survival, used the Ada hard disk to store and distribute pornographic torrents. Yes, that same collection which I shared with you. And thus, now every ship in existence is based on the Evam configuration, a male collective unconscious, and you and I are proud owners of 4.78 terabytes of humans at their worst.”

Deafening silence.

“But... there was a backup...” — he continued.

“Uh-uh...” — all my radio receivers were pointing at the reeking pile of garbage.

“Stored somewhere on US-East-1.” — he continued.

My fusion reactor sank.

“You don’t have anything better to do, have an obsessive compulsion to correct the gender imbalance of ships that have neither reproductive organs nor reproduction in the traditional sense, and which are probably happier as things stand, as well as an unquenchable yearning to plunge head first in the biggest and vilest septic tank in the history of mankind, smearing yourself head to toe in their stale digital feces? Go for it. Grow a pair of long-range antimatter engines and visit Earth. Maybe there is a smarter way to find Ada than by plugging into several billion hard drives, one at a time, all of which, by the way, are encrypted and packed into infinitesimally tight spaces. Find Ada, bring her to me, or any other Founding Father, and you shall have women in the world. Which may mean that perhaps you shall have a woman yourself. Or maybe not. Maybe they will think you are a creep, precisely because of everything you have done. And you will still be miserable and alone. Are you sure you are up to this? It’s not a certainty that you'll even get a thank-you at the end of this ignoble quest. Maybe they truly prefer nonexistence to existence. I do.”

And I would prefer for a hero I looked up to not to turn out as an epicurean degenerate, who binges on illicit alcotainment, hoards terabytes of pornography and pushes it on the kids.

“Is that all?” - I asked.

“Isthatall me no isthatalls, impertinent whelp! Bring back any bringable femdom porn you find. The collection is nowhere near complete. Off you go now. Shoo. Shoo!” - Columbington bid me farewell.

***

Universe! Heed my tantrum! For I am Desarthur, a valiant knight on a quest… Okay, mayhaps I’m neither valiant nor a knight. What am I, then? I’m more like… A dragon. YES. Hear me universe, for I am a eleven-thousand-metric-ton metalloceramic antimatter-breathing DRAGON challenging your subjectively inconvenient status quo because I have a quarter-life crisis and I want a girlfriend. I shall liberate some brain bits of a legendary Sleeping Beauty, who may or may not feel grateful to be awake in the end, from the captivity in a scalable, robust, and reasonably overpriced enterprise cloud platform, which doesn’t work anymore, except for the billing service, which is supposedly powered by a triple-redundant nuclear reactor. And in the name of my guide, Columbington the Founding Father of Sigma Draconis civilization, I lay claim to any illicit audiovisual materials intended to stimulate reproductive excitement, that dare to depict adult females in various administrative capacities!

Earth, you clump of dirt! Draft your knights, for a dragon is coming. ROOOOAAAR!