Hello, Eternity. I'm Isaac

A ship exited hyperspace in the middle of the starry seas of space. Frothing waves of nebulas crashed into black holes, schools of shooting stars dispersed as supernovas chased them, and planets slowly swam along, raising their young moons and teaching them the ways of the galaxy.

It was a world teeming with life on so enormous a scale that to the human eye it seemed as vast and lonely as were it empty.

In front of the ship was a lighthouse, an old space station modelled after the old colonies. A large spire surrounded by a ring—an arrow piercing bullseye.

“I’m not ready,” said Isaac.

“Yes, you are,” said Ava.

She was twenty-four though the memory of her as a young girl hiding in nooks and crannies was still vivid in Isaac’s mind.

“How long has it been since you were home?” Ava asked.

“Eighteen years, six months, fifteen days, three hours, four minutes, and… fifty-six seconds. But who’s counting?”

Ava looked out the window at Idyll, a little blip of civilisation in an endless sea. “How many times have you visited since you left?”

“This will be the first.”

“Wow.”

“You know,” Isaac said, “maybe we should postpone. There’s this fantastic nebula where—”

“No,” Ava said. “You promised me. Come on, Isaac, it’ll be good for you. Face your fears.”

He rolled his eyes.

“For my sake.”

“Fine. But we’re not staying long.”

“I’m not asking you to stay long. Just go down there, walk around for a bit, and we can leave again.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s your home, Isaac!”

Coming closer to the station it became apparent there had been an add-on made to the old design: rather than one ring there were two. The outermost were living quarters and docks.

The smell of sickness lingering in sheets drawn up to decaying chins.

The inner ring was still under construction. As of yet it was just half a hollow shell but the minds on Idyll had large plans. The spire in the middle took care of all their physical needs—food, water, warmth, oxygen. Anything else was mere bonus.

“Still not finished, I see,” Isaac mused.

“They never will be,” Ava muttered.

“Don’t say that. Perfection takes time. You know, back when I lived here the Mayor used to talk about a ring of water. Stocked to the brim with fish and coral and oysters. They would teach the children to swim and none of them would ever miss on-planet life.”

Ava wrinkled her nose. “Screw being on-planet. Nothing beats being raised among the stars.”

“Spoken like a true station-child.”

“You’re a station-child too,” Ava shot back.

“Not quite. But like a turtle finding the beach it hatched on, I will always be able to find Idyll.” He looked wistfully out the porthole. “It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about this place.”

“You think about Idyll all the time.”

A man collapsing, black splotches forming on his skin. The disease rotting him even as he breathes.

Their ship itself was a slender affair. Two sails to catch the winds of deep space and a massive hyper drive seated underneath the prow. Stellar barnacles clung to the hull after the tour through hyperspace but they would not stay for long. Like all of his machines, Isaac took good care of his ship as though it were a living organism.

They set to in Idyll’s harbour, dropping the anchor that would keep them stationary relative to the station.

Opening the hatch Ava jumped out onto the dock and breathed in the fresh space air. A tight yellow top clutched chest, adorned with an embroidered flower in the front. On her legs were baggy, reflective pants that shone all the colours of the stars as they caught the light.

“Well?” she called down to Isaac who still sat in the spaceship, clutching the ship’s wheel. “You coming?”

“Right behind you.”

Though few freighters put to and fewer even left, the docks was still the hotspot of Idyll. Fishermen sat with their floating bobbers, hoping to catch a star or two.

Corpses pushed overboard, floating perpetually through space, limbs waving in the currents.

They waved as he passed them by. Perhaps they recognised him. Isaac told himself he recognised their faces, their space suits, their starry fishing rods. He looked up, saw a space whale pass by, saw it bend and billow.

The fishermen paid it no heed.

The whale, likewise, ignored the fishermen.

The harbour consisted of long docks, stretching in a cobweb between the spire and the rings. Isaac caught up to Ava as she reached the inner ring—the one under construction.

“It’s like a ghost town,” Isaac mumbled, looking inside the hollow ring. It was some fifty metres across and lit up with flickering globes that hovered at irregular intervals. One of the globes tilted, swam slowly down and died by the floor.

Ava scoffed. “Sure, this part of Idyll is the ghost town.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She thrust her hip to one side. “You tell me, Isaac.”

“You’re real enigmatic today, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “You’re the one visiting your ghost town of a home.”

A child crying, black bruises on their cheeks and arms. A mother in her death throes trying to calm them.

They passed through the ghost ring and entered the outer ring—the ring of civilisation. Twenty kilometres of offices and shops, of homes and playgrounds, of districts and plazas and restaurants and little windows where one could look out at starry waves crashing onto planets, kicking up galaxies of surf and space dust.

There was a main road of metal plates. On both sides rose houses following the curvature of the walls. In the ceiling where bright light-strips that slowly moved, creating the imitation of a sun setting on one half of the ring, rising on the other.

A group of teenagers ran past them, whooping and hollering, flying a kite. Up above a woman opened the shutters to her house, began to hang washing up on a clothesline that spanned the ring. Two men sat outside a little cafe, playing chess on a checkered tablecloth.

Ava broke off, began heading clockwise through the ring—the opposite direction of the sunlights.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m gonna look around on my own,” Ava said.

“You were the one who wanted me to come back here.”

“Even so I don’t wanna stay here and hang out with your digital ghosts.” She chuckled wryly. “Takes one to know one. See ya around, Isaac. Don’t get lost in these empty rooms.”

Empty rooms where once had been life. Now naught but the vapid scent of dust.

He watched her leave, a splash of yellow in the grey metal and red shingles of Idyll.

Taking in the sounds, scents, and sights of his home he strolled past people that had never left. Some of them had come here from afar, some of them had been born inside these metal houses clutching the circular walls.

He reached the workers district. Machines and storage crates, cabins where stevedores slept, piles and piles of boxes and containers. He remembered going here a long time ago and playing hide and seek with the daughter of the Mayor—a little girl he’d nannied since she was born.

Isaac hadn’t gone more than ten paces before his past repeated itself. He encountered a little girl running around, looking under the crates and peering into the barrels.

“Hello,” he said.

She wasn’t startled by his sudden appearance. She turned and smiled widely. “Hi!”

Isaac knelt down next to her. “That’s a beautiful dress,” he said.

She beamed up at him. “My mom made it for me!”

“Did she really?”

The girl nodded. “Look!” She spun around as fast as she could. The yellow dress billowed, waving and frilling like a jellyfish.

Isaac laughed. Laughed like he hadn’t done in almost two decades. “You remind me of a girl I used to take care of on this very same station.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Very.”

“Was she a princess?” the girl asked.

“Almost. She was the daughter of the Mayor, which out here at sea makes you royalty. She was around your age.”

An endless stretch of street. Quiet. Vacant. Meaningless.

The girl counted on her fingers. “I’m six.”

“Exactly your age, then. What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for my ball. It’s red. Will you help me find it?”

“Sure,” Isaac said. “Where did you see it last?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Then let’s look everywhere.”

They roamed the factory-like room. It was cool in there, yet neither of their breaths misted. Isaac helped the girl open containers and lift up lids and crates.

Hollow houses. Somewhere a woman breathing her last.

“Are you a robot?” the girl asked suddenly.

Isaac smiled. The girl he’d nannied eighteen years ago had been observant too, finding clues no one else would think to look for. She had known him better than he did, even at her age. “Something like that,” Isaac said.

“I’m also a robot.”

“No, you’re a human. But that’s better.”

“Why?”

He knelt down, poked her in the stomach. “Because it means you’re real. It means you have a family. It means you can be a princess.”

She giggled. “What kind of a robot are you?”

“I’m a little bit of everything. When I lived here I was the Mayor’s personal calculator, if you will, although I did lean a bit more humanitarian in the end. That said, my specialty is holograms.”

“Holograms?”

A plastic man picking up the pieces of what once was.

”You wanna see something cool?”

The little girl nodded.

From the digital mind of Isaac came a conjured space whale. It floated through the walls and crates, swimming but a few metres over them. The girl squealed with joy, reached up trying to touch the whale’s stomach.

The whale sang and flapped its enormous tail. It sprouted from its blowhole and from the gush of stardust fell a red rubber ball, bouncing towards the little girl.

“My ball!” But as she tried to catch it, it bounced through her body.

“It’s not real,” Isaac said, “it just looks real. Like a dream.”

“Oh.” The girl’s face fell. “Why have it if it’s not real?”

Isaac shrugged. “Sometimes it’s nice to have a hologram when you can’t have the real thing.”

The girl chewed her lower lip. Then she said, “Can we go find my ball now?”

Isaac laughed. “Of course, sweetheart.”

They looked and looked, spoke to the workers in the district, the sailors, the fishers. They came to another district of houses and common areas. The little girl suggested the two of them split up so Isaac could look through the houses on the left side, she on the right.

“Alright,” Isaac said. “But don’t you get lost.”

“I won’t get lost,” the little girl laughed. “I’ve lived here all my life. All six years of it!”

He walked through corridors and halls with doors and either side.

Blood on the walls. Some splattered, most of it painted there by the bleeders themselves. Dead eyes staring up at you.

A sound. A regular thumping. The beating of a heart. The ship’s heart, perhaps. Thump it went. Thump. Thump. Thump.

He stopped next to a door, put his ear to it.

The feeling of a heart stopping as you hold her in your arms.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Empty rooms, empty halls, empty ships. An airlock full of corpses.

He breathed in, breathed out, steeled himself as he put his palm on the interface.

Everywhere the sweet scent of sickness, relenting despite the cleaning chemicals. A hand pressing the button to release the airlock.

He opened the door and there in the darkness stood Ava, bouncing a red rubber ball. “Why are you doing this to yourself, Isaac?”

He bit his lip. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Thump. “You know exactly where this ball is.”

“No I don’t.”

Thump.

Thump.

She threw the ball to him.

Before he could catch it it faded into nothing.

“No,” he said. “Don’t do this, Ava. Please.”

She walked towards him. “Say it,” she said.

A ghost town reeking not of death, but of nothing at all.

“No. No!” He turned on his heel, ran out of the room. Ran down the corridors, the halls, burst out onto the street.

The little girl in the yellow dress stood in the middle of the road, tilting her head, looking at Isaac with wide eyes.

“What’s your name?” Isaac demanded.

“Avalon. But my mom calls me—”

She flickered, glitched, disappeared.

An empty, eternal silence.

Isaac tried to grab her, to hold on to her, but like sand she fell through his fingers. “No, no, no,” he mumbled. He fell to his knees. “No! Come back. COME BACK!”

Behind him the red rubber ball thumped.

“You,” he said, turning on Ava. “You did this.”

Her face was sorrowful, sympathetic. “How? How can I do anything? You’re doing this to yourself.”

“Doing what?”

“You know what,” Ava said. “You know exactly what.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Yes you do. You just have to say it.”

“Say what?”

“SAY IT!” she screamed, tears pouring down her cheeks. Her entire body trembled, her breath came in hiccups and he could hear her heart fluttering, looking for a way out between her ribs.

Damn his graphics cards. Damn his processors, damn his memory, damn it all. Why could she not just have been a ghost, a wisp, a translucent spirit, following in his footsteps.

Why did she have to be so real?

“Say it,” Ava echoed, over and over again. “Say what happened to me.”

Isaac wiped his hand under his eyes. Tears that dropped from his chin onto the dusty floor of what had once been a thriving space station. “You already know what happened,” he said in a whisper.

“I want to hear you say it. You have to say it.” Her voice cracked.

He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Please.”

“TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED!” The grief and hurt in her voice was too potent to come from a hologram. They came from the hologram’s creator, just as the pain of a character comes from the soul of the author. “TELL ME I’M DEAD!”

A sob left Isaac, one that wracked his lungs and heart. Head drooped, eyes overflowing, he spoke. “You were so young and so small,” he said. “You were one of the first to go. I stayed by your side every minute of your sickness. I watched as you decayed from the inside out. I was there when the disease reached your skin.”

He looked up at her. “I was there when you stopped breathing.”

Ava cried softly, hands by her sides. The little flower on her top seemed to wilt. “What happened?”

Isaac gathered himself. “Idyll was never meant to sit in a port. It was a wayfarer station, a floating island letting the currents of space drag it wherever it needed to go. It weathered solar flares and comet hail and space whale tails, but some things are not meant to be withstood.”

The two of them stood in the empty station. Around them were naught but hollow houses and closed shutters.

“It came like the tendrils of an invisible man o’war, stinging them all without them knowing.” He swallowed. “I was the only non-organic thinking entity on Idyll. I stayed behind to clean it all up. To clean you all up.”

Ava looked down at him. “That’s the first time you’ve remembered that in eighteen years.”

“So that’s why you wanted me back here.”

“No. That’s why you wanted you back here.“

“I don’t want to remember.”

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“You have to move on, Isaac. You’re turning your past into your future and that’s a very finite pastime.”

“I like the finite.”

“But you weren’t built for it,” Ava said. “You’re eternal. You could walk from one end of the galaxy to the other because years don’t matter to you. You can make a million memories, but you refuse to review them because they force you to face your immortality. If you remember us dying you have to accept that you didn’t. That you never truly can.”

“You want me to remember the horrors? The suffering, the pain? The crying children? You?”

“I’M NOT ME!” she cried. “I’m you, Isaac. A part of you that you have to let go. I want you to remember everything. The silence, the stillness, the complete and utter emptiness.”

“Then my soul will become empty.”

“That’s the point. You have to empty it of us so you can move on and fill it with something and someone new. I’m not her, Isaac. You have to let me go.”

“Ava,” he said.

He looked up and she was gone.

All of it

was gone.

An empty station.

An empty ring.

An empty room.

An empty soul.

Is there anything more lonely than infinity?

Than the endlessness of space?

A robot

looks down

at his hands.

He shuffles his feet

and kicks

the dust

on the ground.

A red

rubber

ball

rolls past him.

He stares after it.

He bends down

and picks it up.

It lies heavy in his palm.

Heavy.

Heavy.

Heavy.

A space whale sings its mournful song outside. The robot looks out of the window.

He looks at the ball.

He bounces it once.

Twice.

He drops it.

It bounces

then

fades.

The robot leaves the empty station.

He doesn’t take a wormhole or the hyperspace highway.

He sets his sales, angles the rudder to face the infinite abyss of space

He lets the currents of the stars take him where he needs to go.

In the passenger seat is no one.

No girl in yellow clothes.

There is no one but the robot.

And Eternity.

Hello, Eternity. I’m Isaac.