The End Of All You'll Know, a Logical World Short
Posted: 2006-03-02 01:11am
My newest short, featuringa character some of you might recognise - Yoric the planetoid! This newest piece is somewhat of a departure from my last pieces, however, returning to the feel of Here, in this Vale of Tears.
The End Of All You’ll Know
Are you all right, Yoric?
Hmm? Yes, I’m fine. I can repair the damage on my own.
That isn’t what I mean, planetoid. The reply was both scolding and concerned at the same time, even though it carried no tone. There was no tone because it wasn’t speech, but rather a stream of data. I’m not asking about the damage to your hull. You must have lost many in the firestorm.
No reply. Just drifting under inertia. A so-close-to-perfect sphere that it was best to just call it perfect, drifting, about the same size as Luna hanging above the earth. From one angle, it was unmarred, smooth. A massive plane of dark, gleaming armour. Around it’s meridian, and it was shattered; almost a full third gone, metal twisted like wax under the flame. It was a gaping wound, brutal - close to thirteen hundred metres deep through Yoric’s bastion wall of armour more than a hundred times thicker than any ocean on Old Terra was deep.
Yoric?
There was no reply. She had heard such silence in the farewells to old comrades at solemn decommissioning ceremonies, in the void between galaxies when she was running on silent. It was not normal – Yoric was a philosopher, a great thinker and orator among men and machines. Since she had been born she had known Yoric to be a rock among the fleet; even if she lived for another thousand years she would not have known a tenth, a hundredth of what he had known and seen. Even in the aftermath of a star going nova, amidst the firestorm caused by the exploding sun, Yoric had not been phased. Even skimming over the event horizon of a super-massive black hole, amidst a battle that counted combatants in the millions, Yoric had been there, a transient digital hand on her shoulder, comforting her even as sun-bright flashes obscured his body and he duelled thousands.
He had seen her through countless atrocities and unthinkable danger. How could have a simple border skirmish silenced him so? And why wouldn’t he talk to her? Was she not his closest confidant? Had she not been his companion for over four centuries? He may have been ancient and wise and powerful, but that didn’t excuse him.
Talk to me! She cried, all at once forgetting her composure and her position as a warship. Don’t you dare keep ignoring me! I know you can hear me Yoric! Answer me dammit!
Esmerelda. Yoric’s reply cut her off sharply before she could continue her desperate pleading. The single word carried the same sort of finality of a falling gravestone. Had she a lip, she would have bitten it; had she eyes they would have been filled with tears. I have, I have lost my captain.
He spoke no more, and Esmerelda did not make any attempt to comfort him, nor even reply in any conceivable way. What could she possibly say? There was no bond in the universe at any level greater than that between ship and captain. No other orga was linked so deeply into the workings of the ship’s higher-dimensional brain. The captain meant more to the ship than any other, for the captain was a part of the ship and the ship a part of the captain. For Yoric to have lost his captain was to have lost something akin to an organic’s heart.
Esmerelda quivered inwardly (it was difficult for a machine over ten times as wide as Mount Everest was tell to quiver in any other way). As close as she was, or as close as she thought she was, to Yoric, she was positively distant when compared with Yoric’s captain. And now that captain was dead; Esmerelda guessed that the barrage that had caused Yoric’s wound had taken out the overbridge, the nerve centre of command and control across the moon sized warship.
I have not lost so many of my family since I saw combat in the climax of the Last Great War. He continued, his words carrying with them an intense desire to keep his tone level and professional. Esmerelda recognised the choked and strained undercurrent in his speech; it made her think of a dammed, flooding river. But that is to be expected, it was brutal, total warfare. On each side fought millions of planetoids, fought hundreds of millions of lesser warships. It was a thunderstorm, a swirling nexus of high-energy weaponry; the power impacting my shields was immense.
But today was not brutal, total warfare. Today there was not weaponry flying that would obliterate worlds. Today was a Fabricator-damned border dispute. I am a Pluto class super-heavy offensive unit! His anger was palpable. Across the void between them Esmerelda could see his shape warp as light bent against his gravitics. Suns tremble at my mere presence. The threat of my guns firing has brought hundred thousand system empires to heel. Kings and emperors bow and scrape, sweat trickling down their backs when I come calling. I should be able to crush weakling Chossok warships like insects – I should be able to disable them without damaging them! Their surprise attack out of the star – I should have seen that coming.
No one should have died today. He finished finally, bitterly.
The End Of All You’ll Know
Are you all right, Yoric?
Hmm? Yes, I’m fine. I can repair the damage on my own.
That isn’t what I mean, planetoid. The reply was both scolding and concerned at the same time, even though it carried no tone. There was no tone because it wasn’t speech, but rather a stream of data. I’m not asking about the damage to your hull. You must have lost many in the firestorm.
No reply. Just drifting under inertia. A so-close-to-perfect sphere that it was best to just call it perfect, drifting, about the same size as Luna hanging above the earth. From one angle, it was unmarred, smooth. A massive plane of dark, gleaming armour. Around it’s meridian, and it was shattered; almost a full third gone, metal twisted like wax under the flame. It was a gaping wound, brutal - close to thirteen hundred metres deep through Yoric’s bastion wall of armour more than a hundred times thicker than any ocean on Old Terra was deep.
Yoric?
There was no reply. She had heard such silence in the farewells to old comrades at solemn decommissioning ceremonies, in the void between galaxies when she was running on silent. It was not normal – Yoric was a philosopher, a great thinker and orator among men and machines. Since she had been born she had known Yoric to be a rock among the fleet; even if she lived for another thousand years she would not have known a tenth, a hundredth of what he had known and seen. Even in the aftermath of a star going nova, amidst the firestorm caused by the exploding sun, Yoric had not been phased. Even skimming over the event horizon of a super-massive black hole, amidst a battle that counted combatants in the millions, Yoric had been there, a transient digital hand on her shoulder, comforting her even as sun-bright flashes obscured his body and he duelled thousands.
He had seen her through countless atrocities and unthinkable danger. How could have a simple border skirmish silenced him so? And why wouldn’t he talk to her? Was she not his closest confidant? Had she not been his companion for over four centuries? He may have been ancient and wise and powerful, but that didn’t excuse him.
Talk to me! She cried, all at once forgetting her composure and her position as a warship. Don’t you dare keep ignoring me! I know you can hear me Yoric! Answer me dammit!
Esmerelda. Yoric’s reply cut her off sharply before she could continue her desperate pleading. The single word carried the same sort of finality of a falling gravestone. Had she a lip, she would have bitten it; had she eyes they would have been filled with tears. I have, I have lost my captain.
He spoke no more, and Esmerelda did not make any attempt to comfort him, nor even reply in any conceivable way. What could she possibly say? There was no bond in the universe at any level greater than that between ship and captain. No other orga was linked so deeply into the workings of the ship’s higher-dimensional brain. The captain meant more to the ship than any other, for the captain was a part of the ship and the ship a part of the captain. For Yoric to have lost his captain was to have lost something akin to an organic’s heart.
Esmerelda quivered inwardly (it was difficult for a machine over ten times as wide as Mount Everest was tell to quiver in any other way). As close as she was, or as close as she thought she was, to Yoric, she was positively distant when compared with Yoric’s captain. And now that captain was dead; Esmerelda guessed that the barrage that had caused Yoric’s wound had taken out the overbridge, the nerve centre of command and control across the moon sized warship.
I have not lost so many of my family since I saw combat in the climax of the Last Great War. He continued, his words carrying with them an intense desire to keep his tone level and professional. Esmerelda recognised the choked and strained undercurrent in his speech; it made her think of a dammed, flooding river. But that is to be expected, it was brutal, total warfare. On each side fought millions of planetoids, fought hundreds of millions of lesser warships. It was a thunderstorm, a swirling nexus of high-energy weaponry; the power impacting my shields was immense.
But today was not brutal, total warfare. Today there was not weaponry flying that would obliterate worlds. Today was a Fabricator-damned border dispute. I am a Pluto class super-heavy offensive unit! His anger was palpable. Across the void between them Esmerelda could see his shape warp as light bent against his gravitics. Suns tremble at my mere presence. The threat of my guns firing has brought hundred thousand system empires to heel. Kings and emperors bow and scrape, sweat trickling down their backs when I come calling. I should be able to crush weakling Chossok warships like insects – I should be able to disable them without damaging them! Their surprise attack out of the star – I should have seen that coming.
No one should have died today. He finished finally, bitterly.
