Butterfly Beach - Science Fiction

[Hare]

Dust blew constantly, even here next to the huge piles of detritus, the new formation of the ‘beach’. The wind endless now, it hadn’t been as bad a few months ago but then a lot of changes had gone on since then.

His feet slid and crunched through the thick layers of scales, their brittle forms destroyed by the smallest movement of his feet. Blackness soared above his head, the cold empty darkness sucking all the light from his enviro-suits faceplate, it was cold here. It took everything you had to give and still it needed more, they were drilling down to the molten heart of the planet in the hope that geothermal might speed up the terra-forming process.

It had been different once, here on this ball of rock, he’d sneaked into the labs to get himself ‘lost’ for a while, to get warm again and when he’d been there lost among the hulking machines he’d seen the truth. Seen the beach for what it was, what it meant. He tried to avoid it block it out, do something anything to forget it but he was always drawn back here. Standing in the cold darkness, alone on the ‘beach’.

 

If he’d just gone to the mess like everyone else he wouldn’t have had the burden to carry on his slim shoulders, hell he wasn’t intelligent enough to even have clearance to get into the damn labs in the first place! But someone had left the door ajar and he’d taken the step that had damned his nights ever since. The half heard conversations in the mess hall would be meaningless to him like they were to his crew mates around him, but he knew the truth now and he couldn’t ignore it.

His feet shuffled through the silica plates, shattering their delicate forms with his weight, even holding one in your fingers would destroy it utterly. Their myriad colours fading into grey dust as it crumbled in your grip. The huge banks of shifting rainbow’s now littered around him on the dark ground of their new home, forcing the memory to resurface again. Making him re-live the awful truth he was standing in.

 

‘Oxygen level – Current 0.5% - Optimum for human survival 10%, Nitrogen level – Current 65% of tolerance level for mass of planetary sphere. Toxicity for current I.L’s reaching 80%, full human habitation and viable water system online in seven months.’

The readout had pleased him at first, sat within the warmth of the lab, hidden away in the depths of the ship; he’d be getting a bonus along with everyone else for completing early. By the looks of things nearly five months ahead of schedule, he was still watching the readouts pass the screen when another smaller screen flashed to life inside the first one.

It showed a beauty he’d only ever dreamed of, shifting colours, impossible shades blurring and passing before his eyes. Colours so vivid he’d had to look away when his eyes began to hurt from looking at the beauty that was playing out in front of him. The movement of colour seemed to go in waves, shifting in direction in accordance with the winds. They flowed over the screen, the small bright patches glowing in brightness then fading away leaving gaps where there had been light before.

 

He’d remembered the bacterial seeders’ telling him about the skies when they’d gotten here, how the entire planet was bathed in light, light that seemed to go through you, make you feel peaceful, calm, wonderful and perfect. They’d done their job, stopped off to report their successful drops and left for the next planet in the system, going where their masters called them.

He hadn’t seen them, the skies, his job didn’t allow for him to go outside much in the first few months. He was a builder, a maker, not a thinker, not a researcher, an ‘organic robot’ was the best title he heard from a pilot. Others just called them ‘Org’s’, expendable human labour, because metal cost more than flesh did out here.

 

Yet he’d sat there watching the smaller screen until he began to discern a pattern to the fading colours. A cloud of beautiful colour would drift over a dark area trying to bring it back into the greater whole when the cloud, would suddenly burst with the brightest flares of colour. Red’s oranges, blues, violets and greens all mingled and huge, massive explosions like boosters in the atmospheres of gas giants. They’d then fade into nothing leaving a bigger gap which the other clouds around the edge would try to fill as the winds blew them toward it. At the bottom right of the screen was a counter, it drifted down through the numbers, backwards from a huge number he couldn’t get his head around but it was definitely counting down. The two words next to it were ‘I.L Count,’ when he’d finally had enough of the cramped space he’d made his way to the mess. The words still in the forefront of his mind he’d asked his supervisor what they’d meant in all innocence. The man had just looked through him, his worth less than nothing in his eyes the weight of iron in his blood worth more than the mind behind the eyes.

“It’s shorthand for ‘Indigenous Life forms’ but you don’t have to worry your head about that here. This rock doesn’t have any, all you need to worry about it getting those nitrogen fixers online, there’s no beasts or bugs this time out.” He’d walked away then, his wisdom imparted to the lesser mind he’d not given it any thought at all why a ‘Org’ was asking such a question. He was too busy telling another supervisor about his near death escape when they’d been in System 12 and the ‘I.L’s’ there. But he’d stood for a while his mind realising exactly what he’d been watching on the screens, the truth about the planet, about what they were doing, about what he was.

 

He’d tried to deny it, turned his mind to the job at hand, the bonus system had him and everyone else focussed on the date of completion and it had worked for a while. That was until he’d gone outside to actually deploy the fixers. The drifts formed from the winds blowing the scales into hollows, the skies were still filled with the beautiful light he’d seen on the screens but it was dimming. New drifts formed every day, the scales drifting down as the bacterial seed began to grow and change the atmosphere into something breathable for humanity.

Every day after his shift he’d go away from the machines and watch what was left of the sky, of the creatures up there, trying to flee from the poison they were pumping out into their world. How the scientist’s and lab workers could stand to know what they were doing amazed him, it was all he could do to function and he did his best to keep silent and his eyes locked to the metal of the machinery he was working on. But he went to the ‘beach’ every night, even if he didn’t want to he’d be dragged there by his conscience. As if just looking at the huge piles of death made the truth any easier to swallow, looking upward at the highest levels of the sky he could see a few flakes of brilliant colour sparkling there. A line working upward and away from the planet; a slim ribbon of hope stretching into the darkness; finding a new wind to feed them, a new home to live on.

 

Now as he stood ankle deep in the dead of the planet, face turned to the great cold darkness above his head, no warm colours to dance in his vision. A feeling he’d never experienced before filled him. Filling eyes that had seen the stars as a human playground blur with salt water, a supply for the dry beach that surrounded him, the wind blowing through the suit he wore chilling him to the bone.

The urge to feel something, anything, rode through him on the tide of grief that overwhelmed his mind. Tearing at the faceplate and neck of his suit he needed to feel something real on his bare skin, he wanted to feel the slick smoothness of the silica on his fingers. To look at the beauty it had once been without a filter in his way, to know that these had once been alive. Free to move, to dance in the winds, communicating in colours too complex to explain in clumsy words or vocal expressions. Knowing that they didn’t bring life they destroyed it, changing what they pleased, how they pleased to. His place as a cog in the machine that had killed a billion intelligent lives filled his mind and broke him, his eyes staring out into the cold darkness searching for forgiveness even as they froze in their sockets. Hoping to see a blur of colour somewhere instead of all the darkness, all the emptiness that they’d brought with them.

They found him a week later, half in an half out of a dune, there was no funeral, no mourning, his metals recovered the waste fed into the machines to build a new world. His death unremarked amidst a billion others and the hundreds to come.

[De Batz]

I liked this. I'm not a consumer of sci-fi generally, so there's not much I can comment on in terms of this being, if you will, genre fiction. Having said that, I will offer the following thoughts.

 

In fifteen hundred or so words, you seem to have created and characterised a world that generates interest. Your execution of the chunks of story - the sentences and the paragraphs - has a readable flow to it and I didn't notice the writing, usually a sign that it is unobtrusively good. Having said that, I guessed / was led to the conclusion that the scales were somehow living things early in the piece. Was I meant to? I wonder if you could somehow hold that back a bit, building the suspense to achieve a bigger 'reveal' at the end.

 

As I say, I'm no sci-fi reader, but the tropes of the genre were represented at various points. I knew what you were getting at throughout, which was gratifying for me as a reader.

 

I've read the other standalone (is it really?) piece, which I'll talk about on there.

 

Anyway, thanks for this - I was entertained.

 

Andy