Warp & Woof: Chapter Eight
A sci-fi serial
Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.
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Now let’s read Chapter 8.
Warp & Woof
Chapter Eight:
Pодной Mир / Cтрелки
(Rodnoy Mir / The Strelki)
Warp / Svetlana / Galina
Popov weaned Warp off the neural blocker and birthed him into a new realm of pain. Sedatives kept him asleep between the waves. He awoke into agony and subsided into unconsciousness, a cycle that lasted for days.
“Eight hours,” Popov said.
Warp breathed hard and with purpose. His fingers clutched the bed beneath him. “Impossible,” he whispered.
“Your sleep cycles were short but deep. You’re holding a conversation now, and that’s good.”
He tried to say, Happy to impress, but only whimpered.
“I know; I’m sorry,” she said. “The mind can only handle a blocker for so long. Already, you can experience side effects, a rush of fractured memories and dreams. Don’t worry. It’s all completely normal.”
She moved to check on Zasha. Once again, Warp was alone with his pain, and he lingered before drifting into troubled dreams where Baba Yaga roasted him on a spit and peeled away his crispy skin. He awoke, thinking of his mother.
The pain had lessened, and he lifted a hand, if only to prove to himself he could. He expected bandages but found none, only faint scars in a hatch-mark pattern that ran without interruption down and between his fingers, across his palm, and around his wrist and forearm until they disappeared into the white sleeve of his gown.
“You’re healing quickly,” Dmitri said, standing where Popov had been. “Enzymes in the grass seem to facilitate the regeneration of cells.”
He uttered a whispered oath. “What now?”
“We’re preparing to re-enter orbit,” he said. “Our next steps can be decided from there.”
“You’ve alerted Pervoye?”
“Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”
Warp anticipated the release weightlessness would bring. He longed to unstrap himself from the bed and then linger so close to the mattress as to leave no visual distinction. He’d feel it, though. If he’d soared through the clouds like a bird, it wouldn’t feel any better. Every strain and ache would be gone or close enough to being gone that his brain would call it even. Every physical trauma would melt away, and he’d laugh and soon realize others were laughing, too.
Dmitri took one last look at the readouts. “The doctor just needs to check a few things before launch.” He paused at the door before leaving. “We’ll be away soon.”
There was that word again. Soon.
Dmitri was gone, but his voice kept Warp staring at the open door. Popov passed by and, from there, entered the mess deck and not the ramp that would lead her to the cockpit. Warp wondered who was preparing the launch. There was no powering up of the engines and certainly no laughter, but they’d both come soon enough.
He closed his eyes and felt the emptiness the laughter would fill. The joy of it would wash over him. He listened closely to the silence, and, in his listening, he heard something else, a traditional folk song softly plucked upon a balalaika. Notes jumped over one another in an expression of resilience over suffering and loss, an expression of the Russian soul as a stubborn act of will.
Warp’s eyes snapped open. The music remained and grew louder. Somewhere in the unseen distance, the musician was drawing near.
“Russian Winter,” Zasha whispered, giving name to the approaching music. Her whisper sounded like a roar.
“You’re awake,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
Something else wafted through the air, a spread-out swarm of blurry, white somethings, articulated as if upon a breeze; one landed on Warp’s wrist, a snowflake. It tilted along his hair and melted out of existence.
Warp braced himself with one hand and caught snowflakes with the other. He felt the ship shudder, and the snow shone like stars. The walls flickered away to a snowy field and a horse-pulled carriage and then flickered back again. The snow disappeared, leaving behind wet kisses upon his flesh.
He closed his eyes, exhausted and lost in hallucinations, but even as he drifted to sleep, he felt the wet upon his skin, like Laika’s tender tapping with her nose, waking him from a seizure.
#
In the privacy of their apartment, Laika rolled into her blanket, lay on her back, and squirmed happily. Her tail thumped against the floor. A drum. A heartbeat. A countdown. The time had come. Warp’s chest tightened, and a cold sweat beaded on his neck.
Starlight burned white hot and went dark. Even in the midst of it, with everything new and strange and his brain useless for anything intentional, Warp knew what was happening to him. The floor beat against the side of skull; urine warmed his legs. Everything fell apart, and he wondered if death was close by. Maybe, it was here already.
Long after it ended, he lay motionless on the floor, his muscles cramped into twitching knots. His head throbbed. It would have been worse, but Laika had scooted herself between him and the floor. She lay there, whimpering, and he hoped he hadn’t bruised her ribs.
He tried to comfort Laika but couldn’t bring himself to speak. She licked his hand, and the whimpering stopped, as if she could sense that he was safe now, apart from the tenderness and the pain. Her fur caressed his cheek and warmed him, and beneath that warmth, he heard the beating of her heart, a sound distinctly its own and not nearly as reminiscent of her thumping tail as he’d imagined.
She was a daughter to him, and she loved him beyond anything his human consciousness could comprehend. The human population was carefully regulated aboard the Strelki. Everyone who had ever applied to become a parent understood that. With every new consumer, resources dwindled, and so balance had to be maintained. It had been that way for centuries across light-years of empty, dark space.
Now, they wanted him to abandon his child, but such a thing was unthinkable. He frowned. Unthinkable didn’t mean impossible, merely cordoned off and shut away.
When Laika was a newborn, Warp had bottle-fed her and rubbed her belly to stimulate her need to urinate, just as a mother would’ve done. He felt her isolation; even if she did not, he felt the lack of siblings and wondered at the difference that would play in her mental and physical development, the only pup to a human parent, tucked away in a private apartment deep within Pervoye. He fabricated fur aprons, which helped him imitate a mother, but the difficulty came in the brothers and sisters, jostling for a place at the teat. His instincts railed against the notion of making her fight for that which love would freely give.
He turned on the holographic mirror for the first time in weeks. Such rituals had lost their meaning, but Popov was bringing Zasha to meet Laika. He paced around his image, stared at his own butt, and changed outfits, and then an idea struck.
With the mirror on the tailor setting, he stood before three images of himself and adjusted the setting to focus on Laika; in an instant, she was quadruplets. With filters that allowed him to try different hairstyles, he adjusted each of her imaginary siblings until they became a brood, each resembling one another but uniquely distinct. He lowered the ambient temperature in the apartment and increased the spot heating in the area where the puppies cried for their mother. He gave the siblings substance by wadding aprons into balls within their projected space, and then settled down among them to feed not one pup but a family.
Laika fed and found herself in competition for a nipple that had once been hers alone. She whined and struggled to regain her perch; she fed again, and when she lost the nipple, she wrestled with the apron before settling down for a nap, wrapped within its twisted embrace.
Warp switched over the holographic mirror, and had the mirror read her heat signature and then impose a reconstructed image of her upon that outline, based on the details it captured just moments earlier. He saw two Laikas, one wrapped in fur and one with the apron’s fur pulled away, revealing the wrinkling brow, tiny yawns, and stretched-out paws.
Before him were two puppies, and the one he studied—the one that revealed the personality of a living soul—was an illusion. Had they still been in Tret’ya, in the apartment he’d shared with his mother, the mirror would’ve held her in its memory, and he could have recalled her just as easily. A question lingered within him, asking if that was what he’d want, given the chance, and he had no answer.
He unwrapped Laika from the apron and pulled her to his chest, and her warmth radiated peace within him. He studied her tiny, shut eyes. His work was dedicated to raising the life birthed through Zasha’s department, and that work depended on the premise of experiences other than his own. Popov’s work with survivors was predicated upon the experiences of others.
He recalled a popular saying, a paraphrase of Tolstoy, and it explained what he felt: We only understand our lives, when we can see ourselves in others.
In reaching out beyond themselves and touching the life of another, their lives found purpose. The experience of others gave meaning to their own, maybe not despite an inability to prove that other experience actually existed but because of that inability. Only by impacting the life of another could they convince themselves they weren’t alone.
#
“You were real,” Svetlana whispered. “You were my son, and I loved you.”
Warp clung to his mother’s hand and wept against her shoulder. “Out of death, you gave us life.”
She sucked in a breath and let loose a tortured cry of grief. When her voice gave out, she fell silent, and when her silence gave out, she spoke. “I’ve carved my own Buratino.”
Warp brushed her cheek. “I’m a real boy, Mama.”
“I begged Cagliostro to bring my dreams to life and now wish only for death.”
Warp buried his face into her pillow.
“A son and a ship among the stars is easy,” she continued, “but I cannot dream my own nonexistence.”
“I hope I was a good dream, mama.”
“You were the best a mother could hope for, and if I had it in me, I’d dream myself away and give you life. Why can’t it be so? Why must Cagliostro fail me? If the program could copy and store my consciousness, if it formed your consciousness from my own desire, then it can make you real, at least as real as me. I’ll dream you into existence, and when my time is done, I’ll ask the program to wipe me clean; I will go, knowing I leave you in my place. You’re my rest and my hope. Give me this, I plead, or what purpose is there? Give us space and breath as well as need. Let my son struggle and thrive; let him love and be loved. Let life embrace us fully and then let us go, or else it’s not life at all.”
#
Zasha’s session with her fiance, and there had been only one, went more as Galina expected. Hell broke loose in a confusion of misery and fear, and it never let up. Within twenty minutes, Zasha ran from the room, and Galina tucked her fiance back into his coma with no wisdom earned, no insight gained.
Warp and his mom had surprised them all. He left only when Galina insisted and returned as soon as she allowed. Every day, he talked to his mother, and at least once a day, Svetlana responded like she’d understood. In her notes, Galina wrote that Zasha’s fiance had no context for the randomness his poisoned mind imagined, but Svetlana had the seas of Titan; she died believing she was a copy in a computer on a moon orbiting Saturn, and that belief squeezed meaning out of every moment, no matter how bizarre.
In their sessions, over the month following his mother’s death, Warp and Galina always touched upon the same two subjects: first, Laika’s progress; and second, a context to understand what had happened to him.
“If my mother understood there was a problem,” he’d said, “Control had to see it. Why delay the evacuation?”
She’d played her role as a therapist, drawing the answer out of him, even after such a ploy became deceitful. “Why do you think they delayed?”
“Denial,” he’d said. “Their pride couldn’t imagine the failure of one of our ships.” Then the day came when he’d offered the answer that made her pulse quicken and unsettled her stomach. “Maybe there was never meant to be an evacuation.”
She’d steadied herself before trying to answer. “What do you mean?”
“I’m young to be the head of a department sub-section, but then, there wasn’t much use for what I did. We couldn’t birth many animals because each ship’s balance was so precarious.” He’d begun his answer detached, but as he talked his mouth twisted with grief. “If you evacuate the Tret'ya and divide its citizens among the other three ships, each population has now grown by a third. Maybe, they decided the best solution was to let the tragedy happen.”
Do you have any idea what your father did? She’d wanted to ask and knew she never would.
“Or maybe my mother was right?” he continued.
Even as she found her voice, it cracked. “How do you mean?”
#
Warp awoke into darkness and the sound of Zasha breathing, but none of it felt real. Not all of it, anyway, of that he was certain. Something within his immediate experience was not as it seemed.
Dr. Popov had discounted his mother’s philosophies, considering them a coping mechanism and blaming herself for the inability to offer a better remedy. For Warp, some deep part of him would always wonder if his mother was right, that they were all together dreaming in the seas of Titan.
— Thaddeus Thomas
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