I followed them into the ship’s interior as they scrambled over the piles of my relics, camouflaging myself among the other obsolete pieces of technology. One of them rushed past me, returning to the beach to retrieve her stick. She knocked over a rack of discarded exercise equipment as she ran, sending it cascading into me. I fell and tumbled back toward the wall of the ship. As I caught myself, I felt the shock of it travel through the palm of my hand.

  The area where my palm met the ship immediately warmed.

  Why do you always refer to me as “the ship”? The words wriggled playfully in my brain. No matter what my nameplate says, I am The Whelk.

  A new happiness stretched into wakefulness inside me.

  The children returned every day for a week. Each day brought a new iteration of their play, another small adventure. Lunch boxes and damp towels littered The Whelk’s interior, and I was able to occasionally cajole more conversation out of The Whelk.

  But on the sixth day, the adventure felt over-warmed. Dry and fragile. On the seventh, it had grown taut and their tempers snapped.

  On the eighth day, the beach was empty.

  (But I could feel the gaze of the fourth child from atop the cliffside, as they watched the late afternoon light layer its glaze on the still form of The Whelk.)

  The next days felt hollow, but I filled them with my missing of the children and their misadventures. The memories of their playing forms were almost as sweet as the actuality had been.

  But even that sweetness fades.

  I began to mark the days by the increasing creaking of The Whelk’s supports. I wouldn’t describe my situation as “bored,” but I longed for some newness.

  That longing was answered by a group of adults in business suits carefully walking across the beach. The dawn held enough sharpness that it was able to glare their forms into shadows. It stung to look at them too long.

  As they approached, their leather shoes scraping along the sand, I heard the specifics of their conversation.

  “They certainly don’t make anything like this anymore.”

  “Of course they don’t, Toma. Spaceflight’s dead. Why explore when there’s so much work to be done planet-side? A bit of society-wide narcissism is what that would be.”

  This Toma replied while shielding his eyes from the dawn. “Fair enough. But, you can’t deny that there’s a beauty to this craft, even if it isn’t space-worthy anymore. A beauty completely removed from its former purpose.”

  The third person paused for a moment, creating a frame for the ship’s length with her upheld fingers. “I think it is more beautiful because it’s not useful anymore. The tilt as it leans into the sea? The strength—bound to fail—that prevents it from collapsing into ruin? Picturesque, no?”

  (This one was my favorite, I decided.)

  “Ok, ok. I will acknowledge that there is a beauty to be found here.” This from the naysayer. And then, after a moment, he continued. “It makes me remember being a child and wanting to go into space.” I marveled that The Whelk could evoke such a longing without my direct assistance.

  Toma seized this thread of thought. “When you’re a child, your dreams are as deep as the sea. As open as the void between the stars. There was so much possibility in becoming an astronaut and being the something in the middle of all that nothing.” He patted one of the struts lovingly.

  “Maybe the bosses could turn the land into a theme park? I mean, obviously we couldn’t build anything on the beach, but we could work something out with the rest of the area. Get some rides going, sell some rocket ship merchandise?”

  The Whelk shivered in apprehension as Toma spun his tale.

  I felt a short-lived hope as the naysayer shook his head. “Toma, I feel you. But, there’s no money in dreams. People are all about sensation these days. Besides, space is passé. Us old folks, sure, we might still dream about it. But we’re a dying breed.” He tilted his head back and looked up and down the length of The Whelk. “It’s a shame, but I don’t see how we can do anything but recommend getting this thing out of here. Maybe some museum will want the old beaut? We’ll have to make a few calls, send some folks out to come up with some numbers.”

  Toma’s face paled. “Ok, that’s what you think, John. Mari, what about you?”

  “Beauty’s meant to fade,” she said as she turned her back to The Whelk and began to walk, leading the men back up the hillside.

  When I first ventured into The Whelk, sea brine drying on my legs and eager for some new remembrances to slake my thirst, I had not expected to feel such a connection to it. Our conversations were stilted, one-sided—forming words involved more energy and precision than what The Whelk had available. But it had become something more to me than just a ship, nonetheless.

  When the businesspeople came to evaluate the value or cost of The Whelk, a brutal sadness tore at my heart.

  Several days after their evaluation, a group of historians from a nearby space museum arrived, toting holocams and other specialized equipment.

  “Lord, she’s beautiful. I wish we could secure the grant money to move her,” said one as he scanned The Whelk’s form.

  One of his colleagues rushed forward. She grabbed the equipment from him and said, “Ahmet, I know that you know everything there is to know about space colonization, but why won’t you listen to me when I tell you that you need to pay more attention to the lighting when you’re using the holocam?”

  She sighed and rescanned the ship, stopping occasionally to glare in Ahmet’s direction. When she completed it, her look softened and she said, “I’ll never get tired of looking at these. Their beauty just kinda cuts to the heart, doesn’t it? But, there are so many of these around. So many of them are in better shape than this one, too.” She grimaced. “I just can’t see us securing the funds.”

  Each beat of their conversation was a harsh reminder of what was to come. Their prosaic ambivalence recalled the wilting and browning of late summer’s flowers. Just before they shriveled upon themselves and collapsed. Such is what I felt in my heart.

  More groups followed, all as dispiriting as the last.

  The virtual game designers approached The Whelk with reverence and bounding energy, not unlike the group of children who had raced down The Whelk’s corridors. They paced around the ship, investigating every angle. They knocked on the hull, turning their ears to catch every nuance of the resulting sound. When they clambered inside, they peppered each other with interjections, excited about the possibilities of The Whelk’s layout. I could feel The Whelk allowing itself some of that same excitement.

  But after the initial tour of the interior, there was a dearth of conversation. I heard one of them break the silence to say that even though the ship was fun and exciting, the paradigm of the ship was too old to draw in newer game players. They preferred the newer ship designs, ones that abandoned the practical and lived-in feel of The Whelk for the promise of the hyperreal.

  The ecologists did not even enter the ship. They stood out of the tide’s way and pondered what effect The Whelk’s collapse into the sea would have on the tidal pools, the sea life. What chemicals would spill, leaking their bitterness into the sweet complacency of the sea? They reassured themselves that the ship’s power core would remain whole at least, protected as it was by safety standards and safety procedures, but a new fear awakened inside me as I listened.

  There were the artists, too, who came in the twilight. For them, The Whelk was nothing more than a canvas to be acted upon, and upon the next dawn, its hull struggled to shine under the weight of the graffiti.

  However, the group of bored teenagers hurt the most. They were not knowingly cruel, and perhaps they were right. They sat around their bonfire, roasting food, laughing raucously, and trying on philosophical versions of themselves to see how they fit. They debated the morality of exploration. They told the tales of destruction and violence that had accompanied humanity’s forays into space. Genocide. Exploitation. The joy of discovery was merely a facade for the reality of human greed.

  I watched them argue from atop the engine bell. I built my defenses around their conversation. I told myself that for them, these questions were merely a fanciful way to test their own developing moralities; the ship was merely a prop. What did they know anyway? The horrors of colonization would never test their integrity, for they (like the rest of their generation) would be fettered here.

  But as they spoke, I felt the impact of their words beneath my hands. A coldness akin to the chill an eclipse pulls over the planet chilled my skin.

  We were no strangers to dark conversations, The Whelk and I. We had contemplated our respective ends together with an almost aesthetic sorrow. The poet faces her end as only a poet can—a final act of poetry. The Whelk and I had passed such a sentiment between ourselves, if not the words.

  But now, I felt The Whelk struggle to form the words with a bitter precision, though the very effort scraped away at it as a rasp in the cabinetmaker’s hands cuts away the wood.

  I was content to cease being. That is the nature of everything. But I cannot contain my horror. I was not prepared to discover the evil being I had been. I am less than what I thought I could be.

  There is no name for the emotion that exists beyond the range of rage and despair; it passes through the normal array of colors and beyond the ultraviolet to some stranger state.

  Though many have felt it, none long for it. There is no sweet wistfulness in seeking it. Being what I was, it was beyond my ken. Because I could not understand it, I couldn’t shape it, or change it. When I tried to alter it by singing the nightingale’s song or pressing myself against the bulkhead, The Whelk’s coldness transferred into me. I lay frozen in the silence of its umbra.

  And so it was that no more words passed between The Whelk and me until its supports failed, it crashed into the rocks of the sea, and it began to drown.

  I watched in horror from the abandoned firepit. I had sat there, hoping to warm myself in the embers of the teenagers’ fellowship—their fond memories of such gatherings in the past and their sad knowledge that their days of firepits and languor were numbered.

  At the moment that the rocks pierced The Whelk’s hull, I wasn’t sure if the shriek I heard was the tearing of metal or my friend’s scream of pain, somehow felt across the waves and beach. But then I saw a gash in its side, and I knew that it had been both.

  A realization gnawed at me. I had grown stagnant for decades, enchanted by my own destruction. I had let myself become inert, trapped in the waves of the past as they gently tugged me under into obsolescence. I had convinced myself that I was nothing more than a robot pursuing its programming. Just like The Whelk had been a receptacle of humans’ violence, I had allowed myself to be passive, merely a vessel for their emotions.

  Such an existence is not enough.

  As I watched The Whelk, my kin of spirit, take on water and will itself to be tugged into the undertow, I knew I had to act. I could not be satisfied with waning and a quiet death.

  I swam out to the breach the rocks had created in my friend’s hull, buoyed by the memories of a million others who had swum such waves in the planet’s past. The distance was not a large one, but the waves bounced The Whelk in their troughs, carrying it out to sea. I felt an urgency roil inside me.

  I felt my palm smack against the side of the hull midstroke. I squeezed through the gash and into The Whelk, the movement recalling scrambling up jungle gyms and hauling oneself up to a hay loft. Once I was inside, I investigated the damage done. Luckily, water had not reached the level of the breach, and the breach itself was not too large. I stroked the hull where the flesh was unspoiled and whole. The Whelk shrieked beneath my hand, its panic electric beneath my flesh. It yearned, oh yes, but not for anything I could give it. It pleaded not for the warmth and play of a summer’s sea but for the crushing depths beneath.

  With a moment’s mourning for what I had been, I began to disassemble myself.

  I carefully removed one of the plates that had protected my chest. Alone, it was too small to cover the rent, but when paired with its partner plate from my back, it sufficed. I took a container of emergency adhesive from a nearby repair kit. With the patience and love of a parent repairing their child’s beloved stuffed animal, I used the bonding agent and my own body to seal The Whelk’s wound.

  When I was done, I knelt beside the patch in the hull and laid my hand upon the scar that joined the new flesh to the old. The Whelk’s fear curled into questioning, a slow unfurling like a campfire’s smoke against a summer’s night.

  As I moved toward the flight deck, I nearly tripped over the piles of detritus I had left behind. Detritus, no. These were part of me, memories made physical, bits of hardware that formed who I was. Nostalgia was not merely my programming; its molecules permeated every component piece of me. As I brushed past them, I was overcome by the joy of fluttering holiday streamers and trees grown large and deep since childhood’s time. I felt the surprising weight of love’s first kiss, and when I held myself up by pressing against the hull, I could tell that The Whelk felt these memories, too.

  Our selves, though still separate, had already begun to merge. Perhaps they had been merging since the first piece of me had fallen carelessly to the floor and The Whelk sought the remnants of its warmth. My warmth.

  That eased the guilt of what I was soon to do. When I clambered onto the flight deck, I looked around to see what was broken, what was empty. A glance around the flight deck showed me that some wiring had gone astray, its tangle perhaps a nest for some long-lost creature. I sighed as I unspooled the wires that ran through my right leg. I was exacting in my cuts, for I knew that more than one life depended on my precision now. I spliced them to the wires that had come loose and reconnected The Whelk’s systems. More lights lit up on the instrument panel.

  I read the panels quickly, assessing what needs were most urgent. A sensor was badly damaged, and so I stripped the sensor from my right eye, and with it passed all that my eyes had seen along to my friend. (Oh, how the sunsets had bowed so gracefully to let the constellations dance across the celestial stage!) The chips of my olfactory systems were able to be repurposed to help rebuild the computer systems that The Whelk needed to navigate the treacheries of the unknown.

  I could catalog each and every piece of myself that I dismantled and used to patch the lingering wounds of my friend. But that pain is not the core of our story. Suffice it to say that I removed the pieces of myself until little more than my core, my hands, and my left eye remained.

  As more of The Whelk’s systems began to come online, its questions became sharper, its urgency more piercing. As I untangled another skein of wire from myself, I said aloud, “No need to worry, friend. I know what I’m doing. I’m not destroying myself for you. I’m reinventing myself. Us.” I fit the wire into place and paused. “I can feel the guilt in you. The violence the humans used you for. I know that pain can never fade, never change. Because the actions of the past can never be changed.” I shook my head. “In your core you link that to what I am doing here. You feel ashamed of the sacrifice you misread in me. But this is no sacrifice.”

  I paused for a moment and looked at what I had wrought. I hoped it would suffice. “I’m not destroying myself for you. I will still remain. I will be me, and you will be you. But together, using what little power we have left, we can be something new. We can explore. Without doing harm.”

  I gingerly reached inside my chest and removed the memory drives that had been my heart. I placed it lovingly in the cradle where one of the ship’s main drives had once been. I smiled as I felt the familiar, faint vibration of a computer’s drive whirring, booting.

  Then there was a pause and a ripple of warmth as The Whelk welcomed me into our body. Our ship-self rumbled as we righted ourselves and began the preparations to launch into the sky above.

  Let us begin our journey and become something more together, The Whelk whispered. Together we looked down at the planet below as we roared into the sky.

  I could taste something new in the air, a longing not for the past, but for an unknown future. I laughed joyfully. Perhaps they will see us glitter in the sky and dream.

  About the Author

  Samara Auman is a speculative fiction writer who is enamored with the concepts of consciousness, nostalgia, and the uncanny. She lives in the mossy Pacific Northwest with her husband and two appropriately mischievous cats. Her work has previously appeared in Fireside Magazine.

  The Neuroscience of “Babirusa”

  Arula Ratnakar

  Human minds are fascinating machines. They are able to process photons, soundwaves, and various other physical phenomena, turning the information into thought, emotion, and cognition—experience. They take snapshots and store these experiences to reemerge as memories in the presence of a reminder, then use those memories to generate fantastical simulations during dreams—experiences in their own right. As humans, we can convert complex, abstract concepts into generative language that has infinite possibilities, because it is communicative, structured, dynamic, and symbolic. This ability to communicate leads to complex networks of society, laws, and ways to judge morality. We, as machines, are perfectly crafted to observe and interrogate the nature of reality. It was inevitable that we turned that inclination inwards, through neuroscience, to try and decipher ourselves.

  In my novella “Babirusa,” I wove in various themes of interest that neuroscientists are discussing and tackling, at the systems and computational levels as well as through direct perturbations by synthetic biology. In particular, I focused on reality, personality, and morality. Of course, since “Babirusa” is science fiction and not real, there was some hand-waving in my speculative science inventions.

  Still, the hypotheses and technologies I came up with are rooted in real science, which is worth discussing.

 

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