Stuck in the snow, the car’s wheels tear a brown scar on white, an exclamation mark on a blank page.
“Where are we going to get a tow at this time of the day?” Sandie leans out of the window as I push up on the car boot. Rubber spins as slush sprays up my legs, freezing away the chance of any children in my future.
“Not the right question, love! How the hell are we going to get anywhere where we can get a tow before we freeze to death! A car hasn't passed in the last hour, your phone is dead and my phone has no signal!”
“Stop, stop, stop!” I shout at the top of my lungs. The engine dies, burnt rubber acrid in my nostrils brings me to a sharp realisation, heat is what we need to be worrying about. Heat, food and water. It could be days before anyone comes along this road.
“Whose fucking idea was it to to go on holiday in Alaska, Carl?” Sandie stares at me shaking her head as I stumble back to the car. “Get in babe, you’re shivering.” She kicks the passenger door open and I clamber inside, thighs burning with pain, flesh crystallising in icy heat.
Sandie grabs my hands and rubs them. “Carl, I think we might be in trouble here.”
“Yeah…no…sh…sh…it,” I stammer through chattering teeth as I look at her face, wan and drawn. “It’ll be ok, love. We need to think about keeping warm and watching the road. Save the power for signalling with the headlights.”
She tucks her knees up to her chest and hugs them, like a lost child. I can’t take this. No way out, nothing I can do to save us, no words of comfort. All we can do is wait.
The light is fading as I wrap myself in my coat, wet clothes lying on the back seat. Now I’m hugging my knees, as Sandie rubs my legs to try and bring some warmth back. My body shudders uncontrollably. Breath slows, a pressure in my head grows, throbbing at the temples. I feel myself falling.
“Don’t leave me, darling, don’t leave me, please.” Sandie’s voice sounds far off.
Ice in my throat, ice in my mind as that hot wall of pressure explodes in my head, building emptiness and then:
Everything opens out. Black emptiness unfolds in floods of colour--Welcome Back to Reality.
The synergy between mind and genetic-chip reverberates through my spine as endorphins and a thousand other chemicals flood my system. I rise through the mist into consciousness.
A rainbow prism of light refracts through the lenses of my retinal screen as vapours infuse in my blood. A simple gesture becomes pure meaning, my hand's shimmer significance as I wave at the other travellers. A rising crescendo of motes of mirrored sound tingle through me as my fellow travellers sound-wave back and I grin. Back to reality!
I shiver at the memory of the pain, the fear, the overwhelming emotion and love for the construct Sandie. The memory tape spliced with my subconscious, down to the bone at a genetic level. I can feel the aching and burn of frostbite in my limbs, an echo from the genetic-chip, a final gift of feeling.
Carl’s memories are mine now. I can see his children, an echo of his face and thoughts. Sandie embraces him, a look of longing in her eyes, as the children watch. Further back, to a woman looking down at me and cooing. Clucking sounds in a sing song voice. Warmth and the smell of skin, soap and something I can’t recognize. This must be a mother. What would it be like to have a mother and a father? To be a father?
I was born of a million specks of skin, recycled matter from other crew members and chemicals extracted from nebula. Designed from a template, computed by the AI from an algorithm so complex that it compartmentalized a section of its operational run-time to create us all. A fractal genetic pattern to ensure complete originality.
We orbit the sphere, the center of the AI core, glowing in a field of energetic thought and purpose through motion. Human batteries in a cycle of recycling, life is what we choose to create, no real purpose other than energy to fuel the journey.
Time is an illusion when you don’t age; experience is an intellectual exercise. I have moved away from the socio-games, the shared realities that can be lived with the other crew members. They just don’t feel like home. We’re still a long way off. How long I wonder? I can’t face asking, or rather I can’t face hearing the answer. Time to move on to another memory. Time to consume someone else’s visceral reality, to languish in those sharp exquisite emotions. Taste the alien feelings of pain and pleasure from another time and place.
The end.
. A big thanks to the folks over at The Writers' Block and specifically to bex-dk, tinypaleokitchen, jayna, authorofthings + carolkean for helping me workshop this story, thanks for your comments and suggestions.