The Stephanie Glitch, parts 2,3,4
The Stephanie Glitch, parts 2,3,4
(includes link to first part)
I’ve got 1200 subscribers here. When I started posting Stephanie I had 25, so I wanted you all to see her, as she is now, polished. The beginning of the story has changed a lot over those months. It’s now punchier. Still weird, but punchier. I’ve cut a lot out and added some smarter stuff.
The earlier parts of the book are split into microchapters, as the perspective alternates between timelines. This is the best way to make a big plot as simple as possible. So, some emails will have multiple chapters.
Missed the first part? Click here.
THE STEPHANIE GLITCH
2
Toumai checked the signal once more. It was not a glitch. The beating heart had a faint murmur. Printed hearts would not suffer this issue. He had also discovered that there had been a spike in temperature and air density inside the research deck at the moment the heartbeat was detected. Air had been suddenly displaced by something within this sealed chamber. But the pod was secure. The airlocks were sealed. The skeleton had not prematurely grown flesh and broke free. Something else was there. Something human.
If Toumai’s new suspicions were correct, an intruder had just teleported into the most sensitive laboratory of the starship and was stood in front of the most precious living experiment in human history. But there was just one problem with this theory: Teleportation was impossible.
He pressed onwards, shooting through another connecting corridor between two asteroids, his body rattling as it rumbled over the curved golden tracks.
3
Stephanie was staring at a TV screen above the bar, depicting some unknown music video. A record player needle was dropped onto an LP, the camera zooming in. Stephanie drew it on the back of an upturned coaster, the drawing illuminated only when the roaming laser lights passed over her, some simulation of the aurora borealis. The outline of the record became something else now, a planetary ring, before shifting again. It was an enormous train track, a particle collider, a spiralling descent into a black hole.
“What did you mean, how old life is allowed to get?” Emma asked. She was halfway stood up, still not fully committed to entering the shuffling crowd of people that had condensed around the understaffed bar.
“We might not last long enough to make a big enough game,” Stephanie explained. “It would be like you dying in the middle of an art exam, unable to finish a portfolio.”
“A preferable alternative,” Emma joked, “I ruined the last layers of detail.” She got up and walked into the crowd.
Almost immediately after her friend had gone, Stephanie took her battered notebook from her little bag and began writing something. At first no words arrived on the page, so she waited. The music was too colourful, the lights too noisy, and the smell of scented smoke from the dancefloor smoke machines filled her head with pink.
Eventually she managed to draw the first half of a spiral galaxy, copying the curve she had drawn on the coaster. But it soon changed, wrapping around itself to become the beginnings of an ammonite shell. She penned the chambers in gently, allowing the pen to wiggle and form the natural sutures. As always, she wanted to add a skull somewhere in the design, but didn’t feel confident enough to finish the piece. The music kept thumping through her bone marrow, the smells and chatter kept mixing into prickles of light, and the passing lights continued their hasty evolution into thudding, shaking embraces against her entire body. The music changed, and blues and greens now hovered through wispy tendrils of smoke machine smoke, embedding Stephanie in a personal nebula. She hunted for coloured pens or pencils, discovering all she had was another black pen.
Stephanie looked up from her table and surveyed her surroundings. She was dressed like everyone else here: Black boots, black dress, dark eyeliner, but she didn’t feel like she belonged. Emma, however, stood out like a unicorn at a funeral. She was in a bold white thing that faded into rainbows at its base. Her ginger hair was natural, which placed her firmly in the minority. Still, she was already making friends as she waited at the bar, already making strangers laugh at her jokes.
“I’m the alien,” Stephanie mouthed to herself, before writing the words above the ammonite. She began penning in little cartoon eyes into each chamber, adding comma-shaped flecks of movement, as if the thing was spinning or oscillating. Someone carrying two handfuls of pints stopped to look down at her drawing, but she didn’t notice. She added a little stick figure to the top of one of the ammonite’s chambers, then numerous exploding planets in the background. Finally, she added some dialogue above the stick figure.
“Do you ever get the feeling the world is about to end?”
4
For Toumai, nervousness began as a performance, a mask put on for the humans. Back when they were awake, the crew had got together and spoke of their theories. Stories of alien archaeologists or godlike scientists were passed around the table like arrowheads or bones, each chipped away at and refined as the humans huddled together in their new space-age cave. They bounced ideas off each other inside the white-walled interior of those hollowed out asteroids, their extraordinary minds free from the endless chatter back down on Earth. Toumai had absorbed all of this, absorbed the new mythologies the humans wove around themselves, draping them over their small tribe like furs against the endless night of the cosmos. He watched as they clutched coffee cups ceremoniously, as they debated the motivations of imaginary gods, and pondered the structuring of theoretical multiverses.
Toumai had read about gods before he was switched on. He knew humans would make gods of stars and weather cycles, of birth and death. He knew they would place them wherever a difficult question arose. Gods were what waited in the darkness, in the ignorance between discoveries, in the space between research fields, in the fear before death and in the ignorance after birth. Gods arose when grief or beauty could not be sufficiently explained by cold science. But what Toumai did not expect was that that behaviour, like some impossible interspecies virus, would one day get inside his head too.
A collection of ideas chattered through the dreamscreen from the Artifice’s hibernating crew.
She was out there, thinking, beaming her teenaged thoughts through space and time. What if she managed to build herself a body here from the raw materials in the asteroid field? And if it wasn’t her, then who was it? Whoever it was could violate the known laws of physics, bypass all security measures on the Artifice. They could kill the experiment, kill her before she even got to her body. Who would do that? Are the Virtualists already here? What if we’ve woken something up we shouldn’t have? What if we’ve looked too far, opened too many doors?
Something changed. The heartbeat on the sensors in the research deck suddenly sounded different. It was faster, stronger. Toumai recognised the change. He was no longer the only nervous being awake on the ship.
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