Steph Bennion - Hollow Moon

“You’re old enough now to think about making plans of your own.”

“Yes, but to leave here,” murmured Ravana. “To leave you…?”

“My life is not your life,” Quirinus told her. “You have your own future to think of.”

They were interrupted by the sound of hands and feet scampering along the crawl tunnel. Moments later, Zotz’s ginger mop bobbed through the hatch to herald his arrival at the flight deck, his progress hampered by the bundle of cloth he held in his hands. While Ravana and her father still wore the flight suits they had donned for the trip to Newbrum, Zotz wore one of his father’s laboratory coats with the sleeves rolled back. It was clearly too big for him, but what drew Ravana’s eye was that he seemed to be once again wearing part of a birdsuit beneath, though she could not recall ever seeing him fly. Zotz was a strange boy who took after his Canadian father in many ways. His mother was away on family business in Welsh Patagonia and Ravana knew he was missing her dearly, not that he would ever admit it.

“I’ve found it!” Zotz declared. He dropped what he held to the floor. Ravana’s cat awoke with a start and went to sniff cautiously at the smelly bundle.

“That was quick,” remarked Quirinus.

“He can move like lightning when he wants to,” said Ravana, smiling. “He reminds me of the big bats you see flitting through the trees by the lake.”

“The flying foxes?” Zotz grinned. “They are pretty cool.”

He carefully peeled back the layers of cloth to reveal the untidy ball of wires and components within, then stood back in triumph. Ravana got up from her chair and regarded the mangled mess with some bemusement.

“What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?” she asked.

“It’s the AI circuit from a toy spider my dad gave me years ago,” said Zotz. “It was made in Peng Lai, Taotie. I took it apart to have a look at its brain.”

“A toy spider?” Ravana shuddered. “I can’t think of anything worse.”

Zotz drew their attention to a small metal capsule, no more than three centimetres square, at the centre of the nest of cables. The lid of the capsule had been crudely prised free and inside they could see a blob of what looked like green mould.

Quirinus peered at the circuit. “So you have a destructive streak. Don’t all boys?”

“The organic AI chip,” Zotz said irritably, pointing at the blob. “See? It’s all squidgy, just like the weird growth infecting your ship.”

“My ship is not infected!” retorted Quirinus.

“It does look similar,” Ravana admitted. “Is it really organic? Alive, I mean.”

“Not exactly,” said Zotz. “It’s a cluster of vat-grown brain cells on a semiconductor base. These chips are a lot cheaper than quantum processors but are smart enough to control simple things like AI toys, food molecularisors and the like.”

“And the Platypus ?” asked Quirinus thoughtfully, glancing towards the console.

“Where was the ship built?” asked Zotz. “Dad told me this sort of technology is common in the Epsilon Eridani system.”

“She came from the Lan-Tlanto shipyards,” Quirinus told him, giving the console an affectionate pat. “That was back when they actually built spacecraft on Ascension. However, she’s had a whole load of repairs and upgrades over the years and I think the AI unit did come from an old Taotie-class interstellar tug that had been broken up for spares. We took the ED drive from the same ship, as I recall.”

“So the Platypus AI unit is also a green blobby thing?” asked Ravana, wonderingly.

Quirinus plucked a screwdriver from the tool box. “Let’s see, shall we?”

Turning to the console, he reached into the mass of wiring behind the facia and pulled the green tendrils away from where they were wrapped around the metal case of the AI unit, a box half a metre square and almost the same in depth. The screws securing the cover came free easily and moments later he was gazing intently into the unit’s metal skull.

“Odd,” he said at last. “Very odd indeed.”

Leaving the cat to eat the dismantled remains of the toy spider, Ravana and Zotz peered over Quirinus’ shoulders to look for themselves. The AI’s metal case was filled by a spherical green mass that had a texture not unlike that of a plant, yet with brown streaks that looked eerily like veins. Like the writhing snakes upon the head of Medusa, a dozen or more thick stems sprouted out of the AI brain and on through the cable outlet, before splitting into the tendrils they had seen reaching throughout the ship. The swollen central green pod had grown across the surrounding circuit boards, swamping the row of data sockets where the ship’s wiring loom connected with the AI unit.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” asked Ravana.

“Err, no,” Quirinus admitted. “Definitely not.”

“The brain has grown tentacles!” Zotz gasped in awe.

Quirinus put down the screwdriver and took a small pair of cutters from the top of the tool box. He reached behind the console again, positioned the blades around a small tendril offshoot, then squeezed the cutters closed.

Ravana suddenly screamed and fell to the floor, holding her head in her hands. At the same instant, her cat let loose an unholy electronic shriek and leapt away down the hatch as if its tail was on fire. Startled, Quirinus dropped the cutters. Zotz knelt beside her, a look of panic etched across his young features. Ravana felt sick and ready to faint, as if all the blood had suddenly rushed from her head.

“Ravana!” cried Quirinus. “Are you okay?”

“What happened?” asked Zotz, looking quite pale himself.

Ravana slowly lowered her hands. “I’m… I’m not sure,” she murmured. She stared wide-eyed at the fallen cutters, beside which lay the piece of severed tendril. “I felt the pain. It was as if the cutters were biting into my own flesh!”

“What?” exclaimed Quirinus. “I don’t understand.”

“How could you feel it?” asked Zotz.

“The pain,” Ravana protested weakly. “I felt the pain of the ship.”

“Amazing,” murmured Miss Clymene, quite taken aback at the view. The ornamental pagoda in the palace garden in which they stood was on a slight rise, offering an unique vista of the whole of the hollow moon. “Totally amazing.”

“Freaky,” remarked Philyra, looking up from her wristpad.

Bellona had to agree. The long cavern was on a scale somewhat reminiscent of the huge canyons of the Eden Ravines, but seeing the ground on either side curve up and above them like it did was extremely disconcerting, especially when the landscape and its people high above somehow gave the impression they were looking both up and down at the same time. Of everything they had seen of the hollow moon so far, the only thing that seemed normal was the pseudo-gravity, which they learned deliberately mimicked that of Ascension in order to acclimatise the original colonists of the Dandridge Cole .

Only Endymion seemed underwhelmed by the experience. He had expected to find the asteroid crammed full of inbred and radiation-mutated recluses, kept alive by antiquated technology and eager to welcome the travellers from Newbrum as their saviours. Instead, the few residents they had met were perfectly normal people who were if anything slightly annoyed that strangers had been invited into their close-knit community.

“It’s different,” he conceded. “A lot of space. The new bio-dome at Bradbury Heights has parks and trees but it’s nowhere near as big as this.”

“But there’s no sky,” murmured Bellona. “Nowhere to look up and see the stars.”

A silence descended upon the pagoda as each contemplated the view before them.