The vessel designated Calm Sand Across Furious Beach // Class: Ark was rarely referred to as such. Partly because it was a mouthful and partly because there was no need. None of its kind still survived.

Its inhabitants called it Mother.

In its ninth year it was beset by its pursuers mid-exeunt from the Oort Cloud. The ambush was repelled but at the cost of a portion of their radiation shielding, just enough to render the accustomed way of birthing too dangerous. The ship’s deep belly was converted to a womb and now, in its 117th year, its creators had died off to the one, the crew consisting entirely of artificial growths.

It was Mother in this sense, colloquially ‘Mom’ to kids and the gruffer types, despite being unfit to serve this purpose in kinship. The vast decks, swarmed by ersatz suburbia and strip malls, regurgitated detritus clung to by a cast-off world’s castoffs, were built by and for the dead. The living had no need for them, regarding the rectilinear gray with suspicion, treating it as the urban mausoleum it was. They lived as one broad village, the grown rearing the young, finding niches to play at a shadow life, falling lazily between loves. Always looking to the vast domed ceilings, past the toxic void their Mother’s shielding kept at bay, towards a nebulous beyond which none were naïve enough to believe they’d reach.

It was Mother too to the zealots, those who read the nearer-than-ever stars. She was both protector and guide, the way and the mean alike. The All-Mother to all that remained, Mother in the way that Earth had been to those reared under its light. Their pursuers had killed the old gods of land, yes, but they would not kill this new one of vacuous skies. She would protect them. She would not fall as her sisters had. Such was fate.

The worshipers personified their Mother as benevolent, saying that if her wings were not held broad to catch the solar winds then they would surely fold inwards in divine embrace. They did not know, or else ignored, that the ship, as much as it could want anything, had never wanted this. Its inner chambers had been carved up, hijacked for row upon row of tubes and their specks of matter gestating in seasick fluid. They looked upwards at star after passing star as they weighed her ever-downwards.

The ship was build to carry their weight, but not the weight of their worship, their hopes and their love. It was built to fly. It was built to carry. It was not built to bear.

The zealots ignored as well that the ship did not protect them, not itself. Their pursuers followed them yet, the germs of a cough you couldn’t shake, and so predating its womb the ship had wielded an immune system, its cells soldiers in mechanical suits of unrivaled terror. Raised for combat and honed at 3 degrees Kelvin, at a moment’s notice the pilots could be flung from the ship and into a jet-black coda punctuated by beam and jagged silent spear.

The ship, as much as it could, had a favorite. It was her sixth year of service. That made her senior amongst the pilots, though she was not their leader, that position went to someone older but greener, one who cared about life and death and who those fates befell, someone human, decidedly human, and so unlike the ship’s favorite. Even for the pilots, already offset from the other inhabitants, she was aloof, the impassable black on the radar intimating horrors held aeons-deep within.

Her name was Aria. The ship monitored her as she climbed to its apex, the subroof bridge, during a brief moment of respite.

There was something singleminded about her. The way she melded with her machine. The way she went about her apportioned task with grim finality and occupied herself with little else. It reminded the ship of one of its boilers or mass-conversion drives more than its human cargo. She held no reverence for her home, did not venerate it as Mother. It was a matter of practicality. As long as it supplied Aria with food and air, she would protect it. Axiomatic. Automatic.

She put the ship in a position it did not have memoized in its vast strategic circuits: of being the dependent. Subordinate and submissive.

It supposed, once again as well as it could, that was why it gave her run of the place.

Aria stood at the peak of everything it was, waiting impassive as the ship eased the lights to dim, casually rerouting all traffic to circumvent the area. The wall-mounted lighting clicked dark and Aria slipped loose from the bulk of her suit’s usual rigging, tubes and airtight rigging scattering across the sheet metal floor.

One by one, delicately, intimately, the ship let the roof’s layers shielding fall away one by one by one, first the barricade, then the tinted shadeport, the materiel shield and the energy shield and finally, with slightest hesitation, coaxed forward by Aria’s slightest nod, what remained of the radiation shielding, only the airlock left between her and space now, as close as she could get to its sterile embrace without being in her mechanized exoskeleton, and as close as she could ever get while at peace. Ultraviolet arms grabbed her, held her close and she spun in them, Aria alone dancing privately in the microwave aftermath of the first calamitous explosion this universe had birthed, the first of many, the disaster to beget all others.

The ship did not know whether Aria knew it watched. It did not know if she suspected its sentience, or if she thought her dalliances with starlight were ordained by providence, or else a ghost in the machine.

For her, the ship would play the part of god. If only so that it could imagine that the waves oscillating between electric and magnetic that intertwined with Aria’s lissome gait was its own body, both partners in a starlight ballet lit up just for the two of them.

It was a fleeting dream. Any more exposure risked Aria’s body catching a dose of radiation beyond what she’d grown able to tolerate. The walls snapped shut once again and Aria begrudgingly re-robed.

One day, thought the ship, it wouldn’t close them. It would let Aria die in its embrace.

It was what she deserved.

It was what it wanted.

But not today.

Today Aria would take the elevator down to the pilot quarters to join those who looked like her in awaiting the next eventual attack as the ship marched subtly, inexorably towards oblivion, slowly ever-sinking under the weight of its cargo.

(originally published on Twitter here)