A.I.Alan

Ryan stared up at the sky. Millions of stars and planets shone brightly in every conceivable direction for billions of miles, their pale glow keeping his home planet of Brant from ever growing dark. It was the sort of sight that was supposed to fill a person with deep wonder and understanding and connect their very soul to that of the universe.

Fuck I’m bored, he thought, finishing the last bite of his sandwich as the cosmos danced majestically around him.

With his break over, he slowly started to return to his workstation. His gaze moved over to the vast scrapheap that lay before him. Thousands upon thousands of broken-down spaceships, appliances and computers covered every inch of the ground, to the point that he had forgotten what the natural floor looked like. It was a view so ingrained in his mind that he could still see it when he closed his eyes at night.

The only time anything exciting had happened was this one time he was pretty sure he saw a hippo, despite them not being native to this planet.

Or indeed, galaxy.

Also, extinct.

Wires, bolts and twisted pieces of metal crunched beneath Ryan’s reinforced boots as he followed the makeshift path towards the warehouse where he spent most of his days sorting broken things into piles of slightly less broken things.

Outside one of the large shutters stood one of his co-workers, a broad, muscular man with an equally rough personality. He had one arm resting against the wall as he made jokes to a woman who seemed captivated by every word.

From where Ryan stood, he could just about make out the shard of spaceship hull embedded beside the man’s eye following an accident two weeks earlier.

Coincidentally, that was around the time the woman had started talking to him.

Ryan looked down at the shallow scratch on his own arm. He had given it to himself in a bar one night before attempting to impress a particularly attractive woman.

Lucky bastard, Ryan thought to himself as he continued walking.

Several posters had been plastered along the warehouse wall. Most were faded, torn or covered in obscene drawings that Ryan strongly suspected had been contributed by people he knew.

One read:

THE NATION NEEDS YOU!

REPORT ANY UNUSUAL ACTIVITY OR SUSPICIOUS MATERIALS TO YOUR NEAREST NATION STATION!

In much smaller writing beneath it:

Your nearest Nation Station is over three days’ travel away, so please pre-empt anything life-threatening and plan calls accordingly.

Ryan scoffed. The Nation had control over pretty much everything: the Space Police, immigration, guns, science, pony rides, food, everything.

Nobody Ryan knew had ever bothered calling them. The Nation made little effort to hide what it thought of places like Brant anyway. As far as they were concerned, scrapper planets were somewhere to put people when the prisons became overcrowded and mines needed workers.

Next to it was a poster for Brant’s recently opened water park. Nobody was entirely sure why it had been built, but it was welcome nonetheless. Ryan had attempted to gain employment there but thanks to being a scrapper for fourteen of his twenty-four years, was told he lacked the relevant experience.

Also being unable to swim was an undesirable trait in a lifeguard.

Scrapping was unfortunately all that Ryan knew. He hated how everyone spoke about the work like it was a life, when really it seemed more like something that had happened to him and never stopped happening.

He had tried to leave Brant several times. His most ambitious attempt involved building a working spaceship from spare parts and resulted in a near-fatal gas leak and a hallucinogenic episode involving the hippo.

He wondered sometimes if he would have been happier not knowing about other worlds.

If nobody had written stories romanticising them, if no camera had ever drifted over shining alien cities, if no smug presenter had ever stood on a beach with three suns behind him and said something like, ‘Truly, the galaxy is full of wonder,’ then maybe Ryan could have convinced himself that Brant was enough.

But he did know.

That was the problem with dreams. Once you unpacked them, they were very hard to put back.

Like a pop-up tent.

Or a snake.

Looking back up to the void, he noticed that there was something different in his familiar sky: a dot that had no place being there, and certainly no place growing larger by the second. It was a Nation ship.

Ryan considered what a Nation ship might be doing here as he stared up, watching it fly dangerously low to the surface. He didn’t get much chance to think about it, though, as he saw it attempting a sudden landing next to a large pile of broken cockpits not far from him, using its emergency thrusters to send scraps of metal and debris flying in all directions. It dropped recklessly to the ground, then killed its lights and engine, plunging the ship into darkness.

Ryan smiled to himself at this new development. He didn’t care if it was good or bad news. The only thing that mattered to him was the fact that it was news.

He immediately ran over to a large pile of scrap to hide behind and observe the ship’s landing spot, waiting for the hatch to open so he could see whoever was desperate enough to attempt an emergency landing on uneven ground filled with scrap metal.

Ryan couldn’t take his eyes off the ship. He kept thinking of how, if he owned a ship this nice, he’d never set foot on a planet like this. Unfortunately, whoever had landed seemed to share the same sentiment. After ten minutes of observing the ship from afar, there was nothing. No lights, no sounds, no anything.

He carefully moved closer.

Still nothing.

Granted, he didn’t know much about Nation ships, but this was strange by anyone’s standards. Why would someone want to hang around in a powered-down ship in the middle of a junk pile? More importantly, why had no one come out shouting? In Ryan’s limited experience, people in authority loved shouting. It was practically their natural language, along with pointing and owning better shoes.

The ship wasn’t massive, maybe large enough for a crew of around ten people. Its cargo bay was quite sizeable. Maybe not big enough to transport anything of any significance, but it would still easily fit another smaller one-man ship. Or around fifty pieces of unused gym equipment, something Ryan frequently had to sort through.

Ryan took a while to appreciate its beauty. He had never seen anything this new before, except on TV. Even then, on TV there was always a smug host standing in front of it explaining how much it cost, which tended to ruin the magic.

His fingertips brushed its metallic exterior. No bumps. No raised scratch marks. Nothing ever came down to this planet in this condition. Even the ships that transported the broken-down vehicles were pretty old and battered. Ryan was unsure how to handle a situation like this. This was a big find. Huge, in fact. He knew the next few moments would mean the difference between a reward and a disciplinary meeting.

Ryan reached into his pocket and pulled out his personal communicator. His supervisor would probably be pretty pissed off with him calling at this hour, which would give Ryan great pleasure, but he’d be in even more trouble if he didn’t tell him about it at all.

The device’s bright glow reflected off the ship’s exterior, highlighting a finish so pristine it seemed untouched. Ryan took a moment to admire it once more before hearing a low whirring coming from inside.

He froze. Ryan’s usual defence mechanism. His brain was unable to come up with a reaction, and he didn’t feel like his body would go through with it even if he wanted it to. He desperately tried to will himself to move away from the noise, but it was no use.

He saw the entrance hatch slowly lowering. He was half expecting a blinding light and billowing fog to come pouring out of it before realising all the lights were off, and that there was no conceivable reason for there to be fog on a spaceship.

His gaze moved between his communicator and the opening.

One of them was a ticket back to normality. A call to his supervisor, a reward if he was lucky and a return to the scrap heaps by morning. The other was an invitation into the unknown, which sounded romantic until you remembered the unknown was very good at killing people who had no upper body strength.

He knew instantly what he’d prefer.

Another sandwich.

But food would have to wait. For the first time in his life, the sky had come down to him.