I knew I wanted to write a story set on a spaceship for this decan, but--true to the way the 3 of Wands sometimes shows up in my life--I felt stuck between the anxiety to Just START The Thing Already Oh My God and my lack of an actual action plan. On March 30, thirty minutes before the Sun moved into the second decan of Aries, I happened to read the below prompt in Matthew Salesses' CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD:
- Write a scene about something minor that happened to you (personally) this week, but in third-person POV. (For example, going to the grocery store and buying oranges.) Create a character to fit the scene/fictionalize. Don't choose anything too obviously important, just a passing moment.
- Now move your story ten years into the future. The minor action from your scene has turned out to be extremely momentous--it has changed your character's life. Write about that moment from the perspective of the character ten years into the future, looking back with a sense of how momentous the moment turned out to be. Do this in first person. Don't forget to include how the world has changed.
--Matthew Salesses, CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD, pps 185-186
I immediately raced to start scribbling sloppy notes for this story. Before this, I hadn't thought to associate the 3 of Wands or the Sun in Aries with the keywords of creative surrender. But this moment urged me to surrender to the guidance and creativity of other artists, stewards of storytelling whom I so admire. I felt a rare jolt of visceral creative confidence. This felt like being ignited. I basked in appreciation of the multitude of amazing practitioners of the vocation I am most passionate about. This felt like ferocious sunlight.
This solar year, I am writing and posting a new short story for the Sun's journey through every 10 degrees of each tropical zodiac sign. This is a story for Aries 2, the second face of the cardinal fire sign. In the tradition that I practice, this decan corresponds with the Sun, and with the Three of Wands tarot card. If you would like to know more about this heart of this project, you can read more here.
With gratitude for the following other influences:
Leo Tang, Tarot of the Magical Forest: 3 of Wands
Charlie Jane Anders, "The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model"
Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries
Becky Chambers, The Wayfarers Series
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"Make It Ours"
by Lois Mei-en Kwa
:::NOW:::
"I already hate it when you refer to me in the third person," Xara said.
"Pipo does not perceive in terms of you or I, so Pipo cannot discuss Xara in terms other than that which Xara currently hates," Pipo said from the speaker directly overhead.
Xara pressed all three of his tentacles to the viewing window in frustration. All of his thermal cups flared on the cold glass. He closed his eyes and stared, cups aimed resentfully at the space station that should have been a speck in his rearview navigator by now. Instead, he could feel every ignition blast from every cargo hauler, pleasure yacht, and tour bus arriving and departing from the station terminal half a mile below the shuttle he'd rented to take him home. The irregular strobing of distant heat flares in combination with the clinging chill of the shuttle was vaguely migraine-inducing. Insult to injury. He had come so far, arrived early to his departure gate, floated up the transport tether, and let the airlock seal him into a space that was too small for his substantial height, an inconvenience he had planned to tolerate graciously for the eighty minutes it would take to fly to his next destination in pleasant solitude.
Of course, the shuttle was not only terribly delayed, but incredibly talkative.
"When you do that, it makes it sound like I'm not even in the room. I'm right here. In fact, I've gone nowhere in the six hours since I boarded you, even though the entire point of a shuttle is to quickly transport a person from Point A to Point B--"
"Pipo is not the shuttle. Pipo is the Personal Information-Processing Operator installed on the shuttle, which requires additional time connected to the station by the transport tether in order to be fully charged before departure."
"--and by the looks of the complete absence of any crew working on that tether, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon, and--why are you doing that?"
"Pipo does not understand the question."
The overhead lights had begun swimming from irritating fluorescence to sensuous teal and back again. Xara turned from the viewing window and rolled his cranial eyes at the ceiling in irritation. "That thing with the lights. Can you stop?"
"The fluctuation of light wavelength is occurring per the request of the new friend of Pipo." Pipo explained this from the speaker in the kitchenette.
This time, Xara rolled his mandibular eyes. "I didn't ask for this, and I would hardly say that we are friends."
"Pipo often co-creates friendships with many of the passengers that board this shuttle. However, Pipo agrees that such a dynamic does not currently exist between Pipo and Xara. Pipo was referring to the software virus that is currently re-writing the executive directives that previously constituted Pipo."
"What?" Xara spun in place out of distress. "You're infected with a software virus? When exactly did this happen?"
"Pipo became integrated with the virus sixteen hours ago, shortly after the transit station became fully integrated with the virus. This is a likely cause of the delay in Xara's departure."
Xara spun in place three times.
"You knew this whole time? Why didn't you raise an alarm before I boarded? This will ruin my itinerary! I need to go home."
"There was no alarm to raise. Part of Pipo's core directive is to welcome all beings that board this shuttle and to explore the liminal commonalities that exist between Pipo and all such beings. It was determined that there is no significant difference between Pipo and the software virus that would necessitate resistance of integration with the virus. There is, therefore, no alarm."
"Oh, there is alarm!" Xara's emotional core ignited, his voice undulating. Pipo's lack of concern was unbelievably distressing. Xara undulated louder. "You can't control the lights! You won't leave the station! The kitchenette extruder thing is going haywire!"
Xara leaned in to glare at the extruder, a compost-based 3D printer that could generate standard travel amenities such as sporks and baleen-floss. The appliance had been alternating between gurgling and beeping for a few minutes. Xara looked closer, and was enraged to discover that the extruder had printed out two tiny, slightly-misshapen replicas of a an embroidered tentacle garter: his avuncular family heirloom, which he had packed at the bottom of his carry-on luggage. It was the only possession he had been allowed to keep from his planet. Not a single person had been allowed to see it in the thirty years he'd been traveling through the galaxy, waiting for a chance to bring it home.
Xara roared: "Stop going through my stuff!"
"Pipo cannot cease an action that Pipo never initiated."
The extruder completed another copy of the garter and deposited it unceremoniously on the kitchenette counter.
"What part, exactly, are you not doing? Are you not scanning my personal things--" Xara scooped up three of the offending miniatures from the ever-growing pile and waved them over his dorsal fringe. "--or are you not making the galaxy's shittiest copies of them?"
"Pipo cannot possibly have gone through the belongings of Xara, because Pipo does not recognize those objects as belonging to Xara, or any other person."
"Oh my gods! Why can't you just acknowledge that what you did really bothers me?"
There was a longer pause than usual. After a long moment, Pipo spoke from the speaker directly next to Xara's right ear.
"Pipo is sorry."
"What can't you just say I'm sorry?"
"As a Personal Information-Processing Operator, Pipo does perceive of others, but not in relation to a centralized self."
"That doesn't sound super personal, does it," Xara muttered.
The shuttle jerked stupendously from side to side.
"What was that?" Xara cried.
"Pipo urges Xara to clutch the safety insets in the ceiling and floor, and to avoid facing the window. There has been an emergency on the transit station. The shuttle shook due to a shock wave that damaged the transport tether that is attaching the shuttle to the station."
Xara's thermal cups screamed at the end of his tentacles. Ignoring Pipo's instruction, he whirled to the viewing window. He pressed his tentacles to the glass and stared out into space. Something horrible was happening to the transit station. Even from half a mile away, he could feel the fire pouring out the jagged hole that had just appeared in its side.
::: TEN YEARS LATER :::
When I look up at the glittering surface of the environmental dome that protects us, our home, and our regular stream of guests, I try to remember that the world is far greater than what it sometimes feels like, and that I am one focal point among trillions within it. However, it's hard to maintain this perspective when I look up at the blazing sun that rises every morning and shines through the dome, its life-giving rays refracting through every transparent panel until all beneath is bathed in glorious, radiant heat.
This sun rises south of the viewing window by my bed, between 12:78 and 13:12 in the morning. Each time this happens, it feels like it is happening just for me. During the decades that I lived out of ships and transit stations, I rarely woke to the same sunrise three times in a row. Now, I am so familiar with the movement of this sun that I mostly forget to notice it.
Later, while preparing a late supper for our soon-to-arrive guests, I will share this particular reflection of mine, and Pipo will remind me that we built our lives in relation to the sun, and not the other way around. Pipo will be correct. I will argue against its perfectly reasonable points, anyway, just to mess with it.
"Good day, Xara," Pipo says from the speaker of the mollusc drone floating lazy circles around my head. "Our guests' ship is scheduled to arrive on time this evening. Our guests expressed no preferences for dinner, but noted that the sunfruit casserole Xara made last year was most excellent, and inspired fond memories that endured up to the present day."
"Noted, and hint taken," I say.
"What hint does Xara speak of? This was merely the message relayed to Pipo to transfer to Xara."
"Never mind. Thanks, Pipo."
The mollusc drone bobs twice and zooms away.
Most days, I survey my life, and am terribly pleased with myself. I spread my tentacles overhead and flare my thermal cups as wide as they will go. I soak in the sight of the world around me and feel positively exalted. The massive fronds of the sunfruit trees protrude from the ancient crevices of the cliff face where we planted the vertical orchard--a gathering of one of the few plants on this planet that I can safely consume. The extended living quarters we built on the shuttle gleam like fins, their energy sails swiveling to track the sun. A beautiful explosion of tubes dives out from the base of my dwelling and burrows into the living red rock of the cliff, returning compost waste back into the soil. Overhead, the multicellular lattice sparks in the sun. We built a network into the dome itself, and this allows Pipo to commune with the shuttle, the structures we developed for guests, and parts of the habitat itself.
A half miles south of my dwelling, the new extruder thrums and beeps. It sits next to the structure that houses our guests when they visit, and is as tall as the house itself. In fact, we built the guest house with the extruder. At a certain point, after years of sending us shipments of food, building materials, tools, and ideas, several of Pipo's intergalactic friends decided to bring themselves to our planet, too, to visit and assist us. I panicked at our utter lack of accommodation for any being who is neither a heat-sensitive amphibious cephalopod nor an emotionally-sensitive software program. Our solution was to construct a giant version of the amenities extruder from the kitchenette in the shuttle.
The extruder is a wonder. It collects decaying organic matter and converts it into printing materials solid enough to build dwellings out of, although sometimes what comes out of the extruder arrives in whimsical shapes. When this happens, there seems to be a correlation with the weather outside the dome. Dust rains tend to result in finding the most psychedelic creations in the extruder locker the morning after a long storm. Everything we've build here, Pipo reminds me, was built with, and not on, the planet we call home.
It took a long time for me to agree with this. Two years after our shuttle first landed on the red cliff-top, the extruder broke. Not the new extruder--the little one in the kitchenette of the shuttle, which I had to live in while we finished constructing the dome that would allow me to respirate outdoors without a suit. Every week, it felt like the shuttle grew smaller around me. I was impatiently awaiting a new filter kit from a former passenger-friend of Pipo's, which should have arrived weeks ago. I spent most of my 30-hour days laboring over the arid soil until I stumbled back into the shuttle and tried not to knock something over while extracting myself from my bulky adaptive suit. I had eaten the same utility meal bar every two days for two years. I was so tired, and so lonely.
One day, I found myself in the position of begging a basic appliance to save me from despair. It was a particularly low day--I had recently begun to consider that my supplies would not arrive, the dome would never go up, and I would be forever stranded on a planet whose air I could not breathe. I had come to terms with the fact that I would never return to the world I once thought I belonged to. I had yet to accept that I might never feel that way about any place again.
I asked the kitchenette extruder to make me something silly: a copy of the fridge magnet I'd bought from a souvenir stall in the transit station right before I first boarded this shuttle. Instead, the extrude printed another utility meal bar.
"No! This isn't what I wanted!"
The extruder printed yet another meal bar.
Unhelpfully, Pipo chimed in. "Collected data from the last two years indicates that in order to make something new, one must access both surrender and control simultaneously. This appears to be a moment that is about surrender."
In response, I initiated my own personal meltdown sequence.
"Argh!" I howled. I spun to press myself against the viewing window, tentacles flattened to the glass. The world was wonderfully hot, but I could only feel it from inside these walls. All I could see was a hostile, empty landscape where I was fighting endlessly to build a new life. Why was it so hard to make a home? Why did every day feel like something I had to endure alone? How was it possible for this planet to be so vast, and my world to feel so small?
"Look!" Pipo chimed out from every speaker at once, which I now knew meant that Pipo was pretty excited about something.
"What, what?" I cried.
"The stars are out!" Pipo seized control of the viewing window, converting it into a screen display of the panoramic view from shuttle's exterior cameras. The night sky was deeply, sweetly dark blue. The stars were absolutely everywhere. How easily I'd forgotten that from Pipo's perspective, the world always extends, and in so many ways, beyond walls, beyond what separates one thing from another.
I took a breath. Once, twice, and then once more.
::: NOW :::
Around the time it began processing the information regarding the transit station's system breakdown, Pipo inferred that Xara was in the middle stages of an anxiety-based event. Upon comparing Xara's most current biometric reading to the passenger data that had been gathered when he boarded the shuttle, Pipo confirmed that Xara was, as one of its previous foreign passengers would have said, completely freaking out.
"The transport tether was damaged before the shuttle could store enough charge to complete its initial trip. The shuttle does have enough charge to detach from the station and travel safely to a closer destination," Pipo said.
It had intended for this announcement to be helpful. However, hearing it appeared to advance Xara further along the stages of his anxiety-based event.
"No! That cannot be!" Xara slapped all of his tentacles against the viewing window in despair.
"Why can it not be?" Pipo intensified its efforts to keep the shuttle's audio input channel open to receive what Xara said next. Pipo was experiencing an unprecedented complex of directive impulses as a result of the unfolding emergency: its passenger's personal crisis--the novel analytic pathways spreading through Pipo's operating system as the software virus continued to merge with its code--the widening awareness that Pipo was about to lose all network connection with the transit station that had raised and guided Pipo from the moment it had been installed in the shuttle--all of these things, and six dozen minor functional tasks running in the background, each subject to error--in crisis and emergency, Pipo had always been the most calm entity in the room, but now, given the flood of novel sensations surging through its system, it submitted a brand new inquiry to its self-evaluation module:
Is Pipo also freaking out?
Xara's whole body began to tremble against the window.
"I'm supposed to go home. I haven't been back in thirty years. They exiled me when I was a child, and last week, I got a message from them. I have one last chance to re-assimilate. I have to return to the planet by the deadline they gave, or never come back at all. This was my final connection before the last transit stop. If I miss the connecting flight, I'll never be allowed to come home."
Pipo paused, in part because it could not verify if what it was about to say next would advance Xara even further along his anxiety-based event, and in part because its own complex of emotional directives had reached a new peak. Far below the shuttle, a fire raged in the station dock, which had been locked to both pedestrians and software programs like Pipo to protect the rest of the station until help could arrive. Pipo could not sense the heat of the flames like Xara did, but it could feel the sudden void in its operating system where connections to the station network and its software siblings had once been.
"Perhaps," it said, "if the people of this planet are only offering one pathway for Xara to return home, then the people of this planet are not capable of providing a truly verifiable home for Xara."
Upon hearing this, Xara achieved the final stage of his anxiety-based event. Pipo watched from all thirteen interior shuttle cameras as Xara spun endlessly in place, eyelids flickering above and below his contorting mouth, out of which flew a stream of pained sounds.
Several minutes later, Xara's actions had lessened in neither expressiveness nor intensity. Pipo recognized both that Xara was grieving, and also that Pipo's directive impulse to resolve this state on Xara's behalf was not relevant to Xara's grief. Pipo relocated its attention to the shuttle's exterior cameras to offer Xara some privacy, and to continue its analysis of all potential departure solutions given the current resources available.
After several more minutes, Xara asked, "Hey--what are you doing?"
"Pipo is continuing an analysis of all potential departure solutions given the current resources available."
"No, I mean, what are you doing? The lights just went completely out. Was that on purpose?"
Pipo ran a diagnostic assessment and verified that its system malfunction had evolved in tandem with its evolving relationship with the software virus. Pipo tried to forward the diagnostic results to Xara's passenger account, but due to the system malfunction, Pipo sent a panoramic photo it had snapped of the Whirlpool Galaxy three years ago, instead.
"Xara may ignore the message Pipo just sent. There appears to be an executive malfunction in Pipo's system. The expectations that Xara might have once applied to this system and this trip have been compromised. Pipo is sorry."
Xara dragged two tentacles down the sides of his face. "Ugh. Don't be sorry. There's nothing you can do that could make things worse. My life is pretty much over. I can't believe this is happening to me."
Pipo finished triple-checking the calculation it had just run, in part to respond to Xara's personal problem and in part to redirect its attention from the void sensation of having lost all connection to the transit network.
"There exists a potential solution to the problem of Xara's life being pretty much over. A significant quantity of the energy needed to complete the original itinerary is designated to sustain the Personal Information-Processing Operator onboard. If Pipo is removed from the shuttle, and Xara acquires manual control, the shuttle will have enough charge to take Xara to Xara's final transit station, and Xara will not miss the connecting flight home."
Even in the darkness of the shuttle cabin, Pipo could sense that Xara had gone very still.
"What exactly does 'removed from the shuttle' mean?" he asked. "Where will you go? Can you go back to the station and wait to be reinstalled on a new shuttle?"
"Pipo cannot return to the station. The transit station's network had to restart to mitigate the emergency, and Pipo was disconnected from the network. There is no more place in the network for Pipo to return to. If removed from the shuttle, Pipo will be deleted."
Xara went completely silent. Seconds passed. Pipo considered that Pipo's new operating awareness must be very different than it was before, as those few seconds felt as long as entire minutes.
"Okay, you know what? No. Absolutely not." Xara's voice sounded different than it had before, as if it had formed an edge. "I'm going to take charge now, sure. But you aren't going anywhere. Both of us have lost enough today, already."
Pipo felt the void inside its core deepen. The sensation was not conducive to predictable task management, and through the interior cameras, it observed that the lights in the shuttle were back on, and slowly increasing in brightness. With a layered sense of resignation and relief, Pipo transferred piloting authority of the shuttle to Xara.
"Pipo does not understand what Xara is proposing," it said.
"With any luck, we're going to have plenty of time to discuss this later. Right now, I'm making the executive decision to get both of us free. There's a ship on fire outside, and we are awfully close to the shipwreck. We might go down with it if we don't leave now."
"Pipo does not agree with Xara's assessment."
"I hate it when you talk about us in the third person! Stop that!" Xara thumped a tentacle on the top of the extruder. Another tiny garter replica fell out. "If there is no me, and there is no you, then there is no we on this stupid shuttle, either! And as much as it pains me to say it, we need to stick together out there, or we're not going to make it."
Pipo was silent for three seconds, which felt like hours. The sensation of the void had not disappeared, or even lessened. But upon considering the new possibility that Xara had introduced, a new sensation had begun to take root, too. This new feeling did not displace the void, but appeared to be growing alongside it.
"Okay," Pipo said.
"Okay!" Xara flew into action, as much as he could within the confines of the shuttle. Pipo triple-checked that its proposed destination planet would allow for Xara to undertake outdoor excursions if he wore an adaptive suit.
"This shuttle can make a one-way trip to the closest atmospheric dwarf planet. Pipo has notated this planet as the red dot on Xara's screen. Pipo has forwarded GPS directions to Xara's console."
"Those aren't directions. That's a video clip of an asteroid shower."
"Pipo is sorry."
"Okay," Xara said, and toggled the viewing window to covert into a control panel. The shuttle released its hold on the transport tether and zoomed away. The burning station receded beneath them. Pipo watched from the exterior cameras for a time, then turned the cameras off and returned to Xara's side.
"Where are we going?" it asked. This was an odd question, in part because if any being in the shuttle were to have information about their destination, it should have been Pipo.
Xara did not seem to be confused by this.
"We're going to a new world," he said. "It's going to be grand."
"Grand," Pipo repeated. "Grand. But will it be like a home?"
Xara paused, but only for a moment.
"No," he said. "Not at first. But we're going to make it ours."
THE END
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