The earth swallowed the moon tens and tens of thousands of years ago and swept up Mars fast after by incomprehensible grav welling operations. Terraformed it, strip mined it, and called it the second half of the dying reverse global cellular mitosis of the planet. All thoughts futureways and algorithmic carried out in deep frozen Qbit quantum computation. The original carrying capacity of the planet multiplied by resource use at accelerating levels and energy limitations, the possibility of throwing the wobbling unstable planet off its orbit and out of the Goldilocks zone capable of sustaining life. There had never been a problem so complex as humanity's continued existence. Never a problem so complex it took a year to run through the Qbits entombed in the cathedral built for them in the void of space. Exoplanets were then identified, courses plotted, another thousand years were spent building out the world ships. Each one bearing a shortened cut up name of some ancient historic figure from humanity’s anthropocene. C-Sar, W-Ton, L-Con, G-Bush, B-Clint, a whole alphabet of them.
I'm watching ancient news reels of some exalted God Emperor saying it was the ultimate destiny of man to reach the stars. Cross reference with pictures of wooden sailing ships, barges, oil tankers, the Knock Nevis. Mankind was romantic for everything pastways and had made sure that the world ships, hulks capable of sustaining life on a perpetual cruise to an exo determined to be capable of sustaining our species, the infinitely wise Qbit algorithms, made originally by ancient man, apparently as romantic as their lords and creators, made sure that these vessels looked a lot like variegated Brutalist interpretations of the hulls of sailing ships, steamers, cargo ships, oil tankers, canoes, anything ancient that took man to new places.
No one could ever count how many of us are walking towards it. A glowing tree tall enough you could guess it might pierce the atmosphere of the planet. Survivors of the crash we, limping and wheezing, a migrant caravan crossing endless sand dunes short and wind swept in one direction, away from us, away from the tree in all directions. Ocean waves of sand, every one of them uniform, four feet high, just enough of a pain to walk over on foot, crest one and then half tumble down into the gap between the next. We're all going to fucking starve or die of dehydration. Hear a ding, your pace has accelerated to six miles an hour. Stare at the tree and blink, try to measure its height, hear a ding, error, error, error. It was hot, night was perpetual, a breeze in my face, I carried a yellow umbrella, pushing it in front of me to block the wind from battering a hovering white and red ovoid medical pod with my wife under a plastiglass dome, breathing softly, drifting in and out of sleep, and I was glad then that if I stumbled over the small dunes, the medical pod hovered over them lightly, a gentle rocking up and down and up and down.
The ships housed a billion people each at their launch with room to expand the population. My ancestors had boarded the world ship L-Con knowing that a hundred hundred generations of their family, if they managed to fuck and breed, or didn't die from causes otherwise unforeseen, would be stuck on this motherfucker waiting to find the nearest but unimaginably distant pale blue dot in the direction the ship pointed. People volunteered for the ships, and people stayed behind. There was no forcing of hands. Your average human doomer back then didn't care. It was all idealists and dreamers who boarded these AI designed godbox wagons to save humanity from ten thousand more earthbound generations of itself.
I couldn't track my lineage back as far as the elite. No one had to work on the ships in a forced conventional sense, but this didn't stop humans from creating new and exciting but old and familiar class divides anyway. Class divides started and lasted thousands of years. And it’s why I grew up in low steerage and high grav, near ship bottom, cause you know, even with no directionality in space no matter which way you drift, humans crave to feel upright and sailing straight from their terrestrial origins. The vertical and the horizontal must be defined. Horizontally I grew up back ship, vertically I grew up bottom ship. "-L-Con/go fuck yourself-" A constant bit of graffiti grown up around.
Hundreds of levels up the party rang perpetual, generation upon generation of edible glitter and sadism. Body modification for no reason. Hedonism multiplied forever. Exponentially. Saw it more than once, got tired of watching the spectacles, confused by the mashing together of fashion from every era of humanity combined with grafted or grown body parts both human and vastly less or moreso. I would drink my champagne and go back down to the ship bottom maze. Spent my time reading and walking mostly.
The parties got worse the closer it came to my thirty third year. Five years out from the new earth for us they started the grand ball upstairs because we were going to make landfall. The name of the Exo we were landing on was given to it: Ozarka. Cross reference Ozarks, stubby jagged mountains, lush, green, lakes manmade and otherwise.
People died walking, fell down against a sand dune they were about to walk up or tumbled down one from the top they had just crested. I kept trying to measure our distance to the tree and it would error out, every time, still, after measured weeks of walking, consuming my own recycled piss water and chocolate flavored shit wafers after running out of the good stuff stocked in the suit. My wife was safe with recycled fluids and a life support system in the medical pod even if she’d died twice already. Once her guts almost ripped out by a shredding piece of wall that had reached point of no return and snapped to splintered teeth when the ship split and fell from the sky on descent. One strained wall in an inner hallway split, curled out in jagged splinters so fast it sent her bowels spilling half out of her suit, her body, floating in by then less than full gravity, her own blood as big red liquid balloons, pumping full and floating away from her, a surreal nightmare when you’re running away from your tiny shit one room flat. Floating intestines, shock, trying to hold them in, but slippery and falling out of both our hands. The other story going on. Planetside she smiled up at me from the med pod, breath fogging the plastiglass. I'd die before she would. She'd die of old age in the pod if I didn't get her somewhere and get her out of it. Feet bleeding in my suit, but numb because of post modern medicine. Tree glowed on the horizon. The tree wasn’t in the description of the exo, not in the travel brochure, didn’t show up on any sensors even as the ship began final descent said an engineer we’d walked next to for a spell before he fell down dead without giving a reason or a goodbye for his departure. We were walking and then he wasn’t.
Ancient ways of measurement. I held my arm out, my thumb pointed up, roughly measuring the tree. Three days later did same. The glowing tree’s crown had eclipsed the top of my thumb by 1.76 millimeters. Ran the equation as well as my shit brain for math could. I was two hundred miles away from the damn thing at least. I Sat down next to the floating med pod carrying my wife. Oh wife. This is fucking hopeless. Passersby wouldn't look at me there, dune topped, sitting staring at the glowing tree. Feet were bleeding. Mouth was drinking recycled piss dry, lips stale heated desert wind cracked. She'd always said she loved me because I was sturdy, a wall, safe, impossible to fatigue. I told her it was just the grav down there, and she said it was something else.
See, a cross class marriage, that's what we were. She, slender, tall, born to lower gravity, higher standing by technicality, rebellious by nature, thin and strong, indeterminate age but within a few annums of myself, had to be. Either that or she had existed forever. Guessed the healing disembowelment and the gash with the compression bandage down her side with the nano tech working it from life ending to light scarring proved that wrong though. She showed up thin with exotic gene modifications in the lower depths, cloaked black one day, and caught my eye the next. Swirled around each other in Oak, Berk, and Sonom provinces bumping together for years before any side of our word problem made an approach. I called her Bird because of exotic modifications like wings hanging draped down from shoulderblades armwards to her thin wrists and a neck so long she could be of avian origin. She called me Ulysses. I said she was exotic. She said I was on a journey. Asked why she came down underside with us and she said she needed the heavier grav, wanted to make her stronger, didn't talk much past the past. Past trauma had been her sustenance within the elite dancing, fucking, torturing, and cannibalizing their way across the top decks, the penthouses and palaces behind the golden doors. Always told her down in the bottoms there's plenty of that too. She always smiled at me over saying it because we both knew I didn’t know shit about the truth.
Sitting on top of that dune with her pod hovered next to me I let pass finite but uncounted minutes on an alien world. Someone had fallen dead crossways top the dune next to me and I'd sat long enough that from their body, quickly decomposing and being slow ran over by the blowing sands, from eye cornered, a glow was seen coming up from the half melting corpse, underneath layers of velvet and silk, for the deceased was obviously an elite overwhelmed by anything from thirst to hunger to the planetary grav, which by mental estimates was .3% higher than even at the depths of the ship where I had spent my entire life. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re ten thousand generations bred in grav less than half the lowers, it can wear down, crush, compact, microfracture, end in cascading collapse, and so the dead silken corpse proved.
My Bird had said years ago, she wanted to be stronger, experience the grav, get used to it. Then with her healing under nano bandage, escaping the wreckage, we fell four breaths long down onto sand and her side caught on a jagged metal edge in the tumble, just after her guts had gotten vac sealed back inside her, a deep razor of spiny metal ripped a mortality proving gash from her hipbone to just under her armpit, and somehow, without realizing, by the time I landed on my back she was cradled in my arms and coughing new blood everywhere under full gravity, painting the inside of her suit’s faceplate oxygenated crimson. Lies would be told if I said no one died in the acquisition of the medical pod she was recovering in, smiling at me whenever I looked down and met her eye to eye.
But the corpse nearby, underneath the velvet, silk, brocade, buttons of silver and gold, underneath every adornment man had ever come up with, a glow came up faint and slow at first, barely noticed until it was pulsing in my peripheral vision. And so in the pile of fabric I went digging until I found a multiplicity of the fruiting body of a fungal organism. I blinked, my eyes told me this was safe to eat, nutrient packed, and hydrating. The sound of trumpets played as I looked at the alien fungus, curled and expanding, burrowing and sprouting with each pulse, the planet eating the dead rich De Sade lookin’ man, sucking him dry, colonizing him with life he would never know existed on a planet he’d been born to colonize. The irony of it is not lost on me. I’d cross reference the fruiting body of whatever this fungal life was with images of healthy colonized coral reef, anemones, extinct bioluminescent ancient sea life so exotic humanity bleached it all to brittle white bones thousands of years before a Qbit even said hey, you gotta leave this planet because you right killed it.
And since no sensor said not to, I did eat a bounty from the corpse of the rich man.
The last thing I remember her saying as the ship made descent terminal was that we were born for that moment. But everyone's vision suddenly flashed red, blinking emergency lights and sirens filled every crevice of the ship, all hundred long horizontal miles and sloping 25 vertical miles at tip to 38 vertical miles at ass of the L-Con went blaring at us from every angle so we knew the worst scenario possible was the one we were experiencing.
The Leviathan had arrived. It bore no heat signature, thermal, radar, full spectrum sensors and absolutely nothing to give away its coming. The Leviathan. A ghost. I hugged Bird tighter to me and overlaid on every eye’s enhanced picture in picture personal view in the ship came live footage from external cameras mostly used for viewing distant astronomical phenomena, passing stars, generated trivia, whatever, only instead of anything imaginable there was a titan’s gaping mouth headed straight for the ship. It swam through the atmosphere. Cross reference a shark or a vid of a kingfisher about to spear dive its dinner. The ship was angled stern up for final descent, having burned through the outer atmosphere and then in free air descending by grace of ancient sciences, landing spot carefully chosen by our ancestors with their magic machines, and here this mouth is atop our vision, with a triple segmented lower jaw, a spiked tongue, and big like God would be if they came up and stared you in the face.
An eternal flaw of mankind in my opinion is the idea that you can build anything big enough to make it specified safe to perfection. Landing on an exoplanet so big earth could fit inside it twenty times, the idea of a craft being large enough to survive things so far removed by the laws of physics and cosmological horizons to the point of being impossible to predict anything aside from possible future existence of X by way of size as deterrent was obviously a cognitive flaw of man from the time there were still terrestrial oceans for ships our world in a box imitated in shape and vague appearance alone to float on.
The Leviathan was God when claws rocked the ship as it grabbed us on descent, and next came the horrible mouth. Me and Bird were thrown helter skelter around our bedroom, thankfully padded, but neither bird nor I made a sound as the whole ship was wrapped around by goliath, gripped by talons sharp as knives and tall as buildings, and over siren wail blew up the most horrible crunching noise, a feedback loop of metal on metal screaming at itself and us gripping walls or upside down unable to switch feeds off. Emergency, emergency, screaming from every corner. The Leviathan was pale with red eyes, but its mouth was black, its tongue red. Cameras cut static to black as they were destroyed, backup cameras switched views all over the externals of the ship’s hull in fast forward giving us vertigo. I vomited. Bird did not. The second bite from the Leviathan cleaved our whole world going back uncountable generations, the world ship L-Con, in twain, and as fast as it started the monstrous entity let loose claws, unwrapped itself from the ship, and pushed off and away weaving through the sky, dropping the two halves and countless pieces of us like a broken toy, but dropped from seven thousand feet up.
A ship as big as the L-Con though, at the very least, has a lot of padding. Tremendous explosive cushions left intact deployed to help soften the landing of each half of the ruined ship. Other airbags left not intact spit jets of superheated pressurized air and vast expanses of thick rubberized material, or worse, tons of shreds of it out into the air creating list and drag. The tumbling around our one room done we suited up and left, scared of ending up crushed under functionally infinite tons of ship, upwards and sternwards. Gravity still tenuous, and then the exploding hallway and my Bird’s guts floating up to meet us. Immediately I laid her down to triage the wound so we could keep moving, and in the middle of it a thunder crash distant from us as the half of the wreck we were inside of made contact. Gravity regained, bubbles of her blood, pints of it maybe, sloshed to the floor as I worked to mend her.
After she was put back whole It took half a day trekking, getting to where the ship had been ripped in half, but only thirty seconds for us to decide our only option was to jump and come what may in the beyond. Welcome to Ozarka.
The thing is, and I'm sure the Qbit god algorithms of forgotten earth knew, when looking this far out into space, you were looking at the past, and they had to decide if by the time a ship got to an Exo, the Exo would still be habitable… The journey to this mathematically distant planet had taken L-Con just over 625,000 years to complete. In that time who's to say that the lush water and habitability of the planet even still existed. Who's to say that the tree we masses walked towards even existed when this Exo was considered a primo choice for humanity over a half million years prior.
After the fall and the second wounding, killing for a med pod, screaming myself hoarse, I looked skyside so often to see if the Leviathan still swam the atmosphere, but if it did, in spite of its sheer enormity, it was invisible to me. Head math said it was bigger than the ship, 100 miles long or longer, at least 25 miles at the shoulder, a creature science of convention and earthward biology would say could exist nowhere in the universe, and certainly not anywhere with more gravity than where we came from.
And then now, I supped on the rich, the corpse’ refinement, that luxury, the glowing fungus growing and expanding and consuming slower than I could chew it up. All hopeless and starved to barbarity atop a sand dune. No one passing on their journey to the glowing tree in the distance reaching past heaven looked at me, or the medical pod, or me feasting on the dead noble. And I wondered if I was the only person on the ship aside from my love who wasn’t in a sort of terminal shock, or hypnotized, or even believing that me and she were alive. The tree glowed in the distance, hundreds of miles away, taller than the tallest mountain I'd ever read of in my whole life of study. And everyone still living from the crash far in our hindsight was headed towards it. My strength returned, I stood up, filled with alien nutrients, feeling more vital than I had in months, years, my entire life maybe, and I bent over the pod and kissed my love, our lips meeting separated by the thin life sustaining layer of plastiglass that protected her while she healed from what should have been two deaths. But she would survive. I would cannibalize. In the distance, the tree called those living, the only visible landmark in the middle of an endless desert, a lighthouse, a might be oasis if you didn’t die on the one way trip. We kissed glass and not lips and the air filled with radio waves from countless thousands of years ago, amplified by the alien atmosphere or some other way beyond my means to explain, an ancient voice, ancient before I was born, a woman singing fly me to the moon, and let me dance among the stars, let me see what spring is like on, Jupiter and Mars. How radio waves can travel so long and still land somewhere intact, the improbability of timing. If there were a god and it was the pale Leviathan, and at the tree the Leviathan made any kind of home inside or atop, I decided as the song went on, scratchy but filling the entire planet with sound, when we started pushing forward again, just a few hundred miles to go, I was going to climb that tree and kill that motherfucker.