↑ Beautiful Truth, Strange Charm ↓ - Part One
By Andrew Akers
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, we have a special story that’s subatomic in scope. I hope you enjoy its ups and downs. - The Editor
↑ Beautiful Truth, Strange Charm ↓
By Andrew Akers
We are going to crash. Gods, I hope so.
Much has been learned and lost in my million eternities, shifting like grains of sand on a cosmic beach. Something has changed, though. A strange wave has arrived at last, preparing its great, terrible collapse upon the shores of my existence. In these, my long-awaited final moments, I tell this story to remember where I am — who I am — and what's happening to us in the world beyond this one.
“I am Silvermore Sar'dalon,” I say aloud, struggling to solidify this personage from all the others. Next to me, the woman I had long-ago bound my soul to smiles. As I speak, we admire the sprawling folds, girders, apartments and wrinkles of the city-sized brain we have come to love and loathe. “And I am a psyche-mechanic, trained in the upkeep of Cassus Deville, a colony ship and one of the twelve Interstellar Consciousnesses.”
The words feel foreign, distorted, filtered through millions of other occupations, memories and experiences. I am a psyche-mechanic but I’ve also been an expert of any occupation with schematics available in the ship’s onboard library. Despite being soulbound to Orlese Lo’ren, the IC’s chief medical officer, I have also existed as a point within countless love triangles, quadrangles, impossibly complex geometries.
“I am one thing,” I say as the first memory organizes itself in my mind, “yet have explored all things available to me.”
My story began a long time ago — thirty-four minutes, external. We were approaching an insertion orbit with Thalamax, a dark, rocky planet hidden beyond the system's heliopause. Details of the mission escape me, but I recall it being twofold. One objective had to do with abiogenesis — the jump between non-living and living matter. The second was to begin life anew on its surface; basically, a colony-sized transplant. Civilizational panspermia.
♫Preparing countercharm,♫ Cassus Deville said in their sing-songy allvoice. We braced for wave collapse.
It's difficult to describe life as a neuron inside a brain superstructure, but I’ll try. It’s like there are two of me, partitioned by a membrane thin enough to be transparent but impossible to puncture on my own. One part — First Self — behaves as it normally would: It goes to the market, engages with the rest of colony, makes love. It participates in the million interactions that make me myself. Second Self, no more than a few hijacked synapses, exists as a link in a chain, computing velocities, trajectories, and life support as the ship travels through Charm Space. Evenly spread among the IC’s sixty-thousand inhabitants and fortified by Cassus Deville themself, the calculations do little to clog the bandwidth of First Self. The accompanying feeling of connection, however, is palpable.
Wave collapse — the moment when the Interstellar Consciousness observes themself and exits Charm Space — forfeits the borrowed synapses and severs the hive mind. It can either feel like waking from a favorite dream or into one’s worst nightmare. In the latter cases, it had become known as psyche-sickness.
Andrew Akers (He/Him) is a forest ranger and fiction writer from Pennsylvania, USA. His work has appeared in Book XI, Stupefying Stories Magazine, Fabula Argentea, Black Hare Press, and Cloaked Press. When he isn’t working or writing, Andrew is running marathons, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or raising his son with his far more talented half, Kylie. For more information, check out his website:
www.Andrew-Akers.com.
Copyright © 2025 Andrew Akers