I Eat Rainbows

Red sky at night
Sailor's delight
Red sky at morning
Sailor, take warning

Yawn. Daybreak. Open eyes, flick off autopilot, and look up.

The fog clears, reveals the world. Horizon curving up into the vertigo-inducing distance. Sky above me.

Red.

I have to fight the urge here, to sweep the flyke around. The sky is always red here, in the morning. Your sun dying does that.

I stretch, and sit up. I’ve travelled… a good distance throughout the night. Not that it matters, but I like covering these distances. It’s a goal, of sorts.

I splash my face, call up a food bar, and start looking for somewhere to touch down. The map shows me an city not too far off, next to a forest I can regen fuel in. Ok. Let’s try that.

Yup, definitely abandoned. Not a sign of life or power anywhere.

I park the flyke in the forest and head to the still-imposing city. There was apparently a military base here, and when I get there I see it’s been, unsurprisingly, swept clean. I’m about to leave when I notice a small disk, wedged into the far corner. Interesting.

I take it, and head for the city complex. There’s a few power cells (more power never hurts), and — jackpot! — a preserved garden, in some form of greenhouse. This will feed me for weeks, and will be a nice change from the Nutritious All-Natural freakin’ tasteless bars.

I carry my hoard back, and dump it into the flyke. The grass and that tree in a perfect circle around it’s disappeared, so the tank’s full. Hey, I can make that a project – find out how to make the regen signature less obvious.

I strap in, take off, and feed in the disk.

It’s a letter.

“If you’re reading this, sweetheart, I haven’t been able to convince the radzi to let you and Harz come with us. So, I want you to remember every single thing I’ve told you about living in a red giant world…”

I blank it. I do not feel comfortable reading some soldier’s goodbye to his family. They must be dead, the poor bastards. There were precious few of us who were prepped enough to survive alone on the ringworld after the radzi upped and left, let alone those who realised it would die as well. And then there’s me, but I got lucky.

It’s only after I’ve flown through the day, through the shadow square-created fog that always denies me a sunset, that I realise there’s far more used space on the disk than the letter would account for.

The brute-force attack is finished by morning – the passphrase is another message from the soldier. I feel nauseous at this, but control it before the flyke’s systems try to, uh, “help”. It’s decrypting the contents now anyhow.

I sigh. I’m going to have to regen fuel again today. A brute-force attack and then decrypting roughly four terabytes of data ain’t cheap. It’d better be worth it.

The city I land in has retained some of its beauty, since the Abandonment. If I squint I can almost see the children cavorting, their parents watching them and smiling, the radzi watching them and not smiling so much…

I shake my head, and scavenge. The shadow square’s almost here by the time I remember to head back, backpack depressingly light.
When I get in the flyke, it pings me. The decryption is complete. I take off, and run the binary in a sandbox.

It’s an AI. A sentient one, by its confused activity, until it finds the speakers and microphone interfaces.

“Hello? Harz? Maria? It was Harz who decrypted it, wasn’t it, he was always such a smart littl’ kid…”

Now I really do vomit. It’s a brain-scan of the soldier – he must have gone to terrible expense to get this done, not to mention ethical dilemmas and hiding it from his superiors. And now I’ve woken him up, to tell him what?

That his family, whose company he was expecting to wake up in, are dead? That he’s been in stasis for over ten years? That the world he knew has changed so drastically that he might as well as have flown to the other side of the galaxy? That all he has for company in an entire world is one wanderlust-infected old man, walking the world to his death?

I switch off the AI, and lie back. And – a part of my brain is churning away that cities must dissipate the fog somehow but I shut it up, because I can see the evening sky.

It’s red.