Weekly Drabble #329: Reminders (Patreon)

This week's prompts are 'fear is what we learn' from jeffrey kessler and 'no one is ever alone' from EBB. Enjoy!

~

Reminder:

Peliska hated getting up. Not just because she was usually comfy and warm in her bed, but because she had to wash up and thatmeant she had to look in the mirror. She hated that, and had since she’d been very young.

“Curs-ed! Curs-ed!” the other children would singsong at her, throwing stones and whatever else they could bring to hand as she ran past them. She was fast enough that she was never in their range for long, but it was more the jeers and insults that hurt. The occasional sting of a rock that found its mark was only the punctuation on that. More than once, she had run home crying to her mother, who tried to soothe her, but she had gone through the same thing, as had Peliska’s father. He wasn’t around. He’d gone missing during one of his long work deployments. No body had ever been found, so officially he couldn’t be declared legally dead for ten years, but Peliska and her mother both knew he wouldn’t be coming home, and that the search for a missing Shamed had been perfunctory at best.

So from early on in her life, Peliska had learned to hate herself, most especially her own face. It was the wrong face, but she didn’t know what else it might look like.

With a sound of resignation that was both groan and sigh, she pulled herself out of bed. Her long tail dragged on the ground as her four clawed feet touched the decking and she flinched. Even expecting the cold, she winced. Temperature controls here were glitchy and the in-floor heating in her quarters had never worked right. She didn’t bother to get dressed. Who was there to see her?

“Come on you nosy little pervert,” she said to Buddy, picking the stuffed animal up and setting it on her back like a four-limbed rider as she trotted out of her small room. She didn’t even have her own privy, forced to use on a communal head, but again – there was no one else here, so she supposed it didn’t matter. Peliska sleepily meandered into the bathroom, hesitating – as she always did – before she looked at herself in the mirror.

The Shamed. That was what her people were called and had been for more than a thousand years, and thatname was the polite version. As she’d learned as a child, her people were also called the Cursed. Peliska stared at herself longer than usual, touching the curves and contours of her face. When she’d been young, she’d wished that she could pull it off and there would be a real face, her trueface, underneath it. A silly, ridiculous dream. This was the face she, like all her people, had been born with. The face that marked them as Shamed. As Cursed.

The young woman tidied herself up, turned on the shower’s water. Praise God, the heating was fine here. It just took a few moments for it to warm up. She posed Buddy on the bench opposite the shower stalls so he could watch, even if this morning she closed the door. Peliska tilted her head up in the blessedly warm spray, feeling the water cascade down her skin, soaking her hair. It was hot, almost too hot and she felt a flicker of that same childish hope, that the water would melt her her features away and leave a true face in its place, but it didn’t happen.

She leaned forward, letting the streams splatter across her upper body and then across her lower torso, rivulets of steaming water sliding through grooves and creases in the greenish scales to drip from her like rain through a canopy of leaves onto the forest floor. Her tail, as long again as she was, flitted back and forth in an instinctive expression of pleasure at the warmth soaking over her bare skin and scales...

...then the timer went and the shower cut off. On a facility with limited reserves, timed showers allowed all the crew to have their fair share of warm water. With Peliska being the only one here, it was hardly necessary, but the cutoffs were hard-locked. ‘No exceptions’ was the explanation, but she knew the real reason why. It was just another subtle insult and a way to keep one of the Shamed in their place.

She did enjoy the ensuing barrage of warm, drying air and she took a hand dryer, twisting her upper body and leaning back to dry out between her scales, passing the dryer to one of her dexterous feet to take care of her underside. Once she was fully dry, she exited the shower and picked Buddy up. “Enjoy the show?”

His stitched-on smile never wavered. “Of course you did,” she scolded him, once again putting him in his usual place on her lower torso. He fell forward against the smooth skin of her upper body’s back. She scoffed. “Keep your hands to yourself back there,” Peliska reminded the toy as she left the showers.

It might look odd, even childish and immature for a grown woman and an officer in the Interstellar Provisional Governance Concord to carry around a child’s stuffed animal and talk to it like a person, but there was a reason for it. Personnel assigned here were only allowed a very few personal items. It gets lonely out there, Peliska had been warned by one the previous sentinel crew. You might not think it does, or you might think you can handle it, but a word of advice – find someone to talk to.

Buddy was Peliska’s favourite childhood toy, so she’d used one of her very precious allotments of personal items to bring him along to this assignment. She’d felt ridiculous at first, thinking she could handle the loneliness but the advice she’d received had been spot-on. Buddy was her confidante, sounding board, workmate and a way to stave off the deafening silence that filled the sentinel station. On the nights when the Great Barrier surged and pulsed, gravitmetric waves rolling out and shuddering observation post to the point that she thought its hull might tear open and her heart hammered in her chest, expecting any moment to hear the shrill of alarms announcing collapsing bulkheads, she would curl around the stuffed animal, two arms, four legs and her tail wrapped tight around him, her shallow, frightened breathing stirring his soft, plush fur.

A station this size normally required a dozen crew, but Peliska was the only one here and would be for another year at a minimum before she, hopefully, was rotated out to a better assignment. Then another young officer would take her place, trapped in the endless, lonely halls and finding escape from the silence wherever they could.

Returning to her quarters, Peliska pulled on a tight white undershirt and her form-fitting regulation leggings. It was a breach of protocol to report for duty in anything other than a full uniform, but once again – there was no one to see her, or care. She took Buddy with her, as she usually did, swiping her code cylinder through the doors to command. An empty mezzanine of computer stations and unused chairs greeted her. Her personal station came to life automatically and she let out an appreciative sigh for small favours. She set Buddy down at the first officer’s post and slouched into her command sling.

The morning’s reports, diagnostics and maintenance logs sprang up in front of her and she scrolled through them. Nothing of note. A few minor tasks she’d have to attend to, but she could do them before lunch, leaving the rest of her shift to go stir crazy.

With a reluctant exhalation, she activated the main screen. “Let’s see what the weather looks like,” she mumbled to Buddy. The viewscreen came on, replacing the simple blackness with a roiling swath of off-orange colours, like zooming in too close to a storm wracking a gas giant’s atmosphere, but that same gas world would be nothing but the size of her thumb against what lay beyond her station’s hull.

The Great Barrier. The galaxy’s greatest mystery. If anyone knew how it had formed, Peliska had never heard from them. The first accounts of the Barrier dated back to very end the Demon War, when the galaxy had been ravaged by an unstoppable evil.

At that thought, Peliska felt a pulse of unease and self-loathing. Her people had chosen the wrong side in that war. They had fought for the Demons, and the galaxy had never let them forget it. Their worlds had been taken, their populations relocated back to their home system. Their economy had been destroyed by reparations, their leadership decimated by post-war trials, their surviving military forcibly disarmed, their industries nationalized and to this day still controlled by the IPGC. Even much of their history and culture had been erased, especially anything from the time they had served the Demons.

Most of that was locked away in Governance archives, like samples of infectious plague. What was left to them was the history that confirmed their crimes. So much had been lost during the war, and the Governance controlled what had survived, stripping away everything they deemed dangerous. The Shamed didn’t even know what their species’ original name was; they’d been given a new and lasting appellation as a reminder of their folly.

Part of their eternal penance was to man the sentinel stations that surrounded the Great Barrier, young prospective officers from the Shamed sent to while their time taking thankless care of automated systems and cogitator banks. Thousands of stations just like Peliska’s and thousands of officers just like her were scattered around the Barrier’s periphery, an area hundreds of light-years around, there to watch it while larger guardian stations watched them in turn. These stations could have been fully crewed or entirely automated, but assigning a single officer to each of them for ‘operational redundancy’ was another reminder of their place.

Many young officers couldn’t handle the loneliness and isolation; most left the service after their tenure was up, rotating into the shambling husk that their people’s Self-Defence Force was. Of those that didn’t, many were ‘rewarded’ with their service by another stint in the outposts, or were shuffled off to some equally unimportant posting. A few, a very few, managed to serve in the Governance’s Navy proper. It had always been Peliska’s dream to be one of them but every day she spent here, that resolve weakened. She still wanted that, but she no longer knew how badly she did.

The young woman stared out at the slowly churning shapelessness of the Great Barrier. Some said it was a prison wall, that behind it lay the Demons who had sealed away forever after their defeat. If that were the case, then stationing the Shamed here was a cruelly ironic punishment, using their former servants to sound the alarm of their return. Others said that behind the Great Barrier lay one of the Aesthetes, the older races that were now all but gone from the universe.

During the war, one of the Aesthetes fought alongside the younger civilizations. Their power was incomparable and, it was said, the Demons feared them more than any other. Though the ancient race fought with all their might, it was to no avail against their enemy. The Demons were nearly strong as the older civilization, their power terrifying to behold. Through weight of numbers and a horrifying ruthlessness, they ground the elder species down, ship by ship and world by world. Facing their own extinction, the Aesthetes did what they had to and sealed themselves beyond the Demons’ ability to reach them. One day, it was said, they would return and for more than a thousand years the Concord had waited for them.

Some stories even said that it was not the Aesthete beyond the Great Barrier, but one of their favoured younger kin, the ancient beings trading their existence to protect their adoptive children. That the Great Barrier was a test; on the day that these young kin could cross it, they would prove they were ready to fulfill the destiny their fallen guardians intended for them. Others claimed that the Great Barrier was merely a particularly unusual oddity in a galaxy filled with them, with various explanations for how it came to be. Peliska didn’t know what she believed, but she supposed it didn’t matter.

Whatever was beyond the Great Barrier’s ever-shifting threshold, Peliska knew she would never see it. Nothing that entered the Great Barrier ever returned and when it stirred, it would spit out the broken remains of the explorers, daredevils and military armadas that had tried to pass through it, just as often sucking them back inside, where they would be warped and fused together with captured asteroids, comets and other stellar detritus into conglomerate wrecks. If the Great Barrier held any secrets beyond being a hellish and lethal sub-sect of reality, it was certain that one of the Cursed would not learn them. Her duty, as it had been for her people’s hopeful aspirants for a thousand years, was to sit in silence across a string of stations scattered across the light years, eternally vigilant in their penance and hoping that maybe, just maybe, one day the rest of the galaxy would forgive them.

Peliska laid her head down upon her crossed arms as she stared out at the Great Barrier. And maybe, just maybe, one day she wouldn’t hate what she saw when she looked in the mirror.