Deathform: A Military Science Fiction Novel by Benjamin Allocco

Author:Benjamin Allocco [Allocco, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2016-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

Lana mops Dino’s forehead. He’s a little warm, but so is the room. Though the pod has ventilation, it’s meant for around five people at the most. They’ve nearly doubled the capacity. The walls are slick with moisture. Now and then droplets of water fall and make the floor slippery. Their own sweat and breath surrounding them.

Dino wakes, disoriented. In the morning, they will need him lucid. If the term “morning” applies. Call it a window of seven hours instead, after which they will decide they’ve rested enough and put their plan into action. Everything is truly relative out here, far from the assuredness of solid ground. All that certainty is an illusion. The truer vantage—space—shows Earth as just one more scintillating pinprick in an overpopulated field of pinpricks. No cycle. No night or day. No atmosphere to nudge evolution along its path. There is only the calendar and the clock, governed by standard solar time, an invention she grew up with. Mankind attempting to impose order onto chaos. She remembers vividly the first time this realization came to her. She was young, but she had outgrown her phobia of looking into space, and she was walking through Observatory Park for some reason. She must have been around eight or nine. She can’t recall now what she was doing there or why. Maybe a picnic with her mother and father. Maybe a playdate with friends. She ran along the stone path in front of the enormous window, the one looking out not at Saturn, but at the emptiness in the opposite direction. The starfield. She had seen it many times, but on this day, she stopped and stared. That old fear bubbled up inside of her, but she let it simmer below the surface, just enough to know that it would always be there, and she felt something that even now she has a hard time naming. It was more like a texture than an idea. It was as if she were suspended in the middle of a canyon, floating high above the ravine and its walls, and at any moment, if she broke her concentration, she would fall. This sensation evolved in time, became less terrifying, more conceptualized. She feels it now, the tenuousness of their position in the universe—in all of existence. Chaos is real. It’s what Einstein left out of his theory. The way relativity itself is an invention because there is no one out there measuring things. That is what humankind does. Space has no need to justify itself. It just is. If we ever make it out of our little planetary system, maybe we will find that physics works differently elsewhere. Maybe there are no yardsticks other than what we bring along.

She explains things to Dino, and as she hears herself saying it, the whole plan seems very stupid. So the hydra can spot a circle of energy moving across the floor like a cat chasing a light. Does that mean the cat can’t

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