Extant and Stasis

by Yamille Moss

00:13
Friday

Claudia, there’s something in the vents, and I can hear it scuttering around in there as I’m doing my rounds. It sounds like its claws are scraping against the sides: a shrill and metallic grating that swallows every other fucking sound.

It reminds me of when we were kids in our bedroom, back before you got your retainer. You would grind your teeth all night, and it drove me crazy. It felt like the loudest sound on the planet, that itchy back and forth collision of your wet, exposed skeleton. Some nights I thought for sure that you’d get up and walk over to my side of the room and bare fangs, revealing you’d been sharpening your teeth the entire time. You never did. Instead, you’d look at me so apologetically in the morning, making your already miniature stature smaller until you all but disappeared into yourself at the coffee table. “I’m sorry I kept you up all night.” Your voice barely above a whisper.

I wonder if you’d be louder now that you’ve kept me up for months with the way you’ve disappeared for good. On this damned ship of all places. Or off it, I suppose. You’ve left me with this god-awful discordant grating sound, lacerating every fiber of my being day in and day out.

This ship is too big. 1000 feet is the size of 36 football fields, and I’m supposed to inspect every wire on its many, many machines. The other space-sea submarines have AI do this. They just program them to walk along the route of the ship, routinely tweaking the systems on board. In fact, I don’t even think any other space-sea submarine has this many systems on board. So many cameras, Claudia. Cameras that fly off and dock at certain ports on the ceiling. Cameras that go outside. Cameras that are hidden in the floor, that have body scanners, that alert Elite Executives when someone’s sick. Cameras that line the walls near the exits and see who takes what and puts what back. They’re all fully operational and terrifying.

I spend an absurd amount of time with these cameras. “They’re more like scanners,” a supervisor tells me in the lab. “Or little friends. Can we add smiley faces? Can we make them ask how your day is going? How about a polling function?” another eager, overbearing overseer hounds. Yes. We can add anything we want to them. We can design anything you want. We can program anything you can imagine and there’s no one to stop us out here wherever we are. Idal Corp is well above the law, and even if it weren’t . . . who’s here to stop us? Humanity’s never been here before.

I think about this all the time as I’m working, Claudia. Like tonight, when I had to stand under a drafty vent to fix one of ‘our little friends,’ I thought about the deep space-sea. It’s an endless, bottomless void. It’s not even water really, it’s something else entirely. It’s liquid technically, yes, tiny particles moving around on top of each other. Vibrating against each other near constantly, but it’s not water. What’s out there is poison, and we call it a sea because there’s so much of it and so much in it, but—

*

09:00
Tuesday

Claudia.

This morning I saw a glimpse of what hides inside the vents. 

The cameras have been updated to humanoids. They stand on two feet when they emerge from walls and crevices. They wear little blue, nonthreatening smiley faces like the kind we used to send in texts. They make a noise when their scanners pick up certain heat signatures. It’s akin to the whirring of an electric drill. I test it repeatedly throughout the day to make sure the whirring goes off when I light a candle or fake a fever. This morning it went off without any outside stimulus.

The schhhhrrwwww noise starts abruptly. I am panicked, overworked, and tired. I need to fix its wiring, I think. So, I cup its face like a child, shushing the machine as if it will respond to that: as if I have given birth to some subatomic appliance that finds solace in my touch. The schrrrwwww continues. It gets louder and louder until I have to push myself away from the robot, have to stand on the wall across from it as it looks around wildly. 

It twitches like a wounded animal. Without arms to swing around, it gyrates its neck in every direction, spinning 360 degrees. It whistles like a coffee pot as it flashes red. We didn’t program it with speech, and still it articulates slowly, with the cadence of a rock against a cheese grater, “H . . . . h . . . h-heat . . . signature . . . error . . . ERROR.”

It does this until it’s yelling. Until I’m equipping my toolbox and realizing I’m alone. How am I alone here on a ship with 900 people? But it keeps going, Claudia. Until it stops and it’s looking up. Its smiling face stares upwards at the ceiling.

Directly above it, hanging out of the vent is a ghastly creature with translucent skin and reptilian parietal eyes too far apart. There is another eye in the center of its forehead, but this one opens the wrong way, it sits vertically and takes a cuneate shape. 

The creature and the robot stare at each other. The former with its mouth open, the latter with a pile of drool accumulating on the top of its head. Then there are footsteps as someone rounds the corner. The creature startles, making the vent shake. It disappears back into it and leaves us there.

*

The robot turns to me, and its perpetual smiley face is still there, though I half expect it not to be. It doesn’t make another noise as it slowly backs into the wall it belongs to. It camouflages itself the way it's programmed to.

But when I touched the wall afterward, Claudia, there was a damp spot right where its eyes were.

Do you cry wherever you are, Claudia? Are there tears in death?

We’re out here to study this vast, terrible ocean and everything inside it. But all the time it’s moving around us, and I wonder if we’re being consumed—swallowed whole. 

Yamille Moss is a Black sapphic Bahamian writer currently in the second year of their MFA program at Fresno State. Their pronouns are she/they. They are an Editorial Assistant for The Normal School and also a member of the San Joaquin Literary Association. They served as the Editorial Assistant for Fresno State’s Young Writers’ Conference and have published several articles on Fresno State’s College of Arts and Humanities blog. She was also the Social Media Intern at this year's CSU Summer Arts.