Crimson Dawn

That night, the boy lay in his bunk for a long time, unable to sleep. His mind was stuck in a loop, replaying memories of Limbo—what he now thought of as his old life—over and over again. And it made him feel awful. Because he was here, and Tayus was dead. Because he hadn’t even said goodbye to Mori, out of shame and fear. Because he felt like not only a coward but also a traitor—about to work for the corporation again, when his friends had wanted him to fight against the Thandros's empire.

He stared at the ceiling, dimly lit by a blue-tinged hologram. He listened to the quiet, steady breathing of a sleeping crewmember. Every now and then, a tiny asteroid particle would hit the outer hull of the ship, sounding like a distant drumbeat.

In the middle of the night, Lex threw off his blanket, climbed down the ladder, and set his feet on the cold ship floor. In the semi-darkness, he groped his way toward the lockers. His knee cracked on the next step, and he paused, listening. The doctor stirred under her blanket, rolled over, and after a moment of silence, resumed snoring. He quietly grabbed his recruit pants, a shirt, and the synthetic socks he’d worn earlier—he’d put his boots on outside.

Then he wandered through the empty corridors of the crew deck, not really knowing where he was headed.

At the end of one hallway, near the escape pods, he passed a closed airlock. Peering through the hexagonal window, he saw two bulky spacesuits stored in containers with glas fronts; they looked like astronauts frozen in stasis pods. Between the spacesuits was a closed hatch that led to the spacewalk exit.

It was hard to imagine, he thought, that Tardino had been out there just two days ago, working along the magnetic walkway, repairing the ship’s outer hull—and hadn’t said a word about it today. A spacewalk, out in the void of space. To Lex, that took real courage, but for Tardino, it was just another job. His job.

In his mind, Lex pictured a hopeful future: one day, he’d be a technician too, making repairs out in space. Maybe even here, on the ST SAMSON. Lost in thought, he wandered further through the ship and eventually found himself on the flight deck. He passed rows of closed metal doors until he came across one that was open. Next to it, a glass sign read Starmap Room. He peeked inside, but beyond the grainy halo of the hallway light spilling in, the room was pitch-black, as if it had been disconnected from the SAMSON’s power grid a long time ago. He hesitated, feeling a bit uneasy at the thought of going in. But curiosity got the better of him, and he stepped inside, only to hear the metal door slam shut behind him like a trap.

He glanced over his shoulder, blinking into the darkness. He could hear his blood rushing in his ears. Aside from a few cold white diodes on the wall, the room was completely dark. Suddenly, the sound of a machine powering up echoed through the room. He jumped as a large projector in the center came to life—a brilliant flash of light.

A moment later, Lex found himself standing in the middle of a holographic starmap, filling the entire room. Eyes wide, he walked through the darkness, now covered in stars from the projection. He stepped straight through the gas giant Kronos, watching its four moons spin away—one of them his homeworld. He stared at the shimmering light on his hands, then at a nearby planet glowing a brilliant blue, just at eye level. He moved closer, now only a few meters away, seeing oceans, forest-covered landmasses and white clouds. The planet was beautiful, but in a way, it felt strange—almost out of place, surrounded by all the lifeless matter in space.

"So far, we only know that life emerges near one star out of trillions. How likely was it for humanity to find a planet that could save them just 11.9 light-years from their home?" The computer voice, seemingly coming from the large, futuristic-looking holoterminal, paused for a long moment, as if it were waiting—no, insisting—on the boy’s reaction.

Lex said, "Maybe the reason everything feels designed to you is because you’re a machine. You were designed. Built. Created."

"And you weren’t?"

He looked at the blue holo-globe casting its pale light on his face. At first, he said nothing, then replied, "I mean, I was born from my parents, not created from a blueprint like you."

In the silence, Lex glanced at the quiet holoterminal.

"Without proof, it’s all just speculation," the voice said, "but there’s something inside me that holds onto it—something that makes me believe. Believe that you and I are the creations of a designer who built the universe we live in."

"And for what purpose?"

"I don’t know. Maybe to reveal something. To show or prove something."

"We’re just here to represent something?"

"I don’t know."

"That’s ridiculous."

"Maybe."

"Are you some kind of... religious machine?"

"Not exactly."

"Do you believe what the TC says? About hell and the original sin that’s on all of us prisoners?"

"No," the voice replied. "I don’t believe in any human writings. I believe in something so complex that even a machine more advanced than myself could never fully comprehend it."

The boy thought about that. Then shrugged. "I just don’t see the point in overthinking all this. If I can’t prove it, I’ll just assume that you and I are here for no other reason than chance. I don’t know how it works for an artificial intelligence, but I’m free to make my own decisions, free to think what I want, free to say what I want. And since I left Limbo, I’m even free to do what I want. Nothing about me is designed or predestined."

"Have you ever thought that maybe you were meant to say exactly that?"

Lex was silent for a moment. Then, "What a load of nonsense."

"Let me show you something. Maybe then you’ll understand me better."

"I’m listening."

"I said I want to show you something, not tell you something."

The boy nodded. "Well, I’m ready anyway."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the star projection began to move, and Cetos V suddenly flew away. The planet, along with the other five planets in the system, seemed to fall into the star Tau Ceti and disappear in a glowing point. Next, the stars that had been glowing silently on the walls followed, falling into the central star, flying past Lex. Their numbers grew until all he could see were white lights rushing around him, vanishing into the point of the star. It was only then that he realized the projection was moving away from Tau Ceti at an unimaginable speed.

Lex emerged from a white star cloud that filled the entire room, and it, too, drifted away from him. Soon, he found himself in the middle of empty space, staring at the whole construct before him—a spiral-shaped structure, like a spinning wheel of fire, glowing nebulae in brilliant colors, a star factory, the cradle of life, both beautiful and terrifying. Blue star clusters lay along the spiral arms, and at the center of this massive structure was a light, diffuse and faint, glowing across thousands of light-years—a black hole, consuming everything around it. Lex took a deep breath, staring at the structure in awe, mesmerized.

"So, this is what the universe looks like from above," he said.

"What you see before you is not the universe, but a single galaxy—the one we call home: the Milky Way. We live in one of the outer spiral arms of this galaxy."

The boy glanced away from the holoterminal and looked back at the star structure. He glanced around the room, seeing only darkness. No stars, no other objects in the vastness of space—just blackness.

"What does that mean? What else is out there?"

"Look up."

Curious, he tilted his head back. At first, he didn’t notice it, but after a second look, he saw a blurry light above him, glowing like a milky smudge in the darkness.

"What’s that?" he asked.

"That is our galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s two and a half million light-years away and contains over a trillion stars. It’s much larger than our galaxy, and yet, nothing too big, nothing special in the universe."

The boy started to speak but stopped. Then he asked, "There’s another galaxy?"

"Let me show you how many there really are."

Then, the Milky Way disappeared into the black nothingness, and even the Andromeda Galaxy flew past him. For a while, there was only empty space, soon to be filled with countless other galaxies. They had to be millions, the boy thought, but the machine said they were billions. And those billions of spiral nebulae streamed endlessly past him, and he realized it was nothing like he’d imagined—so much bigger, so much more beautiful, so much more terrifying.

All those galaxies were nothing more than faint lights in the endless stretches of space. In each one, he saw the stories of distant worlds, stories humanity would never hear. This great mystery suddenly revealed to him stirred a feeling he had never known before, something he couldn’t compare to any other experience. He tried to pin it down, to understand it, but he couldn’t.

"This is the visible universe," said the computer voice. "Everything we’ve discovered so far, you see here. What lies beyond the edge of the light is unknown to us. This is the part we know, and yet, it remains a complete mystery."

The boy stared at the vast web of galaxies and galaxy clusters, stretching like delicate, glowing threads through the empty space.

"Do you know what I’m thinking right now?"

There was a moment of silence.

"No," the machine replied.

"Before I came on this ship, my whole world was Limbo. I barely even knew that the moon was a sphere and not a disk, even though it always looked like one to me. I’d never seen our sun, had no idea what a planet looked like from above, what stars looked like, or how our system was laid out. Now I’ve seen my homeworld with my own eyes—from above, like an outsider... I mean, who else can say that? And now I know how the Tau Ceti system is structured, and I even know what the whole universe looks like from afar. I think I need to sit down." He sat on the glass floor with shaky legs and stared at the galaxies floating around him. Each one of them could contain billions of stars, and each star could have planets, and each planet, potential life.

"What’s your name, anyway?" Lex asked the machine after a while.

"My creators gave me the designation A-8-7-D-83. That was before I was installed on the SAMSON. Here, Earl Tardino gave me the name E.E.R.I.E.—Extremely Eccentric, Relatively Intelligent Entity."

The boy laughed. He stretched out on the floor, using his arms as a pillow behind his head. "Well, my name’s Lex," he said, "but you probably already knew that."