Gnai - Fractions

[Gnai]

Galador was a dead world, and yet, I still lived there. It wasn't dead in the standard sense; it still had an atmosphere, a magnetic field, liquid water, life. No, rather, it was the opposite. Galador was teeming with life, both mine and that which I ate. Life that simply had refused to accept that it was clinging to a corpse until just a moment before it was too late. Every second that I wasted swimming around without a care in the world was another small part of me lost, and I had been wasting time since before I had even evolved.

 

The instrument of my destruction lit up the dark sky for a brief night every rotation around my star, almost imperceptibly brighter each time. Imperceptibly bigger. A hundred rotations ago, a Toaijan body of mine discovered the reason. The rings that encircled my world passed by close enough to the mouth of a wormhole to be sucked in, feeding the maw that would eventually consume Galador. To consume me. Each year it grew, minutely, unstoppable. 

 

And if my predictions were right, this rotation was to be the last of my planet's existence. With my planning, it would not be the last of mine.

 

I had been destroying my planet as the eve of its death grew nearer, all in the hopes that I would escape. But no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much of Galador was stripped of its resources and how much water was drained from its oceans to be bottled up to protect my fragile bodies, there would not be enough space for all of me. It was a sad thought, to know that only part of the whole would escape, but it was better than losing myself completely to the wormhole. I would survive and rebuild and grow myself again to what I was now. It would just be on a different world, in a different ocean, under a different sun.

 

As it was, all of me that would fit floated within the metal shells that I threw to the stars, leaving a cloud of smoke that I thought looked eerily like the vents that dotted the bottom of Galador’s oceans. I watched from millions of portholes as my dots of light bobbed across the dark oceans and faded from view. At the same time, I watched myself grow smaller and smaller until I couldn’t tell what contained me and what was just another star in the night sky. My final glimpse of myself as a whole.

 

From aboard the vessels, most of me floated across to the other sides, jostling myself until I fit and I could see my killer. The darkness of space made me shiver, a ripple passing through every body on my ships as I looked out and saw nothing at all. Something as deep and as dark as space always triggered a baser part of myself to dim my light as it flashed across thousands of tendrils and bodies. Who knew what lurked out there, in the depths? What sort of creature might want to wrap its jaws around one of my bodies and consume it? 

 

I knew it was an irrational fear. I had far surpassed the predators that had used to prey on me in the depths of my oceans, targeting anything that glowed down where the light of my sun could not reach. There was nothing on Galador that could threaten me, they were long dead or otherwise changed. But I caught myself; that wouldn’t be true now that I was leaving. Perhaps my instincts weren’t entirely irrational. What was out there, hidden among the stars?

 

As I watched and waited, silently, the ships made their way past where they would have been eaten by the wormhole. I had calculated it exactly. Just enough time to pack as much of myself into these arks and throw them past the wormhole. I had not strayed from my plans, and this was proof of it. I would be saved. Each second passed and pushed me further from where the wormhole lay in wait, and further towards the world that I had decided to make my own. 

 

It would be a second Galador; a planet that I had spotted late one night as it passed through the light of its star. There was only a minute dip, making the star just fractions of a percent dimmer, but like I had spotted decades before with the light of the wormhole, it was enough. The world was full of water, it had an atmosphere to protect me, it was roughly the size of Galador. It could support me. It had to support me. Time was running out and this was my only hope for a future.

 

Without warning, the wormhole tore itself open again, as it had done every rotation in my memory. Filaments of all colors stretched and wandered across the void of space, pulling dust and rocks into its maw, a mockery of how I ate. The first of the fantastic tendrils touched the oceans of Galador and pulled back in a massive spray of water, arcing across the atmosphere as it was drawn back in and swallowed. A few of me were drawn up with it, consumed instantly. 

 

I felt those pieces of myself die, and watched with horror from all sides as the atmosphere began to whip itself up into a frenzy of wind. The wormhole was sucking in the air, pulling it away from the planet, which in turn fueled the normally tame surface winds past recognition. Waves formed and towered over the dark sky, blocking my view from the surface as more funnels of water were stolen, more of myself drawn into pieces. Every crash of a wave rang through my mind, as more of myself blinked out. It hurt, but I had no idea how much more it would only moments later. As the wormhole grew larger on the waters of my world, I saw parts of myself flashing distress, something that I had not chosen to do. Why? What was happening? I couldn’t focus on this anomaly though, not as I watched the devastation unfold.

 

In an instant, the planet fractured, chunks of the seafloor careened through space and disappeared into the wormhole. I’d felt death before, but never on this scale. I felt torn apart, portions extinguished instantly, others drawn out until my light faded. I found myself unable to see from the surface anymore. Was that it? Was every part of me that I had to leave behind dead?

 

Wait.

 

All I could see was through one porthole. One small window into the night, one fraction of a view of the wormhole and of my cracked Galador. This was wrong. I turned around and saw myself, flashing confusion like a mirror. I looked at myself, and then I looked back and suddenly realized that it wasn’t me I was looking at. I was me, and that was also me. But I was… fragmented. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out with a tendril to touch my own, confused emotions that I knew I was feeling flooding into my head from every part of me that surrounded me. Was this happening on every ship?

 

I couldn’t help but float there, horrified at what had happened to me. I was without a world, and left alone. Just one body. What could I ever hope to accomplish with one body, and one life? I found myself wrapped in the embrace of another part of me, another Galadoran. It tried to calm me down, but I could hear it had the same turmoil in its mind.

 

There was no more Galadoran, just Galadorans. And I… No. We had lost our planet. Every one of us that had survived was stuck in our own minds, with our own lives. With despair, I had to reconcile that I was no longer just I but a part of a we. I could never exist again, not like that. Not for a long time, and not packed into tins that hurtled across the stars.

 

Someone flashed brightly in alarm, which slowly rippled down the others in the ship, delayed by the simple fact that I was now separated. That we were now separated. Wordlessly, we all crowded around the portholes again, waiting. The very last part of our world was drawn into the wormhole as we floated there, dim with grief. We watched the wormhole close for the last time... and knew there would be no going back. There was nothing to go back to.

 

It had been the only home that I had known, and I was slowly resigning myself to the fact that I would likely never experience swimming under the gravity of a planet again. This ship, the Anan, was to be my grave, even as it was the rebirth of myself in a way. Generations of Galadorans would spawn, live, and die on the Anan and its partner-ships before it reached its destination. They would never know the warmth of our sun on their tendrils as they floated to the surface, or the great trenches of the seafloor. They would never know the safety of Galador, only the danger of traveling unarmed across the vast reaches of space. They would never know the bliss of being me, of being one mind and countless bodies. But eventually our ships would arrive to that planet that I had pointed our ships at, and Galadorans would have a home once again. Maybe someday they would find a way to return to being one again. But it wouldn’t be me.

Edited April 13 by Gnai