Empathy Farm

I can tell that this voyage has reached a critical mass of
fuckedness (fuck-ID-niss, archaic, n.) because I have a meeting
with Boreas Ground Control in two minutes to discuss our spike in
incident reports, and instead of getting prepared for this
meeting, I am on comms with Gomez, and he is telling me that a
maintenance issue is now my urgent problem. For six years, I have
been blessed with his ability to get handed a problem in any
department and make it go away. No longer so.

"We'll need you here so we can begin acting as soon as possible,"
he tells me. "Central cargo hull, entrance Celtic."

"Deescalate this to priority Axon and you could begin right away,"
I try.

Aboard U.F.S. craft, there are two categories of maintenance
issues: priorities and emergencies, also called A-B's and 1-2's.
Priority Axon, priority Bartholomew, priority Celtic, emergency 1,
and emergency 2 can all be acted on without notifying the on-board
mission commander--me. Emergency 0 requires the notification of
the commander but can be acted on immediately, because inaction
could cause catastrophic failure. Priority Serpentine requires
approval from the commander before action is taken, because action
could cause catastrophic failure.

"Palmer entered this as priority Axon, sir. I escalated this to
priority Serpentine, sir. You need to see this sooner rather than
later."

I rap my knuckles against my desk, then escalate it to a final
bang of my fist on the oak wood. I key my comms over to my second
in command. "Jason."

"Sir."

"Can you handle Boreas Ground Control solo?"

He considers very briefly. "I don't think it's a good look, but
yes, send me your notes and I'll handle it."

I key back to Gomez. "I'll be down in two."

My name is James Alexander Bachman, Colonel, on-board commanding
officer of Starwell II.

When I arrive at central cargo, Acting Specialist Gomez is holding
out a tablet for me. I grab it and look at the screen. What I see
is a light grey square on a dark grey background. Cutting halfway
through the light grey square is a line.

I look up at the support pillar, which even in this very tall room
is thick enough to be a cube. The sides are all plastered. I look
back down at the tablet, then the support again, then at Gomez.
"This pillar?"

"All ten of the pillars, sir."

My guts twist. I ask, "What's our time frame?"

Gomez cracks a knuckle, wobbles his head. "We're lucky in that we
found this during the smoothest part of our journey. If we have a
problem, it shouldn't be until we get to turbulence nearer Boreas.
Forty one days until then, sir."

"How long to fix these?"

Gomez is silent.

I look to the other personnel standing nearby him who are not
eager to chime in or make eye contact. I single one out.

"You. How long?"

He gives a dispirited laugh. "On-planet, it could take a week to
fix one in the best case."

"Report to your superior for a lashing and two weeks solitary."

"I--"

"Five lashings."

He leaves.

"You. How long to fix one of these, here in space where we
currently find ourselves?"

The man's voice rasps but he does not hesitate to answer because
he has some sort of a brain in him. "With the tools we have
aboard, we estimate we could fix the supports at a rate of two
every twenty days, commander sir."

"One hundred days."

"Yes, sir."

"Odds of failure on this project?"

"It's never been done before, sir."

"Give me a number."

He begins thinking aloud which is not what I asked of him, but I
worry it's the best I'll get at the moment. "Collapse of any one
support would result in catastrophic mission failure. It would be
a race against time for any rescue crews to arrive soon enough to
save anyone who happened to be on a portion of the ship that could
remain sealed. As I said, we've never done this before--"

"Report to your superior. One week solitary."

He nods and dashes away, well aware of how lightly he's gotten
off.

"Gomez?"

"If we stop in the water and dedicate all hands to this, ninety
five percent odds we can do the entire project without failure. If
we don't act and hit the turbulence as we currently are, I'd give
us south of fifty getting to Boreas."

He is bullshitting the numbers, but I take his point about the
importance of acting on this.

I take a deep breath, in, out, staring up at the beam. "Who let it
get to this? Are these fractures spontaneous or did we leave port
this way? Have we left port like this more than once?"

Gomez: "The layers of plastering suggest we've left port with at
least some fracturing for the last four years."

"Specialist Gomez, I want you to put anyone who might be
responsible in cryo until we sort this out, on grounds of
treason."

"It will be done, sir."

I step up and whisper into his ear. "Anyone responsible. Ganymede
Contingency." This means I've approved the use of his real rank
instead of playing U.F.S. Specialist. "Throw your weight around
liberally."

He nods.

I step back. "Get prepared to begin on repairs, but don't lower
our sails quite yet."

Gomez: "Yes, sir."

"Dismissed, all of you."

They flee.

I reach up to my comms and key the head of surveillance.
"Katherine."

"Commander Bachman."

"Can you pull video of anyone performing inspection or maintenance
of the support pillar located in central cargo over the last four
years?"

I hear typing, and then, "Done."

"I'll be up in two."

As I walk, I key Jason. "How did the meeting go?"

"Not well, sir. Commander Nguyen wasn't interested in a word that
wasn't from you."

"Well, it's about to get worse when they hear the latest."

"Sir?"

"Deep fractures in all ten supports aboard the ship."

Silence.

"Yeah. We're going to play it safe and glide in the water for a
bit. I'll have more details to come."

"Understood, sir."

When I am arriving at the door to surveillance HQ, the ship's
emergency lights come on. I have only seen this before in drills.
I enter into Katherine's realm and count myself lucky to be
somewhere that might be able to provide answers and resolution as
to who is being executed.

Surveillance HQ is arranged similarly to mission control on-
planet. Katherine sits at the back center, typing furiously and
glancing between her quad monitors. "Commander," she says in
greeting as I approach from behind.

"What happened?"

She grabs one of the monitors and pushes it up on its arm to face
me. On it are eight stills of work being done on the support.
"These people knew about the fractures as they were developing and
submitted false reports. Likely more personnel involved from the
other supports. Working on a full list of names."

"Send that to me when you have it."

"Yes, sir."

"What happened to set off the emergency lights?"

Her typing becomes even more furious, and then comes to a dead
stop. She pushes up another monitor for me and then leans back in
her chair. "We've been boarded."

"WHAT?"

She sneers and shrugs at the same time, then gestures helplessly
at the monitor.

There are two feeds being shown, both appearing to be live camera
footage. The first shows the exterior of Starwell II, and a leech-
like object clinging to the side of it, hardly visible against the
blackness of space. The second shows an interior hallway, where
two non-human creatures stand near a circular hole in a wall. The
creatures are in the vicinity of eight feet tall, and have slimy
yellow skin. We--humans--have observed alien life from lightyears
afar, but never conceived of contact being possible. FTL has only
been achieved between stellar bodies where a station has already
been established on each side. The two aliens in the hall are both
holding rifles. I look down at Katherine's other monitors and
realize that there are many more breaches than just the one that
she's highlighted for me.

"They haven't broken the airlock," Katherine mentions. She reaches
across her desk, grabs a microphone by the cord, pulls it over,
and offers it to me. "Do you want to make first contact?"

I shake my head and faint.

When I awaken I find that Jason and Gomez are also here in
surveillance. Katherine briefs me on how much further the
situation has deteriorated. Peaceful speech was attempted but the
aliens advanced and fired their rifles, which by some yet-
undetermined means render the target unconscious. We retaliated
with less-than-lethals which had some effect, but their weaponry
proved superior, and we have escalated to using lethals and
sectioning off all divisions of the ship. They are currently
outside the door to several HQ's, including surveillance, though
they seem to be holding for the moment. I see that Jason, Gomez,
and Katherine are all in the possession of shotguns, and I request
one as well. Gomez hands me his and walks off to retrieve another
for himself. Before he's gone five steps, the HQ door is blasted
open.

I have no memory of this incident resolving. I strongly believe I
was hit with one of their rifles.

When I awaken this time, I am not aboard Starwell II. I am also
not in the Christian afterlife of Hell, nor am I in Valhalla,
unless one of the two was very poorly described to me. I wonder
whether I am dead at all. I do not care to be scientific about it
and try to kill myself. On the marginal chance that I am not dead
already, then I don't wish to become so.

I am lying in a field of grass. The sky above is blue. It is broad
daylight and lightly cloudy. I can see stars, one of which is a
sun, but I can see other stars besides the locally relevant one. I
have not set foot on a planet, moon, asteroid, or similar since
graduating from basic ten years ago. One could imagine it a
comfort to be back on solid ground, but I am terrified. I feel as
though I am an aeroplane without an engine. A sailboat with a
sawed off mast. I am stranded, grounded, all but immobile.

I sit up. Look around. There are trees here, but I do not know the
type of them. They have hanging flexible branches like weeping
willows, but they connect from tree to tree, like an immense
bird's nest, or else a spider web. The branches billow in the
breeze.

I am wearing clothes, but I do not recognize them. They are loose-
fitting light-blue pants and an oversized light-brown t-shirt.

I stand. There is a singular trail leading out of this clearing. A
dirt path with no hanging branches in the way. I bite.

I have been walking for about an hour in this place when it occurs
to me that there are no birds, no chirping insects. There are
trees, there is the grass, and there is a wind that causes the
flora to make a rustling sound when it picks up.

When I arrive at something, what I arrive at is an idyllic farm. I
stand at one side of a large paddock, and across the way, I can
squint and see a pair of silos, four barns, and a water tower. I
walk around the paddock fence. It is the afternoon, and it is
occurring to me that I am hungry.

When I near the farm, I hear a sheep baa, and chickens cluck.

I wander around. There is a brown horse in one barn, three white
sheep in another, many chickens in the next, and the last barn is
filled with machinery and tools. I am dumbfounded. There is no
house here, no office, no pavilion, no chairs or benches, and no
road or path that leads away from this farm besides the footpath
that I arrived by. I know that this is strange. I have never set
foot on a farm before, if this is a farm. But I know that this is
strange.

There is no food, anyways. I scour the barns bottom to top looking
for a pantry or a refrigerator. The animals make their sounds at
me. In the barn of tools, I do find a lighter, and with it, a plan
comes to me as though the plan and the lighter were attached. I
will make a campfire. I will wait until night for anyone to come.
And when night falls, if no one has arrived, I am eating one of
the chickens.

After procuring a saw and an axe, I head off only a short ways
into the woods before I am able to find an already-fallen tree.
From it, by evening, I have a very respectable pile of firewood.
There is no fire pit on the farm, but there is a patch of dirt,
about ten feet in diameter, in the otherwise grassy paddock. With
the logs and some dry hay from the silo, I manage to get something
started before it has gotten dark.

I sit on one of the logs and stare at the fire. Occasionally I
glance up at the barns. Occasionally I glance down at my hands.
They are worn red and raw in some places from the work of turning
the fallen tree into logs. I rub the raw parts of my palm with my
thumb, but I cannot feel it. I am strongly preoccupied with
hunger.

I give it an hour into the night, and have resolved with certainty
that if nobody is visiting this farm, then nobody will miss one of
the chickens. I stand and walk to the chicken barn. As I walk, I
look around. I have grown more skeptical of this place, not less.
I know exceedingly little about farms, and so I find this farm
trying, because it seems incorrect, but not in any way that I
could put a name to. It feels made up. It feels made up by me.

I enter the chicken barn and am struck with anxiety like I have
not felt since I was a teenager. I press on, hands shaking from
hunger. The chickens run from me, but I am able to corner one and
grab it by the neck. As soon as I grab it, someone is choking me,
and my anxiety ascends to panic at being caught here. I point an
elbow as I whirl around to push off my assailant, but when I turn,
there is nobody else in the barn. I look around skeptically. There
are the chickens. There is no one here who could have grabbed me.
The only door is on the far side of the barn, and I do not believe
anyone could have cleared the distance in the time it took me to
whirl around. I am delirious from hunger, I tell myself.

I chase after the chickens again. Again, I chase one into a corner
and grab it, this time by the body. As I do I can feel,
physically, like someone is choking me, but I turn, still holding
the chicken, and there is nobody. Perhaps the hunger is more
severe than I had realized. I don't know how long I was asleep
for, out in the clearing in the woods. I carry the chicken out of
the barn, feeling like invisible giants are jabbing me with their
fingers as I walk, making me stumble, making me double over in
pain. I am terrified, but I am committed to resolving one thing,
by making food for myself.

I come back to the fire. I grab the axe, but cannot coordinate
holding the chicken down and chopping its head off, possibly an
effect of my fatigue conspiring with my inexperience. I toss the
axe aside, grab the chicken by the head and body, and snap its
neck. I scream and collapse to the ground as I feel the utter void
of my life being ended: in one second was hunger and anxiety and
phantom pains, and in the next, there is no hunger, no anxiety, no
pain, no thought, no presence. I am gone. Some aspect of me has
gone, anyways, forever. But also I am still here, on my side on
the ground, screaming at the top of my lungs as I stare blankly
past the fire.

I spend the night shaking and crying and staring at nothing. There
is only a brief break from this where I look at the dead body of
the chicken, whose death I felt as my death, whose hunger and pain
and fear was my hunger and pain and fear.

As morning comes, my body fills again with sensations of hunger
and thirst, though there is still a corner that is void, a corner
of my own self that is there, but that I can no longer go to.

I try vainly to sleep, and am unsurprised when I cannot.

I sit up. I sit staring at the fire for a while longer, shaking.
Eventually I stand and go to get water from the faucet at the base
of the water tower. When I turn the water on, the water flows. I
drink for a long time. I return to the campfire. I pick up the
chicken, almost hopeful to feel pain as I do, but there is no
sensation. Not from it, not from myself. I pluck its feathers and
cook the bird with the fire. Its meat looks like roasted chicken
when it is done, but although I recognize it, I do not feel I am
looking at food, at something that my body would accept. I eat
anyways, greedily, grease falling down my chin and soaking my
fingers. When I am done, I wipe the grease off on my shirt, and go
to take a walk around the paddock.

As I walk, I can still feel my body trembling. Worse, I can still
feel hunger and thirst exactly as strongly as I felt it before I
ate and drank. Even after coming all the way around the paddock
back to the barns, I am starving.

I take off my greasy shirt, and wash my hands and face more
thoroughly under the water faucet. I set the shirt inside the tool
barn, planning to search for detergent or spare clothes later. In
the meantime, I retrieve a bucket and go to the silos. In one silo
is grain, tiny yellow pellets. I fill the bucket. I walk to the
chicken barn. I toss the grain around to them, and they peck it
off the ground. I can feel my hunger easing already. I curse this
cruel godforsaken place under my breath. I go to the hay silo and
grab armfuls of the stuff, hugging it against my bare chest. If it
is pricking me, I cannot feel anything. I put hay into a long
trough for the sheep and a round basin for the horse. When they
have all been fed, I am no longer hungry.

I carry water to troughs for each of them by the bucketful, and my
thirst is soon sated. I ask God to damn this place and rescue me,
return me to my life aboard Starwell II, deliver me back to my
role as commander.

I walk back around the outside of the paddock, back up the forest
trail, back to the clearing where I first arrived. I stand with my
hands clasped behind my back, staring up at the starry daytime
sky, longing.

My longing is not answered, and I eventually head back to the
farm. On the walk back, I rub my knuckles against my ribs, against
my sternum. I do not feel pain from it. I stop on the trail, pull
down my pants, and toy with myself. I am able to become erect,
though it seems perfunctory, as I do not feel pleasure either. I
pull up my pants and keep walking.

I feel utterly trapped in this place. I have been all around the
farm now, and have still seen no sign of a road to an outside
world. Coming up to the barns, I look at the water tower, and see
that there is indeed a ladder to the top. I climb up, above the
barns, and then above the strange spiderweb of willows. On my
hands and knees atop the water tower, I look around and around,
and it is nothing different to what I had expected. The willows
continue to the horizon in every direction at a basically uniform
height. There is not a single structure or landmark as far as the
eye can see. I climb back down.

I have a longing to run. I have been cooped up here.

I take off my pants, electing to run in my underwear if no one
else is around to give a damn. I do a lap around the outside of
the paddock, knowing that my physical training has laxed since
basic, and it will be an accomplishment if I can get around the
entire fence without slowing to a walk.

When I have made it all the way around, a dread hangs over my
head. I am not tired out by the run, and I still feel trapped,
claustrophobic, like I have been in solitary confinement. I do
another lap at a sprint. Another. Another ten. I become certain
that I am dead, before remembering that I now have firsthand
knowledge of death's void, and so I cannot give this experience
the name of death exactly.

I go put on my pants. As I am putting them on, my eyes wander to
the horse barn, and I realize my idiocy.

I open the paddock fence, and then I open the door to the horse's
stall. The horse trots out of the stall, and once it has cleared
the barn door, it breaks into a gallop into the paddock. There it
sprints around and around the field, and my feelings of
confinement ebb, and in their place comes a feeling of
contentment, relief. I see the horse urinate, and feel another
relief from a discomfort that I had not consciously realized was
needling me.

I rub my knuckles across my ribs, and still feel nothing.

I look at the horse, and accept that although I, James Alexander
Bachman, am not dead, I am also not alive in the same way that I
was before. I am now another phylum of being. I am now an angel,
or a ghost, or a ghoul, or some unnamed category of steward, or
slave.

I do not go eagerly into my new life, but I do not cut off my nose
to spite my face. When I feel hunger, I feed the animals. When I
feel thirst, I water them. I learn their longings, sometimes a
longing to roam the paddock, other times a longing to return to
the shelter of the barn. One day, one of the chickens falls sick,
and I do not know what I can do to help it. By sunrise the next
day, there is a second void spot in my consciousness. I had sat in
the chicken coop all night, watching the bird whose dying pains I
could feel every pang of. The chicken at no point disbelieved its
sudden terminal illness, from the onset to the terminal breath.
When it died, I went over and sat beside it, mourning the loss of
the life, by way of the new void torn through myself.

After that day, I no longer trudge through my duties, but attempt
to excel at them. When I give the horse a friendly rub, I feel its
--her--appreciation, as though I am scratching my own itch.

One day, while I and the horse and the sheep are milling about in
the paddock, I feel something new from the horse. I look to her to
see what might be causing it, and find that she is looking at me.
She walks over, and the nearer she comes, the stronger the feeling
grows, and I cannot deny that it is lust, surprised as I am to be
feeling it. I ignore her, but her feelings remain, and so they
remain with me, and I last a pitifully short time before caving to
them, and going behind her, and using my arm to simulate the
company of a stallion until she is satisfied, making me satisfied.

As the days go on our sexual engagements continue, and I realize
another, parallel feeling within her, and within myself, which is
love. This barn is our home, and all of us family.

It is the night of the day when I realized this feeling. I stand
in the doorway of the horse barn, my partner having just gone in
for the night. Out in the paddock, lit by moonlight, is a tall
creature with yellow slime-covered skin.

What the hell, I think: why not. I stand up from leaning against
the barn door and walk into the paddock to meet the alien.

We stand face to face. The alien opens its mouth and speaks to me:
"What do you think of this way of being?"

"I would never give it up," I tell it.

It shakes its head. "I feel that even now, it has not yet fully
sunk in for you. The skill of empathy is hard-earned among your
species, it seems. But you are learning."

"Yes."

"You have learned that others feel hurt, and love, and suffering,
and elation, that every life is a world unto itself. You had heard
all of this before, but now you have learned it."

I nod. Then I realize that even still, I am not considering this
alien a life.

They let out a pleased, musical vocalization. "The skill of
empathy is hard-earned among your species," they reiterate, "but
not impossible."

"Thank you," I tell them earnestly. I lower my posture. "I want to
ask what this place is, but I fear that I know, and that it is
coming to an end."

The alien nods. "It is not real. But hearten: neither is it real,
nor is it impossible. When you awaken, destroy your ship's cargo
of weapons, and help us lift your people to the next age of their
civilization. An age where weaponry and hate are relics and
apocrypha."

I extend a hand. The alien and I shake.

"Would you like more time here? To say goodbye?"

I shake my head. "Thank you, but no. Let's get started on making
it real."