Voyage: Embarkation

Episode 2 "Longing"

KAL FELT the summer air of Felis swirl in around him as the metaxic bubble peeled away. It was hot and muggy, but the cats, for all their fur, seemed no worse for it. They lay in clumps around the treehouse, their sides rising gently up and down under the moonlight. Many hadn’t even opened their eyes at the disturbance created by the bubble’s unpeeling. Such events had become commonplace for them.

Kal climbed up into his treehouse and threw his pad onto the table. The interface lit up and erupted into numerous small, slowly filling bars, indicating the progress of the data sync to the treehouse computer system.

He glimpsed his bed, and a small shudder ran through him. He searched the room for something to occupy himself with, anything that would keep him awake.

He walked to the window and looked down at the mess of bird meat strewn across the ground. He smiled, glad that the computer program he’d written to feed the cats in his absence had worked.

Weariness overcame him in a wave and he tried to fight it off. He thought of things he could maybe program, or notes he could write up. On the last world, he’d climbed into an enormous crater for a view of a swirling Lake Michigan. On that Earth, it was not really a lake, but a massive, perpetual whirlpool fed by hundreds of gushing rivers. He had enjoyed the trek, but the effort of mountain climbing had drained him.

Somehow, against all conscious effort, he found himself shuffling into bed, clothes and all, and he shut his eyes.

~

Kal clung to a ladder made of wood and vines. Chirps, buzzes, hisses and squawks sounded from all around him, and everything was green. Leaves and vines surrounded the ladder, which continued upward another ten meters or so. The ground lay at least three times that distance below.

Below. He didn’t like thinking about that direction. He clutched at the ladder as a wave of vertigo spilled over him. He clenched his eyes shut and jammed his chin into his chest. When it subsided, he looked up and focused on the opening that led into the bottom of the large, oval, wooden structure. The wooden bauble hung suspended from the branches of two mammoth trees on either side of him. It pulled at him, commanding him upward, and so he forced himself to keep climbing.

Just one hand carefully over the other, he repeated to himself. He kept his head facing up and focused on the rhythm of the climb.

A breeze burst through the leaves, swinging the rope ladder from side to side. Kal was glad that his hands and feet had been firmly planted on the rungs when it had happened. He waited for the wobbling to cease, then breathed a sigh of relief and continued his ascent.

Before long, he reached the hole in the bottom of the structure and climbed through it. He flung himself from the ladder onto the floor, gasping heavily and glad to feel something solid beneath him once more. The interior was enormous, but it was also very dark compared to the bright jungle outside, and his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted.

He pulled off his backpack, got out his pad, and stood up. He stood at the bauble’s edge, near the wall. A single open portal at the center of the roof cast a beam of midday sunlight down onto the floor. A vast conglomeration of intricate, papery hexagons lay illuminated below it. They wrapped and twisted around one another, spreading out in contorted tendrils, shaped eerily like the map of alternate Earths on his pad.

He readied his pad and put his nanites on alert.

Fist-size insects began emerging from the hexagons. They crept slowly at first, but soon accelerated, swarming forward toward him. Some scuttled over the wooden floor while others flew.

The clattering of their claws against the floorboards and buzzing of their wings became deafening, but he stood his ground, certain that his nanites would protect him.