The Song That Plays Across Time by Orion Fang

[Featured Story]

I. L’appel du vide

Darkness, as usual. She frowned as she stared out the window, her cheek resting in her hand. She didn’t really expect anything different, though. Staring out the window was just something she did.

In front of her eyes, she saw nothing but the regular expanse of black and gray. In her 16 years of life, though, she hadn’t really come to expect anything else.

Sure, the tabloids and the newspapers could run whatever stories or articles they wanted. They could call it the ‘Great Expanse’ or the ‘Final Frontier’ or the ‘Infinite Beyond’ or whatever fancy title they wanted to slap on it. But nothing would change about space just because someone made a nice story or gave it a flashy title.

Mile after mile of emptiness. No interesting features, no exquisite scenery. Just white and gray set up against a backdrop of the purest black. Empty space. Dead space. She felt lonely here. Yeah, the Bowie Station had its crew and her parents so she wouldn’t be left in solitude, but… well, it was her and just her. No classmates. No friends. She didn’t like it here.

One day, she’d leave this station. She’d leave the Frontier, which was nothing more than some overglorified colonization and research effort, and she’d head for the Inner Systems and never look back.

There was too much space here. Too many empty spaces. Not enough people. People living far apart, 1 person sleeping in an individual room that could fit 4.

There was too much space here. Too many silences where there should’ve been talking. People felt distant, far away from each other. Disconnected, disjointed. Everyone might’ve known each other’s names and their occupations, but that was it. Too much space between people, between her and her ‘classmates’, between her and her parents. Everyone’s interactions were minimal, streamlined. Empty.

The Inner Systems would be her utopia. The places, the people… just what marvelous wonders awaited her there?

The glacial seas and sanctuaries of Europa. The brick-red deserts and man-made oases of Mars. The cityscapes of Earth. Earth. The originator of humanity. Humankind’s birthplace. What would she see there? The fabled Babel Spiral? The pyramids of Giza? The underwater dome of Neo Atlantis?

“I’ll go there one day.” It was a promise she whispered to herself, only to herself and to herself alone. Only she cared, anyways. There weren’t enough people to know, let alone people to care. Her parents were buried up to their noses in work and she had no friends.

But she could’ve never claimed to be empty. Even though she grew up in such a setting, she never would’ve called herself someone who had learned to prioritize rationality and logic over emotion.

She had tried before, to be sure. Tried to discard her emotions, tried to pretend that it didn’t matter, because the best thing that humans could chase after was knowledge, and nothing else.

But no matter what she did, she couldn’t deny the emptiness she felt inside. It wasn’t something as simple as a single word. It wasn’t anything like that, because if she tried to figure out and squeeze it into some sort of framework or definition, that wouldn’t convey anything she felt.

If there was a name for what she felt, she supposed it would be melancholy. Something she couldn’t express, something that didn’t let her show how she felt. She didn’t know how to show it.

Music became her escape, the window into which she could project how she felt.

It had started with a single song, some classic called “Fly Me to the Moon” by some long-dead artist called Bart Howard. Except, the thing was that the song itself apparently had been a jazz version made for some old animated show, an altered cover of the original.

The samba beat gently rolling through the room, accompanied by strains of guitar, piano and violin, mixing together to form the perfect balance as the woman’s voice rang from wall to wall.

“Fill my heart with song, and let me sing forevermore…” She didn’t know what exactly it was that made her open her mouth. “You are all I long for, all I worship and adore...” But she felt something in her resonate with the song, something that compelled her to open her mouth and sing, her voice brokenly following the melody like water running over rocks. “In other words, please be true, in other words, I love you…”

And when the song had finished, she knew, there and then: she needed to make a recording of herself singing to the song and put it out on SpaceNet.

A cover of a musical cover. It was stupid, foolish, a thing that only naive amateurs would do. But she did it anyway. She needed to show how she felt, somehow, some way.

So she sang.

Sing. Sing with your heart. Sing with your soul. Sing with every fiber of your being. Sing and sing. Put your voice into the words and match every sound and syllable. Your emotions, your longing, your desires, sing them all into being.

Sitting at the window, she stretched her palm out towards the vast expanse of nothingness of the void. Even though she knew the odds of anyone finding her cover in the vast expanse of SpaceNet were infinitesimally small, she couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere out there, there was someone else like her, floating in the perfect stillness. Could that person hear her singing? Could that someone understand her?

II. The scenery that lay in front of that boy’s eyes

Seas of liquid flames. Deserts of frozen ice. Buried ruins and sunken cities.

Hopes, dreams, visions, all of them were there, at the place where the beginning ended and the end began. The place of beginnings, the place of endings. The final frontier and the first step into the unknown.

He wanted to see what lay beyond. Space - it was everything to him. It was the celestial cavern where humanity was but a mere speck of dust sifting about, guided by forces beyond comprehension that moved stars and shifted galaxies. It was the place where all the unseen possibilities could take form, where the scene that lay in front of the boy’s eyes could be realized.

To spread his wings when he could finally graduate from the Academy and to move out towards the cosmic darkness where everything was open. Where things were far apart and everyone had the space they wanted. Where he could feel alone for once, occupied with nothing but himself and his thoughts.

Everything here on Earth was too cramped. Not enough space to move around. People living together in crowded apartments crammed into gargantuan skyscrapers where the cities were.

Everything here on Earth was too close. Not enough space to feel like you could be alone. Everyone knew everyone else. People knew the names and the secrets and the dramas and the scandals of everyone else around them. Nothing felt as private as it should’ve been.

SpaceNet was his escape. There, space was a concept, and only a concept; in the world of SpaceNet, he could come and go as he pleased, moving about anywhere he wanted. He could take a gander around the stations in the Outer Systems on HoloReality, or visit domains to see the newest publication about Frontier Exploration.

The world–no, universe–was his; all he had to do was to move, to explore, to wander about and to see what the infinite vastness could take him. What the infinite vastness could show him.

Wonder? Awe? Or perhaps something greater than that?

The perpetual half-dusk, half-dawn of Schicksal. The permanent eclipse of Genesis. The frozen monoliths on Atran. What did one feel, living on worlds so different from the neon cityscapes he had seen his whole life?

One day, he’d see for himself what the Frontier was about. New things, new experiences, new ideas, new people. He wanted to know what it was like to do those things, to undergo those experiences, to think about those ideas, to meet those people. One day, he’d do it.

He wanted to know. And so, he’d keep looking.

~

Looking back, it must have been coincidence that he found that first video. Out of the billions of music videos on SpaceNet, and for him to come across that while drifting about listlessly on AutoPlay? The chances were infinitesimally small, one in a billion–no, a trillion, even.

The video itself hadn’t been particularly amazing at first glance, either. The first shot had opened with some blurred stock video footage of light shining through trees before abruptly cutting to some take of a satellite passing by overhead, accompanied by the sound of strings. Then, it had shifted to a picture of a full moon as the track transitioned into some classic samba with guitar, strings, a drumset, and the faint strains of what sounded like a piano in the background. The audio had a scratchiness to it, as if the person had been trying to replicate the phonograph record effect from over 200 years ago, but had failed miserably, since the static was just loud enough that he had to concentrate to hear the instruments.

Overall, nothing particularly impressive. He could understand why the video itself had less than 1000 views and absolutely 0 follows. Anyone could have taken the half-a-dozen shots of Frontier scenery and buildings with better grace than the creator had, and even though he didn’t have any editing experience, he was fairly sure that he could’ve done something to make the animation of a full moon and the spinning figure in the center of the video much better than the low-resolution mosaic that occupied the center screen for the entirety of the 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

“Fly me to the moon…” the voice that hit his ears after, however, had taken him by surprise. “And let me play among the stars…” he had nearly dropped his NetBoard. “Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars…” The singing… just, wow. The voice was soft but clear, with a light grace to it that he never would’ve expected from such an amateur video. “In other words, hold my hand...” The singer had amazing pitch control, too; the voice harmonized with the background instruments perfectly, mixing in to create a beautiful melody despite the audio scratches. “In other words, baby kiss me…”

4 minutes and 25 seconds. Pure bliss. It wasn’t until his NetBoard had let out a click to let him know it was transitioning to the next song that he had broken out of his trance. And before the next song started, he had jumped backwards and hit replay for another time, content to close his eyes and let the music flow through his head.

He couldn’t stop listening to the song. It was just that good. Because despite everything bad about the video, despite everything from the crappy space shots to the low-resolution animation that was constantly spinning in center screen, the singing was phenomenal enough to balance out the scales. He could feel the singer’s passion, the emotions in her voice permeating throughout the whole song. There was a fragile beauty in her voice that made the song feel like a dream–untouchable and fleeting.

Who was she, to make such a song so beautiful yet lonely?

He wanted to know. Lying on his bed, NetBoard at his side set on Loop, he stretched a palm towards his ceiling.

Out there, somewhere… could she be feeling what he was feeling right now?

[Fin]