Day four was an early start; I was up at first light. I watched the sun reach across the horizon, a tiny yellow dot with a fiery ghost stretching thin at first first, then expanding upward into the sky above the ocean. I ate, drank, packed my bag and was on my way back to the leather whatever-it-was before the beach had fully brightened.

As I arrived at the upturned driftwood that I’d planted yesterday, I slipped on my sandals and trudged into the woods. I came to the small bald patch in the overgrowth, turned, and trekked a little further, counting my steps as I went.

One.

Two.

...

Forty-nine.

I stopped before taking another step.

“...think it was about fifty...”

I was not directly in front of a tree... I’d gone wrong somewhere. The palm forest was thick here and it was hard to know how far off I was.

Twenty minutes of frantically scanning the treetops later, I found the leather thingamajig. The entire time, it had been just a few steps before where I’d stopped.

“Cheeky bugger...”

I grabbed one of my brand new axes and immediately got to work.

It took nearly three axes to chop down the tree. As I looped my final axe back onto the rucksack, it had only a thin sliver of durability left. The tree needed an extra push before it fell. I helped it along and got clear as it crashed down to the forest floor. For a moment, it threatened to get caught up in the surrounding trees, but I got lucky. It rolled off the branches and fell with a thud.

{Foraging +3xp}

The leather bound package tumbled out and skittered under a yuca plant. I crawled underneath, stretched as far as I could, and pulled it out by a single finger. I was sweaty. My skin slipped against the leather.

I found a spot on the trampled ground and sat down with the thing. I laid it down, untied the strap that bound it, and unrolled the leather. It smelled good, like smoke & cedar, like the inside of a barrel sauna. It was larger than I’d expected, and once unrolled, it took two hands to handle, like holding an old-fashioned newspaper. It was ‘aged’, but it didn’t crumble or tear.

In the very center, near the top, was another disc sewn in, exactly like my rucksack. The white ring of light pulsed softly, sensing my touch.

I focussed on it, and tiny dots moved across the face of the leather like a wave, from left to right. It appeared as though tiny particles of the leather itself were bursting with light and then dimming. Maybe projected by the ring, but this looked more like a chemical reaction in the leather itself. After the wave passed, a collection of symbols assembled themselves evenly across the surface. I ran my finger over one icon and I could feel its contours, a subtle indentation beneath my finger. The glowing thread-like lines were actually etched into the surface temporarily—ink made of light.

I sat back and studied the symbols. There were eight of them. The first I recognized. It was the same icon I’d seen fall out of the sky, upside-down when I’d found my rucksack. I touched it.

The icons seeped away like wet ink dispersing. I caught myself smiling. The movement was so smooth, so gratifying to watch. And then, the same interface the rucksack had projected before, a grid showing my inventory, inked itself onto the leather surface. I could see my water, my Kehra seeds, everything in my pack, even though I’d left it a few yards away.

“That’s handy,” I said, “not exactly sure how or why... but seems handy...”

The familiar interface came with an additional column of information here. It showed stats about my pack. Upgrade Level 1. Durability. Quick references of how long the food & water held within should sustain me. My current maximum weight limit, and by extension, the stamina drain rate of my current load. A few other things I didn’t fully understand.

“Definitely handy.”

I re-focussed my attention on the glowing circle at the top of the interface.

“You're a U.I...”

The circle glowed again and the inventory display dispersed in the same captivating inky fashion. The grid of symbols re-assembled out of tiny dots. I didn’t recognize any of the rest of them. Most, I didn’t yet even understand. I tried to touch the very last icon, which sort of looked like an old-fashioned Rolodex, but it did nothing. The ink pulsed slightly as I pushed my finger against the leather, but nothing changed.

I shifted my focus to the symbol just below the backpack. It looked like a rudimentary bar graph. I put my hand on it briefly. The symbols melted away again, replaced by what I’d been waiting for...

“Ha! Finally!”

A full display of my stats appeared. No more trying to keep track of every little {+1 this} and {+3 that}! The full list of skills filled the leather. Each had a number and a simple line meter, just like my axe’s durability meter, to signify the points I’d accrued in each. There were 5 over-arching categories: Survival, Crafting, Domestic, Knowledge & Morale. Each of these categories held three skills. The full page read as such...

• Survival

  • Foraging

  • Sheltercraft

  • Firecraft

• Crafting

  • Toolmaking

  • Invention/Engineering

  • Refinement

• Domestic

  • Cooking

  • Farming

  • Heritage

• Knowledge

  • Xenobotany

  • Xenoarchaeology

  • Cartography

• Morale

  • Comfort

  • Eudaemonia

  • Community

I looked at that last two categories for a long time. What the hell was Xenoarchaeology? Worse, what was Eudaemonia?! I’d never seen that word in my life. Worse yet, how was I going to level up a Community skill on a deserted island?!

“Figure it out later...”

I snapped out of tinkering with the interface. I was sat cross-legged in the middle of the forest. I could experiment more back at camp. I rolled it up, wandered back to my pack, and realized that the loops on the one side looked perfectly designed to hold the leather roll. It slid through the loops easily, but they held it snug enough to be secure. I threw the pack over my shoulder and bounced up and down a little to make sure it wouldn’t fall out. The backpack held it tight.

“Spicy.”

Before I left, I glanced at the tree I’d chopped down. It had taken three axes to do, and while I was slowly growing more confident that I could craft more, those last few chops of the first two axes had been bittersweet. I’d tried re-gathering their parts to re-craft them, but the stone had lost its sharp edges, the stick had broken and my handwoven twine was frayed and unusable.

It seemed such a shame to put all that work and just leave the tree lying on the ground. Could I put it in my bag and take it back to camp?

Unfortunately, no magic-backpack-that-could-hold-30-rocks was going to allow me to pick up an entire tree. I grunted. I winced. I gave up. There it would lay.

25 Years Of Rest

The sun went down. Stillness settled across the beach again. The waves calmed. A delicate breeze brushed through my hanging palm frond walls, their waxy leaves rubbing together softly.

After yet another dinner of water, seed pods & hardtack, I vowed to figure out fire. I was down to a bottle and a half of water I could trust. I’d hung a few monstera leaves like little hammocks around the camp perimeter to collect morning dew and rainwater.

“Even if I can collect freshwater, I should still boil it, right?!”

I sat huddled over of a pile of dried grass that I’d gathered that afternoon. I scraped a new axe along the strange green rocks I’d found. It was a long shot, but flint is a green rock… That sounded right. I managed a few sparks over the course of what felt like hours, but no fire. I was nowhere near getting the grass to catch.

Disheartening.

I gave up for the night, but needed a win before trying to sleep. I added everything I’d discovered that day to my map on the dirt floor: the ravine, the enormous creature with the wiggly legs, and the leather caught up in the tree.

Satisfying.

I was excited to see the rest of it take shape. It gave me something to focus on, a mission. Purpose comes easily when your priorities shrink down to only the things immediately in front of you.

“Yea... The map is progress.”

Something more permanent to draw on would be good. I was avoiding an entire corner of my shelter just to avoid inadvertently erasing my map.

For now, it was dark and I needed rest. My legs ached from the long day they’d had. I planned to be up at first light to go back and get that whatever-it-was stuck up in the tree. As I laid down in my hammock and closed my eyes, I heard three large thuds outside. I sighed.

“Yep,” I yelled loudly to no one.

I didn’t bother to get out of the hammock and look outside the shelter.

“21 days left.”

I could hear the words turn to dust and sprinkle among the leaves and bushes.

“…I got it.”

I’m back in the cryopod. It must be a few years into the trip because the little voice in the back of my head isn’t rebelling against the lethargic lifestyle. Idle hands are no longer fidgeting. I’m reclined in the berth, with all its outrageous comforts: pillows everywhere, soft memory foam that never seems to bottom out, drone-y room tones that never repeat. I’m reading Volume 128 of the Guin Saga by Kaoru Kurimoto, only forty-three left in the series. Maybe take a quick break in between to read through the Discworld series… I close my book sluggishly and decide it might be time for my daily movement.

As I lean myself up on my elbows, the calorie-burn counter mounted high on the wall ticks up a single decimal point.

“Allllright. C’mon legs...”

I pull myself up against the wall and carefully shift all my weight to my feet. I shuffle around the pod in a small circle. They had instructed us to use our muscles regularly, but the calorie-burn counter continues to tick upward as I get in my daily walk, turning from green to yellow and then to orange as I cross the thresholds they’d set.

The walk sets my mind wandering. How does Hayley do this in her pod? One big daily walk, like me? Or a few short stints? How do the others deal with sleep? My circadian is all out of rhythm. When you’re using this little energy, I guess your body stops caring what time of day it is. Just like Hayley had described it, Lazy Sunday all week long. I wish I could at least call her. Something about social interactions introducing too much unpredictability, they’d said. Did a brief chat on a video call require that many calories?

The counter buzzes at me, warning that I’m about to enter a calorie deficit outside my routine range. I end my walk and find a place in the bespoke armchair they’d commissioned for me. We all got one. I chose a high-backed little number with ornate carvings in the wood and soft red upholstery. It has the thickest seat cushion possible and wide-curved armrests. It is the best chair I’ve ever sat in. Which is good, given I’ll be spending 25 years in it.

TV break. The Next Generation from the beginning again? Don’t mind if I do.

I hit a button on the universal remote that is strapped to my arm and multiple tiny valves open in the opposite wall. Air hisses out and some sort of chemical reaction ignites its tiny particles, turning the wall into an enormous projection of Worf’s forehead.

“No, no, not where I left off. We’re going all the way back, back to the beginning, back to The Encounter at Farpoint...”

I slide down into my chair as the theme song begins to play. I can think of worse things to endure for the next 20 or so years...

I had some lunch on the cliff-side, a little further back from the edge. While I ate the last of my gathered Kehra seed pods, I watched for the strange creature to return. It never did. Since I couldn’t go any further this way without intense bushwhacking, which I was very unprepared for, I decided to head back to the shelter. I’d scan the forest’s edge for anything I could gather along the way.

I found some good rocks: a few strange green ones that I thought might be flint, sharp-edged ones for axes, long flat ones for shovels. Alongside the rocks, I stuffed as many yucca leaves as I could into the rucksack. They’d be good for winding more twine. I continued with dried bush grass (for fire starting), an enormous, flat monstera-type leaf (for catching rainwater), and a mossy plant that grew in the shade of trees (maybe edible). Lastly, I found a very different seed-pod-looking-thing I hadn’t seen before.

{Unknown Item — Effects: ???}

This was the same pack-projection info as the Kehra seed pod before I’d bit into it. However, this seed was a hard brown oval with pokey bits all around its outer casing. Even if I wanted to stupidly test my luck again, there was no biting into this thing. I shook it and the hard shell rattled, something tumbling around inside. That gave me an idea, so I gathered a pack-full of them as I continued toward home.

About halfway back, I rounded a corner and stumbled onto an arrow in the sand.

[ ↠ ]

Like the other sky messages, it was about a meter high, bold, & chalky white–just sitting in the sand, waiting for me. I stopped and stared, waiting for it to dissipate into dust, and when it did, the particles floated off into the trees and enormous ferns it had been pointing toward. I pulled the rucksack off, set it in the sand, and very carefully tiptoed a little way into the overgrowth.

“Little detour...”

About 50 yards in, just as the beach disappeared from sight, another arrow crashed down through the treetops and landed in a bald patch on the forest floor. It turned me 90 degrees to my right, back the way I’d come.

“If you lead me back to that lower beach, with that thing, I swear...”

These sky messages had mostly been helpful thus far, but I remained skeptical. I stuck a large stick into the ground where the arrow had fallen. It disintegrated. I continued, delicately, lifting my unprotected legs high, like I was John Cleese doing the Ministry of Silly Walks, trying to keep my path as straight a line as I could. Another 50 yards or so in, a third arrow tumbled through the canopy and crashed down directly in front of a tall, twisted palm tree. Its pointed directly at the base of the tree. Why direct me to walk into a tree? I had already spotted some typos with these messages. Maybe whoever was leaving them just wasn’t great at their job...

I studied the tree itself, following its trunk upward, bright bands of sunlight poking through the foliage. Sure enough, near the top, there was something snagged in the leaves. Hard to make out. It looked like leather, wrapped around something long.

I tried climbing. There was no way I was making it to the top, certainly not in the buff. My hands slipped on the smooth bark, and I barely made it off the ground with each failed attempt. Next, I grabbed a stick and tried to throw it at the treetop in order to dislodge the leather-bound whatever-it-was. The overgrowth was too thick. I couldn’t get a good throw in without the stick prematurely hitting something else and changing course. I got one good hit in, but the thing was lodged tight. My last idea was to chop the entire tree down...

That would wait. Camp wasn’t far, and I still wanted to find some more Kehra pods before sunset. I’d head back, repair my axe, maybe even craft another one, gather food, and return tomorrow. Whatever was bound in that leather wrap couldn’t be that useful. Right?! I retraced my steps to the beach and turned another piece of driftwood upright in the sand to mark the start of the path. First thing in the morning, I’d be back.

Back at camp, I spent the rest of the afternoon crafting... I still wasn’t terribly good at any of it. My twine came out loose and my tools came out crooked. The afternoon went something like this…

Scoured the surrounding forest; found twelve Kehra seed pods. That’d get me through another day, easy.

Foraging points, ding.

Repaired my axe. Wove new yuca twine, ripped out the old, re-set the rock, stretched new twine taut. Sharpened it against another large, flat rock. Rucksack projected durability line. From a tiny sliver, to a full bar all the way across. From frayed twine to strong & tightly wound. The rucksack’s durability line was just a measure of how broken the thing was it seemed. Not some magical, repairable status. Just, “Hey, this is getting worn out.”

More sticks and rocks I’d collected, fashioned two more axes. Sharpened stone. Saw sparks this time. Squinted one eye, improvised eye ‘protection’. Twisted more yucca twine. As thin as I could manage. Wound straps around flat driftwood the size of my feet. Sandals. Ad-hoc but better than nothing.

Crafting points, ding, ding, ding.

Put survival suit back on. Finally dry. No more nekked exploring. Hung all three axes from loops on the side of my pack. Strung more twine between the trees surrounding camp, high up, to create an outer perimeter. Wove more arm-lengths. Tied one end to the new rattly seed pods. Tied the other ends to the new outer perimeter. Shaker-seed-pods hung chest height all around. One every meter. Harmless or not, if that massive creature came anywhere near, at least I’d have a second to react before being eaten...

Comfort points… no ding, but I’d still sleep better.

When I woke up, I was comfortable. I refused to get out of the hammock. The sun had re-appeared and I could see its rays piercing through the cracks in the palm frond walls. Little specks of dust floated around the shelter aimlessly. I watched them wander and drifted alongside them, in and out of conscious thought. Falling asleep had been rough last night, but once I had, I’d slept heavy.

When I finally got out of the hammock, I took off my survival suit. That thing still had a musty scent. Before even fully awake, I walked down to the beach, ventured knee-deep into the ocean and gave it a diligent scrub with sand and seawater. I marched back to the shelter, pulled the arms and legs of the suit inside-out and draped it over a tree branch, directly in the sun. I went back inside in my birthday suit; this was now the privacy of my own home.

I had to do some exploring today. I wanted to get to it as quickly as I could. So, I set out three Kehra pods, ripped myself a chunk of hardtack, and took the last big swig from the first of my three bottles of water.

“Big breakfast for the day ahead.”

I retraced the beginnings of my map that I’d drawn on the floor of my shelter. Today, I’d follow the beach in the opposite direction, to the right of where I’d ‘landed’. Maybe having walked the beach in both directions, I could get a better sense of just how big the island was. I emptied my backpack of all but the bare necessities. I needed capacity to gather as I went. As I set out, I rubbed my fingers on the draped survival suit, still damp. Nothing worse than putting on damp clothing... I really wanted to get moving...

“Am I gonna do this naked?”

“I’m gonna do this naked...”

I set out, in all my glory, morning sun warming my skin. This put a time limit on exploring. I scanned the horizon, looking for other landmarks to situate myself. It was astounding how little there was that stood out. There was an odd-shaped tree every few yards, but when everything is bizarre, nothing stands out. I rounded the corner in this new direction and gave a quick wave goodbye to my shelter as it moved out of my line of sight.

What I really wanted to find was a more reliable food & water source. A plentiful grove of Kehra trees would be good. My limited supplies were going to run out soon. The hardtack was half gone, and I was going through water way too fast. With only 22 days until... something... happened, there was now also urgency in finding some answers as to what was going on.

Up ahead, the beach ended. I could see that it gradually turned into a rocky slope, but I couldn’t make out what happened after that. The rocks gradually pulled up and away from the water. I kept walking, squinting against the sun, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. As I got closer, larger rocks replaced the soft beach sand. I climbed the steady incline slowly, careful with my bare feet, wobbling every step. At the end of the rocky rise, the land ended abruptly with a steep cliff. The rock face descended at least ten meters below me. It was a deep gulch that had formed around a small river coming from somewhere inland and emptying into the ocean. I hadn’t understood the gulch from a distance because, oddly, the trees that grew below had grown twice as tall as the trees nearer the top of the rocky cliff. The treeline that bordered both the higher beach, where I was, and the lower beach, at the base of the gulch, looked uninterrupted.

I’ve never been great with heights, so I, again, very carefully, lay on my stomach on a large, flat rock near the edge of the cliff. I inched myself forward on my belly, peeking out over the edge to survey the gulch below. It looked like paradise. The river ran through lush forest and then opened out onto another gorgeous, sheltered beach. There, the river expanded outward and flowed into the sea. The lower beach spanned maybe fifty meters before it met another rock face on the far side. I searched for a safe way down. There was no way I could climb down the cliffside I was peering over without falling. My body wouldn’t even let me try. Maybe the descent was a little more gradual further into the tree line, but I was in no state for that kind of bushwhacking. I looked down at my bare skin, warm against the rock.

“The hell was I thinking?!...”

I squinted further, searching for a way down through the trees. I could go get the suit and come back. As I did, I noticed something else that I had a hard time believing I’d missed until now. It had been standing there the whole time. It was easily twice as tall as me, and almost equally as wide. My mind was still deciding what to do with what my eyes were telling it. This, thing, was swaying gently, just inside the tree line down below, resting in the shade.

The closest thing I can compare it to is a jellyfish. A big, fleshy, hot-air balloon with hundreds of thin, shaking tendrils supporting its weight. The ‘body’ was deep black, matte, as though light couldn’t even approach the surface of its skin. Shining, meandering, gold markings traced across its bulbous body and glinted in the sunlight. A massive, inflated, black jellyfish. On land. Swaying slowly. Its upper half still dripped on the sand. It must have come from the ocean up onto the beach.

It didn’t seem to be doing anything. It just stood there. Sand coated its tendrils as though it had ‘sat’ on the beach. My initial fear turned to fascination.

“What are you!?!”

I wasn’t about to go down there now. This thing was big. After ten minutes, the creature gave its bulb-shaped body a shake, water and sand splashing against the leaves of surrounding trees. It stretched up high on its tendril legs and they all twitched a little. It slowly crawled out of the shade and across the beach. I chuckled as it lumbered along.

“Half a spine-chilling monster... half ludicrous child’s drawing...”

The creature went on its way across the beach and slowly out into the waves. It disappeared under the water. I stared.

“Could that thing come up onto my beach?”

The shelter would be like tissue paper to something that big. It wouldn’t even notice as it bowled me over while I slept. I’d be a light snack if it were hungry... As I itemized all the ways the thing could kill me, a message fell out of the sky and landed on the beach below, sending sand flying.

[HARMLESS]

“Right. Don’t think I’ll be testing that theory.”

I tried not to think about what it meant as the word HARMLESS disintegrated into a fine chalky dust as drifted away in the wind.

[LEFT]

[DAYS]

[22]

“Ha!” I said triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

The initial excitement of not missing the full message quickly gave way to the ongoing worry about what happened after twenty-two days. Ominous.

“Can I get some clarification here!?” I yelled up to the sky.

It simply continued to darken.

“Hello?!”

Another message dropped, an icon again, like the backpack I’d seen yesterday. This time, a battery symbol, a quarter full. It landed just outside my little stone fence, closer to my shelter than I would have liked. More importantly though, someone had heard me. They had heard me ask for clarification, and they had responded, albeit cryptically.

“What’s that mean?!”

Nothing more fell from the sky. The large white countdown and the battery symbol crumbled to dust one by one, and I was on my own once more. Night set in, everything turned black. I climbed back into my hammock.

While I was more comfortable in my improved shelter, somehow the second night felt much longer. My body was exhausted, but I couldn’t seem to turn my mind off. I tried to recollect all the messages that had fallen from the sky, searching for some explanation that made sense. Letters falling from the sky wasn’t normal. I planned out the following day four or five different ways. Then I planned further ahead to what I could reasonably get done in twenty-two days. Had the battery meant they simply couldn’t communicate anymore tonight? Off the recharge? What happened if it ran out of juice entirely? And how did that relate to the countdown? Was rescue was coming in 22 days? Annihilation?! Too many questions, all with no answers.

I tossed and turned. The night crawled along. I could hear more. That first night, the rain had lulled me to sleep. In its stillness though, the second night brought strange sounds all around the shelter. Cracks and creaks echoing through the darkness. Sounds you might expect to hear in the wilderness but amplified by my wandering mind. At one point, I was sure I could hear wailing in the far distance, faint, but vaguely human. It lasted a few minutes and then stopped.

The shelter felt secure. I’d be fine. Eventually, with the distraction of far away memories, my brain stopped nagging and let me drift off.

A few weeks after Hayley had discovered the AERIS seedship project, new neighbours moved in across the hall. Jean-Francois & Madeleine, they were as French-Canadian as anyone I’d ever met. We had them by for dinner and they brought a crokinole board with them. We were in the midst of a heated tournament.

“OK. Can I play the skeptic?”

The couples’ English was still rough, but Jean-Francois had quickly picked up on the appropriate English curses when he missed a shot.

“Dam-eet!” Jean’s piece bounced off a peg and flew completely off the board.

“You? The skeptic?!” my roommate Hayley answered, “Sure, sure, rain on my parade.” She pointed at me, rolled her eyes, and winked at Madeleine. Madeleine seemed quite lost because of the language barrier.

“OK, so they send us off into space, we float around for 25 years and then arrive on some new planet for a fresh start...”

“Mmhm,” Hayley’s tongue stuck out as she lined up her next shot. Despite Jean-Francois’ cursing, the board was full of black pieces, which belonged to him & Hayley. Most of the naked wood pieces, Madeleine & I’s, had been knocked into the gutters. Hayley was quite good at crokinole.

“So we arrive, we start over, but what stops things from going the exact same way they have here on Earth? If we made a mess here, we’ll eventually make one there, right?! We are what we are, sending humans halfway across the universe isn’t going to change that, is it?”

Hayley lined up a perfect shot and sank her puck into the 20-hole at the center of the board.

“Right in the toad!” she shouted, reaching across the table to offer her teammate a high-five. Jean-Francois hesitated, realized what she was doing, and enthusiastically smacked her hand.

Hayley sat back in her seat. “Well, I’m sure they’ve considered that... There must be some kind of plan.”

The neighbours spoke to one another in French, clearly having their own separate conversation at the same time Hayley and I were having ours. Hayley tried to pull us all together.

“Jean. Would you go live on another planet?”

Jean looked confused. “We only just arrived here to our apartment...” he said.

“Sorry, I don’t mean actually, but just for pretend. In your imagination...”

He turned to Madeleine, “Est-ce qu’on irait dans l’espace?”

She smiled politely at me and nodded. “Ahhhh oui, j’aimerais beaucoup voir une autre planète un jour.”

Jean-Francois restated their response in English as best he could, “To have the chance to go to space, we would very much like this.”

“And, do you think,” Hayley began to clear the board as there was no way for Madeleine and I to come back from their lead, “if you went to another place and could start from scratch, plan everything better, choose your travelling partners... do you think things would turn out better than they have here on Earth?”

Jean-Francois and Madeleine whispered to one another in French, parsing Hayley’s question.

“Ah, oui, yes, I think, very much, a nouveau départ is good,” Jean spoke. Madeleine nodded and stacked her pieces, thoughtfully preparing for the next round.

The afternoon clouded over, and everything went still. The tide settled into a slow, gentle lapping against the beach. Further out in the water, the waves had all but disappeared. Everything went silent again. Even the breeze had stopped. It was as if someone had hit pause on the entire world.

A part of me wanted to explore. I might find something that could help with building a more reliable shelter. Maybe I could even find an existing cave. If I came up short though, I risked sleeping in the cramped lean-to again. I needed a stable home-base before I started wandering into uncharted territory...

I went to work pulling apart last night’s shelter. There was a hint of sadness as I did. It had kept me dry, but if another storm like that rolled in tonight, I needed something more durable. And more comfortable.

I was forced to rely on my intuition. All that time drawing maps as a kid, not a lot of fort-building for wee Marlowe... Only one way to figure it out. I started by expanding my work area. After disassembling the old shelter and piling the fronds off to one side, I used my axe, which was in pretty rough shape, to clear the brush from an area between four larger trees. This took time, and according to the pack, my axe was down to its last sliver of durability once I finished.

I found another long, flat rock, got down on all fours, and scraped the ground with it. This turned the soil so that I had a nice clearing. With the area bare, I went back and forth between the beach and the shelter, collecting as many rocks as I could find. Each trek to the beach was easy. Easy trek back, with a backpack loaded up, was a slog. It felt like I was being dragged downward, as though gravity got stronger, when I had the backpack full. I lined the perimeter with stones. Keep the critters out. Still had seen no critters, though...

I walked back to the Kehra trees that I’d chopped down. I carried both of the skinny trees back to my ‘yard‘. I lashed the first horizontally between two of the larger palm trees. The first I tied as high as possible, on my tiptoes, which was awkward. Holding up one side of a tree, even a skinny one, with one arm fully extended, and trying to tie a tight knot with the other hand wasn’t easy. I got it done. The second Kehra tree went up parallel to the first, between the opposite palm trees. I didn’t strain so much this time because I wanted the roof to have a slope to this side. I lashed it a few inches lower than the first.

That’d do. With two rails hung between the trees, it was just a matter of putting down layer after layer of palm fronds across them to create a roof. For durability’s sake, I tied the fronds down on the higher side, so that storm winds couldn’t blow them away. I found long sticks to use for the short sides, and then hung fronds down from the rails to make walls on all sides. I left a small gap in the hanging palm fronds on one short side to use as a doorway. By the end of the afternoon, I had a pretty fancy-looking shelter. I stood back and admired my handiwork.

“Not bad for an indoor kid.”

{+5 Base-building}
{+3 Comfort}

“Hey, can I see the totals of all my points?!...”

The bag slumped in the evening sun. Its vents clicked shut. Nope. I spent the rest of the day braiding twine and half-successfully weaving it into a hammock that hung diagonally across the middle of the shelter, between two corner trees. I also tied a hooked stick to a tree to hang the backpack on. It had all really come together. I climbed into the hammock, tensed & unsure that it was strong enough to hold my weight. When it did, my entire body relaxed. I had a hammock. Inside a shelter! I could feel my nerves going still for the first time since I’d landed. My mind went blank as I rested my head back. Today held no more tasks to be done. I tensed every muscle one by one just to release them all and feel the stress leave.

“Aughhh yeuuuhh.”

The lapping waves had stopped entirely. The sky was a placid gray curtain. My body was quiet. Absolute calm. Just the slow swinging of my hammock against the tree bark.

And then it grew. Involuntarily. All that energy that I’d released came rushing back and burst out of my lungs as maniacal laughter. I couldn’t stop it. The levee broke and euphoria poured in.

“I’ve got a house! Ahahaha!”

For five good minutes, I belted it out into the quiet of the island. Drunk on laughter. Wheezing in between the outbursts.

“I built a house, backpack!”

The sun set over the water, and the world turned orange. Still I chortled until my stomach hurt. It rang out across the open water. The laughter got so out of control that I started to cough.

“I’m gonna sleep so good tonight!”

I almost wanted it to rain as I lay in the shelter. I wanted to put it to the test. The evening remained eerily calm. The sun disappeared over the ocean. I tried for a long while to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, but I got nowhere with it. I decided it was best to conserve my energy and enjoy my hammock. Just as I began to drift off, I heard the thuds again. One, two, and three. This time I was quick. I was on my feet and out the ‘door‘ as soon as I heard the first sky message land.

[LEFT]

[DAYS]

[22]

“Ha!” I said triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

1000 words, ~5 minute read
Recommended listening while you read: Winter Melon Valley by Leon Chang
Day 2 on the island, midday

If you’re new here, hop back to the Table Of Contents.

After breakfast, I took stock. The sea had calmed since the storm. The sun had returned, and again the whole thing looked too good to be true. I cupped my hands over my brow and scanned the horizon. I thought I could now see far enough into the distant waters to make out a vague shape, but it was too far to be sure the light wasn’t playing tricks on me.

I sat cross-legged in the sand, with my digging rock, a big stick, and a palm frond laid out in front of me. First, I peeled leaves from the palm frond and braided them together. I tugged on both ends as hard as I could; surprisingly strong cord. I braided four short lengths and laid these out on the ground as well. Like a surgeon delicately organizing her tools. Next, I spent twenty minutes banging my digging rock against one end of the stick. I would hit it, rotate 90 degrees, then hit it again. Eventually, I’d carved a four inch deep X shape in one end. I jammed my digging rock into one of the grooves. It was snug, but I used the palm cordage to further secure it, weaving back and forth through the X and tying off the ends.

Behind me, I heard the click of valves on the backpack release, the air crackled, and the smell of faint burning wafted down to where I sat. What was the backpack igniting in order to project onto thin air like this? Text appeared in my periphery.

{Crafting +3}

“Ha! Clever little rucksack…”

I admired my newly crafted axe and held it up for the backpack to see. Pretty crude, but for what I had in mind, it would do the trick.

With the axe in one hand, I retrieved the strange fruit I’d found. I peeled my ‘tablecloth’ off the driftwood ‘table’ and set the fruit in a divot. I pulled the axe high over my head and brought it down hard. And missed completely. I wound up a little less dramatically, again bringing the axe down on the strange fruit. The jelly-like exterior split right down the middle, exposing the orange pit at the center.

Maybe if I disassembled it, I’d learn something?! I peeled away the transparent jelly exterior of one half and held the core up to the light. It had a texture like a mango, but the purple dots all throughout the mealy orange flesh made it look more like a strangely coloured kiwi. I rolled it apart between my fingers, examining the purple bits, trying to do anything that might trigger more details about it to float up from the rucksack.

Nothing.

I waited a minute in case there was some sort of lag. The gooey interior of the fruit-thing had a cooling sensation on my hands.

Still nothing.

My impatience got the better of me. I bent down, grabbed the other, still intact, half of the fruit, and quickly took a bite. It was incredible. Compared to the hardtack, the flavour was mouth-watering–a jolt of energy. My tongue tingled. The sweetness, the sugary taste, the soft melting of the jelly-like exterior.

“Oh! Oh! Ooooh! This is good. This is so, so good!”

Another rush of air, a sizzle & a flash.

{Kehra Seed Pod | Effects: +Hydration, +Sustenance}

The backpack’s projection floated right above the half-gnawed fruit.

“Well, that was lucky.”

I made a mental note to never do that again. Action is good, but that was impulsive. I pulled my axe out of the driftwood and went hunting for more Kehra Seed Pods.

A few hours later, at around midday, I had eight Kehra Seed Pods in my pack.

I had only ventured a little ways into the overgrowth nearby my temporary shelter. They were easy to spot, up near the tops of a long, skinny, branchless tree I didn’t recognize. But gathering eight of them had taken me a long time. Clearly, they weren’t growing in abundance, at least not here.

I’d got the first few by chopping down the entire tree with my axe. It was only an inch or two thick, so I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. The tree itself felt rubbery as I hacked at it. My axe would bounce back unnaturally with every strike. By the time the first two Kehra trees fell, the pack had flashed an orange durability meter above my axe. The thicker line segment was less than 1/4 of the way across. Though, this had scored me points.

{Foraging +1}

Foraging was new.

“What do we have so far?” I asked the backpack. “Foraging, crafting, base-building, athletics, comfort & cartography. How many of these are there?!”

My axe would have broken before I got another tree down. So, I resorted to simply shaking the hell out of any other Kehra trees I could find, in order to coax their fruits to drop to the forest floor.

I came back to my makeshift shelter to make a plan and eat some lunch. I ate three of the eight Kehra pods. It was good to save the hardtack and bottled water for emergencies, but the seed pods were more of a snack than a meal. I was going to need to gather a lot more of them if they were going to be my primary source of food.

I took my last bite, a modest sip from my bottled water, and felt ready to take on the afternoon’s project...

“I dunno, Marlowe, this seems sort of legit…”

My roommate, Hayley and I are walking across campus on an early foggy morning. She flicks her finger, scrolling through a website on her phone, not watching where she’s walking.

“It’s got the A.E.R.I.S. logo in the footer and everything…”

She turns her phone to show me. I nod and take a sip of my coffee. It’s tastes burnt. Times like these, I wish I took sugar. We need a new coffeemaker.

“O.K. Let’s hear it…” I capitulate.

“It’s like I told you. We volunteer, we do a little training, they load us up on a spaceship and shoot us off into space. We get to start fresh.”

“Seems like a scam somehow. Why recruit from the public?” I ask.

“Well, the ships don’t come back. It’s a one-way thing. Guess it’s not easy finding volunteers for that.”

“Hm.”

Hayley pulls her phone closer to her face and keeps reading. The fog makes everything seem like it’s hiding. Century-old brown brick buildings peek out of the mist. The ones in the distance look more like mountains than lecture halls. Hayley’s shoes clack on the stones as we walk.

“Take twenty-five years to get to where it’s going…” she mutters.

“Twenty-five years? That’s a long time…”

“Yeah. It is…”

She trips up on a crack in the path but maintains her focus as she reads.

“Heh. You don’t actually lose those years…”

“Huh?!”

“Yeah, you don’t sleep through it or whatever, like the movies. Or, you sleep sometimes, but not only sleep… They call it a ‘cryopod‘. Everyone isolates in one, and you have to keep your metabolism slow, but you can still do whatever you like. Low energy things…”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, anything that’s relaxed. Could read a lot of books or watch a lot of movies in 25 years…”

I tilt my head to one side and consider it, shrugging and nodding in agreement. Then I grab Hayley’s arm and steer her as we turn onto a connecting path. She looks up for a brief moment and gives me a quick smile.

“Yea, this sounds amazing,” she mumbles to herself. “Twenty five years of nothing but lazy Sundays in a cryopod, then a brand new life on a planet that isn’t overcrowded, where things haven’t gone to sh…”

“Marlowe Halcott, can I get a minute?” A voice calls from a building to our left. I turn to see Professor Selwyn holding open a heavy metal door. Her hand still presses down firmly on the metal rod, she uses a foot to brace open the heavy weight. I raise a hand in acknowledgement.

“Let’s talk more about this later…” I say to Hayley as I turn and walk across the grass.

I woke up at first light. After last night’s ominous message, made more ominous by the missing integral first word, everything felt heavy. I yawned and then deflated. The reality of where I was and the difficulty of survival set in. I lay there in a moment of vulnerability. The rain had stopped, save for the lazy tap, tap of drips from massive monsteras. I stretched both arms out of the entrance. My muscles felt sore, but I had energy again.

The storm had done damage to my shelter. Throughout the night, I’d woken up to the wind blowing palm fronds off. I’d simply curled up smaller and fallen back to sleep. I could now see cracks of light where layers of leaves had become thin. The backpack lit up with another hiss in the air. A bar, similar to what I’d seen with the inventory, floated up near the roof of the shelter. A minimal thin white line with a thicker segment extending halfway across it.

“Durability…”

I exited the shelter and started picking up the few palm fronds that hadn’t blown too far. I set them back onto the shelter and the thicker segment inched forward just a little.

“Today’s job… something more reliable.” My calves cramped up. “…And more spacious.”

The trees sagged low, heavy under the weight that the passing storm had left; branches had become tangled together in the wind. It exaggerated the unfamiliarity of the flora here. Some of these trees weren’t right. Looking deeper into the forest, it grew more & more dense. I’d need better footwear before I attempted that. Through the thick foliage, a tall rocky outcropping jutted up above the treetops. That could be a good place to get a lay of the land…

I pulled a large leaf off a nearby plant I didn’t recognize and dragged two other wide pieces of driftwood out onto the beach. I wrapped the leaf over both and tucked its edges underneath. A makeshift table. A relatively flat surface at the very least. I paused for a moment, expecting a comfort point to float up. It didn’t.

“Thrifty this morning, are we?”

I grabbed the rucksack and dug around inside. I broke off a ration of hardtack and pulled out a bottle of water, then calmly took the time to arrange them neatly on my makeshift table.

“Lovely. Breakfast.”

No one around the table to laugh at bad jokes. No hint of real flavour in sight. The hardtack was joyless. But, still, breakfast. Lovely. As I ate and drank, I thought about Comfort points. And Cartography points. And Base-building points… Where were these points going? I tried to tally them up with my finger in the sand, but I’d already lost count.

The cloud bank moved in fast; a massive dark shadow pouring in from out over the sea. The scenery had gone from a beautiful, serene beach of golden sand and crystal water to the indigos and slate grays of a tropical storm. The world darkened.

“OK... Let’s forget the guest bedroom. Need to move a little faster…”

I collected another long piece of driftwood from down the beach and dragged it just a few feet into the forest, leaning it against a tree that had a “Y” shape in its branches at just the right height. Another raindrop made it through the treetops and landed on my forehead. It slid down and I wiped it from my eye.

“OK, OK, we’ll keep it really simple!” I shouted at the sky.

I stacked palm fronds up against the single driftwood beam that leaned against the tree—a rudimentary A-frame. I was skeptical that this would hold out all night, but I didn’t have much choice. I layered the massive leaves, at least two or three thick, on either side of the roof to be sure I’d stay dry.

The rain picked up. The rhythm of the drops hitting the treetops quickened its pace until a deafening thunder strike ushered in a downpour. I bolted out onto the beach and grabbed the rucksack, darting back under my shelter and chucking the bag into the far corner. I pushed sand toward the open end of the A-frame from inside. Hopefully, any rain that dripped off the roof would run down and away.

The illuminated dot on the pack flashed, and multiple texts floated up.

{+5 Base-building}
{+1 Comfort}

Comfort!? Not exactly how I’d describe it. But, it was something... I wished I was up off the ground, in case the storm brought out any creepy crawlies, but that was a problem for after the rain stopped.

The rain didn’t stop.

It poured for the rest of the day. The sun went down. The moon came up, and still, it rained. Thunder clapped overhead. The sky and the sea provoked one another. The wind threatened my roof for hours.

I experimented with the pack some more but didn’t discover much new. I tried to sleep, but it was still too early in the evening. I drew a little map in the sand with my finger—the short bit of beach that I’d explored between my driftwood and the white things jutting out of the ocean.

{+1 Cartography}

“Another, huh?! Generous with the points tonight...”

In the dark, the constant deluge become my new baseline. The sound of rain started to disappear into the background. Intermittently, I’d tune into it again when it seemed to slow down. I’d stick my hand out of the shelter, but it came back dripping wet every time. I emptied out the contents of the backpack and had another ration of hardtack and a few small drinks of water.

“Alright. Survive first. Done. Now, onto the despair part...”

I lay back in the shelter, my feet jammed in with the backpack at the far corner, my head up against a mound of sand by the opening. The storm raged on. The waves kept their steady tempo. The good news was that the shelter kept me surprisingly dry. And while the ground in the forested area was firmer than the soft beach, it was still sand. I’d slept in less comfortable places. Of course, I’d slept in much more comfortable ones too. +1 Comfort seemed right on the money.

I drifted off into a reverie about how I ended up on the beach this morning.

I remembered getting on the seed ship, the SOLACE VIII. I remembered a successful launch. I remembered double-checking co-ordinates & trajectories. And I remembered climbing into my cryo-bunk. SOLACE had left Earth’s orbit well before that, though. It had been nearly out of the Milky Way. Was I somehow back on Earth? What had gone wrong? And where was the ship?

I held the strange fruit I’d found and was inspecting it, lost in thought. Which was more likely to be reality—that I’d arrived in a distant galaxy all alone with no sign of the SOLACE VIII, or that I’d returned to an island on Earth that was so remote it grew strange fruit I’ve never heard of...

The rain continued to patter on the palm fronds. I stared at my little map in the sand, dragging my finger around, guessing how much bigger it needed to be in order to map the entire island. This brought back an even more distant memory. Me, as a kid, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, tracing fingers over a huge, crinkled, tea-stained paper map. Imaginary places I’d drawn in pencil. Each one with its own name, its own climate, flora & fauna. I’d loved drawing up these secret worlds as a ki....

A loud crash outside my shelter shook me out of my thoughts.

I shuffled onto my knees and crouched at the ‘door’. I held my breath, listening for footsteps. Nothing.

I stayed for another moment, trying not to make a sound. Then another crash in the leaves. Then a third, this time even closer. I put my hand over my mouth, desperate not to give myself away.

Not footfalls. Too heavy for that. The rain made it hard to discern.

After a few more seconds passed, I slowly stuck my head out to peek around the backside of my shelter. Inching my way out, I was ready to snap back inside the moment I spotted danger.

I sighed with relief when I saw the words. Just another sky message landing on the forest floor...

The word closest to me was,

[LEFT]

Just behind that was,

[DAYS]

And behind that was a fog of tiny little particles crumbling onto the forest floor. I’d missed the third word before it had disintegrated.

“What!?” I said out loud. “Days left?! How many days left?!”

The word DAYS crumbled into dust and the rain washed it away.

“Wait! How many days!? I missed it!”

The word LEFT fell away as well.

“Days until what!”

A thunderclap roared through the air, and I ducked back into my shelter.

“DAYS UNTIL WHAT!?” I shouted up at my makeshift palm frond roof.

I felt much better after a bit of food and drink. As my jaw laboured over the hardtack, my thoughts wandered back to before I’d volunteered—to life before the seed ship project. We’d been excited, idealistic, young & dumb. We’d also been indignant, unhappy with the way things were going. In the clarity of hindsight, how little had gone wrong for those kids. Here I was, older, wiser, and yet, things had now gone ‘stranded alone on a remote island’ levels of wrong.

I pictured the apartment we’d lived in during that time. The meals we’d made with the neighbours. The joy around the table. The awkward jokes that hadn’t landed, but were laughed at anyway, as a shared gesture of solidarity, a kindness to show we were all in it together. The mess of glasses on the tabletop… The chairs with their cat-scratched upholstery and thick-cushioned seats… The steam coming off the easily chewable food…

Something cracked loudly in my mouth and brought me back to reality. Hopefully just the hardtack. I tried using as little drinkable water as possible, but as it rinsed the sand from my gums, I emptied more of the first bottle than I’d intended. I could feel my body thanking me as I swallowed it down.

After the snack, I walked down to the waterline and rinsed my face in the seawater– refreshing at first, but the salt lingered. I needed to figure out a way to capture fresh gray water for things like this. The musty sting of my survival suit stuck in my nose again, so I looked around one more time to be sure I was alone. I peeled the whole thing off. I swirled it around in the waves, turned it inside out, and then hung it from my driftwood marker. It felt good to be fed, half-clean and naked on a private beach. People paid good money for this.

While my suit dried in the afternoon sun, I tested the backpack more. I reclaimed my strange fruit from its perch in the standing driftwood and grabbed my digging stone, placing both into the bag. The strange circle on the leather flap glowed every time something went in or out, as though it was counting. I held the bag up and stared into the little cylinder.

There was another long hiss of pressure releasing, a crackle in the air, and then a grid projected out of the glow, filling most of my field of vision. Again, the wind caused the image to flicker slightly with each gust. Icons representing my fruit, my digging rock, the hardtack, and each of the three water bottles filled six of eight spaces. This was an inventory! Along the top was a thin line that had a thicker segment on the left side. This segment extended only a small way across. It was much shorter than what I’d expect if I were already using most of the slots.

How, exactly, did this thing work?

I began gathering as many sizeable rocks as I could from the boundary between the beach and the forest. The grid disappeared as soon as I looked away. The afternoon sun beat down as I worked. I’d have to get that suit back on soon if I wanted to avoid a serious burn. Once I had a neat little pile, I tried to stuff the rocks into the bag. First rock, should be slot seven. Second rock, slot eight. To my surprise, the third rock went in with no issue, as did the fourth & the fifth. I kept stuffing until I lost count of how many rocks I’d put in.

Hm.

I focussed on the glowing dot again. The grid projected once more, having now expanded to be twelve spaces. The pack had grouped some of the rocks together. I had my original six icons, then four additional stacks of eight rocks each.

“So, not a limited number of spaces…”

The line at the top of the inventory had changed. The thicker segment now extended more than 1/2 way across and had turned yellow. I threw the bag over my shoulder and immediately felt heavier. I tried to walk down the beach a little, but I was out of breath within a few steps. My body was still underfed and over-rested. My legs wobbled.

I struggled to pull the straps off my shoulders, and the pack dropped to the ground with a thud.

It was weight-based. I could put in whatever I wanted. The bag would auto-sort into as many inventory spaces as it needed, but everything added weight. While all those rocks felt lighter than they probably should have, I still could only carry so much.

Inside the bag was still empty darkness. Why didn’t I see anything?

Why hadn’t the water stacked?

Who put a fancy leather future-techno rucksack in the forest?

The afternoon sun relented, and the air cooled off. I put my survival suit back on, but it still felt damp. I decided that shelter was the new priority. Which was good, because just as I started pulling down palm fronds, I felt a raindrop hit my forehead.

[ +1 C AR TOG R A P HY ]

“Cartography?”

“I stood a log on end...”

Despite my confusion, I got a little shot of motivation. The letters faded away. Points. Points had always worked for me. Why was the sky doling them out? Again, I gave my head a shake, pinched myself, but the beach remained, and I remained alone, toes dug firmly into the warm sand.

“Nothing to do but explore a bit...”

I figured the lush forest was the easiest place to get lost, or eaten. So, it was either left or right down the beach. I flipped my flat rock to decide. Speckle side up. Which meant left, westward... maybe?!

The walk down the beach was long. I abandoned my one remaining boot quickly. It wasn’t helping me anyway, so long as I stuck to the beach. I checked over my shoulder often, gauging how far I’d gone from the upturned driftwood. The tide must have been coming in. The sand within its reach would turn dark, then lighten again as the water soaked down underneath. Each spreading wave crept a little closer as I went.

I rounded the edge of the beach, and the flora obscured my line-of-sight back to my landmark. Around the bend, the beach continued to spread out as far as I could see. I committed to go just a little further before turning back.

The sun; I took a moment to feel it on my eyelids. The water; I wanted so badly to drink.

I scanned the horizon for anything else I could use to situate myself. It all, mostly, looked the same to me. Beautiful, painfully beautiful. Turquoise and green grew everywhere. The palm trees bent and curled around themselves in strange ways. Cruelly, they seemed to harbour no coconuts. Monstera leaves were big enough to climb on. They drooped down low, gently scraping patterns into the sand.

In the far distance, way out in the water, there was something large and white jutting out of the waves. It looked like there might be a few bright things sticking up, but it was hard to make out from this distance. It would be a long swim out to see it up close, well past where the beach would drop off into deep water. However, it was another landmark I could use to situate myself. Mental note: ocean pokey things to the west.

Another massive something dropped out of the sky.

Only a single block this time, not words. I squinted against the sun and watched as it fell, a cube, about a meter or two in every dimension. It was a simplistic pictograph of something. Before I could make out what it was meant to depict, it disappeared behind the tops of the trees. I heard it crash into the foliage somewhere in the dense forest.

Shit. I looked down at my bare feet. If this was anything like the earlier messages, I only had a moment before it dissipated. No time to think it through, I darted into the underbrush.

Luckily, the symbol was easy to find against the lush greenery surrounding it. I spotted it within the first thirty seconds of scampering through the heavy foliage. It wasn’t until I realized that the symbol had fallen out of the sky upside down that I could make any sense of it. Turning my head awkwardly, I saw a crudely drawn backpack. I took a few steps closer, being more careful of my bare feet.

As expected, the massive, mysterious icon collapsed into a fine white dust, this time floating upward in the breeze. As it did, behind where it had stood, was an actual backpack. The icon was a hint to get me here, so that I’d find this.

An old, leather rucksack. It had one large flap that extended up from the back and folded over the entire front, protecting the contents from the elements. The sides were lined with little leather hoops, pockets, and straps that you could hang tools from or tuck smaller items into. Then, there was the stark glowing circle embedded in the thick, leather flap. It was sewn in. The top rim protruded an inch or so above the leather. As I circled the pack, the illuminated cylinder didn’t seem to adhere to the light & shadow of the world around it. It pulsed softly with the rhythm of a sleeping person’s breath.

“Is this for me?” I asked the treetops.

The ocean sighed behind me. I looked around again, shrugged, grabbed the pack, and slung it onto my shoulders. Immediately, I heard a soft release of pressure. There was a faint crackle, a subtle scent of burning and a brief shimmer in the air. I felt the circle pulse brightly behind my head, sensed it in my peripheral. Then, a flash of light from behind my shoulders, and smaller block text floated up, off to the left of my field of vision.

{System Online}

“Heard that before. You have something to do with the alphabet meteors?!”

Again, I reached out to touch the words. This time, letters moved to the back of my hand as I grabbed at them, magnified slightly over those that still hung in the air beyond my reach. These words were projections. My hand was the closer canvas. I waved it slowly, back and forth through the air, deforming each letter of the message. The breeze picked up and the text wobbled slightly before fading away.

I walked gingerly as I headed back to the beach, tip-toeing to make sure I didn’t step on any sharp rocks or strange bugs. Oddly, I didn’t see or hear any bugs. No bugs, no coconuts, fair deal. The backpack weighed next to nothing, but it made ducking between trees and bushes a little clumsy.

Once back to the beach, I beelined back toward my driftwood statue. The wind was a little stronger along this shore. I wanted to have a better look at this bag and maybe think about food & water. A less windward, more sheltered stretch of beach seemed like the better place to do both. I retraced what foot prints hadn’t been washed away by the incoming tide.

As I got close to the driftwood log, another hiss, crackle, glimmer and glow. More small white text floated up in front of me.

{+1 Athletics}

Alright. Getting my steps in... The text stuck in place, floating in the air as I walked by, then it faded away.

I dropped the rucksack at the base of the driftwood and unclipped the leather cover. It peeled back, showing even more loops and clips on its underside. Inside, the bag was just one large compartment. Empty.

I opened the backpack wider and stuck my hand inside. I could feel something at the bottom. I pulled it out. It was a brick of something wrapped in bright red paper with the word “HARDTACK“ written on it. How had I not seen that when I’d looked in? I reached in again, felt around, and then pulled out a heavy, green, thick bottle of water. Again, how had I not seen it? I reached once more. There was another bottle, and then a third. That seemed to be all that was in the bag.

I was hungry. And very thirsty. The backpack would wait while I had a small ration of mysterious water and hardtack bread...

The instinct to yawn. Polymer capsule. Close around my shoulders.
Wanting to stretch. Hard, curved shell. Light. Heat.
A faint chemical sweetness. Air rushing. A low hiss, then louder, sharper.
Space. Clenched teeth. Something rattling. Metal clasps straining.
Smoke, or vapour; thin gray threads curling upward. Upward?
Turquoise. Bands of ocean, dotted with impossibly lush green islands.
Storm scars. A loud, incessant beep. More rattling. Metal giving out.
Air screaming through a seam. The pod shudders.
Heat bloom. The smell of burning insulation. The lid jerks, then lifts.
Serenity rushing toward me, or me toward it. Deafening. Eyes can’t focus.
A bone-deep thud. Warm sand. Clean air. Sleep a little longer…

I came to half-buried in wet sand, with the tide trying to finish the job. My first thought was thank god I’m still here. My second was here has changed. I was face down on a beach.

A loud drone sound interrupted the calm. I bolted upright, hacking and spitting saltwater. The drone ended. I was on a remote island. The water was an unbelievably clear azure, like I’ve only ever seen in heavily colour-corrected ads for expensive vacations.

I sat for a long minute, dazed, squinting at the endless stretch of beach. My throat was dry. There was grit stuck between my teeth.

The ocean breathed in and out, lazy and relentless.

I patted myself down: maybe a bruised rib, one boot missing, a torn survival suit that smelled like mildew.

A chipper little melody of da-da-dings sounded. Far down the beach, massive, white, three-dimensional block letters dropped out of the sky and crashed into the sand.

[ S YS T E MO N LI N E ]

I stared, confused about what I was seeing. The letters were a distance away, but big enough to be easily readable. They had to be at least a meter or two tall. What system was online? My instinct was to look up above me for any more massive falling typographic meteorites. Nothing but clear skies.

The ‘system online‘ text dematerialized, turning into a fine white dust and slowly blowing away in the breeze. Solid & heavy one second and then a million tiny particles the next.

“What was that?” I asked out loud. More letters dropped out of the sky, down the beach, but this time closer. They thudded in the sand, just slightly out of sync with one another.

[ W E L C OM E MAR L O WE ]

I looked all around to see if anyone else was seeing this. There was no one else. But, the sky knew my name. Somebody was dropping monumental alphabets. I slapped myself, shook my head. Nothing changed. I spun around, searching for some kind of explanation, then looked to the sky again.

“Hello?!?” I shouted.

This second set of letters crumbled to dust and blew into the forested area lining the edge of the beach.

Then, the last message arrived. This time the monolithic letters landed just a few meters in front of me. I could feel the sand splash up against my one bare leg.

[ OB J E CT IV E : SUR VII V E ]

“Bit of a typo there...” I muttered.

Then I laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh. It was a nervous laugh. It was an “I’m trying to stay calm, but I’m not terribly comfortable right now“ kind of laugh.

“Survive, huh?” I staggered to my feet. The world tilted for a second, then steadied.

Fine. Survive first. Despair later.

I stumbled forward to see if I could touch the letters before they disintegrated. I had an artificial limp as I walked, the sole of my one boot caked in salt and sand. Just as I reached out to touch it, the last message crumbled away. White specks floated past my hand, but I couldn’t tell if they were actually there or not. They floated around my fingers to avoid having to physically interact with my skin. Odd. I watched them scatter into the foliage.

I spotted something in amongst the dune grass: a round, translucent fruit tucked in the shadow of a large driftwood log. A clear jelly exterior with a bright orange pit in its center. I stepped closer. Little brightly coloured purple specks dotted the pit. My stomach grumbled. I stared at the thing. I bent down and picked it up.

“You’re going to poison me, aren’t you?”

I thought about recklessly taking a bite, but my desire to not die still outweighed my hunger.

“Where can I put you until I figure out what’s going on?” I surveyed the beach again. My survival suit had no pockets. Sand & ocean stretched on as far as I could see in either direction, with no particular landmarks along the shoreline. I needed to get my bearings.

I set the fruit down and grabbed a large, flat rock that was straddling the boundary between the beach and the forest behind it. I used the rock to dig out a depression at the roots-end of the large driftwood log. After it was a few inches deep, I moved around to the top-end, and with a heavy grunt, I lifted it upward, standing the log on end. I gave it a good downward shove to lodge it into the sand and stepped back to see if it would balance. It did. With my stone, I re-piled the sand at the logs’ base for extra support.

A landmark.

I stepped back and admired my work. I hid the strange fruit in an elbow of the driftwood. Now I had a point of reference to find my way back here, once I had a better idea of what was happening.

More massive letters fell from the sky and crashed behind the upright driftwood.

[ +1 C AR TOG R A P HY ]

See the Table Of Contents

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ACT I

1. Arrival

2. The Backpack

3. Heavyweight

4. The Storm

5. Lovely Breakfast

6. Kehra

7. Hermitage

8. Nouveau Départ

9. Creature Comforts

10. Something In The Way

11. 25 Years Of Rest

12. UI (August 13)

13. Lunch Break (August 27)

14. Typhoon (September 3)

15. Write-off (September 17)

16. What Shape The Garden Takes (September 30th)

{There will be a brief pause before ACT 2 begins}

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