ISLE: Lovely Breakfast (Act I, Part V)

After the ominous sky message, Marlowe makes a lovely breakfast

950 words, ~5 minute read
Recommended listening while you read: Immunity by Jon Hopkins
Day 1 Night / Day 2 morning

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“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.

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Author Notes

In my original draft, the flashback at the beginning of this instalment was not there. I had kept Marlowe’s origin a mystery for much, much longer. However, in serializing the story, I decided that I needed to give readers just a little more explanation up front, without completely showing my hand. It’s a very delicate balancing act, and I’m still arguing with myself about it often. Any thoughts on your experience as a reader are very welcome. Do you want to know more up front? Or do you like the mystery coming at you little by little?

My goal with this story is two-fold. The first is to simply create some cozy escapism. I’d like the recreate the feeling of slowly building and getting better; the same feeling you get when playing a survival-crafting game. I want the rainy days to feel like rainy days, and the crafting breakthroughs to feel like big wins. In order to achieve that, the second part of my goal is to create enough mystery to continuously push the narrative forward (without suffocating the experience of simply living alongside Marlowe day to day).

See you in the comments below.