ISLE: Nouveau Départ (Act I, Part VIII)
Marlowe catches the countdown and remembers more
1000 words, ~5 minute read
Recommended listening while you read: One In A Million by Zephaniah
Night 2 on the island
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[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.
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Author Notes
Lots of little hints and foreshadowing in this week’s instalment, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Again, these flashbacks during the nights weren’t originally part of my plan. I rebelled against the idea of any sort of flashback at all, thought it to be trite, but I’m slowly warming up to them. I’ve been explicitly trying to keep Marlowe a (mostly) blank canvas in order to let the reader project themselves onto the character, but as I write, I’m compelled to flesh out the character more. These nightly flashbacks allow Marlowe to interact with other people and show a little more personality.