I started writing this after recently becoming entangled with the early access game Subnautica, a survival sandbox game where you play the lone survivor of a starship crash on what seems like a largely aquatic world (though most spaceships that crashed on earth would think the same thing, statistically).
The world in the game is conveniently earth-like enough that you can breathe its air and consume its food and water with reasonable filtration and processing, but early on in the game, before you gather enough resources to use magical technology to construct a habitat, your home is a tiny emergency escape pod bobbing in the shallows. It’s big enough for two people, but simultaneously claustrophobic and clangingly empty with just one.
This poem started with the idea of a scenario like Subnautica’s, but tweaked. What if the water was less shallow? What if the world outside was that much more dangerous, that much less compatible with terrestrial biology? What if the lifepod was not just your first home on the new world but the whole of your world? What if you weren’t alone?
That’s what I started with. Where it grew from there is complicated, and far deeper than I initially planned or intended. Essentially, it’s a creation myth shown from the other side.
The poem consists of fourteen named and numbered segments. The first one is like this:
I – Stranded
*
Our world is a lifeboat.
*
This was once metaphor
for all humanity,
back on ancient Earth,
back before the push,
back before the spread
of all humanity
to every corner of the cosmos,
to every habitable world
beneath every sky.
*
Our world is a lifeboat.
*
Outside is a world,
not habitable,
not safe, not ours.
*
So close, on the other side
of our pod’s glasteel ports,
so close and yet so far,
too close for comfort sometimes
when the tempest rages
and the hull shakes
and we toss and twist
upon the surface
of the sea.
*
The autoevac
did its job
as best it could
with the materials
available.
*
No plotted worlds within range,
nor any habitable ones,
it put the survivors down
in a planet-sized puddle
we could almost survive.
*
The exosurveyors speak of
the Goldilocks zone;
just the right distance
from just the right star,
everything just right,
just like the old story
that only survived
because exosurveyors
still tell it to explain
about the zone.
*
The only tell half the story, though.
*
Sometimes, Goldilocks
shows up and the porridge
is thin and runny, or already gone.
*
Sometimes the bears are home when she gets there.
*
Sometimes there is no home.
*
The world outside is in the zone,
but it feeds us watery gruel indeed.
*
Warm but not the right warm.
Wet but not the right pH.
Life, but not the right life.
It can’t grow inside our bubble.
We can’t live in its world.
It can’t live in ours.
We cannot cultivate it.
It cannot sustain us.
*
The replicycle
does its job
as best it can
with the materials
available.
*
It filters the water.
It filters the plants.
It filters the wriggling
fish-like organisms
that have never encountered
a single artificial object
in their brief lives
and have no reason to fear it.
*
The water tastes like ionized nothing.
The food tastes like stale nothing.
The nutritional supplements taste,
but like nothing good.
*
Our world is a lifeboat,
bobbing on the surface
of a world we can see
but not touch,
a world that
will never
be ours.
Again, the full poem contains thirteen more segments: Fruitless, Fruitful, Benediction, Malediction, Posterity, Titanomachy, Flowering, Awakening, Foreboding, Temptation, Apotheosis, Exegesis, and Coda.
At around 5,000 words depending on who is counting, it’s long for most short stories, though not unduly so for one of mine. I have posted the whole of it to Patreon, but as part of my new approach to Patreon, I am keeping the whole of it under patron-locked wraps for now.
You can read it immediately by pledging any amount. Because we’re trying to rebuild our financial cushion, I will also unlock it for everyone to read if I receive one hundred dollars in PayPal or Square Cash tips today.