Torn Wings

  So this story begins far far in the future, yours, not mine. But here we find ourselves sitting in the nowpast, ignorant of the reality that formed us, the reality that binds us, is a truth as delicate as a moth's wings. The darkness that lives outside the moth is large and neverending. It is vast, and infinite, and the moth lives in it, but can never comprehend it.

  So in the future, there was something like a building, city, ship. It had the power to move, to reposition itself for the prime spot, for isolation, for continuous sunlight, depending on the needs of its inhabitants and their priorities. A chorus of AIs and Cybrains and Enhanced Input Individuals helped.

  It seemed to run on bureaucracy and petty powers, on insults. But I could find you someone who could tell you it ran on good mornings, and smiles between colleagues and higher scientific ideals. Like all human places, it was plagued by humanity and all its foibles.

  They were advanced, or they will be advanced, but not so advanced that they truly understood what they were doing. Like early scientists poisoning themselves with radiation. Children eating paint chips.

  Three laboratories interacted to create the tear. They were close together, and their Leaders were jealous of their research, and how could they have known? Paint chips.

  We were flung across time, and landed on an unknown and hostile plain, that immediately began its attack. We could tell our time was short, we would die without action, but we had the best minds of the future with us, and they put their heads together, and somehow here it was easier to do so.

  Nythology wrote: A NATURAL came in, but it seemed only I could see it. I was terrified, I felt like a rabbit in the path of a vehicle, shocked and unable to move or comprehend. But then I heard a voice that spoke words in my head. Unknowable words, but I found my hands working as it directed, and somehow I was telling the others what to do, and we managed to create the prototype for the first Beacon. It was a dull thing, but we found we could breathe, the pain that had seemed to be killing us subsided and we could sleep for the first time in what seemed like weeks of emergency status.

  It was before our society stabilized. Everything was in turmoil but we all knew now we could live here. Most of us still hoped we could get back. When we all realized we were stuck here forevermore, we lost almost a third. They just left. Sometimes we find traces of them out there. Now we just call them 'The Lost' and try not to think of them.