A.J.Dahms

The spaceship was more than two kilometres wide.

An unconventional design, to be sure, but one that didn’t matter for one simple fact – not all of it existed at once.

When the Horizon’s Daughter came into production, it was the first (and only) ship of its kind. By that time, holo displays of Argonautics’ deep-space vessels already covered every wall in the capital, the blue flare of their pulse engines driving their whale-like forms on graceful arcs across the night sky. Where those ships relied on conventional technology to reach the depths of known space, however, the Horizon’s Daughter was a cut apart.

Equipped with a flux engine, the Horizon’s Daughter coalesced and de-coalesced parts of the ship as needed. Instead of a rigid structure, the engine used a neural uplink to detect a lone pilot’s movements, forming the ship around them as they moved through a single, unshifting engine space. In this way, the pilot could walk in one direction and bring the kitchen to them, continue on into the barge, the main corridors, and finally on to storage more than a kilometre of real space away from the centre.

All without ever leaving the main deck.

The engine did come with some oddities, though. Parts held in memory were never more than that. If the pilot wanted to boil a pot of water, they had to remain in the kitchen until it was ready. Electronic devices remained on at all times but consumed no power while de-coalesced. Food remained fresh without storage, water as clean as the day it was filtered, but the pilot could only check on certain functions of the ship by visiting them.

But all of that was beside the point.

News of the Horizon’s Daughter set the world aflame. Holo shows on every channel ran segments on the brand new engine, touting its design on personal tours with her chief architect. Banners across the city slowly faded from Leviathan blue to the gold glow of the Daughter’s afterburner as pictures depicted her on her upcoming maiden voyage – a trip past the galaxy’s edge.

A pilot was selected – one Lance McReedy (chosen more for his name and news-ready smile than astronomical prowess, some said).

The day came.

The ship launched.

And nothing was ever the same.

By the end of the first day, the Horizon’s Daughter had already accelerated to a speed of two hundred and sixty kilometres a second, rippling through space faster than the fastest of Leviathans at top speed.

By day 10, Mars.

By day 123, the edge of the solar system.

And then, on day 264 since launch, it touched the edges of known space, gracing past the last known point of human contact and into the wide unknown.

But the damage was already done.

You see, as the ship’s engine coalesced parts, it stored the state of their existence as a series of numbers. Positive for those that existed, negative for those that did not. And each time it stored them, it would correlate the state of their existence with their location in memory. A completely normal function for the engine except for one small, unlikely event.

As the Horizon’s Daughter passed the heliopause, a stray photon from one of the sun’s last rays struck the ship’s circuits at just the right time and just the right angle to flip a one into a zero. A small change outwardly, but one that meant that every object the engine coalesced now borrowed a single part from the one next to it.

And so the decay began.

On day 273, Lance McReedy entered the kitchen to pour his morning coffee. Like every day before then, everything was the way he’d left it. The stove was still on, his cup still on the stove, but something was different from the previous night. A light near the corner – glaring a soft neon glow the night before – now sat as a dark corner amidst a neon glow.

He left the room and entered again.

This time, a second light was gone.

Confused, he returned to the main deck as the reels from basic training ran through his mind.

Mechanical and electronic malfunctions were near impossible, the chief architect had said. The moment the engine detected a fault, it would correct the affected circuits and everything would return to normal.

But they hadn’t.

Sitting down on the main deck, he opened the ship’s panel and ran system diagnostics on the room.

Everything turned up green.

He went to the kitchen again.

This time, when he entered the room, the light was still gone, but so was something else.

There, amidst the simple neon bulb, a single mote of dust marred a previously smooth surface.

He leaned in and scratched it with his finger.

A single fleck of heat sealant fell free – a type of material found only on the outside of the ship.

A bead of sweat ran down McReedy’s brow.

As a growing sense of panic ran down his spine, he returned to the main deck and started the worst thing possible under the circumstances – a full system diagnostic.

Over the course of a full half hour, the engine coalesced and un-coalesced every corner of the ship’s expanse. An operation two hundred and fifty-eight thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three steps long, and one that scrambled every last piece of the ship.

And when the process finished, the dashboard lit up green.

But something was terribly, terribly wrong.

A faint hiss seeped into the previously cold, calm air, the telltale sign of an oxygen leak with no alarms to note it. The door to the side room sat ajar at a crooked angle now, and somewhere deep inside the engine, a rattling sound emerged.

McReedy panned through the manual, scanning the pages until a single word took shape.

There was only one thing he could do.

He flipped the distress call and plotted a course to the escape pod in the aft deck.

The kitchen came first, the light now moulded into the shape of a blender and.. something more. The coffee pot turning into a part of the sink, glistening with the sheen of heat-protected steel instead of hardened plastic. 

Maintenance.

McReedy dashed through a corridor that was no longer a corridor and more of a shower of cables and wires, and the hissing sound rose to a pitch.

Somewhere outside, a shiver ran through the hull as the engine coalesced something outside the ship’s embrace. A metallic scream as whatever the engine had conjured forth cut a hole through the hull only to be instantly replaced by the wrong parts.

McReedy ran.

The mess now, with a porthole on the floor where the tiles once used to be. Quivering from pressure that couldn’t decide where to go but was almost about to decide.

A cable made of food scraps and heat putty lashed across his face, shattering into a million indiscriminate pieces.

The foredeck, pipes and wires swirling and slicing into hardened decks and shafts. An array of obstacles that cut through the space and forced him into a writhing crawl through parts that shimmered in the glow of constant, ongoing coalescence.

The corridors, filled with the smell of fuel and growing thinner by the moment. A silver light that filled the interior as parts of the ship already trailing into open space caught the rays of a distant star, turning them into a spray of dust against the endless night.

The aft deck.

A stream of material spun through the air now, free of form and meaning, as the groaning noise rose to a pitch. A spray of cold, the vacuum of space waiting to tear open the hull the moment the engine stopped regurgitating parts.

Ice particles formed on his skin, burning where they landed.

Storage, a glimpse of the escape pod in the distance, the walls already melting like water.

The porthole, the only object where it was still meant to be, but no longer standing in place.

For all at once, the groaning sound rose to a roar as the engine spray of parts turned into an unstoppable cascade of silver dust through glistening space.

McReedy leapt for the escape pod, and then…

Two hundred and seventy-three days, thirteen hours, and eleven minutes after she launched, the Horizon’s Daughter ceased to be with all systems green.

The faint spray of dust filtered out across the night sky under the glittering light of the stars, then joined the rest of the endless nothing.

A hundred years later, deep space pilots sometimes say they hear McReedy’s distress call on their radio. The details always vary, but they know it’s the Horizon’s Daughter. After all, the signal comes… from everywhere.