Short Story - The Last Heckle Barge
I’ve taken a chapter from The Council of Light and turned it into a standalone story. Click here for a better formatted version of the story (Squarespace sucks for formatting). This story is told by Ben’s primary partner in crime, during his days with The Relliance.
The Last Heckle Barge
I spent my youngest years on a Heckle Barge, one of the last few that remained in the ITZ. It was filled with the most desperate of the desperate, the most lost of the lost. Families that had been without a homeworld for seven generations. Old men that had never seen a real sky. Children that were too tired to tease one another about their cybernetic implants. To walk the cold, innermost halls of the barge was like touring a morgue. But the truly haunting citizens of the Heckle Barge were the ones who had come from real worlds. Young men and women whose sky had been taken from them by overpopulation, or hatred, or mistakes. Unlike the generational residents, they knew what they were missing.
The Heckle Society, established hundreds of years ago, did everything it could to make the barges hospitable. There was natural gravity, and areas of lush vegetation, and copious simlight that was even healthier than starlight. The best medical technology in the Zone counteracted all the physical harms of barge life. Virtual reality programs that were banned in L1-L3 worlds were permitted on the barge to distract from the uneasiness of floating. But nothing could make the residents forget that they were there because there was nowhere else for them to go. Nowhere where they would be truly accepted, except for this Heckle barge, one of the last few that remained in the ITZ.
I lived on this Heckle Barge while my father and the rest of the Council of Light terraformed the homeworld now known as Antaria. It was the largest planet ever terraformed, a Jupiterian-sized rock with more than enough space for the last few Heckle Barges to unburden their loads and allow the sents to spread out. Of course, space was never the issue - there was enough uninhabited space on the 27 existing planets of the ITZ to accommodate trillions of sents. But it wouldn’t be their space.
It might be the single defining trait of the human species, our need to own something, and the cycles we burn to define what ownership means. Why is a slice of a newly terraformed planet acceptable, when a patch of land on a 50-year old planet isn’t? You could come up with a dozen reasons. Alledge lack of resources. Claim divine right. Bring up past injustices. It all means the same thing — it just doesn’t feel right. It wouldn’t be human, to simply accept what someone else hands you. It has to be earned, or bought, or fought for, because that means someone else wanted it before you. And that means you’re not alone in this universe.
My father. The Council. They know humanity. They know what is best for humanity. If the most dejected members of our species needed a place to really live, then the Council would build them one. They would pull the energy from the stars, and bend the elements to their will. For humanity. For the poorest of humanity.
My mother is humanity. She was born and raised on our Heckle Barge, and dedicated her life to helping the people on it. She has the same goal as my father, but she acts on it at an intensely personal level. She hones in on a single person, envelops them in her warmth, solves their every problem. She did that to my father when they met on his second visit to our Heckle Barge, decades before my birth. She continues to do it today, on the now bountiful Antaria, years away from where I now live. Some children might feel abandoned by a mother like mine, but I know it’s because there are others that need her so much more than I do. The poorest of humanity.
I was far from poor. Though I lived on the Heckle Barge, I was not bound to it like the rest of the inhabitants. I visited three Galaxia before the age of 12. I was tutored by some of the greatest minds in the ITZ, my father included. He had other sons and daughters, but none that he doted on like me. I witnessed first hand how he crafted a world for the last few Heckle Barges, as he had crafted a dozen worlds before. I watched him turn the vacuous voids of the ITZ into a home for all sentiency, one that would last us until we no longer needed a home at all.
I can remember the day he arrived to celebrate my seventh birthday, only two days after I had actually turned seven. My mother would say, ‘he was present for your birth, and he knows you will live a very very long time, so what does it matter that he misses a birthday or two?’ He’d missed them all, apart from the first, but I knew he had good reason to.
My mother took me shopping to buy a new outfit for my father’s visit. Small bursts of air fanned my face as my mother flipped through partitions of muted pants, each posed as though they were being worn by an invisible child exactly my size. The colors were drab, such was the fashion on the Barge. Occasionally a new group of people would arrive on the Barge, and spark a trend of more brightly colored fabrics in a quadrant for a few months, but eventually even the trendsetters themselves would slip into loose-fitting grays and browns, and the spark would fade.
“I think I saw some deep fuschia pantaloons in here yesterday, I wonder where that model might be,” my mother said, ever lit by her own warm flame.
“Why were you in here yesterday, did you buy me something else?” I asked excitedly.
“No no, dear, I was helping Mem. Jarviston buy some clothes for her son. He’s lost more weight unfortunately and she just can’t bring herself to pick out anything new for him…” she trailed off, a familiar look descending on her weathered face. My mother’s bright hazel eyes and round pink lips beamed vitality, but decades of barge life had sucked the youth from her skin, leaving her with many small wrinkles around her eyes, and deep lines around her mouth. ‘Smile lines’, she called them.
“You mean Kurt Jarviston? He’s been watching school from his pod all week. Is he sick?”
“His house you mean,” my mother corrected me. “I hate this new lingo you kids have come up with, it makes it sound like we’re all living on a workship. And no, he’s not sick, he just needed a little pick me up in the form of some new pants!”
Sick was a word that had a special meaning on Heckle Barges. The communities were so tightly contained and curated, there were no viruses or bacteria to cause the sicknesses that occurred on real planets. Enpathogenic diseases like cancers were as rare as they were on any L1 world. When someone ‘got sick’ on a Heckle Barge, there was only one sickness that was being referred to. The Waste.
There’s a medical explanation for the Waste involving neurotransmitter physiology, but a better way to describe it was giving up. It was a depression that acted like a virus, sometimes lasting for days, sometimes for months. It was every bit as contagious as a virus as well, often jumping from one family member to the next. It could be fatal, if the sufferer had opted out of neural agonist treatment while they were healthy.
It may come as a surprise, but healthy people often opted out of medical intervention on the Barge, and so the Waste was a terrible, real threat. It was one of the only ways a person could die on the Barge, and thus the right to do so was a strongly held prize. A way out for those that had no other escape. Some prayed for it to come. Once word got out that someone was sick, some would even flock to the sufferer in an attempt to catch the Waste.
I didn’t know it then, but my mother knew the Jarviston’s were sick, and that they had elected not to receive neural agonists nearly a year prior. As my mother was not a medical bot, but a mere human, she could therefore provide them with care without violating the Bargian laws. Often she was able to save the sufferers. But Kurt Jarviston, his mothers, and his two sisters were all dead before I turned eight years old.
It was on my eighth birthday that my father finally cured the Waste and delivered the poorest of the Heckle Barge from their suffering. I thought I could not be any happier when he appeared that morning to help me cut the birthday cake, but that moment was surpassed only hours later when I helped him launch the terraformation of Antaria.
I was sitting on the floor of my father’s office in the Heckle Barge, playing with chrome mini-mag bricks, when Amican appeared at the door.
“Aldus, we have the power supply ready,” said Amican, my father’s colleague and famed member of the Council of Light.
My father turned off the privacy screen that had been shielding his work, and his face. He was a handsome man, I’ve never been embarrassed to say it, even more so then than he is now. He cut his gray beard closer to his face in those days, and the vertical dimples in his cheeks weren’t quite as sunken. He wore a simple, long-sleeved dress made of a hardy white fabric. The hem rippled ever so slightly as he sighed heavily.
“Now?” my father asked.
Amican rolled his stoney eyes. He caught a glimpse of himself in the shiny paneling of my father’s office, and patted the perfectly smooth bun of dark, blue-gray hair that sat atop his head.
“In about 20 minutes,” he replied. “We’ve diverted it to this galaxy. I suggest you make any final preparations.”
“We’ve been ready for terraformation to begin for months, as you well know. Why did you wait until now to tell me you had the power?” my father asked.
“A lot of string-pulling needs to take place to sanction a power jab of this size, as you well know. Not to mention, I had to be sure that everything would go smoothly on your end. We don’t want any disasters to happen.”
My father’s wise eyes narrowed. “You question my techniques, after we’ve already terraformed so many planets?”
“Mistakes have been made,” Amican said carefully. “I merely wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t be made again.”
My father closed his eyes, still not moving from where he stood. “A review is good every so often. After all, we’ve been doing this for hundreds of years. But that does not explain why you waited until the last minute to tell me this news.”
“Aldus, the complexity that is required for this undertaking—”
“You forgot,” my father interrupted.
“I forgot,” Amican conceded, bowing his smooth head. “I made the final preparations a few weeks ago and thought I texted you, but then realized I never did, and—”
My father chuckled. “Let us be thankful that you remembered at all.”
“I came here as soon as I remembered. In person, no less!” He walked over to my father’s side and gripped him firmly around the wrist, his fingers pressing against my father’s inner wrist and the Com-palm that was embedded there, sending the unfakeable sensation of real flesh into his body.
My father smiled and embraced Amican’s Com-palm in his own hand, so proving that neither man was a projected avatar. The intimacy of the moment was not lost even on my young eyes.
“We must get to work then,” my father said.
He cleared his throat and spoke in a voice that carried throughout the Barge.
“Antaria Team, please report to operations at once. We are ready to light the beacon.” My father’s smile widened, and the rest of his body jumped into action.
Aldus Ertian is a reserved, measured man, except when he is not. Like a marble statue coming to life, he broke away from Amican and strode out of the office with surprising speed for a man of his age. He barked orders through his Com-palm to a dozen different people as he entered his personal Flash Point and disappeared. Amican and I reacted only a second later, following my father’s path. My tiny legs matched the speed of Amican’s ancient ones, and we squeezed into the flash portal together. He huffed in annoyance, but knew better than to try to get rid of me. He’d failed in that endeavor more than a few times before.
Moments later, we arrived in the terraformation operation’s headquarters, where men and women were already running back and forth in frenzy. The Flash Point beeped insistently, urging us to quickly vacate the portal so that a queued traveler could take our place. Amican ruffled the bottom of his white robe to shoo me out. I happily hopped away from him, looking through the frantic movement for a glimpse of my father. I found his fluttering linen hem next to a young woman, pointing out something on a holo screen.
Before I could take more than a few steps towards him, he’d left the woman and was barking orders at a ground of technicians huddled over a power control panel. He then crossed the room again to speak to a middle-aged man who’s thick brows were deeply furrowed in concern. I decided my best course of action was to climb on top of a storage cabinet against the left hand wall, out of the way of heavy foot traffic. I’d been stepped on enough times to know what to do at times like these.
From my vantage point, I watched my father’s head bounce from group to group like a light gray ball. I couldn’t make out most of what was being said, but it was clear that he was running the show.
Finally, he made his way over to the atmospheric control center, where my storage cabinet was located.
“MAVEN predicts there will be CO2 leakage from quadrant -3” a petite woman with a weathered face told my father. “Can we spare a dome for that hemisphere during phase four?”
My father looked at the figures the woman had presented him. He ran his fingers through his beard nervously, though his face remained calm, unreadable.
“We need all of the domes protecting the hole created by the energy beam. Have a tug-bot fire a burst of radon at the area during phase three. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Thank you sir” the woman smiled with relief.
My father moved over to another atmospheric control panel, right next to the storage cabinet I was perched on. I craned my neck to see what he was looking at, trying to make sense of the numbers and lines. Nitrogen injection projections, equatorial temperature gauges...Tyson’s score, I knew what that was! Just yesterday, my father had explained to me that it measured chloroflorocarbon absorption rate. I was so pleased with myself I almost slipped over the sharp corner of the cabinet. My father slowly lifted his head to look at me, a proud smile barely hidden beneath his beard. He reached up to take one of my tiny hands into his long, bony one.
“I feel fortunate that I do the work that I do,” he said. “Most people have jobs that are so subtle, so subordinate that it is impossible for a child to understand the impact that they create. You are able to see the good that I do. That is why you are here now.”
With that, he released my hand and flew away, making his way through the crowd to the center of the operations room. He stood on a raised pedestal, next to Amican and Mave, the Chief Bargian Officer.
My father cleared his throat, and the entire room fell immediately silent. He projected his voice to the room, and to the remaining few Heckle Barges.
“This moment we have waited for, for our entire lives. Some of us for years, some of us for generations. After this, for the first time in history, and for the rest of time, there will be no humans without a home. After this, we will begin our lives anew. Humanity has searched for its place among the stars from the moment the spark of sentiency alighted in our brains. After this, we will have found it.”
The room erupted in a chorus of whoops and hollars. Video feeds from the other Heckle Barges showed similar scenes of celebration behind my father. Through it all, he looked at me, and beckoned me to join him.
I hopped down from the cabinet and pushed my way through dancing legs until my knees hit the stairs up to the central platform on which my father was standing. I felt his large, bony hands pull me from the crowd.
“This is the future I have created for you, and your sisters, Elle. Therefore, I feel the honor should be yours.”
My father prodded Amican, who somewhat reluctantly handed me a fiz terminal with a single red button on the screen.
“You may press it to begin the power transfer, and start the terraformation process of Antaria,” my father commanded, in his unique, un-commanding way.
I scrunched my face at the ridiculous red button.
“You didn’t need to make it so simple. I’m not a baby.”
Amican laughed loudly.
My father smiled knowingly. “You don’t want to do it?”
I pressed the button.
Seven light years away, a massive beam of pure, solar-harnessed energy shot into the center of the Antarian planet. Red circles of swirling gas appeared all across the sphere, raising the temperature of the surface to 2,000 degrees K. Soon, the entire planet would be obscured by gray clouds as the atmosphere congealed. In a month, seed bombs would detonate at strategic sites, covering the planet in wet vegetation. Shortly after, bots would begin constructing the buildings and roads. The planet was being born again, under a new God.
Nine months after I pressed the red button, I stepped foot onto Antaria. Heavy rain poured from the sky. The smell of sulfur and ozone seeped through my oxygen cannula into my nostrils. Oppressively hot air squeezed my small frame. It was glorious.
We had landed on a large outcropping of rock, from which I could see for miles. Lush green forests steeped in fog surrounded a gleaming white city with flash highways fanning out into the mist. To the right, the mighty forest yielded to a giant open field of untouched grass. It evoked the same mix of eerieness and anticipation I felt when looking at an empty playground. It was exciting, but it needed life, needed movement.
A deep rumbling came from the distance. Rain clouds began to part, making way for the first Heckle Barge to land; my former home. It came down a few hundred kilometers outside the city, in the giant grass field. It was over half the size of the city itself, and the force of the underburners flattened the acres of forest that surrounded the field. Even from our distant vantage point, my earbuds engaged to quiet the sound of the barge as it cut through the virgin atmosphere, finally coming to rest on the fresh soil. We were too far away to see the Bargians disembark, but I could imagine the wonder and joy on their faces as they took their first steps on their new home. Their first home.
My mother was among them, somewhere. She had wanted me to stay with her on the Heckle Barge that morning to help the sick get moving, but I chose to join my father, who stood next to me on the outcropping, watching from afar.
As my father had said on the day the terraformation of Antaria began, homelessness had now been eradicated from the ITZ. New planets and colonies would be established in the future for convenience of location as new galaxies were discovered, or in a million years, when populations began to outgrow the existing homeworlds, but humans would never again want for a place to feel connected. They would no longer suffer from the Waste. At least, not at the scale that mattered. For thousands of years, humanity had tried to eradicate the issue of homelessness by building houses, and providing jobs, and instituting programs, but they could never solve it completely. The chain of human wanting had been broken too many times to be made whole by such minor gestures. My father, he knew humanity, he knew what it needed. And he gave it to us.
