Friday Fiction: Through The Stars Dumfries

A different view of the town where I live

Here’s a Friday Fiction, written by one of my author friends.

I met Cameron when I was one of the tutors on the High Street Multiverse project, held at The Stove. Cameron came up with this piece, which was available as an audio file that played at a certain place in the town. Enjoy! Karl

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Through The Stars Dumfries

You can see Dumfries from the Moon. On trips to the observatory decks I would point the large lens telescope towards the Southern part of Scotland and have a better look at what we left over. Others who were crammed here in the living centres would use the time they bought to look at the parts of history they wished they had visited. My Grandfather and I would often study the old images of the town stored via projections from the company data packs. Grandfather would always show me the pictures he had saved of the place our family came from. We couldn’t take them too far away from the Grid though, stray from the network and the company would delete them regardless of payment. The charge for reactivating any memory was too much for most, myself included. Most of the images stored in the Grid were constructed from various accounts and memories of those who had left us. The ones Grandfather and I had were real though, at least to me.

The first thing I always noticed about them was the sky. Sometimes it was a bright, radiant blue but mostly it seemed to settle on a dull grey. The main thing was that it was there. No glass above your head, no sealed domes to control the atmosphere, just an expansive sky you can look up to at any time. The people would walk places without the constant connection to the Grid to monitor everywhere they were going.

On the last visit to the observatory deck I asked my Grandfather about going back to Dumfries.

“Very dangerous” he replied.

Tourist routes to Earth had bypassed places like Dumfries. All the major cities could be visited for the day. The culture had been condensed down to a small section of what was there before, the only part they could keep safe for the visitors. Outside the walls were those who refused to leave on the carriers. Stories had come back from Earth saying they were living wild outside the cities, fighting over the remaining plant material. They had rejected the Grid and as a result the Grid had forgotten them.

Grandfather continued though.

“If I could though then I have an idea of a poet’s statue called Burns. I’m not sure if it was real or just another made up story. I’d like to know either way before I am no more”.

I told him I’d had an idea.

The automated system in the showroom asked us to select a destination from a long list of cities. Scrolling quickly to Glasgow and a tour of ‘The Sunken Treasure of Kelvingrove’ soon gave us access to a small ship only three metres long. It had a few dents in the bodywork from the regular trips through the floating debris of Earth’s atmosphere but it would do. On the side, in large letters scratched with years of space travel, was the name ‘The Intrepid One’. It was unaware of how intrepid it was going to have to be.

With Grandfather in the seat alongside me I settled into the cabin and examined the touchscreen controls. A face slowly generated out of the code within, a copy of my appearance without the freckles and blemishes.

“We’ll be off in no time and at Kelvingrove in around three hours, thirty-seven minutes” it said in a digital copy of my accent. The door shut tight with a defined thunk, the walls hummed as the power flowed through to the engine. After a few short seconds we were disengaged from the launch bay and weaving a predetermined route through the compressed traffic towards space beyond.

Earth itself, like a marble hanging in the darkness, grew larger by the minute. It soon became easier to pick out the cities with their enormous glass bubbles shielding them from the water levels and high winds. Culture had survived as long as you could afford the flight fee.

I waited for the moment.

“Not long until we land in Kelvingrove, part of the old city of Glasgow. For now please rate your journey” the system chimed.

It gleefully threw ten icons on screen, a sliding scale of faces from outrageous anger to unnaturally happy. The last few on the better end of the line bounced up and down to draw the eye. I jabbed my thumb directly onto the furious side. The code frowned. The ship slowed to a crawl and hung on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. This had not been the software’s plan. Clearing my throat I told the software that we should land further South as this would be much more to my satisfaction.

“Final destination Glasgow” it bleated.

I hammered the angry icon again.

“Glasgow”

Again.

“Glas…”

Once more.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to try, I have more experience of these systems than you” Grandfather asked.

I pressed again before it had a chance to respond further. In seconds I was jabbing the button, drumming a pattern on the screen as the software jolted to the rhythm. Icons flashed across the display, spinning around, smiling one second then frowning the next. Then came the opportunity of a forced reboot. The software searched for a new identity, ending up instead being a combination of the last few people it had seen. The hybrid spoke.

“Beginning descent”.

With that the ship plunged downwards with gathering pace. I held onto my Grandfather as much as I could as calm control gave way to wild velocity. The pathfinding programme scatter gunned and all the human junk of years of space travel clanked against the hull of our ever speeding can. Old satellites bounced off the glass of the view finder, discarded oxygen tanks dented the engine covers and floating dead solar panels rebounded off the outer shell. The clouds sped past too soon as the darkness of space was overthrown by a light grey sky. Scotland span into a blur through the viewfinder.

Safety measures finally came online as the ship jolted upwards again forcing my stomach to flip and stretch. We flew low into Dumfries clipping the roof of a building, pieces of tiled roof scattered through the air and churned through the turbines. Sparks crackled off one wing as the ship leaned over to the side crippled by the impact. The software desperately tried to find the usual guide signal from the core programme modulator to bring it home safely. It failed to find one. Instead it chose the next course of action by planting the nose of the ship into the ground and pushing to a burrowing halt on the stone below. I took a few moments to regain my breath and get rid of the taste of adrenaline from my tongue. The software’s lips moved silently, audio was the first thing to break when the Grid forgets you.

After I kicked the door outwards we ventured into the stillness of another time. My boots crunched into the dust cast down from the fallen buildings. The standing structures that remained had shards of inner metal that pointed skywards towards the persistent clouds above. Winds whipped around the place, gathering pace and playing out a forlorn melody in the wreckage. The sun had betrayed whatever plant life remained giving it a brown char on the leaves. Pools of water had claimed the side streets with the occasional streetlamp visible above the murk. My nose filled with the smell of what I thought to be burning synthetic meat, far removed from the usual smell of antibacterial spray they sent through the air supply on the Moon. It gave me comfort until I noticed the lack of animal life around us.

“Further up the street?” questioned Grandfather. I began pulling my jacket collar up to protect against the biting wind, we began the walk upwards. The light on my data pack was fading, the grid reduced to a whisper.

I look up to a view of the sky free from the usual glass barriers. There were no ships flying above us, no noise of whirring engines through the atmosphere. The masses of people being allocated by the Grid were absent and I could walk wherever I wanted to be. The place had become dominated by a steady quiet that refused to let go.

Then we saw him.

The surface of the Burns statue had dulled as small dents had been introduced over the years. The plant life below hauled themselves upwards towards his feet, wrapping around the plinth. The unstable fluctuations in the weather over time had taken something of a toll on the man yet he remained standing and watchful over what had remained. He looked thoughtful with an expression that suggested a disapproval of how vast numbers of mankind had finished off here, dropped everything and moved on.

Grandfather wanted to see so I carefully placed him down on the concrete. The data pack buzzed as the power rapidly drained away. The occasional rain droplet danced in the purple light, glitching the image which warped in and out of existence for those few short minutes. Amplifying the projection using the last of the battery gave Grandfather a better view. I asked if it was worth the journey.

The image smiled, built from an idea of what that would have looked like. He did not speak, the audio was the first to go. After a few more seconds he faded along with the light on the data pack. The Grid had lost us and Grandfather with it. All the stories I had heard about him and used in his design and development over the last decade had now gone.

He had been real though, at least to me.

© Cameron Phillips

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About Cameron

Cameron Phillips started writing stories at the age of fourteen and his English teacher only encouraged this behaviour. He mostly writes science fiction with a Scottish flavour as well as the occasional short film and play.

He is firmly of the belief that the rules of writing a great professional wrestling show can also be applied to creative writing.

He lives near Lockerbie with his wife, son and pet dog.

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