Heart Beats

She saw it before it happened. For the young child, the world did not exist beyond the heart beat of the ship’s mechanics. By running her fingers along the oil-slicked gloss, Aura could feel every gear, every movement, and every rhythm. To her, the rusted, gothic hull of the ship was her womb. Within the twisted braids of copper and rubber she would nestle herself, suckling the radiating heat from the ship’s engines.

“Tic, toc,” she mouthed the words of the vintage clocks. “Tic, toc…tic, toc.” So at home was Aura with the grease covered frame, she seldom was aware of Kite’s dark eyes watching her. Kite would often watch her while performing maintenance, with the same thoughtful eyes a mother watches her children on the playground.

“Why don’t you come out of there and we’ll get a bite to eat,” Kite said offering her an extended hand.

“You hurt her,” Aura replied in a voice that made it unclear whether she was addressing Kite or the ship.

“Hurt who?”

“You hurt her head, she went to bed, and now you won’t get up in the morning…,” she sung her reply. Kite shrugged off the bizarre response. Conversations with Aura were seldom without undecipherable monologs. “…rain, rain, go away, I don’t want to play…”

Sighing, Kite lifted Aura up onto the utility walkway. Although the child was already entering her teen years, her body weighed scarcely 80 pounds. Those that have come and gone on the ship have said that Aura doesn’t eat, preferring instead to inject the various tubes and wires of the ship directly into her veins, and thus living on the same nutrients as the machines all around her. It is said, that this accounts for the origins of the needle mark grid on her neck.

The insides of the Ikishochin were horribly disfigured. Suspended walkways, which once ran throughout the ship in perfect rows, were now a maze of twisted metal scraps, collapsed tubing, and fraying cables. In many places, passage was only permitted to those who were limber enough to jump four foot gaps. Even if one could manage to find a path through the salvaged rubble, their clothes would always catch on the fragmented metal exit wounds that dusted the super-structure and turned once proud metal into corroded sponges.

From his room, Joseph had a clear view of the pair as they scampered through the metal foliage of his forest. No one, except him, called the imploded spaces rooms anymore. They were simply clearings in the debris, large enough to lay down bedding, along with the few meager possessions they could afford. For some, this would mean a book; for others, a deck of cards or even just a photograph. For Joseph, it was the sharp blade in his hand.

While all the objects around him were made of materials such as iron, steel, or even copper, the blade was transmuted from the finest carbon fibers. Like a mirror, the blade reflected every hue of light. The crystals embedded in the rare metal were so fine that as Joseph twisted the blade around in his palm, he was able to catch the light refracting off Aura’s tear. Before Joseph could turn, Aura had already run free of the clearing and back into the twisted vines of copper and rubber, where she knew no one could follow her.

“What did you do to her?” scolded Kite as she climbed into his clearing, not nearly with as much grace or silence as Aura. Before he could formulate a reply, Kite’s eyes had already caught sight of the blade.

“It’s—“

“You know what that thing does to her,” she interrupted, her cold gaze now shifting to meet his eyes. “You know better than to have that out around her.” It was true. Everyone knew better than to have sharp objects out where Aura could see them.

“I—“

“Now what am I supposed to do?” Joseph’s eyes shifted to the ground as it became certain he would not be getting a word in. “This rust bucket is barely holding together as it is. I barely have time to keep up with the uplink without having to chase her around this mess. You remember the last time you left a pair of pliers out where she could see them? It took me two days to pull her out of that nest she dug herself into, and another day to replace the cables she had chewed through making it.”

Joseph gave a deep sigh. “If you want, I will go look for that little brat--” Kite’s cold stare cut him off mid-sentence.

“No. I need you to upload our supply requests.” Stumbling over the spent morphine vials, Kite made her way over to the holo-plaque fastened crudely to a pipe at the corner of the clearing. The spinal cord of wires and tubes running from the back of screen might give one the impression that this console was center of the ships information tap, but in truth dozens of terminals just like this one were scattered all over the ship, all connected to the copper spine that ran along the dorsal edge of the Ikishochin.

Kite tapped the console to bring it out of its slumber.

System startup initiated…
LinLink® ©2123 MicroImpose Systems
Attempting hexcheck confirmation…
Databanks confirmed and validated.

Username: kLoKu
Password:

The console was the means by all communication within the ship and the outside world took place. Kite’s fingers glides smoothly over the projected keyboard.

c-lin# ./uplink
Uplink routine initiated.
Enter routing/destination code: 3ns0-23452h-52h09
Checksum daemon validation confirmed.
Connection attempt 1…
STOP: 0x573080
ERROR – NO RESPONSE

Connection failures frequently failed on the first attempt. The error was shrugged off by Kite as a mere miss-fire in the ship’s neurological core.

Retry? (y/n) Y

Connection attempt 2…
STOP: 0x497197
FATAL ERROR

The words on the screen flickered once before going out completely. Kite’s heart skipped a beat as she watched the terminal turn off before resetting itself. Every light in the ship flickered, as if the ship had shuddered along with her.

“Odd--,” she said as if downplaying the significance of the error would somehow subtract from its repercussions. Kite knew far well that it extended beyond the realm of odd. Seconds later, even though the console had rebooted as if nothing had happened, Kite slowly set herself down unto the bedding and pulled her knees up to her chest as if she had just received news of a dead grandparent.

“Broken?” Joseph asked without raising his head. Kite returned him a glare which illustrated her obvious annoyance with his over simplification. “It was probably that girl.”

Kicking the morphine vials out of her way, Kite brought herself to her feet and climbed out through the rubble, with Joseph right behind, and soon they began searching. Although they each stated otherwise, both were looking for Aura. Joseph wanted to find her so that he would have proof that the child was nothing but a nuisance for the ship’s parts, and Kite hoped to prove the opposite, or at least find her with enough time to destroy the evidence.

It had been determined long ago that there was no systematic way to search the ship. Kite set off in one direction and Joseph in the other. Running her over the rusted railing, Kite walked in silence, listening for the slightest sounds of either human or mechanical pain. It was not a sound that caught her attention, but rather the increasingly wet and sticky substance under her palm. Even under the underpowered florescent lights, no one could mistake the red stain for anything except blood. Kite’s heartbeat quickened at the sight, but even more so after she realized the blood was not her own.

Her heart sank and her pace quickened as she rushed to find the source of blood. Clambering over broken pipes and dodging dangling wires, Kite eventually arrived at the apparent source. From the ventilation grill above her, blood dripped at a steady rate as if the ship herself had suffered a wound. Seconds later, Kite was already standing in the cavity that sat above the grill.

The blood ran from the grill, around a knife drenched in a flesh/blood pulp, and to fragile Aura’s hand. She laid her head in the lap of the captain who had arrived only seconds earlier.

“Get up in the morning…get up in the morning…,” the child half-consciously sang her favorite nursery rhyme. Behind her, hung a crudely patched copper nerve. “She bumped her head…and she needed a band-aid…” As she drifted off into unconsciousness, Joseph picked her up and walked passed Kite with the limp body in his arms. It wasn’t until they were back in is cave that they spoke.

“She fixed it.”

“Fixed what?” Kite looked up from Aura’s bandaged body.

“I don’t know how she could’ve seen it, but it was there. One of the nerves had shorted out and it would’ve caused us many problems. Our uplink was only the first of many to come. Somehow she saw it before it happened.”

Kite smiled for Aura at the light compliment. It would only be a matter of time until all of Aura’s secrets would be revealed.