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[anthonyedenwriter]

The Intrepid (Writer in Motion Round 1, self-edits week)

It was in the late spring of 1866, when the Royal Navy ship The Intrepid finally returned from its venture into the frozen north, weighed down by its many failures.

The sun stood high when I made it down to the shore. I had never seen the ocean before, though I had dreamt of it since the first time I was activated. Sparkling and full of warm summertime promises; turquoise and inviting, like a dream in the making. Artificial dreams carefully designed to make me attuned to the seas. Feel a fondness for it. But not that day.

The ship was void of its crew, all but for the automaton figurehead built into the ship itself, unable to break free of her duties come Hell or high water. You could hear her cries for miles, long before the ship first came into view. Wailing and mournful, trapped in the ice-logged terrors that not even the bright promise of summer could shake. What should’ve been a day of celebration soon turned into one of horrified speculation and mourning. There were dozens of personnel already there, securing her onto shore. It would be a ways before she could be moved to the shipyard.

“It wasn’t there,” she told anyone within earshot, her pearlescent eyes desperate for anyone to understand. “It wasn’t there,” as if the words explained everything about what had gone wrong.

The entire crew was gone, except for her. And whatever grim fate they had disappeared into, her mechanical heart had gone with them.

Two Navy ships had sailed ten years before, tasked with exploring the impenetrable North Sea and to rediscover the lost passage to the Hinterlands.

The Intrepid’s return only sparked more questions that could not yet be answered: what had happened to the crew? What about the other ship? Were they alive on the other side of the blizzardous borderlands?

And if they were not, what had become of them?

…and how had The Intrepid made it this far without so much as a skeleton crew? Apart from its grieving figurehead, of course, who once had so proudly led the way forward.

Her name was Lily, and I was to be her replacement.

#

Contrary to my initial assessment, it wasn’t the shipyard Lily ended up, but at the naval body shop, where all the broken sentience came in for repairs. Willingly, or not.

She had been forcibly removed from the Intrepid, and, if at all possible, was in a worse state now than when she first landed. She lay on a gleaming metal slab, like so much carcass to a butcher. Her facial features flickered, as did her colouring. Our paint jobs were integral to us, integrated into our very systems. We do not peel under the battery of natural forces.

But there was nothing natural about this.

I approached her, not yet knowing what I would become in her wake. Her eyes implored me. Her Neptunian beard looked molten and decayed. Her voice broke with every syllable.

“Lily? My name is Olly. I have been tasked with investigating…” What, exactly, I didn’t have the first idea. I was a navigational unit at my core: I had no experience interviewing traumatised victims of foul play. I had no experience doing anything, to be fair. But Lily didn’t care much. All she saw in me was a willing receptacle to her ramblings. Perhaps she thought I would understand. I was not mere flesh and bone, like the others who came to gawk at her distress.

She grabbed my hand so hard my hinged phalanges squeaked; she was carved in the image of the God of the Sea himself, of course she was strong. “It wasn’t there. Do you understand me?”

I resorted to a standardised phrase. I didn’t know how else to proceed. “Please clarify.”

For a moment it seemed to sink in. Lily’s mouth curled like a cat’s whiskers right before the throttling, but the moment was lost in an instant. All the metaphorical flame contained within her died down as some morsel of truth finally crystalized within her mind. I didn’t understand. I didn’t magically infer what she was talking about. She would have to spell it out for me.

I leaned my hip against the slab, and pressed her hand. I had no personal experience of bedside manners, or why they would appeal to a hacked up, sentient figurehead almost twice my size… But I had enough data points to warrant a hunch. Lily had spent her entire span of existence interacting with humans, and their human sentiments. I would have to adapt, if I wanted to learn. If I didn’t learn quick, I could be decommissioned before I’d even closed my first case.

“Please, Lily,” I tried again, using my most amenable register of voice. Tonal intonation like a caring parent, or a long lost friend. “Help me understand. You didn’t find what you were looking for? Did you get lost in the ice?”

For a moment her eyes brightened, like clear skies after a rainfall. “We… lost everything,” she said after what felt like an eternity. The Harbour Master was glaring holes at the back of my neck panel. If I wasn’t quick, he’d cut things short.

“Everything?” I coaxed her. “The Voyager as well?” It didn’t bear thinking. Two Royal Navy ships lost on the same expedition.

Lily’s eyes rolled in their sockets, suspicion swimming in every sharp glare she turned on her surroundings. She lowered her voice, and levelled me with a look so dead serious I was glad I didn’t have a heart. “There was something out there. Something thriving on the other side of the Deep White Nothing. It nestled its way in amongst the crew. Talked sweet, lied through its teeth, and poisoned everyone’s minds one against the other.”

Paranoia and dissent make for a lethal combination, that much I knew from my programming… But even then, that first time I heard of it, I knew Lily wasn’t talking about either.

“Please clarify,” I said, not fully aware of what I was asking.

Lily bowed her head towards me, as if in prayer, or supplication. I leaned closer, in kind. “Just when we thought we’d figured it out, how to track it down,” she whispered. “It wasn’t there. It was never there. It was everywhere, all at once.”

I shifted where I stood bent towards her. It would be a while before I recognized the thrumming of electrical currents running through my system. It was encroaching terror: creeping, biding its time. I saw the end in Lily’s eyes.

“What is your full name?” she asked me. I hesitated to answer, so she pushed on. “What is your function?”

My name was a token of sentiment; my function utterly irrelevant. I mimicked the discomfort suitable to the context. I was an excellent mimic, even then, not yet aware of my potential. “My name is Oleander, for the flower. But my inventor called me Olly.”

Lily sagged into the slab. Her verdict was both accurate and terrible. “That’s the first lie they told you. There’ll be many more.”

I took her meaning. I would have to live up to my name, much like my floral namesake, or I wouldn’t be long for this world. Deadly, but deceptively appealing. Make the human crew underestimate me as they passed their initial judgements. Observe. Take note. Circumnavigate every danger -- or end up like Lily, heartbroken and torn from her sole purpose, on a metal slab in the back room of a body shop.

My name was Oleander, and no amount of programming could have prepared me for the horrors that soon followed in the wake of the Intrepid and her once so proud figurehead.

[anthonyedenwriter]

Writer in Motion 2022, draft 1

Okay, so. First draft of Writer in Motion 2022, and we’re off to a hinky start. Battling a cold, mixing up dates of the month, and being a scatter-brained optimist is not the best of combinations when you’ve signed up for a writing event. All in all, I ended up with a first draft looking more like a zero draft, at all of 379 words. I’m a plantser, as in, somewhere smack dab between a pantser and a plotter, so I don’t really know where I’m going with my stories when I start writing. I write, and let whatever characters that step into the limelight lead the way.

This one turned into a brand new angle to a story I’m working on, which gives me fresh hope of finishing the whole thing for NaNoWriMo (but we’re not there yet). I jokingly refer to that story as my Ghost Ship Wip, but maybe with this short story/flash fiction moment it won’t be so jocular anymore.

Let me know what you think of it - and stay tuned for more this week!

Cheers,

Ant

-----

It was in the late spring of 1866, when the Royal Navy ship The Intrepid returned from its venture into the frozen north, weighed down by its many failures.

The sun stood high when I made it down to the shore, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to find. I had never seen the ocean before, though I had dreamt of it since the first time I was activated. Sparkling and full of warm summertime promises. Turquoise and inviting, like a dream in the making. Artificial dreams carefully designed to make me attuned to the seas. Feel a fondness for it. But not that day.

The ship was void of its crew, all but for the automaton figurehead built into the ship itself, unable to break free of her duties, come Hell or high water. You could hear her cries for miles, long before the ship first came into view. Wailing and mournful, trapped in the ice-logged terrors that not even the bright promise of summer could shake. What should’ve been a day of celebration soon turned into one of horrified speculation and mourning. There were dozens of personnel already there, securing her onto shore. It would be a ways before she could be moved to the shipyard.

“It wasn’t there,” she told anyone within earshot, her pearlescent eyes desperate for anyone to understand. “It wasn’t there,” as if the words explained everything about what had gone wrong.

 The entire crew was gone, except for her. And whatever grim fate they had disappeared into, her mechanical mind had gone with them.

Two Navy ships had sailed the year before, tasked with exploring the impenetrable North Sea and to (hopefully) rediscover the lost passage to the Hinterlands.

The Intrepid’s return only sparked more questions that could not yet be answered: what had happened to the crew? What about the other ship? Were they alive on the other side of the blizzardous borderlands?

And if they were not, what had become of them?

…and how had The Intrepid made it this far without so much as a skeleton crew? Apart from its grieving figurehead, of course, who once had so proudly led the way forward.

Her name was Lily, and I was to be her replacement.