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The Great Ring slowly revolves through the empty space above the ecliptic plane of this alien solar system.
Nothing about this place is genuine. All of it is a simulacrum, an imitation. A fake. The foreign sun doesn’t even truly illuminate it: its golden disk is merely an image plastered onto the gigantic paneled screen that pretends to be the sky. The sunsets that we have witnessed are similarly a fabrication. The panels slowly dim, hiding the view of the sun and replacing it with constellations none of us has seen in decades. And so, too, dims the other false sun, the lamp that illuminates the Ring with artificial daylight and allows the vegetation to still survive, even so far from home.
I still remember home. I was little more than a fledgling, back then, when it all started. When the Decision was made for me, by my parents and grandparents and every ‘grown-up’ like them. I didn’t get a say in the matter.
The Eye called them, and they answered the call. In it they saw the unfathomable and the divine, the impossible and the key to everything. How could they resist? Even I, young as I was, understood the gravity of the situation which pulled us close to that celestial enigma. Older than the universe! How could anyone not be at least curious?
At the time, everyone told me that the Decision was worth its costs and sacrifices. The Great Ring would be the legacy of a generation, and the knowledge of the Eye would be their gift to their children, even if they did not get to see it themselves.
And so we chopped down every tree and strip-mined our moon and dismantled every asteroid we could get our clawed hands on. We carefully reconstructed it as best as we could in the shape of the Great Ring, our future home for the journey of a lifetime, and the endeavor of our entire kind.
I remember thinking that it was beautiful. A masterwork of art and engineering. A monument to our indomitable collective will and craft. A carefully constructed garden, so perfectly designed that I could fall in love with it and call it my beloved home for evermore.
Decades passed as the solar sails’ thrust slowly brought us closer to our fateful destination. All that was left of our home moon was the memory, immortalized in pictures for generations that wouldn’t get to see it.
I grew up. My parents died, one after the other, and I was with them in every second of their final agony. They each in turn exhaled one last breath, and I said my final goodbyes.
I burned their bodies in the green fire, with the same gas of the ringed planet we once orbited. I whispered kindnesses to the urn that held their mingling cinders. United in death as in life. As per tradition, I let them rest in the river, where they would become a part of me, and everything I would eat and drink and breathe.
In a sense, they’d live forever. In another sense, the universe had ripped them from me with cruel finality. I could delude myself with comforting thoughts, but I knew I would never see them again.
I was barely an adult, back then, and I wondered if I’d get to see the Eye before old age claimed me, too. It would be close, according to calculations. My luck could go either way.
A childhood friend became a loving partner, someone with whom I could share the burden of the ceaseless days. We’d play and laugh together, and life wouldn’t be so bad. She’d always beat me at trigonal chess, but I loved her for it. She was bright in every sense of the word. She was the light in my eyes.
She gave me two beautiful nestlings. Even if they kept me awake at all hours of day and night with their cries, I didn’t mind, because I loved them so.
For a time, our house was full of joy. To commemorate these happy days, I commissioned a friend to paint us all together. I hung it in the living room, lovingly framed.
I watched them grow up, and as they did, the entire community taught them all they knew, and they became a brood to be proud of, smarter than one could have hoped. It is just, for the new generation to surpass the old.
I told them stories of how life was underneath the blue rings, and of the momentous Decision, and of how the Great Ring came to be. They both listened, enraptured by these tales of old. I tried to use a vision torch to show it all to them, but the image that came out was an unfocused haze of distant memories, obfuscated by time. So they watched the slides with me, as I waxed with nostalgia of our old, abandoned home. I had to believe our sacrifice was worth it.
The Eye grew nearer, and so did my grave.
My bones grew brittle, and one unlucky day I broke a femur on the stairs to the Eye’s temple. It took an excruciating year to heal, and even once it did, I could never quite walk the same way again. I begrudgingly began to use a staff.
My feathers began to take on a cinereous tone. It wouldn’t be too many years before they would start falling off, first one by one, then in patches.
My eyesight started to go, slowly reducing the world around me to a headache-inducing blur of its former self.
A disease took my beloved wife. It was early for her time, but such is life, they said. We bid her the final farewell as her body gave up, and we mourned her loss together, as a family. We mixed her ashes with those of all who died before her, in the river, and we swore we’d hold her memory in our hearts forever.
The day came. Our chief was called to inspect the Eye, now that it was finally within reach, after an eternity’s wait. The entire community held onto their breaths.
Then, the worst happened. She came out raving about an apocalypse, about the end of all things. We didn’t believe her at first, but we repeated the scan once, twice, thrice, and the same vision showed itself again. The stars ground to dust, and our kind with them.
The Eye had tricked us! Rather than a trove of knowledge, we had found a malevolent lure that led us to deface our sacred home and build a simulacrum out of its remains. All we had learnt is how naive our parents had been, and how their idealism had failed them.
We torched the temple, an entire people furious at the universe’s deception.
We sealed away the cruel Eye, so that it may never lure another species to such ruinous lengths.
We wept, rewatching the slides over and over again, knowing we had reduced our beloved moon to a desert for nothing. The slides were all that was left of its former glory. Our sacrifices amounted to naught but the hollow reality of our foolishness. We could never amend our mistakes, and we could never return to our lost home.
Our children and their peers still tried. They had never seen it for themselves, but that didn’t stop them from feeling just as betrayed as we did, and from craving an impossible return to their ancestral home.
They worked tirelessly, and developed incredible machinery, the likes of which we had never seen in our young days.
They scrutinized the old slides with a ravenous eye for detail, scouring them for every imaginable information. They wouldn’t stop until the replica was perfect.
They asked me to tell them again about the moon underneath the blue rings, and I told them all I knew, as vividly as I could manage. They showed me their work on the holographic table, and asked me what looked right and what didn’t. I assisted them as best I could, and spent countless hours telling them everything they wanted to know, even as my throat rasped, old and dry.
Eventually I became bed-ridden, and I could help them no more. My heart had grown weak. My lungs wheezed and struggled for air. My cloak concealed a mess of lost feathers. I was well beyond the average life expectancy for my kind, which was cold comfort, given the helpless torments of my ancient age. Still, I hung on, waiting for the day this new great work would be finished, and I could have one last dream of home before the endless night.
I woke up, feeble and tired, to my name being called. The time had come, once again. After so much effort, after so many steps and missteps, horrible incidents and strokes of genius, it was finished.
My beautiful daughter, with a mind of steel and starlight, ushered me near the green fire.
My body limped and struggled. I gripped my wooden crutch in one hand, and with the other I held the lantern, with what little fading strength I had left.
I could feel it. The anticipation. The culmination of my desires. For the first time in so long, I was excited for something.
Then my heart gave up, and pain radiated across my chest like lashes of fire. I fell to the floor, as my brain starved for oxygen. Stars danced in my clouded eyes, then faded as the darkness took me.
I woke up again.
I was home. The ringed planet loomed over me. The wind gently blew across the fronds of the willows, and the river reflected the sky I grew up with. It all looked just as beautiful as I remembered.
I sighed in amazement. The air was fresh, and I realized that breathing didn’t hurt. My chest didn’t hurt. My once-stiffened, hunched back didn’t hurt. My legs didn’t hurt! I felt as spry as a fledgling once again! I rolled onto the grass with youthful abandon, feeling it soft underneath my back and between my fingers. If it was a reconstruction, it was an incredibly good one.
I asked myself how it could be possible. I distinctly remembered the agony of what I could only assume was death. Was I perhaps simply in a coma, instead? Or did I enter the simulation for just a moment, before the end?
I waited for my consciousness to dissolve, and the world to fade to black once more.
It didn’t.
Instead, my own daughter appeared out of thin air, and enveloped me in a desperate embrace. I asked her what had happened, and she said she didn’t know. A miracle, perhaps.
Even after death, life is good. The agony of old age no longer torments me, and I’m able to enjoy everyday pleasures, such as wine, song, board games, and the quiet sound of water as I fish.
I just wish she didn’t die so early. We all miss her so much, and I have a feeling we always will. So many died before they could have a chance to live forever. We hung portrait after portrait of those who couldn’t make it.
We still rewatch the slides, uploaded for our convenience, and bathe ourselves in the nostalgia, bittersweet as it is. We never seem to get tired of doing that.
Every month, we reunite to sing an elegy to the rings of our lost moon’s sky. We know that even this is just an imitation, much like the Great Ring itself. It’s not big enough. It’s not real enough, even if it’s very close to it. The feeling of being in a dream never fades. The world feels somehow veiled and not quite sharp enough at the edges.
Perhaps that feeling of unreality is something we could have fixed with enough engineering, but I think there was a tacit consensus not to. It keeps us from forgetting that this isn’t truly our lost home.
One day, there was a great commotion. One of our younger dwellers betrayed us, deactivating the Silencer, exposing the Eye’s signal to the universe’s ears once more, if only briefly. He was swiftly punished, and locked up behind the strictest security we could manage. I heard they burnt the Silencer’s controls, as well as most of the slides, in case any other reckless youth ever got the foolish idea to follow their example.
Eventually, there was no one left alive. One by one, they had all joined the simulation, and preferred it to reality. No new nestlings were born. It’s just us now, a scant few dozen souls in a computer, on a rotting ship circling around an alien Sun. It’s probably gone to seed, by now, with no one to take care of it. It doesn’t matter, so long as it still functions.
I do wish that wasn’t the case. This place would be a lot more interesting if new visitors trickled in over time. As things stand now, that will never happen.
It’s been a very long time. I have no idea how our minds have held up, never bored with centuries and millennia of the same things, endlessly repeated. Even when we’ve long since run out of conversations to have, we still fish, we still sing, we still drink. We still mourn the dead and our lost home. We still remember the good and the bad. The memory has perhaps faded, buried under layers upon layers of dreamy haze after countless centuries, but it’s still there. Unforgettable.
One day, even this dream will end. The Great Ring, marvel of engineering as it is, will collapse under eons of wear and tear, with no architect left alive to mend it. Perhaps the alien sun will one day die, and the power will run out as the ship slowly starves for energy with its solar panels useless. Perhaps the dam will finally break, inundating us all, snuffing out our Lanterns one last time.
When that happens, I’ll be satisfied. I have lived an eternity. I have done not just everything I could ever want, but everything I could ever think of doing. I’ve learned every skill I never had time for, and lived every experience I never would have gotten around to. I’ve read every book, and learned to get to know the rules of our universe with impossible intimacy. I’ve danced every dance, and felt every emotion that a mind like mine could feel, from the deepest trenches of melancholy, to the highest peaks of elated ecstasy. I’ve lived it all.
One day, we shall sing our elegy one last time before we sink into the darkness.
If the universe is kind, we’ll see each other again, friends.