Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Quiet Earth
All things must start somewhere. As does this.
It starts with a planet. Not a particularly large planet, nor one of vast strategic or metaphysical interest to anybody beyond those who live on it. It’s merely just a planet, orbiting a sun, third in a line of others. It has one moon, and while it’s not a large moon nor as numerous as the varying other neighbors, this planet adores its little moon. It loves it so, lends the moon the guiding hand of its biggest resource. Liquid water coats this planet, and as per the agreement made when chunks of another planet broke from impact on this planet millions of years ago. As a form of penance, the moon gets to guide the tides of this planet’s vast array of water. Could be worse, the moon considers. Sure it’s not a glamorous place, sparse and dead like the first planet in the system, it’s not as interesting as its neighboring moons but he’s doing something. Beats being frozen solid.
The moon orbits around the planet while said planet spins on its axis, enforced by magnetic fields from both its sun as well as its core of molten metal. This constant spinning makes the days and nights of the planet move at a relatively rapid pace, keeping everything living on it on their collective toes/paws/appendages in regards to schedules. Time has never had such an effective metaphor as this rotation and night. As the planet spins, so too does the night overwhelm the day for sections of this world, spinning out of the light of the sun and towards the back that faces the rest of space. The moon is the only thing that can be seen, alongside the stars in the sky and with a keen enough eye, the neighbors of this planet far off in the distance. Before too long, this darkness that has plunged into this area is bathed in the light of the sun once more, and thus the spinning continues.
As this planet spins, a new day dawns upon it. Across many places in this world, life that seems so rare anywhere else in the galaxy but so plentiful on this planet arises from their slumber. Across millions of miles of land and sea, from the cold edges of this planet’s axis to the warm and humid center the closest to its sun, the planet awakes to a new day. Creatures dot this planet, simple and complex in equal measure. Some of them are microscopic, barely legible to even the finest of optical observing devices, and yet these small creatures are said to be the baseline of all life on this planet. Every single being evolved from one of these single celled organisms, who over time erected larger and larger organisms for their own collective survival. Much as any primitive group of people create tribes, so too did these cells make their own tribes and bond together. Gathering themselves larger and larger before they would dot the planet that they now call home. They’re one of the more powerful forces on this planet, being the reason for why it has a proper atmosphere via the constant conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen and nitrogen that make up the breathable air of this planet. Suffice to say that it’s impressive for any being to do such proto-terraforming, especially one as small as that. Had we the ability to award a medal that small, we would.
Said beings were not content to merely make their planet more livable. No, that wasn’t just it. Why do the simple, why stick to a formula when you can expand upon it and soon become more than the sum of your parts. More tribes of these little cells banded together, making larger and larger networks before the networks became their own independent beings. Automatic function soon made these cells operate in line, becoming the first assembly line production in this planet's history. These were animals, true animals and not a falsified version made to prove a point. Naturally occurring, multiplying and diversifying. Initially these animals limited themselves to the vast oceans of their world, focusing on a constant battle to consume one another for survival and thriving. The cycle of eating food, producing young and living long enough to do it all again remained until one had an idea. Sparking in the nerves and synapses of its amphibian brain, one of these animals called the bluff of its rivals by producing its spawn outside of terrestrial waters. Have fun trying to eat its young when it’s threading onto the land to do so. A bluff that worked well until one creature grew the ability to go onto the land and eat said young. And then another. And another realizing that all of the plants on this ‘land’ were plenty good eating on its own.
From there life continued on as animals spread onto this new ‘land’ and diversified themselves. Those who were in the warm equator maintained their cold blood to survive high heat and humidity even as the temperatures of the planet fluctuated and the various landmasses shifted under volcanic activity. Plates as large as moons adjusting positions until one was more comfortable and easing it, destroying several thousand lives in the process. The battle for spawn and food continued on land and in sea, and it would continue a biological arms race with itself for the next millenia. Small cold blooded creatures became large, their competition larger and larger and these are known to the inhabitants of this world as the dinosaurs. While they toiled in their constant war, other areas diversified their holdings in a way to hedge their bets. Some developed other ways of acquiring the nutrients they needed to live, and others thought having other genetic advantages would save them time. Such as warmer blood in case the wind got chilly. And it did, especially when a meteor collides with the planet and utterly devastates the former heads of the hierarchy. The bear market of life soon became a bull for those warm blooded creatures who survived, and soon they spread across all of the varying landmasses of this world. Even as the plates found their position uncomfortable to their back and moved yet again, this life survives the slow move away from their large continent into several smaller ones.
Some roamed the planet, some survivors of those cold blooded dinosaurs found solace in the skies of their former domination and the sea continued unaware or unconcerned with the actions of the land dwellers. All was good until a combination of things in a certain continent led to interesting results. Large predators swept across the vast and large plains of this continent, taking advantage of well developed leg muscles and scent to track and run down their opponents at any given moment. To their small meals, they were nightmares. But they were nightmares who couldn’t really jump. This calling of the bluff of jumping has been reverberated for millennia after the fact, and it worked. These smaller beings made their homes in the trees of the plains, awaiting their time in the sun when their larger predators would be driven out. And one day when those predators left, a few of these beings had a discussion relating to the concept. Some were hesitant to make a movement, remembering their days of their fathers and forefathers being mauled by anything from the down below place. And others wanted more. They wanted more food, more water, more of everything and for the sake of nothing but their own desires. They yearned for more than what they had, and when they got the courage to do so, set foot back on the ground. And in that moment, the die was cast and the planet now belonged to the tree dwellers. Their desire to do things outside of the realm of logic, for the sake of themselves and their own well being would soon spread across the planet. Evolving more and more advantages, and evolving across many breaths of the world. From the far cold to the hot and damp jungles, these new creatures, the hominids spread.
Many still do not agree with the spread of homosapiens across the planet, and some of those are even homosapiens themselves. For those who hold such ideas, they always cling to a world where nothing happened and their side prevailed instead of the homosapiens. They’re invariably still angry at losing the evolutionary war to a bunch of monkeys who one day elected to leave their tree and take over the planet by proxy. This coping mechanism did not stop these homosapiens, advancing and evolving further and further. Various offshoots of them would crop up as they spread, and invariably they’d either die out from disease or war, or elect to preserve their genetics by ‘re-integrating’ those genetics into the gene pool. This integration doomed them long term, but it did give the homosapiens more and more superiority. After more millenia, they had become the dominant species by outrunning the others. Not by actually running mind you, but having enough forethought to not waste all their energy and wait until their opponents were out of steam.
It’s not brave or interesting, but it worked.
Like their cell forebears, and so on through the evolutionary chain of events, these homosapiens developed their own small tribes and from there soon a world began to unfurl from that. Many questions these humans had for their new world as they explored it, and they’d explain it away in any way they could. Some made sense, others didn’t but it worked well enough and soon these foundational steps would lead to a terrifying newer concept. These new humans would learn the ways of reason yet again and begin making newer things. One takes the soupy but structurally sound earth beneath them and makes a house, and then invites his tribe over to do so and make their own houses. Huts upon huts make up towns upon towns upon towns and soon these tribes are nations, forged with their own languages, cultures and arrayed explanations for why their world works around them. Some with more malicious ideas in their minds use this to alter the explanations to fit their goals and needs, others choose pragmatism and win in the long haul. One learns of this grass that makes good food when ground and grows it, cultivates the good and uses the bad as fertilizer. Soon wheat is everywhere, farmers reap large harvests that feed their towns and cities.
Explanations were made still, operating on reason to make sense of things like why certain goods were more expensive than others and why certain people remained in power than others. These cliques of humans became leaders and they led their tribes to nationhood, empires and soon fell. But with every fall came more elements of themselves spread wider for others to pick up and continue on with. Empire began a new empire and soon the world was covered in said empires, spreading their own reasons for why they exist and sowing the seeds of wheat and more nations behind them. To those tribes who did not understand what these were, they’d either learn or die and re-establish the hierarchy of violence yet again. And with that these nations feuded, both intellectually and physically. Some had better reasons than others for why the world worked, some boasted about it in pride, others used it as a chance to teach their ways of world function. Knowledge was born properly, stored in writing and spread. Now nothing was lost simply to time, but to negligence. This is considered by many humanity’s finest bit of reason and soon leads to advancement. Bar incidents of accidental loss involving beer or fire, nothing was ever able to vanish as it did. And now these empires died, leaving behind proper legacies to follow. Some leaders spread their influence across wide amounts of continents, establishing new orders and people along the way.
Humanity advanced, forward and upward despite these falls. Sure certain cliques of them complain about how long it took 1,000 years of societal and historical advancement to occur as it did, a dark age of learning that the romantic and pedantic complain of. But soon the world continued advancing. The explanations of the world around them became simpler, more refined and more effective. They got closer to root truths of function, and propagated it with their institutions of knowledge and learning. And the willingness to learn regardless made humanity flourish. Soon those years of darkness faded, first towards a moderately modern age before more changes followed along. Ever upward did humanity go, literally speaking as well. For now that the world was theirs, humanity had a curiosity that needed satiation. They wanted to know more, see more, be more and go to more, regardless of what that more was. It was a desire that flirted in the minds of the small and the large, of intrepid explorers mapping out the planet's vast oceans and the leaders funding these teams to search the globe and find that ‘more’ that they wanted. In this endeavor they succeeded, conquered and expanded outwards. Nothing lasts forever, but they would succeed with humanity dotting almost every island, peninsula and continent on Earth. But one thing remained unchecked. Realms beyond the veil. The stars beyond that twinkled once their sun faded as the planet spun. They wanted to know what was beyond. An innately human drive, to learn for the sake not of simply just themselves, ego or intelligence but for collective goodness. They wanted to see what was beyond the veil of their planet, see into the stars.
An idea flirted with for centuries, some conjuring their tales of the forbidden realms beyond their simple blue planet and telling wild stories about life forms beyond their own but similar enough to which they could satiate their interest and curiosity. This was a curiosity that led them to conclusions of great power, harnessing the power of everything from the terror of combustion to the splitting of atoms, advancing little tribes into global powers and making pushes in technology that advanced them to levels unforeseen in their entire galaxy. True, there wasn’t much competition in said galaxy but that wasn’t the point. They wanted to know and so they knew faster and faster. One day they did the impossible. Breached the bubble, sent man made objects into space. The first were flukes, attempts that while failure riddled, proved a point. And a point others would prove again and again. Some died for this point, animal and human life sacrificed for the concept of moving away from their home that they had grown from. Humanity was to move on, and it proved it with landing on other bodies and worlds, sending out probes and satellites wide. Sure some skeptics called it nothing but nationalistic peacocking between superpowers, but the aims were similar. And once they had called a victory, landed the first visitors to the moon and brought them back several times over, long term plans came into being.
In their year of 1977, in the month of September and on the 5th day of said month, their first long shot was created. It was a satellite, a probe to explore the deepness of space in a safe but scientific manner. It came with gyroscopes and thrusters to guide it towards realms humanity hadn’t been able to reach, past the home planet and out. They powered it with their split atom, using fizzling plutonium to guide it into the depths and gave it as much radio connection as possible. Like a worried parent watching their child leave, they didn’t want to simply just lose this probe. It was important both scientifically and to a modest extent, emotionally. They dubbed it a name, both in form and in function. Like a king granted their chosen explorers titles, so too did these scientists give this probe a name. Voyager. And soon this voyager would begin its voyage. It entered space loaded with cameras, sensors and even a record. A record upon which could be found many things. Music and sounds from this world, alien and unknown to anyone who might encounter the probe. It played from a myriad of centuries of Earth cultural development, in a myriad of languages and styles. It contained images of humans, and star charts upon which someone could find their way there. Should they want to. Many made chide jokes at that inclusion, but no one was going to stop it from happening. Even cynics need something to believe in.
Voyager 1 was followed by Voyager 2.
Both continued their missions long after their creators retired and passed on. The legacy of their work passed down the line, a testament to humanity’s knowledge and transfer of it. Despite their age, the Voyager’s continued their work and so too did the planet.
And so too did other aspects of the wider universe.
—
Tuesday.
To those on the planet called Earth, Tuesday is a bad day. Even the most glad person on the planet, with a corresponding schedule that flatters the concept of a Tuesday does not like Tuesday. They merely like the allusion of Tuesday. The cursory glance at the concept without the deeper ramifications that Tues- and -day bring to the table. Tuesday is a day of immeasurable power, the power to imbue any being of life with an intense feeling of dread and unease, and for no other reason than for the fact that it is Tuesday. You cannot prepare for a Tuesday, merely accept what it brings to the table and move on.
On this day of Tues, in the wee hours of 7:00 AM, the beeping alarm awoke a man from a slumber. He couldn’t remember much as he rose from the bed, beyond a dream where he was back in high school in his senior year, finally making a move on Jessica. Or Monica. Or some other of the many girls that had circled his mind in the off hours, memories of what could’ve been. He finds the reminders obnoxious to a capacity, but it won’t be long before the dream fades entirely to the reality that stands before him. This man’s name is Marcus Penwald, he’s 33 years old, he is 5’ 11” and is around 200 pounds. He is aware that legally speaking he is overweight, but it hasn’t seemed to cause him any problems beyond a couple of destroyed pairs of jeans. There’s always been an aim to get to the gym and put the kibosh on it, but something else always comes in between him and the routine itself.
His hand idly reaches over and smacks the snooze button on his alarm clock, trying to get back in that dream and figure out exactly who he was asking out this time. In this he fails, mostly as he had rigged a sequence of alarms back to back to prevent anything but being woken up. It is Tuesday, Sir Penwald, and your work must begin.
Marcus is a man who lives in an apartment, it is an apartment of unhinged banality. He was never particularly enamored with it or living in it, but it was just the right level of things to make him sign a lease and pay up. Boring, utilities included, not charging him extra for using some water and allowing him to nail things into the wall. His previous one got uppity over a poster and he was always careful to read the bylaws. And so here he was, in the Mason Development Housing Project. Which was a fancy way of saying ancient apartments dating back a good ¾ of a century. Not that he was complaining, it was better than prefab.
Cinder Block walls, old and worn plywood or vinyl floors and every wall in white. He had done the best he could over the past few years to put some ornamentation on the place, spice it up with pictures and posters but he always fell short of any goal. Sure it looked nice and he had a sort of eye for contrast but there’s only so much you can do with white walls. They are known to Earth and the wider universe as both the best and worst canvas for interior design. He had himself a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and at least 3 closets, one for his clothes, one for his coats, one for his boxes. The lack of interior decorating wasn’t helped by his furniture, dastardly prefabricated stuff or remnants from his old place that stood out like sore thumbs against the Designed In Scandinavia, Made In Malaysia fittings of a worn out coffee table or a bookshelf that was one encyclopedia away from tilting over. It was an apartment, lived in and somewhat liked.
He rose from his bed, hearing the faint pathetic squeak of the springs as he rose and rolled his neck. Every vertebrae in the upper part cracking like dropped plates on the ground. Surmising this would put some jolt of adrenaline into his system, assisting in waking him up would be incorrect. No, the looming power of Tuesday hung over him. Not even the tang of his peppermint toothpaste was able to rouse much of a response, either as it hit his tongue or as he spit the foam into the sink. Why? Well because it was Tuesday. And Tuesday meant one thing and one thing only.
And that meant he had to go to work.
Yes, work.
Marcus is indifferent to many things, work is one of them.
Officially speaking, Marcus Penwald is an Assistant Shipping Manager for International Shipping LLC, a shipping company based in Baltimore, Maryland. Officially speaking they deal in both rail, road, ship and air transportation, that last one has been in the midst of heavy negotiation due to FAA licensing and an incident involving a Airbus A331P2F, a training pilot crew, half a bottle of Maker’s Mark and the extended field beyond Atlanta International Airport. If one needs it shipped both nationally and internationally, ISC has you covered and has done so for forty years. When Penwald had graduated college 10 years ago with a degree in business and a minor in psychology, they were one of the few who sent him an offer first and foremost. He initially wanted to look into other offerings, but no one offered PTO. And officially speaking, he wanted PTO. He has never exactly had the time to use said PTO and frequently just cashes it in to make more money on top of his bonus, but one day soon he will find the time and place to use PTO. One day he might go to the many vacation spots of his dreams but they required more money than he or his paychecks had, and the planning and forward thinking to see them through. For the time being he sustained himself on extra bonuses and fluffier paychecks to get fixes for his car or a new game or two for his computer. Simple enough.
This was a job of middle management middle managers, moving against the beating hearts of collective departments to reach closure on any issue. This was a job that was to transport the people within it from the dregs of warehouses and lower level sales gigs into the higher echelons of corporate society, a Rolex for every man and a Mercedes in every driveway. And for Marcus, it was a Casio on his wrist, and his dark gray Corolla awaiting him as he walked outside into the lovingly bad overcast day. For what else was Tuesday to be, if not overcast? Overcast, mildly cold, but not enough to warrant a coat. As the first flirting ideas of staying at home stirred in the back of his mind, he put the key in the ignition.
At the very least the commute was sub 30 minutes, half the reason he stomached the apartment was not having to be like his coworkers who’d always regale him with the trials and tribulations of driving. The post-meeting or coffee corner questions and statements about ‘how was your day’ that always seemed to lead into the grand overarching mess that was this person’s life and the Broadway show that was their day. The office was simple enough, it had its own section of a busy mixed usage street on the outskirts of the city that wasn’t part of the city to avoid paying city taxes, it’s own parking lot and even the name on the side of the building. ISL’s Headquarters was less of a business and more of a generic mid level high rise that seemed to eat into every major metropolis. Give enough time and post modern glass sky pencils poked out of the ground like dandelions in March.
ISL’s building was a generic marvel in this commercial park. Not the tallest building, dwarfed by a nearby banking conglomerate and a venture capital firm recently struck with a crisis due to embezzlement. It was just another mid to large height skyrise poking its way into the stratosphere of the town. Even the interior, god that interior seemed generic. He walked into it every day and he couldn’t ever really tell you what the base floor looked like. Just remembering some rotating doors, a few statues, a name on a wall, a secretary desk and a line to the elevator. Everything looked the same from the first floor to the top floor. Muted grays and whites of corporate America, with the only respite being whites, blacks or the rare bits of wood. Even in the elevator, which shunted him and a small mixture of coworkers and sub-coworkers he only met at parties up a floor, all he could see was gray and black.
He was a denizen of the ninth floor, not high enough to feel special but enough that he got a decent view of the city. He used to work in the central part of it, shuffling paper around in a cubicle hellscape but he had gotten work done enough to earn a promotion. The Shipping Manager. It didn’t mean anything exciting in the corporate world of the HQ, this just meant that he was the one having to handle the various shipping documents, orders and so on that came in from a variety of customers. It amounted to a glorified bit of customer service and making sure the other customer service people didn’t set the building on fire. That was easier said than done, as due to the aforementioned incident involving whiskey and a freight plane. Still, it was a role that pulled him into not only out of the dredges of the cubicle but into the dream of every emotionally stunted office drone.
The personal office.
Exiting the elevator, turning to the right and counting down the doors, one, two, three and four and there he could see it. On a plane wood door with a black stamped sheet metal handle said “MARCUS PENWALD” in big letters. Even on a day like today, as dead as it was and as zombified as he felt, there was a brief flicker of pride in seeing that on the door. Sure you’d turn the handle and find that it was just an office. A desk made of particle board, a computer that was just old enough to chug under any amount of browser tabs, an ergonomic chair that was both comfortable and painful in its own right and a couch that he had slept on enough times to swear he’d never do so again. And then he did. And another time after that just for good measure.
Clocking in, he saw what laid before him. 19 tickets, 5 emails and a company wide one about congratulating all the teams for a successful Q4 and hoping that Q1 is just as good. Even mentions of bonuses, how interesting. Itching his nose, he opened his first email.
Like a sewing machine to a stitch, Marcus D. Penwald got to work. Double checking on emails and invoices, discussing new management systems with his Shipping Manager, Tyler, going for his 10 AM coffee break and running into Maurice from Accounts and hearing the obligatory complaint at his 44 minute commute this morning due to a flipped over pickup truck on I-65. His mind never seemed to engage in a way with his work, merely operating automatically to every day functions. Noon meeting with the sales reps for a machining company on organizing flat rates for their products between ISL and UPS, after a luncheon which boiled down to delivering pizza and breadsticks while his boss and co-workers discussed politics and sports with each other. Penwald listened and followed along with enough knowledge on the subject matter to know what to say without having any level of proper conviction on the subject. He knew how to play this game, play the game of the job and play it better than anyone else. Before long it was the slow descent into the afternoon, with the biggest highlight of his day being having to discuss with the Receiving Team Leader that they couldn’t drift around their Bel Air warehouse on pallet jacks due to OSHA violations and rumors of an upcoming inspection. He never liked delivering news like that, made him feel like a shitheel to some capacity but it was something.
Something was eating him at this moment.
It was something that made those dreams always crop up and allow his mind to float onto the other possibilities that could’ve happened. Other careers or friends and family members he worked with, other jobs he could be doing and other lives he could’ve lived. It was an aimless feeling that affects anything that does the same thing long enough to where it becomes a routine and learned behavior operating automatically without any forethought. Indifferent malaise that settled in like light snowfall on a December early morning, the first bit of proper snow in the year that ices the cake of winter mortality.
As the witching hour of 5 PM approached and every one of his coworkers left, some with offers for what to do with their evening that Penwald made excuses for like fake post-work work or paperwork to file, he didn’t make any attempt to follow them out the door. Rush with them to the exits, down the elevators and into the hell of cars and short tempers that pepper any closing time on any day of the week. No, because this problem was still biting at him, and he wanted some silence to contemplate it. Initially he used an excuse of having to finalize that memo to his boss’s boss on the new proposed rate for that company and that would allow him a respite from the question. He’d return to a podcast or an ASMR video and type on his computer, wrapping up what little work remained by the end of the day in the hopes that no one calls the bluff. No one ever did.
In the quiet of the office, he spun himself in his chair, eyes focusing on the ceiling and attempting to block out any errant thoughts with his focus. What was he doing at this moment? Not simply just placing his keister into an OfficeMax chair made to last until it broke before being sacrificed to the maw of a trash truck. What was he doing? He is in him, as in Marcus Penwald, Manager of Words and Ledgers? The man who spent his entire day in a clean cut office job that smelled like freshly printed paper and overly strong coffee produced two hours from his start time. He had money but never enough to run or do anything beyond survival. He had security in his job but never enough momentum to move anywhere at any speed. He had food, he had electricity and enough clothes and goods to survive winter and all of the ways one could die in this world. Everything was there for him to do more than this and yet he didn’t, and he had the constant realization of that at any given moment. His feeling of malaise was imprinted not simply by himself and his day-to-day routine beating on like the rhythm of a drum, but also by the fact he was still doing it. No rebellion in his spirit anymore, that was against company policy.
Eventually he had to face the music, unplug himself from the system and clock out before any of the security guys came asking why he was there. The sun began to dip beyond, behind the veil of the skyline of Baltimore and flickering every so often as the light reached down from between skyscrapers and high rises and basked the area in the golden glow. Penwald moved back to his Corolla with a quiet step, like a funeral march for a man he couldn’t name but he would be able to remember without a second thought. The drive home was boring, he gave himself enough time for any of the riff raff or chaos to end. Back home, back to the fortress and back to the world that didn’t ask the same question of ‘what’s next’. What was next was simple, a couple of pork chops, some rice and perhaps sauteed spinach, eaten from a questionably clean bowl with a fork of sterling silver while watching random streamed content on his television. There’s an open beer on his coffee table and he kicks back in an attempt to get comfortable while stymieing the thought of what in the process. The night rolled on as the hour hand ticked closer and closer to midnight. Content beget a movie, then beget either a bit of video game or maybe some internet content. Spinning a digital rolodex to his vision receptors in an attempt to outrun that question.
Eventually he started to yawn, his eyelids became heavy and his body pumped out just the right chemical cocktail to make himself feel sleepy. He dressed himself back down to the basics, brushed his teeth and eased himself down onto the twin bed. Some nights that question lingered on too long, too long for him to like and too long for him to comfortably work while at work. So on came some earbuds and another ASMR series of soft rains or the pulsing hum of background noise, a turned on fan for mental tinnitus. He could feel that question lapping at the edges of his mind as he closed his eyes and focused on the sounds, focused and let himself drift off into sleep. Unintentionally setting himself up for that same dream again, remembering someone from the past, as the question came back in the subconscious and finally made him think without thinking. And remembering Cheryl. That was her name after all, it wasn’t Monica or Jessica. Just Cheryl. She wasn’t even all that special to the world or to the school, just to him. And that’s all that really mattered.