Chapter Text
You wake up in a large dark room, and for just a moment, you can’t remember where you are. You’re tucked into a circular bed, under a nest of soft warm blankets. The walls around you are soft and rounded, and the ceiling rises high above your head, making the room feel almost egg-shaped. One wall is taken up by an enormous black blob of a window, and through it, a field of twinkling stars is slowly drifting past.
Now you remember. You’re on a spaceship. You’re on Masada’s spaceship.
You slowly sit up in bed, and the room grows brighter automatically around you. Opposite the bed is a softly rounded doorway, and from the next room over, you can hear the sounds of a piano being played.
You get out of the bed and tuck all the covers back into place. Then you walk through the little round doorway and onto the bridge. It’s a cavernous white room, softly lit and nearly empty. One wall is dominated by another enormous round window, where a sea of stars drifts by through the empty blackness of space. Beneath the window is a long white instrument, covered in knobs and switches and black and white keys. And standing before this instrument is the tall thin figure of Masada.
He almost looks human—two long thin arms and legs, a long thin torso, chin-length black hair framing his strange white face, featureless except for the large black eyes. A tight black bodysuit covers his entire thin frame from chin to toe. His long black-clad fingers are on the keys before him, playing the little wandering song you heard from the bedroom.
When you approach him, his roving black eyes drift towards you, and his fingers drift away from the keys. He leans toward you and carefully reaches those long black fingers to your face, the soft material grazing your cheek in a solicitous gesture.
“I’m okay,” you say.
He gazes into your face for a few more seconds, eyes wide and unblinking. Then he straightens back up and returns his gaze to the keys. His splayed fingers find and hold a loud, unmusical chord, and through the big black window, the stars begin to move, faster and faster until they’re streaking by in searing laser lines of light. Then they slow, resolving once again into twinkling little points. In the center of the viewport there is now a cluster of enormous block-like structures, slowing revolving together in space like a strange little planet and its many many moons.
As you stand there staring at the enormous floating structure, Masada walks away to the other end of the bridge, to the rounded doorway that leads to the spaceship’s little vestibule. There’s an invisible keypad on the wall beside the doorway—the keys light up in soft pastels as Masada presses them. The doorway shrinks, collapsing in on itself, and the walls stretch inward to fill the space, until the doorway vanishes completely and the smooth white wall is all that’s left. Then the doorway dilates back open. The dark little vestibule is gone, and in its place is a long concrete platform, spreading away from the ship for several feet, and ending abruptly in a field of empty black space full of red and yellow stars.
Masada turns back toward you and holds out his long black-clad hand. You put your fingers in his with no hesitation, trusting him completely.
Gently holding your hand, he leads you through the rounded doorway and out onto the concrete platform. As you look around, you realize that you’re standing on one of the enormous floating blocks that you saw from the spaceship. More large square platforms are floating all around you—adjacent to yours, towering far above, and cascading down below you. The air is warm and heavy with the scent of jasmine, wafting up from dozens of potted plants blooming with little pink and white flowers. These and many small potted olive trees are scattered all around the platform. And in the sky overhead, set against the backdrop of drifting stars, hundreds of colorful fish are swimming through the air like water. Past the last of the potted plants, the platform falls abruptly away. That sharp drop would have made you nervous, except for the intuition that if you stepped over the edge, you would simply start floating with the fishes.
It’s a strange and beautiful place, calm and quiet, and empty of other people. Masada leads you along the platform to another dark doorway, which turns out to be a kind of elevator. It takes you to another platform, up and to the left. With your hand in his, gently guiding you along behind his tall thin frame, you ride a series of these elevators, moving along from platform to platform, each much the same as the last. The monotonous yellowish stone supports the endless tiered garden of fragrant potted plants, with the beautiful fish drifting by overhead. Sometimes you see pieces of graffiti scrawled by unknown artists onto the sides of the stones. Once, you pass a doorway that has been hastily boarded over.
Eventually you reach a spot where a red vending machine and a little slatted bench sit unexpectedly among the potted plants and trees. You sit down on the little bench while Masada goes to the vending machine. He reaches into the hip pocket of his black bodysuit and pulls out a large golden coin. He puts it into the slot in the vending machine, and with a clunk, the machine dispenses a small green can. He hands the can to you and you take it as he sits beside you on the bench. The pull tab makes a fizzing hiss as you open it up. You take a sip and discover that it’s watermelon soda, cold and sweet.
Masada is a tall, still presence beside you on the bench. His long fingers are resting on his knees, and his posture is still and relaxed as he gazes off into the starry distance, his eyes lazily following the gently floating fish. You feel utterly at peace, sitting there beside him in the warm, jasmine-scented air. You take another sip of your cool, fizzy drink, and then you let your head fall to the side to rest against Masada’s upper arm. You can feel his nervous surprise, but he keeps utterly still, careful not to disturb you. You wonder what he thinks of you, this strange little passenger interrupting his solitary, spacefaring life. He must like you well enough to show you this beautiful place, to take care of you with little things like this drink, to let you sleep in his bed back on board the ship.
You leave the way you came: from platform to platform, through the series of twisting elevators, until you reach another doorway, identical to the rest, but through this one you can see the softly lit interior of the spaceship. You climb on through, and Masada guides you across the bridge with his large hand on your back, back to the bedroom with the big soft nest of a bed. Is it time for bed already? You do feel pretty sleepy. The cycle of days and nights has lost its meaning out here. Masada’s deft hands tuck you gently and neatly into the bed, like he wants you there, like it’s really okay for you to take up this precious bit of space.
He walks back out onto the bridge, and the bedroom lights dim behind him. You hear him adjusting the synthesizer so that the keys produce long, hazy thrums, as warm and drifting as the fish-filled air of the strange little world he took you to. You fall asleep and dream about floating along with them.