Chapter 1 - The SV-Eclipse (1)

Bored in deep space - Novelisation -Chapter 1 - The SV-Eclipse (1)
Screams. That’s what woke me. 
Not my own. The sound was metallic, shrill and piercing -- a chorus of electronic shrieks that tore through the fabric of whatever peaceful dream I’d been having. My eyes flickered open to a world of violent motion. The universe was shaking itself apart… well, perhaps that was a little hyperbolic, but I seemed to have been trapped in the midst of an earthquake with high-pitched sirens blaring into my ears. 
My body was strapped down, taut leather harnesses digging into my shoulders and waists, pinning me onto a chair that rattled with the fury of a trapped animal. I was bolted to the floor of a nightmare. With every violent shudder, a percussive symphony of rattling metal and shrieking alarms played out around me. A stack of metallic crates shifted with a groan of stressed metal before toppling over, spelling their contents -- of which I couldn't make out what, only a flurry of shadows in the dim, strobing red lights. A web of thick black cables dangled from the ceilings like snapped whips, one lashing against a console inches from my head. The entire space was a coffin filled with incomprehensible junk, and I was buried alive in it.
My apartment. The glow of the monitor. I was just…
My brain offered disjointed images, blurry fragments of a memory that felt a lifetime ago. The gentle hum of my PC. The familiar star charts of the game ‘Stellar Hegemony’. The ache behind my eyes from staring at a screen for too long. I’d finally dragged myself to bed. The cheap comforter, a familiar weight, the city’s distant drones, a lullaby I was initially irritated by but gradually knew by heart. This… this was the antithesis of that memory. Whatever this was, it was chaos. 
The lurching threw me sideways against the harness. Pain flared at the side of my neck. Panic, cold and sharp, finally pierced through my confusion. My hands flew to the buckles at my chest, fumbling, the tremors making my fingers clumsy and useless. 
What was happening?
Where was I? 
Was this an earthquake? Bombing? 
My mind grasped at familiar, terrestrial horrors, but none of them fit. The air tastes sterile and recycled, like at a ward of a hospital. The quality of the red light that washed over everything felt… artificial 
My nails managed to pry open the first latch. Then the second, eventually, successfully in buckling the harness that trapped me on the strangely comfortable leather chair. The space around me continued to tremor angrily, though less than before. Unused to my own feet I tumbled over just as the red lights coincidentally stopped strobing and the lights -- bright and blinding -- managed to come back on. My knees hit against the metallic floorboards -- I definitely couldn’t gaslight myself into believing I was still in my tiny, carpeted city apartment anymore.


The trembling subsided and for a moment it felt as though all the air in this space was sucked out for a fraction of a second. My ears rang with that familiar high-pitched ringing as it adjusted. 
Just then, someone spoke. A woman’s voice, but stripped of all human warmth. Every syllable was perfectly enunciated, every tone pitch-controlled into a state of placid serenity that was, in its own way, more terrifying than the chaos. 
“Autopilot re-engaged.” The words were an alien presence in the pandemonium. The previous shaking had softened to a deep, resonant groan, like some massive beast sighing in its sleep.
“G-Forces stabilising. Structural integrity at 84%. Compartment seven has suffered a full depressurisation event. Life support to the sector has been terminated.” 
My frantic struggling ceased, I froze in the midst of pushing myself back up. I knelt on the hard, metallic flooring of this strange space. My ears perked. The voice was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, a ghost in the machine. I scanned the room, my eyes wide, searching for a speaker, a face, anything…
“Attention,” the synthesised woman continued. Her tone devoid of any alarm. Completely robotic, flat, and emotionless, worse than the newest iterations of Siri. “This is the ship’s Artificial Intelligence, designated ‘Calliope’. Welcome back, Captain,” it said, sounding utterly calm.
Captain? Calliope?
“This alert is a non-critical advisory. Collision avoidance protocols are active, though sub-optimal given current gravitational distortions.”
The ship. The AI. The pieces, alien and nonsensical as they were, began to form a bizarre, unrealistic picture in my mind. This was real. This was not a dream. I was on a spaceship, being addressed as its captain. Me -- a man from the 21st century, a middle manager for a small ship yard -- being called ‘Captain’.
“Status update,” the synthetic woman continued, her voice the eye of the hurricane raging around me. “Autopilot has been forcefully disengaged by external command. This issue has been rectified.” A pause, perfectly timed for dramatic effect that no modern computer should be capable of. “The external Fold Drive has also been engaged by external override. Course destination: this is a currently unmapped region of space.”
Cutting through my contemplation as I quietly listened into the announcement. Something heavy -- a locker, maybe -- rolled from its wall mounts and crashed to the floor with a deafening clang. I flinched hard, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. “Shit…” I cursed. Unmapped space. Fold drive. The phrases from a thousand hours of gaming crashed into the reality of my situation, and the collision was a brutal slap to my face. A cold water dowsed on my head; sweat started to slide down the side of my face. 
“Current Location: unknown. Long-range stellar cartography suggests we are on the fringes of the Milky Way’s Sagittarius Arm,” the AI stated as if reading a shopping list. “Distance from nearest settled space: approximately eight thousand light-years. We have been deposited in what is classified as ‘Dark Space’.” 
Dark Space.
Even I, a layman from the 21st century knew what that meant. The void. The places between places. Empty, starless, endless black. My blood ran cold. This wasn’t just a kidnapping; this was an execution. I wasn't just on a ship, I was on a ship that had been thrown into the cosmic equivalent to the middle of the ocean. And the only other occupant was a calm, detached robotic woman who just told me we were all alone, a long, long way from home. My home. Earth. The one with take-out boxes and the soul-crushing corporate job that, a few moments ago, was the worst thing I could imagine. Now… that all sounded like heaven. 
“Captain?” the AI prompted, a hint of inquiry but no emotion in her manufactured tone. “Your next command is required.”
Captain. The word hit me. It was a title of immense responsibility and zero reality. “My next command…” the word sat on my tongue. I didn’t have a next command. My mental Rolodex, filled with responses for angry clients, confused interns, and telemarketers, had no entry for ‘your next command is required’ from a spaceship AI.
What was I supposed to say to that? Make it all go away? Beam me back to my bed? For a dizzying second, I felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up from my chest. Captain. Right…
Panic was a luxury I couldn’t effort right now. A frantic surge of adrenaline still hammered through my veins, but beneath it, a cold analytical calm was starting to form. It was a survival mechanism honed by years of dealing with workplace bullshit and impending deadlines. First step: assess the situation. I forced myself to my feet, legs still shaky, and scanned my immediate surroundings. 
Okay…
I was on the bridge. That much was obvious. My god, what a bridge. It was like someone had ripped the cover art right off a vintage Asimov or Clarke paperback from the nineties and built it to life. Everything was all harsh angles and gunmetal grey, all straight lines and brutalist functionality. The entire space felt less like a starship and moved like a mobile server room from a decade that probably hadn’t even happened yet. In front of me, the main command console was a sprawling monolith of physical buttons, switches, and blinking lights in a dozen colours. A sea of tactile, chunky interfaces that begged to be mashed with a firm, decisive thumb.
Yet above this homage to the analogue, there was something genuinely futuristic. A holographic shimmer hung in the air, just above the console, projecting the ghostly, beautiful spiral of the Milky Way against the dark wall. It was the single point of ethereal beauty in this metallic tomb with no personality other than ‘90s Sci-fi movies. But even this was mocking me; hovering over the projection, stark red text pulsed with the same steady rhythm as my own terrified heartbeat:
‘NO LOCATION DATA’. 
My eyes drifted from the hologram to the screens embedded in the console itself. They were monstrosities, bulky and deep-set, fixed into the metal chassis like a permanent fixture. They had the unmistakable aesthetic of ancient CRT televisions, but their images were crisp and clear, displaying streams of data I couldn’t even begin to decipher -- system schematics, power readouts, damage reports. They were retro, but undeniably more advanced than any tech I’d ever seen. A weird paradoxical marriage of old-school form and future-facing function. 
I took a shaky step forward, the crunch or the broken plastic and debris under my shoe echoing in the now-still and quiet bridge. The only noise a low-frequency hum of the machine and little beeps from the console. It even sounded retro. Cables like thick black pythons lay coiled everywhere. Some ripped from their housing, spitting faint, harmless sparks. A floor panel had been warped upwards by the tremors, and a support strut was visibly dented. The whole place had the rumpled, hastily-repaired look of something built by a committee and maintained on a shoestring budget. 
Of course, it made perfect sense too in my cynical little mind. Why would anything be sleek and efficient? This ship… it obviously wasn’t the new model, and it definitely wasn’t something built with looks in mind. Like… it resembled a garbage truck more than the bridge of the Enterprise. If that were the case, then it all made a perverse kind of sense. I’d spent enough years watching the company I worked for penny-pinch on everything that wasn’t directly billable to a client. Why would the future be any different? Why would a corporation shell out for elegant design and ergonomic comfort for a crew on a simple cargo hauler? This was capitalism’s endgame, a hundred thousand light-years from home: functionality over form. Build it out of iron and whatever’s cheap, hold it together with duct tape and desperate prayers. As long as it moves from Point A to Point B, it’s working as intended. No expense spared on aesthetics, no frills for the meat-sack running the show. 
I sighed. The AI was still waiting. The silence was a heavy blanket, pressing down on me. My cynicism, however warped, had been an anchor -- my coping mechanism. It brought a tiny sliver of familiarity to this absolute insanity. My world might have been replaced with a retro sci-fi, corporate capitalist nightmare, but some things, it seemed, remained depressingly constant. I took another deep breath of the sterile, recycled air and turned my gaze back onto the console. My console. 
“Okay… Calliope, was it? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Got it.” I sigh again. “What about the crew? What happened to the other occupants on board?” I ask.


The AI’s synthesised serenity returned almost instantly, a stark, unnerving counterpoint to the maelstrom in my own head. “Query processed… The SV-Eclipse is registered under a single-crew manifest. Captain Noah Lee is the only registered and biological lifeform currently aboard. No other living occupants are detected on the ship.” 
My blood turned into ice. “A… single-crew manifest?” I repeated. “This whole ship is… just me?” my eyebrows furrowed as I thought about it. No, before even that. Noah Lee, that was my name. Of course it was, but a captain? The memory of signing a dotted line for anything other than my yearly performance review was conspicuously absent. My fate had apparently been rewritten by someone with a very poor sense of humour. Was it merely a coincidence that this body shared my appearance and had my name? I shook my head; too convenient to be an accident. A derisive, humourless scoff escaped my lips, a hollow sound that got lost in the vast, humming space leviathan that was the ship. Whatever this bizarre situation was, in the end it was just myself and a talking space appliance named after a Greek muse, stranded in the middle of literal nowhere space. “Just… great,” I muttered sarcastically, running a hand through my hair, my gloved fingers coming away damp with cold sweat. “This is just perfect. This is what I get for trying to finish that last turn of Stellar Hegemony before bed.” 
A wave of existential nausea washed over me. There was an irrational part of my monkey brain that wanted to rage, to scream, to kick a console until my foot broke. It was just a fleeting tick at the unevolved part of my mind trying desperately to be unproductive; the anger was hollow, a frantic thrashing in a vast, dark ocean -- useless. Something had to be done. Panic wasn’t a survival strategy, it was a waste of energy and resources. Resources, by the way, that I might not even have. My brain, conditioned by a decade of corporate troubleshooting that was always about finding the most efficient workaround, kicked in. Bypass the ‘impossible’ and find the ‘next-best’.
I leaned against the cold metal of the console. “Whatever. It’s fine. Okay, Calliope.” I took a steadying breath, the sterile air doing little to calm the frantic beating of my heart. “Forget the how, who, or what. Can we get out of here? Can we… jump? Warp? Anything? Get back to civilised space. The nearest inhabited planet.” 
“Your query has been interpreted as ‘Can the Fold Drive be utilised for a return transit?’” the AI responded, her tone as level as a carpenters’ spirit. “Affirmative and negative. The Fold Drive sustained critical damage during the unsanctioned Fold Jump. Emergency protocols rerouted all available power to the life support and basic navigation to prevent structural collapse.” 
It was a bitter pill, served with all the warmth of a tax audit. “Damaged…” I repeated, my tone flat but not defeated. Not yet. “So, we’re stuck.”
“The repair of the Fold Drive will require an estimated forty-five standard cycles to complete, contingent on the availability of necessary raw materials,” Calliope reported. 
“Forty-five… cycles? I’m assuming that means days? Earth days?” 
“Affirmative.” 
“Of course it is.” I nodded. “Is there… is there anything we can do?” the question came out a bit desperate, barely a whisper. “Anything at all?” 
A new stream of data flooded one of the CRT-style screens next to my hand, a torrent of coordinates and telemetry I couldn’t even begin to understand. “Options are limited,” Calliope confirmed, then paused. A flicker of what almost sounded like… hesitancy? A digital stutter? Was she more than just a machine given voice? “However, a local anomaly has been detected. Short-range deep space scans have resolved one solid planetary body within this star system. A terrestrial planet, Class-M classification. Atmospheric analysis indicates the presence of a nitrogen-oxygen mix… breathable.” 
The words hit me like a physical push to the back. I stared at the screen, at the alien text swimming before my eyes that strangely started to look like the english alphabet the more I stared at it. It was… a mystery, but I had no time for that right now. There was a planet. Out here, in the middle of the galactic equivalent of a desert, there was an oasis. A speck of dirt in the endless night that might not kill me the second I stepped off this ship. My heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm, but with a hint of hope. It was a terrifying offer, a gamble on a world that could hold anything from salvation to a swift and ugly death. Or perhaps even worse. Yet to consider the alternative… the alternative was to sit here for forty-five days, slowly going mad in this retro-futuristic tomb, waiting for a repair that might never even happen. 
“Show me,” I said, my voice steady, my decision made. The main holographic display of the Milky Way shifted. The beautiful, intimidating spiral of the Milky way was dissolved, replaced by a simple, glowing wireframe diagram of a single star system. A small, yellow-white star burned at its centre, and orbiting it, a single lonely blue-green marble. “Does it have a name?” 
“Negative. This region of space has not been charted.” 
“Yeah, well, it needs one,” I retorted, almost as if I was admonishing the AI. I thought back, back to the very start… back to the stupid, inconsequential thing that got me into this mess… allegedly. “Let’s call it… Turn Seven.”