Panterra: The Machinist

1: Spectrums of Light

Arlington sleeps restlessly. His consciousness struggles just below the surface. It disturbs the group, and Austin grumbles every time Arlington moves. He's done this before, and I'll remind him then that he's not alone anymore. He'll take a blanket outside then to sleep under a tree.

The muffled hiss of steam releasing from the engines of a fishing trawler startles him.

>> Jacob's heading our early, I tell him through his audial implant. I can tell by the unique timber of the engine sound.

Arlington rises slowly, and I enhance his vision, just slightly, so he can see the bodies of the others. He steps carefully over Dallas's large bulk and moves silently toward the doorway, grabbing his pants and jacket off the wall hook. The others shift and fill in the empty place where we had lain.

He dresses quickly by the light through the doorway and then brushes the thin curtain aside. He steps out barefoot into the bright light of a full moon and the chill of early spring. I observe the village through infrared but feed him only his normal visible light. He likes to stare at the moon.

He searches the gathering place at the center of the village for any sign of life. The central fire pit glows faintly yellow for me. The rest of the village is various shades of bluish purple. In infrared the moon disappears and takes the stars with it. No heat, no signature. Across the dark cold water a receding bright-red light reveals the hot smoke from Jacob's boat, leaving a trail of golden orange behind it in the still air, fading into yellow, then green until it cools and is lost in the blue. That's what I like. The shifting color of the cooling smoke is like a watercolor dissolving in the rain.

I shift my view back to visible light only when he looks away from the boat. He glances at the moon and stares across the bay again. The moonlight dances on the spreading wake of Jacob's transit across the mirror-flat water, pointing at the black shadow of his boat like an arrow.

Arlington wants to follow. His passion is the sea. He loves the smell of it, the salt spray in his face, and the struggle of the natural forces of wood against wave.

He walks slowly down the length of the dock and sits on the edge, dangling our feet above the water.

"Any gators?" he whispers, looking down into darkness. I shift quickly through all spectrums of light, searching for the tell-tale sign of an alligator resting below the surface.

>> No.

"How long, Alex ... how long have we been here?"

He likes to speak out loud to me when he thinks we're alone. No one else knows I'm here, and even if they did they couldn't hear me. I live only in his head. We decided long ago that trying to explain that to the Teegans would be too difficult for them.

>> On this planet, or in this location? I ask.

> How long since we landed ... on this planet?

When he wants to be clear with me, he will often switch to internal communication.

I know the answer instantly but wait for the owner of the barely perceptible footsteps behind us to speak.

"You changed our way of life," Christi says in the language we taught her.

>> Three years, six months, fourteen days, eleven point seven hours.

He turns our head to look back at her. She stands in shadow, her slight figure discernible only by the moonlight on our sleeping hut behind her. An emerald shine reflects in her large eyes.