'23kpc' Chapter 28: Bringing Bad News to Tyler's Brother

...in a surprising setting

[Photo: ‘Rijksmuseum,’ by photographer Frans de Wit on Flickr. This is just about a perfect illustration for this chapter (and I didn’t have to resort to cheap AI tricks to find it!). There’s no reason why a gallery within a Rijksmuseum in space couldn’t look exactly like this, after all, given sufficiently ultra-high-def wall panels and ceiling, and a handful of Twenty-Nth-Century super-realistic hologram projectors for the sculpture…]

What we learned last week

First, a reminder: if you want to skip the plot update, but need your memory jogged along the lines of “Who is [insert character name here]?” or “What does ‘[insert obviously made-up term here] mean?” — that sort of thing — you can always take your question over to the ‘23kpc Reader’s Guide’ at Ye Olde Blog. Likewise, remember that all chapters so far can be found in the archive, here (most recent ones at the top). Finally, you can skip directly down to Chapter 28, right here, so you don’t have to read any of this section (ha).

Guy, Missy, and Matty learned from Orono “Orrie” Jones about Tyler Morton’s side project: something he called a Muybridge drive, to somehow instantly move an object — even up to spaceship size? — from Point A to Point B without having to burn fuel (i.e., fuel mined from the ship’s own interior). He’d demonstrated this to Orrie a couple years before his disappearance (and subsequent reappearance, dead, deep within the ship’s mine), using a prototype of his own making to send Orrie’s Pooch Lolly across the room and back to “fetch” a screwdriver. While this was both shocking and exciting information, the details were over the head of even Orrie himself, let alone Guy and Missy, and Matty didn’t understand it, either.

So Guy tried to return bring them all back to the context of their original investigation: had Tyler really wanted to work on this project the night Jilly Eckles declined to marry him? And why would he have needed an EVA suit to work on it — why had Orrie agreed to sign one out for him? Orrie’s reply: Tyler had decided it was time for a human trial.

Guy’s narration now resumes…

Chapter 28: The Consolations of Art

A couple days later, I’m no closer to getting my mind around the details of Tyler Morton’s side project than I’d been while sitting in the room with Missy, Matty, Orono Jones, two Pooches, a suspiciously tarted-up v-com¹, and a smart wall full of drawings, arrows, and stick-figure running horses². (It looked like a prehistoric physicist’s cave painting.)

And I’d also chosen to defer my questions about the hiccuping wikon³. If I’d taken time to ask them, let alone understand their answers, we’d probably still be sitting there on E deck; in the meanwhile, the ship’s administration would’ve had time to send out search parties for their suspiciously missing purser and chief engineer; Durwood and Lolly both would be in desperate need of recharging; and with Missy and I otherwise occupied for so long, every bartender on the ship would be wondering why his or her life seemed so suddenly empty, so meaningless. I trust my sweet wife would not simply have left me, but her eyes would be shooting plenty of impatient daggers my way.

But I now understand at least one thing which I didn’t before putting a foot in that E-deck room. Now I understand — sort of — what happened to Tyler Morton, and now (maybe) I can bring some closure, if not comfort, to his brother Aloysius.