Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (2/6)

The Vanished

Caroline Barnard-Smith

Apr 04, 2025

A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀

New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.

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Tattie slid her hand onto the coarse surface of the hemo port and braced herself. Even though she expected the needle this time, she still flinched when it punched into the fat vein in her wrist. There was a numbing pressure, then uncomfortable release as the X5 began to suck out her nano-laced fluids.

“I WILL NOW ACCESS DATA ON DIGATH’S GENERATION SHIPS. PLEASE STAND BY.”

Tattie gritted her teeth inside the helmet, trying not to react and alarm Brax. The X5 had been right about the siphoning process not being painful, but it felt wrong somehow. An intense itch she couldn’t scratch that made her fidgety and restless.

“How long will this take?”

“I ESTIMATE IT WILL TAKE APPROXIMATELY 5.2 MINUTES TO AQUIRE THE AGREED AMOUNT OF HEMATOLOGIC FLUID. YOUR FILE IS LOADING NOW.”

LOADING....

She expected text to start scrolling in front of her, perhaps some pixellated holo-images. She was not prepared for a full-out-of-body experience. At first, Tattie was falling. Sinking through the operator’s throne, splicing through the floor plates, and spinning out into a void. She flailed her arms—inexplicably free of the control glove and the hemo port—and grasped at nothing. Solid ground met her kicking feet before she could summon a scream. She reeled, falling to her knees and pressing trembling palms against waxy floor tiles. Light filtered through scrunched-up eyelids. When Tattie opened them, she was brought to her feet by the sight of a ship so vast, she could see nothing beyond it. It loomed before a curved window, pewter grey sides studded with diamond-shaped portholes.

“What the bloody piss is this?” The hollow echo of her voice was like the lonely cry of a ghost.

“GENERATION SHIP NUMBER 18. THE LUMINARA.”

Tattie swayed where she stood, gripped the handrail running along the length of the viewing windows. She was standing in the circular outer corridor of a cavernous shipyard, the arching walls bowing beneath a ceiling inlaid with a glittering liquid metal that ran in geometric patterns above her head. Questions rose hot and fast, but were answered before she could voice them. Tattie knew the shipyard was orbiting Digath, many hundreds of years in her past. The knowledge sizzled across her brain like embers sparking from a blaze.

She turned her attention back to the gigantic ship, the Luminara, readying to depart for the outer edge of the galaxy. Tattie focused on one of the sharply edged portholes, her vision narrowing in to bridge the gulf between the shipyard and the vessel like high-precision binoculars. A man and a woman stood in a richly furnished room. They were arguing about where to place a brash, blood-petalled plant. A poinsettia. The woman favoured the bedside table; the man wanted more room for his collection of vintage paperback books.

The room rippled, overlaying Tattie’s vision with dirty static. When it cleared, she was on the solid ground of a planet, a weak sun slanting from the gaps torn in a thick bank of cloud. Another generation ship—Number 25, the Ascendant—the last to be built. It stood on what looked to be its end, a colossal column striking at the sky.

The people here were anxious. They rustled in their fine clothes, talking in low voices. Their lustrous hair blew in a fresh breeze—golden honey tones, glossy chestnuts, violet blacks. They were the final neo-humans to leave the planet, but their ship had failed. Digath did not have the resources required to repair it, they had mined the planet dry. They would be left behind while their ageless kin traversed the galaxy in a fleet of generation ships. Age, impossible and terrifying, would catch up with them. A sharp keening sprang up, carried on the rising wind to sweep through the verdant mountain passes.

Husks. A multitude of stone-faced, stiff-limbed workers directing drones, driving vehicles, working great swinging cranes. A wall constructed around the Ascendant. Then a building. The workers needed homes to live in. They built a town. A city. Then more people came, filling up its grimy corners, scuttling through its creeping shadows like beetles. The Ascendant lay forgotten in the hills, silent behind its clay brick prison.

Verna, returning to Digath to care for Aldia, her sister. Aldia was caught trying to steal the Ascendant’s keycodes from the N.E.X., was rewarded with a husk sentence. Husk tech doesn’t play well with a genetically-altered seven-hundred-year-old.

Aldia wanted to join the Vanished, her brothers and sisters in the stars, long light years away. Now she is dying. Her skin is like crumpled paper, her flesh peeling from yellow bones and sifting to dust. Verna is the only person in attendance at Aldria’s immolation ceremony. She does not cry. Her tear ducts have been synthetically sealed for two hundred years.

Verna will join the Vanished now. She will continue the work her sister started. She needs a way to break into the Noctarum and riffle through their rank secrets. She’s standing at the entrance to the Blue Bunker, ridiculous in her expensive coat and perfumed wig. A rat limps along a wall, a bulbous growth swinging from its underside. Verna watches it, her face impassive. She makes her way into the club.

Verna and the sagging rat disappeared, rolling up and away into a sky that fragmented at the edges. The sensation turned Tattie’s stomach over, made her insides twist with a seasick lurch. Then the pixelated face of the X5 morphed into view, hard, lurid green eyes regarding her like a scientist studying a dissected bug.

“YOUR PROBING OF MY DATA INCLUDED INFORMATION ABOUT A NEO-HUMANOID CALLED VERNA SHADE. AS VERNA SHADE WAS NEVER A PASSENGER ON ANY GENERATION SHIP, THIS REQUEST WAS BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF OUR AGREEMENT.”

Tattie closed her eyes inside the skull-helmet. She was lightheaded after being torn from the X5’s data-visions, and sweat was prickling at her temples. All she wanted to do was rip the close-fitting chrome bucket from her face.

“Do you need another payment? What do you want now, a stool sample?”

“THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. I WAS MERELY CURIOUS. OUR INTERACTION IS COMPLETE. PLEASE ENJOY THE REST OF YOUR DAY.”

The helmet pulled back on its clutch of cables, wrenching itself from Tattie’s head so forcefully, she thought it would rip her face from her skull. She breathed in deep, luxuriating in the gloriously stale air of the thrumming computer suite.

“Tattie, what happened? Are you okay?”

Tattie grasped Brax’s hands and let him pull her from the operator’s throne. Her legs almost failed, but she summoned a trickle of strength, managing to avoid an embarrassing collapse into his arms.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just down nine hundred milliliters of blood and at least double that in sweat.”

Ginx approached like a cautious cat. “What was it like?”

“Like talking to a grumpy old man.” Tattie glanced at the X5. It seemed to be sleeping, the frenetic beep of lights and the whir of knotted mechanics fallen silent. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” she admitted.

Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (2/6)

The Vanished

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