Overtones

I did not like Threnos. I’d been once before where I spent precisely three hours taking notes. That was enough. The planet was spectacular to be sure. It was a living ball of glass—a curious phenomenon, well worth studying—but plenty of others had taken up the task.

For one thing, Threnos was never quiet. Imagine standing in a windy forest with a hundred windchimes on every branch of every tree. That was the background din of the glass planet. “They communicate in song,” Vesper had said, but one would be hard pressed to find any definition classifying that obnoxious Threnic cacophony as any manner of “song.”

The landscape was also dull. Nothing but an endless plane. The planet was a perfect sphere—a ball of glass, molten in the middle and hard on the edge, making it effectively like walking on a white-hot sheet of ice. Threnic shards swam about below, darting around like fish. Occasionally, one would rise from the glass floor, taking an uncanny crystalline form that mimicked your own. It would open its mouth, and mellifluous tones would burble out. This delighted some. It annoyed me.

One of these Threnic manifestations greeted us once we popped in. They were an ancient species, predating most civilizations by several million years, though they’d never moved out of the Emergence stage. Even so, their memories were long, and they always recognized Vesper and me.

“Greetings, Nodes Tria and Dio,” it sang, the shard’s liquid body looking like a badly rendered version of a glass biped. “You have a friend.”

“This is Eira,” Vesper said, “She’s from Caligo and has yet to see much of the galaxy.”

“I have not heard of Caligo.”

“It’s not worth hearing about,” Eira noted. She had engaged her helmet as there was no atmosphere. My motes worked overtime to ensure there were no imperfections in the suit that might prove fatal should anything go awry. Otherwise, she seemed surprisingly calm, standing on a sheet of clear glass over a glowing white planet.

“What might I call this being from Caligo?”

“You can call me Eira. What should I call you?”

The shard sang out a series of tones.

“Pretty,” Eira said. “Can I call you Melody?”

The glass burbled a wave of polite laughter. “You are amusing, Eira. And you keep good company in the Array. Would you care to join us for the Sonorium? We are in the process of calling the fallen back to the planet.”

We’d been invited to a religious ceremony. A funeral dirge, and one that was known to last for several marks—sometimes even a full turn. I tried to say, “We wouldn’t want to impose.”

But Eira was in a defiant mood. She eyed me with a sly smirk that had become common. “I want to see the Sonorium.”

“We’re expected at Clara’s,” I noted.

“We don’t have to stay for long,” Eira said. “Come on, Hugo, what’s the point of my coming here if I don’t take in some Threnic culture?”

I spotted Vesper watching us from the sidelines, her own little smile telling me more than I wanted to know. There wasn’t a pair alive that my dyad didn’t want to play matchmaker to. I tried to ignore it and shrugged. “Fine.”

The Threnic summoned up three seats from the ground. They looked like glass pool loungers half-melded into the crystalline sea. This was Threnic transportation, yet another thing I didn’t care for. We sat in our glass seats and glided forward across the planet’s surface. However, with no landmarks or wind, it seemed as if we were sitting still. The only indication of movement was the changing coordinates on my internal display.

“Hey,” Eira said, leaning to the side of her glass donut. I assumed she was going to ask why we weren’t moving, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What’s the Array?”

I could see Vesper’s head perk up.

“The Array,” I said before Vesper could jump in, “Is us. Vesper and I. As well as a handful of others, like Clara.”

“Is it your species?”

“More or less.”

“Why is it called the Array?”

Vesper’s face was dripping with self-righteous scorn, her arms crossed as she waited for my answer. Under her watchful stare, I felt increasingly awkward sitting in the middle of nowhere on three seemingly unmoving chairs. Even the Thenic shard had disappeared, probably below us somewhere, humming showtunes to itself in the molten glass.

“Because an array defines a set number of things or, in our case, individuals,” I eventually said. “Honestly, any collection of beings could technically be called an array, but for us, it’s our official collective name.”

Eira’s eyes squinted at me curiously. I was certain she would have already tried to access additional data about the Array through her new display, though I very intentionally left that information out.

“It kind of makes you sound like robots,” she finally said. “I mean, I know half the galaxy is synthetic to some degree, but you both seem different, like not connected to any one place. Are you some kind of robots escaped from a secret lab?”

Vesper’s running commentary was not helping.

“Not quite, but you are correct in that we were designed by something long-gone and forgotten,” I replied. “Though our precise makeup is hardly important. In the end, we’re all just different machines running some manner of self, be it mechanical, organic, or quantum.”

“Or vibrating silica,” Vesper noted, pointing to the oncoming Threnic temple. She was saving me in her own way, having allowed the uncomfortable conversation to linger long enough.

As we drew close though, my irritation only grew. I’d read about Threnic ceremonies before. I’d even fast-forwarded through a few videos. The temporary temples were erected from the planet’s surface: large crystal spires serving as tuning forks to usher wayward spirits home. Around the temple, pilgrims from across the galaxy gathered, names of lost loved ones etched on sheets of crystal polymer.

In the beginning, I found it moderately grim and wholly uninteresting. Eventually, I came to actively despise the practice, as it sparked an interest in “containing the dead” within vibrating containers. There was nothing quite as obnoxious as time, money, and resources being thrown away in the pursuit of the impossible.

Once we arrived, I watched Eira curiously. Would she fall prey to the same delusions of capturing the incapturable? How would her own macabre curiosity play into the practice? According to her history, she had no affiliation with any Caligan church, but that said nothing to her own private beliefs.

Conversing this close to the ceremony was pointless. Even standing upright was a challenge. The sound was so great it threatened to shake every cell into dust. An unprotected biological organism would not survive.

For Eira’s part, she stood quietly and watched. I checked on her visor’s feed, and it was empty for the most part. She was not looking anything up or distracting herself with chats or feeds. She was just watching. Quietly.

Curious.

I was incapable of such a thing. My mind was too full. I knew too much. I couldn’t look at a stone without a hundred data points flooding in. In fact, the data from the ceremony was already too much. Every note, decibel, and vibrating particle screamed out, flagging my feed as something notable. Something to be scrutinized, examined, and documented. A barrage of information danced about my brain, none of it useful. It was existential static, meant to be endured for hours on end. And for what purpose? None at all.

I put my external systems into standby and started running complex simulations in my mind. It was the only thing I could do to stay sane. Though I did, at the very least, leave one channel open to Eira’s feed. Just in case.