Bright, pale blue light dimmed over M-360’s head as she sat in a steel pew of the church. Around her, everyone else in her neighborhood sat in wait for the sermon.
K-111 stepped up to the lectern and greeted his guests. “Hello, my flock. Today, I wish to talk about how we came to be.” He pulled the microphone from the gooseneck holder attached to the lectern and stepped down from the half-circle dais, toward the audience. Behind him, three massive stained glass windows depicted the history of the Nadaist faith.
He pointed to the one on the left, the image of a blue circle planet surrounded by lines. In the center of it was a patch of green land roughly the shape of a triangle.
“Long ago, we used to live in great despair. People argued about everything from politics to words.” He pointed to the image in the center, an assortment of dark shadows congregating under a red sky. “From this, we formed our faith, the Nadaists, to combat those who cared too much.” He pointed to the image on the left of a jaguar among the stars. “We went in search of Lord Otorongo, so we may feed him that which may be of too much significance.”
M-360 held up a flattened palm like the rest of the audience, as if reaching out for silence.
K-111 held up a flattened palm to the audience. With his gesture, the designs of the stained-glass windows faded from the display screens, showing the starscape outside the ship.
“We are coming upon the annual feeding of Otorongo, my fellow Nadaists,” continued K-111. “We must vote on who or what is of greatest value to us in order to make a proper sacrifice. That is your goal for today. Think about what you hold most dear so you’ll be ready to submit it to me tomorrow.”
After the sermon ended, the congregation in attendance walked out to the corridor of the spaceship and down to the cafeteria for lunch. The hologram behind the counter pretended to ladle something out of a silver tray and plop it into M-360’s bowl. Nutrient-filled gruel shot out of the dispenser a moment later in a sputter, creating a small, gray mountain in the center of the metal bowl.
M-360 walked off to her favorite seat in the cafeteria near the faded image on the wall worn by time, a painting of a red rectangle interrupted by a white vertical column inside of which was a badge containing an animal, a tree, and some indiscernible golden item. Though most of the paint from the image had faded over time, she preferred sitting next to it rather than a dull section of wall.
Across the table from her sat her neighbor, M-359. She and M-359 had been born minutes apart and had lived next to each other ever since.
“K-111 gave us a difficult assignment, it would seem,” said M-359.
“He sure did,” M-360 responded. The assignment happened every year, but it was never any easier. In the past, she watched neighbors and parish members as they renounced their prized possessions, watched as they raised their hands with joy at feeding Otorongo, and watched as they returned to their quarters in a glum silence. It made one not want to hold any item dear, but then she would have nothing with which to feed their Lord. She stirred the gray gruel around her bowl, wondering what sort of things people used to eat on earth. Sometimes, when the gruel was less thick, she would imagine flavorful water with plants. Today, the gruel was thick. She flattened it into a flat pad and tried rolling it into a cylinder as if it were something other than what it was. Physics took over, and the gruel crumbled under her firm spoon as she tried to pry the pad from the bottom of the bowl. M-360 looked up at her lifelong neighbor and thought she saw the hint of a smile.
“Can you think of anything worth sacrificing?”
A universe of ephemeral thoughts spiraled in M-360’s brain. The edges of ideas floated on the edge of her lips and passed into shadow before she could put word to any of them. She looked up at the fading image—of what she was never truly sure—and couldn’t determine if the scraped paint or the wall itself would be ejected into space for Lord Otorongo to feast upon.
M-360 turned her attention to M-359. She held a secret, shamefully soft affection for her neighbor, and feared that M-359 might sense it in her and feel nothing or, even worse, return it. As such, she tried to refrain from outward affection. After much thinking, she finally answered, “I don’t know. Can you think of anything?”
M-359’s eyes looked as if she could see miles ahead of her while she thought. She took a drink of her water. After a few moments of silence, her flat lips parted, and she said, “I can’t either. It gets harder each year to find something worthy to feed Otorongo.”
M-360 used her spoon to reform her gruel into a mound in the center of her bowl. The remainder of the meal was held in a warm, familiar silence. M-360 took her cup of water back to her quarters, making sure to take a long, shallow draw from it.
Her door swished shut behind her, enclosing her in her small, personal quarters. As far as she knew, everyone on the ship had the same living space—gun metal walls encased a twin-sized mattress covered in thin sheets across from a desk beneath a mirror next to a thin, metal locker. M-360 placed her cup on the desk and looked at her reflection.
“M-360,” she said to herself. She watched her lips move as she said it, but nothing about the name sounded or looked right. “Melody,” she said as if it were a question. That name didn’t feel right either. “Marienne.” Despite her desire for a name without a number, she couldn’t figure one that pleased her.
She put a hold on the trying names for the day and opened her locker. Inside of it were three copies of the same outfit she wore every day, the same outfit that everyone else had. She slid the gray robes over to see what she hid from the rest of the ship. At the bottom of her locker was a bowl she’d taken from the cafeteria, filled with leftover scraps of darkened gruel.
In the center of the mound of darkened gruel, a green leafy stalk emerged.
A few months earlier, M-360 had taken her dinner back to her quarters. The gruel had been thick and lumpy that day. She was in the process of muscling through it when something small and hard caught in her teeth. Her finger prodded at her teeth to pull the thing out. Even after adding water to the bowl, the meal wasn’t any more palatable. Disappointed, she’d left the meal at her desk and went to bed. The next morning, she noticed the ship’s maintenance bots spray water into the bowl. She let them continue to do so, and she began to notice something small and green emerging from the gruel. She didn’t know what exactly it was or what it even meant, but she knew she couldn’t sacrifice what she was so keen to understand.
Without a name for it, she took to referring to the stalk of leaves as her roommate.
Day passed into night and into day again—the timer on the spaceship’s interior lighting saw to that. M-360 woke up to the gentle sound of an emotionless voice telling her to wake. She hid the green, leafy wonder that was her roommate in her locker, put on a fresh robe and undergarments, and walked toward the church with an uneasy feeling. The feeling nagged at her before bed, but she only juggled names that she felt were interesting and inappropriate for her. Residents in her section of the ship filled in the remaining seats nearby her. M-359, her neighbor, sat next to her. M-360 tried not to smile at her.
K-111 mounted the half-circle dais in his typical slow manner. Audience chatter fell away as he held out an open palm. The audience responded in kind. He spread his arms wide, palms facing up, and began, “Hello, Neighborhood M. Please rise.”
The audience followed the direction; their robes created a flutter of noise.
K-111 continued, “Today marks the day we vote for the sacrifice for Lord Otorongo. Be sure to form a line and come up to the console.”
A funereal solemnity took over the room. Not one person wished to speak. Everyone listened for the taps of the screen on the console, hoping that they heard more or less than the six taps that might spell out their name. M-360 grew nervous. All she could think of was her leafy roommate, but she didn’t want anyone to know about it. That secret was hers and hers alone.
The person at the front of the line finished their response and left the church. An uncomfortable echo of feet shuffling bounced off the metallic walls. As M-360 neared the console on the altar, the nagging discomfort compounded with each passing step, each resonant echo. Answers seemed to spit out of people as they tapped the screen and rushed away. Don’t they realize they’re voting to rid their lives of something? M-360 wondered. This shouldn’t be so easy. How can they answer so quickly? How can they live without something they see every day?
She reached the height of her worry as she waited for M-359 to submit her response on the console in front of her. Her neighbor tapped at the screen and departed for a pew.
The echoes of her footsteps toward the console thundered in her ears. She swallowed hard at the green and black touchscreen keyboard. Sinister green light emanated from it.
Images flashed in her mind. The faded painting in the cafeteria. The gray gruel’s redundant flavor, or lack thereof. The green, leafy secret in her locker. No! Definitely not that. The image of M-359 flooded into her. She smiled at me, so we’re close, right? Their lunch played through her mind again, but the enigmatic smile she thought she saw on her neighbor’s face was replaced with emotionless thin lips and dull eyes. She thought of one of her three spare robes, but she needed those to hide the green mystery in her locker.
“Having difficulty, M-360,” asked K-111.
Without a word, she shook her head. She tapped the screen twelve times and scurried back to her seat next to M-359. Her breath tried to escape her. She turned to her neighbor and gave a gentle smile. Aww, she’s smiling back at me. That must mean she didn’t add my name to the vote. Unless that smile means she cares for me, and she did add my name. No, that can’t be a smile. Are her eyes wider than normal? Shit, I’m still smiling! I have to stop! M-360 cleared her throat and lied, “Dry mouth. I think I’m thirsty.”
The last few congregants in line submitted their prompts and took their seats. A silence took the room. M-360 had never felt the church to be colder than it was in that moment.
K-111 stood up before his audience, his arms wide, his palms facing upward, and said, “Very well, everyone. Go forth and be sure to prepare who or whatever it is that you wish to feed to our Lord in an effort to purge our lives of the meaningless battles we become entangled in.”
M-360 walked to the cafeteria in silence, calculating her actions of the day. Her neighbor walked next to her. The two did not speak. Nobody ever talked after voting, lest their public joy for something might spark someone’s affection toward them. Hardly anyone made eye contact during lunch as they hung their heads in sorrow or shame whilst eating another joyless meal.
After the silent meal, M-360 went to the ship’s library. Like the church, the library was a cavernous room made of gray walls. Recessed in its walls were empty shelves—for what, she didn’t know. Upon a long, metal table sat a bank of computers, storing texts upon texts ready for perusal. To take her mind off of the worry over the vote, she busied herself skimming through books for names that she might try on in the mirror later. Names of characters. Names of authors. Names of reviewers. She repeated them in her mind until they replaced the previously perseverating emotions.
The next morning, she woke not to the disembodied voice that usually roused her, but a knocking at her door. M-360 hid the bowl with her leafy, green roommate in the locker and answered it.
Before her stood a man in gray robes. M-360 couldn’t recall if she knew him.
“M-360,” the man in the hallway stated.
“Yes?”
“I am to escort you to see K-111.”
She followed the stranger through corridor after corridor of the expansive ship. Apart from the varying number of doors and types of intersections, each hallway looked similar. In all seventeen years of her life, she couldn’t recall a single instance of having been called to see K-111 outside of church. As far as she knew, he didn’t even eat in the cafeteria. To be called to see him independently has to be good, right? She wondered. Despite her positive outlook, a pit in her stomach expanded with each step.
The guide stopped outside of one door and knocked.
“Come in,” said K-111’s muffled voice through the door.
The door slid open, revealing a room unlike anything M-360 expected. Inside was not the cramped living quarters she expected, but a spacious room with a small, circular, sunken area of floor that separated the ornate desk from the entrance. M-360 walked to the edge of the sunken floor and noticed that, apart from two small sets of steps, black seating lined the edges of the area. To her left, decorations hung from the wall. To her right, a length of glass gave view to the star field outside the ship. At the back end of the room, K-111 sat in a large chair behind an ornate desk, both of which were colors that made the gray walls of the ship appear lifeless.
M-360 said, “This is quite a living space you have.”
K-111 turned away from the large window to face his guest. “Hmm? This? Oh, this is more of an office. It’s nothing special or important.” He gave a polite smile.
“You wanted to see me?” Her voice faltered. She had never seen K-111’s mouth curve in any direction—nobody had.
“Yes, I do. Please, have a seat in the conversation pit.” K-111 gestured to the sunken section of floor.
M-360 walked down the set of steps in front of her and sat on the open section to the right. Unlike the majority of the ship, the seats were not metallic, but were soft like a pillow. She felt her body sink into the black fabric. A sigh of comfort almost escaped her, but she held it back.
On the wall before her hung a length of vibrant fabric. A white stripe hung between two red stripes; an emblem in the shape of a shield sat in the middle of the fabric. M-360 recognized it as the design from the cafeteria. To the left of the fabric sat a black and white image of a man with a bushy mustache that made her feel small, with eyes that stared into nothing.
To the right of the fabric hung an image of gray stones formed into rows of buildings without roofs atop a lush green mass of ground. White clouds separated the buildings from the peaks that decorated the background, their gray and green forms reaching for a blue sky that was forever out of reach. Beneath the image were two printed words: Machu Picchu. Though none of them could recall it, the image was the first sacrifice of the Nadaists as they left behind their first home. M-360 thought the name would be perfect for the leafy stalk in her locker. The image was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, something that had been long lost. She wanted to live in it.
“Do you see anything you like?” K-111 interrupted her.
She hadn’t noticed the shuffling of his feet had stopped, nor that he sat down in the cushioned seat across from her. “Hmm? No, I think I have something in my eye.” She rubbed the inside of her eye to remove a fictional piece of rheum. When K-111’s face became less accusatory, M-360 focused on his white, fluffy eyebrows. “What is it you wished to see me about?”
K-111 drew in a sharp breath. “I wished to speak with you about the vote. Specifically, your vote.”
“Isn’t the voting anonymous?”
“It’s anonymous among your peers, yes.” An awkward silence hung between them for a moment before he continued. “Why exactly did you nominate the voting console?”
“Oh, it’s silly to say, but I didn’t have anything to submit.”
“And so you chose the voting console?”
“Well, it was right there in front of me.”
“And you didn’t think that could be a bad idea to destroy the impartial voting device that determines what we serve to our Lord?”
“That makes it seem pretty important, doesn’t it?”
K-111 reclined in his cushioned seat, contemplating the words that had escaped her. “So is oxygen, isn’t it? We can’t simply get rid of something that is so integral to how we operate, now can we?”
M-360 fumbled with what to say and chose to lie. “Well, I love Nadaism. I can’t get rid of my faith. I guess I was mistaken on how crucial the console was. Can I choose something else?”
A look of deference crossed K-111’s face as he gave a slight nod.
She looked at the decorations on the wall behind K-111 and pointed to the black and white photograph of the man with the bushy mustache. “Why not that image?”
“Nietzsche? You want to get rid of Friedrich Nietzsche?”
“If his portrait is hanging in your office, he must be significant, right?
“The father of Nihilism and, by extension, Nadaism? M-360, this is dissension.”
“Oh, no! Sorry. I didn’t know!”
“If I didn’t know any better, I would call you an apostate.”
“No, I don’t. I promise.” She looked around for a possible response before patting the cushion she sat on and said, “This seat. I really like how soft it feels, so it needs to go.”
K-111 pursed his lips and leaned forward. “There seems to be a lot of things you care about. It’s concerning to our way of life.”
At that moment, the door slid open. A man in a black robe walked in with his hands behind his back. “Sir, we have discovered something.”
K-111 stood and faced his new guests. “What is it?”
The man produced from behind him a bowl with a green, leafy stalk in the center of it. “It was hidden in her locker, sir. We’re not really sure what it is.”
K-111’s eyes went wide. His jaw went slack, and, for a brief moment, his eyes grew misty. He furrowed his eyebrows, turned his attention to M-360, and spoke through clenched teeth. “Well, what do you have to say about this?”
Words escaped her completely.
“Hmm,” K-111 responded with a sneer. His cold gaze never leaving M-360, he addressed the new guest. “L-147, make an announcement. We have our sacrifice.”
A pale, wrinkly hand pulled back the black curtain at the back of the church altar, revealing the airlock of the spaceship. Through the glass of the door, M-360 could see the church was packed.
K-111 spoke with more excitement than he ever had before. “Thank you for coming, my flock. Our neighbor, M-360, not only created something for us to feed Lord Otorongo, but she has also willingly chosen to be a living sacrifice alongside her creation.”
Even through the airlock door and the spacesuit M-360 had been forced into, the crowd’s excitement was palpable.
She watched as K-111’s slender arm fell upon the control panel next to the door. He stared out at her with a cruel smile. If he couldn’t be the only one who had the stalk, he would rather nobody had it to keep the status quo. The locks clicked behind her and the outer door whirred open.
Air hissed around her as it escaped into space. It gave a sharp tug on her shoulder, spinning her and the bowl with the green, leafy stalk she had only recently named Machu Picchu to face their oncoming demise.
The pull of the air fleeing the airlock, combined with the clumsiness of the space suit’s gloves, caused the bowl to lurch forward from her grasp. Frost formed all over the stalk, adding a white, crystalline outline to the green leaves. M-360 reached out for her roommate, Machu Picchu. The edge of her finger nudged the bowl, sending it tumbling forward.
In the vast blackness of space, two, distant blue stars acted as eyes above a haze of orange light surrounding the black hole that was Lord Otorongo’s throat. The light created a reflection in the spacesuit’s visor, allowing M-360 to see her own panicked face.
She breathed carefully in an attempt to match her energy with the sensation of gently drifting through space. Her heart continued to beat fast. A worried reflection stared back at M-360.
“Carmen,” she said. It felt like a stranger. “Fermina.” It felt hollow. “Jane.” It felt like a lie. She ran through all the names she had memorized, but none stuck.
In the distance, she saw Machu Picchu tumble through space and disappear through a wall of shadow. It had reached the event horizon. She knew her time was near. She, too, was close to the black hole and would follow the same fate as Machu Picchu.
Tears began to fill her eyes. “All my—all my—all my appellations and I can’t figure out who I—” Her words caught and she repeated the sounds that came out of her mouth until the name that formed matched the reflection in her visor. “Alma.” A smile spread across her face at the sound of it.
She closed her eyes as she floated into the event horizon.
Every muscle in her body clenched against the expected onslaught of pain. The back of her shut eyelids appeared red. After a few moments of painless drifting, she opened her eyes.
Light poured through the singularity, illuminating an assortment of beloved items before her—a pair of brown leather shoes, a fuzzy recreation of an animal small enough for a child to clutch, an image of a woman in a white dress next to a man in a black suit, her Machu Picchu. Not an ounce of fear existed in her anymore.
In this gently swirling array of once beloved objects she felt warm, cozy, safe. In the singularity, Alma, formerly M-360, counted herself as one with the vast collection of beautiful things and moments that matter.
F. Malanoche writes, under the cover of night, hoping to bring authentic and odd Latino stories into the world. He teaches English in the Midwest, has a wonderful wife, and a sweet vinyl collection. You can follow him on his Facebook page.
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