Intrepid Trepidation

The polar sun glares like a spark of afterlife. It is disarming, encompassing, and so very cleansing of the stain of humanity. In a place so hostile to life, the barren plain of ice and snow Seb looked over felt like it might extend forever. The horizon gave way to the white of the evening air, and the threshold between was as vague as the feeling now flowing through his skin.

Seb had legs slung over the edge of a precipice. The cheese grater of rocky ice beneath it dulled all thoughts, as did the amber liquid increasingly thinning his blood. For the bottle he held clumsily against his thigh was drained of its ration, thin black lines scrawled in a frozen hand down its side where the contents decreased after each use.

Seb gazed inwardly as much as into the illuminated night. At this time of year the sun barely dipped from view in its twenty-four hour cycle. It wavered in its circle around the sky only briefly below the distant ridge, seemingly moments later arising again to herald forth a new day.

Seb’s lips were forming their curse before his mind actively told them to. The choice of expletives rolled together into a fumbled slur which might have become the motto below his coat of arms were he ever to design one. A fistful of snow and an empty bottle probably wouldn’t draw much respect as a family crest anyway. If such a symbolic gesture were to ever represent his now reduced demeanour then he way as well carve it upon the inside wall of the hut behind him. A coat of arms from an arming coat. That was where it now belonged, on the fringe of knowing, the margins of a world all but forgotten, or very much deleted.

Seb passed his eyes over the features of this continent he had so many times before. There was history here. Sporadic footsteps by explorers and pioneers, adventurers and poets of both land and life. So many nations claimed territory here. A vast island buried beneath its white coat, home to birds, some flightless, some fierce. Surrounded by a sea so fertile that behemoths of marine mammals traversed half the globe to feast here in the summer. For Seb, this was a post of isolation. Self-imposed. A contract here could last an age if spent well. But being alone was the attraction. Being somewhere so ill-suited to existence. He could feel the crystals forming stalactites under his nostrils. The mucus in his throat was building, abated only by the slosh of spirits dragged across it.

There were boxes of instruments unpacked and atop posts behind him, a balloon in the sky above, abundant sensors reading numbers from the air that fed datasets so lengthy they were remarked upon by an occasional six word sentence, always including the classifier of ‘trend’. Soon he would rise and start the odious task of packing them back up and stacking on the shelves inside again. Each label weatherworn, each plastic tub powdery in the corners from constant UV exposure. Between the occasional orange flake and the synthetic orange coat he wore there was no other colour here.

A coat of arms. That was a unique thought. It was something new in the otherwise repetitive nature of what funnelled through his mind. A repetitive nature that was habit, routine, comfort. Distracting.

A coat of arms for a family so small as his own. A coat of arms to be carried by one alone. An armour so outdated and arbitrary that little good would it do for anything. Perhaps only for his own claim of territory here. A principality of sorts surrounding his hut and the radius of instruments he set. There was no point in walking any further. Perhaps far beneath him might exist resources or deposits valued by some enterprising devil destined to further deteriorate the world around them. It was the trade and use of such resources that required the use of Seb’s allocated instruments and the continued monitoring of the air above him.

Seb drained the last mouthful of spirit in his bottle. It was greedy to have done so, but there was little joy to be found here, and breaking his own rules was the only sense of rebellion tolerable. Far below him he saw a whip of wind pick up some dust, and he knew that it would steadily build. WIth a sigh he stretched his curved back, a posture formed in absence of so much self-worth.

Seb clawed the ground to rise under the girth of his cumbersome coat. He wasn’t due to check in for a week yet. No one knew what he did or when he did it. It was freedom in what some might call a prison.

At his foot the bottle found itself between toes and void. All it would take was but a small nudge to send it falling below, to shard and splinter before slowly being ground back to base elements in the churn of ice and melt of a hundred years.

The air was soft upon his face. Seb felt his foot acting for him. But it was unconvinced of its task. Some reluctance existed that was maybe left over from some social norm. A social norm meant for social spaces. But here maybe it was to not burden his landscape, to not infringe upon the emptiness it represented. His own careless mark upon it would be unseen, but not unknown to him. A secret, a burden, another poor choice in what stacked upon him already.

Before his toes could commit there was a whir from above. A whir was something that never occurred here. There was nothing that could whir.

A small machine descended precisely, a mathematical uniformity to it that had it lowering in a single dimension with intended purpose.

Seb watched the drone with a stirring agitation. This was new. In all his time here, this was new.

About a foot from the ground the drone hovered, a small claw beneath it uncurling mechanical digits around the neck of glass it held.

Seb’s eyes widened. In wonder. In fear. No one should know.

The drone rose as quickly as it had come. The air moved with a singular intent as a breeze announced its presence.

Seb, frozen by a sudden fear, broke from his stupor and moved towards the bottle placed in front of his hut door. The spirit was the same. Clean glass. No fingerprints. No note. No sign.

No word, but a gesture of knowing. Of watching.