Jack in a Box

1. JACK IN A BOX

The airlock door was cold to Jack’s touch, yet it hummed with a harmony of machines, footsteps, and voices. This trembling at his fingertips would be the last sensation he would ever feel of life inside The Hamelin. No more whisper of recycled air. No more whoop and roar of emergency drills. No more fleeting moments of laughter caught between his parents’ shifts.

Jack didn’t know what lay beyond these familiar walls of routine and duty, but he knew he could not stay.

Something was calling to him, somewhere Lucy was waiting.

He took a breath, turned towards the outer doors and crouched like a sprinter, ready to launch himself into the unknown.

“Airlock doors will open in FIVE…”

The frozen vacuum of space is deadly.

“…FOUR…”

All his life, Jack had feared it.

“…THREE…”

Now he was leaping into it…

“…TWO…”

..without a suit.

“…ONE. Doors opening.”

Jack need not have braced himself to jump. In an instant, the silent ocean flooded the airlock and swept him out into its dark and fathomless depths.

He remembered his training. Don’t hold your breath, cadet. The lack of pressure will burst your lungs. One long slow exhalation. Fifteen seconds was the record anyone had lasted in open space before blackout. And paralysis. Then it was only a matter of moments before the body froze and that was that. No more Jack.

Twisting, tumbling through the endless black, the boy pursed his lips, and with his last breath, he whistled.

Six months before he took that fateful step, Jack fell out of a nightmare into the tangled blankets of his bed and cried, ’Uroun!’

He sat up in the darkness of his bedroom and rubbed his arms against the cold. In air-conditioned cabins just like his, cadets throughout The Fleet would now be rising with that same word on their lips.

Uroun.

He pictured them readying themselves with flexes and stretches in preparation for whatever challenges the day might bring. This morning was the first day of the most important year of their lives, their sixteenth, the year their roles in The Fleet would be decided. Positions in Communications, Medicine, Engineering, and Food Tech were for the elite. Failing that, he would join the general ranks of Maintenance.

To everyone a place. To everyone a mission.

But Jack knew there was no branch in The Fleet where his skills would be valued. No exam could test and prove his particular talent. There was no rank awarded to dreamers.

Cool air from the vent above the bed blew across his sweaty neck.

With a shiver, he kicked off the blankets and left his quarters.

He kept the lights of the living room off. He didn’t need them. He knew every inch of his family’s cabin. Depending on where you stood, the ship’s drone echoed differently. To his right, he heard the engines buzz and rattle softly through the polished metal surfaces of the kitchenette. To his left the sound was warmer, muffled by the couch, the carpet and the bookshelf. Between them was their cabin’s single wall-wide window. Beyond that, lay the stars.

He stepped silently across the carpet, crouched by the window frame, and slowly lifted the shutter to admit the faint glow of starlight. Through the abysmal black of deep space, these points of light had traveled thousands, millions, billions of years to reach him. They shimmered within the silhouette Jack’s messy mane of raven-black hair cast upon the glass. So many worlds, so many possibilities.

But only one destination: Uroun.

Ting!

A message appeared on the window, which doubled as a video screen. It was a note from his mother and father. Jack tapped the glass and read their words glowing coldly in regulation blue font amongst the stars:

‘Happy birthday, Jack. We’re sorry we couldn’t see you off to Induction this morning. There’s a fleet-wide alert on but nothing to worry about. We’ll see you this evening and you can tell us about your first day of Year 16(!) Stand strong. Listen well. Make friends. We love you.’

Jack could tell his mother had written most of it and added ‘Make friends’ to soften his father’s ‘Stand strong. Listen well.’

He didn’t mind that they weren’t there. Birthdays didn’t matter so much when everyone turned another year older on the same day. It was his parents' birthday too, but even if they’d wanted to celebrate, they couldn’t take a moment away from their responsibilities. His mother, Xinjuan, was a Food Tech engineer, supervising the operation of the algae farms that fed all ten thousand of their ship’s crew. Michael, his father, was a Communications Officer, a ‘Net-Cop’, overseeing the children of HMAS Hamelin as they studied and played in the online worlds of School and Sandbox.

Though Australia had been a small nation, its starship, The Hamelin, had pride of place in The Fleet. After all, it was an Australian, the tech-wizard Theodore Hamelin, who had invented The Gravity Shower. Life in the ships would be impossible without it. Through its interface, the children could escape their cramped cabins and enter an online world they could not only see and hear, but feel. In there, their muscles could flex, their sinews could stretch, their hearts pump from real exertion. Suspended in The Shower’s well of vibrating atoms, they could do more than imagine they were an eagle soaring over the gameworld, they could feel each fine, strong feather slice through the wind.

Outside their parents’ cabins, there was no room for play – no parks, no paths or promenades - and no child was permitted to step beyond those four walls until they graduated. Until that day, The Gravity Shower ensured that childhood was not a cramped and boring prison term. And every day their parents and teachers assured them that the years spent learning and playing in there would be the very best of their lives.

Yet Jack Voyager 1 spent as little time online as he could. He didn’t hang out in the network clubs posing for selfies or trading insults and gossip. He didn’t race or chase or kill in Dragon Quest or Gangstar’s Paradise or any of the thousands of Sandbox games.

To Jack, his cabin was not the prison, his Gravity Shower was.

The first time he stepped into it, his first Induction Day, Jack was five. He had not seen other children before, except in videos. But here they were, together at last, looking back at one another’s avatars, only slightly enhanced by their proud and anxious parents. Above their heads, The Admiral mounted the dais to welcome the children to School, where they would spend the next thirteen years together. Almost as soon as she began to speak, an irregularity in Jack’s heartbeat was detected by his Shower’s diagnostic resonator. Little alarms sounded and yellow triangles with angry black exclamation marks appeared all about his avatar. He tried to run, but everywhere he turned in the crowd the jangling symbols followed, as though he wore a jester’s costume covered with loud golden bells. Everywhere he tried to hide, The Admiral’s stern gaze found him.

Later, the ship’s doctor had assured Jack and his parents that his heart’s irregular beat was nothing to worry about - just a harmless genetic abnormality. His Shower had been reprogrammed not to embarrass him with any more alerts next time his heart skipped a beat. But the damage was already done and the memory of School and Sandbox was long. Jack the Joke, Jester Jack, Jangling Jack or just plain Jangles; from that day he was marked for life.

Since then, every day, all day at School, he kept his eyes on his work, his breath held tightly in his chest. He never spoke unless it was absolutely necessary. He barely moved, lest the wild drummer at the heart of his private orchestra break into a solo.

Even now, he could hear the eccentric rhythm echoing in his chest. It counted four normal pulses and then tripped out several that were completely out of time, and then returned to a regular count of four, followed by a quick triple count, and on, and on, as though the drummer in his chest were impatient with the song.

As soon as each School day ended, Jack logged out, sprang from The Shower, and let his heart loose in a playground of music. His father’s vast collection of vinyl records was the largest of its kind in all seven ships of The Fleet. Jack loved nothing better than to slip the precious discs from their sleeves, and gently press the needle to their grooves. For hours on end, he would lose himself dancing and singing along to ‘the classics’, echoes of the world humanity had left behind: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Billy Holiday. These legends were his friends. These musicians knew all about Jack’s loneliness. They said so with their guitars and drums, their trumpets and keyboards, their tender yet mighty voices and their wise, rhyming words.

Sometimes, when Jack was feeling especially blue, he let the needle crackle at the end of the record, and sang wordless harmonies of his own: rising, falling, ribbons of sound, like birdsong.

He wondered when the day would come that he would fill these melodies with lyrics of his own. He did not know yet what he wanted to say, or who would listen when he did. But he knew he couldn’t keep it in much longer.

He was a Jack-in-the-box. Every hour spent in School turned the handle, wound the spring tighter, and tighter.

Now, alone in the dark, Jack did not want to go back in to face yet another Induction Day. He wanted to stay by the window, gaze at the night, feel the oceanic swell of engines far behind him, and the eager tapping of his hungry heart.

He wanted to find his song.

He wondered if he stilled himself for long enough, he would.

He let his eyes sink deeper into the field of stars and listened.

His mind reached into the void.

His heartbeat slowed, drumsticks poised to play.

Then, for a moment, he sensed a tingle, a whiff, a whisper of melody. It rose out of the silent night like a radio signal from static, or laughter from another room. Or a memory.

Ting.

Another alert. The bell for First Period.

Jack growled and listened closer to the night. He pressed his ear to the chill glass, but the song was gone.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

At first, the high ping of the School alert rang as pleasantly as a church bell. It sounded like a summons to the higher things in life: an education in Science, History and Mathematics.

Jack ignored it.

The bell grew louder and sharper.

Tang. Tang. Tang.

Jack let it ring.

TONGTONGTONGTONG

On and on, louder and louder, the gong clanged through his family’s cell. It shuddered and boomed off the windowpane. It rattled the bowls and plates on the shelves. It reached right into Jack’s skull and banged upon it until he couldn’t imagine a single note, other than that one invincible monotone.

Finally, gripping his head, Jack stumbled towards the only place in the cabin where he could find relief from the awful alarm.

He obeyed the call, zipped up his suit, and climbed into The Shower.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS SAMPLE FROM 'A PIPER AT THE GATES' CHECK OUT THE FULL TEXT AT:

AMAZON AUSTRALIA

AMAZON US

AMAZON UK