#17 of 100: The Divine Drive

The generation ship Penelope lives on is powered by a motionless divine being, but when Penelope is tasked with maintaining it, she can't help but feel a connection with the goddess.

Photo by Aldebaran S on Unsplash

Another lengthy one! Not sure if I chose the right ending, and I think it could do with dwelling on Penelope’s history a bit more, but for a day’s work it’s alright.

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“Does she speak?” Penelope asked.

“In my twenty years of service it has never spoken.” Jonah replied.

Penelope’s face fell. Primary Drive Maintainer was a much coveted job and only three people were chosen every rotation to tend to the Alecto Drive. She had excelled in both her medical and engineering exams, earning her a place as a Maintainer whether she liked it or not. She had wondered if she should have put in less effort and been assigned a less important job - plumber, perhaps, or seed bank worker. It sounded like her job would manage to be both boring and stressful. 

“These are the vitals you need to pay the most attention to,” Jonah said, pointing at one of the many screens on the observation deck. The vigorous nodding of the other two apprentices got on Penelope’s nerves. “If a malfunction isn’t spotted quickly enough it could cost us months, years, generations even. The first malfunction we had, two years after lift-off, is estimated to have added twelve years in travel time, and put the entire project in jeopardy. Never, and I mean never, just shrug your shoulders if something dips out of normal range. Act fast, save lives.”

Penelope looked up from the mass of screens and at the drive itself. It was encased in a large cell made of perspex-like material, itself in a circular room the width of the football pitch in the recreation sector. The body floated in the middle of the cage, huge beams of energy piercing through its torso from above, its limbs splayed out like a pinned butterfly. All of her lessons and textbooks hadn’t prepared her for how human it looked. Vulnerable, even.

“As for the physical check, it must be done at 12:00 hours, for no longer than thirty minutes.” Jonah continued. “Come. Nothing like hands-on experience!”

He pressed a button on the deck. The beams of energy running through the drive faded, and the body drifted slowly to the floor. Jonah grabbed a maintenance bag and led Penelope and the other apprentices down the corridor. He presented his face to a scanner and a second later the thick metal door to the outer drive room clicked open.

A narrow walkway led out to the inner room. The floor of the rest of the room was filled with arcane symbols that glowed faintly green, along with gold, zig-zagging lines. Penelope had seen the symbols in her textbooks and could replicate them if needed, but the precise meaning or purpose of the layout was lost on her. Divine researcher was a whole other job, and her scores in her divinity classes had been laughably low.

There was another face scanner at the inner door, and once they were in, they all paused for a moment to gaze at the drive.

She - for Penelope couldn’t comprehend the body as being merely an object - was naked apart from a medical band on one arm, and lay flat on the floor with arms resting on her abdomen. Her head and body had been recently shaved, and her pale skin had no scars, freckles, bruises, or any other marks. She did not turn to them as they entered, nor did she blink or give any sign of life other than the rise and fall of her chest. The only furniture in the room was a wooden bench and a tank of water.

“I’ve heard that at the beginning it used to talk during the physical assessments. It even used to move about and feed itself. In my time here it just lies silently. Makes my job easier!”

Jonah grinned, then knelt down next to the woman and got to work. He carefully looked over her body, then flipped her on her front to check her back. She gave no resistance. Then he inserted IV tubing into her, hanging the drip from a hook on the ceiling.

“Penelope, could you dim the lights and then check her pupil response?”

Penelope flipped a switch that made the see-through walls turn dark and opaque, then grabbed a penlight from Jonah’s bag. She knelt next to the drive.

“I’m just going to shine this in each of your eyes for a moment,” she muttered to the woman.

“No need to talk to it,” Jonah chuckled, shaking her head as if she had done something foolish.

Penelope gritted her teeth. Even though the woman hadn’t responded to a single thing, it seemed only polite to let her know what she was going to do next. She couldn’t not say something, it would be like not saying thank you when someone had handed her something, or bless you after someone had sneezed.

She gently touched the woman’s cheek to turn her face. Her skin was soft and scorching hot - within normal range for what the woman was, but it still unnerved her. When she shone a light into each eye the pupil contracted as expected. The woman’s eyes were an unnatural forest green that Penelope could have gazed into all day.

The woman had been human once. Back on earth, she was a priestess of justice, and the goddess Alecto had granted her a tiny thread of her power. That was all that was needed. Somehow, a religious researcher had managed to pull on that thread, wrenching Alecto out of the divine planes and into the human body on earth. Now, from what Penelope understood, there was only a single strand of her still in the divine realms, and that straddling of realities was what made the body powerful enough to propel a generation ship through the stars and towards New Terra. The ship itself was called Alecto, but the body containing the goddess was now only referred to as the drive.

She had learnt all that during long, tedious classes that she mostly spent staring out of a window at the sprinkling of stars beyond. It had seemed obviously right and normal then. With the earth burning, why wouldn’t humanity use everything at its disposal to survive and seek out a new home? But looking into those big green eyes a profound sadness washed over her. Alecto had seen civilisations rise and fall over thousands of years and now she was reduced to a piece of equipment, shaping the course of human history against her will.

The corner of the woman’s mouth twitched.

Penelope looked up at the others. Jonah had his back turned, rooting around his bag for another device, and the other two apprentices were too busy eyeing each other up to pay attention to the goddess laid out before them. When Penelope looked back down, the woman’s expression was blank once again. Unease stirred in the pit of Penelope’s stomach. Had it been a coincidence, or had Alecto responded to her thoughts?

In the evening she returned to her living sector, wanting to collapse in bed after all the new information. But her neighbours were throwing a party, and not wanting to seem even more of an odd one out to them than she already was, she joined in.

She had known all her neighbours since she was little. They had grown up in the creche together, and had been assigned nearby living pods based on their genetic diversity. While there was no need for genetic parents to be friends it was still seen as beneficial, and people received incentives when they carried children in their own womb, as those raised in an artificial one were likely to have worse health outcomes. Thus, like everything else, the design of neighbourhoods was based on maximising the survival of the human race.

The problem was, Penelope had never really made friends with any of them. She could make small talk and give compliments and had no actual conflicts with any of her neighbours, but there wasn’t a single person among them she felt she could truly confide in. When she arrived at the party people clapped her on her back and congratulated her on her new assignment, and she smiled and thanked them, but at no point did she feel able to express doubts about her job. She could imagine their response if she did: they would nod and smile some more, tell her everything would be clearer in the morning, and remind her that the drive was vital for their generations-long mission. She knew that others must have qualms about exploiting a goddess’s power, but if she voiced it out loud and found no one who would truly listen and consider her words, it would make her feel even more alone.

Once she had exchanged enough pleasantries and congratulated enough people on their assignments, she slipped away to her living pod. It was narrow and functional and the only place in the universe that was hers. On the bedside table she had a small line of figurines she had 3D printed the year before: monsters from a comic book series she had enjoyed. Most of her peers were more excited about the heroes of the story, or the love interests, but Penelope could never quite get along with characters the creator had tried to force her to like. Instead it was the monsters, with their unknowable motives, that drew her in.

As she drifted to sleep, she let her mind wander to a familiar daydream: some radioactive spill transforming her into a monster, and becoming the head of a monstrous council, designed to defeat the heroes once and for all…

Then she was back in the room with the goddess at the very moment she touched her cheek. The flickering in her green eyes now looked like wildfire.

“You’re right, I have seen civilisations rise and fall.” Alecto spoke in three distinct notes at once. Her mouth was set in a mischievous smile, the voice instead coming from all around. “I’ve made more than a few fall myself. I could tell you every tale in human history, and more than a few tales about the future too. But nowadays speaking constitutes a malfunction. Have they told you what happens when I malfunction?”

Penelope shook her head. It felt like a great strain to do so, as if she was sentient water trying to trickle uphill. 

“That’s when the divine torture comes in. As if being confined to this body isn’t torture enough.”

“Is the woman still in there, too?” Penelope asked, her tongue and jaw feeling too big for her head.

“Olivia, she is called. There’s a fragment of her here. We are friends, me and her. I have let her taste divinity. It is the least I can do, considering she has to endure this also.”

There was a pause, and the vision of the room grew fainter. Penelope could feel her hand clutching her duvet. But just before she returned to the waking world, Alecto whispered:

“I look forward to you being my new jailer.”

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Penelope woke up drenched in sweat, the duvet sticking to her body. It was no fever dream, she knew that much. The goddess had spoken to her. The goddess had spoken to her, no one else in at least twenty years, if Jonah was to be believed. A brief show of kindness was all it took for Alecto to connect with someone. 

As she took a much needed shower, Penelope grinned to herself. The dream felt like a sweet little secret between her and the goddess, on a ship where secrets were a rare treasure. She was looking forward to work now, eager to see the goddess in the flesh once more.

When she arrived back at the observation deck Jonah was already there, frowning at one of the monitors.

“This is the kind of thing you have to look out for,” he said, glancing at Penelope briefly before turning back at the screen and tapping a series of buttons. “Heart rate, consciousness and divine power have all technically remained within the green range, but there were two minutes last night where they all stayed at the very top end. It’s as if it knows just how far it can push things until we start to raise the alarm.”

“But within normal range. So… Something to keep an eye on, but nothing to worry about yet.” Penelope replied, only just realising what a risk Alecto had taken to speak to her. The words divine torture floated into her head. What methods could possibly be used to torture a god, she wondered.

Jonah grunted. He looked like he was about to say something else, but was interrupted by the arrival of the other two apprentices.

The morning was spent going into detail about the various metrics, types of malfunctions, and who to contact in emergencies. “Behavioural malfunctions” were times when there appeared to be nothing physically wrong with Alecto, but either some of her vitals were abnormal or her behaviour during her physical check-up was abnormal. In such an instance, they were instructed to inform the divine researchers, whose lab was a short distance away and who also had access to the drive room itself. Penelope wondered if researchers could be responsible for the torture Alecto mentioned. She had always thought that “researcher” sounded like a benign job, someone who tinkered with lab equipment and jotted down notes on the system. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Soon enough, the time for the physical check up arrived.

“I’m happy to go by myself, if you like? It’s good to get to grips with work as soon as possible, I think. Watching someone else do things only gets you so far.” Penelope gave a pleasant smile, praying that Jonah would be swayed.

“You two go with her. We can’t have one apprentice out of sync with the others.”

The other two apprentices followed Penelope through to the drive room, and along the narrow path to Alecto’s room. They were muttering and giggling to each other as they followed her, having instantly connected as soon as they met. She couldn’t help but resent them and their easy friendship, but at least it meant they wouldn’t be paying too close attention to what she was doing.

Alecto lay naked on the floor just as she did the day before. Penelope felt faintly embarrassed about her nakedness now. It heightened the sense that they were on an uneven footing. On a day-to-day basis, she would just had to check a few things with Penelope’s body, but every so often she would be tasked with shaving her head, or trimming her nails, or other things that felt more intimate and transgressive.

She pulled the IV drip out of the bag, and turned her back to the apprentices, positioning herself between them and Alecto.

“Just need to insert this,” she whispered, and smiled at the woman. All she wanted was some eye contact, some recognition of herself outside of her dreams. She stroked Alecto’s hand, out of the eyeline of the others. Alecto graced her with a blink, but didn’t turn her head.

A blink is all I’m worth? Penelope thought, hoping it would transmit to Alecto. She didn’t stir.

After inserting the IV, she asked another apprentice to dim the light, then checked Alecto’s eyes with the penlight. Instead of contracting, they dilated. Penelope wanted to laugh. All this time, for over sixty years that they had imprisoned the goddess and done all sorts of tests on her physical vessel, she had had the power to confound the tests all along. What sheer strength of will it must have taken to not rage against her captors, against Penelope herself for complying with the job she was given. Or perhaps it was fear. Penelope didn’t know if gods could feel fear, but why else would Alecto have referenced previous torture.

Penelope knew fear herself. Not the instant life-in-danger fear that holovids loved to show, but the constant, seeping fear of what might happen if she did not live up to the standards set on the ship. 

There were plenty who raged against the system. People from all backgrounds who could not fit the mould of the life assigned to them by administrators. From birth, it was drilled into them that the survival of the human race depended on everyone doing their part. If someone started shirking work it wasn’t merely their reputation at stake, it was their freedom. Prison labour was seen as a necessary evil, and while no one was forced to carry a foetus, it was also everyone’s responsibility to be a genetic parent.

Had Alecto ever had a choice? Penelope wondered. Had she been given a prison sentence without even being consulted?

Once all the checks had been performed, they returned to the observation deck to find Jonah pacing the floor.

“I don’t like this,” he said, rubbing his chin. “When you went in there a few metrics spiked again. I don’t know, maybe it’s just more stimulated because it hasn’t seen you lot before and the change just makes it agitated.”

“That sounds right,” Penelope offered. “It must have been years since she - it - has had new maintenance people.”

Jonah seemed soothed by her words, and sat back down, then gestured to show them how to access historical logs.

That evening Penelope was eager to get back to her bed and connect with Alecto in her sleep, but before she reached it she spotted one of her neighbours, Emma, sat in the common room and nursing a beer. Emma was another person who hadn’t quite made friends with their crechemates, and in their teenage years they had tried to bond with each other over this. It didn’t worked. Other than being lonely, they never had anything in common - Emma was into sports and esoteric subjects, neither of which interested Penelope. Things were different now though. Emma had just become an apprentice divine researcher.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Penelope said, taking the sofa opposite Emma and stretching out. She yawned, hoping it would give a casual air to the conversation.

“Oh, you know. Work’s been… Interesting. Lots of new information.”

“Same. Working with the drive isn’t quite what I imagined.”

This seemed to pique Emma’s curiosity. She leaned forward and offered Penelope a beer.

“What’s she like?”

It was weird to hear someone else call her “she”, especially someone who had not yet seen her up close. She knew Emma had been to the observation deck, and would eventually be called to witness the handling of a malfunction, but it was interesting she already saw Alecto as a being. Penelope still felt cautious about using the same language.

“It doesn’t respond to anything, it just lies there and lets us do our job. But I do wonder what it would be if it wasn’t… you know.” Penelope didn’t want to be specific. “Forced” or “Imprisoned” made it sound like she already had opinions on the matter. She wanted Emma to fill in the blanks.

“You do realise she was a goddess of vengeance, right?” Emma said, smirking. “She was never some harvest goddess, blessing the crops or what have you. She incited riots and poisoned fields and drove people to their deaths. If she wasn’t used to power the ship she’d be wreaking havoc. And considering what we… Well, I imagine she’s built up a lot of hatred by now.”

Penelope nodded slowly. The ship that their ancestors had built was powered by divine anger. A dash of her religious studies lessons was coming back to her now. The last few decades humanity had spent on earth had been tainted by their destruction of their surroundings, and the gods, who had been silent for so long, had given certain humans the power to punish wrongdoers. That’s who Olivia, the priestess, had been: someone trying to halt the destruction of the earth. When they found her, scientists had instead spotted an opportunity.

“What would happen then, if Alecto died, or something?” Penelope asked.

Emma exhaled and played with her lip. She took a minute to respond.

“Well, I guess we’d be stranded. Our resources aren’t infinite - this drive allows us to move through space thousands of times faster than we otherwise could, and although we’ve factored in a lot of wiggle room in case of malfunctions, we’d basically be stuck unless we had divine power. I mean, it's possible someone on board has a thread to the divine as well, in which case we could test everyone and cross our fingers. Or else the gods might take pity on us and help us out… Oh, sorry. Look, Penelope, don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll do fine. It’s really not something you have to worry about.”

Penelope grinned. Emma had assumed she was asking due to anxiety, rather than musing on how to help Alecto. She thanked her and said her goodbyes, then retreated to her pod.

Freeing the goddess might mean dooming the human race. It wasn’t a comfortable thought. On the other hand, Penelope had never much cared for the human race. If her ancestors had exploited the earth they lived on, and her peers were happy to exploit a goddess who had watched over them, what was there to stop her descendants from exploiting New Terra? If humanity was truly worth saving, Penelope felt it was up to the gods to decide. Freeing Alecto would prove that humanity was capable of change.

Her mind was so abuzz with such ideas it took seemingly forever to get to sleep. When she did, she returned to the moment of touching Alecto’s hand. Alecto met her eyes now, and bit her lip in a way that made Penelope’s dream-self blush and look away.

“You are worth more than a blink,” Alecto promised, her voice still ringing out in three octaves at once. “You are worth monstrous power, if you are willing to put aside your qualms and help me.”

Penelope interlinked her fingers with the goddess. Something inside her thrummed, as if she had an organ she never knew existed. Her body, she realised, could contain a goddess. This was what Alecto wanted from her: to leave Olivia’s body, tainted as it was by memories of torture, even if the body itself was unmarred, and join Penelope. It would be a union no other human could conceive of, far surpassing some meaningless friendships with neighbours. 

“What do you need of me?” She found herself saying, the words sliding out of her like honey.

“Be careful. Bide your time. And when you are alone with me, dim the lights once more. We shall speak again then.”

Penelope slipped back into a waking state and found herself gasping and slimy with sweat. Once she cooled down a hundred and one anxieties flitted in her head, but she tried her best to banish them all. She had a purpose now. Not one assigned to her by the ship administrators who squeezed every person into a neatly labelled box for life. A purpose set by a goddess promising her freedom from such constraints. 

That day, one of the other apprentices was tasked with checking Alecto’s vitals, under the watchful eye of Jonah. Penelope managed to brush her fingertips against Alecto’s toes while getting something from the bag, thus blessing her with another dream from the goddess, one in which she rose from the ground and embraced Penelope in a way she had never been embraced before.

The day after, the third apprentice was doing the physical duties, with Penelope forced to stay in the observation deck and monitor Alecto’s vitals. Alecto knew how to play the game: her heart rate and divine power spiked a little despite Penelope’s absence, hopefully smoothing over any suspicions Jonah might have developed.

It was three long weeks until Penelope was allowed to venture into the small drive room by herself. She kept her back to the observation deck as she fiddled with the IV drip, then placed it next to Alecto’s arm instead of inserting it. Her hands shook. Alecto lay on the floor, motionless as ever.

“Time to check your eyes, I think.”

Penelope flicked the switch, making the walls turn dark and opaque, hiding their activities from the observation deck.

Alecto leapt to her feet, making Penelope herself jump. Her heart thumped in her chest, as the weight of her decision hit her.

“Wear this for a few moments.” Alecto commanded, holding out her arm with the medical band. “Your heart is racing, but it will still be slower than mine when I use my powers.”

Penelope froze. So many things could go wrong. Tampering with the ship drive wasn’t any ordinary crime, it would count as treason.

“If you do not do this now, you will never do it. And you will never know what it is to connect with another being, human or divine. Take it.” Alecto’s voice had deepened, sounding both threatening and seductive. 

Penelope clutched Alecto’s hand, then slipped the band from the goddess’s arm to her own.

“This will only take a moment.”

Alecto pressed her forehead against Penelope. Darkness draped itself over her and seeped into her being like an oil spill. Primordial rage followed, unconstrained by morality or convention. Power flooded her, monstrous, untameable power.

Then she was back. She watched herself slip the medical band back onto the limp body before her, and flick the switch back on to bring back light. She crouched down beside the body, still turning her back to the observation deck.

Her body felt different. It felt impossibly light, as if gravity was a plaything she had chosen to toy with. It felt like it extended beyond what she could physically see, as if all the surrounding particles were also hers and would bend to her will if she flexed the right muscle.

“Olivia’s unconscious body will fool them long enough for us to leave. We are one now, you and I. We shall take on everyone who stands in our way.” Penelope wasn’t sure if she was speaking aloud or if the voice was just in her head. She could feel Alecto sliding about inside her, exploring every atom with delight. She couldn’t help but grin at the strange sensation.

They packed up the bag and showed their face to the scanner. The door clicked open. The path to the outer drive door felt longer than ever before, but once they got there, they still had no problem bypassing the security.

They wove through the maze of corridors of the whole drive sector and marched towards the centre of the ship.

Humanity would pay for its hubris.

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