Prospero is a rare powered human, born with new abilities resulting from generations of interbreeding by superhumans in space. He is able to fly through the vacuum unaided at super luminal speed and increase his power level by soaking in direct solar radiation. His only weakness is his daughter Miranda.
Sitting together in the grand library of Prospero’s fortress. Countless books from countless worlds line the walls, their smell is as enchanting as the knowledge they contain.
“Dad, why are you always hovering over me?” she asked.
“Because I love you so much my dear.” he commented from across the room.
“If you loved me, you would let me see the stars on my own. Instead of waiting one light year away”. Perhaps she was right he thought, she was beginning to become an adult.
In sharp contrast to himself, Miranda was born without any powers. She was an ordinary human being like her mother, who died years ago when a shuttle she was travelling onboard was lost to an unexpected solar wind. Prospero frequently worried about what could happen to Miranda if he were far from home and couldn’t save her from danger.
Sycorax Industries is a terraforming company that hired Prospero to travel to distant star systems and deposit their wormhole devices. Using these devices to establish a wormhole to travel between worlds, they establish a number of colonies including the mining planet Caliban and casino world Ariel. From Prospero’s vantage point, all appears well and good with these new worlds so he doesn’t think to look beneath the surface. Nor question the narrative the board are telling him and the public.
As Miranda is holidaying on Ariel, her father had finally let her go on her own and assured her he wouldn’t be too close. Even with her upbringing that was quite lavish, this luxury resort on Ariel was something else entirely. She marvelled at the incredible design taste and attention to details that went into her grand suite. Unpacking her belongings in the bedroom, she looks out her floor length windows and notices there are strange looking houses in the distance.
“Hey Janet, what is that in the distance?” she asked the room’s AI system.
“You are looking at the living quarters of Ariel’s original pioneers and some of our staff.”.
“I want to see it. Tomorrow morning, send a vehicle to take me there.”
“Booking confirmed.”
As Miranda sits in the comfort of her vehicle, travelling through the streets of the slums, she notices the poverty of the workers and realises Sycorax Industries has had the same effect on this alien planet as human explorers of antiquity had on indigenous people of foreign lands on Earth. She returns to her hotel and sends a message to Prospero, begging her father to do something about what she has witnessed. Having been sent through the hotels network, the message is intercepted by the Sycorax Industries Corporate Intelligence and then sent to the board.
Back at his fortress, Prospero receives the interstellar recording from his daughter. Alarmed at this violation of what he thought was a legitimate enterprise, Prospero departs for the wormhole to confront the heads of the company.
Facing the wormhole to Ariel that he helped create, Prospero readies himself to travel through it but stops when it suddenly explodes violently. The debris expands for a moment from the force of the explosion, and then is sucked back in by the entropic forces. The wormhole had been destroyed, perhaps maliciously to prevent him from confronting the board.
Having been to Ariel to set the wormhole up in the first place, it was more of an inconvenience. But he was angry now, this move by the board had told him that they were up to no good and that on her first trip into interstellar space, his precious daughter may be in danger.
Flying into the boards chambers, Prospero demands change. They strike a bargain and agree to give the native peoples rights, in exchange for Prospero travelling to Yaweh and investigating what really happened to all the spacecraft that have ventured there. They know it’s a trap and that something akin to a ‘cosmic devourer’ awaits. They had met earlier and discussed the danger in private, they were expecting Prospero to fail like everyone else and die to the beast. With him out of the way they’d be able to punish Miranda for her insolence.
“Go, wait for me at home.” Prospero begged.
“Can’t I come with you?” asked Miranda.
“No, it’s not safe. Only I can survive whatever awaits at Yaweh.”
“Fine, but you better tell me all about it!”.
They hug and part ways, Miranda travels home aboard a secure interstellar vehicle that Prospero knows the board cannot intercept or stop. Secure in the knowledge his daughter was safe once again, and he departs for Yaweh.
The journey takes a number of days due to Yaweh being far away from all established interstellar flight paths. He knew there might be a faster way, but charting the vastness of space was unfortunately not one of his powers. Even if for him blasting through the core of a planet or a black hole would be nothing more than an inconvenience.
Taking a break on a desolate rock in the void, he begins to think about what the company might intend to do with the knowledge he discovers at Yaweh for them. And whether it was wise to depart so far from Miranda after learning the company weren’t who they said they were.
Back at the fortress, a team of security forces in tactical gear issued by Sycorax Industries are waiting to breach the gates. They are here to extract Miranda and take her back to the board for questioning, believing her to be a dangerous terrorist and outspoken racist.
Elsewhere, lost in his thoughts, Prospero’s mind begins to wander into memories of the past.
“Dad, help!” a very young Miranda screamed from the garden.
Prospero blew through the walls of the house, blasting brick, metal and plaster away as he moved precisely and swiftly to his daughter.
As he arrives in the forest clearing, he finds Miranda on the ground with a broken ankle.
“What happened dear?” he asks as he uses a medical device to heal her.
Miranda gestures to the pothole “I fell on it.” and tears up again.
Prospero arrives at Yaweh and finds nothing there. A dark shroud engulfs him and tickles his skin, he gets goosebumps for the first time in his life. An ethereal detached voice in his head asks him why he isn’t dying, he isn’t like anything that’s ever been here before. Prospero shrugs off the consumption and looks right at the creature, for all of it’s apparent scale it was just a small orb filled with organs. It looked like someone had enlarged a microcellular lifeform. Pitying the creature and realising it was just a wild animal; primal, old and terrifying but an animal all the same. There was a similar creature on Earth, that had mutated into living liquid that could devour crops, animals and buildings alike.
He remembered an old myth he read in a book once. There was a race of humanoid aliens on Earth descended from the survivors of a space ship called the Illuminare. They fled a planet called Yaweh long ago, perhaps this planet. This creature probably grew to this scale after consuming that original world and continued to wreak havoc from afar after having an enourmous store of energy.
Reaching into the creature’s mind, he sees an artificial soul piloting the Illuminare, trying to land and then going insane when the creature uses its psionic abilities to create an illusion designed to call the ship to come back to Yaweh. The Illuminare crashed because of the creature using its psychic lure to draw forth its prey.
The creature then reaches into Prospero’s mind, looking for something to consume. It sees a memory of a dog he owned as a boy. The dog’s name was Starbuck, three month old rottweiler puppy. A wildfire. The puppy is gone. Sensing this pain was vulnerability and potentially something the creature could consume, it begins to turn into his lost dog.
Prospero is extremely confused at first as the alien creature morphs into a cosmic version of his lost childhood pet. It even smiles at him the way she used to.
Delighted, he shoots an energy ball across the void. It’s light so immense it lights everything up for miles. Previously a blast like this would be enough to destroy a small moon. The starry dog hops across the void like a puppy, grabs the ball of energy and trots back to him proudly. Like an ordinary dog on Earth would have grabbed a ball. Prospero laughs, for the first time in a decade. He picks up the energy ball from its mouth and throws it again. They repeat this for a while, no one could say how long for, it could have been minutes or hours.
As their play comes to an end. Prospero smiles at what he had discovered and leaves for home. He effortlessly frees Miranda from slavery and assists the many worlds of the colonies revolt against the occupying forces of Sycorax Industries. Rather than killing his enemies, as would be so easy, Prospero chooses the wisdom of forgiveness, even if he does not feel it in his heart – he knows it is the right thing to do in his soul. Democratic elections are held on the newly freed worlds, the company is restructured to be an interstellar bureaucracy and diplomatic mission and Miranda is eventually asked to help lead it.
Prospero swears to never work for an evil company again and returns to Yaweh from time to time to play fetch with the creature, bringing it exotic treats just out of the curious sight of it dismantling things. He wonders what might have been if the original humans who left this star system long ago had gotten to know the creature, instead of feeding it into something that destroyed their world. Maybe reasoning alone wasn’t enough to tame it, perhaps anyone without the powers or wisdom to deal with it would find it absolutely terrifying. To him though, she was just his little Starbuck.