from the straits to the 33rd

The name on the lone incubator screen was “Fatimah”. Robert says the name out loud, wondering if it was African or Asian, and the lightness of it leaving his tongue makes his heart beats a different pace. The sound made by tiny kicks from the inside of the transparent case wakes Robert up from his trance. He presses the grey button and the machine releases the glass cocoon into the air of the hall of the ship’s left wing. Robert takes it closely into his chest.

He carries the armored baby while navigating through numerous half decomposed bodies, floating aimlessly in the main corridors. Something bad has happened here, he thought, and Robert dared not to imagine the smell of dead flesh if he ever to remove his helmet out of curiosity. Maybe the smell of the rotting bodies would kill him first before decompression hits.

The sight of his wreck of a spaceship cured his claustrophobia fast. It is normal for a ship scavenger to spend days or even weeks in a space carrier at this size, roaming the empty corridors for anything to sell before any towing ship come and drag the dead leviathan to the moon. Robert has not called himself a ship scavenger for such a long time. His last trip had found him a huge stacks of magazines and books in some language he cannot read- real magazine made of papers. He traded it with an antique collector from the 29th colony for a huge sum of money, which leads to his early retirement last year, at 37 years old.

He removes his helmet with one hand while holding the baby-case in his left, after exiting his ships airlock. My ship is not a good place to raise a baby. Cigarette butts floating in the main deck facing the front panel and a sour smell lingers in the stale air. Robert picks up every last one of the tiny soft cylinder using his hands, and swears to himself to replace the air conditioning system when he got to the 33rd.

“Out out, little baby” and there she goes with a spray of light fumes. Like a bad swimmer that never sinks, she flaps and flaps all over the main panel. Robert cannot help himself but to observe this tiny creature exploring the inside of his home. He had a pet dog once in his previous ship, and wonders if he could do much out of that experience. The orphanage in the 33rd is not the worse, but certainly not the best place to grow up. He knows of course. Not that he hates Miss Tally.

As the baby is pressing random buttons on the panel, he shifts his eyes to the large window on his left. The dead men ship is a beast, a giant metal city floating side by side with Robert’s tiny decommissioned piece of junk in the vast blackness of space, thousand miles away from the nearest colony. He wonders which one of the dead bodies sets the distress call before his demise. Is it one of the baby’s parents, hoping for a savior for their precious child? What kind of death that took them all?

He kicks the floor beneath him lightly and launches himself towards the baby before she was able to put a cigarette butt she just found into her mouth. He holds the baby, and it is the first time for him to experience such warm feeling. It brought him to a place where he found another part of himself he never thought existed. He fell in love with the baby right away, as her tiny fingers clasping on his blond hair. He is not a lonely spaceman anymore.

“O Fateema. Cigarette butts are no food for babies,”

Robert is no longer a retired ship scavenger. He is now a father.

_________________________________________________________________________________

“Why is it called the blue planet? It is not blue at all,”

“Well, it was once blue I guess?” Robert remembered the tale as Fatimah is pressing her face on the glass window. The red planet, mankind previous home, was once a giant mass of blue, but the massive algae bloom had turned all the water on its surface into a crimson boundless sea. He remembered Miss Tally from the orphanage once told him that they used to carry loads of saltwater to be purified in the colonies, using massing tank-ships, long before she was born. It was the Muslim terrorists from the rogue colony that ends it by releasing the genetically modified algae in the waters, before being blown to debris by the United Colonies. Slowly the planet turns red since that day, few hundreds years ago. 

Fatimah is also a Muslim name, Robert learned from the Arab mechanic that repaired his ship in the 33rd around 5 years ago. She grew up into a little girl with features so foreign to him. Her skin is just a tone darker than his khakis, and her dark, deep brown eyes resemble none of the people that he knew. This December Robert is going to bring her for a vacation across the space to the early colonies, starting from the first one. A grand tour across the galaxy for him and his daughter to find the people she belong to, and hopefully unlocks the door to her unknown origins.

Fatimah succeeded in proving to him that she’s a brilliant child by mastering English, French and Mandarin taught by Robert when she was only three. She learns how to navigate when she was four, and now she claims the invisible seat besides Robert as his vice captain, sometimes replacing him when he was asleep. She had started to refuse to call Robert “daddy” and denies his control altogether after she knew that she is not really his daughter.

“To grow up in that cramped space ship is never good for a child. She needs to be in the colonies with other children at her age, and experience a normal childhood. The 33rd colony is not a bad place to raise a kid. Good school too I heard,” that is what the Doctor had told him. Robert shakes his head. Am I not a good dad? I've stopped smoking for god sake.

“I can’t see any island at all. Are they any left on Earth?” no response.

“Is there anything wrong daddy- oh hell- Robert?” Fatimah had been staring at Robert's face for longer than he could remember. Her dark brown eyes look so foreign, but it reminds him of a past so far that he could only remember in distant dreams. Maybe Fatimah was my daughter in my previous life- thought Robert as he realizes that he is better off an atheist rather than a Buddhist. Karma sounds like bad luck to him.

“Nothing Tim. I just felt so lucky that I’m not alone” and Fatimah smiled back at him.

_________________________________________________________________________________

“Are you smoking again Robert?” asks Fatimah as she exits the airlock. It’s been awhile since the last time she had visited him. She was greeted by a floating black kitten and a rush stale air with a faint hint of sour.

“I never smoked Tim, ask Mr. Armstrong here. All I could smell is his piss” Robert was reading a copy of the Holy Bible. Fatimah wonders about how much that Earth antique had costs him, but she did not ask.

“Happy birthday Robert, my dad,” said Fatimah as she brought out dry cakes in small plastic wrapping from her bag.

Robert let the Bible floats in the air and takes the kitten into his arm. He had totally forgotten his own birthday, and starts calculating using his fingers. He can never guess Fatimah’s birthday correctly ever since he found her, so when Fatimah was three he decided to celebrate her third birthday together with him. Starting from that they shared a birthday on 29th November. Fatimah never really cares about dates. For her the day Robert saved him from the dead ship was the day she was born.

She is now an adult as she proudly claimed. She left Robert’s ship at the age of 7 to attend a French school in the 33rd colony and spent most of her childhood growing up with Miss Tally. Robert was never happy to let her go, but as stubborn as he is, he loves Fatimah so much that he never want to let her talent go to waste. At the age of 19, she’s the youngest in the United Colonies to join the Research Facility in the 40th colony. There she found out that she’s genetically a Malay, a race long lost in the digital history, after the 3rd Earth war melted the ice caps on Earth for good.

“Robert, I’m going to Earth with the gramps in three weeks to make the sea blue again. You know, clean it from all that red shit. You must never tell anyone else about this or else,” she made a gun with her hand and points it to her head. Robert almost squeezed Mr. Armstrong to death in a split second. Is she really going to Earth?

"Maybe we all can return to Earth one day. If we are able to bring back the ice of course. That's the second phase. But to be honest I have my own plan when we get there. I'm gonna be the first pirate on the red sea," and her laugh scares Mr. Armstrong away.

“I’ve been dreaming Fatimah”, Robert stares at the infinite darkness from the front window.

“Quite a few times I’ve been dreaming. The first time is before you moved to live with Miss Tally. I was floating- not in space, but in pools of saltwater, securely held on my back by gravity. The sky is the real night sky. I’m on Earthly sea, floating endlessly in infinite blue water sparkling with stars. It happens again and again, and I realize that I’m moving closer to an island with each dream,”

Fatimah stares into his blue eyes to find any sign of him lying, but she could not find any. Robert looks so old in his pajamas, a sight she had never saw before. But something about it looks so familiar in her head that it disturbs her instantly.

“Last night, I’m already on the sands, and waiting for me was a woman with long hair. I can’t see her face, but I followed her as she walks into masses of trees, thousand times thicker than what we saw in 19th colony’s reservations. I walk through the leaves behind her, until we get to a giant hole on a massive wall of stone, and I followed her inside. All the time I never know what I was doing, but I was not scared. It feels eerily familiar,”

Fatimah brings out a pack of cigarette and a lighter from her astronaut jumpsuit. After lighting hers, she tosses the pack and Robert caught it while she was puffing the smoke with tense eyebrows.

“What’s wrong kid?” asks Robert as he lights his. Mr. Armstrong the cat is nowhere to be found, already escaped from the cloud of carcinogenic fumes, slowly filling the deck.

“What you just told me, can I finish that for you?"

"Then she brought you to a sparkling fountain and told you to drink from it right? Did you get to drink it?”

Robert tries his best to comprehend what she just said. It was confusing, more than the dream itself. He never told Fatimah about his dreams. Maybe she had once heard him talking in his sleep, but she’s not here to listen about the fountain he went to last night.

“I’ve always been dreaming about the same island too, but since I was a kid. It drives me nuts. The only thing about my dream that is different from yours, is that the one leading me to the fountain is a blond guy. And he looks just like you Robert,” 

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dreams don’t make you go crazy. It’s the days you spent thinking about it that suck the life out of you. Robert never wanted to go to sleep. Last night he fall asleep while reading the Quran, and he dreamt of Fatimah.

She was on a lonely craft, floating on an endless blue sea. She never bothers to sit or stand up, instead she just lie on her back, while the wooden boat moves closer and closer to the now familiar island. Or is it the island that moves closer to her? He can’t decide as there is no other landmass for him to observe from his bird-eye view, but he could see- he could feel that the island is always alive. It is circling her craft slowly in a regular speed, like a chunk of a giant moon orbiting a tiny fragile Earth. He woke up immediately when the whirlpool created by the island’s movement sucked Fatimah and the wooden boat in.

After 20 years of denying, he finally accepts that the woman who was always waiting for him in his dreams is indeed Fatimah, and he is the one in hers. He had never heard from her ever since she left for Earth, and he keeps on telling himself that she is still alive. Day by day. He had stopped himself few times from going to the red planet by himself to find her only daughter.  If his ugly ship looks like some kind of terrorist by any chance and blown to debris by the United Colonies, it will only be troubling Fatimah. He waited with lots of patience, as she had told her how the 40th colony wanted to keep the project a secret from the others. He waited and waited as his dreams become wilder day by day.

One night he dreamt that he was a baby, and Fatimah is an old woman carrying him around in the forest, with LED bugs buzzing wildly in the between the trees. She picked a slow one from the air, a huge pulsing red, and squeezed it into his tiny mouth. She then brought him into the cave and throws him into the pool of water beneath the sparkling fountain. He woke up breathless as the tiny boy he is was drowning in the shallow.

Death is a lie. Live forever. Old Fatimah’s last words before killing him keeps on replaying in his head.

The Doctor told him that he is getting old, and spending years alone in a spaceship would definitely drives anyone crazy. He also shows him some researches on how gravity-less environment is not good to a person more than 60 years old. Robert told him to fuck off. He is 77 this year.

He’s not going crazy. He just wanted to have look at Fatimah's face, to know that she's alive. He missed his daughter and everyday he stares at the airlock door expecting for her to come back with a pack of cigarette. Mr. Armstrong the black cat had been dead just 4 years after she’s gone. Robert cried his eyes out that day, and decided not to keep any pets ever before Fatimah returns. What she had told her on the last birthday they celebrated together; about the dreams that they had been cluelessly sharing is steadily making him go insane. He’s desperate for answers, and no holy books or articles could give him one.

Maybe Fatimah had already found the answer on Earth, he thought.

_________________________________________________________________________________

“Do you still remember the time when we were fleeing from the wrath of the crazy Sultan? It was 1408, a time where swords are clashing with cannons. We were lucky the spears won’t hit us. That night we held each other so tight in the storm, and death was rocking us back and forth. We were no doubt already dead back then, but the island, this fucking huge island came out of the sea like its nothing, and saved us,” the woman’s laughter fills the room with echoes of memories and nostalgia. She is in her late 50’s, and Robert was staring at her from his final bed, trying his best to remember where he once saw that dark brown eyes.

“Old folks from 40th thought I was crazy. Even the peaks of Himalayas were miles beneath the ocean. They told me that there's no islands anymore on the red sea, but I found it. Like how we found it for the first time in the straits of Malacca,” Fatimah's voice was mystical, dreamlike.

“Can you believe that I found it again? I thought I was going crazy too. I find it in a place where the sea is still blue, and the fountain is still sparkling like it was yesterday, and oh, how can we forget the mountains? It is right behind the fountain Robert. Mountains made of our journals, from handwritten in ancient ink to inkjet printed."

"All of our lives, from the times of muskets and machetes, pirates and cannons, mountains of them left to be read by no one, until the few years before we left earth for good. Oh God. What year is that?” streams of tears running down her face as Robert's ancient eyes are tracing her features with all the consciousness that he might still have.

"I've spent years reading all of them Robert- every fading pages. We never stop writing as God-knows how many times we replace each other when the other one gets old. What a life we had, taking turns raising each other. You're the best writer I've ever read Robert, and you wrote about our life, about us. It makes me wanna go out there to find our second archive of journals we might hide somewhere in this vast space. Around a thousand years of our "new" life in space my dear. We were writing history perpetually, and I fell in love with you every single day. That was before I made my mind to leave you at the door of this orphanage 90 years ago. I'm sorry Robert," 

"How grateful I am to God now that I could see you again," Fatimah wipes her tears with her sleeve.

She kisses Robert on his forehead and moves towards the suitcase placed on the lone table in the middle of the room. She took out a syringe and a small glass vial containing a clear sparkling liquid. Alzheimer can never be cured, and she’s not trying to cure him. She just want to restart the cycle and forgive herself.

“I’m sorry that I abandoned you Robert. I’m sorry that I left you motherless, alone and oblivious of the eternal life you might miss. I am so sorry my dear, for I am not strong enough to deal with how fast our world is changing every time I open my newborn eyes. I was losing my purpose each time I stare into space, and life feels so empty in this endless void. I needed an escape but I admit that I’m such a fuck up that I left you in front of this fucking orphanage, right after I let you drink it." she put her hands on her face and starts to roam around. 

"How can I repay your kindness? What are the chances, for you to be led by blind fate to find a naked baby in a ship of floating bodies? I should’ve chosen death for I've destroyed our only chance for immortality, but I’m too scared to disappear from this world. And I miss you, but I can’t find you no matter how hard I have tried.”

“But God doesn’t want us back into to his hands yet. That's why he leads you to the dead ship. To me. He brought us together again, to continue what I've might has ended,”

Robert stares and the unknown woman's monodrama as she moves around the small room. The blue room on the second floor of the orphanage once belonged to Miss Tally. Robert had been replacing her after her death around 10 years ago, and now he’s spending his last days in the place where he was brought up, in a company of an unknown woman he swears he once knew from his previous life. A life so far from the present Robert which brain is deteriorating with each minute he spent breathing.

Fatimah slides the needle carefully into the arm of the man he once loved. She still loves him, but their condition was beyond any common circumstances that the feeling she had towards him becomes something incomprehensible to her, heavy and addictive as life itself.

“Death is a lie. Live forever Robert,” whispers Fatimah into his ear before she pushes the liquid deep into his vein. From the sparkling fountain in the cave of the immortal island, the transparent elixir are now finding their way into Robert's bloodstream as he shut his hazy eyes for the last time.

She tosses the used syringe out of the window and moves towards the balcony. She takes a deep breath as artificial sunlight flashing from the dome of the 33rd Colony, bringing life to all of its inhabitants. She wonders how much things will change in a few thousand years. From small wooden boat for two, to a giant mass of living metal wandering in the vast space between Jupiter and Saturn, mankind will never fail to surprise her every time. And for the first time in her current life, she feels alive to her bone.

She returns to the bed but old Robert is nowhere to be found. On his bed another animal is crawling out of an empty hospital gown on its four tiny limbs. Fatimah stares in awe at the blond boy. His eyes are as blue as the water surrounding the island. She takes him and holds him close to her chest, and flashing in her head are all the different times she had done the same thing, in vivid visions like a different kind of deja vu.

"O Robert. I'll take care of you my blue eyed boy, this time, and the next time, and the next time, until eternity ends us,"

Fatimah is no longer a retired Earth explorer. She is now a mother.