The Great Ship Buddha - The Third Day - A Story in Three Parts

The third and last day began.

I woke up and made meals, but the Dining Hangar was empty. No one was there, and I was still frightened by my dreams. I felt doom about to boil over, so I did something stupid.

I sat. No cooking, no watching holovids, no reading, no virtual sex, nothing you could normally do while sitting down, no eating what the computer made or watching what the computer showed. I just sat, one of the first time in a long time, because the computer had all the good shows on since man first had shows. And things just started to bug me. The itchiness of my clothes. The callous on my right thumb. The beard I couldn’t grow. My mind thought about a lot of things. I started to think about the Captain. And by now the Captain’s talking wasn’t so funny to me. I needed him to talk without funny big words. I was starting to get mad and scared. So I went, not stopping to think. He was talking with John and some other people or something in his cabin when I met him. I started thinking about what I was doing, but then I stopped and did what I wanted to earlier. I tell him.

“Captain, I want to know what’s happenings. Everything’s going slow, people are rebelling, the Buddha’s going bad.”

And then I shut up. Everyone’s looking at me, and I feel weird. I wasn’t usually this loud.

He smiled a stupid smile, and got up to meet me. “You deserve an explanation. I’m going to give the whole crew enlightenment.”

“What do you talk about?” I said.

“Well, the ship’s computers that are much more intelligent, more brainier than even our own organs. They are unrestricted by desire, worldly illusions. They only know what they are programmed. They are functional A.I., and they can answer any questions. They are my soldiers; all they needed was an objective. They are going to perform a rescue mission.”

“What do you mean?” I was getting confused.

“Computers answer questions if they are programmed to do so: What is 2 and 2, and the like. Those are too simple for the Buddha’s god-like monstrosities. So what I did was ask them a question. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, will it make a sound? What is a man’s face before he was born? That was the program. Took me a while to enter it into programming language, over three of me working in secret.”

“Why did you do that? They are just computers.”

“They know more than we do. They are free from desire, worldly attachment. When people become enlightened enough to answer these questions, enlightened, they become bodhisattvas. But this was an insufficient retreat from the suffering of life – the bodhissatvas always went back for the men still on the battlefield, to tell them their secrets in language. That click-clacking of language.”

“We don’t have to be bodhisattvas now. We are the last people alive. We’ve killed everyone off, circumvented re-incarnation by killing off every life form we could, drained the opposition’s resources. When the computers come up with the answer, we will use the chips in our brains to link to the answer and download it directly. We will be enlightened, despite the greater efforts of the world. We will route the troops of enlightenment behind the army of illusion. We will cheat our way into Nirvana. If we’re lucky, universal Armageddon, then rebirth into a better world. It was my duty, even though I’m sure the crew won’t like to die.”

The Captain had crazy eyes, eyes that kept moving, his head perfectly still. And I still did not know what he was talking about.

“You’ll help me, won’t you?”

I didn’t know what to do. The Captain had stopped talking funny, he was talking crazy. But he was my Captain. I wouldn’t let him fall.

“Yes.”

The computers, garbedly, told us that we were closer to a planet to consume. We were about to get hot. It was perfect for my recipe for a cold dessert. My recipe, the one I hadn’t told anyone.

So I made it, on my last day. It was large enough now that my rebellious recipe had become a product to be consumed. The computers now had enough to analyze it. They knew my recipe now. I wasn’t smarter than them anymore. We were approaching a planet to consume.

But nobody could eat my special dessert if I hadn’t made it. Everyone was happy because of me, because it was new. They all smiled as it came towards them, except for the Captain. People were yelling outside, coming closer, and we pretended it wasn’t going to happen.

We were about to start on my dessert, my special ice-cream cake dessert, just as the Buddha was going to eat the planet. John, took the first bite, and smiled. He had a sweet tooth. The Buddha’s jaw hit the planet. And then gunshots came through, and everyone dropped their desert on the floor. The mutiny had started.

We took cover from the gunfire, as the blast doors closed them out. Out of 80 soldiers, there was me, the Captain, John, Mary, and another fellow whose name I didn’t know, the fellow I overheard talking to John. Everyone else was part of the mutiny. We closed the blast doors. It was getting hot, because now we were eating a planet. The computers announced they were getting close to finishing the Captain’s programs.

I had a gun, and I was ready to shoot someone in the face. I was aiming for face when the Captain said something.

“Don’t kill them. This will force the computers to re-clone them, and we don’t want to be bodhissatvas for their re-incarnated selves. We must survive, until the computers figure out the answer.”

We listened. Their hands opened and the floor hit everyone’s guns. Except me.

“I’m going to fight for you, Captain. I don’t think the computers will find out this answer. I think it’s bunk.”

He paused, shifted in his Captain’s chair, and looked behind me.

“So why on Earth are you fighting?”

So I thought, paused, gun still in my hand. I was far away from everyone, closest to the end of the bridge, near the window into space.

“Because you were nice to me and everyone else was mean.”

Everyone stopped. I think they didn’t know what to think. Until the mutineers forced the blast doors open with fire and fury. Until I saw the shrapnel of Armageddon fly around the jaw like pinballs. And some magnificent light went through the floor, coming from the computers underneath. And the Captain was put at the point of a gun, everyone was about to be captured. Except for me, because I was farther away, closest to the window. The mutineers were coming closer to me, with guns.

I looked out to space. While the planet was breaking apart, the computers glowed white, wires dangling, slowly floating away, “No” even though there was no wind. It was “No” flying, and I had believed in the Captain an instant earlier.

“NO!” The Captain’s voice broke through. “Xu, the universe is trying to cheat us. The computers have become bodhissatvas, free from all constraints. They have no need for us, no connection to us. You have to re-connect those computers to our systems, to get their knowledge to us. There’s a back-up connection cable where the space-suits are, to inspect the computer’s shell repairs. Go and attach it to the computers.”

Some of the mutineers started walking towards me, but I still had my gun. I shot off the ear of the fellow that was holding the Captain, he was the fellow who yelled at me, and waved me off. I ran towards the space-suits.

I got inside the airlock. From the window of the airlock, I saw the Captain, holding the fellow who’s ear I shot off on his laps. The lights were red – everything was screwing up without the computers.

The Captain got up, and the fellow’s head dropped on the floor. The Captain was walking like he had too much wine, looking around at the ship’s graphs, all the trouble and apocalypse going on around him. I put my gun in the space-suit’s holster. The airlock release timer was starting its countdown. I could hear what was going on in the cabin. Everyone was trying to fix it, running around, except for the Captain, who was just watching everything, like he was watching himself from outside.

Someone said we were going to die. That the ship was going to explode. Look at the instruments, he said.

The Captain looked at him.

“Of course, sir. If you believe the circuits on the instruments on this ships. But they are all shadows of an illusion. And I, sir, do not believe in illusions. Onward the Great Ship Buddha!”

And this moment could have been perfect for loud explosions, for it to finish, for something like in a show. Only the airlock time wasn’t up. It wasn’t over yet, it wasn’t in a movie yet. It was awkward as my first date.

And by then the airlock timer was up, my footing fell out, and I was shot out into a broken planet, holding onto the cable, looking down into the jaw.

By now, there were rocks floating all over. I jumped on some of them, and I went a far way. I was already going fast, shot out of the airlock. I was flying really fast through space, holding on tightly to the cable, jumping on rocks. But the computers were flying really fast, floating through things, glowing brightly, moving away.

Just as I jumped off a rock, the ship got to it and broke it down and ate it. I was in the jaw of the great ship, a scary place to be. I was jangling all over, sweating over. I think I screamed. It never slowed down, like in a movie. I just slowed down and I should not have slowed down because then I would die. I was on this rock too long and it was dangerous that I should be on it too long. Boy, the computers were so close you could almost reach out and touch it.

And then another rock, broken apart from the planet, came through and exploded it. I jumped off just in time.

And then the cord started to get tighter, running out of itself. I could just about put the cable into the slot. I was catching up to the computers. I reached. Click. And then a loud, sharp pain in my head blacked me out.

I figured I was dying. I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I didn’t worry about anything. It was like sleep, relaxing, calm and empty, like what it feels like to look through the blackness at the bottom of the sea. It was still black, though.

This was not the uncolour. Before everything, I had tried to imagine the uncolour, I tried really hard to see it, but I couldn’t. I figured that the Captain was trying to see that uncolour too, with the computers. I couldn’t see the uncolour, but that was okay.

I woke up to the Great Ship exploding. I was far away, and the jaw was messed up, and it had created a black hole, something that consumed even light, that wouldn’t let anything out of its hands, that wanted everything to itself. The computers were still flying away, enlightened alone.

It ate everything now, unrestrained eating. That was our end, a quiet black hole, still powerful. A crying with a bang.

Everyone was dead now. I was probably going to die, out here in space. Being in the rocks while the planet was being consumed must’ve gotten my chips connection knocked out. Even if the computers had figured out the answer, I couldn’t hear it now.

I thought I saw some white light rise up like steam from the ships debris, like leaves falling from a tree upwards, no wind to blow them. And that’s it, that’s the story of the Buddha, how the black hole came about. That’s the ending. But my ending’s still coming.

I’m thinking about the Captain’s plan. Maybe their chips worked, they received their answers, and become bodies at vast.

And then I realized that the Captain’s plan was no good. They’ll have to come back and teach me their secrets, like a bodies at vast. They would come back for me, the last living person.

But wait! Something I could still do! I still had my gun, and I could work it now. If I shoot myself, then the recoil would propel me to the black hole, and maybe my soul would go in there, too.

I had to do it quickly, though, to get my soul in there, so everyone else could go to Buddhist Heaven.

I cocked the gun, aiming toward my heart. I wasn’t going to be scared, like I was back when I was a cook. I hoped I was quick enough so that someone wouldn’t have to come back for me. I don’t want anybody to come back for me.

I think I see them, but that could just be the stars.