Welcome back to the Atlas, friends.
If you are new here, you’ve just stepped aboard The Strings of Us, a serialised sci-fi epic being funded in real-time by readers like you. You can catch up on previous chapters in the archive here. 👇
Today, we are leaving the simulated natural wonders of the ship’s biomes and stepping into the sterile, sound-dampened void of the Holographic Archive.
Cas’shya is about to have her first official working session with Elias, the grieving human historian. Armed with the philosophical grounding Jun’ip provided in the forest, she is preparing to confront Elias’s rigid, academic view of the universe. What happens when a man who relies on verifiable facts meets a rabbit who remembers history by feeling it?
A massive thank you to everyone in the Cartographers Guild who joined the Leaderboard so far to help this vessel launch. Let’s open the logs.
Chapter 10 - Cas'shya - Rabbit - Female: Testimonial 002
Jun’ip and I walked into the holographic archive room. The space was one of five such rooms on the ship. Four were spaced out in quadrants along the band of metal that encircled the ship’s biome, and the last, the one we approached, was at the head. This much smaller part of the ship housed some of the ship’s most critical functions, navigation being one, and Jun’ip’s quarters being another. But this room, this was one of my favourite places to be.
The door to the archive opened wordlessly, which had always amazed me. Having grown up on Earth, I was accustomed to the basic physics of friction and to things making a noise when they moved. This door seemed dead-set on frustrating that life lesson in the most fascinating way. Sometimes, for fun, I would level both my ears at it just before I commanded it to open, determined to find any sign of sound. No such luck yet.
The room inside was pitch-black, save for a small pulsing blue light where a device hung in the air at the centre of the room, defying gravity in a way that put my previous attempts in the forest to shame.
Around one half of the room was glass, an observation deck for other scholars to watch, currently not being used, and so dark. The rest of the room was sterile. Its surfaces were light but shrouded in darkness, revealing their whiteness only in the sporadic reflected glow from the blue LED.
The walls curved slightly inwards, not quite taking the shape of a half sphere, but neither was it a cube. Our feet made soft little thuds in the room, but they didn’t echo like a normal space. The floor and walls were textured like a minuscule rendition of the soundproofing insulation in a recording studio. The whole place gave me an eerie feeling, as if it had been designed specifically to subvert all my usual sensory expectations.
I hopped in and immediately squeaked a little in delight. Jun’ip came in behind me, however, and didn’t seem quite as perturbed or excited.
“Eeeh, I have missed this place! What has it been, like, five weeks now?” I stamped my feet on the ground a few times, savouring the feeling of the odd soft texture underpaw, and then bounded over to the edges of the room and started brushing my head and exposed fur against the walls like I was brushing myself.
“So soft!”
The softness was having a clear effect on my fur as well. I didn’t quite understand the mechanical engineering of the room, but by the way my fur started to stand on end, I suspected there must be a static charge somewhere. My antics against the wall had that balloon-like effect on my hair, and I was now looking a bit tumble-dried.
“Please refrain from touching me until you have released that.” Jun’ip remarked, pointedly eyeing my static fur.
“Ha, you can’t be worried about a little shock, surely, I would have thought being Orion’s heart guide you would be used to ‘shocks’, right?”
Jun’ip did, in fact, seem quite worried about shocks. Being old is not for the faint of heart, and neither is being mildly electrocuted. I started edging towards him teasingly, and he hopped back a little in response. I moved faster, letting a familiar, playful menace bubble up in my chest. Jun’ip stood composed and, at the last second, used his connection to the strings to pull himself smoothly away to the side. Thankfully, I had intended to stop right before him, and I was poised just in front of where he would have been, one paw quivering in the air.
“Do you dare me?” I asked.
“I do not, in any way, shape or form, dare you to do any such thing. Is this how you treat all your mentors?”
My paw lowered, and I twitched my nose slyly.
“Maybe next time I will get you,” I replied. “What’s the score now? I think it’s about twenty-three to zero for you. You always pull away at the last moment, and I never have the gumption to actually do it. One day, I will pluck up the courage to zap you! I am deeply confident it will make you less stuffy and more fun.”
“I will have you know, I am the funnest Rabbit I know. I just have a rather unique perspective on what fun means.”
“Ha!” I pulled away and went to discharge myself over by the door, my fur flattening back into place.
“Whatever you think your perspective on fun is, I am certain it is not in any of the stories you like to regale me with. I swear, some days, I could catch you in those strings, and you would be gone with the wind for hours. Silent as a cloud in the sky.”
“Ahem, yes, well, if you spent more time practising with your own strings, you might too realise the joy to be found in becoming one with the ‘clouds in the sky’.” Jun’ips eyes twinkled a bit as he looked at me. I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Cloud freak.”
“History freak,” he retorted. I laughed at that. Freak is not a word I had heard him use before. Its shape felt unusual coming from him, but oddly satisfying. It fitted well with our natural language of clicks, mixing in with the sounds quite perfectly.
Elias, in the meantime, had managed to step into the room unnoticed because of the infuriatingly quiet door and the dampening floor, and coughed to draw attention to himself. He was still looking dishevelled and worn, but for the first time, I saw a quality to him that had not been present before.
Jun’ip and I froze. My ears flattened in mild embarrassment, and my now-patted-down fur somehow managed to shrink even more. We had been caught in a moment of silliness, and I knew immediately that the last thing I wanted was to give Elias even more reasons to think I was unusual. Elias, meanwhile, just stood there by the door, his hands clasped awkwardly in front of him, his puffy, red-rimmed eyes looking from me to Jun’ip and back again. The silence in the sound-dampened room was suddenly immense.
“I...Ur, I apologize,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly mumble. “The door was very quiet. I didn’t mean to…”
Recovering first, I gave a huff and began to smooth my whiskers down, pulling my shawl tighter around myself, trying to regain a shred of professional dignity.
“Professor. You’re... here. We were just…”
“Being freaks,” Elias finished.
Jun’ip and I exchanged a sharp glance.
Elias looked down, and a small, almost pained smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. Then, he spoke. It was not in the flat, human language, but in the clicks, soft thumps, and whistling tones of formal Rabbit-speak.
He said, in a very rusty, and borderline incomprehensible human meets rabbit accent:
“My apologies for surprise today now. I thinking… if you be ‘Cloud-freak’ and you also be ‘History-freak’… then I also be ‘sad-corner-freak.’”
He finished on a surprisingly accurately timed click with his tongue behind his two front teeth, exactly like a rabbit might.
Jun’ip genuinely recoiled in surprise, and his ears shot straight up. Of all the things we expected this grieving human to say, a self-deprecating joke in our own language was not one of them. I found myself caught utterly off guard.
I just stared, my mouth half-open. The static electricity seemed to have frozen me in place all over again. After a beat of pure, stunned silence, I let out an explosive snort, a sharp ‘Eeeh!’ of surprised laughter.
“Well, who would have thunk it,” I said, hopping forward towards Jun’ip, my earlier static-based menace gone, replaced by pure, baffled curiosity. “Who knew? Even sad humans are more fun than you, Jun’ip.” He remained faux dignified and aloof. As if he were above such things.
Elias gave a small, genuine, and deeply sad smile. “We sad humans have our moments… just not… not recently.” His gaze drifted to the central console. The mood sobered, but the air’s static tension had smoothed into something much more comfortable. That fleeting quality was a flicker of the same, offbeat silliness I possessed. I wondered about his past before he joined us, and whether, beneath it all, we might actually find friendship.
“Right,” he said, switching back to his own language and drawing his academic sword and shield, defensive in posture. “Shall we... begin? I have been briefed and have been led to understand that we are to work together compiling a unified vision of human-rabbit history. How does Ancient Greece sound as a place to start?”
Elias moved to the device with the blue light hovering in the centre of the room and, using it like a magic wand, brought up a console in the air. His hands were still fidgety, but he carefully strapped the remote around his wrist with a wrap-around strap, ready to command the room. As soon as he started typing on the console, however, a sudden sense of assurance came over him. It was like watching a nervous medical student somehow transform into a confident surgeon. The fidgety hands became masterful and precise.
“Right. Let’s begin,” he muttered, as much to himself as to the group. Carefully avoiding making eye contact with either myself or Jun’ip. “The purpose of this project, as I have been led to believe, is to codify… to create a verifiable–”
Frustration sidled up to me like an old friend. I shot Jun’ip an ‘I told you so’ lilt of my head, striking in its effectiveness. He gently chimed in.
“Elias, we are here to share our histories, are we not?”
Elias, taking a deep breath, recomposed himself. He looked at us both again, as if to remind himself that he wasn’t actually alone, and that he could be seen.
“Yes. Yes, of course. A sharing of... data. Let’s start with my own research while I’m here and already strapped in, shall we? A foundation, perhaps, from which we can leap off.” He tapped the console a few times, and the room thrummed. The lights dimmed until all that was left was a constellation of moving lights that came together and formed a spinning Greek kylix, an ancient drinking vessel, that stood tall and proud, magnified tenfold in the middle of the space.
The detail on the artefact was superb. I had never quite got used to the way this room could create something so tangible-looking, yet ultimately a mirage. This mirage, in particular, was very much like a museum piece, segregated from its history by placing it in a dead context. A single point of colour and light in an otherwise unfathomably dark space. To me, it felt cold. As a lifetime student of the rabbit lore and the strings, I could never quite figure out this human habit of removing things from their attachments. This cup was meant to be enjoyed, filled with liquids, and rested on the lips of famous and powerful Athenians. And yet, here it was, alone, segregated from all that it valued.
Elias’s stumbling was gone as he strode over to the projection. The confident professor was in his element. He walked around the hologram, gesturing.
“As you can see, the style is classic Attic, late 5th century. The depiction of the rabbit is, of course, charmingly zoomorphic, a clear...mythological representation... a fable of some kind. It’s a delightful object, but as a historical source...”
My fur bristled. The sheer wonderment at these human habits was rapidly turning into frustration, my old misgivings about him returning. Jun’ip glanced at me, and I held his gaze. Our conversation on the way played on a loop in my head, a shared story between us; a silent plea from him to heed his warnings and be inspired by his story.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
“Elias?”
My voice didn’t quite carry.
“Of course, representations like this allude to realities that we can begin to use as a basis for…”
I had been quiet at first, but I gained a little strength. “It’s not a ‘representation,’ Elias.”
Elias stopped, amused. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s a portrait.”
Elias scoffed, a dry, academic sound, a sadly practised sound. “A portrait? My dear Cas’shya, a portrait of whom? What is your source material?”
I walked past him to the console and looked pointedly at him, waiting for him to lower it down to my height. He obliged by waving the arm with the device downwards, pushing the console down to the floor.
“Of Philoctetes the Swift, my dear Elias,” My slight tone of mockery gave a subtle twist to my lips. Not quite a smile, after all, this was still a precarious relationship at best, but the intention was clear.
“You’re showing us an object that has hidden within it an entire story, but of course, you wouldn’t know that because you have removed this object from its inherent aliveness. Did you know this Kylix was actually a prize awarded to an Olympian? Let me show you the Truth.”
I swiped my paw across the holographic keypad and brought up what appeared to be a simple touchpad. Elias, having never seen such a thing before, was bemused. “What is tha-” But before he could finish his question, I was pawing away at the pad, drawing delicate patterns in its space. The lines appeared as if they were both wide and deep; the pressure I applied seemed to convey to the device not only intention but also feeling. I was a dancer lost in the throes of an interpretive piece. My eyes closed as I lost myself, and as the pattern grew, the thrumming of the room notched up a few notes. The Kylix hologram shattered before him, causing his eyes to go wide with surprise as millions of trailing stars of light swirled about the room.
“What are you doing? That’s not in the index—”
“It is,” I whispered, lost in the movements as I composed around myself a new hologram, infinitely complex and detailed. “Just not yours.”
The archive walls dissolved into daylight. The smell of artificiality was replaced by the phantom scent of dust, olives and other fresh produce, of perfumes and the smell of humanity. The soundscape of a bustling marketplace seemed to stretch past what had only moments before been hard boundaries, of merchants shouting in ancient Greek and goats bleating. The energy and life of a world long passed became our new reality. The final few stars of light swooped down and landed on a man in the middle distance, forming him in real time. We were suddenly standing in a fully immersive reconstruction of the ancient Athenian agora. A digital sun beat its warmth down onto our bodies, and a breeze ruffled the corners of my shawl.
Elias was physically stunned. He took a step back, passing through a number of mirage-like people as they went about their shopping. His academic confidence was completely shattered. He sat down on the floor, almost as if it was the only way he could steady his disbelief. “How... what is this?”
Smiling faintly, Jun’ip hopped over to Elias, putting a paw on his arm. “She is showing you, Elias. As she was taught. By feeling.”
“But this is.. Miraculous. Nothing on earth exists that could do this?”
“My friend, we are no longer on earth.” Jun’ip gently suggested.
I was now in my element, and I gestured towards a holographic man, all tone and oil, the Olympian Demetrius, gleaming on a pedestal. I met Elias’s gaze, my eyes bright and challenging.
“You asked for the source material, Elias. Here it is.” I took a deep breath and narrated, my voice became the soundtrack to the scene unfolding around us: “In the bustling polis of Athens, there lived a rabbit...”
From the Cartographer’s Desk
This chapter was a thrilling challenge to construct. Moving from the quiet, meditative philosophy of Jun’ip’s forest lesson into a high-tech, visually explosive environment required a complete shift in pacing.
I really wanted to explore how grief acts as a kind of armour. We see Elias walk in completely dishevelled, but the moment he straps the holographic remote to his wrist, he transforms back into a confident, guarded academic. Breaking through that armour required Cas’shya to do something radical. Shattering his sterile museum projection and forcing him to literally stand inside a bustling, living memory of the ancient Athenian Agora. It was a joy to write about the clash of these two entirely different ways of experiencing the universe.
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