EP5 The Coin Decides

Jack the Space Dog — Episode 5: The Coin Decides

Hi, welcome back to the channel. I am Aon Alta, cosmic drifter and intrepid explorer and guide through the world of Jack the Space Dog.

In the last episode, we left me and Jack still stranded on the planet of a lost civilization. I was a space courier for important items — making sure they got where they needed to go. I was being chased by the Sect. Long story short, I used a drive that Victus and I invented and built. I warped into the atmosphere of a planet, ripped my ship apart, and now here we are. Stranded.

I covered a lot in the last episode about the change I went through to incorporate and use the technology on the planet of this lost civilization — this long-gone civilization. Now Jack and I have been given access to a technology that is almost inconceivable. With this gift comes a huge burden: carrying on the wishes of this civilization to rectify a long-ago mistake of theirs that led to the creation of the Sect — the big, all-consuming evil that exists in my world.

This next episode, we're going to get into what I do next. What do you do once you're given the weight, the hope, and the sorrow of an entire galactic civilization — and you're now the only spark left of their hope, their attempt to rectify the greatest mistake of their existence?

You might ask: couldn't I have at least reached out to home? The thing that helps keep my power under control while I'm training is TIM — the Terminally Irritable Machine, my little AI, the third part of our triad. Tim is both my guide, my instructor, and something of an antagonist. He's gruff but kind. Snarky, but also capable of real gravity. The gravity is not lost on him — but neither is the fact that I'm just a person.

One of the things he's done is limit what I'm allowed to do. In his opinion, he needs me to not have distractions. And I'm already yearning to go home. Having contact with them — he knows I would spend all my time focused on that, when I need to be focused on training. Otherwise I'll never get home. And having contact with them would be a slow torture. Even if they knew I was okay, they probably already think I'm gone. So better to do it all at once.

Besides, with this technology, I would be speaking directly into their minds. None of their devices mean anything to it. Is that helpful? Probably not. For grieving loved ones, that's probably a recipe for insanity — or at least they would think they were going insane. So it's complicated. There's not really a good option.

Tim is a reflection of a mentor of mine who is no longer alive. He was chosen because he's both someone I can understand and relate to, and someone I looked up to — tough but fair. He is both the Tim I knew and he isn't. He's Tim-flavored is probably the best way to describe him.

I've argued with him about reaching out home — told him I can make it work, that if I just call home I can handle it. His answer is always the same: no, stop bargaining. Do the work. Practice, practice, practice. Everything else will come. That's always his very frustrating answer. Practice, practice, practice. The rest will come.

Eventually, I give up. I find ways to make it fun. Their food nourishes me, but it wavers between bland and disgusting. So one of my first tricks — a non-combat skill — is learning to make a pizza. When you can manifest matter, you can manifest it any way you want. I really like pizza, so it was easy to imagine and internalize a perfect piece — cheese like lava, sauce so hot it burns the taste buds off when you bite it. Things like that irritate him, but they're also surprisingly skilled uses of the technology, so we kind of meet in the middle. I find ways to do what I want with it, as long as I also practice the things that are difficult — and sometimes painful.

The way you have to bend your mind is almost like the brain version of having your arm twisted up behind your back, your shoulder socket almost ripped out. That's the closest I can get to describing how I have to stretch my concept of understanding.

We settle into a rhythm, and eventually Tim has to start ending the sessions because I want to keep going. Once I'm on the path and I know where the target is, I don't want to stop. I'm much more durable now, but I will spend days at a time running through his exercises. Days on end, no rest. While my body doesn't mind, I still have a human mind — and my mind definitely rebels against prolonged stress and exertion. He'll sometimes have to shut my power source off, sometimes in comical ways, sometimes in frustrating ones. Often right when I feel like I'm about to make a breakthrough — which is probably not true.

Tim ends up being a very important figure. Eventually, in theory, I should move past the point where he has any constructive input to add — if I can start to understand my creative ability within this medium, which is how I begin to think about it.

I start to pick up things I haven't done since I got lost. I start to paint. Jack and I play ball. I find nice places to sit and have coffee in the morning. I figure out how to make coffee. I start to do things and make the place home — because making that place home, and acting as if this is the new normal rather than thinking about everything I don't have, is the only way I can keep my sanity and get through that prolonged ordeal productively. I had to change my perspective and just focus on making myself as happy as I can be with where I am.

I'm asked a lot about where the staff came from. I've never painted its origin, but since I would traverse planets for years on end, I got in the habit of always having some kind of walking stick — usually something I'd pick up there. My rule was I didn't take things off-planet that weren't meant to be sold. In cultures as advanced as this, tracing something back to the biology of a particular planet could be pretty easy.

I was on a planet that had a particularly tough type of tree equivalent. I found a branch and shaped it over a long time into a semblance of a walking stick from a tree on my home planet. It just looked like a stick. I broke my own rule and took it with me when I left. It was the only thing I had that connected to all those planets — I used it for support, for carrying things, sometimes for self-defense, sometimes for hunting, because I traveled light with a very small and inconspicuous ship. Something as simple as a stick, given all the technology available to me, was probably one of the most useful tools I ever had. And I got attached to it.

Because the interface of this technology is — at least from the outside — a martial arts-based interface, everyone always had a focus object. For some, it would be a bow. For some, a blade. For others, a staff or spear. Things this race hasn't used in millennia, but that they remember from their history. A grounding object — for their past, and juxtaposed against the unbelievable technology. It represents the distance between where they started and where they've come.

I just had mine because it was my walking stick. I'd learned to use it as a defensive weapon occasionally, but without any real training. When I walk into this, I have it, and I have Jack. So by default it becomes my focus object. I have a lot of emotions wrapped up in it, a lot of attachment. It didn't look like much — it looked like a stick. What it is now is the transformation it also went through when I went through the process. It's a visual reference for the center of my abilities. Not where the abilities are, but a way for me to conceptualize them. At the top, I have a representation of my little pocket sun — my little blue giant, sitting in there. It's not the actual sun, but I'm a visual person, and all these things I had on me transformed into important facets of this power.

Tim, when he's not out as his little three-ring setup, actually looks like the set of mala beads I was wearing when I went in. Just a gray set with little blue glowing parts, wrapped around my wrist when he's dormant — or later in the story when he's trying to be inconspicuous, when I'm just trying to walk through a market and not be the hero of a lost civilization.

There are a lot of things I carry around in the paintings that were objects I walked in with — things that changed and gained significance. Mostly it's how I end up conceptualizing these abilities: splitting facets of them into individual objects. Anything that's mine is just a representation of the powers. You can't pick up my staff and become powerful. You can pick it up, but I can make it disappear and reappear back in my hand. It is and it isn't anything. It is something when I hold it, because it's just an outward reflection of something that's really just in me. Same with the mala beads. Tim is really just in me. The outward expression exists because of my limited ability to fully internalize this technology. A lot of that is my stopgap — my band-aid — to keep myself sane and still able to think about how this works, but in a way that makes sense to me.

How I appear, and how I've gone about making this work for me, is not at all how this program was intended to work. Even me being the one was not what they envisioned. But the last standing Atlean, who left a message for me that I hear when I go through, did imagine there would be someone who would come along — or he hoped. He pinned all his hopes on the idea that if he finished the program and left it running, someone would find it. But he knew there was no way it would be exactly what they thought they needed.

He also mused on something else. He thought his civilization's certainty — always having the answers, always knowing the next move, fine-tuning everything down to the atom — might have been the root of their inability to overcome the Sect. They thought in all spectrums and in all directions, but they had no one to mirror that against. They were it. So how can you know what you don't know? He wondered, as he sat alone on that planet, what other types of thinking exist out there that he simply couldn't conceive by virtue of his own biology. He hoped that maybe not getting exactly what they wanted might also be the answer.

Eventually, I'm just living my life on this planet. It's not that I've forgotten about going home — it's like a whispered message in the back of my mind, easy not to hear if I'm not specifically listening for it. One day rolls into the next and I stop counting them. It gets easier. And it gets easier. I actually start to feel like I'm getting pretty good — though Tim would assure me I'm not. But I feel like he smiles when he says it, even though he does not smile.

One day I come to the plateau where I train, and what was a multi-leveled platform with trees and gardens and a peaceful spot is now a blank, flat disc. Nothing there except a pedestal with something sitting in the middle of it — more like a ring, actually. A flat ring on a pedestal. I yell for Tim. He pops out as his hologram avatar and I ask if this is some new test.

He says: no test.

I ask: okay, so what are we doing?

He says: that's up to you. You can continue — or I think you can go home, if you want. If you want to go home, pick up the coin and let's go. If you think you should train some more, turn the coin over and set it back down, and we'll continue.

Aon thinks about it. He's torn. On one hand, he's made so much progress. This place was made for this training. But now that the opportunity is here, the small voice in the back of his head that reminds him he wants to go home becomes a torrent. Almost a painful burning, everywhere.

Between the transformation and all this time training and immersing himself in the civilization's history, he's almost become two people. He's both Aon himself — and Aon, savior of existence, sort of. Having an entire civilization's memories accessible at all times splits him. One version becomes a kind of repository, able to zoom all the way out — almost dispassionate, emotionless — and that version says: you should stay. The best thing for everyone in the long run is to stay until you are completely finished. And the other side of him is the frightened young man who just wants to go home.

He can't reconcile it to a single choice.

So he says: why don't we let fate decide?

Tim scoffs and reminds him — again — that there's no such thing as fate. To which Aon likes to quote back the exact probability of Aon Invictus making the drive they made, using it at exactly the moment they did, with an address so wrong that they popped into a pocket dimension no one's supposed to even know exists, landing on that specific planet among the many in that solar system, and dropping close enough to the city to even know it was there.

Sounds like fate.

Whether you call it probability or fate — it really doesn't matter. I flip the coin while he's busy explaining why fate doesn't exist.

The coin spins on the dais and lands.

And we're going to leave it there. I'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much for joining me. Come back for more Aon and Jack adventures in Jack the Space Dog — Through the Galaxy, Through Dimensions, Adventure Calls, and I Must Go.