EP6 The Bedouin
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Hi everybody, and welcome back. If you're on Episode 5, I have to feel like you at least like this story. I am Aon, and I am your guide through the multidimensional, galaxy-spanning world of Jack the Space Dog.
When we left the story last, I was standing on the plateau of the training area with Tim — the AI that guides me — and Jack. Tim had asked whether I wanted to stay and finish the full training with the combat system, or whether I was controlled enough that I could go back. His suggestion was to stay. I, of course, wanted to go back, but I was conflicted. I'd started to feel the pull of something larger — a calling I'd half-decided to be a part of.
I said: let's let fate decide. Tim said there's no such thing as fate. We argued, and I flipped a coin anyway.
I left off last episode with the coin hitting the dais in the middle of the training area and spinning.
As it spins — and as Tim is trying to argue why I should just make a choice — the coin floats off the dais, stops on its edge, slams back down, cracks the stone, and melts.
From very close behind me, I hear a voice say: What are you doing?
I jump out of my skin. When I turn around, I'm looking at a bluish-green hologram of a very tall humanoid — someone I recognize immediately. He's the figure I'd been thinking of only as the Visitor. At the end of the Fulcrum — the change I went through — I saw his visions. He was the last prince of that civilization. The only one who stayed on the planet while everyone else made the shift into the pocket dimension. He finished the project alone. And now he's standing in front of me with a very disapproving look on his face.
[the visitor] I asked you, he says, what are you doing?
I freeze.
[the visitor]: Let me start over. My name is Callum Viviam. You think of me as the Visitor, as the Prince. Why are you flipping a coin over a choice?
I try to explain that I was stuck. He cuts through it:
Never rely on luck. Luck is a thing that happens to you. Everything is a choice. Not making a choice is a choice. Make a choice.
I tell him what's pulling me in both directions — I want to go back, but the other option is for the good of the mission. He shakes his head.
You're looking at it all wrong. You think you have to choose based on what's good for this or that. Thinking of fate as though you were chosen — get that out of your head now. You weren't chosen. No one was chosen for this. A path was laid, plans were made, and someone eventually fit it. No one reached into the universe and said, it shall be you. What you are is a statistical outlier. Through your choices — nothing to do with any of this — through your choices, you led yourself here. That you were able to engage with the system, that all of these statistical impossibilities lined up at once — that's how you came to be here. But that's not destiny. That's your choices mattering.
So why, all of a sudden, do you want to give them up?
I laugh. Because it hasn't felt like it's gone that well.
Your decisions and what you do matter, he says. Luck will be there, but you can't plan for luck. Either choice is a valid choice — because you're the one making it. Make a choice.
With that, he snaps out of existence.
Bye, Cal, I say. I've already forgotten his name.
I tell Tim I'm ready to go back. I always knew — the whole time the coin was spinning, I was making jokes because I was nervous, because I really wanted it to land my way.
Tim shifts from his usual floating sphere into his human form, winks at me, and says: You're going to like this next part. He opens a doorway in the middle of the air. After you.
As I step through, I tell him: that Cal is intense. Right?
Cal: I'm still here.
Cal is still with us. He explains that he won't always be there — but that the point of having three of us is that Aon, Tim, and Jack each represent something the others can't replicate. Tim processes through logic colored by a human outlook. I make and do and decide, but I'm always in my head. Jack doesn't think — Jack reacts. Jack just does the next thing he knows is right. Together, the three of us make something new. Not just proximity. A new whole.
That was part of the point of the system, Cal says. We needed a completely new outlook. Our own echo chamber had failed us. We hadn't managed to do anything meaningful to fix the situation.
He then turns to Tim and scolds him for letting me flip a coin. Small decisions are just as important as large ones. They're all decisions.
I've been so busy watching Tim get dressed down that I haven't noticed where the gateway has brought us.
I'm walking backward, watching Tim get lectured — he's back in his sphere form, but somehow his color has shifted in a way that reads as embarrassed — and I'm finding it funny because I've been getting similar treatment every day in training.
Then I trip over a rock, fall off a short ledge, and land flat on my back with the wind knocked out of me.
Jack helps me up. I turn around to see what I've tripped over.
I'm standing at the edge of a massive canyon — a deep well between mountain ranges. At the bottom, a towering structure rises, circled by perfect concentric rings spreading outward like something between a quarry and an orbit. Above it, the largest ship I have ever seen.
Inside the ship: massive rings stretching from one mountain range to the other. Three sets. One around the meridian, one around the vertical axis, one ninety degrees from that. Together they form a spherical cage of slowly rotating puzzle-piece tubes. The ones closest to me feel almost within reach — but I can tell I'm missing the scale. They only seem close because they're so vast. The ones on the far side are lost in atmospheric haze.
The ship is hovering. It looks ancient. Made of the same material as the city — the same stylistic language — but inert. Like it's made of stone but has no life in it. It looks dead.
Cal says: Oh, this is the good part. I'll see you in a minute.
Tim floats up in front of me and says: May I present to you the last, the only, the not-working ship that will take you home.
I ask what it's called. He rattles off a long string in the native language of this civilization — and while I can understand it, I haven't learned to say it out loud. I think about maritime tradition: when a ship becomes yours, you rename it. It's bad luck to sail without a name.
I look at Jack. What are we going to name the ship?
An image rises in my mind — hooded figures moving across a desert, hauling blocks of salt.
[I thought]: Oh. Bedouin. He means Bedouin. It's Bedouin.
Tim protests. It already has a very special name. I tell him I can't pronounce it.
It's Bedouin. That's it.
Tim explains that I'm the key — the same connection I have to the city, to everything. I bring up the interface: the three sets of rings that appear in the paintings, surrounding me when I use the technology I've been given. A platform appears for Jack and me, along with all the ship's readouts. Everything looks dormant. Lots of windows, lots of stats — all of it dead.
me: How do I make it start?
TIM: You're the key. The tech recognizes you. Put your hand on the screen.
I do.
A low hum begins. Lights move up the tower in sequence. The rings stop their listless drift and begin to move with rigid, clockwork precision — synchronized, counter-rotating, shifting into double helixes of interlocking segments.
Cal and Tim both say: This next part is the fun part. Hit the button.
Me: What button? There are no buttons.
Cal: Make a button. Then hit it.
Everything in this interface is whatever I want it to be. There's no button because I hadn't thought of one. Once I think of one, there it is.
I manifest a comically large, completely silly blue button with "GO" on it.
I push it.
The rings expand out of view, break into fragments, and slam together. The collision creates a massive focused gravity wave at the center of the ship — and from that, a tiny point of light begins. It grows. It becomes a small, captured sun, contained within a pocket field at the heart of the vessel.
This is the drive.
Let me rewind for a moment.
This is not originally a battleship. This is an ark ship — one of the ships the Atlians used to evacuate their planets before moving everything into the pocket dimension. These ships weren't just built to carry millions of people. They were built to move organisms. Whole biomes. Flora and fauna, preserved intact.
Inside the ship — despite its massive scale — are gateways to small pocket containments, each holding entire ecosystems. This is their backup for the backup. If they couldn't return to their solar system after the shift, they could seed a new one somewhere else. Nothing would be lost. They had fail-safes on top of fail-safes.
When I say the ship is massive — it looks like a small continent standing on its end between the mountains. Its base reaches into the lowest part of the valley. Its tip scrapes the edge of the atmosphere. It is very hard to understand how large it is.
And now all of it is on.
I use one of the short-distance jump gates to move us inside. Jack, Tim, and I step onto the ship — and Cal too, in whatever way Cal is present.
A note about Cal: what's here isn't actually Callum Viviam. What remains is a neural imprint — a digital recording of his thought processes and life, given the ability to continue making decisions in the way his neurology would have made them. Not Cal in digital form. A model trained entirely on his biology, his history, his mind. And he knows this. He knows he's not Cal.
Anywhere this civilization's technology exists, he can manifest — and, we'll learn later, so can many other personalities from that era. But that's a much longer story for another time.
On the ship — which you can see in the painting Bedouin — there's a pill-shaped section at the rear. The whole vessel forms the An symbol, the mark of this civilization, lying on its side. The pill is the operations center. The rest is living space, cargo holds, and the biomes.
And the ship is full.
It looked dormant from the outside, but it's been running for hundreds of thousands of years. The biomes that were originally placed inside — carefully constructed, man-made ecosystems — have been left alone long enough to populate and expand. As each ecosystem grows, so does its containment. Some of them are now whole jungles. Whole biospheres. They've had longer to develop than human civilization has existed.
For reference: it took humans only a couple hundred thousand years to go from not using tools to landing on the moon. Consider how much has changed inside some of these containments in the time they've been ready to go somewhere — and didn't go anywhere.
This was Cal's ship. He stayed behind to make sure the transition went well. While every other ship carried copies of these biomes, he had them too — his own backup. If something happened to the others, he could leave and carry what remained. He obviously didn't. He chose to stay and finish the project. The others were all destroyed in a surprise attack by the Sect. He was the last. His ship was the absolute final option for preservation — an entire civilization distilled into a single vessel.
He didn't have to do it. The planet was fine. But he was the only one left.
On the bridge, things start making sense to me. The knowledge of this civilization is somewhere in my mind — it's all there, but without context it's inaccessible. Seeing the bridge is like finding the file. Oh. I know how this works.
There are two forms of travel: distance travel, and dimensional travel. Same drive, different operation.
I tell Tim to get the ship ready to move out of this dimension. He immediately starts complaining in the background — I haven't even looked over the ship, don't even know what's in it — and he's right, but I'm not listening. I'm tunnel vision. I'm about to leave. I pull up screens — projections, because that's how I like to work. I don't need to use my hands for this. I can do it in my head. But I've spent my whole life doing things with my hands, and there's something satisfying about having movable screens everywhere.
Me: All right. Let's go.
TIM: Go where?
Me: Out of here.
TIM: Out of here is the rest of existence. Where do you want to go?
I thought about it. I have dead drops. From my old life — from when I was smuggling artifacts off these planets, I know remote locations in out-of-the-way asteroid clusters that I used for quiet transmissions. I pick the furthest one I know. Away from my home world, away from anything I remember being active. This is a big ship. Bigger than anything I've encountered. I don't want anyone to see it before I'm ready.
We open the gate — half bubble, half tunnel, a donut-fold in the fabric of space — and spaghettify.
We arrive in the middle of the asteroid cluster.
Which immediately starts bouncing off the hull.
Me: What are you doing?
You told me to go from A to B, Tim says. You didn't ask me to check what was in the way.
He's always a little bit of a jerk about this kind of thing.
The debris settles. Nothing's damaged. I find the communication nodes — the tight-beam frequencies I used back when I needed to say I have the stuff, make sure the buyer's ready without anyone listening in. Tim works out the technical side of bridging this ship's systems to those nodes.
I pull up the mic.
I say one word.
Victus.
The static shifts. A squelch. And then:
Aon?
We'll leave it there.
Thank you for coming on the journey with me. New episodes every month — if you like listening, I like telling it. Audio-only episodes are on Spotify. Time-lapses and upcoming works are on Instagram. And if you want a piece of the Jack the Space Dog universe, aonalta.com has t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, and new products coming soon.
Adventure calls, and I must go.