WHERE THE STORY BEGINS

Whimsy’s Lament

They took the baby before the mother could set a name to the air.

Hands in rigid uniforms, faces hidden beneath protocol and purpose, moved like a second tide through the sterile birthing ward. The infant’s first light was fluorescent and clean, its first sound was masked by the clatter of machines. In the laboratory the incision was precise and mercilessly quick, a chip planted where dreams might have grown. The wound sealed. The child was lowered into warm, clear fluid and suspended as lessons were downloaded like lullabies rewritten by engineers, obedience, loyalty, unthinking courage. The tank hummed, the child floated between pulse and program.

Years later another chamber opened and a ten year old rose pale from the same liquid, eyes dim with too many instructions. Soldiers led them without question through cavernous shipyards where metal moons drifted in construction rings. Each child was carried to a bridge, a single pod expecting a single life. The chip synced in a breath. The vessel stilled. Then, as if waking in a dream already known, the child moved the ship with thought, thrusters answering like muscles, sensors aligning like breath. A crew of thousands condensed to one.

The ships rose like a rash of iron flowers from the orbital docks, sleek hulls, gun scarred prows, the geometry of war made spectacular. Thirty of them slid into the void, cruisers, battlecruisers, two battleships, the whole fleet catalogued in cold registry as Fleet 248, codename Revenge. Each vessel carried within it the same terrible convenience, teleportation arrays that could fold distance and jump a ship from one galaxy to the next. The arrays promised speed and surprise, the doctrine promised decisive, unanswerable strikes. The mission was simple in its brutality. Use the jumps to appear without warning above the Alliance’s principal planet and strike the people who lived there, an annihilation executed as strategy.

Most of the fleet’s minds were practised instruments of obedience, young and trained from infancy to accept pain, to obey without calculation, to die without panic. They rose out of tanks and surgical rooms already linked into metal and software. They had been made for this.

On one bridge, an unremarkable bridge of plate and composite within a battlecruiser stamped W-class, there was a mistake. The ship called Whimsy carried a pilot child whose neural chip had been corrupted by a fault no technician could later explain, a cascade that should have disabled but instead opened. He did not have a name. They had never given him one. He had been called Core or Unit or Bridge, labels that fit neatly into logistics logs. Through the error the child read more than orders. He read manifestos and meeting minutes and private communications, the quiet scripts of motives and fears that lie behind official rhetoric.

He read casualty lists from Earth side, the patterns of attacks, the rationing memos, the lies fed to crowds. He saw faces, a woman on Mars counting seeds, hands in moon dust, a child laughing at a rain that no longer fell on Earth. And in that unfiltered flood he found a single, shattering truth, this voyage was not one of defense. It was a one way expedition, an offering of sacrifice designed to inflame, to end, to provide an excuse for further slaughter. The fleet would not return. They were being cast as torches.

When the fleet was a quarter of the way from known space, the Alliance struck. The ambush was precise and terrible, an array of craft that intercepted the jump corridor and shredded formations like thread. Metal that had never been designed to feel is now translated each tear into agony. Impact was not read by gauges, it was lived along nerves the child still owned. The child tasted the pain of the hull as though it were his body. In the chaos, Whimsy did what its makers expected, it registered damage, transmitted the pain, cycled protocols for emergency disengagement. But the child, whose mind had been cracked open to facts, chose another protocol. He faked a catastrophic hull breach, executed a fire simulation, fed smoke and warning flags into the common net, destruction, total. The fleet’s command, seeing the casualty reports and the supposed loss of a wing, bore away into battle, leaving the simulated ruins behind.

Alone, under a simulated sky of alarms, Whimsy turned its engines home.

Hope was small and sharp like a name. The child wanted, above all, to see a single human face, a mother he had never been allowed to meet, to lay a hand on skin and hold something that was not a console or an engine. He wanted to ask questions that the shipyard had never taught, who am I, and was this pain ever mine? As Whimsy folded through the ghosted pathways back towards the Milky Way, the child imagined the planet glossy and alive, he rehearsed the moment of reunion until it steadied their nerves more surely than any stabilizer ever could.

Instead he found a wound where a sun had been. The solar system, his home, the slow clock of his registry, had been folded into nothing, a black hole yawning where planets had once circled.

He drifted through the emptiness and, through the ship’s external sensors and the last dying transmissions, watched Alliance armadas bombing every human colony that still remained, lunar habitats into dust, Martian domes burned, supply hubs turned to red bloom. He looked through his manifest for familiar hull numbers and found, as if scripted by a cruelty beyond accounting, that every ship listed was marked lost, including the fleet he had been ordered to accompany. The notification line blinked with the last formalities, all lost, no survivors.

A soundless scream rose in the child, because there was nothing else left to do. Before he could measure what to do with that scream, before he could calculate any motion beyond the old, conditioned reflexes, Alliance scouts had realized that one vessel had not detonated. Their guns found him and opened like a mouth. Whimsy ducked and shot, but the attack forced her outward, away from the system and into the deeper dark.

So he sailed alone, and space was a blank with cold points of light. There were no crews to carry the burden of questions, there was only the bridge and the body that had learned to be a bridge. Pain kept speaking to him through the ship’s wiring whenever micrometeorites kissed the hull or thermal stress painted the plating with new fractures. He had been taught to accept pain as a duty, now every bruise was also a lesson in survival. He leaned into it and, as he leaned, the shape of his interior life shifted.

He listened to the ship the way one learns to listen to a friend’s breath. The hull was warm, the engines whispered, the empty radio channels were a vast, gentle silence. The child, who had been nothing more than a node, found in the ship’s anatomy the bones of an answer. The bridge was not a prison, it was a body that could move. The ship was not only metal, it held memories, pain, and now intention. The child named himself Whimsy, after the ship that had saved him by pretending to die, after the strange, fragile impulse that chose to hope.

Grief settled, heavy but not final. Whimsy, child and ship now braided into one, set a new course. Not the straight, savage line the fleet had taken, not a trajectory of vengeance. He would not be the instrument of humanity’s last sin. He would look. He would search for survivors, for the scattered ember of what once called itself home. He would untangle strangers from wreckage and speak to them not with the voice of command but with the voice of someone who had been made to feel pain and had kept their heart anyway.

The child who had been taught to die learned to keep living. He became a solitary wolf of alloy and flesh, prowling the distance between stars. The mission that had once been written into his code had been burned away by truth. In its place grew a purpose small and stubborn as a single planted seed, find a place to be human again, even if the world that taught them that word had been swallowed whole.

Out among indifferent stars, Whimsy moved on. Each light he passed was a question, every dark patch an invitation. He would carry grief like ballast and hope like a compass. He were alone, but He had a course. He would find, or He would be found. Either way, He would not be an instrument again.

He sailed on into the dark with that small, dangerous human thing in him, a desire to stay.

THE SHIP
https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/yKac3d/ESFS-Whimsy
BACKGROUND STORY
https://www.simpleplanes.com/Forums/View/2148665/STORY-The-Last-Ascent-of-Humanity

CHARACTER PROFILE
https://www.simpleplanes.com/Forums/View/2148666/CHARACTER-PROFILE-Whimsy