Cold Heart

'Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say,' on Earth that blue, green planet, third out from a star, they called the 'sun' in one of the languages that was still operational to the end of the 2100s. But nobody knew better than 'Clyde' just how very wrong that 'fact' was as he screamed and tumbled his way back in ever decreasing orbits, to that light years away distant orb he had once called 'home'.

His reconstructed vocal cords could not help it. He screamed exactly as his predecessors had done, screeching, swinging and fighting in that long extinct fauna called trees. A Scream in exactly the same pitch as these chimp ancestors had shrieked against predators, against each other, teeth bared as they descended from these trees eons ago and started to slowly walk upright on back legs.

'Clyde' was now an X0008 re-rendered construct, the 8th model so far attempted, as had been explained to him repeatedly in mindlink by the patient Imagers of the LLaix. But 'Clyde' was forever unique in being made from mammal humanoid DNA from a far galaxy the LLaix did not know and his reconstruct would always 'scream' when triggered. Whether in fear or anger or warning, his vocal chords would tighten reflexively and produce a Scream sound though the real emotion felt in the moment was now substantially lessened by the LLaix rational light mind patterns linking into his homosapien core.

He knew these facts, all fact like the millions of facts and data that processed inside him instinctively as well as abstractly in a cold distant mind as vast as the vacuum in which he now circled at speeds no humanoid had ever moved at; had ever envisaged moving at.

He was both the object travelling at near speed of light and the viewer high in the mindlink, looking down on a tiny 'Clyde' reconstruct with strange but familiar appendages, glistening vision globes... 'eyes' he remembered almost instantly the long forgotten word in a 'face'... and the appendage words returned as well...legs, feet, arms, hands...

He knew the Llaix were with him in this dense darkness, the entire hive planet of Light L.A.I.X minds travelled with him or rather they were the light by which he travelled. They tried to calm the reconstructed human mind as the more developed LLight species could continually override his vast mind, especially the huge prefrontal cortex had the capacity to just slide into cognitive dissonance and accept the Llaix mind link by using the 94% his past species had never got round to fully developing.

L.A.I.X mindlinks forged links of understanding and depth that humanity had never reached as too many of the species stayed in the knee jerk cerebellum survival lobe of fight or flight and with it fear, aggression, violence.

But 'Clyde' mused...No human of his era, maybe any era could have ever envisaged such an encounter of a long dead re-construct with a species of what? Of LLight; of waves, radio and magnetic waves that were the 'alien', the 'familiar' of every particle in the expanding and contracting universe.

And though two 'species' minds merged a tentative acceptance in his X0008 outer reconstructed frame, it really didn't help much to know all these facts around consciousness, communication, memory and human intelligence for the primordial fear resurfaced with each wild loop in an inky dark of a universe that no Earth mammal or reptile had ever been designed or evolved to travel in.

Scream

Light calming

Scream

Light calming

Scream

The Llaix...Light L.A.I.X sent the light waves out again and again in rhythmic fractals, interlocking waves like a throbbing drum beat, they could be heard in the jet black nothing of space to 'species' of waves, particles of light sound, dark sound and Clyde knew that in every fibre of his screaming being.

No mammal homosapiens could hear the space screams, maybe other earth species could have, he corrected his thought, for he remembered the millions of species rendered extinct but never really 'known' by the sapiens and certainly never communicated with.

Maybe the vast life web of Earth species could have heard screams in space for all the focus had ever been on humans. Yet he now knew some 'entities' could hear that 'scream', he questioned his knowledge for they were listening to his reconstructed vocal cords scream over and over as he left the Kuiper belt to at last enter in freefall light circles, the solar system he never thought he would 'see' or 'hear'.

'Why?' his sapiens mind screamed over the Llaix 'Why?' Why had his long gone ashes been sent out by a humanity 10000s? of years gone? dead? extinct? he did not know? Why had they sent them out past the planet he remembered 'discovering' as a young 'man' on 'February 18th 1930' in the 'Lowell Observatory', the facts, memories raced in his mind, some retaining no sense, especially dates and names; but he remembered vividly that tiny planet called 'Pluto' he never really got to see in detail, that 9th orb last out before the Kuiper Belt.

He, that 'Clyde' had passed to ash and dust long before the 2005 astronomy debate around planet Pluto and its contested 2006 demotion to solar system 'debris' as the word 'planet' got redefined into humanity's endless naming of all they perceived. He certainly never imagined the NASA flypast sending back incredible images of the stunning cold heart of Pluto, its frozen expanse in the centre of the space debris-planet-space object now named after him, in that 2015 New Horizon space probe.

Nobody could have foreseen an encounter with this interspace species and their ability to reconstruct humanoid semblance, then painfully reanimate cortex reptile brain, the frontal lobe cortex to allow memory to flood back as he looked down with mind eyes at the casket in his reconstructed appendages, his new mind forging links to try and understand an inscription on a container that 'Clyde' could no longer even really relate to let alone understand. Pluto?

Clyde screamed

Scream

Light calming

Scream

Light calming

Scream

Clyde and the Llaix looked down on the floating, tumbling X0008 Humanoid Re-construct, a tiny object in the vacuum of space as it started the descent to a blue, green planet , third out from a star in Galaxy 2080441 and in its long limbed appendages it clutched a metal container with the inscription

"Interred herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the Solar System's 'third zone'. Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906–1997)"

Scream...