On board Ship, traveling through the depths of time, a young girl, now becoming a woman, seeks an answer to a prophetic dream. She thinks she’s the only one to have such a dream, to face such a terrible dilemma. Right or wrong. Light or dark. White or black. Which one am I? She’s finding her identity, a right of passage anyone would on Planet Earth, except she’s not on a planet. She’s in a spaceship traveling to a faraway place.
In the small village of Roann, lives a community of AIs whose job is teach, guide and enlighten. Called the ‘christs’, they are adorned in grey cloaks and number only a few, as the Knights have invaded to destroy them. For now, they keep Ship operating so that it transcends to the next universe; this one replaced, and in the new one, God is created so that God can create habitable planets so that we may all live.
The young girl’s mother is very sad. Both her children leave her in emotional poverty. Loneliness. First her son, Johann, the young girl’s brother, who left for the Dream Field, didn’t come back. Now her youngest daughter seeks to do the same. The young girl believes her brother is either a knight or cannibal. His departure reminds her of dad leaving, a bad thought. But now she must leave to figure out her dream, leaving her mother just like him, with plates set on the table but no children to use them. A mother’s love cannot be unrequited. That world is a veritable hell.
The local priest asks about the dream, but the litter girl falls into the sky instead, head first, only to realize that map’s drawn her into a neuro-simulation of the Ship she lives in. When he learns about the dream, he realizes the young girl must travel to Roann to find her salvation.
He doesn’t tell her that everyone has had this dream where a black knight approaches to destroy her, while sleeping, but she awakens, he disappears and, all around her Ship is enfeebled and dying, but she sees a light and walks towards it, and when she does, she recognizes the landscape around her. Telling the priest points to Roann, a small village with a monastery in it. She needs to know if she’s good or evil.
A ship with a human colony in it, travelling through the stars, to get to the next universe to create God so that habitable planets may form. A young girl, becoming a woman, travelling to a monastery, to figure out if she’s good or evil.
This impoverished human colony Meynard has created, can barely hold on to its civility. Ravenous cannibals roaming the street is indication enough of social breakdown, let alone the dire poverty. All that’s left is a bare notion of right or wrong, light or dark, or black or white. Which side are you on? That’s what drives the young girl, now becoming a woman. Not a search for her father, her brother or even food. She needs to know if she’s a good person in a horrible world.
But there’s more to life that black or white. Nothing is as it seems. Life contains no absolutes. On the way to the village to find the monastery, she encounters knights who want to rape her. But one of them holds them back, her brother Johann, who is among the knights killing the christs. Is Johann good or evil? He protects her, but slaughters the innocent christs?
The christs tell her that everyone on Ship gets the dream, but no one has travelled like her. The priests shoots a look of disdain before she leaves. Does he regret not going on the journey? Would their poverty hurt less if they all travelled to the monastery to learn about good or evil?
With dead AI corpses lying around her and listening to the shrieks of human knights slaughtering the rest of them, she realizes that the world doesn’t contain absolutes. Not the universe. Not God. Not Ship. Not the monastery or the priest or her mother or her brother or even herself. No one is purely good or evil. No black or white exists, only greys. She doesn’t know what else to say.
Equinox: : either of the two points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic / Merriam Dictionary Online
“Equinox” by Yves Meynard. 1992. Tesseracts 4. Beach Holme Publishers Limited.