The Captain’s Machine

Note: this tale of dream-fiction was originally published on 11 January 2024, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.

The Captain’s Machine

By Christopher Deliso

What there confronted me, aslumber, resembled nothing more than a Mechanism of Antikythira, though only by a species of metaphor, for—I grow weary of the spectacle—instead, let us start with the captain, if indeed he was one.

I did not feel endangered by this congenial fellow of dry wit. I call him captain, though he was perhaps just an officer; and I never saw him steer, nor offer his name.

As for me? I hold no navy post, and am not even English. My own commercial ship—seized, yes! It comes back, slowly—that would explain my presence on his ship, in the now-then of the captain’s comfortable quarters.

I occupied a beige couch like a seal on an iceberg, neck craned forward at the captain. He swiveled on his wood-and-brass seat and tapped at what was his difference engine; almost, I thought, his computer. I supposed this made him a different sort of engineer… Like the above-stated moss-wracked ancient device, it was overhung and clustered with shells and barnacles, with green and purplish needled bracken… a most extraordinary exterior, even though its screen seemed glassily modern.

I stared beyond him, at a wide glass partition that caught my eye. It led to another part of the ship, perhaps the saloon; there, I spied people stood up like cocktail guests, some in uniform, others in plainclothes. They seemed totally unaware of us on the other side of the partition.

Similarly preserving our splendid detachment, to our left was another glass partition, having the same magical effect. Yet this partition also comprised part of the ship’s outer hull. Beyond it, I saw people gathered on a pier; some were gazing at the sea-glitter under afternoon sun. Again, though the captain did not explain, I understood some confidentiality in these constructions; the ingenuous ship was built so that those beyond the glass partitions could neither see nor hear us inside the ship’s central brain.

“Good man,” the captain said, congenially telepathic. “You’re learning how this ship works. Taking the lay of the land, as it were.”

Mystified, I watched the captain type at his sea-encrusted computer. He commented about the Aegean; were we indeed still in those waters?

“Can I help?” I said, remembering my station in life. I requested a beer, to think better, and soon received stout. Perhaps it is remarkable, as a dream, to note its taste was clear and of the sharp export variety… I gazed upon the machine’s strange screen, now overhung with tentacles of octopi slithering from behind and over its top… I drank again, amazed.

This machine I must describe, for it was no off-the-shelf model.

The captain’s computer screen, more standard than its ornate and living encasement, was divided into four quarters of information. The information ordered there was unlike on any screen I knew; I assumed it unique to the captain’s mysterious profession. I was transfixed; I regret having asked only for beer. I thought, perhaps, salad—

“Cabbage?” the captain roared, echoing my request. “Mate, you’re not far off there! Have another go!”

I relented from offering another guess but spied furtively, knowing I was not meant to look into either his business or the future. But there it was, as plain as day.

Instead of paragraphs of text, the words were bunched into quarters on the screen, captain’s quarters, left and right, as above so below; intersecting this drawing and quartering of text were sub-titles between each section.

The captain’s keyboard was equally unusual; it extended into the air, rather than resting flat on the glass table. To my horror, I saw that each lettered key was formed of rounded ruby or jade, and hung at the tips of symmetrical and elongated skeletal fingers—the hideous hands of some long-drowned buccaneer. Even the keyboard on this thing has active memory, I recall thinking…

At least there were not many keys, I thought, shuddering. Reading my mind again, the captain sighed.

“A good fully-intact keyboard’s a rare find these days,” he said, laughing. “We must make do with what we can patch together.”

The letter rows were of digits, which continued upwards and outwards. Each key contained two or three or four letters, with a larger numeral separating them. For example:

IO3PA

And so on down the alphabet.

As I pondered the strange contraption, the captain peppered me with questions as he typed. He mentioned that he’d heard the islanders were suspicious of the Turks; he blamed the latter for some underhanded business involving a sabotaged undersea cable. I looked at his computer and what it needed to run on, and thought it all over.

“Oh, that’s just like the Kalymniots,” I demurred. “Lazy islanders, giving you a good story, sir. Probably just no sponges down there that day. Maybe there heads were dizzy from the diving, too.”

“You reckon?” the captain said, surprised.

“Certainly,” I said, finishing the beer. He called to some unseen person, or force for another bottle, which soon manifested. The situation became stranger. I drank.

The captain inserted a small cylindrical key into a hole on the computer’s side, through a barnacle clinging to the machine’s edge; out popped a small circular disk. The captain took it neatly, like a surgeon, and dropped it into a white paper case with a see-through front. He pressed a button and this ‘envelope’ passed under a writhing, tentacle that slathered it shut, as if with imperial undersea seal. He placed it on the couch. I intuited it was for me.

I was still marveling at this peculiar technology when the captain suddenly rose and slid the glass door open. He walked onto the pier after shutting the glass partition behind him. Somehow, we alone still could see and hear each other despite that no one else could; I intuited that the outside world of the pier might also be in another time…

For verily, he looked younger there. On the pier, he greeted a woman who I understood to be his wife, pushing a pram. He lifted up a little girl in a dress from it, and gave her an affectionate fatherly kiss before placing her back. After speaking with his wife, the captain re-entered and sat behind his resonant, living machine. I had of course not dared even think to touch it or otherwise spy on its unknown abilities, clinging fast to the beer instead.

By this point, it was requiring increased concentration to remain in that place; I feared any lapse would end the dream and consign it to oblivion, before I knew where I had been, or what I had really seen. Perhaps sensing my concern, he spoke.

“We appreciate your assistance in helping to refine the Medusa-111 system’s organic search functionality, Mr. K_,” the captain said, smiling and eying the envelope on my iceberg beside me. “I trust you’ll know where to take that.”

I had no idea, actually, but trusted my intuition would guide me.

“May I finish my beer before leaving?” I asked. Somehow I feared the passage through the impenetrable, unseen glass to the outside world of the pier, to where—and when—it led.

“I see no reason why not!” the captain thundered, and in the shrillness of his laughter I could swear I heard an echo from his computer’s coterie of innumerable inhabitants—the fearful symmetry of octopi and mollusks and starfish and anemones… Unsafe boats, these sacrificial forms, I thought, beside this seabed of advanced organic search. Finally, I drank the beer and considered my assignment of where—or when—I would be going…

Firmly clutching my envelope, which I perhaps would not know how to wield, I went out onto the pier.