NGIS · 2024—

NO GODS IN SPACE

I know the vapour, though I have never breathed it.
Kōd never issued such knowledge. The Learning Grid taught us to maintain the Platform: its systems, our biology, the mission, the aquaponic circuits coupling root beds to the lower reservoirs, the temperature gradients between water and air, the humidity at which inhabited chambers began to hold mist. We learned how to preserve the conditions our bodies required without ever being told where those requirements had come from.
It never spoke of the world that had produced us. Origins served no operational purpose. They belonged neither to maintenance nor to survival.
Spfoβarii survived somewhere Kōd did not reach. Not in the Learning Grid. Not in the routines performed at issuance.
The Platform carried older things: preserved cultural archives no protocol rewrote and no optimization indexed. They were never forbidden. They were simply ignored. Kōd neither recommended nor interpreted them. History survived because someone chose to remember it aloud.
By the time I was issued, nobody who had ever walked beneath those skies remained alive. Even so, someone had left enough of themselves behind to trouble me with sensations I had never earned.

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About
I’m a Romanian-born engineer living in the UK. I spend most of my working life around energy systems and infrastructure, which probably explains why, when I decided to write a novel, I somehow ended up designing an alien civilisation.No Gods in Space is my first book. It began with a few ideas about time, memory and very long journeys, and then got slightly out of hand.I have a daughter, an unreasonable number of unfinished thoughts, and no particularly good explanation for why writing a novel seemed like a sensible thing to do.I’m still working on it.
Marius L. Nasgodineanu