Into the Blue

Robby Thomas
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  • Fiction

When the sky falls, the city runs for the Arks, the hundred-year-old evacuation shuttles everyone spent a lifetime mocking, kept polished as a monument to a doomsday that never came. Mary Solomon, seventeen, daughter of the richest man in the city, never makes it aboard. She drowns within sight of the lifeboats. And, something is waiting for her in the deep. Something with no name in any record, because it is older than records, older than form, older than light. It asks her for rescue. Then it changes her.

  1. Jul 18

    16: Sky

    ## Episode descriptionIn a room no map has ever carried, a shadowed man watches his screens draw new machines, and the thing that destroyed Sangara comes home to report. Two words close the ledger of a city: it is time. Prepare for stage three.

    16: Sky

  2. Jul 14

    23: Genesis

    Jonah wakes strapped to a table under a ceiling of green lights pulsing slow as a resting heart, held by restraints with a fitted gentleness that frightens him more than cruelty would. A file of machines takes station around him like ushers. And a tall, spare, perfectly still man introduces himself with a name Jonah has never heard — and then reaches up, almost fondly, to the hinge of a familiar face, and shows him what the kindest night of his journey was actually made of.

    23: Genesis

  3. Jul 14

    21: WhiteOut

    A little after midday, the tracks lead Jonah into a battlefield: a dozen Sangara droids dropped in a ring through the trees, every wreck facing inward at something that went through the whole of them anyway. Then the cold stops being weather and becomes a tenant, and the last quarter mile of his day has only two outcomes in it — and the fire he staggers into belongs to two men he has met before, one of whom answers his frozen question with the strangest grammar in the world: not

    21: WhiteOut

  4. Jul 14

    19: Human Element

    At first light, in a frost-silvered camp in the north country, Hannah counts her people and comes up one short — and the oldest thing alive tells her, without waking properly, that Mary went to find her boyfriend and she'll be back. He is never mistaken out loud. Hannah builds the fire up anyway, and stands facing south for a long time.

    19: Human Element

  5. Jul 14

    18: The Game

    Two days north of the burning horizon, the country goes white and quiet. A boy who came as a guide tells the fire how the machines taught his village their one simple lesson — those who did not fight survived — and a two-hundred-year-old woman says good night to everyone by name. Then a warm, deliberate hand settles over Mary's on the log, and the oldest thing left alive says: come with me, there is something I want to show you.

    18: The Game

  6. Jul 14

    17: Tartarus

    A hundred years ago, in a courtroom built for an empire, nine tired judges sentence the four biggest names of the war: the general, the infiltrator, the factory chief, and Marcus Clayton — head of weapons engineering, father of the machine called One-Zero-One. The investors who paid for it all get something shorter. They are given to the machine they bought, in a concrete room built in four days for one afternoon's use — and then, in the same room, on the same chains, the city takes its executioner apart piece by patient piece. The four are made to watch. Then they're mailed to the farthest of the orbital prisons, a rock past the moon named for the pit under hell.

    17: Tartarus

  7. Jul 11

    22: Plessuan

    Hew solders a voice into the armor — microphone in the helmet, an aerial he's moderately proud of — and Albert delivers the collective's one commandment to its new pair of wings: you see for us, we think for you, nobody is alone in this arrangement. Sarah punches through the cloud deck with a whoop the whole camp hears, hangs at the top of the sky, and for one entire minute forgets to be anyone.Then a huddle of fur-clad strangers wanders into camp with news several days stale and secondhand: a girl who talked like a city, a small one who talked like a grandmother, a tall one the fire seemed to like — walking north at the missiles. An old man who has never owned a map lifts his arm and points through the trees, through the ridge, through everything, at the place itself. And the crack of Sarah's going rolls back off the ridges like small thunder, carrying Albert's eyes away with her — out of counsel, out of the collective, out of reach.A valley to the north sits on hot springs, warm all winter, fog standing between two mountains like a curtain. Behind the curtain: terraced fields, a steaming river, tidy roofs — and through them, out of them, something sleek and dead black that has grown among the houses like knives in a drawer of spoons, and six fields of silos with their mouths shut, pointed at the sky. The two guides look down at the transformation of everything they have ever known, say the name of their home like a word over a grave, and then walk straight down into it — while the boy behind them discovers what it means that they aren't running, and what "now that we have you, we'll be safe" might actually mean, and how it feels when the machines send wires instead of bullets.Because they don't take prisoners. Which means somebody down there wants him alive. And is expecting him.And at the front step of the largest structure in the valley, hard enough to ring the earth like a bell, the second bearer of the gear comes down standing out of her own sound, lifts her face to the black doors, and says the last two words of the episode.

    22: Plessuan

  8. Jul 10

    20: Without a Machine

    At first light, in a frost-silvered camp in the north country, Hannah counts her people and comes up one short — and the oldest thing alive tells her, without waking properly, that Mary went to find her boyfriend and she'll be back. He is never mistaken out loud. Hannah builds the fire up anyway, and stands facing south for a long time.In the ruins of Sangara, two old men meet across forty years of history: the doctor who remembers a betrayal, and the toolmaker who says the word back to him flat and asks what any Sangarian scientist is doing lecturing anyone in this particular graveyard. Between them stands a tracking monitor with a motionless marker on it, and an argument about a grounded boy that everyone loses — because while they argue about whether Jonah would be insane enough to disconnect from the gear without tools, without help, without anesthetic, Jonah is lying in a crater a day north, looking at the hundreds of hair-fine wires grown into his body, telling himself it's a bandaid. A very, very committed bandaid.Above all of it, on a station promenade with the whole burning earth in the window, a man in a suit reports to Jairus Solomon that the sky has no paper on his daughter — and turns down a blank check, and promises the turning world he's coming back down.What the search party finds over the rise is the best weapon in the hemisphere lying open in a field like something hatched, bootprints walking away north — and what happens next is an argument Albert finally loses twice in one morning. A syringe of deep blue, a count of three, a key-pin turning in its collar — and the armor sits up out of its crater with someone new behind the visor, who looks at the sky and understands, at last, why Jonah flew away from everyone.

    20: Without a Machine
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About

When the sky falls, the city runs for the Arks, the hundred-year-old evacuation shuttles everyone spent a lifetime mocking, kept polished as a monument to a doomsday that never came. Mary Solomon, seventeen, daughter of the richest man in the city, never makes it aboard. She drowns within sight of the lifeboats. And, something is waiting for her in the deep. Something with no name in any record, because it is older than records, older than form, older than light. It asks her for rescue. Then it changes her.

Information

  • Creator
    Robby Thomas
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Robby Thomas
  • Show Website
    Into the Blue