NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

From the beginning of his existence, he knew only righteousness. The source of which this derives is his first Assembly with Birdie, an experience in which a meadow of flames emblazed all that was within him; the lines on faces of lifeforms that often strain and warp never formed around his eyes or mouth and P77 set his gaze forth with an intransigent spirit unbeknownst to those who surrounded him.

In human years, we might recognize P77 as ten years old when he first set his eyes upon his first human lifeform, Birdie. In the way a soul adapts to its environment throughout the very temporary and short-lived human lifetime, it feels at home on Vessel 1: an apparatus so technologically advanced it is said to be God. How else should anyone describe it? Vessel 1 is from where the soul came forth and so the soul thrived.

The inhabitants of Vessel 1 made Birdie a spectacle to whichever Host was assigned to her in their first thousand intergalactic years. She was displayed vertically on a glass panel, her limbs floating lightly in the absence of gravity. Even after the successful preservation of her body, the Hosts, by universal law, feared what they could not understand and shifted the duty of examination after the assigned Watcher’s first millennia. Files, held in the depths of Vessel 1’s mainframe, mentioned experiences Watchers had with Birdie that set this precedent. A few Hosts revisited these happenings by reading reports from previous Watchers that comprised a foreign language – singular words they could not translate into their native tongue. The terminology used in the ancient language of the humans wrote: love, freedom, mystery, God. Had they been eradicated over spacetime from the septillion languages spoken throughout the galaxies?

From the moment P77 set eyes on Birdie, he knew she was quintessential of the human race. And when she grew a sixth toe on her right foot, he was stunned and the manifestation of this seemingly ordinary digit stayed locked within him. He did not know it, but this spectacular happening made him feel blessed. He remained poised but the intensity of his feeling was to be expected – the soul was at home and so the passion would endure. Did any other Hosts ever feel these things? He had no clue; these things were never talked about as he was a mere cell in a divine body.

P77’s first attendance at Collection occurred in an atrium with a panoramic view of glistening stars, winking against the infinite abyss in the intergalactic distance. In accordance with The Universal Law of Hierarchy, P77 drowned in the back of the atrium with other comrades who were also at the beginning of their millennia and listened to the findings of the elder Hosts’ assigned specimen.

Examinations and findings in Collection lasted unremittingly over 730 human hours and were gradual, infinitesimal, and verbose yet fundamental and dire to the purpose of Vessel 1. It was all compelling until it wasn’t. Knowing all and all-knowing, Vessel 1, originator and pioneer of all lifeforms knew the nature of their creations, like that of an expectant mother with the maternal gift of special transcendent cognizance that presents an inner knowingness of the features of their fetus before the Genesis of their corporeality; it was all measured with hypothesized trajectories never sidestepping the margin of error, which for the Hosts species, consisted of one dot and many zeros. Collection was high-level maintenance of these ‘parental’ theories as it parallels with the nature of their creations’ evolution. With this practice, it was impossible to be wrong. This rules for everything Vessel 1 has created even in the human soul.

Expectations that are always met rob one the gift of mystery. Specimens take time to change, and so very few elder Hosts had much to say. At the 724th hour, P77 took his place at the atrium’s center, all Hosts and stars watching.

“Birdie, lifeform human, remains preserved and active.” He said the coordinates at which she was found on the planet Earth by Vessel 6 at the deepest depths of the Pacific Ocean. He said Birdie’s height and weight. He said he performed countless tests to analyze and track her body composition and the state of her skeletal structure. He said with their technological infrastructure, he was able to inhabit her body as the blood they pump through it and obtain statistics on her cardiorespiratory, sensory, and cognitive abilities. He said her eyes remain closed, he didn’t say he was afraid to open them. He said her state is WELL, he didn’t say he misses Gatherings and Meditations to be the air that passes through her nose. This was standard procedure, but spacetime became lost to him during Birdie’s upkeeping and P77 was just performing his duty. He said the Type 1 (F) human body remained in its fundamental shape. He said the cognitive function was still in its sphere and the engine was still in its core near the midline of the specimen and an orb of light, known as the SOUL, gleamed adjacent behind a shield made of bone. Then, he said she had two arms, two legs, ten fingers, and ten toes…

He stated the findings of the Watchers who preceded him — two optical orbs with impaired vision, even during the human experience; a growth of follicles on the sphere, four crevices, extremities, and digits – two orifices for waste relief. Humans defined sensory organs, and so P77 used his native tongue to describe the nose, eyes, ears, mouth, and skin and their purpose regarding human design. He said he does what he must for inspections of Birdie to be uninterrupted which involved a plethora of tools laid out before him, and he plucked, cut, probed, and wiped like the finest and most attentive of mothers.

He said these things to the Hosts, new and elder, and while there remained an inert stoicism and a silence only experienced in space, the stars outside the glass dome seemed to become more luminescent, blazing balls of hot gas. As he continued about the human lifeform, Birdie, he heard a sound that he wanted to identify as bells. Everything is an illusion until you bring it to the attention of others. Before his first Collection, Birdie could have been a wild figment of space – even with the records, the Watchers, and all there is to prove her physical existence, he still could be a mere plaything of vast emptiness. But there was nothing he was sharing that was new. Why the need for possessiveness? These are things the elder Hosts have heard before.

After Collection, P77 resided in his room, a structure with four walls, one of which was made of spaceglass so clear as to almost not exist. There, with a view of several thousand galaxies and a gargantuan electric blue starburst that hugged this west wing of Vessel 1, he began Meditations and the passions waned.

The blue light shined on him and cast a shadow on the floor.