Transition, p.1
TRANSITION, page 1
TRANSITION
Book Three of the Narrator Cycle
Ian Patterson
Copyright © 2026 by Ian Patterson
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Ian Patterson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Book Cover & Illustration by Barış Şehri: https://www.sehribookdesign.com/
Editing by Emil Ottoman: https://emilottoman.substack.com/
Proofreading by Colleen Reimer
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9909170-4-0
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9909170-5-7
— First published edition, 2026 —
For anyone who ever wanted to stop.
This book is for you.
Keep going.
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”Zhuangzi
One
Micah
“Itried to kill myself last year.”
Micah says this while rolling a lit cigarette between his fingers, a smile on his lips, a flippant statement made with the reckless abandon of someone certain to be misunderstood. That the meaning will be lost on the beautiful face he’s speaking to. What was his name again? Michael? Vincent? The dark eyes of the other man squint, and his mouth quirks upward at one corner.
Alpha station—where people come together. Micah hears the advertisement again and grimaces. There is a particular loneliness in communicating with mostly non-native speakers. Then again, there’s a different loneliness in communicating with native speakers too.
“Are you… hunter, then?” His English is thick and slow, the corners rounded by a heavy foreign accent.
“Yes, of experiences and meaningless life lessons, mostly.”
Oh Micah, how true these words are. I see your inner self on display. I see you running across the sand, striving to learn. What are you? Why are you? I want to know.
The brows of his companion crinkle together. Was it Liu? Was that his surname? He just said it, why do I never listen? Was it Hsieh? Micah takes a swig from his warming bottle of beer and crowns it with a long drag from his bummed cigarette. Fuck it, I wouldn’t have remembered tomorrow anyways.
“You cannot hunt here,” his companion responds after some time, clearly confused.
Fuck, this is dismal. We’re in the middle of space on a mechanical bubble of artificial gravity and reprocessed air, flying around in the orbit of a home world all of us want to forget. The beer we’re drinking is probably, somehow, made from our own recycled piss. No, of course there isn’t hunting here.
“Look, did you want to come back to my place tonight?” Micah crushes the butt of his cigarette into a tray overflowing with them. It’s cramped, poorly lit, and mostly covered by a bed too small for two, just like yours is, I’m sure.
The other man cocks his head. Idioms never translate well.
“Do you. Want to. Fuck me? I am ready to leave.” Micah speaks each word forcefully, but stops short of making any obscene gestures to make sure his meaning is understood. Nearby heads turn in the cramped bar. A few people even eagerly raise their hands.
Anonymous Liu, or Hsieh, or whatever it is grins and nods. Micah leads him from the crowd.
Curious, I follow him closer. I want to see things through his eyes.
We walk the corridor back to my room, abandoned now but for the chittering of rats in the darkness. They’d infested the station, riding the coattails of human civilization, eating our detritus. In time, they warped like us to become something different, something new. The size of cats, skin strained from cancerous mutations, they’re best left alone.
Shafts of artificial light from circles set in the ceiling punctuate the hallway, bastions of clarity that make our drug-strained pupils scream. Under their gaze, we squint and smile at each other. In the inky black between, we giggle, stumble, and fly. Our balance lost to booze, a few lines of Luna, and the fucking reduced grav they switch to every evening. With the ground holding us less firm, our steps become bounding leaps. We are unmoored in the darkness, and found again in the light.
He’s pretty, or the cocktail in my gut is doing its job. Fresh-faced, shaved smooth, dark eyes and skin, he smells like a bloom of honeysuckle—an intoxication in itself. When you’re inebriated, your brain blurs edges to find symmetry and lessen the mental load, so everyone looks prettier. The drunken pillow talk from an old lover traces its groove in my memory.
We enter another pillar of light. I turn to find his face different than I remembered in the darkness. Lighter skin, a close-cut beard, twinkling blue eyes squint against the sudden illumination.
My smile falters.
Fuck, was I remembering a different night?
A different person?
The darkness consumes us again. In it, I try to count the people I’ve slept with, to place their faces in a timeline, but I keep getting it wrong and revising it. Is it still called loneliness if you fill the void every night? No, it’s only loneliness if it comes from the lonely region of France. Otherwise it’s just called a sparkling coping mechanism.
When the light breaks in again, he’s changed.
Pale and skinny, with lanky hair.
This isn’t right. Something is wrong.
I drop his hand and back away as adrenaline soars through me. My heart is a deer chased in the wilderness, thundering hooves in my chest. Fear chasing clarity into my brain like a sudden punch to the face.
His smile widens, impossibly huge.
I look down the hall. I need something real, something to anchor me.
I’m drifting.
I’m drunk.
This isn’t real.
Under each lamp is a different reflection of me. They mirror my movements, backing away from a different person in each.
I whip my head around, and so do all of them.
In both directions.
What the fuck is happening here?
What the fuck is this?
“Is everything okay?” His voice is a pantheon. A cacophony of dialects, tones, and pitches. All of them familiar. It echoes—repeating, overlapping. Waves over waves.
I take a step backwards into the darkness, and he reaches for me. In my periphery, some other version reaches for some other me in every shaft of light. His hand draws near. So close. Almost touching mine.
I run.
I race into the void, hands outstretched to find the access hall I know is there. I sprint blindly into the pitch, bouncing high from the low gravity, guided by the squeals of rats as they scurry from me. I follow them, and when their noises echo off the walls, I know I’ve made it into the passageway.
Freedom. Escape.
Legs pumping, chest heaving.
And then, my ears are ringing and I’m lying on the ground.
I don’t remember running into the low-hanging metal pipe. I won’t see it until the next morning. Vertigo writhes inside me, and I vomit a torrent of sour-milk-smelling undigested booze and drugs and sadness. I taste the acid on my tongue before it splashes against the cold metal flooring, and then the true darkness takes me.
I stare out into the twinkling abyss of space through a full-height viewing window. In the thick, reinforced plastiglass, I see a reflection of myself with softened edges. More a form than an image, my outline defined by the muted illumination of distant stars. When I move forward to touch it, the whole window pulls away like a curtain in my hand. Behind it is the gray static of background electromagnetic waves. Humming white noise fills my head. It builds and builds and builds.
I wake to fluorescent lights punching my eyeballs and the noise of small, scampering feet. My head pounds. I wince and push myself off the ground to a sitting position. It breaks the crust of dried puke and unleashes fresh waves of stomach acid, old beer, and rotting soy sauce. I rub the heels of my hands against my blurred eyes, and stare at a rat lapping up the pile of spew. Its tail is half-missing. Gray hair spills haphazardly from its too-large body. Swollen tumors stand out on its shoulder and belly.
“Fuck. What the hell happened last night?”
As if I was asking it, the rat looks up.
“Well, you ran into a pipe and knocked yourself out. I’d advise against it in the future.”
The voice yanks me back into some semblance of sobriety, and I spin around to look down the hall. Electric pain ricochets through my brain and lances the backs of my eyeballs. There’s no one there. What the fuck?
I see shafts of light.
I se e the multiples of me.
I see a hand reaching.
I clamp my eyes shut as nausea fills my mouth with saliva.
“Hey, down here.”
I look back and lock eyes with the rat. It’s sitting on its haunches now, waving at me. A speck of vomit clings to its lower jaw.
“Yeah, that’s right, I know, talking rat. Very surprising.”
I stare at the thing dumbfounded. Was something laced in those lines of Luna? Did I actually break my brain? Am I dead? Is that what this is? I look around again at the same shitty, bright hall of the orbital station. The metal is as stained as I remember it, covered in half-removed graffiti and what might be blood. Dirty and dingy is a way of life up here.
“Can you talk? It’s a lot more interesting if you respond, you know?”
I open my mouth, and close it again like a fish out of water. “Are you God?”
The rat laughs at me, a deep, knee-slapping, crying kind of laugh.
“God? I just ate your vomit, and you think I’m some magical deity come to visit you? That’s rich.”
“But you’re…talking. Wait, are you like, an experiment or something?”
“Are you struggling to not call me a lab rat right now?”
“I mean, I know the science deck is working on something important, so it seems fairly reasonable to assume—”
“That I’m a science experiment?”
“I mean, it seems reasonable to assume, right?”
“Do you have a depth of experience with talking rats to draw on here?”
Have I offended it? What does it say about my flagging sanity that I’d feel bad if I offended it? Flagging? Not so sure, it might be fully gone by now. I did just ask the rat if it was God.
The rat sighs. “Maybe it’s best if we don’t talk about what I am.”
“Oh, then what should we talk about? Have a little chat about the weather? It’s really nice today, they must have turned up the heat a fraction of a degree because I’m only partially reminded that we’re surrounded by an unlivable vacuum. I heard we’re expecting solar flares by midday though, which will almost certainly affect my doom scrolling when it blacks out our communications network.”
“You just woke up in a pile of your own vomit, and a rat is talking to you. Shouldn’t you like, go back to your room or something? I don’t know, take a shower? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you smell.”
I open my mouth to make another witty response. The talking rat, or whatever is creating this sign of my own crumbling grasp on reality, is right. I need a shower, not more banter. Moving inch by inch, my hand on a nearby wall for support, I make my way to standing. My stomach does acrobatics, and I close my eyes and breathe. One foot in front of the other, I start the journey back to my room. The scratching of tiny rat feet follows me.
I’m too hungover for this shit.
The station is a continuous stream of people flowing in both directions. As I move down the halls, half blinded, shaky legged, and with a piercing headache, they rush around me, avoiding all contact. I must look pretty terrible. Some are uniformed officers dressed in their sharp military blues, always hurrying, and as I get closer to my room I see more white uniforms of the science crew. There are a few other civvies like me wandering the halls, obvious by their plain, brown jumpsuit, maybe making their way to a shift in the mess hall or janitorial.
None of them seem to notice there’s a cat-sized rat following in my footsteps. Potentially, this is because it’s Monday and most of them are at least slightly hungover, as evidenced by their bleary eyes and ruddy faces.
Everyone up here is required to work, it’s part of the housing contract. Which doesn’t mean the civilians aren’t paying through their nose for a placement, we all are. It’s hard to argue against when the only other option is to be part of the dockyards on Earth. At least up here, you don’t have to build the seed ships that will eventually leave us all behind. I’d done my time down there, and thankfully escaped to this lap of luxury. And conveniently, being required to work also means it’s damn hard to be out of a job. They just give you a different employment contract.
Allegedly, I should be working my shift in janitorial right about now. Which almost certainly means I will be receiving another angry voice memo from my supervisor. It was a new position after my boss at the bakery got me reassigned, where I’d only landed after my dream job as a bartender saw me drinking more than serving, and was equally as awful as my brief tenure in shipping and receiving. I’d already blown off half my shifts with claims of migraines. I’m not sure where I’ll get reassigned after janitorial, but at this moment signs are certainly pointing to me finding out in the near future.
Do they just throw you out an airlock when you flunk out of shit-cleaning duty?
I look behind me, and hot on my heels is the same lumpy, partially haired creature from earlier. Shit. Maybe I could just claim I missed my shift because I was so concussed I thought a rat was talking to me? It would add a bit of flair to the usual, anyways.
“Stop following me, you lumpy, vomit-eating cretin.”
“You’re the one covered in the stuff. Also, you’re making other people think you’re crazy.”
I look up in time to catch eyes with my elderly neighbor as she peers through a crack in the door. She closes it hurriedly. Great, now she knows I can talk to rats.
I turn the final corner to my room, and find a small crowd gathered in white uniforms outside the door. I furrow my brows, hoping it will unlock access to a deeper level of understanding, or at least make me look thoughtful, but the pinching movement sends pain stabbing through my temples. I close my eyes to shut it out, my hand coming up to ease the pain, and lose my balance. I fall sideways into the corridor wall.
What an entrance.
The medical professionals stare at me, collapsed against a wall and covered in dried vomit. I push myself back upright and smile at them. In my mind, it’s a dashing smile which simultaneously transfers the knowledge that I am fully in control, not at all still drunk, did not suffer a concussion after a potential drug-fueled mental break, and am not now currently, nor have I ever been, associated with a talking rat. Unfortunately, it sends shooting pain through my temples again and a repeat of the previous falling episode.
“Christ, he’s still hammered.” I hear one of them say.
“We have got to get the bars to stop over-serving.”
“Yeah, they should be the ones doing this.”
“I mean, what, fifth one this morning already?”
“You should have seen the mess he woke up in,” the talking rat says at my side, and I kick at it.
“Is he having a stroke? Just our luck.”
“Why do we always get the fucked-up ones? Why can’t they just be accidentally sleeping in or something?”
“Citizen, we came here for a health check as requested by your employer. Are you currently experiencing mental and/or physical duress which would require assistance? Please keep in mind, a full report will be made of this situation, including bloodwork, if so.” One of the whites says, her eyes boring into mine.
“I’m fine. Just hit my head last night and need to lay down. Should be dancing by midday I’d bet,” I say, meeting her unflinching gaze. When I blink, all of the white uniformed faces become hers. A copy of a copy of a copy.
Like a repeated image down a hallway.
Like a multitude of past lovers reaching for me at the same time.
Mouths impossibly wide.
Fear hits first, then overwhelming nausea.
I empty the contents of my stomach, which at this point just contains a large quantity of frothy yellow bile, onto the hallway between us. When I look back up, their faces have returned to distinct people again, each of them disgusted in their own uniquely personal way.
“Dammit, Frank, order a cleanup crew. God it smells awful. Look Mr.—” She looks at the datapad in her hands. “Mr. Angelos, with your permission I’m going to help you into your apartment and let your employer know you’re sick today, but will contact them tomorrow. Do you consent?”
