Have you heard about Carl?

Posted on Sun Feb 9th, 2025 @ 12:31am by Ensign Mercy Mourne & Ensign David Kipling

Mission: Remnant
Location: A remote area of the ship
Timeline: Day 407
1264 words - 2.5 OF Standard Post Measure

It was on a late shift when they heard it. Mercy as part of her data categorisation initiative had to create a series of backups for all the local systems on the ships. As such she had roped in Kip to helping her with one of the engineering consoles down near the armoury. With the fuel shortage, all the lights across the ship had been reduced down to minimum in areas where people were unlikely to linger or were non-essential. Which left an eerie glow of the safety lights and some head torches to work by. It hd the effect of making many of the quieter junctions and areas almost feel like they were abandoned.

Then it happened. As they were working it came, quiet, and unexplained. A soft beep, accompanied by the flicker of a light on a console.

“Hi Carl.” Mercy said, without really thinking about it. Only to blush when she realised that she had said it loud enough for David to hear. “Oh uhm… h-have you heard about Carl?” She asked David.

David looked up from the console he was working on, careful not to shine his headlamp into Mercy's eyes. He scanned the compartment, searching for whoever she might be talking to. But the compartment was empty.

He rose from his seat and checked the passageway to make sure no one was there. David turned his head to the left and the right, playing the beam from his headlamp across the empty passageway. Sure enough, the passageway was empty, and the only lighting besides David’s headlamp came from the floor-level “slime lights,” electroluminescent panels in the passageway’s wall used in emergencies.

"Uhm... Mercy... you feelin' ok?" David asked, concerned for his friend. He reasoned that the current mission had been quite taxing, so hearing and seeing things wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

Mercy snorted and then waved away David’s concern. “Yes, sorry I’m fine. It’s just, have you ever noticed how sometimes the consoles beep at you for no reason? Or how sometimes the Jefferies tubes make funny sounds?” She then took off her head lamp and sat down on the floor for a bit, patting the ground beside her. Suddenly she was reminded of ‘camping’ in her little brothers bedrooms. She had never actually been camping before. Tycho city was under a dome, and everything there carefully curated, so it wasn’t the same as being outside on earth. But they had still liked to pretend.

“Look I know you are going to think I’m mad, but a couple of us… well we call it Carl. The ghost who haunts the ship.” She takes her head lamp and angled it under her own face, stark shadows morphing normally cheery and round features into something comically strange. “Want to hear what people say about him?”

Kip snickered at Mercy’s explanation. He knew exactly what she was talking about; he’d had to chase several instances of phantom beeps since coming onto this Atlantis.

“I was aware of the phenomenon…but I didn’t know that it had been named,” Kip answered. He took off his headlamp, rubbed his scalp where the lamp had been sitting and then joined Mercy on the deck.

“This reminds me of camping with my folks. My mom used to love telling ghost stories…but they were always so…cheesy…somehow,” Kip reminisced.

He feigned fright when Mercy moved the lamp under her face, playing along with the gag. In truth, however, he knew there were several unexplained, observable “ghosts” throughout the ship.

“So, what does the crew say about…uh, Carl, did you say,” David said before taking a swing from a water bottle.

Mercy chuckled warmly. “Yeah I was just thinking the same thing. We never really went camping exactly but I used to drag a sleeping bag into my little brothers room sometimes and tell ghost stories.” Mercy had a path of home sickness and rubbed her chest a little. She was eager to change the subject, so latched on to Kip’s follow up question.

“Well, Carl, the ghost on Atlantis.” She said dramatically, her face turned mock serious. “They say it was his first week on the job, working at Earth Spacedock and helping outfit the Atlantis for her maiden voyage. Just a young kid, fresh out of the academy. Not always the brightest but very hardworking.” As she said that last bit the console beeped. She glanced at it and then back to David with a nervous laugh.

“Poor guy never saw the accident coming. To this day no one knows what caused it.”

Kip chuckled and in a moment of inspiration carried on one of his mother’s traditions. He snatched up his own lamp and placed it under his chin, emulating Mercy’s dramatic face.

“Some crew members say…that on a dark and stormy night…you can still hear Carl programming his console…as he was just before the accident,” David improvised, putting on a stage voice. He smiled as he checked Mercy’s face.

“But on the anniversary…of that fateful night…Carl has been known to…make contact with the crew…” he finished, adding an “evil villain” laugh.

Mercy grinned, wickedly delighted that David hd caught on so quickly. She cackled in response and what an odd sight they would be to anyone unfortunately choosing that moment to pass them. “Yes! And woe betide those who ignore his attempt to communicate. For a lonely ghost is a bored ghost and Carl would cause great mischief in the ship if people ignore him. So if you hear a beep unexpectedly, make sure you answer his greeting.” Just as Mercy said that there was another beep from the nearby console, the sound in the dark corridor made her jump and then laugh nervously as she looked at Kip.

“Hi Carl!”

David put on a look of false terror as Mercy took up the story, nervously looking around the room like a character in a horror movie. He glanced behind her at the opened-up console they’d been repairing and the various bits of circuitry he’d removed from the console. A small voice chided him for not completing the repairs and moving on to the next project on the list. Then, the console beeped at just the right time. Kip looked at the console and then back at Mercy, struggling to hold in a giggle. But, try as he might, he couldn’t do it. The giggle burst out as a belly laugh.

“CARL,” Kip loudly proclaimed, as though his best friend in the world suddenly appeared.

Mercy jumped and then let out a chuckle, elbowing Kip in the ribs with a grin. “I knew that was coming and it still got me.” She held up her torch towards where he was supposed to be working and then tilted her head. “Come on, better get back to work before Carl snitches on us and people start to say I’m a bad influence.”

Kip jumped at Mercy’s response. He was chuckling too until he had to stop and gently massage his ribs.

“Yeah, yeah….back to the old salt mine,” he mocked. In truth, he loved his job. Most people saw what he did as a drudgery but, truth be told, David approached Engineering and, more specifically, Damage Control tasks as simply challenging puzzles to be solved.

“Alright, Carl, let’s get this show on the road,” David muttered to the console in front of him.

 

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