Inktober 2026 29, Tusk

The dapper man collected things. I should have guessed. Somewhere aft of the passenger deck, past a door that had not been there the day before, he had a long, quiet room lined with trophies, and he invited me in as though I were a guest rather than a captain without a ship.

Most of it I couldn’t name. But the piece he stopped at, he lifted from its stand himself: a tusk, ancient, yellowed to the colour of old piano keys, curving up to a split and weathered tip. It stood in a banded collar of pale metal, ribbed like a barrel hoop. Down its length, cut with a needle’s patience, ran a whale. Heavy-lidded eye, deep furrows along the head, the tail curling away round the curve of the ivory, every line as fine as a hair.

Inktober 2026 28, Trophy

They gave us a ceremony, of sorts. No crowds, no speeches. Just the silver ship settled somewhere quiet, the survivors ranged along the ramp, and the dapper man stepping forward with something held in both gloved hands.

A trophy. Not gold, not glass. A squat grey box on a round pedestal, scuffed at the corners, a cassette sitting in its window with two white hubs and a strip of handwriting across the label: MIX TAPE. Along the front, in blocky letters, a single word: WALKMAN. It was around the same age as the machines in the dark corridor, and it looked as though it had been loved.

Inktober 2026 27, Dumb

Nobody told us not to look, so we looked. A hatch left ajar, a corridor we weren’t meant to find, and beyond it the machines that had ripped space apart.

They were ancient. That was the shock of it. Vacuum tubes, actual valves, glass bulbs glowing amber over their sockets like something out of a museum. Dumb terminals with blocky glyphs crawling across small screens. Reels turning slowly, feeding out ribbons of punched paper tape, row after row of holes.