The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  That had to draw the attention of everyone…around…

  He blinked against the sun reflecting on the windows and the steel and the polished streets. Vehicles were parked in place, not moving. Thick layers of dust and debris coated their surfaces. Air blew along between the sides of the buildings and stirred…nothing.

  There was no one around. No one. Anywhere.

  The entire city was deserted.

  * * *

  He walked alone, in the empty spaces that should have been filled with millions of people.

  James had been walking for most of the day now. There had been places where he stopped to explore along the way. Empty office buildings. Empty apartments. Eateries where he had found canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs to eat before he went out and explored some more. He wouldn’t starve, and it was nice to know that, but it still didn’t solve the bigger issue.

  Where was everyone?

  Underneath the shadow of the famous Starkate-X building, he stopped. His ankle throbbed. His head hurt. He needed to sit down and rest but he couldn’t stop until he knew what was going on. He needed to find someone. Anyone. “Hello?” he shouted, as loudly as he could. “Hello!”

  His echoes were the only answer, and so he walked on. He walked for days. In circles, mostly. Stopping only for sustenance when he needed it.

  At some point, he started laughing. He didn’t know why. Nothing here was funny. If anything, he was scared out of his mind. He found himself back on Earth with no idea how, and no one to help him. No one, anywhere.

  How was this possible?

  The laughter took him again, and he doubled over with his arms across his stomach as his mind slipped its tracks. There was nothing funny. Nothing at all.

  But he couldn’t stop.

  Long moments later he found himself curled up into a ball on the wide sidewalk in front of a clothing manufacturer. The display window showed the latest fashions for men and women and children, anything that someone might want or need. It was all right there for them.

  He realized he was still in his one-piece sleep suit. He needed clothes. Well… This place had clothes, and there was no one else around to take the clothes, so that meant he could have whatever he wanted as far as he was concerned. Who was here to tell him different?

  No one. That was who.

  The doors to the building opened automatically for him. No handcranking necessary. When he went inside soft music began to play over the loudspeakers and lights came on to welcome the new customer. This was the time when the salesclerk would come out and offer to assist him in finding a new wardrobe.

  James waited. No one came. He looked around at the utter stillness of it all. Dust had settled but everything else seemed intact. Normal. The area couldn’t have been deserted for that long. Years, maybe. But not decades. Surely the music wouldn’t still play after decades. Right?

  His journey was meant to be twenty years, but who knows how long he was out there before he arrived back on Earth.

  A titter escaped his lips, and he clamped his hands over his mouth to stop himself.

  He was going crazy. Had to get a handle on that before he went too far to ever come back.

  There were rows upon rows of clothing just waiting to be picked out, and it was an easy thing to find pants and a shirt and even boots for himself. All this time he’d been in his bare feet. He hadn’t even noticed until now. The skin on the bottom of his soles was raw and cut, and he hadn’t even noticed.

  He laughed again. Then he got dressed.

  As he was about to leave, he heard a sound. A soft, hushed sort of sound. It was something so familiar. Something he should recognize.

  There it was again. Whispering all around him, right at the edge of his hearing. It was right there and he could just barely hear it—

  Whispering! It was whispers. Voices, dozens of them, all talking at once but so far away that he could only just hear them. Where were they? Where were they?

  He ran through the store, stopping to listen every dozen yards, his ankle threatening to give out on him and the cut on his hand opening up again. The elevators were working, and he went to every floor, and stopped, and listened. Every floor. Stop. Listen.

  Somewhere around the forty-eighth floor, he gave up. He couldn’t hear them anymore. He hadn’t heard them for several minutes. Back on the first floor, he stopped and listened again. There wasn’t anything to hear except the music overhead. Maybe that was what he heard, he thought to himself. The music. Sure. It was just the—

  Then it was there again. Whispered voices, all jumbled and impossible to understand, but definitely voices. He was sure of it this time.

  What were they saying?

  He stopped and listened. He thought maybe they weren’t in the building at all. Outside. They were outside! That’s why he hadn’t found them in here. They were outside. Waiting for him outside!

  James ran out through the doors into the dying light. The sun was going to go down soon, even sooner here in the city where the highrise buildings blocked it out long before it hit the horizon. All around him was the same empty nothingness that had been out there before. The wind blew, and on the breeze James heard the whisper of voices.

  He began running down the street, up one way and back the other, listening with each step. They were somewhere close. Somewhere very close by. He could hear them, he just couldn’t understand them.

  “Where are you?” he shouted at them. “Where are you, dammit!”

  The shadows lengthened and night would be coming soon, and still James ran. He ran until his ankle twisted under him and pain drove into the nerves of his leg and he tumbled to the smooth pavement face first. He cried then, hard racking sobs that shook his whole body. Taking in a breath that choked him, James beat his fist against the ground.

  “Where are you?” he pleaded. “Where are you?”

  No answer came. Even the whispers had gone silent.

  * * *

  Dawn found him in that same spot, shivering in the cold until the sun touched him and warmed his skin. James had planned to stay in this same spot for the entire day, or maybe the rest of his life, until this nightmare passed him by. His traitorous stomach had other plans, though.

  When it began to rumble and clench up, he knew he had to go and find more food. He hadn’t come all this way to die of starvation. Not when there was so much food around.

  “Heh,” he laughed involuntarily. “All this food, and nobody to eat it. Heh. Heh, heh. I can’t take this. I can’t take it. Heh. Food. I’m going to get… heh. I’m going to heh heh eat food and be alone until the day I die. Heh.”

  He bit down on his knuckle as hard as he could until the laughing fit passed. Then he got on his feet, and walked back toward the heart of town. Back where he knew there was food to be found. He had to step carefully because his ankle was still killing him, but he needed food. Then he needed to figure out what he would do next.

  Part way up the street, the voices started whispering again. This time he ignored them because they weren’t saying anything that he wanted to hear. They weren’t saying anything he could understand, for that matter. Snatches of words, buzzing around in his brain. Here. No. Find. Alone. Pain.

  He understood that last one clear enough. Pain. If he couldn’t find a doctor, would the pain ever end?

  Alone…pain…

  They were still talking to him when he made it back to the food. Freeze dried, imitation fruit. It would fill his belly but it would never be his favorite meal in the world, that was for sure. Still, he ate his fill and listened to the words whispering in his ears.

  Home. Crash. Pain.

  Laughter again bubbled up in James’s throat. It came, and he could not stop it. He laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe, and then he laughed some more, and he just… couldn’t… stop.

  Somewhere in that hysteria a thought occurred to him. In the city’s center would be the Legal Bureau. They would have records of everything that had happened here. There would
be information he could access to give him the answers he was looking for. Maybe there had been some sort of mass evacuation here, and everyone was somewhere else. Maybe he could contact someone from there to come and get him.

  Yes. That could work.

  A little spark of hope woke in him again and he got moving. He went down the streets, taking random turns until he got close enough to find his way. The Legal Bureau was a tall spire of a building, framed in cement and steel and carved with beautiful statues that spoke of honor and power. The front doors were already open, and he walked right in.

  Empty desks. Empty service counters. Blank computer screens. It was exactly what he had expected to find. Well. That was going to change.

  The whispers grew louder. There were so many of them, all talking at once, and none of them making any sense.

  Picking a random terminal James folded out the computer keyboard and tapped in universal command sequences that brought up the city records.

  He fast-forwarded through several years of information, looking for the last entries that would have been recorded by city personnel. When the screen turned blank, he backtracked.

  Reading to the end of everything was a very humbling experience. This was the answer he’d been looking for. Just not the answer he wanted.

  He giggled like a little boy, and then swallowed it all back, and read it again.

  Eleven years after he had left on his deep space mission, a plague swept over the globe. The oldest people died first. The young and the newborn died next. The rest of the population lasted for six years. That was no blessing. The plague made people suffer. Bleeding through the skin was the least of it. All attempts to find a cure failed. Anything they tried made it worse.

  Until everyone was dead.

  He looked around, but saw no sign of death. Had they evacuated first? The preserved city seemed so strange. So normal.

  The voices grew louder. The only thing that drowned them out was his laughter.

  He was running before he realized it. He found himself on the stairs, going up, and when he realized how stupid that was he stopped at a random floor and ran some more until he was in a room with a balcony that looked out across the entire length of the city. It was all there in front of him. Beautiful. Perfect.

  Empty.

  The voices hummed and buzzed in his ears and he just wanted them to stop. “Shut up!” he screamed, waving his arms all around his head. “Shut up! Just… stop!”

  They did.

  It was so quiet that he could hear his own breathing, his own heartbeat, and when he started laughing again it was the only sound for miles.

  He was alone. Every single person, every human being in the universe, was dead. The only one left was him. For the rest of his life there would never be anyone else for him to talk to, or listen to, or touch. No one.

  Just him.

  The voices began to hum again and he couldn’t stop laughing and even though he grabbed the sides of his head, his skull felt like it was going to split apart. He staggered this way and that way, and then his legs bumped up against the low wall around the balcony. He saved himself from going over, but just barely.

  Might jump, the voices said. Die. All over. Only way. Die.

  Alone. Pain.

  James turned to look over the edge again. It was a long way down. At the bottom would be a sudden stop that ended everything. Ended his pain. Ended him being alone.

  Ended everything.

  Jump, the voices said. Die. End it. End it now.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, and prayed again for God to make it stop.

  And then he put an end to it. Just like the voices said.

  He jumped.

  As the ground rushed up to meet him the voices got louder.

  Jump… Jump… Jump…

  * * *

  “Jump. He jumped!”

  General Vanstein slammed a fist against the monitoring console. This simulation wasn’t supposed to end in the subject’s death. When Pilot James Ashton had volunteered for this he had seemed like the perfect candidate. Isolation sims were rough on people, true, and this one was meant to test a pilot to the limits, but no one had expected… this.

  “I told you!” Pathologist Amelia Hemmer fairly screamed in Vanstein’s face. “I told you he was in pain, and alone, and that we needed to end this! I told you to end it before something like this happened!”

  The General grabbed her by the throat, and then moved her out of the way with a glare. “You do not talk to me that way, Hemmer. I am a General in the Space Exploration Corps. You are nothing. Nothing!”

  He pushed her away, and she choked and gagged as she rubbed at her sore throat. “I might be nothing to you, General, but at least I’m not the one who just killed one of our best pilots!”

  Vanstein wanted to beat her until she stopped talking, but Command really didn’t enjoy reading reports that contained the phrase “beaten into submission.” He’d have to let her comment go.

  Besides. She was right.

  Pilot James Ashton had been doing so well, too. He’d piloted the dying ship back to Earth against all odds. Sure, having one of his people smack him in the back of his head to simulate injury from the crash might have been going a little too far but that was how he trained his people. Hardcore. Then Ashton had managed to get out of the crash site even with the power off. Obviously his training had kept Pilot Ashton alive.

  No, the problem wasn’t the Academy training. That had worked perfectly. Just as expected. The problem had been the isolation. The solitude. Pilot James Ashton hadn’t been able to take being alone.

  Looking into the simulation chamber, General Vanstein considered that. Ashton’s body lay bloody and broken on the floor in there, and all because he didn’t have someone to share his life with.

  “Clean that up,” the general said to the support staff. “Notify his family and make sure they get the maximum service allowance for his termination.”

  The three menial workers in their gray uniforms nodded to him and went into the chamber to begin removal and sterilization. As it should be, he thought. He ordered, people obeyed.

  “Pathologist Hemmer,” he said. “You and I have work to do. We have to revamp our mission parameters. Two people to every ship. It turns out human beings aren’t meant to be alone.”

  Leaving the Academy that day, in the midst of the millions of people crammed into the city around him, Vanstein wondered. There was no end of people in the world. Too many of them, actually. How could anyone ever feel the isolation that Pilot Ashton had?

  With all these people everywhere, anyone should be happy to be given some time alone.

  But Ashton. Ashton has been alone. He had died believing he was the last human left on Earth.

  You couldn’t get more alone than that.

  More About TJ Ryan

  TJ Ryan is a Canadian author, born on the rainy West Coast (or is that Wet Coast?) of British Columbia. He spent his early years travelling the world, obsessing over new cultures and culinary experiences. Preferring spaceships to airplanes, he has now settled into his little slice of rainforest paradise, escaping reality through Science Fiction. Visit him at www.tjryan-author.com to learn more about his work, or sign up for his newsletter and receive a free copy of the prequel short story to his new sci fi space opera series, The Broken Earth Saga.

  Genre: Science Fiction Adventure

  Blue Eyed Devil – Raiders Farthest Reach by Spencer Pierson

  For the red-skinned Devlothen, battle is the true test of one’s mettle. They have traveled far into their frontier to test a new species, and when they meet, they will discover this new race has a few surprises. None will be more surprised than Krelth, a Battlemage for his people. He has been drawn here by the Warp and Weave for an unknown purpose but one that will change his world forever. However, the humans on this far-flung colony world will not take kindly to this trespass nor to what is taken. It may take years, but they will meet again.

  Chapter 1r />
  The three-hundred-meter raider scout Bastion’s Reach drifted just outside of what the Devlothens could identify as the alien colony’s detection range. Several weeks earlier, their small scout ship had phased in from slip space, letting their energy signature blend with the background radiation of the system’s Oort cloud. Once they’d let the initial energy discharge, they had crept in on their grav drives. This was a new species so they followed their people’s first-contact protocol, which was to say they examined every emanation they could identify before taking any further steps.

  However, studying every quark and tachyon could only reveal so much about a species. It was up to the crew of the ship to take the next step and test their capacities in their time-honored tradition. Boots on the ground and claw to whatever it was the aliens used to cause harm. This was the Devlothen way and the best way they knew to determine if there was a threat before it became a matter of life or death when it was still located months outside of their own space.

  The stern-eyed Captain of the small raider paused, studying the holographic readouts and displays before him. So far, the operation appeared straightforward as far as a raid went. The technology level of their targets seemed to be decent but not an overt threat to their own technology. Their core worlds would probably be higher tech, but not something they would need to worry about for this first contact. There were not even any patrol ships, only a few communication and monitoring satellites.

  Normally, he would be pleased at heading up this first contact raid. He had fought through numerous duels to earn the right and handpicked his warriors from the ranks of other status arenas. Everything had gone well until the last week when the battlemage had asked to be included.