The Rogue World

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “Yes, what kind of orders?” her mom echoed.

  “It’s classified.”

  “It might be classified on earth,” Eleanor said, “but we’re not on earth, and you need to tell us what’s going on.”

  “I don’t need to tell you anything,” Hobbes said. “I don’t care if we’re on a moon made of cheese, you—”

  “Eleanor, catch.” Watkins lobbed something into the air toward her.

  Eleanor reached up and snatched it, almost by reflex, as Hobbes felt his now-empty pocket, his eyes widening with anger and surprise.

  “That was a mistake,” he said, shoving Watkins away from him.

  The old man stumbled, but Eleanor’s mom stepped forward and caught him before he slipped, saving him from a fall into the chasm. Hobbes reached for his gun, and Eleanor flinched, but a second later she saw that the gun was missing from its holster.

  Watkins had it aimed at Hobbes. “I do know how to use this,” he said. “You taught me.”

  “I remember. That’s on me, I guess.”

  “What was he hiding?” Watkins asked Eleanor, without taking his eyes or the gun off Hobbes.

  Eleanor looked at what she held in her hands. It seemed like some kind of portable drive, but it had a series of buttons used for controlling digital media, and a convex lens. “I think it’s some kind of player. Or a projector.”

  “You press that button,” Hobbes said, “you won’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Hand it over, and I’ll pretend like this whole thing never happened.”

  Eleanor pressed the power button, and the lens lit up, projecting a holographic image of the UN seal into the air, a map of the globe supported by olive branches. She hit the play button, and the projection changed to a menu listing the languages of earth. She scrolled to English.

  The projection changed again, this time to the image of the president of the UN, a woman from the Union of the Congo Republics, but Eleanor couldn’t remember her name.

  “Greetings,” she said. “On behalf of the human race, I welcome you to our world. . . .”

  “What is this?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  Hobbes ignored her.

  “We regret that our first meeting is taking place under these circumstances. It was not our intention to engage in hostilities with you, and it is with the hope of peace that I speak to you now. I understand our world has resources you desire. I am confident that we can come to an agreement over those resources, in exchange for your forbearance.”

  “An agreement?” Eleanor said. This image was meant to open negotiations for a treaty of some kind. That’s why Hobbes had brought it. He had expected and hoped to deliver it to the aliens who had built the Concentrators.

  “We would like to meet with you to discuss our proposal,” the UN president said. “Furthermore, we would like to resolve this matter before tensions escalate any further. Until then, I wish you peace and prosperity.”

  Her image remained for a few seconds more, smiling, and then it vanished.

  Eleanor held up the device in her fist, facing Hobbes. “What is the proposal?”

  Hobbes looked right over her head, sneering.

  “It’s the second Preservation Protocol,” Watkins said. “The contingency plan. It has to be.”

  Hobbes lost his sneer, and shook his head.

  “What is in the second plan?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  Hobbes was silent.

  “Look around you,” Watkins said. “Do you see where you are? I’m not talking about jurisdiction here. I’m talking about the fact that I could shoot you and no one would ever know. And I am perfectly willing to shoot you, Hobbes. Are you perfectly willing to die here on this desolate rock?”

  Eleanor believed Watkins meant it. She had already watched someone die from a gunshot that Watkins had indirectly fired, and she did not want to again.

  “Please, Hobbes,” Eleanor said. “What would you even be dying for?”

  “The world,” Hobbes said.

  “No,” Eleanor said. “Not for the world. You’d be dying for the people who think they control the world. Who think they can pick and choose who lives and who dies . . . Wait. That’s it.”

  “What’s it?” her mom asked.

  “The second Preservation Protocol. They let the aliens take most of the energy, without putting up a fight, and in return the aliens leave enough energy for certain members of the human race to live.”

  “It couldn’t be,” her mom whispered. “Hobbes, please tell me—”

  But the subtle smirk on Hobbes’s face confirmed it, whether he meant it to or not.

  “It’s not any different from what you were going to do,” Eleanor said to her mom.

  “It’s entirely different!” her mom shouted.

  The situation had somehow, suddenly, become about her mom’s decision to support Watkins, the whole reason Eleanor had left her mother behind. “How, Mom?” Eleanor asked. “How is it different?”

  “You can’t negotiate with nature! All you can do is adapt to it, and those who can’t adapt will die. The universe is hostile. It drives evolution forward so it can feed on the remains. You can’t plead for mercy from an ice age.” Then she turned to Hobbes. “And you shouldn’t plead with terrorists.”

  Hobbes shrugged. “Sometimes the only way to survive a mugging is to give the mugger what they want.”

  “But you’re not doing this for you,” Eleanor said. “You’re doing this for your daughter. The UN promised you Mariah would live, didn’t they?”

  Hobbes scratched at one of his eyebrows and looked away.

  “I’m sorry, Hobbes,” Eleanor said. “You might think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re not.” She looked down at the device in her hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway. There’s no one here to negotiate with.” Then she tossed the player into the chasm.

  “No!” Hobbes shouted, lunging toward her.

  Watkins moved to intercept him, but Hobbes was quicker, and he seized Watkins by the throat with one hand, and with the other he grabbed Watkins’s wrist, pushing the gun aside.

  “Let him go!” Eleanor shouted.

  “You pointed my own gun at me, old man,” Hobbes growled.

  Watkins choked and gagged.

  “Let him go!” Eleanor snatched and clawed at Hobbes’s arm, trying to pull his fingers away from Watkins’s throat.

  But Watkins struggled to fight back, too, and he suddenly threw his body against Hobbes, setting the soldier off balance, and in the next moment Eleanor felt them slip past her hands, and they both went over the edge.

  CHAPTER

  26

  NO!” ELEANOR SCREAMED. THEN SHE TURNED AND RAN down the spiral pathway.

  “Eleanor, wait!”

  But Eleanor couldn’t wait, and she wouldn’t slow down, so she stayed as far away from the edge as she could, and she raced around and around and around, deeper and deeper and deeper, until at last she reached the bottom of the chasm, stepping into a round, open space without any doors, or windows. The green light she had seen from above filled it to a height of three or four feet, as water fills a well, flowing and drifting, splashing up against the sides, lapping at the path.

  Watkins and Hobbes hung suspended in the air a foot from the ground, as if held up by the light. They didn’t appear harmed, and Eleanor realized she hadn’t heard anything after they had fallen, which made her think that the light had somehow caught them before they’d hit the ground.

  She waded into the light toward them to get a closer look. Their eyes were closed, and they didn’t move, or speak.

  “Eleanor,” her mother whispered.

  She turned.

  Her mother stood on the pathway, apparently afraid to come all the way down to the bottom.

  “It’s okay.” Eleanor motioned her forward. “Come on.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, and then she pointed at Eleanor’s chest.

  Eleanor looked down. The light had begun to stick to her, and
even climb up her clothing. She didn’t feel anything. It didn’t seem harmful. But she found it disconcerting to think about, and tried to brush it off, sending away little whiffs of glowing green.

  Here.

  Eleanor felt the entity more strongly than she ever had. Its voice had its hands on her shoulders, huge hands like Uncle Jack’s, that made her feel small.

  “I am here,” she whispered.

  Something stirred in the mist-light at the center of the room, and then a control console emerged from the floor, rising up dripping green glow in runnels. It was several times the size of the console aboard the ship, and when Eleanor stepped up to it, she felt very small.

  But she lifted her hands to lay them down.

  “Stop!” her mom said.

  Eleanor didn’t want to have this argument again. It only hurt and made her angry. How many times had they fought about it? How many times had her mom made her feel like there was something wrong with her?

  “This is what I came here to do,” she said, keeping her voice even. “And I’m going to do it.”

  “Sweetie—”

  “This is exactly why I left you in Egypt,” Eleanor said, sounding less even.

  That brought her mom the rest of the way down the path, easing slowly into the green light as it swirled around her. “I know it is.”

  “This is me.” Eleanor pointed at the alien console. “This thing, right here? All of this? This is who I am. This is—”

  “Don’t say that.” Eleanor’s mom waved her hands before her, crossing them like a shield. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why, Mom?” Eleanor raised her voice. “Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  Her mom just shook her head.

  “I don’t care if it makes you uncomfortable.” Eleanor jabbed her own chest with her bunched fingers. “You don’t want it to be me, but it is. It’s in my DNA, and I can’t help it. Neither can Uncle Jack. It could just as easily be you, you know.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  Her mom opened her mouth, but no words came.

  “I can tell you why. It’s really pretty simple.” Eleanor paused. “You don’t like who I am.”

  “Eleanor—”

  “Do you know how it feels to know my mom wants me to be someone else?” Eleanor heard the pain in her own voice, and she let that question hang between them for a moment. “You know something else, Mom? This started a long time ago. Way before the aliens. Whenever I got bad grades, or got in trouble at school, or did something you thought was too risky or dangerous, I could see it in your eyes. You’re disappointed in who I am.”

  Her mom closed her eyes and bowed her head, covering her mouth with one of her hands. “No, sweetie. No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  Her mom looked up, and there were tears in her eyes. “I love you, Eleanor. And I am proud of you. You’re the bravest, kindest person I know. I am hard on you, that’s true, but that’s only because I worry about you. I watch you being reckless, and it scares me to death. I’m not even talking about aliens here. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago you tried to sled down a building.”

  The memory of that day, back in Phoenix with Jenna and Claire, felt like a different life from the one Eleanor had now.

  “But you’re right.” Her mom nodded. “If I’m being honest, in the beginning of all this, I didn’t want you to be this way.” She gestured around them, the green light reflected in her eyes. “Who would want this for their child? But I never meant for you to think I don’t love you. I do love you, and I should never have let my fear get in the way of you knowing that.”

  Eleanor wanted to believe her, but she kept the flood of emotions rising up contained. She had to have a clear mind for what stood in front of her.

  “Listen to me,” her mother said. “I don’t always understand you or why you do the things you do. Honestly, that may never change, and that’s okay. You frustrate me and you scare me, but you amaze me, too, and in this moment, I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

  That was all Eleanor had ever wanted to hear.

  “You be you.” Her mom glanced at the console. “Do what only you can do.”

  Eleanor nodded. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Eleanor laid her palms down on the console, closed her eyes, and projected her mind.

  The entity waited for her, larger and stronger than anything she had ever felt, floating in an ocean of green light in which Eleanor thought she could drown. This wasn’t a prisoner of the rogue world, or simply a part of it. This wasn’t an intelligence installed in a piece of alien technology for a single, limited purpose. This was a being. This was like something out of a myth, the kraken or the leviathan, a mind vaster than Eleanor could comprehend or contain. This was the consciousness of the rogue world itself, and Eleanor knew that she and Watkins were no match for it. She couldn’t imagine how many minds it would take, all joined together, to stop the entity before her.

  “What do you want?” Eleanor asked, her voice sounding very small, and very weak.

  Here.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Why did you call me?”

  Here.

  “I am here,” she repeated.

  The entity said nothing, but then it moved, and when it moved, it was as if the entire ocean of green light moved, the entire planet tilting on its axis. She sensed its impatience. It wanted her to do something, but she had no idea what that might be.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Here.

  “Here, what? What does that mean?”

  Be. Here.

  How could she be more here than she already was? She had broken into an alien ship, crossed who knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles of open space, climbed up a mountain on another planet, and then descended down into that mountain. There wasn’t anywhere left to go. To be more here, she would have to be the entity—

  Be the entity.

  Did it want Eleanor to join with it? To become one with it the same way she had with Watkins? Because that was impossible. To do that she needed something she could latch onto, a shared emotion, an understanding, and she had none of that with this being. It had come from a different solar system, a different planet, created by a different species Eleanor still couldn’t really imagine. What could she possibly find in it to share?

  Be here.

  “I am.”

  Be here.

  “I am!”

  Be here.

  “I’m trying! But you need to stop killing the earth!”

  Be. Here.

  This entity was desperate. She tried to reach out to it, but it was too alien, and the rogue world had done too much damage. She hated it for the Freeze, for killing people and driving people from their homes. She hated it for all the suffering it had caused. It didn’t matter to her that it was lonely, it—

  Lonely.

  Could that be it?

  She had no idea how long the rogue world had been traveling through space. Millions of years? Longer? She had no idea how long the planet had been dead and empty. How long ago its builders had abandoned it. But she knew this entity had been alone since then, and Eleanor couldn’t fathom that kind of isolation.

  Her brief space journey here had almost been too much for her, the emptiness of it, and the vast distances between points of light and living things.

  It hadn’t always been that way. In school she’d learned about the big bang, back when all the matter in the universe, all the planets and stars, every atom, was all part of a ball so hot and dense the laws of physics couldn’t even really explain it. The singularity, they called it. That ball had exploded, creating the universe and all that incomprehensible distance Eleanor had experienced, but before that moment everything was together and part of something. The atoms in Eleanor’s body, and the atoms in the rogue world, had been a part of the same thing.

  And may
be that was it.

  Maybe that was the only thing Eleanor really shared with this being. If she looked back far enough, she had that in common with everything she could see and touch, and everything she had never seen and would never touch. All the beautiful and infinite variations of matter the universe had ever expressed all came back to the same beginning.

  Eleanor looked at the entity once more in its ocean of green light, and she reached out to it. She reached for the matter that gave rise to its consciousness, the atoms that were the same as the atoms that made up her heart and her mind. She reached for the singularity within the entity that had given rise to it and to her, and she found it. With that key in her hand, her mind joined with the entity, and it opened the universe before her.

  When Eleanor’s mind returned, her mother stood beside her.

  “Sweetie?”

  Eleanor smiled. “Yes,” she said. Her mind had been so far away, and so inhuman, that she needed to hear her mom say that to help her come back to who she was.

  Everything she had just seen, through eons of wonders, and light-years of roaming, faded quickly. Without the entity’s mind joined with hers, helping her comprehend it, all that it had shown her simply fell away, unable to fit. But she retained what she needed.

  “We can save the earth,” she whispered. But there were things that needed to be taken care of first. She looked over at Watkins and Hobbes, still resting in their cushions of buoyant green light, and changed the position of her hands on the console.

  “What are you doing?” her mom asked.

  “I’m sending Hobbes back.”

  “Back?”

  “To earth.”

  Eleanor picked Peru. The Concentrator there hadn’t been buried in an avalanche, and it would be safer than Egypt with the riots going on. She reached into the planet’s reserves of energy and then activated the link.

  The green light around Hobbes became active, swirling and flowing around him, coating him entirely in its glow, and when it had reached its brightest point, it simply vanished, taking Hobbes with it.

  Eleanor’s mom gasped. “What did you—is he . . . ?”

  “He’s fine,” Eleanor said. “I teleported him.”