Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Kalder sipped his drink ruminatingly, and looked up to watch one of the blue eels go swimming through the air, crossing the room to Moira.

  “So, what aren’t they?” Kalder asked of himself. “Well, they are not great fortresses. They don’t make terrific redoubts. They are not equipped with weapons or sensors. They don’t make great viewing outposts—there are almost never any indications that the systems in which they reside ever had life, so they weren’t homes to rich people on safari, or made for a wilderness preserve.” He took a seat, slowly. Moira winced when she heard his old bones popping. “They are also barren. They don’t have any sign of anyone having lived there. So, they are not anyone’s home. And that’s the key, I think.”

  “The key to what?” Moira asked, following him to the center of the room. In front of them, on the table, the Kennit Scroll was still emanating its light-show, and its haunting alien words.

  “To figuring out exactly what they are for, of course,” said Kalder.

  “Don’t you mean were for?” Moira said.

  Kalder downed the last of his drink, and set the glass to one side. He licked his lips, and gazed at the Scroll, as though peering into a crystal ball whose premonition he worried about. It was the first time, Moira thought, that she had seen him look fretful of something.

  “Did you know that PI has run numerous tests on all the Scrolls ever to come into human possession?” he asked. “And always they find the same basic things. The Worshippers built them out of some ceramic-alloy conglomerate, something strong and long-lasting, potentially everlasting.” He raised his lecturing finger. “But, there is one test they haven’t run, because, as it turns out, they cannot run it. Apparently, no race of beings currently in existence can run it.”

  “What test?”

  “Do you know what a tachyon is, Miss Holdengard?”

  Moira had to think. “I believe so. A particle of some kind, in quantum physics?”

  “A theoretical particle,” Kalder clarified. “One that moves faster than the speed of light, perhaps traveling forwards, backwards, and even sideways through time.”

  Moira nodded. “When you first asked me my opinion on Worshipper Theory, you suggested you had an alternative theory. Does this have to do with that?”

  AS THEY APPROACHED the point on the map where Kalder had indicated, Lyokh felt the need to pull his rifle up, and aim it through the dark, oval hallway. It was instinctive. A feeling.

  For a moment, his HUD showed a troubled spike in his heart rate, but his suit administered a drug to soothe him.

  Stepping into the room, he had the momentary uneasiness of being back inside the Kennit sepulcher. It was wide and tall, just like that chamber had been, only here there were no walls that looked like the stomach lining of a monster, and no fumes, and no creatures sprouting up out of the floor and falling from the ceiling. There was also no main dais. Instead, the great room was ringed with tables that stuck out from the walls, all of them blank and bare, and made out of the the exact same materials as the hull.

  Lyokh examined the tables with the flashlight at the end of his rifle, running his fingers along them, looking for seams where screws or some other fasteners had been used. Nothing. It was all one solid piece, flowing seamlessly out from the wall.

  A bead of sweat ran down his forehead. His heart rate jumped again, and again his suit mollified him. The drugs entering his system also lifted his focus, brought it to the foreground. Lyokh aimed his light around the room, marveling at the supreme lack of dust motes in the air.

  Compelled by some unknown need, he knelt and touched the floor. He did it before he knew he was doing it. The touch of it, even through his glove, seemed to communicate something. For just a second, and for no reason Lyokh could imagine, he remembered the planet of his reoccurring dreams. Indeed, he was almost there. The air being gently recycled through his helmet felt like the loving breeze of that world. He felt the wind on his arms and legs, heard the whispering tall grass…

  Just as he started to smell the greatwyrm’s breath, Lyokh shook the feeling and progressed across the room.

  “I’VE BEEN WORKING on something,” Kalder said, just as a blue serpentine ribbon slithered around his neck. “A theory. And it stems from what I just told you about what the Watchtowers seem not to be. Tell me, Miss Holdengard, when you see the pics of the Watchtowers, when you watch the vids of past explorers, what strikes you the most about those dark corridors?”

  Moira didn’t even need to think about it. “That they’re so empty,” she said.

  Kalder nodded. “Exactly. That blankness. It leaves us to wonder, how could an entire civilization just up and move, all at once, and without leaving a single trace? Not one scrap of alphabet, not one computer station, not one line of poetry inscribed on any of that nigh-impervious metal. Nothing. But, inspired by what my thinking of the Raven Paradox, and the very definition of things being not what they are, I inevitably had to ask myself, what if it’s not what it seems? What if none of the Watchtowers are how they appear?

  “So, I decided to lock on to the notion that the simplest answer tends to be the right one. All aliens have their own version of this, us humans call it Occam’s Razor. And I asked myself, ‘What other things are as blank as the Watchtowers?’ Now I ask you that question.”

  Moira played with the glass in her hands, thinking. “Well, I suppose a place is most blank when…” The words stuck, because she suddenly realized that she had not honestly considered them before. “When it’s just been built.”

  Kalder nodded proudly. “Just so.”

  “But…they weren’t just built,” she said. “They’re at least a few million years old. The oldest Worshipper Scrolls date back two million years. Carbon dating clearly shows that.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting they weren’t old,” Kalder said. “I was suggesting they might have only been built, but never occupied.”

  “But, there are hundreds of them,” she said. “Probably thousands. All throughout the galaxy. Why would they build so many, so huge, and then never occupy them.”

  “Because they were waiting for something,” Kalder said. “Or, perhaps, someone.”

  “Like who?”

  “The intended occupants.”

  THERE WAS THIS feeling of detachment that Lyokh could not quite shake. He felt like the more he walked, the further away he got from his team. He heard their voices calling out “Clear in this sector” and “Check those corners,” but they sounded like they were at a distance. It sounded like someone had cupped their hands around his ears. He tried to warn his people of the strange fugue that had come over him, but somehow he didn’t think it mattered.

  On some level, he knew they couldn’t hear him.

  He heard the flapping of wings. He sensed the coming seasonal change. Wait…seasons? Yes, seasons. He was now standing in the grassy field. Yet he was also in the giant chamber near the center of the Watchtower. He was in both places at once.

  Is this a hologram?

  If so, the others weren’t seeing it. He turned and looked at them, saw O’Tulley walking through the fields, each blade of tall grass sighing and swaying as he walked through it. Was he dreaming?

  Part of Lyokh’s mind knew that he was now an operational hazard. He needed to contact someone, let them know that he was now a danger to the mission. He needed a medic. Morkovikson was right over there, his beard filling up most of his helmet, directing his contrite brothers around the room. None of them appeared to see Lyokh’s distress, even once he lowered his Fell rifle and began tapping the side of his helmet—the universal sign for distress. Voices in his ear were asking for his permission to continue through the next corridor. He both heard them and didn’t hear them.

  A tingling sensation started at his sphincter, then traveled up his spine. Vertigo set in, then passed, then returned. Lyokh felt like he was winking in and out of existence, one moment awake, the next moment he wasn’t. Again, his vitals showed signs of distress, but the injec
tions weren’t enough this time.

  Now, others seemed to notice. Each of their HUDs would be telling them about their captain’s plight. A few of them turned to look at him. Morkovikson rushed over to him, but he seemed to be running in slow motion.

  Morkovikson reached out for him.

  Lyokh tried to grab hold of him.

  Their hands passed through one another.

  KALDER REACHED INTO his robes, and produced a dataskif. He placed the small, walnut-shaped thing on the table. “The folders contained in this are what started me on this Crusade.” He gestured at Moira to scan it. Wordlessly, she did so. It was hardlocked and password protected, but with a few waves Kalder had opened it for her. What she saw in her lenses were countless files, all of them reading either CONFIDENTIAL or TOP SECRET.

  She eye-flicked some of them, brought them to the fore, then blink-clicked them. What she saw were reams of unimaginable size, filled with data translated from a dozen different alien tongues, most of them some form of Isoshi.

  “Ancient data,” Kalder said, standing up to fetch himself another glass of Old Staz’s. “From ancient scientific expeditions. The data you’re looking at was gathered by Isoshi explorers before Man had climbed down from the trees. Some Faedyan work has been done, as well. The key points you’ll see highlighted, in the files I’ve most recently scanned.”

  Moira did a quick search of the files with the most recent activity, and she pulled them up, scanning for the highlighted bits Kalder was talking about. A lot of incomprehensible alien language had been translated in only slightly less incomprehensible English Standard. “Violations of causality…imaginary mass fields…meta-particle stability…tachyon condensation fields…what is all this?”

  “A study done on the alloy that makes up Watchtower hulls,” said Kalder, returning with a refilled glass. A blue light snaked its way through his chest, emerged out his back. “A long, long time ago, Isoshi scientists determined something that they didn’t care to share with anyone else. But times have changed, some walls have been broken down, and my spies have managed to dig up a thing or two they kept hidden from us.”

  “Your spies?” Moira said, slightly alarmed. “You have spies?”

  “Merely a turn of phrase, I assure you.”

  Moira was not assured. Moira was thinking of the TRX security bot, and the accidental death of her professor that was no accident. Moira was thinking Holace Kalder had ulterior motives that were blacker than the void.

  “And what did your spies turn up?”

  “It’s all in front of you, but I’ll give you the summary. The alloy the Strangers used is saturated with an unknown energy, which gives off strange wave fluctuations that, though they are very dim emissions, translate into disturbances not too dissimilar to black-body radiation. That is, radiation emitted by black holes. The disturbances are faint, but felt, at least by the most sensitive scientific equipment the Isoshi had at the time.” He took a seat, bones crackling again. “And those disturbances led to closer inspections of the space surrounding each Watchtower. The Isoshi scientists found strong evidence for distortions—sort of like permament ‘wounds’ in the spacetime fabric, which they tracked through particles they believed able to move through time—what we would call tachyons.”

  “I’m getting lost. What does all this mean?”

  Kalder sipped his drink, then studied her a moment. “There is a very old theory among humans, a theory dating back thousands of years. It’s called the ‘tachyonic antitelephone,’ and it states that it’s possible, however unlikely, to use tachyons to send information into the past. Indeed, this theory was expanded to suggest that the future itself, from where we stand, is nothing more than an infinite ball of energy, constantly reacting and exploding, exciting all sorts of particles, including tachyons, and sending ‘information’ in the form of energy into the past, forming the universe itself. Every star, every planet, every lump of rock, every tuft of gas, all sent here from the future, and the ‘future’ itself being nothing more than an unreachable point of unimass: that is, all-encompassing energy.

  “But imagine that that last part isn’t true at all. Imagine that the future is a place that you can visit, or, at the very least, that we exist in a space and time that is able to receive messages from the future. Imagine if the Strangers possessed a machine such as the tachyonic antitelephone, and could send these messages far back in time. Messages in the form of information. And now imagine that they had managed to tap into zero-point energy, the foundational energy of the universe. The ‘information’ they sent back in time might not be something as mundane as a Hello, but rather information that could be useful.”

  “What kind of information?” asked Moira.

  “In the past, we had printers, and fax machines. Then we had 3D printers, which paved the way to giant fabricators like the one aboard this ship,” Kalder said. “But imagine the ability of a civilization to ‘fax’ information back in time, using zero-point energy to fashion raw matter, forming a network of machines that built the Watchtowers.”

  Moira’s eyebrows retreated towards her hairline. “You’re suggesting the Strangers don’t even exist yet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that they’re in the future, and they made a phone call to four million years ago and started building giant husks.”

  “Yes.”

  “Giant husks like the Watchtowers, that have no apparent use.”

  “Yes. The fact that they are all in barren solar systems with no quality resources could suggest that the Strangers themselves used all the precious resources in each solar system to make the Watchtowers. They didn’t travel here themselves, they sent the information back, information on encoded tachyons, which then hacked the zero-point energy of the raw matter in each system.” Kalder downed his Old Staz’s, and added, “I imagine that, had anyone been present to see the construction of the Watchtowers, they would not have seen one single machine, just clouds of dust churning around one another, like balls of gaseous nebulae forming stars. The machinery of the universe itself made them, as instructed by the zero-point energy, harnessed by the Strangers.”

  Then, for the first time ever, Moira saw a smile spread across the old man’s face. It was deeply troubling.

  “What a sight to behold.” He looked distant, as if remembering it all, as if he had been there.

  LYOKH FELT HIMSELF sinking deeper and deeper into the illusion. No, not an illusion. It was far too real to be an illusion. This was happening. It was really, really happening. He saw Morkovikson and the others fading, heard them distantly shouting at one another to do something, to help him, to save their captain.

  No one had any answer.

  Lyokh tried to scream for help. The words rose to his lips like a drink offered to a man in the desert, but he never drank their sweet truth.

  His friends reached out to him.

  Their own motions slowed, like they were moving underwater, and soon they were as still as statues. His friends now seemed ancient and dead. Frozen idols, picaresque figures without anima, unable to help him.

  Lyokh was lost. He felt his friends becoming more distant. He started to panic. It wasn’t like him to panic, but he was definitely panicking now. He felt reality slipping away from him. He tried to move, but the world felt like quicksand, and the more he struggled, the more he sank.

  “WHY ARE YOU telling me this now?” Moira asked, somewhat afraid of the answer.

  Kalder said, “There is a file in there marked ‘Lyokh.’ Kindly pull it up.”

  Moira did a quick search, found it, opened it. There was a service record of Sir Captain Aejon Lyokh, along with personal information, including Corporite Identification Number, or COIN, which every Republic citizen was registered with in order to label them with the correct corporate sector of their homeworld. There was his Military Enlistment Number, his medical history, and even his psychiatric evaluations. Moira saw that the file most recently read was the psych evals, so she opened them, f
eeling a bit dirty as she did so. These were Lyokh’s private records, not meant for anyone but him and his military shrink, and only to be shared with his superiors if there was something in them damning.

  Moira read over the evals, and saw nothing unusual. Except…

  Reoccurring dreams, she read in the notes section. Reports of dislocation during his dreams, hypersensitivity, and lucid dreaming. Waking up in the middle of the night, bouts of shaking, cold sweats. Always standing on an unknown planet, staring up at three moons and a set of planetary rings that dominate the sky. There are echoing voices, laughter, whispers. The dream always ends when patient is swallowed by a huge greatwyrm that comes out of nowhere.

  “Why are you spying on Captain Lyokh?” she asked. “What’s this got to do with your theory?”

  “Because I’ve experienced it before.”

  “What, lucid dreaming?”

  “No, that exact dream,” Kalder said. “Only, Captain Lyokh doesn’t yet understand that it’s not a dream. He still thinks it’s a manifestation of his mind. Shock or trauma. But it’s not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The antitelephone. The line is still open, between Now, the Future, and the Past. What do you think all these lights are around us?” He waved at the light-show. “The signal is faint, dying, but not yet dead. The line is like a doorway, and anyone that has spent enough time in the presence of the keys collect residue, a residue that is saturated with the base molecule, and permits them to see. Sometimes, but not always.”