For the first few minutes, we did the usual stuff: hopping, grinning, taking pictures, planting a flag. After that I got down to business and started to sample the rocks and dust around us. The light didn't extend far enough to reveal much at all, but the scalloped line of black where the stars stopped meant there were peaks in the distance. The ground was a milky shade of green where light struck the ice. The layer of soil and rock on the surface was patchy and thin here, and it immediately made me long for more time to explore. But the next time we came down, there would—
"Hey guys," Aster said over the com. "Progress?"
"We're fine," Shar said.
And that was all. No reprimand for Aster's informality, no status report, just "we're fine." I was too excited to have my boots somewhere completely new to notice that Shar wasn't all there anymore. I hummed and took samples, until I stopped and really looked at what I was holding.
Those rocks. I've never seen anything like them. I hope I never do again. Maybe the eons-long exposure to the radiation emanating from Nodus had altered their chemical properties, but that was the least of it. They simply looked wrong.
I know that's vague, but you'll have to trust me.
Their color seemed to change as you looked at them. They looked like shale or limestone when seen straight on, but they glittered like quartz in your peripheral vision. Can rocks ooze? Perspire? Maybe somewhere, but they shouldn't be able to do either in a vacuum.
"So pretty," Shar said, her voice crackling from the speaker in my ear.
Shar was staring out across the field, watching something. I couldn't tell what at first, but then I saw it. A black line that stretched into the darkness on either side was racing toward us, dividing light from shadow, the glow-bulbs winking out as it approached. My mouth fell open, and my stomach clenched as I realized that whatever I was looking at probably wasn't geological. The line was long, slightly curved, and—
In my memory, that's when everything quieted.
Underneath the ice, there was an eye. That eye had an eyelid, an eyelid that was now closing, and by that action somehow extinguishing our lights. Before I could move, darkness had swept over us completely, and suddenly Aster was talking rapidly—waves of radiation, Raj stirring, vibrations inside Nodus.
That curve, that eye.
I'm a scientist, trained to think, to estimate. I know rocks, but I know biology, genetics, and the forms that life, both simple and complex, tends to take. It developed in similar patterns on Earth and Zarmina, and close enough on the less-hospitable worlds where we've found it. I know about ratios, about proportions of sense organs to body mass.
In that moment, I understood—enough to lose part of myself, and it hasn't come back.
Beneath the ice was a thing. A living thing. A creature the size of a small moon, trapped inside a rocky, icy shell that was carrying it through deep space.
Shar started screaming, and I remember some of it, but I was screaming by then, too.
If anyone ever finds this, I have one request: please be kind. I hope that's not too much to ask. This is my first time going into hypersleep without prayer or sutra whispering through the speakers. No tinkle of cymbals, no scent of sandalwood to ease my mind. Everything's jumbled inside me right now, and I can't stop thinking about what happened to Raj, and about that dark, curving line.
I can feel the Som taking hold now. The docs call hypersleep sopor vacui, but spacers call it "the short death." Always hated that, but I find myself hoping it's true this time. I'm afraid to dream.
Will Shar be there, face pale as she removes her helmet and walks into the airless dark of Nodus, no longer in need of breath? Or will Aster be staring at me, asking how I could have fled like that, the lifespan of atomic batteries dooming it to centuries of isolation that could only result in madness?
Or Raj, colors rippling across his skin in waves when I last saw him, pounding on the glass of the suspension chamber. Raj, who was speaking strange, guttural words to me when I closed the com channel.
Despite all of that, I think my mind is mostly fine. The pod's internal scanners claimed I was all right, and there's no reason to distrust them.
Just—be kind.
It traveled through deep space for eternity before we came, never once shattering. That can't be coincidence. Either that thing is guiding itself, or something guided it. That's what I'm... imagining right now. Does it have a destination, or was it steered away from everything, in the hope that no one would ever find it?
All that time, and it's still alive.
That bell was the hypersleep compartment. Temperature's plummeting. Gotta go.
One last thing.
At the end, Shar said "that creature, she can see the lies inside" before severing her air hose. If she wasn't just insane, and the females of that creature's species... if it has a species... bear the young, then where are they? Under the ice with her, or are they hurtling through the darkness between other stars?
Too many questions, and knowing the answers would change nothing.
I hope there are no dreams.
J. T. Glover has published short fiction in Fungi, NewMyths.com, and Underground Voices, among other venues. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, these days he lives in Virginia. By day he is an academic librarian specializing in the humanities. You can find him at www.jtglover.com.
Story illustration by Peter Szmer.
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The Basalt Obelisk
by Michael Wen
It was said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. If that maxim works on a psychological level then that cannot happen soon enough for me. My doctor told me that the bouts of sweatiness and hyperventilation that invariably afflicts me before and after every public appearance can be fully explained by your garden variety performance anxiety, but I preferred to attribute my symptoms to the cognitive dissonance caused by having to knowingly dissemble in public, and to the damage done to my ego from constantly making statements that I know to be beneath my intellect. As someone who’s very proud of his ability to remain detached and apply analytical skills to emotional situations it was exasperating for me to take stances that I believe should be beyond the pale for any rational person with sufficient evidence. I hope the day would come when I can come forward and share my knowledge of what happened to Serge Mufel with the world, but enough of my rationality has survived the constant assaults by insomnia and nervous breakdowns to keep me from destroying my credibility once and for all.
I shall start from the beginning. I first met Serge four years ago at a reception for new associates at Solomon Brothers, one of the premier institutions in financial services before the market crashed. I remember forcing myself to go to the event more out of a sense of obligation than a desire to socialize since I had interned with the firm the summer before and knew most of the attendees. Truth be told I often felt uncomfortable around my testosterone-fueled, type-A colleagues. It had not been mine but my father’s dream for me to work on Wall Street, but we did not clash over this as I found a way to incorporate a stint in high finance into the narrative I was creating for my life. My passion was in policy; fiscal, monetary, foreign, and judicial. As a borderline introvert I did not foresee a future in electoral politics, but I was confident that with my analytical skills, eyes for detail and general wonkish demeanor I would be invited into a powerful inner circle someday. Working hard in my twenties to attain financial independence would have given me a significant leg up over those who need to sell books or give speeches to pay for their mortgage. Principle and integrity do not come cheaply as some of you may know.
After half an hour of obligatory mingling I retreated to a spot near the buffet table, close to a platter of excellent beef carpaccio. Sooner than I liked however I was joined by a gaggle of fellow wallflowers and before I could extricate myself a new round of exchanges on respective entry-level careers began. One of the newcomers, a skinny tall guy in his late twenties wea
ring a pair of rimless glasses that covered the palest pair of blue eyes I’ve seen, mentioned that he had studied Persian history in college.
“Really?” I never could resist a chance to show off. “Which period? Achaemenid or Sassanian?”
“Neither. Safavid.”
“Didn’t they last only two hundred years?”
“But more happened in those two hundred years than the thousand before.”
He introduced himself as Serge Mufel and we had an engaging conversation on all sorts of esoteric but useless subjects that I did not think can interest anyone else. Soon we would lunch together almost daily at the deli downstairs, taking turns bouncing ideas off each other. He was the only one I felt comfortable enough with to share my market based schemes for solving problems ranging from Peak Oil to Third World corruption. We spent a lot of time together after work too since we both shared a fondness for lectures and seminars while our colleagues preferred expensive dinners and lavish parties. Serge did not like to talk about what he did before coming to the US for an MBA from Columbia, but he did mention that he studied particle physics in Russia and worked for a few years at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known here as CERN. He claimed he left physics behind in order to make more money but I didn’t buy that for a minute. I saw him as a fellow traveler, someone with a vision and a grand design who could not possibly care too much about the acquisition of more and better things.
As many of you may know a significant part of a Wall Street trader’s income is the year-end bonus which is performance based. The mid 2000’s were good years for finance and I had managed to reach the top tax bracket during my first two years at Solomon. I always assumed that Serge’s pot was of a similar size but one day a tax document misplaced on my desk showed his take to be over three times of mine. I brought that up later that day, more out of curiosity than envy.
“Yes I had a good year. But remember in addition to derivatives I also do stock trades.” He explained.
“Baloney. I did some calculations based on company stats. To pull that kind of dough your stock trades have to average at least 300% in returns.”
“Maybe I was lucky.”
“Then tell me how you got so lucky.”
I continued to pester him about this afterward, half out of jest and half out of competitiveness. I was doing too well for myself to let this bother me, so was a little surprised when he finally gave in one day.
Even though Serge and I spent a lot of time together we’ve never been to each other’s home before. He gave me an address in Midtown which I didn’t make much of at the time, but when I exited the subway station and saw the street full of storefronts hawking cheap cameras and flashy jewelry I thought I must’ve gotten off at the wrong stop. The scene was reminiscent of the New York shown in eighties movies, not what one would expect to find outside the doorstep of an affluent financial services professional.
Serge greeted me and showed me around a nine hundred square feet one-bedroom apartment. The place was, like mine, sparsely furnished. Aside from a couch, a bed, a dining set and a large folding table that doubles as a desk there was little in the way for creature comfort. The couch was the only item that might’ve cost more than five hundred dollars, although the mythological motifs on its wooden frame were so antiquated as to predate any style I’ve studied. The apartment was far from uncluttered, however. Cardboard boxes, some of them unopened, stacked along one of the walls, while the opposing side was taken up by two pieces of electronic equipment encased in large black metallic frames. A thick, black wire protruded from one of the black boxes, snaked around the floor, and penetrated the back of a mounted air conditioning unit large enough to occupy two windows. I looked outside and saw the view dominated by a long, narrow screen built into the side of the building across the street that continuously streamed tickers and prices of major stocks and indices in bright green symbols.
“Nice view.” I commented.
“It’s not as fancy as Brooklyn, but I show you why I live here.”
He began to unscrew nuts at the back of the huge air conditioner. After the back panel was removed he gestured for me to come and look inside. What I saw did not look like the guts of any air conditioners I’ve seen. It was half empty and the panel facing outside was actually a one way glass. Behind the panel a large, black telescopic lens was bracketed at such an angle that it pointed directly at the giant stock ticker.
“Did you set up a live webcam feed of the ticker? Why?” I asked. “The ticker in our trading floor has got to be more up to date.”
“It’s not a live feed. It… I show you.” He sat in front of his computer workstation started pounding away on the keyboard. Numerous grainy still images of the ticker popped up on the monitors.
“So, instead of streaming video, you took images of the ticker and processed them to look like they were taken with old cameras? Is that for an art project?”
“Look at the date on this one.” He pointed at the largest image in the middle.
“March twenty-eight, two thousand and fourteen? What … Is it photoshopped?”
“No. The date is correct. These prices are from twenty fourteen.”
“But how? That’s two years in the ….”
“Here, I explain.” He dragged the ticker images to the monitor to the right, pressed a few keys, and other screens began to pop up on the monitor to the left. From what I could tell some of the screens showed partial differential equations and while others showed schematics to electronic devices. Serge then went into a lengthy monologue interspersed with terms like “hadron”, “tachyon”, and maybe some Russian words. The gist of it, from what my non-technical mind could grasp, was that while he was working at CERN he wrote a secret program that allowed him to emit packets of certain subatomic particles in specified directions whenever the particle accelerator’s running, and that some of the particles have the ability to travel faster than light.
“Well, that’s impressive ….” I knew he was waiting for a light bulb to go off in my head but my modern physics was very rusty.
“According to general relativity, when something travels faster than light speed, it goes back in time.”
“Oh. So you, future you, sent yourself this image through those particles?”
“Sort of. I rigged this camera to take images of the ticker and send them digitally to my program at CERN, and the program then sends out those tachyon particles in encoded packets. I built another device that can receive and decode these packets. It’s really simple, just a matter of calculating …” I was not able to follow the rest.
After he was done I exclaimed, “Wow. This is huge. Did you get a patent for this? I bet they’ll even give you the Nobel Prize.”
He was completely dismissive of the idea of making his invention public. “No. Imagine this in the hands of politicians.” I was going to say something in protest but then he handed me a flash drive containing two years’ worth of prices. That immediately set the gears in my head into motion toward contriving various discreet schemes to take advantage of this clairvoyance. I was very successful in the end and over the next two years exceeded my financial target threefold. We did not speak any more of his invention except in passing. Serge stayed at Solomon for another year and we shared a couple more adventures together, including a stint as digital freedom activists where we both became accomplished hackers. That’s a great tale that I hope to write someday.
I was on the verge of starting my post-financial career when the financial markets crashed. The timing could not have been worse. I had already been accepted by a couple of good but costly law schools and was in the process of starting a public interest law firm/think tank prior to matriculation. But before I was able to take the first step toward making my mark in the world I lost three quarters of my net worth. I thought I had played it safe by putting at least a quarter of my assets into annuities and other safe investment vehicles, but the near collapse of economic stalwarts like stud
ent loan lenders caused a financial tsunami large enough to breach my safe harbor. I still had enough left over for a modest income, but having factored in my newfound tycoon status in my future plans I could not imagine continuing without it. So I emailed Serge to get back in touch, and was pleasantly surprised when he called right away and asked me to come and visit him at his lab in Los Robles, New Mexico.
It had been two years after Serge left Solomon and at least six months since our last correspondence. Last I heard he had taken up environmental activism with gusto and was heavily involved in research on geoengineering, the application of technology to counteract the effects of climate change. He had built a lab in a remote and scalding valley in New Mexico to carry out his experiments, and practically lived there according to his last email. He insisted on the phone that I should come and visit him, so I found myself, a native New Yorker who barely passed the road test, struggling to maintain control of a four-wheel drive SUV on a deserted road two hundred miles out of Albuquerque. The landscape was almost Martian in appearance and aside from boulders and scattered sagebrush was completely devoid of feature. The condition of the road was so poor that it may as well be unpaved, but that was a blessing for I would certainly have fallen asleep on account of scenic monotony and exhaustion without the constant stream of pebbles bouncing off the windshield. After the most nerve wrecking three hours of my life the valley where the lab was located finally came into view. It was surrounded on all sides by a tall electric fence which I was forced to almost circumscribe until I found the entrance, where a uniformed and armed guard opened the heavy gate for me.
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