When her eyes returned to the creature before her, it was already staring at her.
She could see the realization in the dark pupils of her doppelgänger.
“They know,” she whispered, barely moving her lips.
Her heart rate quickened. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Slowly, she moved her gloved hand. Her fingers settled on the armrest controls of the MMU and she came within a heartbeat of pulling back, but curiosity got the better of her.
Whoever or whatever this was, it clearly meant her no harm. It had tried to appear in a form that would be familiar to her. It had to be as curious about her as she was about it, but the charade was over, and they both knew it. This vast alien intelligence must have known she'd see through the ruse eventually. Had it wanted to perfectly mimic the imperfections in her appearance, it could have, but it didn't. It wanted her to recognize it as more than an illusion, but in such a way that she could accept it without freaking out.
“Who are you?” she asked.
For the first time, her doppelgänger acted independently, reaching out and holding its gloved hand toward her. Jasmine could see the grip marks on the tips of the outstretched glove, a perfect match for her own.
“What do you want?” she asked.
There was no answer. Jasmine watched as the alien replicant smiled warmly. What do you want? That was a dumb question, she decided. They didn’t want anything. It was humanity that wanted contact.
She wondered how long these creatures had been out here. How long had they been stranded in orbit around Saturn? Decades? Perhaps hundreds of years? Thousands? How long had humanity been blissfully unaware of this interstellar neighbor?
What would have happened if their ship hadn’t been damaged? What would have happened if they had approached Earth during the European renaissance when Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens and saw Jupiter and Saturn? Jasmine remembered hearing that Galileo had once wondered about the ears of Saturn. Ears turned out to be rings, but for thousands of years humanity had been astonishingly ignorant of the heavens, thinking stars were tiny pinpricks of light, not absurdly massive balls of fusion-induced plasma. What would have happened had Plato or Aristotle had the opportunity to meet with representatives from another world?
She thought of how European contact had changed the lives of American Indians, Australian aborigines and the Aztecs. Such a radical clash of cultures had been both a blessing and a curse. For every advance, there had been heartache. Would the same have been true with First Contact?
We’ve always wanted this, she realized. We’ve been driven by a desire to know, cursed by those that guess, and yet guided by those that wanted more than speculation, those that had the heart to learn from all that lay around them. Slowly, we’ve reached out to learn more, she thought, looking at the outstretched glove so stationary before her.
Jasmine raised her trembling hand. Fear welled up within her. She couldn’t help but be afraid. The uncertainty, the doubts about the message. Monsters hide under the bed, she told herself. They don’t come out in the open. They’re never real.
“I have to know,” she whispered, fighting against her natural sense of fear. She had to reach out and touch the glove. Her desire to know was stronger than her instinctive drive to flee danger. In her mind, she could hear the message broadcast from Bestla. The ghostly wails and the inhuman voice speaking of a sweet, glorious Satan.
“I—” she began, not knowing quite what to say. Her voice broke in a quiver. Her heart thumped in her throat as she spoke. “I want to live and die for you, Satan.”
With the word Satan, the two hands touched.
Nothing happened.
Her breathing slowed.
Jasmine expected the creature to feel stiff, perhaps robotic, but there was barely any resistance to her touch. The alien entity remained stationary as she ran her fingers over the fake glove. Like the wall by the iris, fine grains of sand appeared to crumble beneath her touch. Fascinated, she pinched gently at the alien's glove, watching as the grit came loose and rolled beneath her rubber-padded fingers. She ground the dust between her finger pads, holding it up for the camera and watching as it fell from her glove, falling back into place and repairing the section she'd damaged.
“Satan,” she whispered again, her mind reeling from the implications of First Contact with an alien species. She could remember their enigmatic message so clearly. There had to be some greater meaning. As much as her natural reaction was caution, she remembered the optimism of Nadir. He was convinced there was more to the message, that it had somehow been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Floating here with her mirror image and seeing how patient it was with her, she agreed.
Jasmine used the touchpad on her wrist to pull up the audio files containing the message from Bestla. The file was 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds long, matching a sidereal day, the length of time it takes Earth to rotate relative to the stars. There had to be something important about that length, she thought. For her, and everyone else on Earth, 24 hours marked one day, the time that transpires from noon to noon, but as Earth is racing around the Sun at 67,000 miles an hour, a day is slightly shorter when measured against the position of the stars. These alien creatures had chosen the length of a terrestrial day for their message, but a day as measured from outside of Earth. There had to be a reason.
“Why us?” she asked. “Why choose the exact length of our day for your message?”
There just had to be a reason, and thinking about a reason calmed her nerves.
The message bothered her. There had only been one tiny portion that seemed intelligible, roughly a dozen words spoken over less than a minute, and yet everyone had focused on those words while ignoring everything else in the transmission. It was as though the other 23 hours and 55 minutes were meaningless, but they couldn’t be, she thought. The entire message held some meaning to this alien species.
Jasmine had no idea at what point those seemingly Satanic words had been spoken, but she pressed play and an eerie swirling noise filled her ears. She could hear the pulsing tempo, like the beat of her racing heart. The pitch fluctuated, surging and swelling in intensity. Static cut in and out. The signal was weak. Sections wavered, becoming clear for a few seconds and then fading into little more than a hiss.
Jasmine looked at her doppelgänger. Could alien-Jazz hear this? Sound wouldn't carry between them in a vacuum, but would that be an impediment for a species that had traversed the stars as mankind sailed the seas? Would the creature recognize its own message played back? After roughly a minute, Jasmine pressed pause and gestured with her hands to her dysfunctional reflection, trying to interact with the creature, wanting some kind of response.
The creature copied her motion from less than a minute ago, reaching down and pressing its thick gloved fingers against the touchpad on its arm. Jasmine was fascinated. No detail was spared. Faux-Jazz even looked at a variety of images displayed on her fake HUD just as Jasmine had moments before. Jasmine was pretty sure her alien counterpart didn’t need to, but apparently this was all to set her more at ease.
Suddenly, Jasmine heard music in her helmet headphones. The sound was astonishingly clear. There was no static, no hiss, no wavering signal. She could have sworn someone just turned on a car radio.
“Houston?” she asked, but this wasn’t a signal from Earth. This was Faux-Jazz. She could hear the soft twang of a guitar, the beat of drums, the thrum of a bass. Although she didn't recognize the song, the words were in English.
I just want to be with you.
To be with you always.
Always with you.
The song sounded old, like some hippie song from the 60s or 70s. As the song ended, a voice spoke.
“This is Charlie Chasen and you're listening to American Top Fifty live from Los Angeles, California.”
The voice was surreal. Chasen had a theatrical tone, giving plain words a sense of gravitas they shouldn't have had, as though Chasen was an actor o
n a stage.
“This next song comes from a band that continues to rewrite the record books. This is Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones, coming in at number seventeen in the Top Fifty after a remarkable fifty one weeks in—”
The sudden silence was deafening.
Jasmine was stunned.
Floating there inside the alien spacecraft, she had found herself projected back to her early teens. She'd once listened to that show. The various presenters had changed through the years, but the format was roughly the same. Saturday nights from six. She'd sat there on her porch swing listening to the American Top Fifty on sultry summer evenings in Atlanta.
“I don't understand,” she said, pleading with her reflection. “Talk to me! Speak to me!”
The creature smiled, but never spoke.
"Why this? Why radio?"
Jasmine thought about what she’d just heard. The radio broadcast had stopped mid-sentence. Looking at the soundtrack positioned low on her HUD, she dragged the position forward, scrubbing through the message. She could hear audio sampling as she moved her finger over her touchpad and she began to recognize a subtle difference in the sounds. For stretches of roughly four minutes, the pitch and rhythm were more intense. Interspersed between them were monotone sections. These must have been when the radio announcer was speaking. She came across another monotone section and played the soundtrack for the alien.
Although she didn’t understand the message, she listened to the garble of noise until it seemed as though another song was starting. No sooner had she hit pause than her doppelgänger played its message in reply.
“Expecting highs in the 90s for the next four days, with a cool change coming by the weekend,” a woman's voice said. “Back to you, Chasen.”
“History is being made,” Chasen said. “Right now, on the far side of the solar system, a space probe is beaming photos back to Earth. NASA's Pioneer 11 is cruising past the gas giant Saturn.”
Chasen sounded excited. No longer was there an air of showmanship in his voice, rather he seemed genuine in his enthusiasm.
“They tell me Saturn is so big, you could fit our entire planet into the gas giant over 750 times! And those rings are 175,000 miles wide. I don’t know about you, but to me, those numbers are stupefying. They’re so big I have trouble imagining them in practical terms.
“As this decade draws to a close, we’ve had Three Mile Island, we’ve had anthrax released in the Soviet Union, we’ve had shootings in our schools, the Unabomber, Flight 191 crashing out of O’Hare. Doom and gloom is everywhere, but the Pioneer and Voyager space probes are reminding us there’s more to life than just this little rock floating in space.
“Taking us back into space, at number twenty four in the Top Fifty, is The Police with Walking on the Moon.”
A bass rift started up, accompanied by the strained sounds of an electric guitar striking rather than strumming chords, but before the singer could begin, the replay stopped abruptly, and Jasmine understood—this was where she had started her audio file.
“So this is us,” she said. “But why? Why play this back to us?”
Light slowly flooded the vast chamber, revealing it as a sphere easily a hundred yards in diameter. From what she could tell, she was no more than ten to fifteen yards from the center, looking at a line of glowing lights suspended behind her doppelgänger.
“There’s light. I think it might be life,” she said. She was guessing. She desperately wanted this to be a spark of life. She wanted to find something that would give her hope.
Jasmine used her MMU jets to drift slowly over toward the yellow lights. As she approached, her replica flew slightly ahead of her. It was a little disconcerting to see the replica flying backwards without turning around to face in the direction of travel. The creature, it seemed, was intent on keeping its eyes on her. Its eyes or her eyes? Now the charade was over, she wanted to see these creatures for real, but they seemed to want to maintain the illusion. Perhaps that was for the best, she thought.
She was tired, so incredibly tired. Even with all the excitement, she felt as though her life was being drained from her. Concentrating was difficult.
From its motion, Jasmine understood the creature felt a need to protect these strange objects so she proceeded slowly. To her surprise, the replica positioned itself slightly below and behind the closest of the objects, still facing her but allowing her to approach to within a few feet.
“Whatever these are,” she said, “they’re organic rather than mechanical.”
She could see light radiating from within what appeared to be transparent sacs. There were dark patches, thin strands that looked like veins, specks of green and red along with an almost marble texture. Jasmine was electrified by the sight before her. Without thinking, she reached up to touch the object when her doppelgänger held out a hand, signaling her to stop. Her replica was gentle, but Jasmine had no doubt about what it was signaling. She lowered her hand back to the controls of her MMU and backed off a few feet out of respect, wanting to show the alien entity she meant no harm.
“They’re eggs,” she said. “Seeds.”
Jasmine double-checked she was still transmitting back to Earth.
“I think I get it. I think I know what this is all about. I don’t know what happened here, but something disastrous occurred, something that crippled the ship. The crew were killed, perhaps long before Bestla entered our solar system. The ship drifted for thousands, maybe millions of years given the dust and impacts I saw on the surface.”
Staring at the seeds, the slightest motion of her head caused the light to twinkle. There was a rainbow of hues catching her eyes.
“This isn’t a ghost ship, it’s a lifeboat.”
Her eyes settled on her doppelgänger.
“I think that’s some kind of caretaker. I don’t know what you’d call it, but some kind of automated robotic system is protecting what’s left of the crew. It’s sending out an emergency signal—an SOS. Only its distress call has to consider the possibility of being picked up and understood by an unknown intelligent species—us.
“They must have detected the Pioneer space craft when it passed by Saturn. They’ve been replaying our own radio signals back to us ever since, but in reverse so we’d know our signal hadn’t bounced off something natural. Only their SOS is so weak, it barely registered with us until the Iliad approached. And their SOS has a date-time stamp, one we should have recognized.”
The lights faded from view, plunging the chamber back into darkness.
“They’ve been out here so long they’re almost out of power. It must be all they can do to show me this.”
Her CO2 alarm beeped three times, but Jasmine ignored the noise, saying, “They’re asking for help.”
Her doppelgänger drifted to one side, signaling with her arm for Jasmine to follow her into the darkness.
“And Satan, my sweet Satan, that’s just us. Amidst the noise and chaos of our own sounds, we heard what we wanted to hear, something that would validate our primitive fears.”
Jasmine’s vision began to blur again, but this time no amount of focus on her part could bring her sight back as anything other than peering through a dark fog or heavy rain. Her head throbbed. A stabbing pain cut behind her eyes. Her doppelgänger was a haze, a blur of white some thirty feet ahead of her.
“I—I always knew this was a one-way trip,” she said, stumbling over her words. “With the loss of the Copernicus, there was only ever one way this could end.”
She choked on her words.
“For me, this is goodbye.”
Jasmine was dying, and she understood that in just minutes, perhaps seconds, she’d fall unconscious never to wake again. Through tears forming in the corner of her eyes, she could see her doppelgänger on the far side of the chamber. A white gloved hand beckoned her closer.
Jasmine eased forward with the controls on her MMU. The signal bar flickered and disappeared.
Loss of signal occurred at 14:
57:04 on 18 May 2037… rerouting… seeking… seeking… no signal.
Jasmine was past caring. Her breathing was shallow. Her heart raced. Dots appeared before her eyes, but she had the presence of mind to bring the MMU to a halt before the pristine white spacesuit of her doppelgänger.
Before her eyes, the astronaut replica faded to black and dissolved into the darkness. Jasmine blinked, unsure of what she was seeing. She squeezed her eyelids together, but struggled to open them again. She felt tired, defeated. Her eyelids were so heavy.
Her spotlights illuminated a wall covered in what looked like dark tentacles, or perhaps fronds of seaweed waving with some unseen current. Jasmine couldn’t be sure about what she was seeing, but two of the tentacles grabbed at her hands, wrapping themselves around her gloves.
Even with carbon dioxide overwhelming her body, her fight or flight response flushed adrenalin through her muscles. She jerked, wanting to break free.
“No!” she screamed, trying desperately to pull her arms away. She twisted the MMU controls and jets of compressed gas shot out, wrenching her away from the wall, but the tentacles held fast, pulling her back. The alien tentacles responded rapidly, reaching out and wrapping around her legs and pulling her closer despite the constant burst of gas.
“No, please. Don’t,” she yelled as the black tentacles pulled her arms away from the controls and the MMU jets fell still. “Please, I don't want to die like this. Not like this.”
Jasmine struggled. She was trying to pull her hands free when she felt the outer layer of her gloves dissolving. Warm fluid ran in around her fingers, and it took her a second to realize that was coolant leaking from her suit.
My Sweet Satan Page 26
