Anomaly

by Peter Cawdron

  Finch made sure he got a shot of the two of them curled up together.

  Cathy opened her eyes, hearing the familiar sound of the zoom lens moving.

  “Human interest, Cathy. Human interest,” said Finch softly. “There's only so much people can take of hydrogen, helium and lithium.”

  Teller stirred. He was awake, but he kept his eyes shut, not wanting to give that tidbit away to Finch and the camera.

  “I'll give you human interest,” growled Cathy, shaking her fist at him.

  Finch laughed and wandered off. Cathy got herself comfortable, curling up against Teller, and drifted back to sleep, as did Teller.

  Shortly after midnight, the core team ran out of elements to exchange with the anomaly. Mason made the call to pull everyone off the intersection. He wanted to send a message, let the anomaly know they were finished. And besides, he figured, no one knew what was next so it made sense to be cautious.

  The members of the contact team on the slab ascended the ropes one by one, being hoisted up/down from the ground using pulleys. They'd become used to twisting around in midair once they felt the pull of normal gravity just past the halfway mark. It made for great footage, said Finch, capturing their descent on camera.

  It was almost one in the morning before the team was back on firm ground. Mason and the others turned in for the night, leaving the graveyard shift to just a handful of scientists and engineers.

  Bates woke Teller and Cathy so they could get some proper sleep in the air-conditioned tents. Truth be told, Teller was a little disappointed at being woken. He would have been quite content to stay there all night, although he realized being woken by the rising sun would have cut his sleep cruelly short. He ached as he got up, his muscles sore from the events of the day.

  Teller stretched. He was a little dehydrated. The bruising on the side of his head throbbed slightly. He figured he'd stop by the medical tent for some painkillers before turning in. Cathy was just as lethargic as he was.

  The two of them looked up at the anomaly. Nothing had happened. The scaffolding sat there idle. There was no visible activity at the heart of the anomaly. If it wasn't for the scaffolding, Teller wouldn't have been able to pick out the center. All was quiet. It was a bit of an anticlimax.

  “Maybe alien probes need their beauty sleep too,” Cathy said as they wandered off to bed.

  Neither Teller nor Cathy rose before noon. They ran into each other while heading for the showers. Neither of them looked respectable, and looking at each other, they knew it. Cathy's hair looked like she'd stuck her finger into a light socket, while Teller's looked like something out of a 70s punk band. With knowing glances and coy smiles, they went their separate ways and enjoyed relaxing under a hot shower, washing the aches and pains away. Teller finished first, and sat outside waiting for Cathy, which she seemed to appreciate. It was amazing what a good night's sleep, a shower and a fresh change of clothes could do, thought Teller.

  The anomaly was almost perfectly aligned when they wandered up to the NASA trailer with a coffee in hand. The noonday sun made it a bit hot for coffee, but Teller felt he needed the caffeine kick. Cathy barely touched her latte.

  Bates and Anderson were busy chatting with the contact team over to one side and didn't notice them, which was fine with Teller.

  The anomaly looked as it always had, a fractured segment of reality. Nothing was glaringly out of place at this time of the day. It was the subtlety that made the anomaly unnerving. The slow moving slab, the ragged sections of the State Department and the flags looked almost normal as they approached their original positions, but that they were in motion at all was unsettling. The mind demanded that these artifacts remain stationary, but they moved in defiance of expectation. The abandoned equipment on the slab looked chaotic, out of place on what should have been an unassuming road cutting north through New York City.

  Finch saw Cathy and Teller walking down the road toward the anomaly and yelled out, “Hey, Teller. Looks like you were wrong again.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that,” replied Teller, not appreciating Finch and his caustic humor. So much for his theory of progression, with the anomaly moving on to a biological conversation. Oh, he thought, why did I open my mouth last night.

  “Don't worry about him,” said Cathy. “Mouthing off is a kind of compliment for Finch. It means you have his attention.”

  “Great,” said Teller, feeling a little low.

  Cathy wandered off to talk to Finch, probably to tell him to pull his head in, figured Teller.

  Mason was sitting alone on the couch with his laptop and phone, madly typing on the small computer keyboard. He seemed quite pleased nothing had happened. They needed a few days just to catch up on everything that had happened so far. It was nice to have a break. Mason said he'd spent the morning trying to patch up diplomatic relations, and answering a backlog of correspondence and emails.

  Teller went to sit down next to him when he noticed a couple of the guys from the engineering team walking toward the anomaly to collect some of their equipment. He glanced at the intersection. Something was different. Something wasn't quite right, but he wasn't sure what. At first, Teller didn't think too much about it, but out of the corner of his eye he noticed the rest of the trees stretching out along 1st Avenue. Their foliage was rich, full of vibrant greens. He looked back at the one, lone tree on the slowly moving slab. It was different. It looked tired. The limbs of the tree sagged a little. The leaves lacked luster. The branches had curled downward.

  Maybe, he thought, it's not getting enough water, maybe the roots are drying out. But the traffic light was sagging as well. The engineering crew were too busy talking with each other to notice. They walked up to within ten feet of the gently sloping intersection.

  Teller dropped his coffee, spilling it on the ground as he burst into a sprint, running over toward the engineering crew yelling.

  “Stop. Hey, you. Stop. Don't go in there. Stay right where you are.”

  Mason, Anderson and Bates all stopped what they were doing and looked up. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  Teller was in pain, even just a short burst had exposed how sore his body was from the day before. Half-running, half-limping he made his way over to the engineering team. For their part, they were standing there baffled, wondering what the big deal was. The slab barely moved, creeping onward at an almost imperceptible rate. The spherical shape of the anomaly meant their heads were within inches of breaking the invisible perimeter that defined the gravitational influence of the alien environment, but none of them seemed to realize that.

  The slab making up the intersection within the anomaly was almost level with the ground. Walking onto it would be like walking down a slight ramp. The leader of the group went to step forward.

  “No,” yelled Teller. “Don't.”

  The team leader looked out across the intersection.

  The trash in the gutter had been crushed. It looked as though it had been ironed flat. Most of the leaves on the tree had been stripped off along with the smaller twigs. Instead of lying on the ground, they had been compressed against the slab. The flags were hanging straight down even though there was a stiff southerly breeze blowing along the avenue. The traffic light sagged under a heavy load.

  “Don't go in there,” said Teller, hobbling the last few feet over toward them. “Get back.”

  The team backed away slowly.

  “What is going on?” asked the team leader.

  Mason, Anderson and Bates ran over.

  “I don't know for sure,” replied Teller. “But something is not right. I think the strength of the gravitational field may have changed.”

  Teller picked up a small stone and tossed it into the anomaly. It should have gone a good twenty feet, but it didn't. Instead of following a casual arc through the air, it dove straight at the ground as though it had been shot down out of a cannon.

  “If you'd gone in there, you would have been crushed.”

  A large
branch broke off the tree, crashing to the ground in less than a second. It didn't bounce. It slammed hard against the pavement.

  “What the,” cried Mason.

  They all backed away slowly.

  “Well, you were right about there being a new phase,” said Anderson.

  “But wrong about what that would be,” added Teller. “This isn't what I imagined.”

  As ever, Finch was their wingman, broadcasting their reactions to the world.

  The scaffolding within the anomaly fell, crumpling on the ground. But it didn't end up in a pile of steel rods at various angles, with gaps in between as they'd expect. Instead, it spread out, crushed hard up against the concrete.

  A few seconds later, the traffic light snapped and crashed into the concrete intersection.

  “Did you notice that,” remarked Bates, raising his hand up near his ear.

  “It's delayed,” replied Anderson. “And at a low pitch. There's nothing in the higher frequencies.”

  “What is going on?” asked Mason, wanting answers.

  “It must be the density of the medium,” said Bates. “It's dulling wave propagation. Teller?”

  “Ah, yeah,” replied Teller, as surprised by all this as everyone else.

  “Tell me this is not something I should be worried about,” said Mason.

  “Well,” said Teller. “It's contained, so whatever is happening it is limited to the anomaly, just as it has always been.”

  “That's good,” replied Mason. “What else?”

  Cathy walked up to them, not sure what she'd missed but realizing there was a sense of alarm rippling among the scientists. She noticed a blue tinge inside the anomaly.

  Teller hobbled over and picked up the binoculars sitting on the coffee table. He looked toward the center of the anomaly. That's where the action had always been, he reasoned. He fiddled with the focal ring.

  “Well,” he said, handing Mason the binoculars. “It's moved on to another phase, all right.”

  “What the …” said Mason, staring through the binoculars. “What the hell am I looking at?”

  He handed the binoculars to Anderson.

  “So what is it?” asked Cathy. Teller could see she was dying to get her hands on the binoculars but suspected she was quite a way down the pecking order.

  “It's hard to tell,” said Teller. “But it's asymmetrical. Finch, can you zoom in on that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get as close as you can,” said Teller. “But whatever you do, do not go in there.”

  Teller hobbled over to the NASA trailer where the broadcast was being displayed on a large external screen. Finch moved to within a few feet of the anomaly, kneeing down so he could get a steady, close-up shot.

  “Look at the color,” said Anderson, noting the build up of a distinct cerulean blue tinge within the sphere. “It's denser toward the center. That has to be an illusion, an artifact of the spherical shape, but, damn, the density must be still increasing.”

  “Nitrogen? Oxygen?” asked one of the other scientists standing beside them.

  “I'm picking up both, and lots of methane,” said another scientist, looking at a spectrometer graph.

  “Interesting,” replied Anderson. “It's similar to a gas giant.”

  Bates was over by Finch, near the anomaly. “Temperature's dropping. Must be well below zero,” he cried out, holding his hand within a few inches of the now distinct barrier between the two worlds. The moisture in the air was condensing, forming a fine mist just before the smooth blue edge of the sphere.

  The tree gave way, collapsing to the ground. Finch panned down, zooming in on the crushed metal and then over at the flattened tree.

  “Finch,” yelled Cathy. This was no time for getting candid shots. They needed to figure out what was happening at the core.

  Teller had his fingers up by the screen, moving his hand back and forth as he looked at the blurred object in the center of the anomaly. He was covering the object and then slowly drawing his hand back, trying to stimulate his thinking, trying to see things in a different light.

  “Can you hold it still?” Teller called out.

  Finch was taking shallow breaths. With the zoom on full, even the slightest movement was amplified through the image. Finch rested his elbow on his knee, trying to steady the camera. The backup cameraman ran off to get the tripod.

  “It's in motion,” said Teller.

  “Really?” replied Mason.

  “Yeah, I think so.” Teller moved his hand back and forth over the fuzzy image. “Any movement from Finch is only going to be in two dimensions, shaking the image about. But this bit, right here, is receding, it's moving on the z-axis, away from us. That's not Finch.”

  Teller dropped his hand and stood back, squinting at the hazy image.

  “Look at the irregular patches, the smooth edges,” said Anderson as he examined the video feed. Bates came up beside them, looking intently at the fuzzy glob on the high definition screen.

  “At a guess. It's organic,” said Teller.

  “You think this is...” said Bates.

  “...alive,” added Anderson, completing his sentence.

  “I thought you said this was a probe,” said Mason. “That it wasn't alive.”

  “I was wrong,” replied Teller. “I seem to be wrong quite a bit these days. But, actually, it's not that surprising, if you think about it a little.”

  “What do you mean it's not surprising?” queried Mason, wondering if Teller had gone mad.

  “Spam in a can,” said Bates.

  “Precisely,” said Teller.

  Anderson answered Mason's question.

  “If we were going to send out an interstellar mission, something that would take generations to complete, we wouldn't send people.”

  “What would we send?” asked Cathy, intrigued by the concept.

  “DNA. Sperm and eggs,” said Anderson. “It'll be cheaper, easier and more humane to simply make people at the other end.”

  “Spam in a can,” repeated Bates with a smile. “It's not very romantic, but it's practical.”

  “Exactly,” replied Teller. “If you think about the astronomical cost of propelling something from one side of the galaxy to another in terms of energy expenditure, it's going to be orders of magnitude easier to send the blueprints for life instead of sending life itself. The absurd amounts of time involved make it impossible to send living creatures between stars. This thing could have been traveling for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years. So the freeze-dried option is really the only option.”

  “So that,” asked Mason, “is some kind of test-tube alien?”

  The image went blurry as Finch switched to a long-range lens. It took him a few seconds to adjust the filters and balance the light before the image displayed more definition. Although the edges were blurred, they could see a central mass curled up in a ball with several appendages along with what appeared to be veins and some kind of pulsating muscle.

  “So that's some kind of fetus?” asked Cathy.

  “Yes,” said Teller. “But like us, the embryonic stage is probably full of vestigial elements that are nothing like the fully formed creature. Our own children tend to look more like a lizard or an alien than a human in the first trimester.”

  Anderson smiled at the irony, saying, “Yeah, it's going to take some time before we see its final form.”

  “How much time?” asked Mason.

  Teller loved the way Mason assumed there were answers available on tap.

  Bates added, “It could be days, weeks, months or even years.”

  “There's no way to tell,” said Anderson, slapping Mason on the back as he added, “But it looks like you're going to be a daddy.”

  Cathy laughed.

  “Biologists are going to pour over these images for years to come,” said Teller. “It's giving us a glimpse into its evolutionary past, a snapshot of millions of years of alien evolutionary de
velopment from the other side of the universe. Fascinating.”

  “I hope it doesn't expect the same kind of show-and-tell from us,” said Cathy.

  Teller laughed.

  “I hate to sound like I'm paranoid,” said Mason. “But tell me why this thing isn't breeding some kind of clone army to conquer the Earth?”

  He didn't look that worried by the concept, but, pointing at the permanent camera mounted on the side of the research trailer, he suspected those watching might be. Hollywood had a way of molding popular opinion.

  Teller looked up at the camera. He'd known it was there for a couple of days, but it was only now he noticed the microphone mounted below it. He hadn't given any thought to audio being recorded, assuming the only sound that was being captured was by Finch, but all of the cameras broadcast both audio and video. He wondered what inadvertent conversations had been captured with this camera, and he remembered standing here looking at the images of Paris burning the previous evening. He couldn't remember what he and Cathy had said about that, but whatever they'd said had gone global. There was nothing like being caught unawares, and he hoped he hadn't said anything indiscreet, only to have that broadcast around the world.

  “I don't think there's anything to be alarmed about,” said Bates. “To start with, the pressure difference between in there and out here is extreme. Organics tend to be fine-tuned. Bodies evolve to deal with certain tolerances. For that thing, being out here would be fatal, so I don't think it's going anywhere. It's a bit like hauling up a deep sea creature. The pressure difference is lethal.

  “To put it in context, if the same difference was applied to us, it would be worse than standing atop of Mt Everest or being caught unprotected in a decompressed plane. As pressure changes, the intricate chemistry associated with cellular life changes; the interactions are all different. It just won't work. The inside of the anomaly changed for a reason, because that's what this alien needs to survive.”

  “And it's all wrong,” added Anderson, “You generally don't start your quest for world domination by being polite. You don't go out of your way to be considerate and courteous only to then crush the natives underfoot.”