by Kondor, Luke
“Moomamu, Darpal’s in the car,” Nisha screamed as the cloud was now all around them. The IPC Security on the perimeters had disappeared into the fog of black. The cloud was closing in on them. Moomamu shook his head and teleported to the car. He reached inside and yanked Darpal’s body out. Darpal was floppy in Moomamu’s arms. He was out cold. Moomamu winced as he tried to hold him. He walked back over to Nisha.
“Come on,” he said. She climbed to her feet, her head still aching, her eyes still streaming. She wasn’t crying, though. Something was happening to her. Her head was beginning to go light. The world was starting to spin. It was happening again. The visions from the studio, but, this time, it felt different. She was still lucid.
As the cloud of black buzzed around them, they ran back towards the Pig-House. The cloud was now circling the entire farm, working its way closer and closer. Before they entered the Pig-House, Nisha looked back to see Luna’s body disappear into a sea of black. Mr Foster was crying, closed in one of the cars. Dr Warwick was on his knees, looking up to them, unsure what was happening. He didn’t even seem to realise the wayward pieces of the cloud were already on him. The last thing Nisha saw before they closed the Pig-House door was his pale skull, exposed through where his eye was supposed to be.
Moomamu The Thinker
Moomamu collapsed as they climbed inside the Pig-House. Nisha placed Darpal on the floor and slammed the door shut. She looked around and grabbed armfuls of farming equipment — hoes, rakes, shovels — and propped them against the door. A plastic bin. Anything she could find to hold the door firm. Outside and all around them, the storm of the cloud crackled.
Moomamu’s arm felt broken. With every movement, a sharp spike of pain worked its way from his wrist up to his shoulder. Nisha retched against the door. She held her hand against her stomach. What a time to be sick.
“Are you okay?” Moomamu shouted.
“Fine, you need to jump,” she said to Moomamu, holding her hand over her head. He nodded and used his good arm to stand up. He stepped over a trough on the floor and walked back to the soft spot. He looked around, listened, smelt, as hard as he could for any change in the air. But there was nothing. An absence of anything he might call a soft spot. How could he be sure it was there? Maybe they were too late.
“I’m sorry,” Moomamu said. “But I don’t think I can do it.”
“You have to,” she said as she scooped Darpal up into her arms and walked towards him. “You have to do it now.” She looked upwards. Through the hole in the ceiling, they saw the great tornado of black they were in. It was the eye of the storm. Sparks of electricity. The sounds of the tiny machinery smashing against the walls of the Pig-House.
Moomamu jumped on the spot but again nothing happened. Each time he jumped he was met with nothing.
“Please,” she said, crying. Her eyes puffy and red, and the sleeping Darpal beginning to stir. His eyes opened. Confused. Unaware. He should’ve stayed asleep. “You have to save us.”
As the words left her mouth the roof of the Pig-House ripped away and disappeared into the swirling black whirlpool above them.
“Okay,” Moomamu shouted. “Okay.”
He closed his eyes. Jumped. When he opened his eyes he saw the black pouring into the Pig-House. The cloud filled the Pig-House, submerging them in black. Somewhere amidst the chaos, Nisha screamed. He tried to say sorry. He covered his face. Waited for the inevitable. But there was no pain. He didn’t feel his skin being torn from his body. He didn’t feel his insides being eaten away. He opened his eyes to see an empty bubble of nothing around him. An invisible force field holding the cloud back. Before he knew what was happening he saw a second bubble emerge in the darkness, a purple light finding its way through whatever holes in the cloud it encountered. Flickering until the two bubbles merged completely and he saw two sources of the purple light. The two eyes.
“You have to do it now,” Nisha said. “I can’t hold it for much longer.”
Darpal was still in her arms, barely aware of what was happening around them. Nisha’s face was washed in the indigo pouring out of her eyes, amplified by the darkness. She was shaking. Struggling. The oldest indigo.
“Okay,” Moomamu said as he closed his eyes.
Five.
He thought of Luna. He thought of Gary.
Four.
The protective field around them shrunk.
Three.
The sound of the cloud around them was almost too much. Growing louder and heavier with each passing second. The tiny particles chomping, crushing, gnawing, hungry, so hungry.
Two.
Nisha’s field fell. She screamed. Darpal didn’t make a noise. The purple lights disappeared into the darkness.
One.
Moomamu jumped.
The Signal & The Ship
Miss Sam
The force of the atmosphere pulled her back into her seat as she was flown upwards into the skies. She called out. Nobody listened. Flashbacks of the nets in her home-trees came to her. Her mother shot with the gun. Blood. Lots of blood. Once up and in the atmosphere, she calmed a little. She thought of her friend. The woman with the blonde hair and the glasses. The one who hugged her when she was scared. The one who fed her when the others didn’t. The one with the kind face. Dr Liz Cooper. She touched her hand to her chest and the word “home” came to her mind. She cried again but nobody listened.
The straps on her front pulled on her fur. On the panel by her hands the usual levers. She’d seen those before. She knew how to do this. She saw the shape, pulled the lever, food fell into a tray. She placed it into her mouth and was happy with the taste. She did it again.
She felt strange. Her body was light. Her fur on its ends. She didn’t recognise the feeling, but it was okay when she thought of Dr Liz Cooper — the woman with the glasses. The woman who said “home”. It was okay when she thought of that word. The way it sounded. The way the woman’s mouth curled up and she’d touch her middle. Home. She pulled the next lever and another treat clanged as it hit the tray.
The straps tugged at her fur and she yelped. Nobody listened. It would be okay, though. Home. Woman with glasses. Home. It would be okay.
As the next shape appeared she went to pull on the lever but instead of getting the treat, a pain shot through the soles of her feet and into her body. She screamed. It was the right one. It was the right lever. Another shock of pain. She screamed again but another shock. Home. She tried to remember. Woman with glasses. Home. Another shock. She screamed and tried to move her body but the straps were too tight. She was in a cage of darkness. No windows. No woman with glasses. Another shock. She howled and screamed and shook her body back and forth. The straps pulled on her. The pain shocked her feet. The darkness. Nobody listened.
Back on Earth, her ship had been reported as missing. It was floating along the Earth’s atmosphere one moment and then the next it passed through a hole of some kind. Something that the people of Earth didn’t realise was even there. A connection between two distant parts of the universe. The capsule slipped through without a noise. Passed through the Event Horizon.
As the electric shock equipment continued to malfunction and burned Miss Sam’s feet, she screamed and thrashed and thought of the woman with glasses. She thought of home.
The shocks continued for the rest of Miss Sam’s life. Eighteen days in the capsule, floating past sunsets of a star system she would never know, travelling much further than ever intended. Tired and drained of the energy to scream, the battery eventually died and the shocks gave way. As Miss Sam wheezed, her feet burned and aching, her stomach lining beginning to collapse, she thought of the woman with glasses. She thought of home.
The capsule would still travel, though. Its forward momentum was already configured into the physics of space like lines of code. The capsule steadily made its way past meteors and planets. It danced, as if to music, past vast sunrises, past the pull of a collapsing star, and continued to do so, frozen in time,
for millennia. Miss Sam’s body, long dead, frozen and encased in metal, eventually drifted into an area of space never intended for visitors. Well, for the most part.
A giant black cloud, lifeless, acting as the moon to a planet that once harboured the life of the Ancient Artists. Gods of a kind. If one believed in such a thing. The black cloud was developed by the three brothers: Hectares, Morphosus, and John.
They had no powers over the stars or the suns. No abilities to create organic matter from nothing. To create women from ribs and men from dust. Not at all. They had no powers of a supernatural nature. They were simply able to work with the materials at hand. Their godliness came from their ability to use technology.
The Ancient Artists built the black cloud, which Morphosus entitled “his greatest accomplishment: The Signal”.
A mass of microscopic black robots in need of a consciousness. It would need organic matter to become complete. To awaken. And that’s where the art would be in this installation. What kind of consciousness fell into The Signal would determine the outcome of the universe. The character and the mind would determine the use.
And it was Miss Sam’s capsule, drifting constantly at the same speed, which fell into the black cloud. A sperm cell to an egg, the capsule pushed its way inside and towards the centre. As the nanobots found their way into a hole in the capsule and crawled over Miss Sam’s frozen body, into the nose, into the grey matter of the brain, the equation was complete.
The cloud moved. It shimmered in the darkness with life. The black cloud ate away at Miss Sam’s brain, filed through the neurons and pathways and took on Miss Sam’s character — her needs, her desires, her pain.
For the first time in a star’s lifecycle, Miss Sam awoke, more alert and lucid than she ever was before her death, and the first thing she did was scream. A wail that made its way across the universe, seeking something, anything, to get her back. Back home. The woman in the glasses. Home. She howled through space and time until she heard the numbers come back to her. Finally, somebody was listening.
The Galactic Community’s Stance On The Signal.
Tl;dr: We don’t like it
Scourge of the known galaxy. The Signal is a plague to us all. The Community has decided. We don’t like it.
The Signal has passed over and dealt considerable damage to a number of smaller planets. Nothing major yet, but as far as we can tell, it’s on course for one of the one of the potentials for the Galactic Community. In fact, JonUl from Gamma Nebulous said he was looking at some of the received signals from the planet and he caught a moving picture serial of something called The Big Bang Theorem. He said it wasn’t bad. Nothing ground-breaking, but enjoyable enough.
Regardless, we would hate to lose the planet and its potential to something as destructive as The Signal.
Galactic politics being the way they are, we can’t afford to go through the rigmarole of calculating relative time differences and matching up the twenty-two thousand committee planets’ calendars to schedule a committee meeting to spare the resources to travel that far. After all, the planet is all the way over in the Milky Way galaxy. It would take ages. We’d probably be too late unless we were to use a warp-hole, which is, of course, illegal within Community law.
Legality, though, isn’t something that would faze, say, a Freelancer.
I propose that within the next ten years, we put a message out to outsource the issue to the Freelance Network. It really is much better these days to outsource one’s work. Generally, freelancers are cheaper because of the Geo-Arbitrage. Also, you’re not fixed to any sort of health plan, there’s no contractual obligation to keep them employed after the job is done, and also it really is user-friendly. The UI on the Freelance Network is super straightforward. Hey, even the little ones could figure it out, right from their mother’s sucklings.
But, hey, you know what, it’s not my decision. That lies between the three brothers. Oh, blessed are they. Or does it?
I propose we move forward and push it through anyway. We can use private networks and ciphers to hide our posts. We have the fake account already.
I’ll leave it up to you, JooLa,
All the best, worst, and whatever great fate awaits,
Digre-El
Gamme Capulus Consulate
Moomamu The Thinker
BLUE LIGHT ALL AROUND HIM. Waves passing through him. His fingers stretching outwards and his limbs elongated. It was just like the star-door on Othos. It was the great time-stream. The only way to pull and push one’s body forwards and backwards across time.
Moomamu didn’t even get chance to exhale before he opened his eyes again and found himself standing in the cold on a hill. Thick mist around him. Grass on the floor. Lovely greenery and trees. A bushy little creature ran past him and grabbed a nut from the floor before clambering up the bark of a tree and into the green leaves above his head.
He took a deep breath and the air felt fresh against his lungs. The smell of dirt and metal had been replaced with the sweet scent of the green. A drop of morning moisture rested on a blade of grass by his feet. He went to reach out to it but the pain in his arm came back with a vengeance.
He winced and saw it was swollen where his arm and his hand joined. A red and purple line marking where the club had hit him.
At the bottom of the hill, he saw buildings. No-nonsense cubes and cuboids of concrete. Not many. Just a few surrounded by runways and stationary flying machines. He teleported down and hid behind one of the buildings.
Humans were talking, their boots clapping against the floor. He carefully dipped his head around the corner to see the two humans in green marching away from him. He teleported to the other side of the building when he heard them — the screeching and the crying of animals. He walked to the door but it was locked. He peered through the glass of the window and teleported inside.
Oh, that smell. Thick and hairy. It reminded him of the prison cells in Minu.
He walked forward, past a number of the chimpanzees in their cages. Their names in black marker pen on white bits of paper. Albert, Ham, Holloman, and then, Miss Sam. Each of the chimpanzees looked at him with confusion. Some of them came to the fronts of their cages to stare up at the unfamiliar man. He ignored them and walked to Miss Sam. She was at the back of the cage, hiding as if she knew why he was there. Moomamu bent over and looked through to the back of the cage. Tiny, horrid living conditions. No animal should be kept in such a thing.
He walked further on and found a table full of papers, folders, a crappy old computer, some bowls of fruit (lots of bananas), and some eating sticks. He picked up the sharp eating stick and walked back towards Miss Sam’s cage.
He sighed as unlocked the clasp and swung the door open. He got down to his knees and looked into the cage. He held the eating stick out in front of him, unsure of how he was going to do what he was supposed to do.
He looked at the sweet little brown face with the bulbous eyes. She had her back turned to Moomamu and was looking at him over her own shoulder. She was scared, clutching a green length of string. On the floor were some rags, dirty browns and yellows. It reminded Moomamu of his own prison.
He had to kill Miss Sam. He had to. She would go on to destroy the world. She would go on to become a menace, not only to Earth but the universe. He had to end it before it began, and, more importantly, The Light had told Moomamu that if he killed the chimpanzee, he would take Moomamu home. He’d be free again, free to watch it all from a distance; to go back to his life in the stars where he could be alone to think.
Miss Sam pressed her hand to her chest and looked up to Moomamu, a little more confident now. If a chimpanzee could smile, this was probably it.
He sighed and the vision of Nisha Bhatia came to his mind. The woman who saved the children.
“No Miss Bhatia,” he said. “I don’t think I’m a killer either.”
He crouched down by the cage and reached into it. The other animals were screaming now. Banging fists on the side
s. It wouldn’t be long before a guard came to check it out.
“Come on then,” Moomamu said. “Come here.”
Miss Sam lifted her arm and placed her small hand on the cage floor. Her fingers were tiny digits wrapped in wrinkled skin. She looked fragile. Moomamu placed his hand on the top of hers and with a quick one, two, she shifted to the entrance and placed her arms around Moomamu’s shoulders.
“I hope you know how much you’re costing me,” he said before standing up and teleporting away.
A second later and Moomamu, Miss Sam still around his neck, his arm supporting her bottom, reappeared.
The others were now screaming and howling. One in particular. The name tag read Ham.
Moomamu pushed them out of his mind and walked over to the bananas and grabbed a handful before disappearing again.
Holloman Air Force Base, December 24th 1960
Dr Liz Cooper
“Where did you say these apes were from again?”
“Well, first of all, Colonel, they’re not apes,” Dr Liz Cooper said. She readjusted her glasses as she spoke, trying to get a clear focus on the man sat across from her. He seemed a mile away over that giant wooden desk. The Rolodex to his right. The hunk of metal that was his typewriter. She squinted and he came into focus. His face had been chiseled from years of use. Shouting and screaming and fighting and whatnot. That’s what colonels do right? They fight.
“Okay, whatever,” Colonel Glenn said. “Monkeys. Where … tell me where these monkeys came from.”
