by C. J. Odle
Sirius knew what it had to do, in spite of the disappointment it experienced. It was a member of a peaceful species, which had given up on war at such an early stage in its evolution that it barely remained a distant memory.
Sirius crossed from ocean to land, and from late night toward sunset. The dwarf yellow sun on the western horizon looked odd compared to the bluish-white cluster of the Pleiades.
They attacked Sirius on the way, of course. Creatures as primitive as humans were incapable of accepting their fate with good grace. No, they sent aircraft so slow and badly designed it amazed the alien scientist that they could fly at all. They fired crude explosive weapons at Sirius, some tipped with materials the pod’s scanners flagged as radioactive or biologically contaminated, or both. The craft’s lasers quickly disintegrated the attacking weapons along with the vessels launching them. Sirius collected data on the process as it happened, determined to learn what it could.
It flew into position above the largest of Japan’s cities—Tokyo, Sirius’s computer informed it. Not that the human name mattered. Soon, all such human concepts would be gone, except in the databanks of the Pyramid, and in the minds of the two they would keep to sustain the species’ DNA. Sirius planned to file its reports and request permission to experiment with these living specimens.
It had already performed one procedure successfully on the male; now there would be a female too. With intelligent research, something useful might be salvaged from their DNA. It was an intriguing thought but one to keep for later on.
The pod rose into the upper atmosphere, fending off a few more clumsy assaults. Even when futile, the species appeared determined to attack. Sirius could hardly complain, and it pressed the controls on the console to instigate the deployment of the crystal sphere and, before long, pulsed in the final command.
The device floated out, dropping slowly until reaching the right location above the planet’s surface—twenty thousand Earth feet, the control panel showed. It began to turn on its axis, growing exponentially, its glow intensifying by the instant until it shone as bright as the sun that had recently set. Below it, bullet trains slowed to a halt and traffic congealed on the multilevel freeways, the heart of a city teeming with life submerged in vision after vision as it drew ever closer to the universal consciousness.
Humans started to fall. They fell in their thousands, consumed by visions that must have seemed like instant revelation. At least in its final, blissful moments, mankind received the chance to experience what it could have become. As the crystal sphere continued to spin, Sirius’s conscience was eased somewhat by this thought.
“You must stop,” Jake pulsed, straining against the metallic band.
“I cannot,” Vega replied. “The Supreme has judged.”
“This verdict is flawed, we corrupted the trial.”
“It does not matter.”
Sarah gestured down to where the crystal sphere was doing its deadly work. “Maybe the Supreme considered the outcome of doing this, and what it might mean, but have you?”
“It is not necessary,” Vega sent. But Jake could feel uncertainty there.
He seized on it. It had to be their best chance, perhaps their only chance.
He dug into the universal consciousness, feeling the stream of identities flowing into it as the crystal sphere pulled them clear. He forced himself not to get too close; it felt like the psychic equivalent of a rip tide. One brush against it, and Jake might be sucked away with the mass of people below. Jake pushed in a different direction instead.
In the mothership after his operation, he’d found it easy to direct his visions toward people and locations from his existing life. Now he needed to go much deeper into the substratum of the universal consciousness and allow it to flow through him to show him what the effects of the releasing process on Earth would be like. He opened his inner eye to the strands of the future. Perhaps this was how the Supreme calculated the possible outcomes of different variables. He concentrated so intensely he began to feel the cosmic plasma pulsing softly in his brain—
The visions hit him with the force of a hammer. He saw buildings overgrown with plant life, their doors and windows hanging open. Silence reigned so absolute it seemed to overwhelm any attempt at noise. A half-starved dog scuttled through the streets, chasing after whatever morsels of food it could find. Jake walked into the vision, peering inside houses to see plates still laid out on tables, rats scurrying among the rotted food. A ghostly library gathered dust, humanity’s collected efforts shelved and abandoned.
The hospitals were the same, long past being sterile, long past helping anyone. The courts where Jake had spent so much time, empty shells with no meaning. There were no humans, no signs of people hunting through the wreckage for scraps to survive. Only the awful, total silence, permeating throughout to turn the concrete of the city into a desolate wasteland.
And then there were the bones. Bones lay strewn in the street, picked clean and bleached. Millions and millions, more than Jake could have possibly imagined. A city of skeletons, their souls long since fled.
“This is what you’re doing,” Jake sent, forcing himself to hang on to the vision as he brought his consciousness back to the pod. He mentally balled it up and pulsed it forcefully into Vega. “This is what you’re bringing into the world.”
He dove back into the vision, dragging Vega with him. His vision showed them the dead, empty city, sitting there like the desiccated corpse of some great beast. The vision stretched out, showing more of the world, the skeletal structures of roads and buildings standing as an epitaph that would never be read. Jake refocused his power, not even sure if this next phase would be possible. He reached into the depths of his vision, and the ghosts of the dead appeared. Or rather, the instant of their absorption surfaced, their faces caught in that last moment before the bliss had come over them, showing their terror as the crystal sphere called with its siren sounds.
“You’re doing this,” Jake sent to Vega. “You’re choosing this. This is what you’re helping to create. You want us gone? This is what it means.”
He broke off and tried to force his third eye shut, but maybe he didn’t shut it down fully, because when he looked across to Sarah he saw something unexpected, and he knew Vega did too. He saw the glow emanating from her abdomen. Vega seemed to be seeing much more.
Jake watched Vega grip the console with its three-fingered hands as its oversized head began to tremble. The trembling spread through its torso and limbs, and its thin legs buckled. As if in response, the pod shook violently from side to side as Vega fell hard against the controls and then slumped to the floor.
“The Startoucher prophecy is alive,” it pulsed feebly before closing its eyes.
“Vega,” Jake sent, “are you all right? What’s happened? The sphere has changed course!”
Vega lay crumpled on the floor of the craft, breathing hard as it recovered. The nictitating membranes were closed over its eyes, and Jake noticed a subtle difference in its face. The translucent skin was drawn tighter around the skull, as though the alien had aged. The small nose was slightly more prominent and there were faint hollows in the cheeks.
A thin leg twitched, and membranes uncovered the black pools of its eyes. Vega staggered to its feet, clutching the bulk of the command console, and gazed out of the glass-like dome.
The crystal sphere was moving at a vastly increased speed, leaving the pod behind as it raced toward the mountains northeast of the city.
“Vega!” Sarah cried.
Vega snapped back to life and grabbed the controls.
“The pod and its operator are inextricably linked, and my incident overloaded the communications system. With this malfunction, the sphere is programmed to return to the main ship to be redeployed or decommissioned,” Vega explained.
With a sickening wrench, Jake found himself worrying about Marina and Gemini. Had the sphere reached them yet? There was no time to ask, because Vega flicked the levers of the pod to se
t it in motion.
It moved in a blur through the sky, tracking the huge sphere by the light it put out, racing for the spot where cosmic plasma turned night into day. The crystal sphere appeared to speed up as they approached, almost as if trying to keep ahead of them. Vega proved equal to the task. The alien flew the pod with astonishing agility, ripping across the sky as they closed in on the brightness of the sphere. The intensity of it made it hard for Jake to look at it directly, but he could feel the spot where it spun, sucking in the humans within its orb.
“We must destroy the sphere,” Vega pulsed.
Jake and Sarah jerked back with surprise.
“Why? I mean, that’s great, but what’s changed?” Jake sent.
The short alien swiveled its chair around to face them; its meltdown at the console had definitely aged its face.
“I have glimpsed a different future for humanity.”
“What did you see, Vega?” asked Sarah, still clutching her pendant.
“And the Startoucher prophecy is alive?” Jake sent. “What does it—”
“There is no time to explain.” Vega cut him off and swiveled back to manipulate the pod’s controls again. “The sphere can be stopped by a concentrated burst of dark matter, but we must be directly above it to deliver it.”
Darkness seemed to form in front of the pod just beyond the console, folding in on itself multiple times before coalescing into a dense ball blacker than the depths of space.
Jake felt precisely when they were in position above the sphere, even before Vega started to guide the controls. The dark matter packed into a space that could have been cupped in Jake’s hands. For a split second, it remained suspended, until the moment Vega released it, blasting it downward into the larger crystal sphere with tremendous velocity. Its darkness disappeared into the brightness of the sphere with an almost liquid ripple, little more than a small stone cast into the ocean.
At first, it looked like nothing would happen, then the light from the crystal sphere started to falter. Jake found he could look at it now without his eyes hurting. Darkness spread across it, moving in lines like a web of cracks across a mirror as one power dripped into another, containing and consuming it. The crystal sphere’s spin reduced to a crawl, its seemingly unstoppable momentum giving way to something more tortured as, second by second, it shrunk into itself and reduced in size.
Then it shattered.
The explosion took Jake by surprise. The crystal sphere exploded not in a burst of energy but in its absence. Shards of crystalline material rained down on the desert below, so fine they seemed almost more like powder than the fragments they were.
“We’ve done it,” Sarah said. “We’ve stopped it!”
“We must not celebrate,” Vega sent. “Sirius’s sphere is still out there.”
“So we find it and destroy it,” Jake pulsed as the metallic band across his lap retracted.
“Sirius’s current location is not known,” Vega sent. “The damage to the communication system will take time to restore. Sirius’s starting point was in Tokyo, but by now it could be anywhere in the world. As with the sphere, detection of malfunction from one of us requires the other to change location immediately. Exactly where this location will be is impossible to specify.”
“That depends,” Jake sent, “on whether there’s any chance of Gemini still being alive.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Marina ducked as shards of clear crystal fell from the sky. Beside her, Gemini did the same. They crouched against the shields of the alien ship, hoping it would protect them as the sphere’s fragments peppered the sand. Thankfully, none of them landed close enough to do them any damage, and Marina wondered if this was pure luck or due to something else.
When the crystal sphere had first appeared high above the desert, she’d felt certain that they were all about to die. Visions had hit her then, so many and so powerful, she’d had to struggle not to succumb. It had been impossible to keep track of them all, but one shone in her mind far brighter than the rest: a vision of a young woman with a special aura, moving through humanity, changing it.
Marina had felt the pull of the sphere, but the shields of the spaceship grounded her like a kind of psychic anchor. She’d pressed her body against them, and she’d reached out to hold onto the guys as well.
When it was all over, she felt different. The guys also felt different. Marina still wasn’t sure why, or what had happened to them.
“Marina.” Jake’s voice came into her thoughts, even clearer than before. She instinctively looked up and saw the pod above, a tiny point of light in the night sky.
“I can hear you, Jake.”
“Are you all right?” Jake asked. “Are the others OK?”
“I… don’t know,” Marina admitted. “I feel a bit weird. As for the guys…”
Billy and Adam were staring at their hands, at each other, at the world, as though they were seeing all of it for the first time.
“The crystal sphere worked by building the connection with the universal consciousness,” Vega sent, the alien’s telepathic voice appearing alongside Jake’s. “Those surviving the effects will have found their latent psychic talents awakened.”
Billy and Adam, psychic? Marina didn’t know whether to be glad they might finally be able to understand, or slightly terrified.
“Is it over?” she sent back.
“No,” Jake replied. “While this sphere has been destroyed, Sirius still has one, and we can’t locate it. We need your help to find it.”
Marina tried to concentrate. “What do you need us to do?”
“Sirius started in Tokyo,” Jake pulsed, “but has changed location and we don’t know where. Can you look online and find out where Sirius is? People must be posting updates.”
“So you want us to turn on the news for you?” Marina sent.
“I want you to help us save the world,” Jake sent back.
“You’ve asked us to do that before,” Marina pointed out. “And it didn’t turn out very well.”
“This time it will,” Jake promised her. “Vega has decided to help us.”
And Marina guessed that at least tracking down the sphere wasn’t something massively unethical, unlike Jake’s last request. Maybe it would also stop Adam and Billy from staring at grains of sand while saying things like “Amazing!” and “That’s just… so deep!”
“All right,” Marina sent back. “I’ll see what I can do. Let’s hope some of the computers are still working.”
They were, although it took a full minute to explain what was required to the guys. They found it difficult to concentrate at the best of times, and now the connection to the root source of the universe was coursing through their heads. Marina suspected she coped more easily because she’d always had at least some of this affecting her. She couldn’t tell exactly how much the sphere had increased her connection, but this wasn’t the moment to look into it.
Instead, she more or less dragged the guys back to their computers. The online world was in chaos. How could it not be, with so many people dead and such widespread fear and panic? There were large gaps of information, but people were trying to tell others about what was happening or document it for posterity.
Tasha Baker still broadcast to the world, with her bleached hair and blue eye shadow, doing her utmost to remain calm as the curtain came down on humanity. She sat in the studio alone, the producer and cameramen having left the building as soon as the first effects of the crystal sphere had been reported. At one point, she felt waves of elation and peace sweeping over her, but just as suddenly, they’d stopped.
Now she had a laptop open by her side, trying to keep up with the latest news through a combination of social media and occasional e-mails from the few people who still cared enough to keep her updated.
She kept presenting as best as she could, even if unsure about the number of people who actually watched her big moment. Even if the world was about to end, she finally had the chance
to show her true mettle as a professional. Maybe some alien species would even see the footage, eventually. The thought of being famous long after her death brought a tear to Tasha’s eye.
“So,” she said. “The latest news on the crystal sphere shows it moving northeast from LA, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Except…”
She checked the flurry of activity on the internet. New messages came in, along with video footage obviously shot from phones. Tasha tried to remember how to use the editing suite on her computer, and settled for doing more of a piece to camera to kill time.
“This just in,” she said. “The sphere above the United States appears to have been destroyed. There isn’t any information on how this happened, if action by the military, malfunction, or outside intervention, but the sphere has been destroyed.”
Tasha actually felt pretty bad about having to ask the next question.
“Now, we just need to know—what’s happened to the other one?”
Perhaps in years to come, this would be the defining moment of her career. Despite the interviews and the hard-hitting stories, the eventual move into tabloid television, and the brief stint on Dancing with the Stars, she would always be remembered for asking “what’s happened to the other one.”
Tasha took a breath. “Does anybody know? If you have any information, please e-mail it in. Is this over?”
Normally, she wasn’t the one who asked. She reported the news other people had researched, occasionally regardless of whether she had the full facts. Having to wait in limbo like this felt strange.
She did her best. By dredging through her contacts, scouring the internet, and finally just firing up Twitter to ask people to send in updates, Tasha soon discovered the second alien device was still very much alive.
“The second crystal sphere is in Asia,” Tasha delivered in her best reporting tones. “It has been active over Japan, and now it looks like it’s moving in the direction of Shanghai.”
What they really needed right now, of course, was a diagram. Preferably nicely animated, but failing that…
