“I have no idea.”
Joe activated the scanner. The nearest black hole was over seventeen parsecs away.
“Okay... okay...” Joe said, his heart-rate returning to normal. You could never be too sure.
Just then, a picture of him and Tammy escaping from Shezhen’s shop popped up on his display. “Wanted by the authorities,” it read in Chinese.
It must have gone out to all vehicles in the Empire’s territory.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Joe said.
Tammy was quiet for a moment, then she scoffed. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. You call yourself a sheriff?”
“Not anymore I don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Joe said. He wasn’t in the mood to inform her as to what this particular set of circumstances meant. Instead, he’d parcel out that information in bits over the coming days. “You don’t have to be anywhere this weekend, do you?”
“Not really,” Tammy answered.
“Good.” He leaned up and set the coordinates for the Falsterboo system.
“Why are we going there?” Tammy asked.
“The only person in this quadrant who can help us lives there.”
“Who’s that?”
“Alma Peterson,” Joe answered.
“I’ve never heard of her,” Tammy replied.
“She’d be thrilled to hear that, honestly.”
Tammy breathed out stressfully.
Joe secretly checked the long range sensors once more. No black holes in sight. With the coast clear he continued on the interstellar highway.
Interstellar highways were passages through subspace, where the normal rules of physics didn’t apply. You could traverse hundreds of light years in mere hours. The United Department of Transportation built these passageways two hundred and fifty years prior. Conveniently placed wormholes scattered throughout the galaxy had made the project decades long, instead of centuries long. Once installed, the highway system changed space travel dramatically, making the galaxy a much smaller place. A trip across the Milky Way went from hundreds of years and billions of dollars in planning, to something a middle-aged father might consider doing with his family over the summer holiday.
To the human eye, when traveling on the interstellar highway, outer space appeared as a negative image of itself. The normally black space became white, while the stars and other light sources turned black. It always reminded Joe of cookies and cream ice-cream.
Once in warp, with a nod and a sigh of relief, Joe stood up and went back to the kitchen.
“Wait, what are you doing now?” Tammy asked.
“I want to see what all the fuss is about.”
He approached the black box and lifted it up onto the table. It wasn’t very heavy – which wasn’t a good sign.
He ran his hand over the smooth gold markings. They were mechanical and otherworldly. He couldn't place them. All this made his spine tingle. It wasn’t so often he was met with something he couldn’t identify. He twiddled his fingers and approached the latch on the lid.
For the first time in his life, he was going to see a Talashaa artifact up close and personal. This was all so surreal. There was so little known about the Talashaa, since more or less everything about them had disintegrated long before humans had ever even left their caves.
Joe lifted the lid. The grapefruit sized, metal orb sat inside. He couldn’t identify the metal. Lead perhaps? It was so... uninspiring.
“What is it?” Tammy asked from the doorway.
“Just a ball...” Joe said, “but when I do this...” He reached in and touched it. The metal tingled like electric against his fingertips and the sphere began to glow. Joe squinted as he picked it up. He was astonished to realize that the orb had literally no weight whatsoever. It was, in fact, lighter than air.
Joe purposefully let go of the orb. It stayed there suspended before him, completely unaffected by the gravitational pull of his ship’s system. He pushed at the artifact with his pointer finger. The metal glowed when in contact with his skin and the sphere moved until he stopped pushing. Then the light faded and the artifact stayed there, suspended on air.
“This thing is worth a fortune,” he muttered.
“Is it activated by touch?” Tammy asked.
“Looks like it,” Joe said.
“And what does the light mean?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Joe asked. “But it’ll help sell it.”
“You’ve got to be... you’re not going to sell that thing.”
“There’s no going back now,” Joe said, turning to his deputy. It seemed a good a time as any to break the news. “Chinese authorities are after us and they’ve got our picture. Did you know that legislation was put in place last year that allows police to cross international borders to extract criminals? Like it or not, we’re on their wanted list now. And I know you’re going to say that we shouldn’t have run, but you and I were destined for that list the moment that shootout happened.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m dead serious.”
Tammy smacked her forehead. “I can’t believe this! I can’t believe I followed you. The only time I didn’t follow the rules, and look what happened!”
“Why did you follow me anyway?” Joe asked, surprised that he had completely forgotten the fact that his deputy had just waltzed into his place of work in a whole other country.
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Tammy said, putting her face in her hands.
“Like hell it does,” Joe said, thinking back to his pistol in the glove compartment. People died wherever this artifact showed up, and now this new deputy stumbled upon it twice on her very first day. It seemed too unlikely to be a coincidence. He growled, “Why did you follow me?”
The girl sighed and closed her eyes. “I was assigned by the outpost to monitor you.”
“Why would they want you to monitor me?”
“Because you had untaxed income and they wanted to know where it was coming from.”
“Really?” asked Joe. He still wasn’t sure if he could trust the girl, but the story made sense. “They could have just asked. It was coming from my other job at the shop.”
“I know that now,” Tammy said. “They thought it was from your antique appraisals, but I told them it was just a hobby since you didn’t make any money from it.”
“Oh,” said Joe, reminded once again how his passion had earned him nothing.
“I can’t believe they ever even made you sheriff,” Tammy said, shaking her head.
“Join the club,” Joe said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There was an opening and I applied,” Joe stated with a shrug. He had never planned on becoming a sheriff, it was just a passing whim that happened to changed the course of his life. “Now look, the way I see it, I can sell this artifact for a fortune and start new someplace else. And I can give you what you need to get started too.”
“What do you mean get started?” Tammy shouted.
“We need to stay low. I hear the Slovangian System is pretty nice nowadays – and cheap.”
“I’m not going to go to the Slovangian System,” Tammy said.
“Well, where do you want to go then?”
“Where do I… I’m not running away.”
“I thought we went over this?” Joe said.
“I’ve got a life.”
“Not anymore, you don’t.”
A particularly violent alarm went off. Joe’s heart began to race and the anxiety gripped his chest. He sprung across the room and pressed the release button on the inner ship controls. Lights flashed. A box emerged from the wall with a hiss and a cloud of steam.
“What is it?” Tammy asked, paralyzed at the doorway.
“I think I’m too late,” Joe berated himself.
“What’s wrong?”
Joe ran to the sink and filled a pitcher with water. “How could I be so c
areless?”
He approached the box that had opened from the wall and lifted its metal lid. Inside were dozens and dozens of pods with soil and tiny plants in them. Light green life in the blackened earth stood out like a sore thumb in the sterile starship kitchen.
Joe eyed the plants. They were still alive – so it seemed he had panicked for nothing.
“That’s what all the fuss was about?” Tammy asked.
“They almost dried out,” Joe said.
The girl rolled her eyes and stormed out of the room. “Oh my god!”
“That’s blasphemy,” Joe called out as he examined the plants. “I think.”
He poured the water onto the parched soil. The life-giving liquid formed a puddle on the surface before finally soaking down into the dirt. Joe breathed in the earthy smell, like the first rains of spring. When he was a child he’d help his grandfather plant beets in the family cosmogarden. This was as close as he could get to that nowadays.
“How do I make a call from here?” Tammy asked from the cockpit.
“You don’t,” Joe replied. He poured more water onto the seedlings. “They’re probably tracking us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
The Chinese couldn't really track calls made in subspace. That was impossible. Joe didn’t want to say it, but the real reason he didn’t want her making the call was a financial concern, and not tactical one.
Tammy came back to the kitchen and paced around the room, chewing on her thumbnail. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“That’s really annoying, you know,” Joe stated.
“I don’t like this situation one bit.”
“I don’t like it either.”
“But there’s got to be something we can do to fix it.”
“Not really.”
The girl began to hyperventilate and tear up.
“Just be cool,” Joe said. “Here, help me with my plants.”
Tammy stared at him, her face becoming red.
“Trust me, it’s relaxing,” Joe said.
Tammy sat down at the table across from him and he presented his miniature garden.
“Tomatoes, cocachin, beets, zucchini, Bobganni fruit, tamarind.”
Each canister had 5-10 seedlings sharing the same small patch of dirt, far too many for all of them to grow to maturity.
“Why are there so many packed in each square?” Tammy asked.
“Survival of the fittest,” Joe said. “Once they’ve grown for a while, the biggest one stays and all the rest get plucked.”
“What do you do with the plucked ones?”
“I throw them in the garbage.”
“Couldn’t you replant them?”
Joe shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I could, but the seeds are cheap and it’s not really worth the time.”
The deputy leaned in and studied the plants before her. The closest row happened to be tomatoes.
“Looks like this one is winning,” Tammy said pointing to the largest of the tomato seedlings in the closest cup of dirt.
“Yep. He’s the strongest,” Joe said. Out on the edge of the cup sat a tiny runt that had sprung up recently. “That little guy is new though.”
“And he’s going to die?” Tammy asked.
“Probably.”
Tammy stuck out her lower lip. “He never even stood a chance.”
“Fortunately, he’ll never know the difference,” Joe said.
Tammy nodded. She took the canister and carefully administered water to the remaining plants. With a calm smile she looked up. “You’re right, this is relaxing.”
“Glad I could help,” Joe said with a grin. He stared past the deputy at that artifact, still floating there in the air. For some reason, the sight of it levitating on its own began to bother him, so he got up and placed it back in its black box.
A reminder on his starsailor’s compass sounded. It had been fifteen hours since he last slept. Time to retire for the day.
With regards to one’s sleeping schedule, there was little use in keeping track of time anymore, not with all the planet hopping, time zones and variable daytime length from place to place. The only useful metric was time since you last slept for around eight hours.
“I’m gonna hit the sack,” Joe announced. He set the plants back into the drawer in the wall and closed it all up.
Tammy nodded and checked her watch. “What am I supposed to do then?”
“That table folds down to a bed,” Joe said, rubbing his eyes. Since the notice had gone off he had become noticeably drowsy. “Whenever you want to sleep, it’s yours.”
“Okay,” Tammy said. “I guess I can read for awhile or something.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not your mom, so do what you want,” Joe said with a smile. He patted at his pockets as was his custom before bed. Usually there was nothing of interest in them, but on this occasion he found the Applebottom book.
As he climbed the stairs to his room he noticed the stressed out look return to his deputy’s face.
“Look, Tammy,” he said. “Don’t be so worried. These things have a way of working themselves out.”
Tammy nodded.
To be honest, Joe couldn’t foresee see any way of this working itself out, but he wasn’t about to say that to the girl. She was a sensitive creature.
“Well, goodnight,” he said with a nod and climbed up to his bedroom.
His quarters were modest, more of a loft than a room, with a small bed, a desk and a reading lamp. Joe hesitated at the door. He still wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could trust Tammy, so he decided to lock himself in.
Once he undressed, he placed the book on his shelf and climbed into bed. Suddenly, the bedside display lit up, informing him that Tammy was indeed making a call to the outpost. It may have been annoying, but it was mostly harmless. Hopefully it wouldn’t cost too much. And god willing, she wouldn’t say anything important.
There was a twinge of guilt in Joe’s stomach. She didn’t deserve to be dragged into all this.
How could he have called himself a sheriff? He had never made Sector 121 safer or a better place to live. It was almost as if he had been killing time until somebody realized he was a phony and took him off the job. But that moment never came.
He stared up at the ceiling. With Shenzhen dead there was going to be a big hole in his pocket book. That 900 credit payment to Falsterboo Cardiology was coming up. The thought of it made breathing difficult.
They needed to sell the artifact and fast. Fortunately, they were headed to the one and only person in the quadrant who could do such a thing. Joe glanced at his compass. There were twelve hours before they’d arrive in the Falsterboo system. He needed to get some sleep.
After flipping off the light he spent the next several minutes tossing and turning in bed. Gunfights and police chases echoed through his mind. He exhaled. As he rolled onto his right side he noticed the Applebottom book.
Some light reading could help bring on the sandman. He grabbed the softcover, flipped on the light and began to read from page one.
Humanity is alone in the cosmos.
Although the universe is mindbogglingly huge – with billions of galaxies and stars and planets, asteroids and comets – humankind remains the only sentient species, and Earth and its ecosystem the only place where the current life in our universe originates. Considering that space is so vast and so ancient, it is reasonable to assume that life should come about more often. But life as we know it is absent. All of this begs us to ask the question: Where are all the aliens?
This, in short, is the Fermi Paradox.
It has been proposed that there must be some “Great Filter” that stops life somewhere in its development. This we have seen see most famously with the Talashaa, a species that dwarfs us in accomplishments. But before the discovery of our galactic forebears, the filter was thought to be something early on in the evolutionary process. The forming of life itself, life becoming multi-celle
d and complex, or life becoming intelligent. But now the parameters have been changed. And the answer may lie in the Talashaa’s extinction.
So is this Great Filter somewhere in our past and we made it through? Or is it somewhere in our future, waiting for us?
Could it be climate change? Artificial intelligence gaining sentience and turning on us? Development of weapons of mass destruction? Or something else completely?
In order to find out, we must make a sober study of what we know about the Talashaa. Are they to be revered for their feats of galactic engineering? Or do they serve as a warning to us on this side of the Great Filter?
The results are the only thing we can judge.
Joe read on for a while before dozing off and dreaming of someday meeting Enoch Applebottom.
7
Enoch Applebottom stepped from his landing shuttle and entered Shenzhen’s antique shop. Taking off his grandma-style sunglasses, he saw on the floor, in a dried out puddle of blood, his old schoolmate, Gary Shenzhen. This is where his choices had gotten him. Instead of working for the government, like a good little boy, he had decided to go the rebel route and tried smuggling an item with top level importance across international borders. And look what happened.
Applebottom walked to the back room through the beaded curtain and stared at the shelves upon shelves of old crap. He shook his head. What a pointless occupation.
“Any sign of the artifact?” he asked Saburo.
The man was taking inventory of everything in the shop, to be sure that the artifact wasn’t hiding somewhere.
“No. The two police officers from the ruins must have followed it here and stolen it back. This was obviously premeditated. They must be working with the Talashamen.”
“What the cult? How could they have known it was coming here?” Applebottom asked.
“Either they had inside information or very good luck.”
“There’s no such thing as good luck,” Applebottom said, not even trying to hide the annoyance from his voice. “Only bad luck, and only for those who deserve it. Where did the thieves go from here?”
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