Bridge to Elsewhere, page 22
“I don’t remember that part.”
“As a planet builder, you should have known.” Lucifer’s eyes were cold and piercing. “What will you do now?”
“The SI said I only have two choices. Either I watch it destroy everyone, or I destroy them first.”
“Either choice means you fail the assessment.”
Hwanin couldn’t deny it. “Is there some cheat out of this?”
“I’m afraid not. That rabbit is going to breed with all the energy it’s gained.”
“What should I do?”
“That’s your decision,” Lucifer coldly replied. “But you’ve just sealed the doom for the rest of the planet builders.”
“How?”
“SI will replace us. I’d been arguing that with a few cheats here and there, non-SI could succeed. You were supposed to be the test case for it.”
Behind them, a planet exploded.
“I screwed it up?” Hwanin asked.
“Judicious cheats only help if the person applying them understands the system in the first place. They will study your incompetence and put it on par with Yahweh.”
Lucifer left.
Hwanin wondered if a direct intervention could do something. If he appeared as a planet-size Crepitan, would it somehow help? But if he did that, his own body’s gravity would affect the other planets. Even a slight shift in their orbit would result in a climate catastrophe. As he tried everything he could to no avail, he found himself prevented by the constraints of the laws of physics. The rabbit regained its appetite and continued its feast. By the time the Deity Board came for their assessment, he had to cancel the review. He had failed, and his Crepitans were going to join the hundreds, maybe thousands, of defunct worlds that failed planet builders had left behind them. Goodbye benefits and generous salary.
IV
Sullen, Hwanin didn’t know what to do. He’d already received the documents with his termination notice from the planet builders. He had two days Yomi-time to clear out. He sat in his room, unsure how things had unraveled so quickly. There were mementoes from his three civilizations that he’d kept on his shelves, artistic works that he’d found remarkable. He felt an empathic message ping him. “Want to talk?”
It was Nuwa. “Not much to say,” he thought back to her. “When do you leave?”
“I don’t,” she replied. “Visiting your Crepitans inspired me to change my mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going down as a shepherd to what remains of my civ.”
He couldn’t believe it. They’d all heard horror stories about what shepherds endured. “I thought you hated them.”
“I do,” she acknowledged. “But there’s a few thousand who survived. Maybe they can learn and rebuild.”
“You won’t be a planet builder. You won’t have the same control keys.”
“Maybe that’s better and I won’t feel so responsible.”
“Nuwa,” Hwanin said with deep concern for his friend. “Once you make this choice, you can’t leave until the last being on your planet is dead.”
“Or they achieve the threshold I failed to guide them towards.”
Which was to go to the stars.
Later that day, Hwanin visited the Crepitans, or at least what was left of them. It wasn’t much. The rabbit had been ravenous, and almost all traces of their extraplanetary travels were eaten. He had failed them due to his incompetence, and he felt responsible for the dying society. To his surprise, he saw there were colonies interspersed throughout, still struggling to survive. Theirs had been a bitter struggle, fueled by persistence and ingenuity under duress. They were clinging to life despite his shortcomings. He felt a certain sense of pride in them and thought about the consequences of his actions. There was more to civilizations than the SI or even the Deity Board taught, something only three miserable failures in a row could have drilled into him. Maybe some of those lessons could be useful and he could help them from the clouds up. He thought about Nuwa’s decision and knew what he had to do.
— QUANTUM LEAP —
By Justin C. Key
After years of interstellar travel to find an exoplanet that no longer existed, something found us instead. I sat up to focus on the cockpit’s display. Since arriving in the Barnard system, So Fly’s search algorithm reported erroneous signals every few days or so, likely confused by the vast nothing surrounding us. But instead of the usual error message, the display showed specific origin coordinates about thirteen light-years away. I looked out the cockpit to the stars beyond, my mind already going through the calculations. With our particle accelerator supplying a constant 1G push, it would take us about two to three years to cover that distance. The relativity cost would be a hundred thousand years back on Earth. Traversing galaxies at near lightspeeds, we’d already made that leap a long time ago.
I slid to the intercom. “Captain Womack, get up here. We got something.”
I pulled up So Fly’s interface and found Captain Womack reading in the common room. The urgency in my voice did little to stir her; she only glanced at the camera to show her annoyance. Full of life and hope when our six-person crew first went out on this expedition, her afro always perfectly shaped, her smile and warmth felt throughout the ship, the captain had changed the most when we suddenly became five just a few days before.
My finger fell off the comm button. The constellation. It was off. We had stopped accelerating in the middle of Barnard’s system months ago just to find a field of uninhabitable rubble. Still undecided on our next course of action, I had stared at these constellations, lost in my thoughts, for days on end. I squinted, just how my father taught me to look at a crescent moon to see the shadowed part facing away from the sun. Yes, there was definitely something there. I checked the signal again to see how far away it was.
I switched the comm to address the entire ship. “Captain Womack, get your ass the fuck up here, now!”
That did it.
“What the hell, Shawn?” Captain Womack said seconds later as she knocked open the cockpit door. “Have you lost your godforsaken mind?”
Her gaze followed my finger out the window. Turning towards the view, I gasped. Just a black shadow moments before, only decipherable by how it blocked out the stars behind it, the mystery object now materialized as something tangible. To call it a craft wouldn’t be accurate. It almost looked like a tree, thin at the base and branching up and out of the view in tendrils. Its top seemed to blend into the cosmos.
“How did we miss this?” The accusation in her tone wasn’t lost on me. How did you miss this? I was, after all, the crew’s cartographer and navigator.
I reloaded it and wiped the screen; the result was the same. The nature of the signal was unchanged. The origin coordinates, however, were. According to the computer, the signal came from right here in the Barnard system. Only a thousand miles from our location.
“Either the computer is shit and this object appeared out of nowhere, undetected, or…” I looked at the Captain. “Or this thing has been traveling damn near the speed of light from when it first sent the signal.”
“I knew Shawn would be the first to crack,” Spry said as he entered the room. The deck came alive as more crew followed behind him. “Bet the last freeze-dried tiramisu that the captain bodies him.”
“You already ate the last tiramisu,” London said. “What’s going on?”
“That’s what’s going on,” I answered. Then, to the captain, “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. Get full system scans. Check the logs for energy spikes for the last forty-eight hours.”
“You’re thinking it came through a wormhole?”
“I’m not thinking anything. Get information first, then we’ll think.”
Spry leaned over me to shut off the comm, which was still beeping. There was a hint of bourbon on his breath. “Finally. I haven’t had coffee yet and my head is killing me. What are you watching?”
“My god, we found it,” London said. Her physician’s bag close to her side, she pushed past Spry to touch the cockpit window. For the first time since Dwayne died, I saw the beginnings of a smile on her face. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?” Spry said.
“Life.”
“What’s this talk about life?” Shamia said, the last one through the cockpit door.
“The fuck I miss?” Spry said. He punched the controls. I shifted as my chair tilted under his weight. The cockpit window grayed into a computer screen. He pushed another button and it cleared away, showing the same view as before. In those few seconds, it seemed, the object came into even better view. “Looks like Oakland. This is a joke, right?”
Oakland. A brief silence fell over us at the mention of the city. None of us talked that much about home anymore. Had the city of Oakland meant anything to me? It must have, the way I felt at the sound of its name. I shook away the feeling. We’d all given up any connection to our old lives a long time ago. It only made sense to focus on the present and what was right in front of us.
I could see the thing fully now, so clear that it was hard to imagine that it had been virtually invisible just a few minutes before.
“Put our shields at one hundred percent,” Captain Womack said. “Make sure our weapons work. Run full diagnostics. If there’s anything that even smells like life on there, I want to know about it.”
“Doesn’t sound like a joke,” Shamia said. “Oakland, eh? We just found life.”
“No,” I said. “Life found us.”
“Oakland” floated static in front of us. I spent much of the next couple twenty-four-hour cycles watching it through the ship’s protective barrier. I tried altering our course and varying our acceleration. The monolith’s velocity didn’t change relative to ours: it matched us exactly.
So Fly’s scans showed a honeycomb interior with hollowed paths carved throughout. The computer system analyzed the pattern against all known lifeforms on earth and didn’t find anything that matched known colony architecture. Even more, there was a complete lack of organic material. So Fly searched first for organic carbon. Then it explored a plethora of calculations of what life “as we do not know it” might look like. Nothing remotely compatible registered on the scans.
The last thing the computer looked for was energy expenditures. Not only did it find that there weren’t any traces of energy cycling, past or present, consistent with biology, but there wasn’t an energy signal at all. The energy of the vessel was the same as the surrounding background.
Which was, in a way, impossible. Oakland accelerated and decelerated. And there was an entrance near the bottom that opened and closed periodically, like breathing. Captain Womack postulated the vessel was actively creating an energy vacuum to balance out its energy signal. Still, such a feat would have to be near perfect. And very intentional.
“One of us is going to have to check it out.” Captain Womack addressed the crew in the common room some seventy hours post-contact. London trimmed wilting spiderettes from a lone hanging spider plant as the captain spoke. The rest of us sat around the central table. The air stank of insomnia.
“You mean go inside?” Spry said. Oakland seemed to touch him the most. Always discreet, he never drank in front of us. The lingering smell of alcohol and the occasional mid-day deep sleep were the only signs he allowed. Now, I suspected he hadn’t taken a sip since Oakland arrived. His eyes were sharper, his tongue clearer. As if he were preparing himself for something.
In a lot of ways, I guess Oakland sobered all of us.
“If it makes sense to, yes,” Captain Womack said. She waited for a rebuttal. There was none. We drew sticks. I got the short end. “Well, that decides it, then. You straight, Shawn?”
I was. There was a catalog of feelings associated with Oakland and not a lot of time to process. Fear wasn’t on the agenda. That, most of all, made me curious.
When everyone was gone, I picked the straws out from the trash and sized them up. Just as I suspected. Two of the straws were significantly shorter than the rest.
I found Shamia watching the monolith from the main bridge’s viewpoint. I came to stand beside her. She twirled one of London’s trimmed spider plants between her fingers.
“The good doctor cut this one off prematurely, I think,” she said. “It’s still got life to it.”
“I didn’t take you for a botanist,” I said.
“I’m not. I put the mama plant in the quarantine bay. To keep you company when you get back.”
“You wanted to go,” I said. She was set to deny it until I showed her the straw. “You didn’t get it short enough.”
Shamia sized me up. We hadn’t talked much during the mission. The first night out of the solar system Captain Womack passed around moonshine. Both of us had one sip of the stuff and then bowed out of the rest of the drinking game, watching as our crewmates, including the captain, got piss drunk. Somewhere in the night, well after the sting of moonshine had left our throats, our laughter turned into kisses. With the next day came mutual regret, written clearly in the awkward air that existed between us since.
“I thought the short stick stays.”
“Bullshit. Why do you want to go?”
“I figure there’s one of three things inside that thing,” she said. She counted off on the yellowing leaves of the plant. “One: nothing. If we’re going to waste our time, I’d rather be out there than waiting here in anticipation. Two: it’s something fucking awesome that the human mind can hardly fathom. Three: it’s a horrible monster that’s going to infect whoever goes over there and use them to kill the rest of us. In which case, I’d rather get it over with.”
“What do you think it is?”
She shook her head. “Whatever it is, it came undetected, uncontested, and I bet the only reason the computer picked it up at all was because it wants to be picked up.”
“Those are all good points,” I said. “You’ve convinced me.”
“You’ll trade with me?”
“No. You convinced me not to trade.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
She handed me the plant. Its leaf edges crumbled under my hold.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I said.
“Be less of an asshole, maybe? Take it with you. Maybe it’ll be good luck and you won’t end up killing us all.”
“If I turn into a murderous zombie, I’ll kill you last, if that makes up for it.”
“No, not last. That also sucks. Somewhere in the middle. Make me a nice, middle kill.”
“You got it.”
Something about the vastness of space made the human mind feel infinitesimally small and unimportant. Everything civilization built, studied, and congregated around was, in part, to distract from that vastness. Even So Fly, with its familiar walls and rooms and artwork from home, protected against the truth of this.
Now, out in the open, I felt how small I was. A derivative of stardust put into an ancient cosmic dance with other stardust to spark life that then went through a cycle of energy, creation and destruction, unbroken, all the way up until me.
“Earth to Shawn.” Spry’s voice. “Earth to Shawn.”
Muffling, an angry voice, some laughter, and then Captain Womack was in my ear. “You straight, Shawn?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said.
“State your name—”
“I’m good,” I said. Dwayne’s sudden death during a spacewalk had shaken So Fly’s crew to its core. We still didn’t know what happened, only that his spacesuit had a clean puncture in its arm. After the autopsy London simply stated that he’d died of asphyxiation and spoke on it no more.
“Name.”
I gave her my name and also the date as determined by the ship’s motherboard. After that, I began to list off the rough coordinates of where we were in the Milky Way galaxy, orbiting the star Barnard, approximately one hundred thousand kilometers from now disintegrated exoplanet—
“All right, all right. Point made. Focus. Keep moving.” Or else I’ll pull you back in, as soon as I have reason to.
This last didn’t need to be said.
I targeted my thrusters towards where the scans showed an entrance. Acceleration in space was different than on Earth. Leaving the atmosphere, you could feel yourself pushing against something, fighting both the gravity that called you back into the planet’s embrace and the atmosphere that objected to your departure. Out here, among the stars, there was neither, just the push forward.
“Slow down, Shawn!” Captain Womack’s voice came crackling in my ear.
“What? I’m fine.”
“That’s an—” And then, silence.
Suddenly, Oakland consumed my vision.
I turned so the length of my right arm and shoulder could take the brunt of the impact. At this speed, I knew injury was unavoidable. What I could control was my angle of collision. Too sharp and a broken bone would pierce right through my spacesuit, and there would be two bodies lying in our morgue.
The bone snapped—not violently, just matter-of-factly—as I rolled my shoulder into the wall and onto my back. Finally, I stopped.
“All good,” I said into the comm. “I think I might have crushed the plant you gave me, Mia.”
No answer came. Not even static.
I took a second to breathe. I checked my vitals. Only slight internal bleeding at the site of the fracture. I grit my teeth as the suit squeezed around my arm, assessed the area, and then acted as countless strong fingers to set the fracture. Soon, the merciful morphine kicked in. Just enough to take the edge off the pain without compromising my cognition.
“Okay, piece of cake,” I said. “You guys and gals still there?”
No answer. Suddenly, I didn’t care. In front of me were a small set of stairs, about three or four, leading up to what looked like a narrow porch. Beyond it, a door. Made of wood.
Fucking wood.
I opened it and went inside.
