by Ike Hamill
“If the population hadn’t been reduced to just a handful of us,” he said, “then I’m sure that disease would have killed everyone. It was starting to happen before the end of everything—diseases were coming back because people weren’t vaccinating. Then, when everyone disappeared, the diseases disappeared with them.”
“Only the healthy lived?” Lisa asked.
Tim thought about that and then shook his head.
“I’m not sure if only the healthy lived, or if maybe the world was just a healthier place because so few people lived, you know?”
“No,” she admitted.
“You remember when I had that infestation of squash beetles?” Tim asked. “I sent you those pictures of them?”
“Of course,” Lisa said.
“I sent you that picture to ask you what type of pesticide to use, and you said none.”
“Right,” Lisa said. “The bugs weren’t your problem.”
“Yeah. You told me that I should burn my crop and pick a new location for a new crop. With the right moisture and nutrients, I would be able to grow squash that would be healthy enough to resist being infested with beetles.”
“And, I think I also mentioned that you should police the leaves for eggs and scrape them off before they got a foothold.”
“Yes. You did,” Tim said. “But, honestly, I think the advice about the health of the soil was the more important piece of information. In the right environment, the organism was in good enough shape so that it could resist the invader on its own. Maybe it’s the same way with people. In the old world, there were so many of us that we would get sick all the time. A baby was going to come in contact with a million things that would kill it. That old world was better suited for the diseases than it was for us. That’s why we had to be so vigilant about vaccinations and medicine. In order to stay alive in that broken world, we had to constantly play defense against every bad virus and bacterium.”
“Oh,” Lisa said, starting to get his point.
“But, now, the soil around is healthy as hell. We’re eating better and everyone is more active. This must be what it was like a thousand years ago.”
“Kinda,” Lisa said. “I don’t think they spent a lot of time attending presentations at observatories.”
“Some did,” Tim said. Penny came back up to them and Tim scratched her head.
“Yeah, of course they did. I can picture it now—a Power Point presentation put on by Druids, projected on a bedsheet at Stonehenge.”
Tim laughed.
His idea had reminded her of something she had heard at a dinner party. She couldn’t remember exactly who had said it.
“You don’t think we were chosen?” Lisa asked.
“Chosen by what?”
Lisa shrugged. “Whatever. You can call it whatever you want—fate, God, evolution, or aliens. Some people think that we survived because we were chosen to survive. And, being the chosen people, we haven’t been plagued with the diseases of the unchosen.”
“I don’t buy it,” Tim said immediately. “Maybe I spent too much time at the Outpost with scientists, but it’s hard for me to believe in anything except randomness.”
They sat with that thought as the shadows rose and the sunlight diminished. At the top the hill, they could almost feel the sunset on the shifting wind. For a moment, everything was perfectly still and then the cooler air started creeping in around the edges.
Lisa believed in randomness, but she also believed in something bigger. The two forces worked together instead of at odds with each other. In her mind, there was a big hand that put things in motion, but then that motion was like a roll of the dice. Anything could happen once things started flowing.
“Are you afraid?” Tim asked, eventually.
“Of what?”
“Whatever is next.”
“I try to only be afraid of things that I can avoid. If there’s a fish in the water with giant teeth that bite, I’ll be afraid of the water,” Lisa said. “But I don’t see any point in fearing the inevitable.”
Tim smiled at her and crinkled his eyes. She didn’t know if he was amused or slightly sad. She decided that he was both.
“You really believe that?”
“Believe it? Yes. Practice it? Almost never. Truth is, I’m afraid more often than I would like to admit.”
Tim nodded and his smile faded.
“You ready?” Lisa asked.
“Okay,” Ashley said. She had already assigned them their seats and told them where to look. Then, rushing to the back of the room, she clicked off the lights and turned on a projector. On the screen, an image of the moon filled the screen. It was bright and beautiful—not the moon they had grown accustomed to looking at. There was no red cancer on this moon.
“This is the most recent image I could find. You can see the impact near Mare Nubium, but not the one near Tycho. And, of course, there is no hint of the red spot. Here it is today.”
When Ashley clicked the button, the biggest change was the giant red spot that jumped out in lower middle of the image. Lisa thought she saw other changes as well. She held her tongue as the presentation continued.
“All the decent telescopes up near home were destroyed, and the ones we managed to cobble together weren’t able to show us much detail of the red spot.”
Ashley clicked the button and the image zoomed.
“As far as I could tell, there was a new impact crater.”
They zoomed in again.
“And the red tint looked to be growing from that spot. When we see things grow over time, there’s a natural tendency to believe that the thing growing is alive in one way or another. I heard a lot of people suggesting that there might be some kind of organisms that were spreading out from the impact. The main evidence for that was the rate at which the spot was traversing the craters.”
Lisa squinted at the screen as it zoomed in again. They were looking at the area right at the edge of the red spot. She could see the way the line took a slight turn at the edge of the crater.
“Because the spot follows the contours of the surface, one can surmise that the spot is a surface phenomenon,” Ashley said.
“Instead of what?” Tim asked.
“I’ll get to that in a second,” Ashley said. “I’m sorry—I’ve been racing through these. Do you guys have any questions on what I’ve said so far?”
Tim put up his hand, like they were in a lecture. Lisa smiled. He didn’t notice—he was focused on the screen.
“Yes?”
“You said that the image without the spot was the most recent you could find.”
“Yes?”
“And you knew it was recent because it showed the impact near Mare Nubium?” Tim asked.
“That’s right,” Ashley said.
“Doesn’t that mean that the image was taken after the end of the world?”
“Yes—after almost all the population was wiped out. We first spotted the impact at Mare Nubium when I was… about four years ago, Gladstone time.”
“So the people who took the image were here recently? In the past few years?”
“That’s right,” Ashley said.
“So, they could be coming back. We don’t know if they’re going to object to us being here and using up all their stuff.”
“They’re gone,” Ashley said.
“How do you know?” Lisa asked.
“I’ll get to that. Any other questions?”
Lisa looked at Tim. She guessed that they both had a million questions, but it didn’t make sense to keep interrupting Ashley. The young woman had to tell the story in her own order.
Lisa gestured for her to keep going.
“This is about as well as we could see the edge of the red spot from our simple telescopes,” Ashley said, clicking the button again.
They were looking at some object on the moon. With no context, the thing could have been a rock or a giant mountain. Lisa didn’t have the slightest idea of its size.
“As you can tell
, the red has climbed the lower-right side of this object faster than the surrounding terrain. Now, let me show you the same spot from two days later.”
For a few seconds, Ashley clicked back and forth between two images. The only thing that changed was the border of the shadow. In the second picture, the shadow was a tiny bit thicker.
“Now you see why I chose this spot to concentrate on,” Ashley said.
Lisa shook her head so Ashley would explain.
“Okay—look here.” Ashley moved right up to the screen. They could see the curved image of the moon painted on her face as she turned back to them. “Do you see this part where the red spot follows the shape of this mountain?”
“Yes,” Tim said.
“Then, in the second image, watch it shift.”
Lisa saw it, now that Ashley was pointing it out. The movement of the shadow had been so much larger that it had drawn her attention. But Ashley was right—the border of the red spot had moved as the sun’s angle had changed over the course of a couple of days.
“This shows that the spot is not part of the terrain, but something projected onto it. One would think that as the moon went through its phases, the effect would be much more magnified, but it’s not. That was the second big discovery.”
Ashley clicked to a new slide. This one showed a different planet. Lisa guessed they were looking at Mars, but she really didn’t know for sure.
“Wait,” Tim said. “Before you move on, can you tell us what you mean by projected?”
“I’ll explain it more thoroughly later, but I intend to prove to you that an unusual emission from the sun is causing all of the strange phenomena that we have been experiencing.”
“Why?” Lisa asked.
Ashley’s eyebrows went up. Her face was colored by the orange hues of Mars. The hue made her smile look particularly wicked.
“That’s a great question, and I started with that question as well. I think that by the end, you’ll change your question to, ‘When?’”
They review detailed images of planets and moons. Ashley even showed them some strange shadows that she had found on dust clouds, and one odd streak in the sky that seemed to be independent of any object at all. By the end of all the evidence, Lisa’s eyelids were drooping. It was all very interesting, but it was also very repetitive. One red blob looked just like the next. The really fascinating slides were at the end.
Ashley put up a photo that looked almost like a paisley pattern of yellow, red, orange, and black. Lisa tilted her head and revised her estimation. It looked more like the top of one of the custards that Brad would make if they had a surplus of eggs.
“This is a particularly large sunspot that was recorded at some point in the past. Here’s Earth for relative size.”
Lisa gasped when a little blue and green spot was superimposed on the image. It was hard to imagine the scope of the sun compared to the planet they lived on.
“Just wait,” Ashley said. “Here’s the storm that’s happening on the sun right now.”
Before the image changed, Ashley zoomed out the sunspot so they would understand the relative scale. Almost the entire sun was captured on the screen.
“I don’t see anything,” Tim said.
“Sorry, this is before the filters were applied.”
When Ashley clicked the button, it was like someone had split the sphere with several jagged cracks.
“And this is how they move over time.”
With another click, the still image animated through a series of frames. The crack shot and split, running across the surface of the sun like lightning.
“What could possibly do that?” Tim asked after the animation had looped a few times.
“Again, I don’t think the right question is what or why. We should only be asking when. Let me go back to the original sunspot image.”
This time, when they saw the sunspot, it was animated like the other picture. With each new frame, the thing changed slightly as it moved across the surface of the sun. Ashley clicked when it got to the center of the screen. The animation paused.
“Here. This is where the line first starts. Then, you can see it extend a little. They didn’t get that far in their study. From what I can tell, the effects of the burst took them one at a time, depending on how much exposure they had to the unadulterated sky.”
“Ashley, slow down. You’re throwing out all kinds of stuff without explanation,” Lisa said.
Ashley turned back to her and blinked. She had been lost in her own world—explaining it to herself more than to them. Tim’s chair barked against the floor as he got up and went to the lights. The image faded when the overheads came on. Penny thumped her tail as Tim returned to his seat.
Ashley sat down and hit the button on the remote to shut off the projector. The three of them formed a little triangle.
“I’m not the first one here to study this,” she said, waving her arm in the general direction of the screen. “The people who were here before—the people who used to work here—they saw the impact near Mare Nubium. They documented it and I’ve figured out some of their notes. If not for that stray impact, I would assume that all of this solar activity could be a part of a normal cycle. Instead, I’m guessing that something impacted the sun as well. Something extrasolar came, broke up, and hit a number of objects in our system. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that it happened thirty years after the attempt at colonization. I believe that the changes to the sun were meant to assist in the development of the embryo that you guys turned away.”
“And those changes caused the red spot?”
“The red spot on our moon, and the other planets, yes. It looks like they all come from these weird emissions from the sun. If we could see Earth from afar, we might see the same red spots there.”
“But the moon is moving,” Tim said. “Why would an emission from the sun show up as a slowly growing red spot that’s always centered on the same place?”
“It’s not, though,” Ashley said. “We’re just seeing it there. Think of a rainbow. All those droplets of light are moving constantly, but we see the rainbow as being in the same place. It’s because of the angle that the sun is forming with the object that it’s hitting. You see?”
Tim narrowed his eyes. “I get the rainbow analogy. So the moon dust is refracting the sunlight?”
“Yes, in a way,” Ashley said. “It’s not refraction, and it’s not visible light until it bounces, but yes.”
“And all of this means…” Lisa spread her hands as she asked.
“It means hide and wait, unfortunately,” Ashley said. “We can’t do anything about the sun. We can shield ourselves somewhat by putting a lot of dirt and rock between ourselves and the radiation. The effects will be geographically constrained, but they’re going to move. With each day, or even minute to minute, they can shift and change. I have a bunch of data on the magnitude. I would bet anything that the data here would line up perfectly with the shifts that were seen in the border of the electrical disturbance in the Jungle. Of course, the time scale would be all wrong.”
Tim pointed at her. “You’ve made several references to time—what are you talking about?”
“Yeah, that’s the big one. I came to realize that it’s not a question of what happened to the sun, or how it happened. The really interesting question is when did this happen and when is it going to stop. One of the people who worked here had a stash of data stored that suggested they were studying impacts that went back a long time. The problem is that I don’t have any reference to tell me how much time we’re talking about. None of the information is coded with a date. The only way I can put things on a timeline is to track them relatively.”
Ashley rubbed her forehead as she looked down at the floor.
“So, the one thing I can use as a yardstick is when things happened relative to each case of insanity.”
When Ashley paused, Lisa looked over at Tim. He seemed just as confused as she was, so Lisa asked the quest
ion.
“Ashley, what do you mean by the first case of insanity?”
“I mean when they started killing each other."
Chapter 85: Janelle
“Yup, this place is weird,” Janelle’s father said, repeating himself. She saw his mood turn. Her father did a thing where he would take in information, consider it, and then change his mood in an instant. His frown changed into a smile and he shrugged.
“You guys want to see if we can help set up the garden?” Robby asked.
Janelle nodded. She had a paperback book crammed into her back pocket. As soon as her father got wrapped up in a project, she would be able to find a quiet corner and read. It wasn’t that she objected to working on things. Janelle preferred to make stuff alone. When there was a whole group involved, she only got frustrated when they didn’t do things her way.
Jim was more excited.
“Yes!” Jim said.
“I’m going to head out,” Liam said. “I have to…”
“Okay,” Robby said, reaching out and touching Liam’s shoulder. “We’ll catch up with you later.”
Liam waved and walked off.
Her father led them the other direction.
“With all the engineering that went into this place,” her father said as they walked, “it’s a little surprising to me that they don’t have a facility for growing food. It looks like they assumed that all the provisions would be loaded in. Then again, I suppose that it’s easier to control the situation by removing variables.”
“What do you mean?” Jim asked.
“Well, when you grow, you would have to account for training, diseases, and then inconsistent yields. There might be surplus or shortage, and you have to load in all the nutrients and energy required to produce the food. It would be much easier to plan for storage of pre-made food.”
“But it wouldn’t taste as good,” Janelle said.
Her father shrugged. “Enjoyment is the first thing to be discounted when planning for survival. It’s never deemed important.”
They consulted the markings on the floor and took a left.