by Julia Keller
Rez tried to speak, but couldn’t. He tried again. This time, he was able to answer.
“It started five minutes before I called you,” he said. “At first, I didn’t know what it was. I’d been working on the signal all morning long, trying to track it. When that didn’t work, I tried to intensify it, and clarify it. And then—” He faltered. “And then this video feed started up, replacing the graduation scene. It repeated several times before I realized that … that it was still Rachel. It was still her perspective. It was Rachel’s Intercept feed. Rachel’s feelings as she perished.”
The video had repeated twice again while he talked: the lightning, the flashing, the tumble, the water, the pressure.
The end.
And again: lightning, flashing, tumble, water, pressure. Death.
“Can’t you make it stop?” Shura asked.
Rez swallowed hard. He tore his eyes away from the screen. “That’s the thing, Shura—I don’t want it to stop. I mean, I do, but I don’t. It’s excruciating to watch, yes, but it’s still Rachel. It’s as close to her as I can get now. It’s the last thing she knew. The last thing she saw. The last thing she felt. The last thing she was.”
His eyes were pulled back to the screen. Their eyes went there, too:
Lightning. Flashing. Tumble. Water. Pressure. Death.
Violet looked at Shura. Shura slowly shook her head. Violet understood what her friend was saying. I don’t know what to do, either.
The image had no sound, which only added to its surpassing strangeness. We’re filling in the sound with our own imaginations, Violet realized, and that probably makes it ten thousand times worse than the sound as it really was. Or is. She was certain she could hear the screeching howl of the wind, the moan and roar of the storm-whipped ocean, and Rachel’s cries as her fate became terrifyingly clear to her.
Yet the room was silent. Only the occasional chirp from Mickey as he ran through his progressions in his continuing search for the signal’s origin interrupted the vast, momentous quiet.
And so there they stood, the three of them, mesmerized by the final seconds of Rachel’s life as it unspooled in front of them, over and over again.
Finally, Rez took a deep breath. The spell was finally broken.
“Wherever that signal is coming from, we’ve got to find it,” he declared. “Look, I know you guys have your own stuff to do, but I could use some extra help for a few hours, okay? Mickey and I can’t make much headway by ourselves. I’d like to expand the search parameters. What do you say?”
“Absolutely,” Violet said.
“Count me in,” Shura said.
Hearing that response, anybody else would’ve high-fived them or fist-bumped them or even just offered up a brief but heartfelt, “Hey, thanks.” But not Rez.
He nodded.
Because Rez is Rez, Violet reminded herself.
Now he was talking again. “Mickey, fix them up with laptops, okay? And assign them quadrants.” He dropped back down in his big red chair. Each hand clamped around a joystick, he rotated the chair forward. “We’ll find her.”
Violet thought about correcting him; there was no “her” to find. They were looking for a chip, not a person. A signal, not a little girl.
But Rez had already returned to his own world, a world of auditory trace programs and numerical analyses and probability fractals. A world of rigor and resolve. He wasn’t listening anymore. Because he was working.
“Hey, Violet,” Mickey said. “What did the astronaut want for Christmas?”
“Mickey, I’m not sure this is really the time for—”
“Missile-toe!”
She laughed. She was glad to have something silly and lighthearted to think about for a minute, something to act as a counterweight to the grim obsessiveness in Rez’s eyes. Her affection for the AstroRob, goofy as he was, was growing. Maybe it was the fact that Mickey had almost been destroyed by Graygrunge, and she pitied him. Or maybe, Violet thought, she just had a weakness for bad jokes.
“Why did Saturn turn down a marriage proposal?” Mickey asked.
It was Shura’s turn. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why did Saturn turn down a marriage proposal?”
“Because it didn’t need another ring!”
Shura and Violet both groaned. Then they settled down to work, tracing the elusive signal. Each of them claimed a corner of the lab, sitting on the floor, backs against the metal shelves, laptops balanced on their upraised knees. They scoured their assigned quadrants.
The only sounds in the room were the breathing of the humans and the slight humming of the robot.
An hour later, Shura stood up.
“I’m taking a quick break.” She did a few deep-knee bends to get the kinks out of her legs.
“Good idea,” Violet concurred, standing up next to her. “This is pretty tedious work.”
Rez glared at them. Violet didn’t take it personally
“Yeah, fine, take a break,” he groused. “But make it short. We’ve got twelve more galaxies to get through before—”
He stopped. His attention had been jerked back to the screen.
Shura and Violet looked, too.
The picture of a dark ocean and a wild night had vanished. Across the screen, unrolling in bright yellow letters, was a simple, haunting plea:
HELP
PART TWO
Rachel’s Return
9
Trillum, Nogg, Waw
The five friends gathered in the shadow of the great telescope.
Beyond the telescope was a glittering wash of stars, a swipe of light that looked like a brushstroke across the vast black canvas of space.
Beyond those stars were more stars. And beyond those stars, more stars still. And more and more and more.
From somewhere far beyond the limit of all that these five people knew, all that they understood about the universe, something was stirring. Something as yet undreamed of.
Whatever it was, it was trying to communicate with them, sending forth a single word across distances too immense for the human mind to envision.
It was good that the five of them were together in this moment, Violet thought, a moment that filled her with a sense of bright, burning wonder. When Rez had asked them to come, they came: Tin Man and Kendall had just joined Violet and Shura here in his lab. They put aside their petty feuds and their minor grievances, and they looked toward the stars.
They had been through so much together already. They had known pain. They had faced down the possibility of disaster. They had weathered storms—real storms, like the one on Old Earth on the night that Rachel died, and other kinds of storms, too: storms of the heart. They had dealt with grief and with love and with all the troubles that grief and love could bring. They had quarreled the way all friends quarrel, but they always came back together again stronger, and sometimes wiser, too.
They had seen death.
And they had survived.
Everything they had been through had brought them to this moment.
Violet was not a mind reader, but she was fairly certain each of them was feeling roughly what she was feeling as they stood beneath the motley, magnificent array of instruments with which Rez had stocked his secret lair:
They were on the threshold, once again, of a grand adventure.
But first they had to solve a baffling mystery.
They stood in a ragged half circle, facing the screen upon which HELP had continued to pulse in yellow letters.
The small lab felt even smaller with so many people—and one AstroRob—crammed in the space. It seemed cold, the sterile, metallic cold of scientific instruments, but the chill was mitigated by the presence of the five friends and the comradeship they shared and by the amazing, astonishing thing that seemed irrefutable now:
They were being contacted by the inhabitants of another planet.
They stared at the message. They pondered it. Compared to the sophisticated equipment all around them, the word on the
screen was about as simple and primitive as could be:
HELP
For several minutes, no one spoke. The silence was finally broken by Tin Man.
“Where’s it coming from?”
“I don’t know.” Rez’s reply was sharp. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked you guys to come right over, okay?”
“Don’t talk to him that way,” Violet said. “Calm down.”
“We’re under a lot of pressure here,” Rez muttered, “and I don’t have time for stupid questions.”
“It’s not a stupid question,” Kendall countered. “It’s the perfect question. Who’s asking us for help?”
“And why?” Shura put in.
Rez didn’t answer. He wouldn’t snap at Shura and Kendall the same way he’d snapped at Tin Man; he thought of them as his intellectual equals, whereas he considered Tin Man his inferior. Violet didn’t like the snobbery, but she knew that was how he felt. Rez assessed people according to their brainpower, and he had little respect for Tin Man’s.
Or mine.
She pushed the thought away. There was too much to do right now to sink into self-pity.
“It’s coming in on the same transmission as Rachel’s chip,” Shura added after checking the numbers at the bottom of the screen. “I’m not sure, but I think the chip is being used as a sort of surfboard. The message just rode in on the chip’s back, you might say.” She was thinking hard. Violet could tell because her friend’s lips were drawn up into a thin line, and her dark eyes had a faraway cast. She had seen the same expression on Shura’s face when she was finishing up an especially difficult painting or attempting to make an elusive medical diagnosis or bumping up against a daunting challenge as she upgraded an oxygen synthesizer or a neural trigger for a cold-fusion initiation sequence.
Or—Shura being Shura—trying to make lunch. Domestic skills had never been her specialty.
“But it can’t be from … well, from Rachel,” Shura concluded.
They still tiptoed around the name when they were in Rez’s presence. They weren’t sure what he was feeling about his sister’s death.
Hell, we’re not sure what he’s feeling about anything, Violet thought.
“Because she’s dead,” Rez said. “Understood.”
“So who’s making the request for help?” Kendall asked. He seemed to be addressing his question as much to the screen itself as to any individual in the room. “There’s got to be some sort of consciousness behind the message. Asking for help is a specific, urgent action. Someone’s in peril.”
Shura shook her head. “Not ‘someone.’ It’s not a ‘someone,’ remember? The signal’s not really coming from Rachel. It can’t be. It’s her chip, but it’s not her.”
“Whatever.” Kendall’s attention switched to his wrist console. Calling up jewels and then swiftly rearranging them in an elegant dazzle, like a juggler with a collection of colored balls, he performed a series of calculations. “Okay. So given the triangulation theorem I just used, Shura’s right. The message came in simultaneously with the chip’s signal. But that’s also the same frequency Rez has been using to measure the orbital parameters of New Earth.” He turned to Rez. “Can you send me those coordinates? I want to cross-reference the numbers. See if there’s any symmetry between those parameters and the angle of incidence of the incoming call for help.”
“That’ll take days,” said a disgruntled Rez. “My numbers go back to the founding of New Earth.”
“So I’d better get started.” Kendall didn’t take any crap from Rez. There had always been an edge of competitive tension between the two of them, dating back to when Rez and Violet worked together in Protocol Hall—and Rez had a crush on Violet, while Violet was obsessed with Kendall. All of that was different now; Violet’s feelings for Kendall were strictly those of friendship. If she had a crush on anybody these days, it was Rez—a fact that she didn’t like to think about too often, because it was so … well, so weird. And it probably didn’t mean anything at all. She’d sort of convinced herself that maybe it was just a temporary glitch—like a short in a computer keyboard. It would sort itself out soon.
Meanwhile, Kendall and Rez treated each other with a kind of mild, keep-your-distance wariness. They collaborated on projects, and they respected each other’s minds, but they didn’t socialize.
Come to think of it, Violet reminded herself, Rez didn’t socialize with anybody. Rachel had been his only real friend. And she was gone.
“Maybe whatever entity found Rachel’s chip is the thing asking for help,” Shura said. “Either that or it’s an automatic distress beacon of some kind.” She looked over at the AstroRob. “Hey, Mickey. Even if we can’t tell where the signal’s coming from, can we at least pin down if it has a true source or if it’s just a random distress beacon that got mistakenly triggered?”
Mickey jammed his pincers into the sides of his keyboard. “Give me twenty-one seconds,” he said. His pincers vibrated ever so slightly, and his central processing unit thrummed as he synched himself up with the computer’s hard drive.
While Mickey finished his calculations, Shura leaned closer to the screen. “Look at the words and how they’re formed,” she said. “Must be the nature of the signal. Those letters are kind of … tentative. Like whoever sent the message wasn’t sure which letter was supposed to come next.”
Violet leaned in, too. “Yeah. They’re sort of rickety. Like maybe they were made by a kid who just learned how to spell.”
Rez made a humfph sound, a small noise that seemed to start in the back of his throat and then move into his nose. It was filled with skepticism bordering on ridicule. Not even his reverence for Shura’s tremendous brain could override his natural inclination to scoff. “I think you’re both seeing things. They’re just regular letters.”
Mickey spun around and addressed the group. “Inconclusive,” he said.
“Great. Thanks,” Rez said.
“I don’t think robots get sarcasm,” Tin Man murmured.
“Oh, we get it, all right,” Mickey said cheerfully. “We just choose to ignore it. Rise above it.”
Rez slammed a hand on his control panel. “One more word out of you,” he said to the AstroRob with a snarl, “and I swear I’ll throw you back in the recycle pile. You’ll be a rail at a tram stop before the night’s out. Or maybe a toilet-paper dispenser in a public bathroom.”
Kendall moved to the center of the room. Because the space was so compact, the entire journey required only a step and a half.
“Guys, come on,” he said. He made eye contact with each one of them: Violet, Shura, Tin Man, and finally Rez, who brooded in his big chair. He even included Mickey. “Do you see what’s happening here? We’re arguing and squabbling like a bunch of kids. We have to stop—and stop now. We’re dealing with important things. Crucial things. Things that might affect the fate of New Earth. So can we stop sniping at each other? And remember that we’re all friends here?”
No one spoke for a few seconds.
“Everybody’s tired,” Shura said. “Tired and frustrated and confused. That’s the problem. But yeah, you’re right, Kendall. It’s time to quit picking on each other. Time to focus.” She gestured toward Rez’s screen, where the HELP message still hovered. “I want to figure this out. So, yeah. I say we start over.”
“Me too,” Violet declared. She looked at Tin Man, who nodded.
“Okay, then,” Shura said. “From now on, we remember why we all became friends in the first place. Because we’re a great team. And okay, I’ve got to say it, even though it’s corny—because we love each other. And because we know that if this mystery is going to be solved, it’ll be solved by somebody in this room with help from the others.”
Kendall looked inquiringly at Rez. “How about you? Are you with us?”
Rez shrugged.
That was the best they were going to get.
* * *
The message changed.
They had just settled down to work
again. Rez was running his calculations on the probabilities of signal origin. Kendall stood next to Mickey, joining forces with the AstroRob as he ran multimatrix analyses through his computer, and Shura and Violet continued their search through the assigned quadrants on the laptops. Like before, the two of them staked out a corner of the lab and settled in, computers propped on their knees. Tin Man had noticed a loose fitting on the porthole door in the floor and was busy fixing it so that the next person who entered or exited didn’t find herself dropping unexpectedly into the storage room just below, holding a ripped-loose fitting in her possibly broken hand.
And then, after several minutes of companionable, work-filled silence, Shura glanced up at Rez’s screen.
“Hey,” she said.
There was no immediate response from her friends, because Hey lacked any real drama.
“Hey!” she said, raising her voice.
Now they lifted their heads from their own work. They followed the direction of Shura’s finger, which meant that their gazes landed on the screen.
The message still read HELP. The letters were still yellow. They were still all caps. But now the word seemed to be squirming, getting bigger. The letters themselves were fluttering uneasily. The picture wavered. Fuzzy static gathered in the corners of the screen like lint in a pants pocket.
“What’s happening?” Violet asked.
Rez scowled. He punched a series of buttons on his control panel. He twisted a dial next to his keyboard. His scowl deepened until it seemed to swallow up his face.
The message continued to shiver. The fuzz in the corners was moving slowly toward the center.
By now, Kendall had relocated from his spot next to Mickey to a spot behind Rez’s chair, watching the message as it twisted and shifted.
“The signal is—well, I don’t know what to call it,” Rez said. Bafflement had turned his usual sharp tone into something softer. “The letters are getting thicker. That’s the only way I can describe it.”