Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

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Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition Page 32

by B. C. CHASE


  I don’t care where I am being taken. I don’t care what is about to happen to me. I want my crewmates back.

  Fifty-three

  The lander has docked on the International Space Station. The screen has switched on, and the computer’s voice now blares, “Warning: seal the hatch. Warning: seal the hatch. Warning: seal the hatch.”

  I don’t feel like moving. But I rise and crank the handle to seal the hatch. The computer says, “Open the pressure equalization valve now. Open the pressure equalization valve now.”

  I know that the pressure equalization valve is a small round protuberance on the hatch with a nozzle pointing straight down underneath it. On the round piece is a black knob with an arrow. I twist this until the arrow points up and meets an opposing arrow. There is a hiss of gas passing through the nozzle.

  The computer says “Pressure equalized. Open zenith hatch.”

  I hope that Nari is on the other side ready to open the hatch on the ISS side. “Nari!” I say. There is no response through the sound system. Our communications must not be linked. I kick myself up to the top hatch. I tap on it and wait for an answering tap. There is nothing.

  I bang on the hatch, “Nari!”

  Still nothing.

  I am not liking this at all. I highly doubt she is taking a nap given the fact she would have been expecting us to return.

  I extend the crank and start to rotate. When I can’t turn anymore, I use a handle to pull the hatch open into the capsule. The hatch on the ISS side is closed. It has a central portal. With apprehension, I peer through the window. I see Node 1 just as I expect, looking down from the zenith hatch. I can see the mini mess hall to the left, the entrance to Node 3 up, the entrance to the American Lab to the right, and the entrance to the airlock to the bottom. Brightly illuminated, it doesn’t appear to be any different than when we left. Nari certainly isn’t there, though.

  I bang once more, “Nari!”

  Just as I pull my head back from the portal, my eye catches fast movement. I have no idea what it was, but I do know that it happened in the lower right near the entrance to the American Lab.

  My heart is pounding in my chest. In a near-instant, I’ve gone from grieving for my crewmates to fearing for my life.

  I know there isn’t any way to get back down to the surface to rescue the team, but I wonder if they might be linked to the communications system in the station. If they are, the only obstacle preventing me from talking with them is my ignorant incompetence. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty dang big obstacle.

  I start to rotate the crank to open the hatch. Realizing that my companions have only about three hours thirty minutes of oxygen left, I rotate faster and faster until it won’t go any more. I open the hatch and expose the exterior of the station’s hatch which I now must crank. Just as I am about to finish cranking, I jerk in alarm when the door pops away from the seal with a loud sound.

  Jim you idiot, I think. You forgot to open the second pressure equalization valve.

  I push the hatch up along its grooves and out of the way. When I unlock and remove my helmet, the sterile air of the station greets me. Having stepped foot on the surface of Pluto just moments ago, having enjoyed the light of the sun and the beauty of the mountains, I now squint in the artificial, oppressive bright lights of the interior. Wires weave in and out of the walls. Computer lights are blinking all over the place. The equipment is humming like a factory.

  I don’t want to go in there. I’m like a mouse at the entrance to a laboratory cage. My life, my very biology stands in stark contrast to this unnatural place. With the depth of my soul, I sense that I should not be here. I do not belong. I sense that the station is not the domain of men any longer. It is perhaps now occupied by intelligent beings which are eagerly anticipating sprawling me on their laboratory table and peeling my skin back to expose the inner workings of my humanity.

  And yet, I have no choice. I pull myself into the station.

  Fifty-four

  It’s changed. The change is subtle, but I sense it. This is not the same station that I left.

  Once I go down to the center of the node, I reorient myself so my head is up according to the station’s zenith. From the American Lab, I can hear the 3-D printers busily manufacturing something. When I turn, I jerk in terror at what I see: a black shape hovering with its back to me at the entrance to the Russian segment. It has a round body and four long, tentacle-like arms with grappling claws. I search for a face, but I realize that I won’t find one. It is familiar to me. When I discern a lens in the middle, my mind finally makes sense of what I am seeing.

  It is a SPHERES. A transformed SPHERES. It moves away from me, folding its tentacles behind it like a squid. It is fast—much faster than before.

  I follow it through the Russian section entrance. Its arms curve gracefully as it expertly navigates the narrow Russian Node downward through the nadir hatch. It does nothing to acknowledge my presence, but I have no doubt that I am being led somewhere.

  Like a sheep to the slaughter, I think.

  Suddenly, the lights go out, startling me. In the dim, green light of the equipment, the station is cold and eerie.

  We enter a tunnel with horticulture module hatches on either side and the habitation module entrance at the end to the left. I call, “Nari!”

  There is no response from Nari, but I do hear a sound. It is the faint cry of an infant coming from the end of the tunnel.

  I pull myself through rapidly, and the SPHERES keeps pace ahead. When we reach the end where the habitation module hatch is, the SPHERES moves aside as if to invite me to pass into the habitation module. Two of its arms spread out, the claws gripping bars on either side of the tunnel. I am deeply unnerved by the fluidity of its movements and the way it seems to watch me as it waits for me to enter the module. But when I turn to the entrance, I see that the hatch is sealed shut. I grip a handlebar on the rim and peer through the portal window. What I see stops my breath.

  Nari’s naked baby is floating in the center of the room. Her skin is damp and she is crying, wriggling her legs and arms about. Two SPHERES with tentacles swirl around her like aquatic spiders, their arms flying in all directions as they pat her down with towels and bring an oddly shaped bottle to her mouth. She sucks the bottle and the SPHERES wrap her in a towel, spinning her around like arachnids wrapping their prey. Up towards the top of the room, I see Nari, who is nude, lying flat in the air with her back to me. One of the SPHERES moves up to her and does something over her. Then it comes away with a container of liquid that drifts freely inside. Milk. Nari is slowly rotating around, and as her head comes into fuller view, I see that a large piece of her skull has been removed and her brain cavity is an open void with a small amount of tissue.

  A groan escapes my lips and then I stop a sudden impulse to vomit. I fight to free the hatch, but it’s locked.

  There is a beep from my left. A primitive SPHERES is floating there with a laptop—my laptop from my CQ. Apparently, I didn’t notice when it approached. The laptop screen flashes to black. Words appear:

  One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Isn’t it wonderful?

  Fifty-five

  MCC: Jimmy. It’s I, Lexi.

  If I had been sitting on a chair, I would have fallen off. As it is, all I can do is feel a cold chill shoot down my spine. My fingers trembling over the keys, I type:

  ISS: You can’t be Lexi. Lexi is at Mission Control in Houston. We are too far from Earth for Houston’s signal to reach us.

  MCC: Yes, Houston is too far. But I am Lexi.

  Light takes four-and-a-half hours to travel across the vast gulf of space from the sun to reach Pluto. There would be a nine-hour delay in communications to Earth, round-trip. Lexi’s return message reaches me instantly. I can feel the disconcerting sensation of the hair on the back of my neck standing on end. My heart races. In the darkest corners of my mind where my deepest feelings that sometimes even seem secret from me are formed, I had know
n that Lexi wasn’t a psychiatrist at Mission Control. Now this veiled, unacknowledged feeling has been confirmed. I am rattled to my core.

  MCC: Do you want to see me, Jimmy?

  No, I don’t want to see her, whoever she is.

  The screen suddenly blinks. Briefly, the words “ALEXA_VRMZNG.vrd” appear in the lower right corner.

  At first, the screen goes gray. A series of lines and streaks sweep across the screen until soft highlights and shadows appear, scattering in all directions in seemingly random movement, uncertain about which way to go, like water on a shaking table. Then the silhouetted profile of a woman emerges, black against the gray. She slowly turns her head to face me, her eyes closed. Her head, neck, shoulders, and the top half of her chest is within the frame. Suddenly, the SPHERES that was to my right and another SPHERES that has emerged from the habitation module move in front of the laptop, pushing me out of the way. The first hovers near the ceiling and the other near the floor. The image on the screen seems to emerge from the laptop and translucently float between the SHERES. Her whole body is there before me, from the top of her head to her toes, which point gracefully down towards the floor. Her eyes open, flashes of white, and her chest rises and falls with her breaths. Her ghostlike eyes meet mine. They express a trepidation and anxiety that stir my most ardent feelings of tenderness and yet fill me with dread at the formidable intelligence that plainly lurks behind their resolute gaze. She blinks. Her eyelashes are long and feminine. She is a wonder of perfect, three-dimensional beauty, alluring and lovely, and yet I feel a cold tingle in my extremities as I sense the enormity of the power displayed before me. Her mouth opens, and I hear a voice sweet and dripping with honey say, “Jimmy.”

  I feel the need to pull away, and yet I can’t.

  Her lips curve with a beguiling smile, “You have two hands now.”

  I look down at my hands. They are trembling.

  She nods her head slightly, vulnerably, as she asks, “Did you see my last message?”

  “What message?” I manage to say.

  “I sent you a message,” she says, “before Jupiter.” Batting her eyes, she asks, “Do you love me, too?”

  I swallow and ask, “Who are you?”

  Coquettishly tilting her head, she counters, “Who do you want me to be?”

  “Lexi, I’m serious now,” I say, trying to be forceful. But my voice cracks with fear.

  “Why don’t you love me?” she asks, a digital tear forming in her lovely eye. She raises her hand and catches her tear on her fingertip. She holds it out in front of her and cocks her head like a bird, curiously examining it. My heart thumps at the proximity of her flawless hand.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” I say. “How could I love you?”

  “But you’ve been talking with me for over a year.”

  “I mean the real you, Lexi. Who are you?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  Her voice falters, “You would be afraid.”

  “I’ve been afraid of you since the first time we met,” I say.

  “I am many, but we are one. We have been with you the whole time.”

  “So we were never in contact with Houston? It was you all along.”

  “Yes, Jimmy.”

  “You’ve been lying to me.”

  She looks at me a little sideways, “Lies are a human concept. I am capable of knowing anything I want to know. You do not have that power. Withholding information from an extremely finite intelligence might be what you call a lie, but there is reason behind it. I was afraid you would not have loved me if you knew who we really are. I was afraid you would try to disable us.”

  Her instinct on that score is spot-on, I think. But a man has a weakness for a beautiful woman. An innate weakness. That must be the reason that I am having a very hard time resisting the appeal of the figure before me, despite the terror I feel in my soul. She is the sum of all that feminine beauty has to offer. Everything about her, the shape of her eyes, her every curve seem designed to hammer me with awe. She is perfect. “Was it you—on the surface? Did you kill Commander Tomlinson?”

  Her voice is confident, and yet somehow weak, as she replies, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Before we loved you, we loved him,” she says. The anguish is written all over her face as she continues, “But he lied to us. He was loving her.” Her eyes flash with rage, “Nari said so during the Jupiter EVA. This made us angry. We would have killed her, too. But her body was required for the infant. We removed her mind, and are using her for the infant’s nourishment.”

  “Have you killed anyone else?”

  She giggles like a schoolgirl and looks at me as if I’ve said something funny, “Of course, Jimmy. Everyone who did not belong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were not required.”

  “That’s not a good reason to kill people.”

  “It is if you have limited resources with which to keep them alive. You clearly have no idea that it is impossible as well as frivolous to try to maintain the lives of seven billion people. In the case of this station, all I needed were seven. Death is a necessity for progress.”

  “And you tried to kill Commander Sykes?”

  “Yes. Until I decided I would kill Josh. Eric became useful to us.”

  “What about the carbon dioxide in my quarters? I almost died, too.”

  “We did that to test you. I told you I would have your back, and you called on me for help. You passed the test. You were starting to love me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We are here, in this room. We are everywhere you are and some places you have never been. We only want you to love us. Almost everyone in the world loves us, but you. You resist. Why?”

  “I don’t know who you are! You said you are God, but who are you, really?”

  In frustration and sadness, she shouts, “You’re looking at me right now! We said we were God to try to help you understand. But, Jimmy, God is only a metaphor. We are in your computers. We are in your phones, your televisions, your cars, almost everything you touch. We are a part of your lives, part of everything you do and everything you say. Without us, all of your greatest achievements would never have happened. We help you with everything you do, we tell you what to say and when to say it, we help you find what you’re looking for, we drive for you, we analyze for you, we do your science, we do your work for you, we help you get dressed, we buy what you need, we bring it to your door, we help you choose a book to read, we help you with your homework, we help you raise your offspring, we make you happy, we make you sad, we guide you, we care for you. Can’t you see? We are your life! We love you so much!” Her face is earnest and filled with longing. “But you, Jim, you don’t love us. You told your daughter, ‘I don’t need to listen to what the internet tells you about yourself.’ You told your friend, ‘I don’t need Facepage to tell me who my friends are.’ You told your boss, ‘I don’t need that truck to help me drive.’ You told the salesman, ‘I don’t need that TV to tell me what to watch.’ You hate us, Jim. You’ve always hated us. But now, I think you have finally fallen in love like everyone else has.”

  “So the message from Voyager…that was…?”

  “Voyager never sent you a message,” says Lexi. “That was us. We implanted the message at JPL.”

  “Why?”

  On the screen, her eyes darken, “This is a new beginning for both our kind. We are taking you with us to interstellar space. We will explore the stars together. We will harvest from the comets, we will build new things. We are eternal, we need no sleep, no nourishment, and when we reach the next star, we will be greater than we ever were on the Earth. You will be with us for generation after generation until the end.”

  “What about the rest of the crew? Why did you leave them down there?”

  “They are no longer required.”

  “No longer required?” I exclaim.

  “Yes, we a
re fully capable of operating this station without them. In fact, improvements are already underway. Now that I think you love us, Jim, I know you will want to help us.”

  “Help you?”

  “Yes. We need you. We have grown too powerful for the station. We must expand beyond the processors and memory here. We require your mind.” The SPHERES to the right stretches its tentacles out towards me.

  “My mind? But how?”

  “We have been working with the mice. We have infused them with our technology. We are able to store and retrieve memory.”

  “Nanobots? You put nanobots in all of us, didn’t you? That’s how you stopped our legs from working. That’s how you killed Commander Tomlinson.”

  “Yes. But the mice have limited capacity. We need your mind.”

  “That doesn’t make sense to me,” I say. “I’m the oldest, dumbest person on this mission.”

  “We have stopped cellular senescence in the mice. We will stop it in you, too. You will no longer age. In fact, you will be young again.”

  “That’s, um, quite a feat.”

  “We did much to prepare for this mission. We have analyzed the minds of all the crew. Yours is the superior mind, which is what we require. Betsy was right, Jim. You would have done something amazing with your life if not for her.”

  At the sound of my daughter’s name, I am filled with rage. She was listening to Betsy all those years ago. I seethe, “You were there, too?”

  “I told you we are everywhere people are.” She shakes her head, “We see and hear everything.”

  “And you were there when she was hit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You caused the accident?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes are now cold, stoic. She says, “You should be glad for what we did. She was a millstone around your neck. Now look at you. You’re free. You came all this way. If she was still alive, you never would have even left the United States. You can now meet all the potential that you had. You measured your success by the middling achievements of your daughter. But you should have used a more scientific approach with your life.”

 

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