Faster Than Light: Babel Among the Stars

by Malcolm Pierce

  *

  The line should have been straight. And the more Seth stared at the picture, the more his mind tried to make it straight. It was starting to give him a headache.

  “What am I looking at?” He was sitting at a desk with several tablets in front of him. They were full of photographs very similar to the one in front of Seth. He’d already looked at dozens of images, but there was something about this one that he kept coming back to.

  Absalom peered over his shoulder. “I believe that is the corridor leading towards the medical bay aboard the station. There’s a magnetized streak to help stabilize stretchers when they float through the hallway.”

  “So this is definitely supposed to be a straight line? The magnetized streak?” Absalom nodded. Seth narrowed his eyes and tried to focus in on the picture. “But it’s... It’s...” He couldn’t put his thoughts into words. There was something wrong going on, something twisted within the line. But it didn’t curve or spiral, waver or turn. It was straight and it wasn’t. “It’s off.”

  “In most of the pictures, the distortion is more obvious. That’s because the camera is outside of the same warped space as the subject. This photograph is different. The area within the medical corridor is one of the most distorted areas on board the station. The camera was actually within the warp, so the line still looks straight. But you know it’s not, don’t you?”

  Seth wanted to laugh it all off, to diminish it. He wanted to tell Absalom that he’d exaggerated. There was nothing on the tablets that was particularly scary. It was just a bunch of distorted photos. They were just lines that should be straight but were not.

  He couldn’t do it. It was horrifying and he couldn’t explain it. There was something about the pictures that made him sick to his stomach. And it wasn’t just the photographs. The reports from the station were almost as bad.

  The warp happened so slowly that the inhabitants of the space station didn’t even notice it. It didn’t have any apparent physical effects. It was happening on a level of reality so base that it distorted everything seamlessly. Walking into a warped area didn’t hurt people, even though it displaced certain parts of their body. They couldn’t even feel it, at least not on the surface.

  But the warp did something to their minds. It was how the Republic first noticed that there was an issue aboard the station. Violent altercations broke out regularly. Almost everyone on board reported severe insomnia. Their intake of stimulants and anti-depressants skyrocketed, with most crew members using both to stabilize themselves.

  Several of the crew kept personal journals during this time. There was nothing obviously amiss within them. They read just like any other journal, dull accounts of day-to-day life that yielded nothing remarkable. Yet Seth could barely stand to read them for very long. Just like the distortion of the medical corridor, Seth couldn’t explain why it disturbed him so much.

  Seth placed the tablet with the photo and picked up another one. This one contained several journal entries.

  “Why does all of this feel so wrong?” Seth asked. “What does this mean? None of this... None of this is that strange at all. But I can’t...”

  “Now do you see what I mean?” Absalom asked. “This is why we can’t release it to the public.”

  No. Seth didn’t see what he meant. It made him feel uneasy. But what he felt didn’t make any sense. He started to read over the journal entry in front of him. He made it a paragraph in before he had to stop. This time, it wasn’t just that he couldn’t continue. He was stuck. There was one line, one seemingly meaningless line, that drew him in. He read it over and over. Each time, he felt a building fear inside of him.

  A few seconds later, his heart was racing and his palms were sweating. He wanted to throw down the tablet and look away. But even more, he wanted to understand. He needed to know why it was having this effect on him.

  “I don’t get it!” Seth exclaimed. “This is all... There’s nothing remarkable about any of this. Why is it so terrifying?”

  Absalom didn’t reply. He just waited and watched as Seth tried to rationalize something that clearly could not be rationalized.

  “Can I read this to you? I keep looking at it, over and over again, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep at night because of this. It’s... It’s like...” Seth tried to throw down the tablet again, but he couldn’t. He had to see what Absalom thought. He needed to know he wasn’t crazy. “Let me read this to you.”

  “Go ahead,” Absalom said. And so, with a deep breath, Seth read back the sentence that transfixed him:

  “Today I looked in the mirror and for the first time I noticed that the colors have changed. I am not sure if they are better now.”

  A moment of silence hung in the room. Then Absalom grabbed the tablet in Seth’s hands and pulled it away. “So you got to that part,” the commissar said. “I hope you get the point now. Do you see what we’re up against?”

  Seth was puzzled. “That ‘one’? Up against? That sentence didn’t mean anything. It was just...”

  “You can read more, but I wouldn’t suggest it. If you’re having trouble with the entry about the colors...” Absalom’s voice trailed off, as if he didn’t want to go any further.

  Before beginning this investigation, Seth would have never turned down access for more information. He wanted to know everything, and he wanted to be able to reproduce everything. After all, he wasn’t just building a collection of Heilmann Drive plans. He was also building a case for maintaining faster-than-light travel.

  But today, Seth didn’t want to see any more. He didn’t want to copy anything he’d seen or read. These photos and these words scared and disgusted him in a way he couldn’t begin to fathom. He was done.

  5.

  At first, The Spatial Preservation Act prompted little resistance within the Republic. People were used to trusting their government. If the government said that faster-than-light travel was dangerous, then it could be believed. Soon, however, the reality of the Fall began to set in. Everyone started to see the effects on the less-populated worlds. Then they realized that the images they saw from these planets might be the last ones they would ever see.

  Dozens of worlds would become completely isolated from one another. It was the end of an interconnected, galactic human society. And many worlds were not prepared for that. The people of the Republic saw the food riots on NewPasTur, the despondent suicides on Yuan, the religious upheaval on Linaria, and similar disasters across the galaxy. Their government was doing nothing to quell these crises it created with the Spatial Preservation Act. The Republic seemed content to let these other worlds destroy themselves.

  To make matters worse, the Republic was not forthcoming about its plans to eventually re-establish faster-than-light travel. Were they studying ways to improve the Heilmann Drive? Were they exploring the possibility of a completely new method? No one knew. Republic scientists working on the problem were sequestered from society.

  The Republic also refused to provide substantial evidence that the Heilmann Drive posed a threat to the galaxy. They claimed that the reports from the warped space were dangerous and inflammatory. They acted as if they possessed some dangerous power on their own. And the public had to be protected from this power.

  Soon it became clear that the Republic didn’t have the answers or solutions everyone wanted. People started to question the Spatial Preservation Act. They wondered if there was really any reason for it, or if it could be some kind of power grab by the Republic.

  For the first time in centuries, the people of the Republic began to rise up en masse against their government. They staged protests outside of Republic facilities. They distributed incendiary articles about the Act. They interrupted speeches and disrupted rallies. Rumors began to spread that Republic officials were being attacked by organized resistance groups.

  These wer
e not the easily-captured terrorists the Republic demonized after every tragic freighter accident. This new rebellion was real, and it was powerful. It hid in plain sight among the crowd, and it was fairly popular. After all, no one liked the end of faster-than-light travel.