“The possibility of discovering an alien civilization has long been prepared for by scientists. I’ve been programmed with the combined talent of thousands of the world’s greatest linguists. I cannot promise I’ll do it quickly, but I can decipher anything of coherent construction given enough time. As the technology has never before been tested on a real alien language, I cannot say whether the time frame will be anywhere from minutes to weeks, but it is possible.”
Sam mused on that, wondering why he never knew SNTNL had such capability. Yet the strong part of him that had very little interest in corporate jargon and A.I. programming refused to ask any questions of SNTNL to explain itself.
He kept staring out at the incredible landscape of buildings before him—there was so much to take in. “Could you also locate Randy and Terri when you connect with whatever system this place has? If the two of them went somewhere into that maze of structures, it could take me days to find them.”
“Yes, that is also possible.”
As he surveyed the wide expanse before his eyes, he couldn’t help but marvel at the construction of it and the mystery of where the buildings had come from. Had they been cloaked with invisibility until now? Had they materialized out of nothing, appearing from some other dimension? For the first time in Sam’s life, such far-fetched thoughts didn’t seem quite as unbelievable as before. He assumed that there was a more plausible explanation, but he certainly couldn’t figure out what that could be.
It was a minute or two before he could even begin to make sense of what he was looking at and start deciding where to go next. He spotted a bridge that was newly connected from the level he stood upon to the very nearest of the “skyscraper” structures, sagging in the middle as if it were a rope bridge, and yet it looked constructed out of the same unnatural, metal-like substance that most other things here were.
“I’ll start there,” he said with great trepidation. After taking a deep breath he jogged to the bridge. It had handrails made out of single poles stretching across the length of it, but they were tall, almost at Sam’s head. The bridge’s floor was riveted and rough, good for his shoes to grip, and the width of it would allow nearly three people to walk side-by-side, but he still stepped fairly carefully, wary of every step.
At the end of the ramp, a tall and open doorway led into the building. He passed inside as if entering into a dream.
The alien room was made from stone and metal and looked like it had been ransacked. The walls—even made of tough material as they were—were torn up as if with a buzzsaw. Crates of a material that had the color of wood lay strewn on the floor, most of them broken open, the pieces splitting into small, spherical pieces like styrofoam. What had been stored within may once have been useful, but now it looked rotted away and turned to dust.
He saw a few basins in the wall, some cutaway shelves full of dust and stones, and a central, short, wide pillar housing a large glass stone. The ceiling was multi-tiered, fitted with dim, greenish lights, and was embossed with strange lines and symbols.
Everything seemed to have a sickly, dusty pallor to it. Set in the far wall was a pod with glass exterior and metal encasing it. It took Sam a minute even to recognize that it was a pod made of glass, as it was full almost to bursting with black liquid.
His eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat.
It was, undoubtedly, the same strange liquid that had consumed Shauna and apparently killed her in the end. He could hardly breathe for a long moment beholding it. He walked up to it and slowly tapped the glass with a finger. It was as solid and opaque as ink.
Stopping for a minute to examine and behold everything, it took effort to tear his gaze away and remind himself that he hadn’t the time to marvel.
To his right he saw a long hallway and decided to walk through it, searching for any sign of a terminal or technological device that SNTNL could tap into. He couldn’t believe that the beings who created all of this weren’t sophisticated enough to have built computers of one sort or another.
The hallway was mostly dark, the greenish lights attached to the ceiling shining weakly. Sam kept his headlamp turned on. The walls were solid and bland, these ones looking less damaged than the last room. He was perpetually struck with awe as he proceeded.
He found an entryway on the right, tall and empty of any door just like the last. He stepped inside to a circular room with mostly-undamaged walls and a slightly-angled ramp spiraling from the door downward to the low center of the room. At the center was an empty pedestal. If he were to stand down beside that pedestal, Sam’s head would have been at eye-level with the floor he stood on now.
“Another room like this?” Sam said with fear in his throat. “Why? Execution rooms?” he guessed.
SNTNL didn’t answer.
Sam did not dare step down there. He had been to a place like this one too many times already. Before leaving, Sam searched around the sides of the room. There were shelves and crates lining the walls, and even a stone statue of a featureless, naked humanoid figure with palms pressed together to its chest. Its proportions were extended and inhuman, but it did not look entirely unfamiliar. Though so roughly cut and designed such that there weren’t meant to be discernible features like eyes or textures, Sam could count its five fingers and toes, its two ears, and hair reaching to its back.
Whatever had lived and created the civilization here, it was some sort of humanoid species.
Hairs raised on the back of his neck. And yet…considering what he had been up against for the past several days, Sam found the fact that what had dwelt here was humanoid in shape to be strangely comforting, if only a tiny bit.
Still, that raised more questions than it answered. Questions he knew could change the world and start an uproar of speculation and theorization among all peoples if they were to become aware.
Being the very first man to learn of that fact left him feeling extremely disturbed.
Just to the right of the statue he found an outcropping in the metal wall: a boxy object with a few button-like objects sticking out of it at around chest-level. Above the buttons was a depression in the box that almost looked like it should have held a screen, only it was plain metal.
Sam stepped up to it and examined it further. To the right of the buttons was a slot that, he supposed, may have been meant for inserting things.
“If I put you in this slot,” he asked SNTNL, “do you think I’ll be able to get you back?”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” the A.I. replied with a hint of a smile in its voice.
The slot was larger than his device, making him uncertain that anything would happen while confident that he could reach in and get it back when it didn’t work. He pushed the device in and SNTNL automatically activated its sensors. If there was some way the software’s reaching out was able to be picked up by the alien device’s, it should work now.
But nothing happened. Don’t know what I expected, Sam thought with a cynical chuckle. But before he retrieved it, he decided to try pushing some of the buttons.
At the push of one, lights shone in his eyes and he leapt back in shock. The space where no screen was now held an image that moved and extended outward like a hologram. Each “pixel” of the holographic screen was an individual, physical bead the size of a grain of sand that had extended out from the computer terminal—or whatever it was—suspended there in mid-air somehow. Each bead was lit up like a computer pixel and was suspended at a different depth forward to form, with the others, a three-dimensional screen. Sam saw the beads formulate a basic-looking operating system with lines and dots that were most likely a script of some sort. There were no images.
He was almost surprised that anything still had power to shock him at this point. He felt a drop of sweat run down his forehead that he couldn’t reach for the helmet on his head. “SNTNL, is it working now?”
SNTNL took a moment to reply. “I’m working on the connection. This will likely take some time.”
; “Alright,” said Sam, looking around. He was ever aware of his increasing hunger. “While you’re working on that, I think I’ll use the space tent and get something to eat.”
“Good idea. You’ll need your strength.”
From his backpack he pulled out the space tent and started setting it up. It was made with pressure-adjustment and oxygenating systems built in, a godsend for space travelers in lethal or unhealthy atmospheres who wanted to be able to get out of their spacesuit while still outside their ship in order to eat or relieve themselves outside of a spacesuit, which was always preferable. Sam planned on making full use of it while SNTNL worked.
After fifteen minutes he had the tent standing and ready. It was large enough for four to lay across comfortably. He crawled through the opening and pressed a button to make it mechanically seal up behind him. The walls, of course, were made of an extremely expensive and powerful material that let no air escape or pressure break it, yet was still bendable and foldable. After a minute long-period of pressurization and oxygen-generating, Sam was free to remove his spacesuit, which he was always happy to be able to do. He took some of the foods he had brought with him from the carrier and before long was enjoying a much-needed meal of re-hydrated chicken and rice. Not quite the same as his mother’s, but in a life-threatening scenario it did pretty well for him.
He could only rest so easily in the tent not knowing what lay out there. Something could stumble upon him and destroy his tent and him. But if he was to find Terri and Randy, it was a risk worth taking. After finishing his meal and gulping down a special, rare find of a bottle of beer from the carrier, he was the most pleased he’d been in days. He almost wanted to take a nap.
“Sam, I have something for you to see,” he heard SNTNL say.
He stood up and started putting on his spacesuit again. “You’re finished already?”
“Not entirely—I’m not able to access everything in this place—but I’ve deciphered most of the language and I’ve found Randy and Terri.”
Although SNTNL was only an A.I., its tone didn’t sound as joyous as Sam might have expected with news like that. With suit on, he pressed another button to begin the process of depressurization in the space tent. When it finished, he exited and went to the computer terminal. On the screen he saw a video feed of some part of the city, likely a camera angled down from the corner of a ceiling. The room was dark and the floor rose upward in short walls across it, split in the middle. It looked like a ribcage rising out of the floor. There he saw Terri and Randy walking around in their spacesuits looking lost and struck with terror.
Sam stared at the image carefully. His crewmates looked exhausted and in danger.
“There’s something else,” SNTNL then said with an ominous cadence to its voice.
The screen changed to a new camera’s viewing angle at SNTNL’s direction, and Sam’s jaw dropped.
This camera was stationed in a shaft of some sort, with a staircase crisscrossing up and down the other end of it. To the left of the staircase were a set of connected tubes stretching endlessly down and transporting a liquid through them that sloshed around as it went. It was black liquid.
The screen shifted to yet another camera angle, this one overlooking a long, wide hallway strewn with metal crates and barrels and lined with rooms. Along the ceiling rushed more of the liquid through yet more tubes. Splits in the tubes led through the walls and into the individual rooms.
“I’ve deciphered most of the alien language,” SNTNL said. “The dark liquid is called ‘Seclurm’.”
13
Bewildered and desperate Terri Jones felt her left ankle begin to ache as she and Randy White tried to keep up with the running figure. Here they were in a bizarre and foreboding set of ruins chasing someone they could not identify upon a minor planet that they wanted more than anything else to leave and never see again in their lifetimes.
Their pursuit had gone on far too long, with the distance between them and their unidentified crewmate growing broader and broader all the while. They had passed into the enormous cavern once again and beheld with shock its new status: full of tall buildings everywhere. But with no chance to stop and take it in, they had simply turned right and kept after the running, suited figure. The chase had brought them dashing down a staircase, around several corners, and through long and empty hallways.
Their puzzlement at everything that was going on multiplied exponentially as they realized at last that they had lost sight of the unidentified figure. He or she hadn’t heard their relentless shouts and never once stopped to look around or decide where to go.
The two of them finally came to a stop and rested with hands on knees. They stood at a junction of long, metal hallways that had large, tinted windows on either side, displaying that they were now on the underside of some outcropping structure hanging in the midst of the cluster of tall buildings. It felt surreal to think of it as a city, but evidently that was what it now was.
“We lost them,” Terri breathed, huffing and puffing.
Their suit helmets’ lights shined in the hallway, breaking through suffocating darkness.
Randy stood up and leaned against the glass wall, looking out at the distant ground below in wonder and confusion. “Why didn’t…why didn’t they ever stop? It’s like they were deliberately outrunning us!”
“They must have heard us yelling, right?”
“Yeah. …I’m starting to wonder if we were wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
He paused before answering. “About who we were chasing.”
Terri inhaled uncomfortably. “But if it wasn’t Rosalyn or Sam…who else could it have been?”
She had deliberately avoided saying “what else”.
Randy swallowed and let his vision grow unfocused. The windows and lights upon the many buildings he looked at seemed to speak to him. You’re not alone.
“I don’t know,” he replied finally, tapping nervously on the glass.
Terri looked back the way they’d come and felt her head spin. She was incredibly hungry and thirsty, she realized only now, and after all that running had grown dizzy to boot. She groaned and sat down on the ground, holding the sides of her helmet.
“Man, we should have got something to eat sooner. I feel dead…”
Randy turned to her and said, “Let’s head back, then. We came from that way, right?”
After a moment she opened her eyes and saw him pointing down one hallway. “I—I think so,” she answered.
Something echoed down that very hallway then, as if in response to Randy’s pointing. The two of them perked up and frowned fearfully as they looked down at the distant corner lit afar by a dim, bluish-green light.
A shadow appeared on the wall: something with a large mouth and inhuman shape to it. Sounds of its breathing bounced against every wall and reached their ears, drowned out somewhat through their helmets.
Randy stumbled back, looked around at his options for escape, and chose the left hallway to run through. Terri scrambled up to her feet and followed him, cursing him under her breath for dashing off first as if to outrun her. They kept their voices silent, not daring to draw any more attention to themselves than they already had.
How idiotic of them, they both thought, yelling after that suited figure as they had chased after it! How could they not have taken precautions? How could they not have guessed?
There were more aliens here in the ruins.
♦♦♦
The colorful holographic screen in front of his face, strange new buildings he had seen, and lights all over this dead alien city were overwhelming Sam very quickly. The circular chamber he stood in, much like the one Shauna had entered just before being submerged in black liquid, was beginning to seem increasingly strange to him. And now that he knew Terri and Randy were alive and in trouble, it was imperative to find them and bring them back.
“I think I need to get down to the others,” Sam said. He didn’t understand why SNTNL hadn’t
told him the whereabouts of Terri and Randy yet. Just trying to babble about this ‘Seclurm’ thing.
“That is wise, Sam, but I must advise you to listen to what I have discovered. I promise it will be pertinent to what you are working towards.”
Sam sighed. “Couldn’t you tell me as I go or something? I’m getting really worried about…”
He trailed off as his gaze shifted to his right. He realized that along the rounded wall past this computer terminal were more screens, three of them in fact, set into the wall and three times as wide as the one SNTNL was currently attached to. Between them were small columns. He saw the first screen begin to activate, and he walked over to it, stepping slowly and watching it closely.
Like the other screen, it had tiny beads shoot out of it suspended in air to display semi-three-dimensional images. Here Sam could see a motion image of the alien city in what looked to be its prime; nothing was decrepit or ancient-looking, and there were tiny figures with indistinguishable features walking across bridges and everywhere in the place.
SNTNL spoke then. “This city was almost completely dead when you were here last. Now it roars with mechanical activity.”
The latter half of the long screen displayed the very room, or perhaps yet another almost exactly like it, that Sam recalled Shauna having entered before she became covered in that black liquid—what SNTNL apparently called “Seclurm”.
♦♦♦
Terri’s body was assaulting her with pain for forcing it to drive yet onward, ignoring its pleas for rest. Soon enough, however, her adrenal responses dulled the pain and allowed her to focus on one thing:
Survival.
They ascended a short staircase into a broader hall filled with rippled pillars and statues of figures they barely noticed out of their peripheral vision. They could hear faint hisses far behind them; they weren’t stopping even if they did suddenly run into Sam or Rosalyn or anything else.
Seclurm: Devolution Page 20