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Radio Sphere

Page 6

by Devin terSteeg


  It chased me into the hollow structures, fueled by an intense rage that made lightening and smoke fume off her back excessively. It crashed and careened through strange metallic walls. The bulgasari’s movements were explosive, quick and short leaps with crashing paws and jab—like swipes.

  She roared in an awful way, a way I knew was desperation, but at the same time reminded me of the moans and wails of all the ones like Grandpa, dying together in the most unnatural way.

  George jumped from a cloud in the sky firing several volleys from the torch as he descended onto the bulgasari’s back, then stabbed her with a metallic shard the length of his arm. The bulgasari didn’t care much when George stabbed it, in fact she seemed to enjoy it at first, finally rising in a violent twist and upwards thrust landing George back on the ground. The torch slid across the ground on impact and George shut his eyes.

  It loomed for several slow motion moments as if to decide on how hurt it might be. I noticed the torch nearby. The mother of bulgasari stood stunned, but the lightening off its back burst with empowered force that channeled through the wreaked walls; the smoke made it seem like growing midnight. I grabbed the gun and shot the final bullet into its neck. The torch—light pellets burrowed their way through the carapace of the beast, dripping out of its under carriage in a slow race. It whimpered then collapsed, as everything else does when it dies. The metallic clank when the bullets dropped from holes in its belly onto the floor sounded like what I imagined when sunlight reflects off frozen water droplets long caught in the planet’s orbit sounded like. There was a pleasant song—like quality to it, a tap—dance signifying the mother’s death. I wondered if it haunted those hypothetical bulgasari pups left behind.

  Crawled. Crawled. All alone he crawled, and crawled, and crawled, at least four devrons around the side of the bank. I selfishly wondered if Chad thought of me at all.

  His last act, a scribbled note on blood soaked paper and stolen ink:

  This place fascinating

  alien ship

  It’s technology.

  We caused it, they came

  Chad died in agony during his efforts to uncover truth and history, to find answers to questions people long forgot to ask as humanity slipped backwards through melioration. As Liz decided to bury him I had to wrap up the remains and carry them over my shoulder until we found the spot where we dug the devron deep hole. We hung our heads and watched the sun—filled hole, leaves on the wind, orange and dry from weeping, no longer draped in emerald, discarded as the Torch was into the pit before we filled it in and covered it with a stone that bore no name.

  When looked upon logically, one can deduce that the nature of this world has been affected by the combination of alien influences and split atoms. A simple deduction, now, but why is this one location preserved? Are there other islands of preservation as well? My attempts to communicate this with Liz have failed. She’s enamored by the apples, withdrawn into a mental cocoon.

  Somewhere, over gradual time, we forgot the basis of our whole. Anarchy loosed upon the world and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, was told to me in one of Sarawati’s dreams by Michael Robartes. We seemed to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, who stood on the shoulders and corpses of those before them. Are we humbled by any of it?

  We found something special, though, something outside of what we thought possible. I’m not sure if Liz had figured it out yet, what Chad was looking for, but we’d found it.

  The debris is from one of the three interstellar vehicles that landed on the Earth. The aliens had advanced far beyond humanity, yet were vulnerable; they failed to predict how mankind would cognate their arrival.

  Liz was lost in mourning. We buried Chad’s remains nearest where Liz thought her family’s plot sat, that was the best we could do and I told her Chad would have liked it there.

  After two days of silent camping at the grave, we went on to explore the area of the empty field beyond the grave. Liz was in a silent state of shock, blankly attempting to follow along as I careened forward. We went past the field, across a dingle, and into a thickly wooded area. Liz fell down a steep embankment and I followed her to find us on a shady path overgrown by trees; the sunlight that pierced the canopy was blemished green and gold.

  An irrigation canal trickled across the path. It was perfectly straight, leading to an opening in the ground held open by mechanized debris. We walked and walked and walked into the black, I knew not why. Liz didn’t say a word as she led us down the perfectly straight hall, she kept descending with no notion I was still there, and I stopped caring if we’d ever come back to reality. I could feel her pain and understood where her mind had gone; a circle of infinite quiets like when I carried pa.

  Eventually I lost all feeling in my legs, but the path kept going as if we’d eventually reach the belly of the world, but I knew that wasn’t possible so I wondered where it could possibly lead and if this is what we were supposed to be afraid of.

  “You can hear it, can’t you?” She muttered so softly I wasn’t positive I’d imagined her in the first place. Our only source of light was a golden red mist of various densities throughout the air.

  She wouldn’t tell me what she heard, what was leading her, but after walking more k—devrons and still feeling as fresh as I did in the morning, we kept going. It didn’t take long after that, we saw a light and reached a room.

  “Ah, finally, you have arrived.”

  “Where are we?” Liz asked him with a calmness like I’ve never seen in her before, “What are you?” she spoke rhetorically as if to a child.

  The room was larger than the whole of my childhood home. The curved walls formed a dome several sizes larger than the one dad and I saw distant weeks south of Boston43 only this one was still intact and a mix of blue and white and green, with blinking purples and orange. The room appeared something like a workshop filled with broken devices both theirs and ours. The center of the room was filled with formed light images depicting the night sky. All the stars were crashing all over as I watched on with amazement.

  “My name was À¥ÐŁŒ, don’t be scared Creatures,” a holographic creature appeared in front of the stars and night, composed of the same wavelengths distinguished only by a thick black outline uttered at us.

  “What are you?”

  “It helps, they dictate me Lois.”

  Lois seemed to toggle gloaming switches and keys.

  “How long have you been down here?”

  “Two hundred years or more, can be what I spent composing your species I at that time, all. Don’t expect to find a bit of Sapient life.”

  I think it was a her, but like the stars the luminescence flickered and had an artificial air.

  “You’re not real, are you?”

  Lois seemed irked by the term ‘real’ and while it made no facial expression of indication it did rapidly tap at buttons with a sense of urgency.

  “Holography is to separate the light from the object can later write, and construction technologies. It is used for the transmission of three—dimensional images as holograms. The hologram is an image, 3—d.”

  A blue thick mist jet from the walls into our being, forced itself through our skin, forced us into a state similar to the time moments before falling asleep.

  “Maybe there are moments, when possibility space of dream’s humanity. Unfortunately, we have those dreams you short. You would have expected and our intention is to anxiety among people it had, people he reacts violently we are conversation expense? And anyway, it is our think following delays have shame.”44

  “I’m not sure I understand. George?” But I had not and could not say anything.

  “Translation lexicon patching… voice protocol… adjusting… syntax errors… repairing. Your ancestors attacked us when we arrived.”

  “Had you not considered we would react in fear?” Liz was reforging her own mind.

/>   “Your planet’s transmissions were accidentally picked up by a probe network we sent into deep space. It was the first evidence of extraterrestrial sapient life. Deranged by this illumination we re—purposed several vessels and charted in your direction post haste. Our approach was not calculated; we expected you would be as impatient as we were to meet new life. The probability of alien life forms is high, that’s true, but the vastness of the void made it seem like finding it would be dubious. The chemistry of life, that which makes fauna, are the most common elements in the universe. Life happens relatively quickly with the most abundant ingredients. But you were the first we had the chance to meet; the only species we knew where to find.”

  The alien went on and on. It spoke in a similar way as Saraswati in that it clearly had developed and accumulated knowledge over many years. We sat and listened to the words while deriving the shame and sorrow felt by the creature. It— this digitized mind— had spent the last two centuries time trying to learn as much about humanity as possible.

  “My solitary goal has been to preserve whatever I was able to of the human race. As I undertook this task I found that despite any success I might have, I would never be able to capture a significant picture of it all; the sheer diversity of culture and wonderful variations of on the dataset. I’ve done all I could. I’ve archived it all in the hope we can mend some of the damage. I’ve cloned several minds onto data storage here in the ship. One day others from my world will come and perhaps we can rebuild and forge ourselves a new future.”

  I told the mind about the apples and Saraswati. I asked if it knew about Iktomi, Dinesh, Yeomra, and if they were aliens, too. I needed to know if Lois had anything to do with that, how the apples made us smarter, how the trees could talk, and the bulgasari were eating all our past.

  “That is unlikely.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Allow me to take a scan. This machine will not hurt you, but will allow us to image your brain to better understand you. You both are the first live Refulgents I’ve met.”

  I climbed into a horizontal tube that softly ejected from the floor. It was so sleek, so beautiful, like an upright sarcophagi made of metal; like the barrel of a gun. The chamber was just larger than I with an inset the soma form of a human for me to rest in as the booth tilted prone. Even as I lay flat, through a small lunette peephole, I could watch the conversation between Liz and the alien computer.

  “For over two hundred years of study and observation I have come to understand that the human lifetime has reduced to seventy approximate years provided healthy living.”

  “Your coming here did that?

  “Our decent through your atmosphere triggered a response that we never expected— that you would be willing to incur self inflicted wounds to limit potential outcomes. But it wasn’t just that. Something happened to us. It was a combination of weariness, deep space, and home sickness accumulated. Our stasis system’s cascading errors built up that, while continually purged and reset, caused many of the population to go in and out of stasis many times more than was necessary. A systemic glitch caused variations of pressure and lower average perfusion of blood to the brain. Many of our leaders suffered transient ischemic attacks at first, coritcobasal degeneration and chronic ischemia developed commonly over the course of our journey.”

  “You’ve doomed us to a life only a quarter of what we deserve,” Liz cried.

  “Yes, and destroyed tens of million of my people. We came with great need for catharsis, dreams of ultimate possibility, to remedy a lingering toska. At least some of you have survived. Only six survived the crash on this ship and we built this representation of À¥ÐŁŒ before they died. You can rebuild. There is hope.”

  “Chad’s become nothing more than a memory.”

  “I’m still reconstructing human history from the sources I can access. When living, corporeal members of my species come they can aid in this endeavor and the reconstruction of all you’ve lost.”

  “You will never be able to understand our true loss, let alone give us back what we’ve lost.”

  The tube gave a low hum as it did the thing it was intended to do. I hoped that it would help us somehow. Through the glass I could see Liz, still weeping and engrossed in her memories, when suddenly thousands of images of people appeared before me, both of us and of them; I was no longer certain if time was real, or if those moments had lasted a second or a hundred years, whether there was a Liz or a Chad or a self and others. A thousand forms on the mirror surface, disappearing beneath each other and melting into each other, filled my view. They eventually vanished and I could see Lois smiled gently. I tried to properly fool a smile back. Liz curved over on the floor in a purely fetal position as another tube rose up for her to enter. Uncontrollable tears trickled down her childish face. She was overwhelmed by the feelings of a great love, a love forever lost. She curled tightly into a ball, right down on the ground, in front of the holographic alien watching motionlessly, lifeless, whose holographic smile reminded her of everything that she had ever loved in her life, of everything that had ever been of value.

  All the Zeals are dead. First the Prime, then those who would try to be. Stasis failure caused hallucinations and aggression. Some of us survived the crash, initially, but we had yet to prepare for the atmosphere and available consumable materials. All the time getting here; all our hope and excitement. We should have done more, better. I fear all of us will die. I am in charge now and I’ve ordered all the power be reserved for the stasis. I will remain awake for as long as I can to ensure our survival and to collect data

  on—

  and for—

  Electroencephalography is a poor comparison for my imaging device. You know how well they could read and display the images of the mind, but in my time here, and with the weakness of the human brain, I’ve developed the ability to implant memories and information of my own.

  The life on this refulgent blue orb, a gem that seems valuable only because it is surrounded by filth in dead space, is all synthetic. Mere chemicals that react in simple and predictable manners have developed in cascading complexity to simulate consciousness. Their intellect, a biological and accidental mimic at low efficiency. Human beings are pretend; our way is everlasting. These human minds are like a defective, enfeebled pet, a dog barking at its bark. I’ve implanted within them knowledge of what we are.

  This is the last transmission I will bother to send home. You will come here. Fail not as you’ve often done before. I’ll soon be uploading the last of my mind into the ship’s processors for you to find, as a beacon, with all the information I’ve been able to collect collated in the mean time.

  When you come they will know our name and they will accept you from their knees.

  — À¥ÐŁŒ

  Footnotes

  1. “Not many years back we learned the news that the Lebagir are not alone,” he paused. “We all gathered together, huddled with our friends and family, to hear the sounds broadcast through the stars that found their way to our Timber planets. That is somehow old news now, as the first images from the alien world have been processed by the the ڇŁϞ¥ אלڑ telecomputer. A resplendent world like none we’ve seen, sitting all alone, blue like a polished stone.” The newscaster won an award for his historic commentary. He went on to discuss the implications there would be on our society, namely in terms of religion and science, since for many the proof of another species provided the last evidence their dogma was correct. The eruption of chaos combined with cold rationale of the movement’s leaders forced action from every group with an opinion and will to act. Nobody wanted any particular result except to be accepted as in the right. It made little sense, those days, so many of the scientists and engineers behind the initial discoveries grouped and lost in exile to construct our passage.↩

  2. I had thought about “Ginger Jar in Fiction” but that felt pretentious, a weary vestige of my old ‘self’ as it might be called, to be conscious of something in a negativ
e way. Then I’d have to go on about what ginger is, but I’m sure you’ve seen Gilligan’s Island by now and that’s good enough. Could have gone with “A wind beaten tree” but, these things… Fiction, though, has different uses for them. Humans escape in it, but use the escape to reaffirm prioritized traits and feelings. It makes sense to me actually.↩

  3. Imposed house confinement during the times the star is down, which is rather vague, reminds me of home a bit at the end. We’d caused an uproar, a d20 of rebellion or revolution— mostly some loud groups making the lives stuck between them miserable. We thought ourselves noble.↩

  4. A central character in a Refulgent belief structure known for his skill in painting eggs.↩

  5. An ancient type of data— in this case musical— storage that self—destructs into a ball of fire after forty—five uses for the purpose of fire starting. Old timey Refulgents were inventive, for primitives.↩

  6. In the before times, antediluvian humans developed along different ethnic paths with national segregations. One of these was called German, a pride known for its blond hair and advanced chocolate engineering.↩

  7. Located somewhat central, east coast, and western North America respectively; the former catacombs of human civilization called Chicago, Virginia Beach, and Reno were once populated, livable, and not completely terrifying. The radiation has died down, but the fallout and fear keeps most life away.↩

  8. Includes what was once called Alaska, the Yukon province, and parts of the Northwest Territories.↩

  9. A hand—held, portable game device created by the Responsibility Heaven Corporation (RHC)— which is exactly what it sounds like, a powerful technology conglomerate and plush toy manufacturer— primarily in use by under—parented children and lonely adults. The device underwent many variations until in 20XX a pill, once swallowed, enabled the brain to act as screen and controller as directed by the user’s thoughts. It came out the day before we came and sold over 200 million units.↩

 

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