In A Universe Without Stars 1: Skyeater

by J Alex McCarthy

  “It’s going to be alright,” Lance murmurs to her. Her sobs over-power what he said. She’s lost in fear.

  “It’s going to be alright! Okay!” He yells, clutching her harder, to the point of pain. He needs an answer, if not for her for himself.

  To know that all they’ve been through, that even though there going to die, that it wasn’t all for nothing. “O…Ok…Okay…” she mutters. She reaches up and they kiss for one last time as the sphere gets closer, light reflecting off their bodies.

  The angel Lance stabbed lands on the rooftop and it looks pissed. Its crown disappears as its arms and wings rips its chains. Its wings disintegrate off its back. Yellow-orange energy wings float on the angel. Lance and Serena shield their eyes from the brightness.

  It walks toward them. The chains weren’t helping it, it was holding it back.

  In the distance on another rooftop, the crown appears over Ulbe, the Damons head, it has only one thorn. He’s lost control.

  Back with Lance, he shoves Serena away as the Angel shoots a beam of light at him. Forgetting about the looming doom from above, his body acts on its own, not really knowing what he’s doing.

  Lance swings as the beam fires at him, a energy based projectile erupts from his hand, cuts the beam in two and—

  It hits the angel. It screams as it burst into flames. It flies off. Lance looks up and—

  The sphere of light rips straight into the rooftop, Lance gets one last look at Serena as it explodes out.

  “Lance!!” She’s thrown off the roof. Lance jumps and follows her. Falling fast, the building coming down above them.

  Serena cries for him. There is nothing he can do. He’s about to watch his wife die. The angel flies under her, face half melted off, it opens its mouth for one final blow—

  It explodes, guts flinging everywhere. Beneath it, a SE6 numbered ship flies fast under them. Its side opens. Serena falls into its bay. Lance doesn’t know what it is, but he’s glad his wife didn’t see the ground and neither is he. That was his last thought as he falls into the bay.

  The ship turns toward the sky and shoots off incredibly fast. We are left with New York City as it burns to the ground. The mysterious ship in the sky splits vertically in half and hovers apart. The clouds disappear and reveals a giant ball of light in the middle.

  Everything in city is ripped from the ground, buildings, roads, the last survivors, trash, everything levitates toward the light.

  9 - Yes, Even The Stars

  A grey cloudy sky peers through the windows of a house’s office. The patter of the rain hitting the giant bay windows overlooking the river creates the perfect white noise for the man sleeping at one of two identical glass desks in the office. His head lies on various scattered notebooks and papers.

  His desk is chaotic but suits him. The desk next to his is picture perfect. Papers stacked perfectly, all their angles perfectly aligned.

  Exact opposites.

  The wide screen monitor on his desk silently runs a simulation. It pinpoints a view of a cluster of stars, all swirling in their natural chaotic progression. It is version forty-three revision number five. It’s the latest of many.

  Behind the clouds that blanket the sky the sun sets. Colors and light flee out of the office, leaving darkness until only the monitor illuminates the man and the wall behind him. On the wall are several white boards and bulletin boards.

  On the white boards are many complex equations and notations. On the bulletin boards are pictures of stars and galaxies, held on with tacks.

  Several are labeled with red marker as “Missing”. The bulletin board bears the title “Starless night theory.” Above that board, near the rafters, is another on which multiple awards and pictures are pinned. They’re ordered from left to right, oldest to newest.

  The first award is plaque with a picture of a black man, Thomas Wilker, as he accepts his first Nobel Prize in physics. He is the very man who sleeps on the desk. The next award is a Nobel Prize for a classically beautiful woman.

  Isabel Love.

  As the awards go on, it is to be noted that Isabel has many more of them than the man. After her second Nobel, the rest of the awards are hers. Her pale white features age with each consecutive honor. It’s been years since Thomas won a single thing.

  The awards are high and prominent, but the half circle shaped of the room brings focus to the desk and the rafters above. The man at the desk, Thomas Wilker, is a man of science and the husband of Isabel. He goes just by Wilker.

  Wilker knew what he was getting into when he married the smartest woman on the planet. As he sleeps, his computer continues to run, the simulation of the stars nearing completion.

  The rain hits the windows harder, the storm picking up momentum. One by one the stars on the screen flicker off at a constant rate, darkening until every single star disappears.

  Blackness.

  The monitor leaves the room pitch black. Only the small weak blue haze of the monitor’s power button remains.

  “Simulation complete” pops up in big white letters with a beep. It doesn’t wake him; he’s exhausted from building and running simulations all day. He’s finally found what he’s been looking for, though he doesn’t know it yet. When he wakes, he’ll have proof that the stars are disappearing.

  One by one.

  All the work he’s been doing for years will finally come to fruition. Yet in a month’s time, all the things that humanity has worked for will be for nothing. All the works of all the lives that ever lived will cease to matter. In a month’s time all of humanity and life in the universe will change.

  Humanity will end.

  …

  The storm bellows hard in London. A woman in a yellow rain coat runs in the rain slicked streets to her car. The BMW 4 series lights up as she jumps into the driver’s seat and slams the door.

  She coughs hard, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket. She continues to cough into it for some time until her body shudders to a stop. She looks into the handkerchief, stained with mucous blood, a lot of it. She sways a little in disgust and wipes her mouth.

  She pushes the ignition button, rolls down the window and throws the handkerchief out. She wrestles off her coat and throws it in the back.

  It’s Isabel, her dark brown hair sticks to her damp face. It takes nothing to take away from her stark beauty. At forty-three, she barely looks a day over thirty. She often thanks her mother for that.

  Isabel curses to herself. The back of her shirt becomes wet from the residual water from her coat. Bloody hell, if not for the coughing attack she could’ve taken off her coat before the water could soak in. Closing her eyes she breaths in.

  Her day has been neither memorable for any positive or negative reason nor forgettable. Home and a hot shower await. So there’s no reason to get angry. She’s already wet so she’ll just have to deal with it.

  Her phone dings. She has an email from the SETI institute. ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’.

  It’s addressed to the head of the organization: Isabel.

  She ran the office for many years, it’s her main passion: to find life out there in space, to learn she is not alone in the universe.

  The email says the echo experiment was a success and that the American government is interested in funding it.

  “Why does it interest them so much?” she says out loud. She doesn’t think the Americans have an ulterior reason for providing help for the project; she’s just a questioner. That’s why she joined SETI all those years ago. It’s why she became a scientist, to find the answers to life’s questions.

  A bright blue light suddenly flashes in her eyes. She stares at it in disbelief. All her emotions ebb, and she becomes calm. She has no fear, no excitement, no thoughts at all. She forgets about her email and drops her phone.

  …

  Wilker still sleeps at his desk, his monitor put itself to sleep to conserve energy. The office lightens as the sun peeks over the hills, lighting up rooftops
still wet from the storm the night before. Smoke billows from chimneys as they warm the occupants inside.

  Isabel walks right up to Wilker’s desk, giving him a good shove. He wakes slowly.

  “What is it?” he moans.

  “You’re going to be late,” she says softly with a hint of weariness.

  “Five minutes.”

  “It’s always five minutes with you and then it’ll be an hour later. Get up Thomas.”

  He sighs hard and runs his hands over his curly black head.

  He looks up at her. She looks as though she’s been up all night in the rain.

  Her shirt and pants are soaked through, her shoes are covered in dirt and falling apart and her face is covered in smudged dirt as if she recently tried and failed to clean herself up. Alarmed, Wilker struggles to his feet.

  “What happened to you?” he demands.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Nothing? Have you looked at yourself?”

  “I’m fine. Promise.” She smiles weakly.

  There’s a smudge of blood on her lips. She’s been coughing again. Wilker wipes away the blood.

  “Dammit Isabel, you need to get help,” he whispers. He’s calmer-sounding, but still angry. He loathes seeing her suffer.

  “You keep telling me time and time again and my answer is the same.”

  “I will keep telling you until you get it through your thick head.”

  “No,” she says. They have had this discussion before, about her illness. She won’t listen to him. He gently strokes her face until she grabs his hand to stop it.

  She says, “You need to go. If you’re late again—“

  “If you’re not going to get help I at least want to know what happened to you,” he says firmly.

  “If you’re late again, they’re going to fire you, tenure be damned. Please, I’ll tell you everything when you come back home.”

  He just stares at her. She let’s go of his hand. He steps to his computer and pulls out the flash drive with his simulation; he didn’t have a chance to look at it but he will at work.

  He gives his wife the biggest hug he can muster without hurting her and lands a passionate kiss on her lips. Some of her dirt rubs off on his face. After what feels like an eternity he puts her down and their lips part.

  She rubs his face and gives him two small quick slaps. “Now go,” she says. He lets go and hurries out the door.

  She lets out a long breath. She walks to her desk and slumps into the chair and starts to quietly cry. The tiredness overwhelms her; the weight of the situation crashes down upon her.

  She places her head on the desk and weeps. She’s seen it, everything she’s worked for, the very thing she’s thought she would never see in her lifetime, the thing of which she’s dreamed.

  It frightens her, in ways she’s never anticipated, though it’s what she has always wanted.

  The realization of it has finally hit her, along with implications she’s never thought of when it was just a distant dream.

  She’s made contact.

  …

  Wilker stands in front of a university class, all one hundred seats are filled. He has a presentation of the stars on the projection screen.

  “This is only a small portion of the stars in the universe.” Wilker says. The students sigh and relax in their seats.

  “The number we can see with our human eyes on any given night, are only eleven thousand give or take in this picture. That’s already a number some of us simpler folks can’t comprehend. Not all of them are stars but are galaxies.” He paces up and down before his desk as he continues.

  “In a single galaxy there are believed to be at least two hundred billion stars making up it’s worth. Two hundred billion stars in that single shiny speck in our night sky. That shows us how small we really are. A galaxy is a vast island of stars floating throughout the ocean of the universe and yet there is a theory that there are more than four hundred billion galaxies with two hundred billion stars. It’s an incredible thing that really puts things in prospective. As humans our brain can’t even begin to understand that number. So we are here, stuck on Earth, left to dream of the stars above and the understanding of them., Wilker finished.

  A student raises his hand in the front row.

  “Yes?” Wilker asks.

  “When will we continue on to harder subjects or literally anything else? It’s near the finals and this is the fourth time you’ve told us how small we are.”

  Some of the others laugh while the rest look at him for a reply.

  “Ah yes, Mr. Perry is it? I’ve seen the rating you’ve given me on ratemyprofessor.com, I was wondering what is your problem with me?” Wilker asks.

  Perry looks around, some of his colleagues look away. He didn’t think Wilker would find out about that.

  “Well? Speak up, I won’t hold you against your own opinion. Academically,” Wilker says.

  “Well... you’re a physicist, not an astronomer, I have a firm belief that you should stay in the field you studied in so you can master a subject. You didn’t study astronomy in school,” Perry says.

  “And where exactly did you find that out?” Wilker says.

  “The…Int….Wikipedia…” The words stumbles out his mouth.

  “Don’t you know the phrase ‘don’t believe everything you read on the Internet’. You’ve got me wrong Mr. Perry. I’m an astronomer at heart who just happens to dabble in physics. That would make me an astrophysicist which I studied at Harvard University. I happen to find comfort in the stars and galaxies and I think you all should too.”

  Perry doesn’t respond.

  “I’m not a parrot, I have my reasons when I repeat certain things, no matter how trivial it seems, and that’s because it’s going to be on the final. But most particularly it really is important to understand how minuscule we all are. Once you apprehend that, only then can you begin to understand the complexities of the universe. If you think you can do a better job than I, then feel free to come up and show me what I’m doing wrong.” Perry recedes farther back into his chair.

  Somebody chuckles, a man near the door. Another professor and Wilker’s boss, Matthews, leans against the wall. He must have slipped in during Wilker’s speech. Wilker looks at his watch.

  “Look at the time. Class dismissed.”

  His students swiftly file out at the gift of a short class. Matthews leaves with them.

  “Perry, can you come here?” Wilker asks. Perry sulks over.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, and I’ll keep this short. You are one of my brightest students, and I like people who stand up for themselves and their beliefs. But next time you think of speaking up either keep the hell quiet or get your damn facts straight. I won’t have anyone interrupting my class with rubbish like that again.”

  “Yes, professor,” Perry says. He turns and leaves.

  That was Wilker’s last class of the day. Now he can take care of Isabel and whatever the hell happened to her last night. But first…

  He checks his computer on his desk. He was running the simulation all day. He needs to finish it so he can figure out what to fix on it next. As he wakes up his computer the simulation pops up. The stars that should be there are gone. He clicks through the info and pulls up a page full of numbers.

  He falls to his chair, his hands clutching the desk. He closes his eyes.

  Finally.

  The ratio in error is twenty-eight percent, which means most, if not all the stars in his simulation that are gone, truly gone. After all the ridicule he’s endured he finally might be able to prove that he was right.

  “Matthews!” he yells. Wilker closes the simulation, pulls out the flash drive and runs out of the room.

  Matthews is talking to a colleague down the hall.

  “Matthews!” They look at him as Wilker runs up. The other man wants no part and walks away as Matthews rolls his eyes.

  ”What is it? I was just in your room making rounds. Nothing
else,” Matthews says.

  “I need a favor,” Wilker says.

  “I’m not doing any favors for you. Not a bloody damn thing.”

  “Come on-“

  “NO.”

  “Please, my simulation finally works. I have proof,” Wilker pleads. He clutches the flash drive his hand near to the point of snapping it in half.

  “This shit again? I was this close to saying yes and you pull this bull. I’m not going to support you nor your crack pot theories,” Matthews says stepping away.

  “Do you know why I am even speaking to you? And why you still have a job here? It’s because you decided to marry one of the greatest minds in the world, Wilker. From this point on, I’m not your friend, I don’t do you favors. I don’t ‘help’. You just do what I tell you to do and you will do it,” Matthews says.

  Wilker looks down. He wishes he can really tell him how he feels, how much of an asshole Matthews is, how much of a dumb cock he is. But Wilker loves his job, despite everybody hating him.

  “Yes,” Wilker mutters. It’s all he can say at this moment. Matthews starts to walk away but stops.

  “I thought you had potential once, to be in line with the greatest. Above the rest. But your arrogance got the better of you,” Matthews says.

  He speaks as if he’s decades older than Wilker. But Wilker is a year older and smarter. And Wilker is always right. For the most part.

  “I may be above average but that only makes me smarter than the first half of humanity,” Wilker says. Matthew stops and chuckles.

  “And that’s what’s holding you back. I’m surprised you didn’t ask Alexander, he believed and supported you more than we did.” With that Matthews walks away, leaving Wilker with his flash drive in hand.

  …

  Alexander sits alone at a table in the Quad. Wilker sits down in front of him. Alexander looks up from his Caesar salad. He sighs, he didn’t even get to start it yet.

  “No,” he simply mutters.

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask, Alex,” Wilker says.