Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  The bartender smiled. "There aren't easy answers here, if that's what you think."

  "I didn't think anything. But I like the drink, and you don't have anyone else who's asking." Jake smiled. He had briefly forgotten the moment ago where mortality struck a blow on his psyche.

  "They're not calling them what they are. Or at least what they appear to be."

  "Which is what?" said Jake.

  "They're black holes. Mini black holes. It's pretty obvious what they are, when you think about it," the bartender said, contemptuously. “My guess? They’re created by the government. Something happened, an experiment went wrong somewhere. Now these things are sprouting up like weeds all over the planet. Tells you something.”

  “How do you know they’re black holes?” Jake asked. “How do you know the government created them?”

  "They couldn't keep them locked away for long. Some kids got in behind the military fences they had set up. Took videos with their phones. You can’t keep that shit secret for long. You should have seen it."

  Jake had now also momentarily forgotten about his drink.

  "What happened?"

  "One of the kids stuck her arm in it. It's difficult to really describe what happened exactly. She got stuck. But not stuck in a sticky way. More like, she was moving really slowly. But only her arm. The rest of her was still outside the pool, see?"

  “Like the security guard.”

  “Except you never saw what happened with the guard.”

  “But the girl--?”

  "--the girl, yeah. You see everything. She starts describing how she can feel her arm moving. She says something about her arm stretching. She tries to pull it back out of the pool, but her arm is just.... stuck. No other word for it."

  "Weird."

  "No. That's not that weird. If you know anything about black holes, that's exactly what you'd expect to see if you saw someone about to go into a black hole. From their perspective, they'd experience falling or stretching, like it was real time. But from your perspective, outside the perimeter of the gravity well, they'd appear to be stuck, infinitely hovering over this giant abyss, falling at the same rate as you're drinking your Bronx."

  "Sorry," Jake said, embarrassed. He quickly took another sip. "It's really great. So why haven't they sent a robot in there with a camera? One of those remote control things with the video feed and what not?"

  "They did, but obviously it didn't work. It couldn't work."

  "Why not?"

  The bartender sighed. "Look, if these things are like tiny black holes, then that means they are basically the densest collection of matter in the known universe. You know about black holes, how they work, right?"

  "Kind of. They suck you in, right? Or no, they suck in all matter!" Jake was proud of himself for remembering something he thought he'd read in a science book in grade school.

  "Everything gets 'sucked in' if you really want to simplify the point. Not just matter. Everything. Light gets pulled in and can't escape. Even time."

  "Time gets sucked into black holes? Time is a human construct, isn’t it?" Jake asked, starting to feel confused and slightly tipsy. The bartender made a strong drink.

  "Not really sucked in. More like--time gets stretched out to practically infinite proportions. It no longer operates with the comfy regularity that you're familiar with. And that's what these things are doing. It's why people appear to get stuck in them."

  "So if they sent a robot in, it'd just get stuck too."

  "Exactly. Even though from the robot's perspective it would be falling into the black hole."

  "Ah! Well there you go. So you just look at what the robot is seeing from the video feed." Jake felt his equilibrium was back on track with this return to logic. The bartender sighed.

  "Guy, the robot with the camera uses electrical signals to send the video feed to the monitors."

  "Yeah," said Jake with a deliberate upward trailing tone in his voice.

  "And those electrical signals are just energy, moving along at nearly the speed of light, which is the fastest thing in the universe, but it's still not fast enough to escape a black hole."

  "Uh huh."

  "Which means..." the bartender trailed off.

  "Which means..." Jake replied. "I don't know what it means."

  "It means that any signal recorded by the robot video camera would never arrive back at the monitors. So you can never see what goes on inside a black hole. Hell, even if you fell into a black hole, there wouldn't be any available light inside, so you probably couldn't see anything with your own eyes."

  "How do you know all this stuff?" Jake asked him.

  "Some things you just pick up reading books from a library."

  The girl with the poodle skirt wandered over to the bar, a few seats down from Jake.

  “Something for you, honey?” asked the bartender. The girl flashed an annoyed grimace, as if she smelled something distinctly unpleasant.

  “Just another beer,” she said. She glared at Jake, who looked back with a meek countenance.

  “Talking about them black hole things?” she asked. He nodded. “Well, it’s annoying the shit outta me. Jesus, all you men do is talk about these things. Can’t ever just let the world be as it is. Stop trying to figure everything out. Giving the rest of us a damn migraine.”

  “I like your tattoo.” Jake pointed at her spiraling Celtic design. The bartender placed a glass of dark beer in front of her. “My name’s Jake.” Jake nodded at the bartender, not wanting to leave him out of the exchange.

  “Keep your tab running?” the bartender asked the girl. She nodded, grabbed her glass and withdrew back to her table.

  “She’s got a real attitude problem,” the bartender said quietly, returning to his spot in front of Jake. “But she doesn’t bother anyone most of the time.”

  Jake was nearly through the Bronx. He wanted to savor the last bits of it. It had gotten stronger as he got closer to the bottom of the glass.

  "So what happened to the kid?" Jake asked. The bartender grew quiet. His face darkened.

  "Something pulled her in," the bartender replied, jerking his towel over Jake's puddle of spilled Bronx.

  Jake put down his drink again. "Something pulled her in? You mean the black hole pulled her in."

  "No. I mean 'something'. The video quality isn't great, so lots of people still don't buy it, but a lot of people swear they can see a claw grasping around her wrist and then yanking. And then the kid just vanishes. And that's where things get tricky. Because if those pools really are black holes, and that thing that pulled that kid in was some kind of nasty creature with claws and a taste for human meat, and it can escape a black hole..."

  Jake was silent. He wanted to ruminate on the possibility. It didn’t fill him with fear--rather, he was intrigued, morbidly curious at the possibility of something monstrous emerging from the other side.

  “Anyway,” the bartender said, sighing. “Not much we can do about them, whatever those holes turn out to be. The outcome’s still the same.”

  “What outcome is that?” Jake asked.

  “The end of time. Light’s out.”

  Exactly one week later Jake had convinced himself what he was going to do. The coughing fits had started in not too long after his encounter at the bar, and had grown steadily worse, as had the headaches, dizziness, and general weakness and joint pain. Breathing was worse too. He realized it wasn't going to be a dignified or comfortable death, not at this rate anyway.

  “You’re not going to be able to walk around much on your own the last few weeks,” Dr. Silverman had told him. “Your body is undergoing radical changes at the cellular level. The cancer has spread from your lymph system into your bones, and now it is in your blood. I’ll be honest, Jake. I’ve rarely seen cancer this advanced before. I don’t want to pretend this is treatable when I know that there’s nothing we can do for you. There are limits to our abilities; I’m afraid this is our limit. The question you need to ask yourself i
s how can you make your remaining time as comfortable and pain-free as possible. I’m so sorry, Jake.”

  “How much walking around time do I have?” Jake had asked him.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a month. Month and a week. It just--there’s no way to know for sure. This is why you need to make arrangements now. While you still can.”

  It was eating away at him from the inside. He knew this was happening--he could feel the cancer, it made him nauseous. He’d vomit up untold parts of himself. Blood and bile came out in equal mixture, and he could only lie on the cold bathroom tile, head pressed against the foot of the toilet, exhausted and wracked. The barbaric horde was invading his personal Rome, raping and pillaging the hell out of him. Eventually all his cellular stone walls would be ground into dust, along with his bones, skin, and organs. He was twisted and stretched and dessicated by the warfare happening inside his very essence. Like the Huns and Visigoths running in from Germania, Cancer would eventually conquer him and he would fall--the ignominious end of a mediocre empire. It was the slow but inevitable violence of a mudslide, a sickening slow smothering, and he realized he was no match for it. He was not the kind of man who could endure, the way he couldn’t endure his marriage to Elsie. He didn't want prolonging drugs, or tubes, or miserable hospital beds. He couldn’t bear surly nurses and tired doctors. He had thought he would die at home, in his own bed, eating that damn bowl of cereal. This had been when he first heard about the cancer and began mentally processing his sudden, impending doom, but he realized now that was a foolish and impotent fantasy. Jake now felt silly in the face of this scourge; no one eats cereal on their deathbed. But now, this new solution had presented itself. Being near the end, it seemed he was blessed with a clarity of vision and purpose that he'd never had before in his forty-nine years. Death, he guessed, had a way of focusing one's attentions, the way the body shut down extremities in dire circumstances. The actuarial tables hadn't told him this. But this close to the end, he was privy to new insights into the human condition--his own, at least.

  He read all he could about the time pools. Theories were so wild and varied that there was no getting to the truth, but he could narrow the field. He watched homemade videos of kids throwing rocks over barriers. The rocks would stop short, seeming to hover over the blackness of the deep. Later videos would show the rocks no longer there. He saw an interview with a woman who swore her husband was in the backyard reading a book in a chaise lounge when a black hole formed beneath him, spontaneously. She said he was locked in place, a serene look plastered on his face. She took a photo of him, and she tried to draw him out, first using his fishing pole, then a hook attached to the end of a pool cleaner’s pole. By the time she gave up, a train of various implements were stuck in that black void along with her husband. And then he simply was no longer there. He, and the tools for his ineffectual rescue, were no longer present.

  He read reports from scientists who measured gravitational pull of the holes--and found there was none. Which punctured the black hole theory, though no one had made a definite determination. Whatever force was generating them was unlike any force known to science, or so the news reports claimed.

  One man, an engineer, claimed that pure nothingness could not possibly have a quantifiable mass, so it could not have a gravitational pull. He further posited that if it were, in fact, nothingness--true nothingness, then it would be, by definition, a vacuum, which was also impossible, since there was always some kind of particle in any given space. There was a reason for the saying “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Jake didn’t know about all that. He just cared about what happened inside that black circle.

  Then there was the recurring theme of the creature reaching out of the void to grab the teenage girl. Most people had debunked the claim. Reputable experts refuted the video evidence and made shockingly sure announcements that whatever it was, it couldn’t be an inter-dimensional monster; to Jake, it seemed a desperate attempt to close one eye against one horror in order to contemplate a more clinical, scientific horror with the other. What was worse? A fanged, clawed monster, or the infinite abyss of nothingness? Who was it that talked about staring into the abyss? Nietzsche? Kant? One of those guys. Wasn’t the abyss simply a mirror into man’s soul? God, he felt himself going philosophical. Never a good sign.

  As he read and researched and cruised the byways of video sites and crackpot blogs, he realized that he could end his life the same way he’d ended his marriage. On his terms, without notice or warning. Maybe it was the act of cowardice. Or just fatigue. Because he couldn’t face the awful decline, the precipitous cliff of the final weeks, which Dr. Silverman had promised would be ugly, brutal, and agonizing in its exactness.

  “You’ll wake up one morning, Jake, and find you can’t get out of bed. Your body will no longer take orders from your brain, and that is when you’ll need someone by your side, to take care of you, to help administer pain medication, to help feed you and bathe you and help you use the bathroom. I strongly recommend hospice care. But if you’re set on spending your last days at home, then these are the things you’re going to need to arrange for, before it’s too late.” Jake finally appreciated Dr. Silverman’s straightforward approach to death. Silverman hadn’t tried to sugarcoat the inevitable. He’d just laid out Jake’s options in an organized manner. Jake silently thanked Dr. Silverman for that.

  But Jake didn’t want a soft landing. Couldn’t have that end. Jake realized his stoic nature had hidden the true horrors of this disease from him. Now that he was facing the end, he finally felt its claws grasping around him. It had the capacity to cripple him completely, and that, more than the death that would follow, was what Jake feared.

  The plan he came up with wasn’t complicated. But the world was getting more so by the day.

  In the last week since making his decision, more hotspots had formed in more areas. Some of them conjoined and merged like shallow prehistoric lakes. Whole communities were trapped in rings of encroaching sinkholes where it seemed time and light were compressed into tiny points. That was another aspect of the pools that hadn't immediately been apparent. They were growing, spreading out tendrils, and new pools were growing from these creeping fingers. Quarantine zones were being established by all agencies the government could throw at the problem--the National Guard were first mobilized, along with FEMA and the CDC. The Army Corps of Engineers had built barricades, flimsy chain link fencing and concrete Jersey barriers to prevent access, and civil authorities manned perimeters and stood guard fearfully. There were hundred-meter buffers between the growing pools and the so-called safety zone, but the growth rate of the pools made this impossible to maintain for long. Soon the fences were gone, along with cars and road, buildings, trees--the Earth was becoming a Swiss cheese wasteland.

  Fear was the undercurrent of life now. The fates of those few who had gone too close and gotten stuck was unknown because they hadn't just gotten stuck, but had been subsequently snatched into blackness. Their whereabouts (or whenabouts if the bartender's theories were correct) would remain shrouded in unquestionable doubt and unknowable, literal darkness.

  Jake had analyzed the video of the teenager, too. It was the first documented footage of a disappearance – even before the security guard – and unlike the many who believed a creature had loomed out of the hole to grab the girl, Jake believed it was the darkness itself, the gravity of the thing made physical by unknown forces.

  But the question of what the planet itself would do still remained. Forecasts had the entire surface of Earth inundated within six to eight months at the present rate of growth. Attempts to study the pools had so far failed; instruments failed to register measurements as they approached the affected areas. Astrophysicists excitedly called the behavior of all objects around the pools “singularity symptoms,” which referred to the event horizon as seen from the perspective of an outside observer: just as the bartender had posited, the objects would appear to slow down immeasurably. Data flow--in the case of th
e digital recorders, spectrometers, and other measuring devices -- electronic transmissions would delay and then cease. Eventually, visuals themselves failed. It was not known whether the instruments were in fact gone or if the light itself was no longer available to illuminate them.

  All this made Jake’s new goals much more than mere escapism. He wanted to end his life spectacularly, and he wanted to beat the unbeatable disease inside him while doing so. The pools gave him that opportunity. He also wanted to see what others before him had perhaps seen. Those souls who had by accident or intent ventured into the void, never to be seen again, were the true pioneers. And that number was growing, as it happened. Suicide by black hole tripled once quarantine became unviable. Governments around the world were cordoning people into smaller and more crowded areas. News reports were simultaneously frantic and calming, as if the dictate was both to comfort and frighten the masses.

  Meanwhile, as Jake’s will strengthened, he felt in himself the weaknesses of his flesh, as cancer continued to consumed him. It was advancing faster even than Dr. Silverman had predicted. The ocean waves crashed higher and the tidal rush drowned him even as he walked about. He would have to act before his body completely betrayed him.

  There was a black hole about a mile wide on the other side of the city. The freeways circumventing the city were closed off--like arteries tied off to prevent blood loss--but he could still get most of the way there by driving.

  He had to ditch the car with three quarters of a mile left to go. All roads had been barricaded off. A cop loitered at the end of the impromptu cul-de-sac. He warned Jake that he wasn't allowed to go further, but Jake told him he was dying anyway. The cop shook his head and muttered something about "another one."

  Jake walked as briskly as he could, feeling his wasted muscles crying out against him. He met no one else along the way. Everyone had fled, instinct overtaking all other sensations. The human spirit wanted so desperately to survive.. Jake didn't know what would happen to the planet if this phenomenon continued, which seemed likely. There didn't seem to be a solution to this. It was a problem intrinsically and literally of time itself becoming extinct.