He turned to the seemingly manmade structures that shot up from the ground about fifty yards away. If there was any human life to be found, perhaps it found shelter in the abstract buildings that appeared along the horizon. He inhaled sharply and headed in that direction.
. . . . .
The structure turned out to be the ruins of a building, perhaps even of a skyscraper. What he took to be three odd spires jutting from the snow were actually three remaining corners a building. There were shattered remnants of windows and floors attached to the frail portions of outer walls. The tallest spire nearest to him arose almost four stories above the snow-covered rubble.
“A city,” he whispered as he now recognized some sleek variations of battered street lights.
Even the few buildings that remained intact appeared to be in a precariously fragile state. He steered clear of the buildings as he navigated deeper into the crumbled city.
Instantly, the world brightened before his eyes. The sky was brilliant as though lit up by an all-encompassing summer sun. He stepped back as he watched hundreds of people running wildly in the immaculate streets. They were laughing and dancing as though they were involved in a party or perhaps even a parade.
A gasp escaped his lips as he tried to figure out where this summertime world appeared from. It was as though someone had changed the channel all of a sudden. He had a hundred questions perched on the tip of his tongue and he didn’t know which one was the most pertinent. Where was he? What happened to the snow? What year is this?
“Pardon me, but…” he started to say before the world shifted back to the gloomy winter.
He spun around and stared at the cold, dead world.
“Hello?” he shouted.
His voice echoed off a fairly solid building a quarter-mile away.
“Where is everyone?” he hollered.
The echo returned to him again. Other than the replay of his own hollow voice, there was nothing.
He started to wonder if the CT scan made an error and created a flaw in his brain when it reassembled him in the future. Did his mind create these images and sounds? He had heard laughing when he arrived and now he clearly saw people laughing and playing in the streets. A mental flaw was the only explanation he could think of.
He shrugged off the backpack and dropped it next to a rusted pole that probably supported a sign at one time. He knelt down and unzipped the bag. After a quick search, he located the gun and the large knife. He slipped the gun into the leg pocket of his cargo pants then stabbed the knife down into the snow. Then he located the gloves which he immediately put on.
He zipped the bag and then lifted the knife from the snow. He stabbed it down again then shoveled out a chunk of packed snow. Using the knife as a shovel and his fingers as a rake, he continued to dig deeper down in search of the ground level. He stabbed, raked, jabbed, raked, and then hit concrete with the next jab into the icy snow.
The last three inches nearest to the concrete was a solid slab of ice. He chiseled it away until he could clearly see the concrete that had been hidden beneath more than two feet of snow. Skylar stepped into the hole and started chiseling away the snow around him. Now that he knew the true depth of the snow, he chose to look for clues under the various layers. The geologist in him was pleased to note that he didn’t just arrive in this world following a violent blizzard. Instead of being presented with two feet of new fallen snow, he took note of the various layers of ice and snow. This was the accumulation of many weeks of snow without any complete thaws in between.
“Why do I care?” he muttered to himself.
He continued to clear out more of the snow, hoping to get a clear view of the sidewalk or street beneath him. After several minutes, he uncovered about six feet of cracked concrete but nothing else. He found no bodies, papers, or soda cans. It was then that he realized his goal was simply to locate something – anything.
. . . . .
The sun was progressing along toward the horizon. The sky was still overcast, but now he was able to discern the location of the sun. Without a wristwatch, he could only make a wild guess that it was probably around four o’clock. He was getting hungry, but with the worries of this new planet creeping in, he had no time to entertain the concept of food.
The crumbled buildings in the city behind him and the fallen bridge he just discovered spoke only disaster to him. He spent the last few hours trying to disprove this theory, but he continually came up short. Now he found himself trying to figure out what caused this shattered landscape.
Was there a battle here?
Is this the results of an all-out nuclear war?
Is this nuclear winter?
Was there a natural disaster such as an earthquake or an earth-darkening volcanic eruption?
Was there a pandemic long ago that killed off the human race?
The questions crowded him and he failed in his attempts to rule out any of them. His vivid imagination had always been a virtue until today. Now it only served to fuel his fears.
Skylar shivered as he walked to the edge of the gorge. The road beneath him continued out over the ravine for almost two dozen yards before it stopped abruptly. He stepped to the edge and looked down at the trickling river beneath him. Large chunks of concrete and steel jutted out of the river, creating the appearance of a shattered dam in the river below rather than the remains of a broken bridge from above.
His eyes were then drawn to a lighted building on the other side of the ravine. The small, one-story building appeared to be intact with a lighted antenna array towering four or five stories next to it. The oddest thing that caught his eye was the shimmering blackness of the roof. Everything he had seen so far was covered in snow, yet this building wasn’t.
Satisfied that no answers could be found in the city behind him, he stepped down the slope toward the river below. The chunks of broken bridge would be his only way to a possible shelter from this cold.
. . . . .
The cold was finally starting to irritate him. His jacket was too thin and the gloves were of poor quality. Skylar grabbed a hold of the bent signpost and pulled himself out of the ravine.
“At least give me a bird or an insect. Come on!” he shouted at the sky, “So the people are all dead. I get it already. But what about animals?”
As always, there was no answer. He shook his head and the peered over at the building with the three lighted windows. Now only twenty or thirty paces away, he was able to see that it wasn’t in perfect condition as he had suspected. One of the windows was shattered and another cracked. An angled gutter was making a last feeble attempt to keep a hold of the shiny black roof, though it would probably only weather one or two more storms.
Now he was able to discern that the roof was really no roof at all. It was a large solar panel and it appeared to be in excellent condition. Surely there should be bullet holes or shrapnel damage from whatever had devastated this world, yet it remained shiny and smooth as a sheet of black glass.
“Well, if the heaters still work, I’ll be just fine.”
He proceeded to the building then pushed on the door. There was no doorknob or lever to use, so this appeared to be his only option. He stepped back and then rammed his body into the door.
The door didn’t budge, so he proceeded over to the shattered window and peeked inside. Surprisingly, he felt a wave of welcomed heat escaping into the winter world. He knocked a couple sharp pieces out of the window before shrugging the backpack off and tossing it inside. Then Skylar carefully climbed through the window and into the large, dimly lit room.
He found himself in a room almost as large as the building itself. There were six padded chairs located in front of what could only be defined as computer terminals. One wall was taken up with dozens of cabinets beneath a long marble counter - similar to that of a kitchen.
He stepped away from the window and welcomed the warm air shooting out of a small vent in the ceiling above him. He removed the stocking cap and flung it car
elessly onto a computer terminal, bringing forth a loud beep.
He jumped, startled by the first unnatural sound since he had arrived. Skylar looked down at the keyboard before catching sight of a warning on the weird three-dimensional monitor.
“Message received and not acknowledged,” it stated, “Please respond.”
Skylar smiled and lifted his hat from the keyboard. Of all the changes in a thousand years, the keyboard remained basically the same with the exception of about fifteen more function keys to the left. He sat down on the chair then tapped the spacebar.
Another beep resounded followed by a new message – “Message sent from the CetiDrifter 73,116 days ago. Review message? Y or N”
“Seventy-three thousand?” he muttered, “365 days times ten would be 3650. Or times a hundred would be 36,500. We’re talking like… two hundred years and no one responded?”
He immediately pressed the “Y” key.
The computer responded with a quick double-beep followed by a display of a sheet of paper hovering above his fingers. He reached up and tried to touch it but quickly realized that it was non-existent.
“This monitor technology is awesome,” he said.
He read the message on the sheet of paper.
“ISDC CetiDrifter to SA: My name is Autumn and I have assumed control of the ship. There has been a disaster, but we’re still heading to Tau Ceti. Almost 10,000 are dead but through careful quarantine procedures, none of the remaining crew are at risk. We are going to proceed under the final instructions of the previous Captain and wait to hear from you.”
Skylar stared at the message. This at least spoke of a disaster which could help him to answer his main question. He never heard of Tau Ceti but figured it would be somewhere around Asia or in the South Pacific.
He glanced down at the keyboard, wondering what he would do next. If they still had some form of internet, he could search for more information. That was when he noticed a key simply labeled “Define”
He pressed the key and an arrow appeared on the hovering sheet of paper. This reminded him of the arrow-shaped cursor on his home computer, but there was no mouse to move it. He tapped the arrow keys but nothing happened. He lifted the keyboard and ran his fingers over the small table hoping to find a mouse or a touch screen imbedded into its surface.
Frustrated, he reached up and tried to slap the hovering sheet away. Instead of moving the sheet, he moved the arrow. He looked closer and then reached up and poked his finger at the word Tau Ceti. The arrow moved to the word and highlighted it. He pulled his finger back and then pressed “enter” on the keyboard.
“Tau Ceti – a type G star in the constellation Cetus. Distance 11.9 light years from Earth. Similar to the Sun in mass and spectral type. This star system was visited by the Space Administration probe “Planet Chaser” which left Earth in 2818. Analysis suggests a planet located in the habitable zone of Tau Ceti with spectral signatures of water vapor, CO, oxygen, and Ozone.
“This wasn’t an ocean-faring vessel,” Skylar muttered to himself, “Autumn was headed to another star! Another star!”
Skylar leaned back in the chair and smiled broadly. The concept of time travel had gone from science-fiction to reality in such a short period of time that it had almost became blasé. But interstellar travel was never within the reach of realistic science. Sure it existed in the plethora of novels and movies of his era, but even the smartest minds at NASA would admit that it was far beyond the reach of science. The professors and scientists of his day always managed to step in and destroy all the fantasies depicted in his favorite movies or novels.
“She was headed to Tau Ceti over two hundred years ago. If they survived…” he pondered.
He reached up and touched his finger to the hovering screen behind the message. This holographic screen swapped places with the message from Autumn. He was now presented with the screen that read “Message received and not acknowledged”
He pressed the “Define” key and watched the arrow appear. Then he reached up and touched the word “acknowledged”. This highlighted the word along with the “not” next to it. Then he pressed “enter”.
“not acknowledged – failure to respond to the message.”
Below this, another screen popped up.
“Reason for failure to respond? Y or N”
He typed “Y”
“Office has been inactive for 73,462 days. Do you wish for a net check to provide potential reasons?”
He typed “Y” again.
“July 8, 2908 more than a quarter of the net in the US powered down and remained offline. The top net searches on July 9, 2908 were “fission weaponry” and “death tolls”. The remainder of the net, including this system, powered down on July 24, 2908 due to more than four days without external charging.”
“No external charging after an attack? This system is solar-powered,” he whispered, “A war that was significant enough to take out a quarter of the US and block out the sun?”
The computer offered another note suddenly.
“The net is currently online, but consists of only 76 units. There has been no activity for 46,640 days anywhere.”
He looked up at the ceiling and then peered underneath the monitor.
“Can you hear me?” he asked aloud.
“Yes,” came an audible response.
He scooted back from the computer and stared at it.
“Are you alive?”
“No.”
He continued to gape at the computer in awe.
“Is anyone alive?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well,” he groaned, wondering if he should even ask, “Am I alive?”
“Apparently.”
Skylar laughed in spite of himself.
“Am I the only one?” he pleaded.
“Accessing my records and the net, I can only assume the answer to be yes.”
“What about those people on that ship?”
“The ISDC CetiDrifter?”
He laughed again.
“You speak well for a computer.”
“I only speak how I am programmed to speak. Please respond to my question.”
“Yes, the CetiDrifter.”
“I received some remote net transmissions that were designed to update the Space Administration even if the crew didn’t survive. The transmissions verified their arrival at the planet and the confirmation of its habitability. The landing dome was manually launched onto the surface, meaning of course that someone was most likely alive when it arrived.”
“Wow,” he said.
He rose from the chair and looked around the room.
“Where are all the bodies?”
“As in the deceased?”
“Yes. If everyone suddenly died, why aren’t there bodies everywhere? Shouldn’t there be carcasses back in the city or here in this very room?”
“I assume death of the human race based on no net activity and no local activity in this building. Perhaps they all left for Tau Ceti or they remain in the underground habitats.”
“So there are other ships available?”
“There are other Space Administration ships, but these have automated tracking, so I would have been made aware if these were used. There has been no activity with the long distance craft remaining.”
“So how can you just assume that people could have boarded ships and went to Tau Ceti?”
“Because spacecraft can be built and launched outside of my net reaches. I am a US Government Space Administration unit tied to all of the net as well as Space Administration units and ships. I am not all-knowing.”
He laughed again.
“You laugh a lot for a person without hope.”
He gasped at those words. “Why do you say that I am without hope?”
“Temperatures remain sub-freezing three quarters of the year. All evidence points to the destruction of all life on the planet. Plant life, if it exists, must be minimal. Your survival appears to…”
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“That’s enough. I get the picture,” he interrupted, running his fingers through his hair and then looking up at the ceiling, “What about these underground habitats you mentioned.”
“There is a habitat sixteen miles to the west of here. Net activity increased significantly in these habitats in 2908 after the start of the war. It appears that many people fled to these habitats.”
“Can you get me directions and maybe instructions on how to get in?”
“You do not seem to have a receiver. I just sent you the information but it wasn’t received.”
“A receiver?”
“Receivers are implanted at birth and would permit me to send information to you and display it in your field of vision. I will print you the directions since you do not seem to have this capability”.
A sheet of yellowed paper slid out of the front of the computer and landed on the floor. He knelt down and retrieved it.
“I will be awaiting your arrival at the habitat. Once you arrive, I will identify your voiceprint at the door and open it for you,” the computer stated.
Skylar ran his fingers through his hair again as he glanced around the room. Gina used to make fun of this nervous habit of his when they were younger. Every time he caught himself doing this, he stopped abruptly and folded his hands in his lap.
“Do you have the ability to be curious? I only ask because you seem to be urging me on toward the habitat.”
“I would like to know if there are others. I was startled by your arrival since I grew to believe that there was no one left alive.”
“You can be startled?” he asked, glancing at the sheet of paper in his hand.
Event Horizon Page 2