by Ryan Notch
He was back at the lab at 11 p.m., checking that no one had messed with his careful setup. At midnight Brock showed up, and at 12:30 Kit did as well. He asked Kit how he knew they’d be here, and he replied that he’d heard that Shaw had been working in here all day and he’d been in the neighborhood so decided to check it out. For a moment Shaw thought about finding some reason to get Kit to leave, felt that Kit was barging into a carefully guarded secret. Then he realized he couldn’t think of what aspect of this actually was or even should be a secret and his temporary animosity vanished. All the better that Kit should be there, the whole thing was pretty cool after all.
“Should we head over to the black room,” asked Kit.
“No need,” replied Shaw. “Node 8 has been sending just fine every night for years, and for a change something will actually be receiving it.”
“Receiving what exactly?”
“I don’t know really. Data for a start. And sound. Do you know anyone who can analyze sound?”
“Yeah, I know some guys going for their music degree who spend their nights as DJs. They can do incredible things with sound and a computer.”
Shaw smiled. “Yeah I thought you would.”
“How long will it go on for?”
Brock answered, “Just two minutes. There’s an undergraduate up there who will move it back to its proper alignment as soon as possible, which will be about two minutes.”
The three of them bantered about for a few more minutes, having nothing to do but wait. Until at 12:59 when the alarm on Shaw’s watch went off. He noticed they had accumulated a crowd, twelve or so other computer guys who happened to be in the lab and heard what was going on. Everyone went quiet quick when they heard that alarm. No one had to ask what it was for. The last minute was interrupted by occasional hushed banter and questions despite the expectant atmosphere.
And then it was there, 1 a.m. The reaction wasn’t instantaneous. In Shaw’s head he could practically see the command shoot through the network and up the mountain lines, tilting the telescope and reflecting the collected data back down the mountain to Node 8, and from there straight to the computer sitting in front of Shaw. With a clockwork precision and speed only the simplicity of a pre-Windows computer was capable of, the program shot to life. And the sound poured out.
The difference between the tinny mold soaked speakers of Node 8 and the cutting edge surround sound system Shaw had bought was amazing. They didn’t just hear it, they felt it. They drowned in it. It was like how space would sound if it was at the bottom of the ocean. Shaw could hear nuances in it he couldn’t hear before. Almost rhythms and almost harmonies. The complexity was amazing. One moment he thought it was like ocean waves, another it sounded like weeping, and deep below it all something almost like a mad piping.
Shaw stopped breathing, even his heart slowed to hear it better. He could almost see it, see the shape that was the sound.
And then it stopped. He opened his eyes and there was a message on the screen, and a question. He responded by hitting “Y” on the keyboard, without even thinking about it. Only he had seen it, everyone else was still blinking their eyes, trying to regain focus.
It was a full two minutes before anyone said a word.
“Jesus,” said Brock later, when they were all excitedly talking about it. “I’ve never heard anything like that, and I’ve heard every kind of astral phenomenon. What the hell could that be?”
“I’ll have my friends listen to it tomorrow,” said Kit. “Maybe they can tell us why it’s so freaking hypnotic.”
“And I’ll check out this data,” said Brock, holding up one of the portable hard drives Shaw had bought. “See what it matches.”
Shaw was a little jealous, having nothing to do on his end. But there was one thing he could think of.
“Kit, I want to find out who set this whole thing up. Whose office was that before it was sealed off?”
“Yeah I’m kind curious about that myself,” Kit replied. “I’ll check into it tomorrow.”
Kit and Brock left, and the others filed home or went back to their nocturnal work. Shaw stuck around for awhile, looking at the collected data, but it meant nothing to him. He was wired and didn’t want to go home, so decided to finish some of the rough spots in his network map. He found he couldn’t concentrate though, he kept thinking of the sound. So he sat down at the speaker setup and played back the recording. He set it to loop and leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed listening to it again and again.
He was in the black room again. Lucidly he realized he had fallen asleep in the chair, but that didn’t make him any less afraid for knowing it was a dream. Terrible things could happen to you in dreams. The thing at the desk was staring straight at him, he could tell even though it had no face with which to stare. No eyes to stare out of. It had heard him whispering to himself from before, from the last dream. It slid out of the chair and stood up. The patches of light filtering down from the fluorescents only emphasized the dark blotches under its wet translucent skin. It began walking towards him, its arms raised in front of it as if reaching out to him. They flopped in the air impossibly fast, as if under the effects of a localized seizure.
He pushed back up against the door, frantically trying to turn the handle behind his back. His hands kept slipping off the slick black mold. No whispering now.
“Wake up wake up wake up wake up WAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP!”
He woke in the dark. Details came to him slowly. The first thing he realized was that he was in a computer chair.
I fell asleep in the lab. But why would they turn the lights off? They wouldn’t ever turn the lights off in here…what is this?
On the computer screen before him was a blinking cursor, dimly illuminating the walls on and off. The too close walls. He could see around the edges of the workstation to a crack under the door, dim light leaking in. Even in the dim light he recognized the dimensions of the room.
Oh no no no no no.
How did he get here, did he come over here to check something and forget? Did someone move him, did he sleepwalk?
Am I still dreaming?
But he wasn’t. He could feel the cool air on his flesh, smell the rot of it. His mind filled the darkness with a hundred creatures, all faceless. Panic paralyzed him, he couldn’t breathe. The seconds counted by while he got ready to make a run for the door. But what if he slipped on the slick floor? What if it was locked? Could he call for help, would his cell phone work in here.
Some sliver of rational thought came with that. He pulled out his cell phone, opened it for its light. At first he looked straight into it, just dying to see any kind of light. He realized he’d stupidly ruined his night vision and pointed it away from him, using it as a flashlight to scan the room. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The light showed the room to be empty, though his eyes took a few tense seconds to believe it.
He really was in the Black Room, had been sleeping in the very chair the thing had been sitting in moments before.
But not really. It was only a dream. But how the hell did I get here?
He got up and walked to the door, resisting at every step the urge to spin around and check for something sneaking up on him, though it would have been impossible in the tiny room. Reaching for the door knob his emotions made a wordless prayer that it be unlocked. His skin crawled at the touch of the black mold, but the handle turned. The heat of the steam tunnel washed over him. He managed to make it a full five steps before he started to run.
Shaw didn’t sleep again that night, spending it bathed in caffeine and light instead. By the time he met Brock and Kit at noon he was feeling the effects of it. The sun beat down on his eyes and blinded him as he made his way to Kit’s office. He found them both there already, Brock holding a sheaf of papers and Kit a box of artifacts. Shaw felt unarmed, his hands empty.
“So what’s it pointing at,” he asked Brock without preamble. The idea of small talk when there was actually business never crossed
Shaw’s mind.
“Nothing.”
Shaw reacted with gut indignation. Of course it was something. But he stopped himself from saying it. Brock was baiting him, he could tell. The man was practically buzzing with excitement.
“Are you gonna make me ask,” said Shaw.
“Take all the fun out of it will you,” said Brock. “OK, well the exciting thing is that finding nothing in space is actually kind of impossible. All the other undergrads down at the telescope were really excited about it. They can’t wait to see more of the data from tonight.”
“Ok I’ll bite,” said Kit. “Why is nothing exciting?”
“Because there is never nothing. I mean…well a few years ago they did an experiment with the Hubble telescope where they pointed it at a few empty parts of the sky and turned it to maximum magnification. Everywhere they pointed it, every inch of the sky, was full of galaxies. You can find the pictures online, they’re pretty cool. Only where Node 8 is pointing the telescope is completely empty. It is absolutely the darkest part of the sky. Near as I can tell it might be the first empty part of the night sky ever discovered.”
“Huh, well that’s kinda cool,” said Kit, trying to empathize with Brock’s enthusiasm but clearly not sharing it.
“No, you don’t get it. Ten years ago it would have been kinda cool, but today with every astronomer in the world looking for evidence of dark matter, it’s huge.”
“I’ve heard of dark matter,” said Shaw. “But I don’t know what it is really.”
“Well no one knows what it is really, but we know it’s out there. See back in 2003 the WMAP satellite scanned the sky for a clear picture of background microwave radiation left over from the big bang. To put it in overly simplified terms, it was like a baby picture of the universe. Since all of the matter and energy that is in the universe now was already in the universe then, it told us for the first time exactly what the universe is made of, how much of it there is, and how old it is. The age wasn’t that far off from previous estimates, but the composition was a shock. It turns out that only 5 percent of the universe is made up of visible matter. 23 percent is made up of dark matter and 72 percent of dark energy. Can you imagine that? Everything we can see in the entire universe, every star, every nebula, even every black hole only makes up 5 percent. The rest is invisible. We don’t know what it is or what it’s made of.”
“That’s a pretty wild theory,” said Kit.
“No no, it’s not a theory. It was a theory before WMAP, now it’s a fact. See even before then astronomers were seeing that some things weren’t adding up. We use some pretty tricky mathematics to figure out the volume and mass of things in space. If you put a baby in a bathtub full of water you can tell his volume by the amount the water rises. But if you put him in a swimming pool and all the water splashes out, you know there is some part of him you aren’t seeing. We saw thin galaxies being held together that should be flying apart for lack of gravity. A mysterious dark matter adding extra mass would explain a lot.”
“And dark energy?” asked Shaw.
“Equally mysterious. Right now the predominant theory is that it acts like the opposite of gravity, pushing things apart. It would explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up instead of slowing down. Although that doesn’t seem to have much to do with the phenomenon we’re looking at here.”
Brock’s manner grew serious, but no less excited.
“You know WMAP changed my life. Before that all I cared about was drinking and football. The day they discovered exactly how much of the universe was still dark to us is the day I decided to become an astronomer, to the endless surprise of friends and family. It’s only fitting that I should make my name off of maybe discovering the first entire dark matter galaxy. Don’t worry, Shaw, I’ll make sure to mention your name when I write my paper.”
“You’ll probably have to share the credit more than you’ll like,” said Kit, spreading some of the contents of the box on the table. “Gentlemen, meet Dr. Hemah.”
Papers, pictures, a framed diploma, an award, sky maps with notes. The stuff of an office was laid out before them. Everything had brown stains under the dust. It looked as if someone had spilled a soda into the box at some point in the distant past. Shaw looked at the man in the picture, he was proudly holding up a fish he’d caught. Something about him seemed familiar.
“Getting this stuff was surprisingly hard. Mrs. Paisly has been running the filing department for decades and is usually really helpful, but she absolutely refused to give this stuff to me, let alone tell me anything about Dr. Hemah. I had to bribe a student who has a part time job there to sneak this box out for me. I don’t understand 90 percent of what is written in his notes, but I’m willing to bet that this is the spot that the telescope is aiming at.”
He pointed at a circled spot on one of the sky maps and looked up at Brock.
But distractedly. Shaw knew Brock had noticed the same thing he had.
“Yeah, that’s the place,” Brock said. “But Kit have you taken a close look at these notes?”
The notes covering the map, covering every inch of it, they weren’t just the excited scrawling of a scientist with bad handwriting. You only had to read one or two to realize they were a work of madness. Half of them were math equations balanced out with bloody threats or odd predictions. In one section was a string of words capitalized like names, but all unpronounceable. Not scientific terms, Shaw was sure of that.
“No wonder I’ve never heard of him or what he discovered,” said Brock. “The guy was obviously completely insane.”
“Well, even he didn’t exactly discover it I think,” said Kit. “Look at this.”
He pulled out a rolled up piece of cloth. To Shaw’s surprise it was also star map.
“Now unless I’m mistaken,” said Kit. “They haven’t made star maps on cloth in quite a while.”
Shaw looked close at it, but Brock was looking for the same thing and his trained eyes saw it first.
“Yeah, there it is. Ursa Major, Polaris…It’s the same section of sky. The newer map is obviously a lot more complete, but this one must be two hundred years old. At least. There’s our dark spot. It’s even labeled.”
“Yeah,” replied Kit. “But it was clearly labeled after the printing of the map. Look at the splotchiness of the ink. It looks like writing from one of those old fountain pens. Hell, maybe even a fucking quill.”
He looked closer to better read the writing. “Ad noctum. What does that mean?”
“It means into the darkness,” replied Shaw absentmindedly. The cloth map had brown splotches too, but they looked older. Something about them…he looked over at the paper map where his hand was resting on one and suddenly pulled away with revulsion.
“Blood. It’s fucking blood.”
It took the other two a second to realize what he was talking about, then they both pulled away as well. They looked at their hands with faces of disgust. Everything from Dr. Hemah’s old office was splashed with blood.
Shaw, Brock, and Kit made plans with their voices raised over the splashing water as they washed their hands in the three bathroom sinks. No one talked about Dr. Hemah.
“Some of the other undergraduate astronomers are coming down tonight to catch the signal in the computer lab,” said Brock. “Shaw, will you help them hook up some more computers and equipment to analyze the signal live?”
“Yeah, of course. You gonna be there, Kit?”
Kit dried his hands as he talked.
“Oh yeah. Not just me - rumors about this whole thing are spreading. I’m thinking we’ll have quite a crowd. Just call me if you need anything, I’ve gotta go get some work done. See you guys later.”
Kit left, leaving Brock and Shaw alone. Brock was drying his hands as well, though Shaw felt his own could use one more wash. Somehow he still felt like the mold from the door handle last night was sticking to them.
“Shaw, I saw you press a button on the keyboard last night in res
ponse to some prompt at the end of the program. I found out this morning that around that same time we had a power spike in the telescope. That didn’t have anything to do with you, did it?”
Shaw turned off the water. “I…I don’t know.”
“Well, what did the screen say?”
Shaw thought about lying, but decided finally it would be irresponsible somehow.
“It asked if I wanted to send a return signal. I pressed yes.”
Brock’s face was a combination of shock and annoyance.
“Fuck Shaw, I thought you were supposed to be the one who thought things out first.”
“Well I guess I didn’t think it would do anything. I mean how can a telescope send a signal anyway?”
“Well a radio telescope can, sort of. It’s like if you plug a microphone into a speaker jack and turn the power way up. You can get a little sound to come out but it sure isn’t good for the microphone and it sure as fuck isn’t good for the ten million dollar telescope.”
“Yeah I…I guess it was pretty stupid.”
Brock sighed theatrically. “Yeah well, it’ll probably be fine. Just be more careful next time. See ya tonight man.”
Shaw was left alone with the bathroom mirror. Under the florescent lights his skin was beginning to look a little blotchy. Reminding him of something, though he couldn’t quite remember what.
Chapter 4
********************
That night there was more of a crowd, and much more of a setup. Half the stuff Brock’s astronomy friends had brought in Shaw didn’t even understand what it did, but because they were designed to be attached to computers it was easy enough for him to find the instructions online and how to hook them up. The astronomy people were enough like computer people in their eccentricities for Shaw to at least be able to talk to them, but there were differences too. The look amongst computer guys was fairly uniform, jeans and a collared shirt with various PDAs always attached to the belt. But the astronomy guys sported a wild variety of different styles, the kind that can only evolve amongst people who are rarely seen in the light of day.