The Abyss Above Us 1

by Ryan Notch

  Kit had stopped by at one point earlier and seen to it that some of the school’s newest computers were made available for the experimenter’s use. He was clearly getting into the spirit of the thing himself. The dusty corner of the computer lab was starting to look like a back room at NASA, and the center of all this cool equipment was a yellowed old computer with a four-color monitor running a program fed to it through a cable in the wall.

  Over the course of the night several people had gone over in groups to check out the fabled Black Room, although under the auspices of lung safety none had actually gone in. In fact as far as Shaw knew, he was the only one who had ever gone all the way into the room since Dr. Hemah.

  In addition to Shaw, Kit, Brock and all his astronomer friends, there were about twenty five other people around, almost all of them computer students. Despite the excitement and occasional party like atmosphere from the astronomy people, there was something much more subdued about the computer group. Brock picked up on it first.

  “Kit, some of the people here seem kind of upset, what happened?”

  “You remember Ken from last night,” Kit asked. Brock nodded yes, though Shaw couldn’t place the name. Of course he never paid much attention to the actual people around him.

  “They found his body today. He had committed suicide.”

  “Oh man, that’s really terrible,” Brock said sympathetically. Shaw stayed quiet, afraid anything he said in empathy would sound fake. It wasn’t that he was heartless, only that he couldn’t feel bad for people he didn’t know.

  “The really terrible thing is how he did it,” Kit continued. “He rigged up a noose to the axle of his car going up between two beams in the ceiling, that way he could just put the car in gear and let the engine idle pull the rope up until he was dead. Only the thing about a noose is that it doesn’t always kill you that quick. It kept pulling and pulling until he was all the way at the ceiling, then he got caught between the two beams…”

  Shaw thought he would stop there, let them assume the rest. But some compulsion made him keep going, as if in a trance.

  “His neck didn’t so much break from the pressure as just get dislocated, and because the angle of the rope kept all the pressure against the side of his neck he could still breathe a little. When they found him almost thirty minutes later he was still alive, but he died in the emergency room. They call it crush damage, he actually bled to death internally from ruptured arteries in his neck.”

  Shaw and Brock were quiet, eyes wide. Shaw thought he remembered a red headed programmer last night talking about how he was doing some customization work on his car. The same guy maybe, though he didn’t want to ask.

  “Holy shit…” Brock said.

  Kit was quiet, looking down. Shaw thought for a moment that Kit seemed intensely interested in the details he had just relayed to them. Then Kit snapped out of it as if awakening from a daydream and looked at them.

  “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have told you all that. Anyway people are pretty broke up about it. I can see a lot of people are missing who were gonna be here tonight.”

  Brock said something in reply, but Shaw wasn’t really listening. The whole thing sounded so familiar somehow, as if he had heard it somewhere before. Just the shock of the story, maybe.

  Despite the horror of this event, they had no time to dwell on it. Or rather they did have time, Shaw had seen to it that everything was installed and triple checked well in advance, but everyone acted like there were last minute preparations to be made anyway. Excitement brooked no patience. Brock asked Kit if his sound expert friends would be coming. Kit replied that he had expected them to, but he hadn’t been able to get a hold of them since earlier in the afternoon.

  “They were listening to the sound file over and over. They said that the analysis didn’t match anything he could find on record. One said that no matter how close he looked at the waveform monitor he couldn’t find any order to it, but he swore his ears were telling him it wasn’t random. Of course I haven’t been able to get him to answer his cell since then. You know how musicians are. So Brock, are we going to get to listen for any longer than two minutes tonight?”

  “Nope. As much as everyone’s interested in this thing, a time booking at a major telescope can only be changed by a ruling of the entire board or a direct decree from Jesus. And I’ll tell you right now, the second one is a lot more likely. NASA once had a ten billion dollar space probe almost ruined because they almost couldn’t get enough emergency time on a radio telescope to do a mid-flight test.”

  While they spoke Shaw bent down, as if to tie his shoe. No one noticed he was actually tying his shoelace to the bottom of the chair. No risk of wandering this time. When 1 a.m. came, whatever intentions people had had to study the signal live as it came in were left by the wayside. They were lost in it, each to their own private world. Shaw listened differently than them, though. Both more and less alert. Whereas they floated, he dived. Searching deeper and deeper in the dark waters for the center of the sound. The bottom that the darkness spiraled up from. There was definitely something different about the sound this time. He looked for different patterns, a different cadence. But it was nothing so complicated. It was simply a higher pitch.

  And then it was over again. People snapped out of it, one by one as if slowly waking up. They started asking each other questions about what this piece of equipment or that had said, each assuming the others had been paying better attention than themselves. Shaw took the captured signal from the old workstation and transferred it to one of the newer concept computers Kit had brought down, almost tripping on his shoelace when he stood up. This time he played the signal back with no sound, so they could watch it on the machines without distraction. He caught snippets of observations, debate…

  “Look at this azimuth bearing…”

  “…doesn’t have anything in common with that kind of celestial matter…”

  “…this part of the spectrum, supposed to be only for pre-Hawking radiation…”

  “It’s blueshifted.”

  This last one caught Brock’s attention from across the room at another workstation he was overseeing.

  “How can you tell if it doesn’t match anything to compare it to,” Brock asked with good natured derision, obviously not buying it.

  The man who had spoken had long slicked back hair and wore a paisley button up shirt.

  “I mean it’s blueshifted since yesterday. I compared the signals.”

  “What? No, that can’t be right.”

  “What’s blueshifted? What does that mean,” Shaw asked.

  The man in paisley answered. “It’s the Doppler effect. You know how when a siren is coming towards you it gets higher and when it is moving away it gets lower? It happens because the signal gets compressed when the source moves towards you and expanded when away. Same thing happens with light. Blue is a higher frequency so when it moves towards you the light is said to be shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, when away towards the red end. Of course this isn’t visible light but still, the concept holds…”

  “You’re taking too big a leap,” interrupted Brock. “We couldn’t make heads or tales of the signal yesterday, and we can’t today. Hell if this thing is spinning like a pulsar, we could just be getting a signal from a different side of it.”

  “I’m telling you…” said the man in paisley.

  Despite Brock’s flippant attitude, Shaw felt a chill go over him. Suddenly, even though he was surrounded by people in a brightly lit room, he felt very afraid.

  “Brock…” said Shaw, indicating with a nod of his head that he wanted to talk off to the side. When they were well away from the others he spoke hurriedly. “Brock what about the signal I sent yesterday? I mean I sent that out and today that thing out there is heading towards us, that can’t be a coincidence.”

  Brock shook his head dismissively. “Shaw, you don’t understand astronomy. Even at light speed that signal would take years t
o get to even the closest star, maybe hundreds of years depending on how far away that thing is. We’ll know more tomorrow. I’ve got some undergrad friends at a radio telescope in Hawaii who are going to steal a minute of telescope time to measure the phenomenon at the same time from there. They’re going to tell their board that it’s for ‘emergency recalibrating.’ It’s a risk but they’re pretty psyched that an undergrad like them might get the scoop on something this big before the professors. After we measure it at the same time from two points we can use triangulation, which is a word for our fancy astronomer math, to figure out exactly how far away this thing is. Whatever it is buddy, I guarantee you it is massively, maybe even ridiculously, far away. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”

  With that Brock slapped Shaw on the back and headed back to the group, which was getting more excited with the results by the minute. Shaw was left standing by himself. Brock was right, he didn’t know astronomy. But even he knew enough to know that the universe was a very big place and almost everything in it was very far away. Still he couldn’t shake the feeling of fear, couldn’t stop himself from glancing at where the wire went up into the wall and thinking of what lay beyond it. Then one of the astronomers said something about how the “stupid computer isn’t working” and Shaw forgot what he was thinking and rushed back before the idiot could screw something up.

  That night they listened to the signal again and again, till finally around 4 a.m. everyone left to get some sleep. Everyone took home a copy of the data and sound burned onto several DVD-Rs. Everyone except Shaw. Despite his growing exhaustion, he was still afraid to sleep. In a way he could feel the nightmare building in the back of his head, just waiting for him. So he read, he watched TV, he worked on network programming, he surfed the internet, but he did not sleep.

  The next day Shaw was at a loss as to what to do. Whatever the signal was he still had a job to do. He’d been paid to remove Node 8 and its invasive programming from the network, and he’d been lying about how long it would take to finish that job. Something which, here in the bright light of day, seemed a little ridiculous. Or rather, like something someone else would have done. He called Brock but got only his voicemail, so left a message telling him that he could cut off the signal at any time and Brock should meet him down at the network lab if that was what he wanted him to do.

  The streets as he drove to the campus were a blur of rushing cars interrupted by grinding traffic. He moved through it all numbly, thinking for not the first time in his life how horrible the morning sunlight was if you haven’t slept since the last time you saw it. To Shaw a sunrise was like a mushroom cloud, if you were looking at one then it meant things had already gone terribly wrong and were going to get worse soon.

  After the press of people at rush hour, the emptiness of the campus was a quiet shock. Shaw didn’t see a single student as he walked past one building after another. Not on the commons, not through the windows into the buildings. He wondered if there was a holiday he had forgotten, such things had happened to him before while concentrating on a job. To see a place like this without people was surreal, somehow apocalyptic. He checked the computer lab hoping maybe Brock had come down and would be waiting for him, but for the first time ever found it completely empty save for one person. Kit was sitting in the back amidst the equipment, a pair of headphones on his head.

  As he approached he saw that Kit’s eyes were open, looking in Shaw’s direction. In his direction, but not at him. Shaw stood there awkwardly, waiting to be noticed. If his eyes had been closed he could tap his shoulder, but surely Kit could see him, couldn’t he? For a moment Shaw had a strange feeling that Kit might be dead, might have died in the chair of an aneurysm with his eyes open. But then Kit blinked and his eyes focused up at Shaw. He took off his headphones and laid them on the table. Shaw could hear the signal leaking from them.

  There was an awkward silence as the usually exuberant Kit looked up at Shaw from the chair, saying nothing. Finally Shaw felt compelled to break the silence himself.

  “Have you seen Brock today?”

  Kit didn’t answer for so long that Shaw thought he wasn’t going to. He began to wonder if Kit was mad at him for something, until finally he did speak just one syllable.

  “No.”

  Shaw pressed on. “You ever get a hold of your musician friends?”

  “They’re dead.”

  The word “what” formed on Shaw’s lips, though no sound came out. Kit went on just the same, speaking in a slightly accusing monotone.

  “We found the four of them in their room. They had, apparently, each taken a knife and slowly flayed each others skin off until they died of shock. None tried to escape…they all had knives. The last one finished himself off. According to the video they left of the whole thing, it took exactly one hour and twenty three minutes from start to finish. They left your signal playing on a loop the whole time. That was yesterday, it was still playing today when we found them. Only it looked like they’d been dead in there for months. Their skin was putrid, the wood floor where their blood soaked was worm ridden and rotten. Even the dishes on the counter were covered with mold, though I could swear they weren’t even sitting there when I stopped by two days ago. Those were the first ones we found…”

  Shaw’s mouth was dry, he didn’t want to hear anymore. Didn’t want to face Kit’s unblinking, accusing stare. But he couldn’t help himself.

  “What do you mean the first ones?”

  “The first suicides,” Kit said it with surprise, as if Shaw should know already, as if he were asking something ridiculous like what day it was.

  “Bobby, Steve, Irving…most of the computer lab. I heard Henry drove two hundred miles back to his family farm just to cover himself in bacon grease and feed himself to the pigs. I guess that means you have the place to yourself today…”

  This last part he spoke as if it was nothing other than an interesting fact of the weather. Without another word Kit stood up and walked out. Shaw immediately thought of Brock and tried calling him again, both on his cell and at the telescope. No answer at either place. He wished he knew Brock’s parent’s number. This morning he was willing to let the nightly signal continue even if it was slightly unethical, in order for Brock to get the research time he needed. But now, now he was not. He set to work, trying to find a way to do exactly what he knew he wouldn’t be able to. Shutting down the signal from Node 8 would be easy, shutting it down remotely without having to go into the black room however…

  So he searched the network for back doors, for process breaks, buried deactivation commands, anything he could think of. Anything to keep him from having to face the room of his nightmare, a nightmare he could still feel in the back of his mind, waiting for him. He worked slow, the haze of exhaustion like a layer of wet gauze between the network and his thoughts. The whole day slipped by while he tried one possibility after another.

  That Shaw hadn’t even considered just disconnecting the cable to stop the signal was something even his friends would not have understood. Any risk of shutting down the telescope was a risk he was unwilling to take. Getting the job done, setting things to order was more important to Shaw than frustration or even suffering, especially his own.

  By 8 o’clock he knew he had no choice but to follow his original plan. He could mess around longer, chase down a few more infinitely remote possibilities, but he was worried about Brock. He had to get this done so he could go looking for him. His fear was such that he was covered in sweat before he even got out of the computer building. By the time he got to the basement of the economics building his hands were shaking. It took him a full five minutes to work up the courage to turn the final corner, the one that would put the black room in view. He almost turned around and went back, it was only an increasing sense of urgency about Brock that finally pushed him to take the step.

  And there it was, door wide open as he had left it, the room absorbing all light from the hallway into blackness. It almost looked like it was
waiting for him.

  With unsteady hands he pulled out his cell phone and opened it for a light. It felt almost like a crucifix after how it had saved him last time, but he felt stupid for not bringing an actual flashlight. He thought about going to find one, but knew if he left he could never come back. And the light switch was just inside the door…

  He tried to tell himself to move fast, the faster done the better. But in the end he moved slow, an inch at a time. He reached into the room as if it were a snake hole, his sleeve covering his hand to protect it from the mold as he felt along the wall for the switch. Time seemed to stretch and even after only a couple seconds of feeling around panic began to claw at his mind. He wondered what would jump out of that darkness to take him.

  And then he found it, flipped it up. The lights flickered maddeningly for a few moments then caught, filling the room with a dim light that was more welcome than the brightest sun ever had been. The room was empty.

  Shaw’s fear at entering the room of his nightmares had by no means vanished, but after the panic of before it seemed like almost nothing. He sat down and prepared to work, though his head was so filled with adrenaline it took him a while to remember what he had to do. He typed in the programs safe shutdown code and blinked with surprise when a password prompt popped up. Trying to guess the password would be more risky than hacking it, and just because Shaw didn’t like to do things the rough way didn’t mean he didn’t know how. A few keystrokes and he’d broken the back of the ancient password program. Whatever kind of astronomer Dr. Hemah had been, he was no match for Shaw on his home turf.