Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  And the reports lied.

  He had an odor. A faint one, dry and dusty but machine-like, almost like she had stepped inside an empty mechanic’s bay.

  She rubbed her nose, wondering if the scent was real or if she imagined it. Or if Giuseppe’s cologne interfered with it.

  “May I touch him?” she said. “I promise not to hurt him.”

  “We do not know what hurts him,” Giuseppe said.

  She glanced at him. “If you’re right and he’s experiencing time slowly, he won’t even know that I brush against him.”

  Giuseppe didn’t argue. So she leaned forward and swiped her finger along the figure’s arm.

  She shuddered. Pitch wasn’t quite right, but close. Like tar that hadn’t completely set—rubbery, but soft, almost like partially baked cookie dough. But that wasn’t right either.

  Something in the feel of him was wrong, so wrong she wanted to step away. She resisted the urge to rub her fingers against her pants. Instead she touched them to one of the handheld analyzers the Organization had supplied her with.

  Other people had gathered. Many had cameras and cell phones, others had handheld pieces of equipment. They were taking readings. One man, using the light meter for his camera, said the light was different in the area around the figure than it was just a few meters away.

  She didn’t know what to make of that, just like she didn’t know what to make of all the information she was gathering. Most of it made no sense to her. She was there to run the equipment, not analyze the data.

  She did as she was told, collecting everything, watching and working, and listening to what everyone else said.

  Somewhere in the confusion, Giuseppe moved away from her. The figure was all that existed for her—for her and the dozen people around her, people trying to figure out the phenomenon just like she was.

  Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, the figure vanished.

  And, it seemed, the morning got a little brighter. Had the man with the light meter been correct? Had the figure changed the light? Or had he brought a bit of his slower-moving universe with him?

  She backed up the readings on the USBs the Organization had provided her. Then she gathered the camera she had placed a few feet away.

  She was shaking, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She was in some kind of shock, some kind of near-denial. She wanted to tell herself that the thirty minutes hadn’t happened, and yet it had.

  And that was the surprise. She never expected the figure—L’uomo Scuro—to appear. Only the name Dark Man wasn’t right either. He was something else. She would have thought him a robot or a sculpted bit of art if she hadn’t touched him.

  If his strange skin (should she call it skin?) hadn’t been warm.

  She shuddered.

  Giuseppe made his way toward her. She stepped away from him. The experience had been too weird to dissect. She didn’t want his perspective to contaminate hers.

  She gathered her belongings, took one last shot of the empty place on the Steps, then climbed up them. At the top of the hill, she tried to send the data from her phone. She couldn’t tell if it went through.

  She would have to send it all through the internet café, and she really didn’t want to.

  But she had no other choice.

  The waif was not there as the café opened at seven, which had to be some kind of record, a business opening that early in Rome. Another young woman, this one without piercings, wearing a tasteful sundress, didn’t seem interested in Condi at all.

  Condi sent the information as well as a brief blog, promising to send backups by FedEx later in the day. Somehow the Organization would get the information.

  She didn’t know what they would do with it.

  She didn’t know what she would do with it either. But it made her feel odd.

  As she watched the little blue bar that told her the information was going across the internet, traveling as bits of information across a space impossible to traverse instantly when the first appearance of the figure was first recorded, she tried to calm herself down.

  She had felt like this when she had discovered corruption in Denver’s city council elections. She had felt like this when she had found the smoking gun in a military airplane crash not far from Fort Collins. She had felt like this during all the major discoveries of her career.

  Only she had known what those meant.

  She wasn’t sure what this one meant.

  Except that it had shaken her assumptions.

  Frankly, she had said during her job interview, I think they’re all going to be hoaxes.

  Only this one was not. She had investigated the area for weeks, knew there was nothing beneath it, no way for the figure to suddenly appear without some obvious help.

  Unless someone was using technology she didn’t understand—and had used that technology for centuries.

  She gathered her equipment, put it away, used the remaining computer time to surf the news sites, seeing if anyone covered the reappearance of the Dark Man.

  Not yet. But she suspected he would appear on YouTube quite soon now—and she felt tempted to put him up herself.

  But that would mean editing her phone video, taking out the conversation with Giuseppe, which she had deliberately sent back to the Organization.

  She didn’t know what they would think about his theories. Had she heard them without seeing the figure, she would have dismissed them out of hand.

  But she couldn’t now, no matter how much she thought of Ross making fun of her.

  The theories made an odd sort of sense. The same kind of sense that most of Rome’s legends made. That it was founded by Romulus, that Peter the Apostle had founded a church in this place, so far away from Jerusalem that he had actually been buried here.

  Yet the past lived in Rome, more than in any other place she had ever been. If someone—something—were to phase in and out of time, this would be the place, because time was strange here. Old and new and forward and backward all at once.

  It was, she privately believed, the reason her phone did not work well here, although it worked well in Paris and London and Berlin. Those cities had history, yes, but they were modern. They had a twenty-first-century feeling, clearly built on the foundations of the past, not dwelling within the past.

  She shook her head, gathered her stuff, and stopped long enough to buy herself a Coke. A cold, sweet example of the modern era.

  She carried it outside, stopping at the door like she had the night before, watching the girl inside shut down her computer. No screen capture this time. Maybe it hadn’t mattered. Maybe just the waif was trying to steal information.

  Maybe Condi had imagined all of it.

  All of it except the Dark Man.

  And Giuseppe, who waited for her in his usual spot, looking a bit shaken himself, somewhat vulnerable.

  Now was the time to dissect the experience, to share perspectives.

  She needed to talk to someone. And Giuseppe, at least, would listen.

  Even if he was one of the crazies.

  Even if she was too.

  One Big Monkey

  Ray Vukcevich

  RayVuk tweets, “Hey @MarsMom how are you guys doing in the habitat today?”

  To which MarsMom tweets, “We are starting a game! Shiro calls it The Fermi Game! Stay tuned!”

  All six people in the Mars simulator tweet. We also get limited news from more conventional sources, but all we ever see on TV is the outside of the habitat in Russia and maybe some boring interviews with people who should probably be doing more science and less talking. Statistics. It’s like they are trying to put us to sleep.

  The direct links of social media have all the good stuff. It’s so exciting!

  Three men and three women locked up in the habitat for more than five hundred days! We can’t help making couples of them. Aside from MarsMom (Carol from London) and Ookami (Shiro from Japan), there is VictorOnMars (the Russian), DaveToMars (the American), Trella (Estrella
from Mexico), and FarOutMars (Farida from Iran). We arrange and rearrange them. We like to tease Victor and Dave by turning them into a gay couple, and they sometimes protest too much.

  Because Shiro mostly looks like what you expect a young Japanese scientist to look like (slender, neat, half the time wears a necktie and neutral facial expressions), he takes great pains to violate this stereotype. He has a bolt of lavender lightning in his hair. He claims to be a member of a sect of Christians who handle poisonous snakes, but when pinned down, he can answer no questions about Christianity or snakes.

  “Each of us,” he says, “will construct a solution to the Fermi Paradox.”

  You know the one: if the universe is full of intelligent beings, how come we don’t see them or hear from them? You say that sounds more like a salon than a game? Well, it is sort of a salon, but with a twist! Once you construct your solution, you must make up CHARACTERS who have POWERS! Then we’ll all get together, and the theories will slug it out!

  But Shiro, what does all of this have to do with snakes?

  Nothing! It has absolutely nothing to do with snakes!

  Ookami tweets, “Come on you guys! It’ll be fun!”

  I am Ookami, the big bad wolf, but I have a surprise for you. Open me up and out jumps Alice! When you sink into the mind of a modern Alice master such as myself, you should be prepared for an illuminating ride as it is my turn to entertain these snooty bastards. Maybe I won’t come out about being Alice; it’s not like they would understand it, anyway. They would call me a cliché, oh, Shiro, you silly otaku, if they knew about my Alice manga. They would lift eyebrows and then look away, muttering about comic books and worrying about me becoming a little blond girl in the heat of battle. That is so opposite to the real situation! My Alice steals up on you in the night and engulfs you like a manta ray, you little fishes. I will not be defeated! Besides, Farida is the real cliché in the group. The most beautiful women in the world are from Iran, and here she is so startlingly gorgeous she stops clocks as she passes, bananas peel themselves and ejaculate at her touch, walls pulse with heavy breathing, overflying birds drop dead with erotic squawks and splatter on the outer skin of the habitat. I will surprise them. Alice to the left of us, Alice to the right. It’s not my birthday! Most likely iThink, ha ha, that when a society can make reality be anything they want, they all turn around in their heads and look inward—iPut the clouds in the sky and the birds in the trees; why look out at things you cannot change when inside reality can be whatever you want it to be? There might be holdouts, hardliners, Luddites, but in the end, the temptation will be too great, thinking creatures will shape their realities, and if everyone has gone inward, it’s not so surprising they are not knocking themselves out to talk. Why bother? If they want us, they can just make us up. But the strange thing is, why have we not done it already ourselves? If you consider that once we go in, we might stay in for thousands and thousands of years, making “in” the most common state, and “out” very rare, and why would we think this time right now is one of those rare times? Isn’t it statistically more likely that we live in ordinary times? And if we live in ordinary times, shouldn’t we be in already? So, maybe we have already gone in, and that is why we hear no one out there. Even if there are one or two civilizations shouting into the cosmic wilderness, we don’t hear them because we are not really listening. We are only pretending to listen. We are also only pretending to go to Mars, doubly pretending in that we are pretending that this time in the habitat is a real Mars mission, and when that real mission happens, it will only be simulated, so why are we bothering? Isn’t that a flaw in your theory, Ookamisan, as Carol might say? Thinking this was being very clever and making sense, which it might I suppose from a motherly perspective, and she might have a point. If we are already “in” why are we not living lives of wild excitement? Why can’t we fly just by flapping our arms? Why do we have to pretend to go to Mars instead of just getting in a rocket ship and zip zoom fire the landing jets and watch out you buggy Martians, we’ve come! There is an obvious answer to that. Maybe this was all you could afford, Shiro. Okay, but not so bad, me, educated, picked to be in the Mars habitat, of all my countrymen who might have been picked, it was me! And it will be me who is Alice. None of the others will be Alice. They all want to be Alice, of course, but I won’t lose! In the end, I will be the ultimate Alice. I will be the one to really go to Mars! The rabbit hole is mine! I will get tall, I will get small. We’ll have tea!

  Ookami tweets, “There is a constant low rumble or hum right at the edge of perception in the habitat.”

  FarOutMars tweets, “Hooray! A game! Yay, Shiro!”

  Just because you like snakes and have some psychodelic purple in your hair doesn’t mean you are edgy and cool, Shiro, who thinks he is so clever. Don’t you mean psychedelic, Farida? I do not! Don’t tell me what I mean, people are all the time telling me what I mean. It makes me so angry! I’ll bury you all up to your necks in the sand, and rabbits will hop by and fart in your faces! Tee hee, Farida, bunnies, you are so cute, cuddly, we want to squeeze you! Will you squeak when we squeeze you? I’ll bet you do squeak. Get away from me, you smelly donkeys! And what’s with the Alice references? Has he gone crazy? Will Google Alice. Probably not the English book, probably not the AI program, but it could be, I guess. Not this, not that. OMG! Manga! Of course! What else? I must IM Trella about Shiro and his Alice manga—maybe leak it wider somehow. Take that! What kind of CHARACTERS can I come up with to counter Alice? Okay, bunnies, white rabbits with magic powers and big eyes, or Persian bunnies with huge, horrible swords! Not that the swords will matter much since you’ll all be smothered in your beds with rabbits sitting on your faces by that time anyway! You think you know me. You don’t know me! No matter what I come up with, the others won’t get it, they’ll be all oh how nice, Farida, you’re so creative. Oh, don’t look so serious, cutie pie, everyone is kidding! Maybe it’s the wind. Maybe there is a kind of radio wind that blows communications from other worlds away from us. Maybe the universe is full of communication but when it drifts toward us, the wind blows it away. Maybe we just happen to be in a particularly windy spot so nothing that comes our way ever really gets here. Will they like that? Will they think that might be worth thinking about? Space wind? That’s so darling! And those cute bunny CHARACTERS! The “hum” is driving me crazy! How is this even a game? I don’t see how anyone can win, but I do see how we can all lose. We will look so foolish, and we will feel bad about looking foolish. Rats! I hate this.

  FarOutMars tweets, “I will spend all of my free time today playing my clavichord!”

  RayVuk tweets, “Out here there is too much noise for a clavichord. Even when everything is turned off at night, there is a low buzz.”

  Several twibes of Twitter people interested in #MarsHab have arisen. Members of the twibes all have much to say about The Fermi Game. Hundreds of solutions to the paradox have been suggested.

  DaveToMars tweets, “Thanks for all the suggestions, tweeple, but I must come up with something on my own!”

  Of course, they wouldn’t let her bring a real clavichord, but has that stopped her? It has not. She rolls out a printed keyboard and plays and plays and sometimes if you listen very very carefully, you can hear the notes! I swear. We all pretend to hear them anyway just so we can be close and watch her, she is so pretty, until she shoos us all away. There is a simulated delay in network communications, not that it really matters. They pretend not to know about our phones. We pretend not to know about them, too. That is, I pretend the others have not also smuggled their phones into the habitat, and they pretend not to know about mine. It’s a ridiculous charade since some of us call each other. Whoever is out there watching us has probably decided they can learn things by observing the way we communicate with each other clandestinely. Or maybe they are just getting sloppy on this late mission. I wonder if Victor would pick up? I would like Victor more if he had boobs, he could keep his dick. Jesus, I will now put my red face
under my wing like an embarrassed bird, which is to say a bird without pants, which would be them all, wouldn’t it, bare-assed birds of the world unite! If I had been making up this game, I would not have asked where is everyone. Instead I would have asked why do we care? We are like children. Look at us! See what we can do! Do you love us the best for being so smart? To hell with all the ingenious suggestions. It really just boils down to loneliness. We look out at the universe and feel deep down there is no one there. Maybe we are the first. Someone has to be the first. Maybe we will fill the universe with ourselves and then someday someone will be wondering who is out there and they will look and find creatures just like themselves! Maybe they will even speak English, like in the movies where everyone in the universe speaks English. Everyone speaks English here. Everyone speaks Russian, too, but that is just a side effect of how we were chosen to be in this Russian experiment. How many times are they going to do this? Will they learn anything new from us? Will any of us still be young enough to actually go on a real Mars mission? My CHARACTERS are rugged pioneers. Their strange POWER is that they can use any tool without even reading the instructions. We are the guys who seek out and settle new worlds using tools! I am so lonely. That’s it, really. We care because we dread the thought of being alone in the dark. All of us are locked up alone in our own heads. But lately, it’s not so quiet. My ears are ringing, or maybe something has come loose in the structure of the place. I don’t know.

  DaveToMars tweets, “Hum or no hum, I’m off to the gym. I will use every piece of equipment in there, you lazy comrades!”

  RayVuk tweets, “The hum is out here, too, Dave! I thought it was my computer, but it’s not just that. RT @ DaveToMars Hum or no hum . . .”

  MarsMom tweets, “My babies are all up and busy! I am so proud of the way we are all working together!”

  The center cannot hold or something like that. I wish I could just go lie on the beach and a beautiful boy would bring me a drink with a little umbrella in it and when he handed it to me our fingers would brush and one thing would lead to another and he would scoop me up so easily and he’d be running with me in his arms running like a dark stallion across the sand and the waves would be lapping at his feet and my hair would be flowing back in the wind we’d be making as he ran. Well, we wouldn’t really be making wind, hee hee, but there would be music and the sun would warm me everywhere, where did my suit go, I don’t care, little huts ahead and palm trees. I hate them, the hulking, stinking American, and Farida, the Persian doll, is she even real? I want to pull her arms and head off and look down her throat to see if there are mechanical parts down there. I’m going to slap Shiro, I know it, one of these days, I’m going to snap and slap him, first one way on the left cheek, whap! And then the other way on the right cheek. Whap whap! That will make his monotone rise up a little, I bet. Oh, no, Estrella is making chocolate chicken. I can smell it. Is it her turn to cook again? Time flies! My stomach has only just got over the last chili assault, you don’t own the world, Victor, I don’t care if it is Russia outside, in here it is not Russia! Go eat a cucumber! I want what you all want, I want to hit someone. Quiet, children. Shush. We don’t really want to be noticed. We need to be cautious. If we must go out into space, we must be prepared. Just look at everyone else. So quiet, so discreet. Why do you think that is? Surely everyone is not just being polite. Isn’t it possible they are all hunkered down so the Bad Thing doesn’t notice them? My CHARACTERS are children, and their POWER is silence. I don’t want to play games, we never play nice when we play games, can’t we all be more supportive? Go to your rooms! I vant to be alone! You ungrateful dummies. Off with your heads!