The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  “That’s like a five-meter wingspan,” said Jordy.

  “Tails, legs,” said Mom. “Similar biology.”

  “Tasty,” Jordy replied over the comm.

  “Come on,” said Kyla.

  “What? You’re telling me all those nutri-bars haven’t left you hungry for some whatever-they-are burgers?”

  “Just watch your approach. You land wrong, and those things will be eating you.”

  “Let’s put down over there,” they heard Dad say. “A couple hundred meters from the waterline.”

  The ship slowed and touched down on a flat swath of grass in a swirl of wind. As the engines powered down, Liam could hear the commotion of everyone standing up.

  “All right, we’re switching over to helmet cams,” said Jordy.

  The view out the cockpit was replaced by five camera feeds from the team’s pressure suits, their views shaking as the team filed out the side of the ship. Mom and Dad moved a few dozen meters from the ship and stopped. Jordy busied himself checking the contact points of the landing gear. The other two team members, from the Artemis crew, continued on toward the beach.

  “How’s she looking, Jordy?” Kyla asked.

  Jordy’s gloved hand ran along the underside of the hull. “Pretty much perfect. Not even any burn marks from entry. I mean, I knew I was good, but not this good.”

  “All right, settle down.”

  Mom and Dad knelt in the high grass. Mom produced a laser shear and clipped a handful of the thin leaves. Dad twisted a long, slim device into the ground, coring a soil sample.

  “Seems to have cellular structure,” said Mom, holding the stalks close. She looked out at the horizon of low grass hills. “Unbelievable,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

  “We can’t be sure yet,” said Dad. “But it might just be.” He stood, and they briefly appeared in one another’s helmet cameras as they embraced.

  “Guys, you’re on camera!” Mina shouted uselessly at the screen.

  A few minutes later, they were filing back on board and unpacking the analysis instruments.

  “Heading for the next drop zone,” said Jordy. There were sounds of cheerful conversation behind him.

  The ship rose, buffeted by wind currents, and streaked across the ocean.

  “Captain Barrie,” Dad said over the comm, “given the results of this initial sampling, I’d suggest that we prep to send word to the fleet.”

  There was no answer.

  “Captain,” said Kyla, “are you reading us?”

  Another couple of seconds passed— “Yes, I’m here,” said Barrie.

  “They’re saying to send a message to the fleet. Will you give the go-ahead?”

  “Affirmative. Kyla, have Jordy ready his comm system to fly through the portal to our old universe and begin transmitting.”

  A grin spread across Kyla’s face. “Roger that, sir. Our team is already prepping for launch.”

  “Congratulations, everyone,” said Barrie. “We’ve found a home.” Liam thought he sounded as relieved as the rest of them. Perhaps the oddities that he’d observed in the captain really were due to the incredible stress of what they’d been through here.

  The officers on the bridge erupted into cheers and slapped hands. Liam was surprised to see Mina crying, but also grinning. She threw her arms around him.

  Liam smiled too, and yet his insides felt more stormy than ever, his heart racing, his throat dry. They had a new home in their sights. Of course he’d already seen the future; they were going to be okay, humanity was going to be okay. All the terror of their journey—even though it had been only a couple weeks of conscious days, Liam felt like he could feel the decades, the nearly half century, in his bones—all of it would be behind them, fading in time, like a bad dream.

  “Hey,” said Mina, seeing that Liam had a tear in his eye, too. “No matter how Mom and Dad act, you did this, little brother. If it wasn’t for you, we never would have made it here.”

  “Thanks,” Liam said, nodding, and yet the burn increased in his eyes. Mina was right—he really had done it, despite all the danger and uncertainty. . . .

  And yet.

  He hadn’t done it alone. He’d had a friend, a best friend, a partner and an ally who had helped him and fought beside him even when she’d had so much to lose, who had lost more already than he could ever really imagine. And now, to have what he and his family and all of humanity had yearned for, all he had to lose was her.

  13

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 01H:37M

  Liam lay in the stasis pod. He’d stayed on the bridge as the message was sent to the fleet. Kyla expected it would take a minimum of five hours for a response to arrive. Liam had watched Mom and Dad and the team arrive at the second sample site, on the edge of a tropical-looking forest, before he’d asked Kyla if he could return to his compartment to rest. Mina, exhausted, had joined him.

  He’d managed to sleep for almost six hours, despite the constant churning inside. When he woke, his brain felt like syrup, his eyelids scratchy, like he could have used twice as much rest, and yet his insides were spinning too fast now. Why, he wondered, did he feel as nervous and worried now as he had when they’d first arrived here?

  “Did you sleep at all?” Mina asked, from the pod where Phoebe had once been.

  “For a little while,” said Liam, sitting up. “What about you?”

  “On and off.” Mina braced herself on her elbow and turned one of the beacons—she wore both around her neck—between her fingers. “It’s weird. Now that the danger’s passed, I miss him more. Or maybe that’s normal. I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. When’s the last time you and I shared a room?”

  “When you used to come to the research station.”

  “Oh yeah. And also that trip we took to the gas giants. I remember when we were transiting the asteroid belt, you were so freaked out that we were going to get pulverized that I had to read to you for hours.”

  “I was six,” said Liam.

  “True. It was more cute than annoying.” It sounded like she was enjoying this, reminiscing, but all Liam felt was that persistent whirring spin.

  He just wanted to go to Mars for a while. And yet when he’d pushed back from the moment and turned toward his past, he’d been frozen by the fear that when he returned, Phoebe would be gone, even though he knew that was impossible. He still went a little ways back toward Mars, but he knew even before he arrived that it was no use. Unlike before, leaving his present only stressed him out rather than calming him.

  So he’d been thinking instead about how to meet up with Phoebe. Maybe he could slide back in time, to some point when both he and Mina were asleep, and then get himself down to the hangar. But he would need to find a point when Phoebe wasn’t being observed either. It all seemed too complicated and made him feel exhausted again.

  “Have you checked out their VirtCom?” Mina asked. Kyla had given them both retro links that connected to the Artemis’s systems. The VirtCom was seriously dated compared to what they’d had back at the colony. The simulation games and environments were so low-resolution it was almost sort of cool. It had a lot of the old games Liam remembered playing when he was very young.

  “I looked at the sims,” he said, “but I didn’t feel like playing anything.”

  “I found Fashion Apocalypse,” said Mina. “Like, the second edition. I can’t believe I used to love that game.”

  An announcement tone sounded, and Captain Barrie’s voice came over the ship-wide comms. “Attention, everyone. We have just received the reply message from colonial command. They have verified the results of our preliminary tests, and agreed that this Earth should be humanity’s new home.”

  Liam listened for more celebration but only heard silence from the core. He wondered what it would be like to be one of these passengers who had been in stasis lockdown this entire time—to find out how much had happened to the human race.
/>   “The fleet has set course for the coordinates of the portal,” Barrie continued. “The Starliner Saga will be first to arrive, in approximately eight hours. Command will want to send further teams in for analysis before we officially land on new Earth, but they have agreed to let the Artemis transit the new portal, as a stress test for the coming starliners. We’ll be the guinea pigs, I know, but on the other hand, I think we’re all looking forward to having our new home firmly in our sights.” Barrie paused, and when he spoke again, there was a hitch in his voice. “I know we have lived with a terrible sense of powerlessness and uncertainty these long days. For some . . . that feeling was too much to overcome. For the rest of us, the sense that we had put our loved ones in danger has been a hardship unlike any other. But as it turns out, our suffering was part of a larger plan. Whether you want to call it fate, or luck, or divine providence, we can rest easy that humanity’s salvation has come. Many of you are too young to remember Earth as it was before the sun began to change . . . as our population grew and advanced, we also left a shameful path of destruction in our wake, so much so that large swaths of our home world were rendered uninhabitable. It used to break my heart to see the damage we had caused. Careless with our progress, with our ego . . .”

  “Jeez,” Mina muttered, “way to bring down the mood.”

  “The truth is,” Barrie continued, “and this would have been too flippant a sentiment to utter in more dire times . . . but had this cosmic sequence of events not happened, as costly as it has been, it is likely that we would have been setting out to find a new home before long anyway. My point is, we should not take the lesson away from this moment that things will always work out. Instead, the discovery of this new world should make us grateful, and more important, humble. We must treat it with care, with dignity, and not take its gifts for granted. Humanity can be something more than it has ever been, if we meet this moment. It is time for us to evolve.

  “We will take two more hours to rest, or celebrate as you see fit, and then we will begin to prep the Artemis for portal transit to new Earth.”

  Silence overtook the compartment again. Liam stared at the ceiling, his insides buzzing like an exposed wire. A matter of hours. After everything they’d been through, they would be going to Earth; the fleet would be arriving . . . Phoebe would be leaving.

  “Guess we have a couple more hours of lying here doing nothing,” said Mina. “And Mom and Dad are in a different universe.”

  “Yeah,” said Liam.

  “Never doubt our parents’ ability to treat us like an afterthought. Their work has always been the most important thing. If they hadn’t been such freaks about it, we could have gotten off Mars earlier. . . .” Her voice caught, and Liam knew what she was thinking. What if they’d left on an earlier starliner? Would those legions of people who died on the Scorpius still be alive?

  But Liam wondered if perhaps a worse fate would have befallen them if he had never been there on Mars at the very end, to find the watch and lead them here. Again, he could probably go look if he wanted: no doubt Iris would be happy to assist in exploring those other possible futures. But there was that jet flame again, that head-lightening spin. The past would only remind him what he was about to lose.

  “I bet you’re having feelings,” said Mina.

  “Huh?”

  “About your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  Mina sat up. “You know who you’re talking to, right?”

  “We’re friends,” he said. “It’s just messed up. I mean, we’re going down to that new planet, and they’re going back to our universe, to . . . who knows what.” Liam’s breath got short. “I know what you’re going to say. Good riddance, or whatever.”

  “Well, yeah . . .” Mina paused. “If I were Phoebe, I guess I’d probably be feeling conflicted about everything that happened. Especially if I had a friend like you. It must have been pretty hard for her, being caught in the middle.”

  “Her brother died in the Phase One attack. And her grandparents. All her friends . . .”

  “I know a little something about that. Not as much, but a little.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then she said: “Okay, fine.”

  “What?”

  “Go see her already. I’ll cover for you.”

  Liam sat up. “Are you serious?”

  “Seriously an idiot,” said Mina, “but I can’t stand seeing you depressed like this. Besides, Mom and Dad clearly don’t care what we do, or they wouldn’t have left us here.”

  Still, Liam sat there for another moment, tingling in his arms and legs like they wanted to move. “I don’t know. . . .”

  Mina checked her link. “In a couple hours she’ll be gone, you know, forever. Make ’em count, lover boy.”

  “Stop,” said Liam, but at the same time he climbed out of his pod.

  “Does she have a weird tongue or anything?”

  “Shut up!” But Liam smiled again. “I don’t even know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “Well, I’ll expect details when you return.”

  Liam just shook his head. He zipped up his hoodie, moved to the door, and paused. “Do you mind if I take JEFF?”

  Mina glanced at the head lying on the dresser like she’d forgotten it was there. “No. But why?”

  “Just to catch up. We spent a lot of time together. Like decades.”

  “That sounds like a total lie, but whatever, I don’t care.”

  Liam hoisted JEFF’s head. A coiled green wire connected from his neck to a port on the wall. As Liam disconnected him, his eyes blinked to life.

  “Good morning, Liam!”

  “Hey, JEFF, we’re going on an adventure.”

  “Oh man,” said Mina, “don’t make JEFF record your weird alien-kissing—”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.” Liam stepped out into the red light of the core. “Thanks,” he said to Mina, but he was surprised to see that she was brushing tears from her eyes.

  “Just hurry up,” she said, holding the two beacons that were around her neck. He almost asked for one, but he didn’t think she’d want to part with it now.

  “Okay,” he said, and slid the door shut. Out on the walkway, Liam peered up and down the core, at the walkways above and below. No sign of any crew members. Perfect. He hurried toward the stairs.

  14

  TIME TO DARK STAR FUNCTIONALITY: 01H:09M

  Liam walked as quickly as he could along the empty walkway of the Artemis core, the weight of JEFF’s head knocking against his hip.

  “What curious architecture,” said JEFF as they waited at the end of the core for a staircase to rotate into position.

  “It doesn’t really look that different than the Scorpius,” said Liam.

  “I am referring to the VirtCom, and its operating system. Though it has sustained significant damage, and has numerous faulty packets that are corrupting its function, it is still interesting to observe its processes.”

  “Glad you’re having fun,” said Liam. He started down the staircase.

  “It is actually challenging, as I am having to filter a significant amount of interference coming from Dark Star.”

  “What kind of interference?”

  “The signal is hard to decipher, but I believe it is scanning us with a wide spectrum of frequencies. This scanning is so powerful and specific, it can likely see your every move, if not right down to your heart beating.”

  Liam reached the bottom of the staircase. He thought of Iris watching him, hearing his thoughts, and it spun up his insides in a way it hadn’t before, especially given where he was headed right now. “Is there a way to disrupt it?”

  “You could wear a tinfoil hat. HA, HA, HA.”

  Liam eyed JEFF.

  “Are we not still working on humor?”

  Liam smiled. “Seriously, though.”

  “Shielding from this kind of scanning would take significant
time to design, not to mention access to materials we do not currently have available. We would need high density—”

  “It’s okay, I get it.” Time . . . maybe there was another solution. “Did you try to talk to the Dark Star computer, the way you are talking to the Artemis?”

  “I made a few inquiries, but when it comes to interfacing with that machine, I am afraid that my processors are too primitive. If I’m going to communicate with Dark Star, it will have to want to talk to me. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered if you could find out anything more about it.”

  “I am afraid not. Its capabilities obviously suggest an incredible level of intelligence, as well as a high degree of benevolence.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am not surprised, I just find it noteworthy. Just because something is intelligent does not necessarily mean it is good. An artificial intelligence is built with a specific goal, or task, in mind, something that the beings who created it could not accomplish themselves. Whether that goal is good or bad must initially come from the beings who created it.”

  “Making universes with livable planets for races who need them seems like a pretty good task,” said Liam.

  “That is certainly true . . . ,” said JEFF.

  “But . . . ,” said Liam.

  “Two things: first, it seems unlikely that a race of beings would build an intelligence, not to mention a mechanism of this size and scale, only to discard it.”

  “If the Architects used it to build a new home, then they probably didn’t need it anymore.”

  “That may well be. And yet if humans had built this place, can you really imagine them leaving it behind?”

  “Well, no. Maybe the Architects are different.”

  “They might be.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “Given the age of this intelligence, it is also possible that whatever the goals and intentions of the Architects were, they may no longer be what Dark Star wants.”