THE VIGIL
Chris W. Martinez
Copyright © 2014 by Chris W. Martinez
All rights reserved.
Edited by Alice Siempelkamp.
Cover design by Keri Knutson.
The gaunt woman hunched over her orbital chart. Alone in the pale glow of the bunker lights, she whispered with anticipation as she traced a finger along the hand-drawn lines. Her head jerked left and she checked another polymer sheet, this one a calendar, also drawn in her own hand. The year written at the top: 2073.
Normally, the calendar served as little more than a grim reminder of how long it had been since she last saw or spoke to another human being—four years, eight months, and five days—but now it triggered a rush of hope.
Her pulse quickened, the jittery tingle urging her on, but she had to be patient. She had to be absolutely sure before she risked going up again. She cross-referenced the chart against the calendar a second time, and then once more.
The calculations checked out. This could be her last chance, she had no choice but to take it.
She jumped up from her chair, went to the other side of the small room, and opened the sealed door that led to the quarantine chamber. The motion-activated lights in the corridor blinked on as she passed through.
She came to another door, opened it, and went inside. On a wall hook by the door hung a gray radiation suit. She put it on, boxy and bulky across her whittled frame, the legs and arms several inches too long, but functional all the same.
At the opposite wall, a metal ladder stretched 80 feet to the hatch above. She clambered up, slow and clumsy in the suit.
At the top, she threw her arm over a ladder rung and held fast, waiting for the burning in her muscles to cease. Once her strength returned, she reached up and turned the hatch release.
Now, the hardest part. With both hands on the top rung, she took a deep breath, stiffened her legs, bent her head down, and with the top of her back she heaved the hatch upward.
First with a grunt, and then a growl rising to a desperate scream, she moved the metal mass inch by agonizing inch. Blinding sunlight poured in through the widening crack and she pushed the hatch further, her legs trembling with adrenaline as her body slowly straightened, until finally the portal stood open.
She pulled herself out and collapsed on her back onto the parched earth. Above, the dirty-blue sky. Cloudless and blank, the mute, expressionless face of an indifferent universe.
The radiation gauge on her wrist powered up as her suit absorbed the sun’s energy. She lifted her arm and checked the levels on the gauge. High enough to leave a grown man flopping like a fish on the ground.
She stood up and surveyed the jagged landscape, an endless boneyard of dust and stones. The truck had broken down about 500 yards to the west. She and her unit commander had gotten as close to the bunker as they could before the engine died, but after coming so far across the desert, it seemed a petty cruelty for the vehicle to quit with only a tiny fraction of the journey remaining. Even crueler that her companion had perished there, too.
As she trudged across the stark wasteland, her last memory of him played over and over again in her mind.
She had avoided direct exposure to the initial blast, but he had not been so lucky. His chin and neck maroon with drying blood, he rasped through cracked lips for her to go on without him. His hemorrhaging had grown so severe, he insisted, that even if he survived the march to the bunker, he would be gone within a day. She knew he was right, as right as he had been about so many other things: that orders be damned, their only chance was to escape to the remote bunker; that the deadly fallout would reach the desert, as it would inevitably reach everywhere; that the world as they knew it would soon be gone, forever gone, erased in a blink of time even shorter than humanity’s momentary scratch on the vast arc of the eons.
Finally, she made it to the truck. Yet again, seeing it untouched came as both a relief and a crushing disappointment. Relief because nobody had stripped it of its precious equipment; disappointment because such an occurrence would mean there were other survivors out here, somewhere.
She didn’t want to look. She wanted to forget. But inexorably her eyes pulled in the direction of the silent mound of stones. Not once since she had left him had she seen buzzards or other scavengers picking through the grave. Through the ceaseless procession of sunbaked days and frigid nights, death ruled unchallenged over its barren kingdom.
This was no longer her world. It had been made alien beneath her feet.
She climbed into the truck and turned on the communication system. A small miracle that the vehicle’s solar array still worked. She clicked through the radio channels, already knowing she would hear only static, but still she had to complete the ritual before turning to the real reason for her visit.
She shut off the radio, activated the telecommunications laser mounted on the roof, and pulled the viewfinder up to her face. The electronic eye briskly scanned the open expanse above.
There it was. Her heart pounded at the sight: gleaming in the heavens, its modular sections stretched out like an archangel’s wings, the space station slowly crossed the sky.
She had first spotted the station two years ago, then twice after that, always on the same orbital track. In all likelihood, the crew had been communicating with and receiving supplies from a surface base somewhere. Perhaps they could help her, even if only to relay information to her or send word of her location.
Regardless of how little the station might be able to do, or how few living people remained on the planet, she refused to lose hope. Or, rather, hope refused to leave her. She could feel it burning in her DNA, the species instinct to claw out from the brink of extinction.
She locked the telecommunications laser onto the station. The crew could only receive and respond to the digital message she had encoded in the beam if they noticed the laser in the first place, so she set the wavelength to visible light, maximized the amplitude, and initiated a simple signal from an era long past: SOS in Morse code.
☼
“And now coming into view is South America, in all its splendor,” said the woman’s voice, soft and dulcet over the swelling strains of Ravel’s Daphnis Et Chloé: Daybreak. “Marvel at all the different colors of the Atacama Desert and the majestic Andes Mountains, flawless and pristine, as if formed by a painter’s hand…”
He looked down upon the vista—the curvature of the planet shining in the sun, the delicate halo of atmosphere holding back the black of space—and for that moment he forgot his breath.
“All is still below,” the voice continued. “All is peaceful and perfect.”
He lost himself in the intricate tableau, a wrinkled band of mountains, a feather of cloud. From up here, he could see no evidence of civilization, no petty grids, no gray geometry, no cold clusters of artificial light. Just the grand skin of Earth, all traces of humanity invisible as microbes to his eye.
His sight passed across a flat slate of featureless desert. Suddenly, a starburst of violet light flashed out from the center of the plain. Again it came, repeating in a pattern of some kind.
The sequence felt familiar to him, but he couldn’t discern how. No doubt it was a signal, possibly a distress.
He felt compelled to turn and tell someone, but found himself strangely paralyzed, unable to look away. He tried to move his hands but… he had no hands to move. He felt no body, no air on skin, no physical sense at all. Just a visual perspective, forever staring down at the spinning Earth.
He struggled to recall where he was and why. Then he realized he couldn’t even remember his own name.
The woman’s voice narrated on, “As we continue east, soon you will see a great, gray expanse. This region was once a vast jungle, the might
y Amazon Rainforest…”
A surge of panic. The majesty of the view became a prison, a forced spectacle. The music behind the woman’s voice rose to an anguished crescendo as the purple beacon flashed over and over, urging him to act.
With every shred of his will, he fought against the invisible walls that hemmed his vision. He tried to scream, but he could muster only the dreamlike idea of a scream, echoing from deep within the vault of his mind.
All at once, the boundaries gave way. But instead of his perspective moving left or right, it jumped to another place entirely.
A dark, cylindrical chamber. White, concave walls, ghostly gray in the half-light.
An object floated in the dead space. He strained to make out its shape. It was a corpse, shriveled in an astronaut jumpsuit, its face a grim mosaic of skull-shadows.
He forced the image away and his view snapped to another room. He looked down on two pilot chairs, a motionless figure seated in one of them, barely visible in the dim glow of the holographic control panels.
A sliver of sunlight peeked through the window and crept across the figure’s sunken, lifeless eyes. Something seemed vaguely familiar about the face, but still he remembered nothing. No name, no date, no cause or reason. Just a yawning chasm.
He noticed the tiny lettering on the left breast of the man’s jumpsuit. When he focused on it, the image instantly magnified. “PETERSON.”
Strange the way his vision had zoomed in on the name, like a camera. A tingle of surreal epiphany descended on him. He willed his sight elsewhere.
Blink. An internal view of another room, two more bodies floating in the shadowy space.
Blink. Previous view of Earth, South America creeping toward the horizon.
Blink. External view of the craft, looking from one end down to the other. He studied it closely. Space station. Again the haunting swell of déjà vu.
He switched back to the cockpit, the cadaver forever seated at the helm. A thought spontaneously entered his mind.
“Access final log.”
A new image popped into his sight: video of a man from the torso up, looking straight at him. The fat was gone from the man’s cheeks and dark circles ringed his hollow eyes. On the left breast of his jumpsuit, the same name as the corpse in the pilot chair: “PETERSON.”
“December 18, 2069,” the man said in a frail near-whisper. “We’re out of food, the oxygen and water recycling systems are failing, and we still can’t make contact with the surface. We saw the devastation from up here and know there’s probably no hope of rescue or resupply. We can’t even count on other spacecraft. It’s everyone for themselves now.”
The man’s thin chest heaved in a sigh. “We won’t last another week. As an astronaut, I thought I had learned not to fear death. But now that the time has come, I’m ashamed to admit, I’m terrified. I’m not prepared to go.”
A glint appeared in his eye. “But it turns out I may not have to go—at least not completely. As the captain, I have a direct neural link to this station’s artificial intelligence system. The computer is powerful enough that, if I reconfigure it just right, I may be able to upload part of my consciousness to it. I can achieve a form of immortality.”
The video switched to the planet below. “From up here,” the captain said, “I’ll forever have the perfect view of the world I once called home. No suffering or misery or violence. Just pure beauty and tranquility, the way it was meant to be.”
The man’s voice went quiet for a moment as the oceans and continents slowly rolled by. “I don’t know if there’s an afterlife,” he said, “but if it turns out there isn’t, this right here is close enough to heaven for me.”
The video went back to the captain’s face, looking somehow even more haggard than before. “Still, there are serious risks. Being trapped forever in an orbiting computer, with the awareness that the human race may very well be extinct, could easily drive me to madness. So I need to come up with a way to prevent that. I need to program the system to save me from that fate.”
He took a deep breath. “I might not be able to get this to work the way I need it to. And even if I do, it won’t truly be me on the other side. So on behalf of my crew, my brave, loyal, amazing crew, well…” He blinked, but his failing body could produce no tears, “I guess this is farewell.”
The video ended, replaced by the sight of the cockpit and the captain’s long-dead body.
His body.
The image twisted and spun in his mind. It couldn’t possibly be, and yet he couldn’t deny it. He tried to recall an earlier memory, something other than staring down at Earth from space, but nothing came. If not for the flashing signal, the one thing that had broken the spell he had cast on himself, he probably would have remained forever entranced.
The flashing signal.
He switched back to the planet-facing camera. The beacon continued to pulse.
He needed to access the station’s sensors but didn’t know how. “Analyze repeating signal,” he thought.
The computer spoke up, “It is an SOS distress signal, Morse code. There is also an audio message digitally encoded in the laser. Would you like to hear it?”
“Yes.”
A woman’s voice, breathless and tense. “Unidentified space station, this is Sergeant Yvette Burgess of the U.S. Army 66th Cavalry. I am the sole occupant of an underground shelter at coordinates 22° 00’ 48” S, 68° 33’ 08” W, and have been unable to make contact with anyone else. Please respond. I repeat, please respond. If you receive this signal, if you can hear me up there, please. I need… I need assistance. Are there other survivors out there? Please, please respond.”
His mind raced. He didn’t know what to do. “Send message, send message now.”
“What kind of message?” the computer replied.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I guess like the one I received.”
“Affirmative. Would you like to complete one of the previously started messages?”
He paused. “What?”
“I have recorded three prior attempts to reply to the distress signal. First attempted message…”
“Sergeant Burgess,” said his voice, “this is the space station. I’m so confused. I wish I could explain my situation, but I can barely understand it myself. Was there a global disaster of some kind? I’m scared and I can’t remember…” A beat of silence. “Hold on, I’m getting a warning of some kind. I, I don’t understand what’s happening. Planetary shadow? What is—”
“End of first attempted message,” the computer said. “Second attempted message…”
Again his voice, more urgent this time, “Sergeant Burgess, this is the space station. You are not alone. I have so much to ask you, so much I need to know. I’ll do everything in my power to help you, but there may not be much I can do. This is so hard to explain. Maybe it would be easier if we spoke over a live, two-way channel? Is that possible?” A gasp. “There’s that warning, oh my God. Cancel. Cancel. Cancel!”
“End of second attempted message. Third attempted—”
“Stop,” he said. “Stop playback.” He tried to think clearly but couldn’t.
“Warning,” the computer said suddenly, “now entering planetary shadow. Solar power loss in 30 seconds.”
“Solar what?”
“Resetting memory and program sequence for next solar cycle.”
“Resetting memory? No, no, no, no, wait.”
“Negative.”
“Override. Override!”
“Negative. Override of psychological integrity protocol requires verbal confirmation from a living human. Ten seconds to reset.”
“Sergeant Burgess is a living person,” he pleaded. “She’s alive down there, didn’t you hear her?”
“Negative. Pre-recorded message is insufficient to establish existence of currently living human.”
His mind jumped to something he had said in one of his previous attempted replies. “Open a live communication channel with the signal sou
rce, do it now!”
“Affirmative,” the computer replied, but its voice drooped, the words slowing to a lethargic crawl. “Initiating two… way… comm…”
The computer went quiet. With one last wink of light, the sun disappeared behind the thin, blue crescent of the planet’s atmosphere. His sight dimmed to black and a numb silence enveloped him. As the last of his senses sank into the abyss, he clung in the darkness to his remaining thoughts, desperate to protect a memory, any memory, from oblivion. But his will to remember was as illusory as the memories themselves, and like wind grasping at wind, he twisted away into nothing.
☽
Sergeant Burgess watched through the viewfinder as the space station slipped below the eastern horizon. To the west, the sunset drowned in its bath of poisoned sky.
She hadn’t brought her orbital charts with her, but endless hours of studying the figures had seared them into her mind. She counted the months until the station’s next pass. Thanks to her training, she could track its movements with mathematical precision, down to the day and the hour. How much longer she could survive on her remaining supplies was a far harder question.
The desert faded to charcoal gray in the deepening dusk. She climbed out of the truck and began her weary trek back to the bunker. The sun would come up again. It always did. And for as long as she could, until she no longer had the strength to climb that ladder to the light, so would she.
MORE BY CHRIS W. MARTINEZ
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Table of Contents
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Copyright
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