Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  Neither the ceilings nor the walls show any sign of technology. How had this area been lit while the door was still closed? Perhaps these creatures don’t need any light. On the other hand, the symbols they had found were only legible in bright light. She’d better stop speculating too much right now. These creatures might have had helmet lamps, or the ceiling might have glowed when energy was supplied.

  The stench is not as intensive as it was yesterday. Hard to believe how useful airing out extraterrestrial towers for one night can be, she thinks with a laugh. “It doesn’t stink as much,” she informs Marchenko.

  “Could you go a few steps forward? Then I might be able to follow you,” he says in a whiny tone of voice.

  Eve complies. The slope is steep. She aims her lamp downward. Then she slowly walks ahead. Judging by the sound of her own footsteps, the ramp does not seem to be made of metal. She walks until the rope tightens. “Are you finally coming?”

  The rope goes slack again, telling her that Marchenko has come down. She begins moving downward and he follows.

  Now and then Marchenko stops. She only notices that when the rope stops her from going forward.

  “What are you doing, stopping like that all the time?” she asks in an annoyed tone.

  “I am determining our position in the tower.”

  “We are approximately 40 meters below the surface,” she says.

  “Good estimate—it is 35 meters. We have moved down vertically.”

  “I could have told you that, Marchenko.”

  “You can do that now,” he replies, “but later on you will be grateful for it.”

  Five minutes later the corridor ends. It leads to a small, square room. Eve stops at the entrance to the room. Marchenko stands behind her.

  “Well, that’s it,” Eve says.

  “That can’t be true. There are still many cavities below us.”

  “Perhaps it is a fake corridor, like in Egyptian pyramids, meant to confuse unwanted visitors. Let’s go back.”

  “I have to check it out first,” Marchenko says. “Let me go past you.”

  Eve presses herself against the wall to let him through. Suddenly the floor in front of her disappeared. Eve has the impression that Marchenko is floating over a dark hole for a moment, then gravity pulls him down. She tries to get a grip on the smooth wall, but she knows what is about to happen. The rope tightens. She doesn't stand a chance. Marchenko’s mass pulls her into the abyss.

  A moment later she feels mud against her face, filthy stinking mud. Disgusted, she tears off her helmet. The stuff must have somehow seeped inside.

  “Calm down, Eve, I am here. It is just some kind of dirt.”

  Easy for you to say, you darned robot, she thinks.

  Marchenko shines his helmet lamp at her. She tries to activate her own lamp, but it doesn’t work. Marchenko hands her a flashlight. In its glow she sees that his body is splattered with mud. She probably looks just the same. She tries to clean her face with her bare fingers. That only works after a fashion. She is glad not to have a mirror with her right now.

  “Where are we?” she asks, choosing to ignore the mud.

  “This is a large room, at least 100 meters long and wide. The ceiling is three meters above us.” He aims his spotlight upward. “We fell through that hole. The floor must have reacted to my weight.”

  “I would be worried about this,” Eve says. “No, ‘I am worried about this,’ I should have said.” Now that Marchenko is talking to her, she almost feels normal again. If only that acrid stench would go away! Will they find a way back?

  Marchenko concurs. “I am worried, too. It tells me that the creatures this mechanism was meant for are considerably heavier than you.”

  The echoing sound of Marchenko’s words shows Eve that they are in some kind of hall. She aims the flashlight toward her helmet. The lamp on the forehead is cracked. “Lousy quality,” she says.

  “You should complain to the manufacturer.”

  The irony is not lost on Eve. “Haha, very funny. Do you at least have something I can use to clean the visor? Stuff got inside.”

  Marchenko steps closer and hands her something that feels like paper. Eve squeezes the flashlight under her right arm, picks up the helmet with her left hand, and wipes the visor. Then she looks at the dirty piece of paper. It is covered with dark green slime that seems to glow in the shine of the flashlight.

  “Show me,” Marchenko says. She gives him the paper and he holds it close to his head. “Organic material. Medium-chain fats, carbohydrates, something like cellulose,” he analyzes.

  “Sounds tasty.”

  “Unfortunately it has almost decayed.”

  “So did we land on a kind of garbage dump? Perhaps a food storage silo for hard times?”

  “It might be that this grew all over here. Perhaps this was a public park. The air is very humid, do you notice? In times when it was just 20 degrees warmer, there might have been abundant vegetation here.”

  Eve nods. Marchenko is right. A simple food depot makes no sense, but a habitat for the survivors seems more likely. But where have they gone?

  “If this was a public park,” she asks, “then where did the public disappear to?”

  Marchenko does not answer. Instead, he turns around and points with one arm into the distance. “Let’s check,” he says and starts walking.

  Eve slowly follows him. With each step she shines her flashlight toward the ceiling, the floor, the sides. She does not want another surprise just like moments ago. Now the hall starts to make her feel scared. It was just as dark on the surface, but she never felt this kind of fear up there.

  After about 30 steps, the flashlight shows an obstacle on the left side—perhaps a wall? The hall seems to narrow there. Shouldn’t she take a closer look? Yet Marchenko keeps marching on steadily, as if he is already aiming for a specific destination.

  Eve shakes her head. Stopping means she might lose sight of him, but... She aims her flashlight toward the left again. The wall is still there. At about waist height she sees a narrow, more-reflective stripe. Otherwise, no embellishment can be detected.

  Then she notices a cavity heading into the wall. She wonders whether to call Marchenko. He is already 15 steps ahead of her. He probably will be grouchy and will try to dissuade her from this detour. Eve stops anyway. She can clearly see the light on Marchenko’s head, even though he is moving away step by step.

  What can happen, after all? She once read that the human eye can detect a candle flame in the dark at a distance of one kilometer. She cannot lose sight of Marchenko down here. Eve nods and slowly moves toward the side. The cavity turns out to be a corridor that starts beyond an opening in the shape of an inverted ‘U.’ The smell around her is getting stronger, so this path definitely does not lead to the outside.

  Eve turns around again. Marchenko is still moving in the same direction. While she can no longer see J’s body, the light shows her his location. She is relieved and shines her flashlight into the corridor. She imagines that there might be a light switch right inside the opening. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrial architects were not so obliging. The only thing she sees on the wall is the luminescent stripe at waist height.

  Eve walks one meter into the corridor. There is something approximately ten meters beyond the portal. Several objects reach upward from the ground to slightly above knee level. She scans a full 360 degrees. Everything appears to be safe. The hall behind her is only a few steps away. If I yell, Marchenko will be here in a few seconds, she tells herself.

  Eve cautiously approaches the objects. The flashlight reveals ten of them. At first sight they resemble rounded vases. The mud on the ground is getting thicker. When Eve walks, her boots make a smacking sound. She crouches in front of the first vase. She shines her light at the outside of the vessel. The wall seems to be transparent and must be very thin. The vase tapers considerably from its not-very-wide belly to its top and could be compared to a very slim egg. In the cone of her
light, the thing—whatever it is—looks celestially beautiful, as if it had not been manufactured, but had grown naturally. It might be connected to the slowly decaying mud, but then why would it look so clean and bright?

  Eve kneels to get a better look at the vessel. Her knees sink into the mud, but she does not mind because her suit is already splattered all over. She places her hands on the slightly-bulging sides of the vase. The area feels surprisingly warm. Eve is startled for a moment, but then she remembers they are no longer on the icy surface. She leans forward to look inside the vessel. The opening of the vase has a diameter of approximately ten centimeters. It is too dark to see anything inside. Eve moves the flashlight across the outside, but even though the wall of the vase seems transparent, the interior remains black.

  She lifts her right hand to shine the flashlight directly into the opening. What might I see inside? Eve bends forward a bit more. Her heart is beating faster. She feels like she is about to open a treasure chest. Soon she will see it. The beam of the flashlight touches the edge of the vessel.

  Suddenly she is yanked backward. She shrieks. Just as quickly, she recognizes the hard robot hand on her shoulder. “Are you insane, Marchenko? You could have said something first!”

  “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you notify me? We must not allow ourselves to get separated. Eve, that is much too dangerous!”

  “Come on, we are all alone down here, or haven’t you noticed? Everything here is dead and decaying.” Eve conspicuously leans over the vase-like thing and shines her flashlight into it. “You see? It is all empty.” There is only a black layer on the bottom of the vessel, which probably resembles the ubiquitous mud here.

  “That might be true,” Marchenko says in an angry voice, “but you are being reckless if you impose your own ideas on everything you see here.”

  “Are you trying to say that not everything down here is dead?”

  “I don’t know. We have far too little information yet. What do you think you are dealing with here?”

  “A vase... a trash can... a flower pot... I have no idea.” Eve says.

  “Then try to lift it.”

  Eve snorts. What is that supposed to mean? She once again carefully puts her two hands on opposite sides just below the bulge of the vase. The vessel weighs less than a kilogram, she estimates. And she has already seen that it is empty.

  “Go on!” Marchenko encourages her.

  Eve tries to lift it, but the thing resists. Her gloves keep sliding over the surface. “It is simply too smooth,” she says. She does not want to admit defeat.

  “As if!” Marchenko stands next to another vessel and holds it with all three of his hands. Then he tries to lift it. The vase does not budge.

  “You are not really trying,” Eve complains. Yes, she knows it isn’t true, and yes, she knows that Marchenko is reading her like an open book.

  “We have to be really careful here,” the robot says. “Nothing is what it seems. And now, come with me. I found an exit at the end of the hall.”

  Marchenko leads her out of the side corridor. They cross the hall in silence. The wall they are approaching looks different from the side walls. There are vertical lines at regular intervals.

  “It almost looks like pleats,” Eve says.

  “If I am not mistaken, those are pleats.”

  “You think—”

  “Yes,” Marchenko interrupts, “this is not a wall, but a curtain.”

  “It’s not made of fabric,” Eve determines once they reach the wall. “The material feels amazingly hard.”

  Marchenko starts an analysis. “A mixture of asbestos, tar, and carbon nanotubes,” he finally says.

  “A strange mixture.”

  “Yes, and I suspect the tar represents a decayed form of the nanotubes.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a hunch. Perhaps it is also a precursor material. But it doesn’t matter.” Marchenko tries to jostle the curtain, but it is rigid, immovable. “I am sure there is a switch somewhere around here,” he says.

  “So far we have not noticed any energy emissions,” Eve says. “If the switch is not supplied with electricity, it won’t be any use to us.”

  “And what about the warm temperature in here? If this building has stood empty for a thousand years or longer, it should have cooled down to the ambient temperature a long time ago.”

  A good argument, Eve decides. While it is not exactly warm here, there must be an energy source somewhere further down that still supplies heat. “Then we should find the energy source,” she says.

  “No we shouldn’t, or at least not until later. Imagine if we examined a gigantic car. What good would it do us to find the engine?”

  Eve nods. “We would certainly learn something… but you’re thinking we need the command center, the steering wheel.”

  She slowly walks to the left alongside the odd curtain. It is definitely not a normal wall. So... the builders must have designed it this way for a reason. A curtain is meant to be opened. Therefore there must be a mechanism that triggers the opening process. And it should be at the left side or the right side of the wall. Or is she still thinking too much in human terms? What if the mechanism is hidden on the floor or the ceiling? She carefully shines her light at every square centimeter. She briefly turns around and feels gratified as she observes Marchenko currently walking toward the other edge of the wall. So, her idea was not that bad.

  Eve finds something indeed. She can see it from three meters away, when her flashlight shines on the luminescent stripe. At the end of the stripe there is a fist-sized, egg-shaped object. It has three indentations on top and one on the bottom. Eve looks at her hand. The egg is slightly larger than her palm. If this object is meant to be used with an extremity, the aliens should have three fingers and an opposable thumb.

  “I found something,” Eve calls out via the helmet radio.

  “Me, too,” Marchenko replies. He sends her an image. It shows a matching egg-shaped object at the end of a matching luminescent stripe.

  “I have the same thing on this side. What now?”

  “We have to find out how it works.”

  “Shouldn’t we be more cautious? Nothing is what it seems, you know.” Eve gets a kick out of teasing Marchenko with his own words.

  “That is a different situation. We can’t go on from here. Or should we turn around?” A rhetorical question.

  Eve is not against learning more about the egg-shaped object. She places her left hand around it for a moment, lets go and switches her flashlight to her left hand, and feels the object with her right. She does not feel any difference. The intended users must have symmetrical extremities. She tries to turn the egg, but no matter the effort she cannot get it to move. Instead, she hears a loud cracking sound in her helmet radio.

  “Damn,” Marchenko says, groaning in frustration.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It broke off. I must have turned it a bit too forcefully.”

  “We still have one left.”

  “And what if both have to be used at the same time?”

  “They are so far apart from each other that it would make no sense. One has to be enough.”

  “Hopefully! But wait a moment,” Marchenko says, “at the back of the egg-shaped object there is a kind of pin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have it in my hand. Before that, the pin was inside the wall. Now there is a hole there.”

  “About where?”

  “Exactly in the center of the luminescent stripe.”

  “Hmmm.” Eve is not sure what she can do with the piece of information Marchenko just gave her.

  “I am coming over,” Marchenko says.

  “Take your time. I’ll come up with an idea.” She reaches for the egg with her left hand and tries to push it carefully upward and downward. She must not damage hers as well. She pulls on it, but nothing happens. Eve bends down a bit. Why is this object directly on the luminescent stripe? Only
because it looks pretty there?

  She takes off her glove and feels the stripe with her index finger. In the middle she can feel an indentation invisible to the naked eye. If the egg has a pin on its back, as Marchenko said, that might be the decisive element. The egg would then only be the handle for it. She gently pulls the object away from the curtain and to the left, in the direction of the luminescent stripe. She has to overcome a slight resistance, then it feels as if she were tearing a piece of paper. She does not need a lot of force, because the egg in her hand moves almost by itself. It moves along the stripe in the direction away from the curtain, obviously held on track by the pin. Yet her hope that the curtain would now open does not become reality. Eve has moved the strange egg two meters toward the center of the room, but the curtain stands rigid, unmoving.

  “Nothing is happening,” she says via radio. “I am already two meters away from the curtain.”

  “And the egg?”

  “You were right. It sits on a pin that runs inside a notch inside the luminescent stripe.”

  “Let’s try for another meter or two.”

  Eve nods. It could not hurt, pulling the egg-shaped handle a bit farther back. She walks one step, two steps, three steps along the wall. The farther she gets, the less force she needs to apply. And then comes the moment in which the egg definitely starts moving by itself. She has to push against it with her hand to stop it.

  “Um, Marchenko.”

  “Yes?”

  “The egg is sliding along by itself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I let go of it, it moves backwards, farther into the room.”

  “Just a second,” Marchenko says. “I am locating you. Now let it go for a moment.”

  Eve lets go of the egg. It slides along the wall hesitantly. She walks with it. Could it be increasing its speed?

  “Stop the egg now,” Marchenko says. “I don’t want to worry you, but I think we’ve got a problem.”