Radio Sphere (8 page)

But like a sponge gently placed on a puddle, slowly soaking the loose water into its pores, ‘not since the baby’ seeped back into my mind and my memories began to congeal together in one place. “Not since the baby” meant something to me. How could I be certain of anything if I could so easily undo my own past. How could you confirm something as intangible as a memory?

Once I did have a baby. A baby girl. Liz, I would have called her. Liz… like me, except I’m not really Liz, am I? I hadn’t really known that until now— lodged, or trapped, in this bed—like tube with my head covered in probes by the alien. My… my story has yet to catch up to the present. My story…

Zaps of electricity force me back to the campsite with George only days ago…

Electricity…

Mom…

Grandpa…

Chad…

“Look George! Somebody was here before us.”

“The guy you’re looking for?”

“If we can just figure out which way he went.”

“He had a campfire, but it was small; he didn’t stick around long. It looks like he rushed off that way.” “How can you tell all of that?”

“He dropped some stuff over there.”

“So, he got chased you think? Or was chasing?”

“Only one way to find out.”

We followed the wrapper debris to footprints in the mud. George was busy tasting trees, for some beat—brain reason, so I snagged another apple and took off looking around. Weeks Cemetery was long ago the final resting place for many ancestors, but that place was no longer for people. There were few remains of headstones around, but rather the skeletal remains of something else covered most of the area. We stood before what looked like a shelled out main street that had been left to rot for hundreds of years; a city lost underwater only now to be rediscovered, the water drained but the damage maintained. The layout of the debris field was difficult to comprehend; it was huge, and old as the ground that had grown up around it. Trees grew through the gaps in the metal. My resolve was set, however, my confidence was low. Whatever it was, it was Chad’s mystery; if I found him maybe I could get some answers, and stop worrying.

Inevitably, the trail ended. In a layout that reminisced a city block, the alien structures lined an open pathway. Several large building—sized frames clamored around, reaching towards open sky, scuttled husks of nothing any longer. Halfway up on the left side was a puddle of cackling water. It looked like the purest water ever, so clear you almost couldn’t tell it was anything at all. Blue flames bubbled off the water’s surface causing a frightening crackle as they slowly dissipated. From the puddle was a black char streak leading to a dog—sized char—chunk. We walked with utter trepidation. George looked at me and I nodded with pretend confidence. There was a lot of blood leading from the chunk into the distance. It was no dog.

Chad hacked off his right leg, mid—calf.

The blood led us right to the rest of his corpse.

His face expired in pain. I could tell he had been crying, his eyes were bloodshot red and his cold cheeks still damp.

He died from the blood loss, I could tell it didn’t take him long to bleed out.

Chad had stepped into the fire water, he hadn’t seen it and stepped in deep, past his ankle. He decided to rend the flesh from his bone to escape the rising flames. He traveled at night it seemed. He knew the dangers. He was the one who told
me
about the floating, about the burning water, but only George had known about the bulgasari.

Ejected from the rooftop onto our pathway, the bulgasari looked wretched and even startled. George ran away. I wanted to run, but the monster caught my eyes in its gaze. It held an aggressively defensive posture, as if to ward us away. In the moment I was too scared to notice… but it acted like a mother protecting its children. Did those things have children?

It chased me into the hollow structures, fueled by an intense rage that made lightening and smoke fume off her back excessively. It crashed and careened through strange metallic walls. The bulgasari’s movements were explosive, quick and short leaps with crashing paws and jab—like swipes.

She roared in an awful way, a way I knew was desperation, but at the same time reminded me of the moans and wails of all the ones like Grandpa, dying together in the most unnatural way.

George jumped from a cloud in the sky firing several volleys from the torch as he descended onto the bulgasari’s back, then stabbed her with a metallic shard the length of his arm. The bulgasari didn’t care much when George stabbed it, in fact she seemed to enjoy it at first, finally rising in a violent twist and upwards thrust landing George back on the ground. The torch slid across the ground on impact and George shut his eyes.

It loomed for several slow motion moments as if to decide on how hurt it might be. I noticed the torch nearby. The mother of bulgasari stood stunned, but the lightening off its back burst with empowered force that channeled through the wreaked walls; the smoke made it seem like growing midnight. I grabbed the gun and shot the final bullet into its neck. The torch—light pellets burrowed their way through the carapace of the beast, dripping out of its under carriage in a slow race. It whimpered then collapsed, as everything else does when it dies. The metallic clank when the bullets dropped from holes in its belly onto the floor sounded like what I imagined when sunlight reflects off frozen water droplets long caught in the planet’s orbit sounded like. There was a pleasant song—like quality to it, a tap—dance signifying the mother’s death. I wondered if it haunted those hypothetical bulgasari pups left behind.

Crawled. Crawled. All alone he crawled, and crawled, and crawled, at least four devrons around the side of the bank. I selfishly wondered if Chad thought of me at all.

His last act, a scribbled note on blood soaked paper and stolen ink:

Chad died in agony during his efforts to uncover truth and history, to find answers to questions people long forgot to ask as humanity slipped backwards through melioration. As Liz decided to bury him I had to wrap up the remains and carry them over my shoulder until we found the spot where we dug the devron deep hole. We hung our heads and watched the sun—filled hole, leaves on the wind, orange and dry from weeping, no longer draped in emerald, discarded as the Torch was into the pit before we filled it in and covered it with a stone that bore no name.

When looked upon logically, one can deduce that the nature of this world has been affected by the combination of alien influences and split atoms. A simple deduction, now, but why is this one location preserved? Are there other islands of preservation as well? My attempts to communicate this with Liz have failed. She’s enamored by the apples, withdrawn into a mental cocoon.

Somewhere, over gradual time, we forgot the basis of our whole.
Anarchy loosed upon the world and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity,
was told to me in one of Sarawati’s dreams by Michael Robartes. We seemed to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, who stood on the shoulders and corpses of those before them. Are we humbled by any of it?

We found something special, though, something outside of what we thought possible. I’m not sure if Liz had figured it out yet, what Chad was looking for, but we’d found it.

The debris is from one of the three interstellar vehicles that landed on the Earth. The aliens had advanced far beyond humanity, yet were vulnerable; they failed to predict how mankind would cognate their arrival.

Liz was lost in mourning. We buried Chad’s remains nearest where Liz thought her family’s plot sat, that was the best we could do and I told her Chad would have liked it there.

After two days of silent camping at the grave, we went on to explore the area of the empty field beyond the grave. Liz was in a silent state of shock, blankly attempting to follow along as I careened forward. We went past the field, across a dingle, and into a thickly wooded area. Liz fell down a steep embankment and I followed her to find us on a shady path overgrown by trees; the sunlight that pierced the canopy was blemished green and gold.

An irrigation canal trickled across the path. It was perfectly straight, leading to an opening in the ground held open by mechanized debris. We walked and walked and walked into the black, I knew not why. Liz didn’t say a word as she led us down the perfectly straight hall, she kept descending with no notion I was still there, and I stopped caring if we’d ever come back to reality. I could feel her pain and understood where her mind had gone; a circle of infinite quiets like when I carried pa.

Eventually I lost all feeling in my legs, but the path kept going as if we’d eventually reach the belly of the world, but I knew that wasn’t possible so I wondered where it could possibly lead and if this is what we were supposed to be afraid of.

“You can hear it, can’t you?” She muttered so softly I wasn’t positive I’d imagined her in the first place. Our only source of light was a golden red mist of various densities throughout the air.

She wouldn’t tell me what she heard, what was leading her, but after walking more k—devrons and still feeling as fresh as I did in the morning, we kept going. It didn’t take long after that, we saw a light and reached a room.

“Ah, finally, you have arrived.”

“Where are we?” Liz asked him with a calmness like I’ve never seen in her before, “What are you?” she spoke rhetorically as if to a child.

The room was larger than the whole of my childhood home. The curved walls formed a dome several sizes larger than the one dad and I saw distant weeks south of Boston
⁴³
only this one was still intact and a mix of blue and white and green, with blinking purples and orange. The room appeared something like a workshop filled with broken devices both theirs and ours. The center of the room was filled with formed light images depicting the night sky. All the stars were crashing all over as I watched on with amazement.

“My name was À¥ÐŁŒ, don’t be scared Creatures,” a holographic creature appeared in front of the stars and night, composed of the same wavelengths distinguished only by a thick black outline uttered at us.

“What are you?”

“It helps, they dictate me Lois.”

Lois seemed to toggle gloaming switches and keys.

“How long have you been down here?”

“Two hundred years or more, can be what I spent composing your species I at that time, all. Don’t expect to find a bit of Sapient life.”

I think it was a her, but like the stars the luminescence flickered and had an artificial air.

“You’re not real, are you?”

Lois seemed irked by the term ‘real’ and while it made no facial expression of indication it did rapidly tap at buttons with a sense of urgency.

“Holography is to separate the light from the object can later write, and construction technologies. It is used for the transmission of three—dimensional images as holograms. The hologram is an image, 3—d.”

A blue thick mist jet from the walls into our being, forced itself through our skin, forced us into a state similar to the time moments before falling asleep.

“Maybe there are moments, when possibility space of dream’s humanity. Unfortunately, we have those dreams you short. You would have expected and our intention is to anxiety among people it had, people he reacts violently we are conversation expense? And anyway, it is our think following delays have shame.”
⁴⁴

“I’m not sure I understand. George?” But I had not and could not say anything.

“Translation lexicon patching… voice protocol… adjusting… syntax errors… repairing. Your ancestors attacked us when we arrived.”

“Had you not considered we would react in fear?” Liz was reforging her own mind.

“Your planet’s transmissions were accidentally picked up by a probe network we sent into deep space. It was the first evidence of extraterrestrial sapient life. Deranged by this illumination we re—purposed several vessels and charted in your direction post haste. Our approach was not calculated; we expected you would be as impatient as we were to meet new life. The probability of alien life forms is high, that’s true, but the vastness of the void made it seem like finding it would be dubious. The chemistry of life, that which makes fauna, are the most common elements in the universe. Life happens relatively quickly with the most abundant ingredients. But you were the first we had the chance to meet; the only species we knew where to find.”

The alien went on and on. It spoke in a similar way as Saraswati in that it clearly had developed and accumulated knowledge over many years. We sat and listened to the words while deriving the shame and sorrow felt by the creature. It— this digitized mind— had spent the last two centuries time trying to learn as much about humanity as possible.

“My solitary goal has been to preserve whatever I was able to of the human race. As I undertook this task I found that despite any success I might have, I would never be able to capture a significant picture of it all; the sheer diversity of culture and wonderful variations of on the dataset. I’ve done all I could. I’ve archived it all in the hope we can mend some of the damage. I’ve cloned several minds onto data storage here in the ship. One day others from my world will come and perhaps we can rebuild and forge ourselves a new future.”