Back to the Bubble - Chapter 2 - Deafening Silence
16 Nov 2019Smertkopf
As I record this log, I have one hundred jumps left until I reach Sagittarius A. My disquiet had been growing with each step closer to the Great Annihilator. Gone was the thrill of discovery as I uncovered system after system and world after world, the wonder replaced with a cold malaise of the spirit as I went about my exploration work mechanically and almost without conscious thought, the motions becoming automatic. So engrossed was I in my dark thoughts that Midnight found himself unable to get my attention during a scan of an icy moon orbiting a Class V gas giant."Commander Smertkopf!" he finally yelled, turning the ship's audio up to maximum and causing me to damn near leap through the cockpit roof and out into space in my astonishment.
"What the hell is it, damn you?" I snapped angrily, and immediately regretted my harshness. "...I'm sorry about that, Midnight; I was lost in my thoughts, and you startled me."
"I called for you three times, sir," the old man said, sounding a little wounded. "I was afraid that you were having another...episode."
"Hell," I sighed wearily, "I may have been for all I know, but I think this time it was just honest woolgathering. Were you only checking up on me, or was there something you needed to tell me?"
"Both, Commander."
"Explain."
Although he currently exists as a disembodied intelligence residing partly in my ship's databanks, Midnight still has a habit of occasionally making a throat-clearing sound before speaking, a holdover from his human days. Old habits die hard, I suppose.
"Ahem," he began. "I've been spending some of my idle time analyzing the gravitonic transmission from the galactic core that we received just before your period of incapacity. It was remarkable in many respects, but in others it was downright uncanny. For instance, the graviton transmission arrived in a shaped tightbeam configuration, and the beam was shaped and oriented in such a way as to encompass our ship and nothing else."
"And this is significant because..."
His annoyance at my witlessness was clear in his voice. "Sir, gravitons have never been known to propagate in such a configuration. Beyond that, they move at the speed of light in a vacuum. So, can you imagine what the odds of us being in exactly the right space-time coordinates to record such an occurrence might be? And please don't say 'astronomical'."
Either I am growing predictable or Midnight is growing into a mind reader, because that was exactly the word I was about to use.
"Then let's go with 'highly unlikely'," I conceded.
"'Bloody impossible' would be my choice of words, Commander. If our being in exactly the right place and time in all of the universe to be hit by existence's most unlikely graviton beam and your subsequent unconsciousness happened by mere coincidence, then I must insist that we report all of our findings to a university department of statistical analysis as soon as possible so that we might collect our accolades for recording perhaps the most unlikely chance event ever witnessed in sapient history."
"What are you driving at, Professor?"
"If it was not a coincidence," Midnight said with a sigh of exasperation, "then it was deliberate. And if it was deliberate, then whomever or whatever shot that graviton beam at us did so some six thousand years before we arrived to detect it, and managed to hit us at exactly the correct time and with perfect accuracy."
"Okay," I said pensively, "I've got to admit...that's pretty strange."
A minute-long silence stretched between us before Midnight broke it with a question.
"What did the voice say to you, Commander?"
A sudden and irrational anger flared up in me, accompanied by a wave of equally nonsensical paranoia.
"I don't remember!" I barked. I was lying to the old man, and I could hear the churlishness in my tone, but I seemed helpless to stop feeling the abrupt sense of being persecuted or even indeed to recant my falsehood. Another long silence took hold, only now it had grown awkward and a little ominous.
"Forgive me, sir," Midnight said at last, his voice sad and apologetic but also firm, "but I don't believe you."
"Oh?" my tone had become icy and vaguely threatening. "Are you calling me a liar, my friend?"
"I would not call you a liar, because I haven't known you to be one for the time that we've traveled together," said Midnight, a bit of anger entering his own voice, "but I do think that you are lying to me when you say you don't remember what the voice said to you."
"And what makes you think that, Professor? Are you running scans on me, looking for fluctuations in bodily functions that might indicate deceit, or perhaps doing brainwave analysis on me?"
"It could not be more plain that you are lying to me, Commander," Midnight replied coolly. "A child could see as much. The question I'd have you answer is why?"
In the face of that simple query my anger and resentment evaporated, and as I ran a trembling hand through my sweat-dampened hair I muttered, "One word."
"Come again, sir?"
"One word," I repeated, but more loudly this time. "That's all it says to me. While I'm awake, anyway."
"What is the word, sir?"
Before I could answer him, it happened again. A feeling like a pair of white-hot metal pins being jammed into my temples threw me out of the command chair and to the deck, writhing and screaming in agony whilst all around me the cockpit lights and panels flickered spasmodically and the discordant jangling of a myriad of ship alarms filled the cockpit with a cacophony of electronic feedback and static. As loud as all the tumult was, the Voice was louder still.
"...Come...To...Me..."
The pain was immense and all-encompassing; my own screams were lost in it. And when the sweet escape of unconsciousness finally and mercifully arrived to rescue me from my bottomless torment, I fled into its arms like a lover.
I woke with my face pressed to the cold metal grille-work of the cockpit floor, a film of drool coating one cheek. I felt like I had the universe's worst hangover, almost paralyzed by a throbbing ache that seemed to reach down into the very marrow of my bones. I don't know how long I lay there before I realized that the cockpit was utterly silent, and when my pain had dulled enough so that I could again contemplate moving, I slowly and nauseously rose to my knees and then to my feet, using the command chair to brace myself as I did so.
"Midnight?" I called, my voice bouncing off of the hard surfaces of the empty cockpit and coming back to me as an eerie, wasted echo of itself.
No answer. I called again. And again. And many times more after that. For at least an hour I wandered the ship like a forlorn ghost, calling out 'Midnight?' over and over and over.
Still no answer. I should have been terrified, but a strange, numb sort of calm had descended upon me. Wherever the old man got off to, I decided that he must be fine. I was suddenly sure that everything would be fine, so I returned to the bridge and resumed the command seat, manually punching in the next system and pointing the ship's nose in its direction.
One hundred jumps left...I mustn't keep the Voice waiting.
Ex Nihilo, In Nihilum.
o7
CMDR Smertkopf