New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

Something in the air felt different as Brooks went back outside.

It could not be colder; his old home was already just as cold as the surrounding air, and the wind made no difference within his weather suit.

But it was changed all the same, and he uneasily put his hand where his sidearm would have been on a normal excursion.

It was not there, of course.  He was on Earth, the homeworld, and there was no native life that could be a threat to him.

Yet he felt a danger.  All his senses were on alert as he moved back towards the crawler.

He had walked almost out of town, he could see his vehicle, when the strange man came out from behind a building.

He walked out, between Brooks and his crawler, and stopped, staring at him.

He was nondescript; tanned skin, dark hair, brown eyes.  Rather short, and his clothes extremely plain.

And he wasn’t even wearing a weather suit.

Brooks continued to approach.  The man was making no overt signs of threat yet, but his senses screamed that something was terribly wrong.

“Hello,” he said cautiously.

The man said nothing, only watching him with unblinking eyes.  Even when the wind whipped towards him, he made no move, neither swaying nor blinking.

Brooks’s unease suddenly made sense, and he understood.

“You are a Shoggoth, aren’t you?” he asked.

The being only continued to watch him, and he was about to speak again when it finally talked.

“You are Brooks,” he said.  He sounded human, save for a subtle timbre that made a shiver go down Brooks’s spine.

“I am,” he replied, though it had not been a question.

The man turned.  “Come,” he said.

He could ignore the being and continue to his crawler.  Something inside told him that he probably should – but he did not.

Instead, he followed the Shoggoth.

The being said nothing, never even looking back at him, and having no difficulty with snow or climbing.  When Brooks fell behind, the Shoggoth stopped and waited with seemingly infinite patience.

They walked towards the foothills.  There was no way they could go that far, Brooks knew they were many miles away.  But as they walked further, he began to wonder.

They’d been walking over an hour, and he’d had very little information to go on.  He silently sent a signal for his crawler to navigate itself to his location.  He couldn’t do that in the town – a half-buried building could have collapsed under it, trapping his only transport.

The flatness of the immediate environs was broken as the Shoggoth ahead of him turned suddenly, and began to disappear under the snow.

As Brooks caught up, he saw that the being was walking down into a crevasse.

It was raw stone, all its harsh edges worn down by ice over the millenia.  It went down at a slow angle for ten meters, dropping only just under the surface, then veered off to the right.  A chasm above opened it to the air which he had been unable to see before.

He began to follow the being down.  The ramp was shallow, but slick, and he realized that it was not rock, but dense, ancient ice.

Some had survived through the centuries, he’d always known, but he’d never known about this one.

His boots clamped onto the ice with spikes to help him walk, but he was quickly being left behind by the Shoggoth, who seemed entirely untroubled by the slippery surface.

“Wait,” he called.

But the Shoggoth kept going, and Brooks sped up as much as he could.

Finally reaching the bend, he went past it – and saw a crowd waiting for him.

Thirty people stood in the cool dimness of the ice ravine, their eyes all fixed upon him.  Their faces were tranquil, and no two looked alike.  All ages, all sizes, with skin tones and features just as varied.

They had no systems that his could recognize.  Their faces were unknown to the records he had on-hand.

“Hello,” he said, feeling a tingle down his spine.  A strange pressure felt like it was crushing down on him.  The effect of so many of the strange beings all gathered together.

They were all Shoggoths.  They had to be.

None of them spoke, and he was not sure why they were here or what they wanted.

He waited, as they waited.

A male pushed through the group, and Brooks recognized the face as Kell’s.  But that didn’t mean it was him . . .

“Ambassador?” he asked.

“Captain Brooks,” the being replied with a slight nod.

“What are you doing here?” Brooks asked.

“I would ask you the same question,” Kell replied.

“I was born in Perry.  I am visiting my home,” he answered.

“You might say that I am doing the same,” Kell replied.  He looked up, towards the direction of the ruins of the town.  “What was once your home exists near mine, it seems.”

---

< Ep 4 Part 34 | Ep 4 Part 36 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

“To a safe trip!” Davo said, raising his glass.

Pirra, Alexander, and Eileen all raised their glasses to the toast.

“Here here,” Eileen said.

They drank.  The humans drank wine, while Pirra drank something they called soy sauce; when watered down it was non-toxic to her kind in limited qualities, and tasted a lot like some Dessei drinks.

Her eyes flickered between the members of the family.

This had been a good trip, she thought.  Alexander and his father had not argued once.  Perhaps it was because the topic of his father’s work had not come up – the elder Shaw seemed pleased as long as he got to tell someone, and Pirra was quite happy to be that someone.

Alexander had inherited some of the more gentle qualities of his mother; he was a neobotanist in her footsteps.  For hours, while Davo and Pirra had run off to explode things and play with ultra-hot plasmas, Alexander and his mother had gone over research and the latest breakthroughs in building new plant life from genetic scratch.

It was important work, she knew.  But as much as she loved Alexander, it was not her forte, and she rarely had anything much to add when he talked about work.

“Will your trip back out be as long as the one here?” Eileen asked.

“Not quite as long,” Pirra said.  “We’ll sync up with one of the heavy carriers that’s heading out of the system.  They’ve got permission to use their zerodrive, so we’ll be back at our ship in only a few hours.”

“I’ve still never taken a trip through zerospace,” Davo said.  “I’ve always been curious.”

“It’s a lot less exciting than a dashdrive,” Alexander said.  “Assuming nothing goes wrong, at least.”

“Have you ever been on a ship when something went wrong?” Eileen asked, glancing between her son and daughter-in-law.

“No, no,” Alexander said placatingly.

“I have,” Pirra said.  “Three times.”

Eileen gasped, and Alexander shot her a look, asking her with his eyes to not worry his mom.

Pirra only shrugged.  “In the Response field it’s not unusual.  But don’t worry, there’s a lot of ways out of such a situation – if you’re clever.”

“What happened?” Davo asked, his eyes sparkling with curiosity.

Pirra wondered if Alexander got his expressive eyes from his father.  “One of them was an experimental ship where we were tasked with rescuing the data before it accelerated too fast.”

“Too fast?” Eileen asked.

“Yes.  In Zerospace, momentum works differently.  Things will continually accelerate, until they’re moving too fast to be able to return back to our reality.  It takes about three days in most circumstances.  After that – we just don’t have a way to shed the momentum and slow down.  There are some very risky ways to try to come back anyway, but most likely you’d just explode into pseudo-light.”

“Pseudo-light,” Davo grumbled.  “That’s a neophysics particle, right?”

“Yes.  We’re not sure why, but they behave just like photons, so essentially the object would become a massive blast of gamma rays.  But rather than continuing on until they hit something, they rapidly decay into krahteons and seem to seep back into zerospace.”

“If not for that, they’d make for a hell of a weapon,” Davo muttered.

Alexander shot him a dirty look.

Pirra glanced to Alexander, trying to warn him off now.  Did they really have to have a fight at their last dinner . . . ?

“What do your parents have to say about these adventures of yours?” Eileen asked, adroitly shifting the topic.

Though it caught Pirra off-guard.

“Oh, ah . . . not much?  They are proud of my successes.”

“And that’s it?” Davo asked.

Alexander came to her rescue now.  “Dessei don’t tend to be as close to their parents and children as we are,” he said.  “So it’s nothing unusual.  In their own way, they really do care about her.”

“Oh, I see,” Eileen replied, looking troubled.

“Ah, well they’re an ancient people.  I’m sure it all works for them,” Davo said.

Pirra wondered if he was convinced.  He didn’t quite sound it.

It was . . . odd.  Perhaps she should be defending her people more, though Alexander at least explained the differences very politely.

The only part he said that was not true was probably the latter bit.  If her parents did care about her, they did a very good job of hiding it, even by Dessei standards.

“Do you talk to them often?” Eileen asked.  “I hope I’m not being rude – I just want to understand,” she added.

“You’re fine,” Pirra replied.  “We don’t talk often, but at certain times of year they message me.”

Her last such message had been succinct;

We are very proud of you, her mother had written.  And we request that you seek a divorce from your human immediately.

A lovely note, by their standards.

She took a sip of her drink to wash out the bitter taste.  Carefully, though; her real mouth, hidden under the fold of her chin, was little more than a tooth-lined maw, and humans tended to be bothered by it.

Alexander was probably the only one she’d known who wasn’t.  At least, he was the only one she’d let see it.  Even among Dessei there was a certain disrespect at seeing the mouth of someone you were not related to or close friends with.  Some ancient tradition about showing contempt by being willing to take your eyes off a potential enemy.

And thinking of danger brought a question that had been on her mind to the fore.

“I’ve been wondering,” Pirra began.  “What kind of plan do you have here if there’s an emergency?”

“First,” Davo said, leaning forward.  “We make sure no one’s been dabbling in teleportation!”  He laughed uproariously.

It must have been some kind of Phobosan in-joke, she thought.

She smiled, but then continued.  “I’m serious, though.  The moon is hard to catch, you have supply problems, and it’s just . . . such a unique place that it could have novel problems.  Do you guys have any plans in case something happened?”

“What could go wrong?” Davo said.

She hesitated.  She could understand Alex in his native tongue, but she was not great at telling the tones of other humans.  Her system translated his words, and she thought there was an edge to his voice.

She didn’t want to insult him . . .  but at heart, she was a Responder and she wasn’t going to mince words.

“If the moon began to break up, or something collided with it – or something big broke.  There are many possible scenarios.”

“Oh, you over-worry,” Davo said.  “Alex, does she always over-worry like this?”

“She’s good at her job, dad,” he replied.  “I’ve always thought you guys should have more emergency drills.”

“It’s fine,” Davo said.  “We can handle anything the Mars area can throw at us!  I mean, we’ve certainly got the ability to defend ourselves!”

Alex shifted, but before Pirra could interject, Eileen spoke.

“I know that you two . . . can’t have children, of course,” she said suddenly.  “But have you ever considered adoption?”

Alexander almost choked on his food.

“Mom,” he managed to say.  “That’s a little out of the blue, isn’t it?”

“I’m only curious,” she said quickly, seeming to regret changing the topic to this already.

“I’m sure with enough science they could have a child,” Davo said.

“Dad, no, literally it’s impossible for species from different worlds to have any interaction like that.  It’s a miracle that we’re not allergic to each other’s-“

“I mean with genetic re-writing, of course!  Dessei have that tech.  It’d be more like creating something from scratch that shares traits from each of you.”

“So not really our child at all,” Alexander replied dryly.  “And remarkably illegal, I might add.  Dad, do you even pay attention to mom’s work?”

“I failed genetics,” he said laughing.  “But where there’s a will, there’s a way!  You can’t just let a thing like genetics prevent-“

“Dad!”

“Alexander, I’m just saying that it can’t be ruled out!  Not saying you have to.  But for the science, wouldn’t you want to try?”

Eileen spoke.  “Davo, please drop this line of thought.  I just want to know if we’ll ever have grandchildren.  They don’t have to decide now, I just-“

Pirra slammed a hand down on the table, making the three humans jump.

“Adoption is not off the table,” she said firmly.  “The rest is a firm ‘no’.”

An awkward silence fell, but it did not bother her.  She was good at those, when it came to family.

At least this one wouldn’t last for years.

The meal was nearly finished, anyway, and Eileen soon stood.  “Pirra, dear, would you help me with these dishes?”

There were drones for that, but the woman seemed to like to do some busywork herself.  And Pirra was glad to help.

As they left the room, Eileen took the plates from her and put them in the cleaner, then turned to her.

“I’m so very sorry for bringing that up,” she said.  “And sorry for, well . . . everything Davo said.  He . . . thinks genetics is just like tinkering.”  She shook her head.  “I swear, that man – a genius in some ways and then a total . . .”  She trailed off.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Pirra told her, liking the woman greatly.  “I know that it’s important to parents to see their line continue on.  And that . . . well, that we can’t do that.”

“No matter what,” Eileen said, “the important part is that you and Alex are happy.  That’s the best thing I could wish for.”

Pirra felt a warmth in her chest.  “Thank you, Eileen.”

“Oh,” the woman said, laughing.  “You can call me ‘mom’ if you want.”

The casual human word had no equivalent in her language.  She couldn’t even quite make the sound; but the offer meant something to her all the same.

“Thank you, mom,” she said, the human-like smile coming as a second-nature and truly meant.

Eileen hugged her suddenly, and Pirra was thrown off again.  Her own mother had not hugged her since she was immature, and even then it had only been for warmth on a cold day.

As little emotion as it naturally would trigger, she still knew that it meant something coming from Eileen.

Awkwardly, she returned it.

“You are so good,” Eileen said.  “I’m so glad that Alexander met you.”

She thought back on her own days in her youth of fascination with humanity.  She’d been considered odd for her interest in another species.  At times, even something of an outcast.

But it had put her on the path to meeting Alexander – and Eileen and Davo.

“I’m glad, too,” she cooed, leaning into the hug.

---

< Ep 4 Part 33 | Ep 4 Part 35 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

There were no headstones for the thousands who had died.  Too many had died, too quickly, for anything other than a mass grave to be possible.  He had always thought that one day this place would be reclaimed, but now seeing as it bordered on the land ceded to the Shoggoths, it was unlikely that the town of Perry would ever live again.

Part of him was all right with that.

But there was a memorial, at least.  A marble, still maintained by a caretaker who came in on alternating weeks to clean and preserve their memory.  Brooks knew the man well, Sylus Tanaka.  He’d have to write to him soon, to thank him again for his work.  The man did not do it for accolades, though.  He had lost everyone in the fimbulwinter.

He had been older than Brooks, nearly 75 when the disaster had occurred, still in his prime.  Now, decades later, he was finally starting to approach the age where it showed.

The monument listed the names of over 9,000 people on each of its six faces.  It still didn’t cover all of them.  It had been a city of 70,000, and less than 6,000 had survived through the long winter.

The disaster itself had not dropped much wreckage on them.  But the ensuing disappearance of the sun from the dust and smoke of the fires had plunged them into true antarctic temperatures, as bad as some of the glacial periods.  Nothing had been built to withstand cold that extreme.  And there had been impacts, as debris in orbit came down.

Too much critical damage, as the time went on.  Too few supplies.  People had rationed and kept faith with each other, for years.  But eventually, the cold encroaching, with families falling asleep in their beds and never waking up, it had broken down.

The survivors had only lasted by digging down as deep into the ground as they could, using anything to keep warm, scrounging for food in the town.  Primitive hydroponics.  Never enough food.  Always hungry.  Shivering and burning off too many calories.

For a lot of them, it had been too much.

He gazed at the list of names.  Organized by their proximity to each other, to keep together, even in death, a community.

Ai Goto, Donovan Yamazaki, Ryo Takada, Lise Zhang, Li Chen, Bai Liang, Zaim Aliyya, Dasha Aldwin, Sivert Karol . . .   All the names of neighbors, childhood friends.

His eyes travelled to a familiar spot on the marble, and his thumb stroked over the name of Clemence Brooks.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, for the ten thousandth time to his younger sister, who had fallen asleep and passed to a mortal dream in the span of a night that had lasted for years.

Reaching into his pocket with his free hand, Brooks took out the taiyaki he’d picked up on his way here.  They had been her favorite treat.

He smiled slightly, remembering how they’d joked that these were the only fish she’d ever eat.

“Split it with you,” he said, his voice sounding even to his own ears like that of a boy.

Breaking it in half, he set the larger piece in the snow for her, and opened his face mask for a moment to put his portion in his mouth.  The wind slashed at him, a pain like a lash, but then he closed his mask and ate the taiyaki slowly.  Trying to savor it.

There, in the snow, he saw something else, that had apparently nearly been swallowed by the ice.

Carefully, be pulled it free.  It was a small plush seal.  On it, faded by the sun, were the words;

With love, from sis.  Always thinking of you.

-Maria

He re-settled it with the taiyaki against it, and rose.  With a last look, he turned, and continued on his path.

He was already exhausted, already feeling chilled to the bone even though his suit kept him warm, but his journey was not done yet.

---

The streets in the residential district were less intact than the earlier areas.  They were lighter, easier to knock down, and easier to disassemble for parts to repair other houses.

But his was still there.  It was still in good shape.  He knew that, because he’d been the one to scrounge and repair it.

His mind flashed back to a cold December morning.  His parents had said their goodbyes the night before, leaving before he’d even gotten up.  A close friend of the family’s had woken him, telling him there had been an accident.

It had been more from the light outside the window, that strange shade of reddish gray, that he’d realized just how serious things were.

With the neighbor – a kindly woman who he’d always called Aunt, even though they weren’t related – he’d gone outside.

A red glow seemed to swallow the Northern skyline, and the sound of booms still managed to reach them, though the impacts were thousands of miles away.

Or perhaps those had been the sound of smaller impacts nearby.  Those had started less than an hour after the initial catastrophe.

Later on, he’d seen footage of the collapse start; the initial shudder that no one could ever explain, that a million theories had been invented to explain.  All inadequate, yet they all accepted them, because how else could you understand what had happened?

The orbital ring had been built up over hundreds of years.  It should have been nearly impossible to have it fall, and yet the shaking had quickly become resonant, and not long after it had fallen apart.

Then the space elevators around the equator had collapsed.  That was where his parents had been, going to their jobs that had kept them away from home three days a week and with he and his siblings for four.  Just bad luck it had come on the day they were off to work.

If not for the supply drops shot down from above, they all would have died.  But they’d been rare, never enough.  Or . . . rather just enough.

With the dense kessler syndrome, even those drops had been risky.  Though unmanned, so much small debris was circling for so long that they risked a collision that would make it even worse.

Many had gone off-course, and as soon as he could he’d started volunteering to be among those to go retrieve what they needed . . .

He’d been standing outside the house for ten minutes now, he realized.

He felt cold even though his suit told him his skin temperature was the same as it would be in a temperate environment.  Even his face was back up to a pleasant temperature, though he still felt a tingle where the wind had touched him.

Going to the door, he saw that the mat was buried under ice.  Only the steps up kept the door from being blocked.

But it was okay.  He’d not locked the door the last time he’d left.

It was hard to force open, but he managed, and went inside.

The house still seemed to exude warmth somehow.  But it felt like cold mockery, a hint of false comfort that was taunting.

The main hall led to a living room empty of furniture.  He’d wound up burning it all.  Even the carpet had been torn up and fed to the flame.

The kitchen, his bedroom – that he’d deliberately emptied so long ago.

His parents’ room.

It was the only room somewhat intact.  Though anything wooden or cloth had been salvaged, he’d set up just a simple metal sheet on which he’d carved their names.  There could be no burial of what had burned in the atmosphere.  This was the only physical remembrance of Nabil and Dorothy Brooks.

The darkened image frames once had shown pictures of them, until their batteries had drained.  Nothing could be spared to charge them, however much he’d wanted.  Even the atomic batteries, that lasted decades, had been taken away to help power something that grew food or kept them warm or cleaned the water.

Lowering himself to his knees, he sat back on his haunches, simply looking at the memorial, lost in his own memories.

“Mom,” he said.  “Dad.  I missed you.”

---

< Ep 4 Part 32 | Ep 4 Part 34 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

The snow crawler came to a shuddering stop.

Brooks checked that his suit was set to meet the ambient air temperature – a balmy -30C – and put his helmet on.  It was lightweight, the front a curved glass panel that was as clear as air.

He opened the door.

The wind blasted past, but despite its strength there was nothing to blow.  Antarctica received very little snowfall, and what had come down recently had been long since swept away.

He felt cool, but not cold, his suit working well.

He walked forward.  He was only at the outskirts, and he had a ways left to go.

Structures still stood in what had once been a town.  Many were half-buried, the snow that had fallen in the previous decades having built up to the point of turning to a dense firn that resisted the scouring winds.

He walked on, observing.

Some of the houses were buried up the first floor on some sides, out of the wind.  Others were already partially submerged in ice.

The onset had been rapid, and more intense than they had anticipated.  He wondered if, millions of years ago, when this land had first frozen, if the earliest ice had formed as quickly.

There was not the slightest sign of life.  What that was Earthly could live in such a place?

Certainly not humans, not with the conditions that had come after the Ringfall.  Too much damage had been done across the equator for help to come.  Things were bad everywhere, but short of the devastation areas themselves, none had been worse off than here.

It had been the follow-up debris de-orbiting down upon them that had slowly wrecked their oasis – that and the fimbulwinter that had brought the cold.

He looked out at an empty field.  He could recognize that it had once been a park.  He could recall days in his youth of running across the grass that grew in the summer months.  That building, just beyond, had been a restaurant.

Without even thinking about it he found himself crossing the field, walking in what he imagined were his own footsteps – though the ground was now a meter below him, under firn and ice.

The park seemed smaller than he remembered, and he reached the restaurant.  The windows were still intact, but he knew a way to get in.

Going around back, he found that the rising ice had made it easier to climb the dumpster and reach the second floor window that had been broken.  Even the sharp edges of the glass had been broken and worn down, by hundreds of feet that had come in here, seeking temporary shelter, or hoping to find some kind of food or fuel.

He went in.

The floor tiles were more faded than in his memory.  All of it was smaller than he remembered.  But he’d been a young man the last time he’d come in here.

Walking deeper, he knew this had once been an apartment for the couple that had run the restaurant.

There was little sign of them.  The man, Adam, had died early on.  His wife had survived a few more years, but then she too had died of hypothermia after the primary reactors for the town had to be shut down.

Her body had long since been taken away and given a proper burial, and their personal effects had all been taken or lost.

Anything that could be burned had been pried up, and there wasn’t even a bed left on the metal frame.

On the floor, he saw just one empty image frame, the screen that had projected various photographs having long-since lost power.

Following the path he’d taken when, he too, had been scavenging, he arrived in the kitchen below.

There, on the tile.  He could still see the dark stain – or at least a trace of it.  It had not been scoured clean in all these decades.

Kneeling, he brushed a hand over it.

Blood had spilled here, from a knife into the side of a man who had been trying to kill him for a bag with three dented emergency rations and a single mostly-empty fuel cannister.

The first time he’d ever killed a man.

He hadn’t even known it at the time.  His knife had struck deep as the man was raising a brick to crush his skull.

The man had tumbled back into the burners, knocking one off its seating, it had crashed to the floor, and he could still see it there, at an angle to the wall.

After that, he’d run and Brooks had let him.  He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he’d been scrounging, and he was good at it most of the time, but this man had come from another town further towards the mountains that were even colder, whose power had been knocked out by falling debris long before.  Perhaps the last of a dying town.

He’d run off into the snow, and no one had ever seen him again.  Years later, a drone scan had found him.  He’d bled out, losing his strength in the cold until he’d gone to sleep and never awoken.

Like so many others, except he might not have faced that fate if Brooks had not stabbed him, no matter how justified it had been.

He left the store, though not running as fast as he did when he’d only been sixteen.

---

< Ep 4 Part 31 | Ep 4 Part 33 >