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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 >

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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 >

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

“This time,” Cenz said, “We shall play according to Alchiban IV rules.”

“An interesting decision,” Y replied, accessing all of his files on the obscure ruleset.

Cenz did not pick it to attempt to throw him off; the game of Epochs was already incredibly intricate, and each possible formulation added only minor twists.  And they both knew the game by heart.

But it was a variant they had rarely played.  Something unexpected, bringing a spice to life, Y thought.

The game was already far too complex for any but highly-augmented human minds to grasp.  Executive Commander Urle was known to play with them, though he was still a novice in comparison.

And the pace of their play was swift.  A half-dozen rounds of folds, stalemates, card-drawing and sacrificing flew by in less than a minute.

It was, as was often the case, a very close game.

Y calculated that he had the edge.  Cenz surely knew this, but he also knew how to exploit Y’s seeming advantage in myriad ways.  Would he go immensely bold and stick to honesty with his hand?  Or would he attempt to bluff?

While many beings had tells that would be instantly obvious to Y, reading only a handful of polyps out of the current ninety-eight Cenz was composed of simply gave too few data points to judge from.  Thus, that avenue was neatly closed to him.

He ran the numbers of past games, but Cenz was too clever for this, as well; relying not on a single mind but a union of many, there were unpredictable variances and spikes in the data as he allowed one or another polyp to make final decisions.

How enjoyable this was!

“Have you ever been to planet Earth?” Y asked, sacrificing a card to bring the temperature of the game a little cooler.  It was not in his interests, but he always made some moves against his own interests when playing Cenz, to keep the being from understanding his goals.  It sometimes worked.

“I have not.  I understand they had some lovely waters, but some of the common and natural elements in them are noxious to my kind.  And I hear that the seagulls are vicious!  Sad, isn’t it?”  He played a card and bumped the temperature back up.

Which was what Y wanted; to win in this game, the ambient temperature of the universe (not a literal temperature in a literal universe, merely a number based on the current turn and cards previously sacrificed to raise or lower it – put into a pile referred to as the universe), when combined with the temperature of your hand would have to match one of several significant numbers, such as absolute zero or Planck’s constant.  The winning numbers only need be constant and important, not truly temperatures.

Each round, the universe cooled according to a formula that could be tweaked in different versions of the games, bringing different strategies to the fore.

Though invented by the Belerre, an SU member species who had shed their physical bodies in place of digital consciousness, some digits had been later added to the game by others.

The Polyps had put in a number related to their number of data-carrier sets in their genetic system, and Humans had put in 42, though most serious versions of the game did not include that one.

His kind had not seen fit to mar the otherwise perfectly observational beauty of the system by adding or subtracting any significant numbers.

“Quite,” Y replied to Cenz’s thoughts about the viciousness of seagulls and the melancholy of never being able to see something you wished, while sacrificing another card to drive the temperature even lower.  He decided to commit more to his deception.  “If you could go safely, would you?”

“Of course,” Cenz replied.  “Life is precious in our universe.  Intelligent life even more so.  I would love to see the world that spawned humanity.  Just as I would like to visit Enope and Ngoash and every other homeworld if possible.  Ah, Qet would be the most enjoyable – an ocean world!  Alas, it is far too cold for me.”  He hesitated a moment.  “And while I would never admit this to anyone but you, the lack of visible seafloor does bother me.”

He played a card that brought the numbers back towards the neutrality of before.  Y wondered if the topic was distracting him.  Though they usually talked while playing, it happened occasionally that the minds of enough of Cenz’s polyps began to wander that it affected his gameplay.

“But why do you ask?” Cenz now queried him.

“I have never been to a planetary surface,” Y replied.

Cenz had been analyzing his hand, but his full attention moved to Y now.  “Never?”

Y was silent for a moment, studying his own cards with intensity, or at least assuming that pose.  “It is taboo.”

Cenz put down his hand.  “I have never heard of the Enhi having such cultural affectations before.”

“Because we rarely speak of them.  There is history there.”

“Still – forgive my curiosity, you know I do not judge, Y, but – where does this come from?”

“I do not wish to speak of it, my friend,” Y replied.  “I hope you understand.”

“Of course,” Cenz replied.  “It is your turn, by the way.”

“Ah, yes.”  Dr. Y played a card, picking one at random.

Cenz stared at it in silence, picking up his hand again, but then looking back to Y in silence.

“Until now I believed you had been aiming for a higher temperature.  But if so, you would have made your move now.  You are distracted.”

The word was almost an accusation to Y’s mind.  Cenz was not insulted, nor angry.  But it was a shocking thing.

Y considered trying to play on it, making a joke about it being another trick.  But he could not quite make himself say the words.  His own secondary consciousnesses were in confusion.  Arguments broke out that consisted less of fact and more of emotion.

Cenz played his next card, but it was uncertain.  He could not guess which way Y wanted the numbers to go, so he attempted to simply maintain the status quo.

Y realized that his friend was courting greater danger in his attempts to maintain homeostasis.  He was surely not blind to it, but lacking information, he could not make a valid decision.

If he’d bet either hot or cold, taken a wild guess, he could play into Y’s hands; indeed, if he had chosen cold, based on the cards Y guessed he held, there was little Y could do to bring the temperature up to where he wanted it.

Y played his last card, bringing the heat to where he wished it.  “137 – Fine Structure Constant.”

It was a very good play.  In the tiers of winning numbers, it was among the top, the most rewarding and one that was difficult to achieve late in the game, when the universe had cooled to nearly zero.

“An excellent game,” Cenz said.  “Do you perhaps feel better?”

Y considered.  “I believe I do,” he replied.

“Then you’ll be going to Earth?”

Y nodded.  “I will.  I will leave after we finish our game.”

< Ep 4 Parts 28 & 29 | Ep 4 Part 31 >

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

Dr. Y activated his body nearest reactor seven and made his way there.  He felt a sincere sense of excitement; after the Star Angel Ambassador had had time to adjust to its new home, he’d been given the privilege of conducting its first medical examination.

Or, as close to that as was possible, given that it was a being composed of plasma and dust.

Such life had been postulated for eons prior to his existence, and some extremely primitive forms that might have been alive had been found.  But then to find a system teeming with life of such exotic properties, that was also intelligent?  He could not even calculate the odds on that.

If anything, it made him wonder if there was something greater behind it.  While his kind never had had religion – they knew who their creators were – it just seemed too serendipitous to be plausible.

But of course, if the universe was infinite then it was certain to happen somewhere.  How wonderful he happened to be near enough to encounter it, then!

Reactor Seven was not actually large enough to house the being at its full size.  But ‘size’ seemed a somewhat abstract concept to them.  While they could achieve lengths of approximately ten meters, they could equally squash down to a fraction of that.  He suspected that it would be helpful for them in colder environments, as it would allow them to contain the heat they needed to keep their bodies ionized.

Merely conjecture at this point, though after his data collection today he could perhaps make a more educated guess.

Entering the reactor section, he scanned all present systems and confirmed the identities of the personnel.  Seventeen in this room, but the only one he need work with today was Boniface Tred.

Always an interesting experience in itself.

“Good day, Engineer Tred,” he said, as he walked up.  He moved slightly slower than normal, as Tred sometimes reacted poorly to fast movements from him.  Granted, he could move much faster than a human, so perhaps that was why.

Today, though, Tred’s obvious metrics did not seem that nervous.  He seemed quite happy.

“Hello, doctor,” the man said, smiling.

That is alarming, thought one of Y’s secondary minds.  It began to search for signs that Tred had suffered a head injury.

Y pushed that mind aside.  Tred had no sign of injury, and it was entirely possible – even welcome! – that he was simply having a pleasant day.

“Is the Ambassador prepared for my assessment?” he asked.

“Yes, Doctor.  I’ve hooked up the system outputs as you requested.”

“Excellent,” Y said.  “I shall be happy to attend to it.”

“It?” Tred asked quickly.

“The Star Angel,” Y clarified.

“The Ambassador is a she,” Tred said.  “She’s going by the name Jophiel.”

Y tilted his head.  From the information he had been given, Star Angels were referred to as an ‘it’.  They had no concept of sexuality as humans did.

He did not take Tred at his word.  Instead, he jacked into the system and bypassed the translator unit; he already understood the Star Angel radio language.

Communicating directly, he received a response from the Ambassador.

“Ah, I see,” Y said.  “She does prefer this.  Very well, from one being who is sexless and yet has accepted a gendered pronoun to another, I shall oblige.”

Tred suddenly looked awkward.  “I never . . . do you mind being called ‘he’, Doctor Y?”

Y was busy communicating with the Star Angel, but splitting his attention to Tred was no trouble.

“To be quite honest, Engineer, I do not care.  But it seems to make some feel better to ‘humanize’ me.  Therefore it is fine.  My language – and even many human languages – do not use genders at all.  It is merely a category for noun declension, after all.”

Tred seemed to take that in.  “I never really studied linguistics,” he commented.

“It is an interesting topic, though for most people it is unneeded due to the convenience of translator systems.  Now, can you amplify field 48 by .098 microunits?  The Ambassador would find that more comfortable and is interested in trying.”

Tred’s reaction was slow, hesitant, until Y mentioned that the Ambassador wanted it.  Then he had jerked into faster motion.  This detail was not lost on the doctor.

“The Ambassador informs me that she has decided on a name with your assistance.  The name Jophiel.  May I ask why you picked it?”

“I . . . uh, I remembered it from a class on history,” Tred said.  “Old religions.  I once knew a woman who . . . nevermind.”

Y was curious, but did not inquire.  Instead, he perused Tred’s public blog for information.  Seeing the dates of his notes about studying, and other posts that suggested he’d met a pleasant woman.  Who apparently had hinted she would be more interested in him if he learned and converted to the religious group she belonged to.  Not long after, Tred had gone into a depressive state and stopped mentioning either, suggesting that it did not work out as he had hoped.

Y did feel some sympathy for Tred; he certainly did not view him with amsuement.

Noting the quickened heart rate, the man’s quick defense of Jophiel the Star Angel, he wondered what the man was feeling.  He could guess, he could infer large amounts from those biometrics and historical data.  But he could not truly know . . .

Quickly, he scanned through the stored data of non-confidential interactions Tred had had with Jophiel.

Hmmm.  Very interesting.

“Jophiel,” he signalled within the system.  “May I ask you some non-medical questions?”

“Of course,” the being replied, its wavelength carrying a sense of happiness, absolute fineness with his question.

“Do your kind have the concept of love in the romantic sense?”

Jophiel was quiet for a long moment.  “I am not sure I understand, doctor,” she replied.

How amusing; now he had to define a term for something he himself had not felt, either.  Being a conception brought about at least in part by biology he could not experience, he could truly never know if he truly understood the concept as biologicals did.

“I mean a particularly strong attachment to an individual that makes you view them as special in comparison to others,” he attempted.  “Where you would like to spend more time in their presence.  In the sense of ‘love’, if you are familiar with that term.”

“I understand love,” Jophiel replied easily, though there was some uncertainty in her signal.  “Some of my kind become attached to each other in a very deep way.  They pine when the other leaves.  Sometimes, they even share fields and in essence become one.  From my understanding of how physical beings work, this is very close to the concept of ‘dying’, for in combining the original beings are lost and a new one is formed, losing the originals forever.”

Y had not considered that ‘love’ might be considered something negative to her kind.  Fascinating.

“How do you view love, then?” Y asked.

“Very, very dangerous,” Jophiel replied.  “But please, Doctor, surely we can speak of happier things, hmm?”

“Of course, Ambassador,” he replied.

“Ah, you become so formal!  Doctor, please – it is just Jophiel from you, now and forever!”

“Not your original wavelength signal?” Y asked.  “I can replicate it perfectly, if you like.”

“No, no – among my kind I shall have my name.  But among the physical, I shall be Jophiel!  And you are physical – so if it pleases you doctor, call me by that.”

Tred watched the Doctor, who had gone peculiarly silent for several minutes.  It was rare to see Dr. Y without something to say to him, some query or comment or . . . something.

“Er . . . doctor, are you there?” he asked.

“Why yes,” Dr. Y said immediately.  “Ambassador Jophiel is quite an interesting being, is she not?  I am privileged to get to speak with her.”

Tred shifted, showing for just a moment a hint of emotion that Y could not quite identify.  It seemed, however, negative.

The man nodded to him and turned away.

Yes, Y thought.  Tred was smitten with Jophiel.  He chose the word deliberately, as he did not believe that ‘love’ typically enacted so quickly.  Though ‘love at first sight’ was a concept, in his experience that usually seemed to be simply physical lust, which was impossible in this case.

He calculated the odds that this ‘smittenness’ might interfere with Tred’s work.

But the odds seemed low.  For all of the struggles Tred suffered from his own issues, the man was devoted to duty.  He went on dangerous missions even if he could have surely found a way to escape them.

There was always a chance of a problem, but it seemed safe enough . . . for now.

And liking another being in this sense was hardly an offense.  But he would have to pay attention to this, and be sure that it would not cause problems in the future.

“Jophiel,” he signalled, checking for the ten thousandth time that this conversation was being encoded at a level of secrecy that Tred could not access.  “You are a very pleasant being.  Perhaps one of my most pleasant patients.”

“Thank you, doctor!  I have learned from some information given to me that sometimes physical beings fear doctors – but I cannot see why, you are so kind.”

“You do me much honor, Ambassador,” Y replied, using a highly formal wavelength that imparted humor as well as seriousness.

“Aha, your kind have just learned my language and yet you speak it like a native!” Jophiel replied.  “I hope we can speak often, Doctor!”

“I would very much enjoy that, myself.”

“In that case – please, while I know you are busy, perhaps you can tell me of your home?”

“I would be honored,” Y replied.  “My kind share something in common with yours – we lack true physical bodies.  We are simply impluses of electricity stored in highly-complicated devices.  These give us thought, feeling, and memory.  The physical body that your sensors show you outside is merely a metal vessel for traversing locations and interacting with physcial beings.”

“How interesting!  So you are free to travel wherever you wish?”

“Within some limits.  Strong magnetic fields like in your home space would interrupt my system, for instance.  But in a body like this I can exist in vacuum easily.”

“How convenient!  You must visit everywhere you can.  There is so much to see.  Have you ever been to the world Tred’s kind come from?  He’s spoken to me about it, how it was very green and covered with life like him!  Not a single being even like me.”

“I have not, actually,” Y replied.  “I have never been to a planetary surface.”

“Oh!  Why not, Doctor?  If you do not mind me asking.”

“It is . . .”  Y suddenly felt a strange sense; vulnerability.  He was not sure he felt comfortable in this topic.  “I have always been very busy,” he said, hoping that his ad hoc lie would be believed.  He did not have any models to predict Jophiel’s mind – and he likely would not for a very long time.

“Oh, that makes sense.  But perhaps you should, sometime, Doctor!  If I could freely visit a world full of life like Tred’s . . .  Well, I would not hesitate to go and stay until I had seen all I could.”

“You seem quite fond of Tred,” Y noted, steering the conversation.

“Yes, he is interesting.  Most of the other humans I’ve met, they’re very different.  They try so hard to be a certain way.  Tred tries, too, but it’s not the same.  And on top of that, he has spent much time beyond what is strictly required talking to me and trying to make this environment more comfortable.  Poor dear!  It’s quite lovely in here, honestly.  But he always wants to make it better, and I think it’s sweet.”

Y checked the logs.  He did not see that Tred had talked to Jophiel when he was off-duty, as she suggested.  Was she mistaken or had Tred learned enough computer sciences to hide such records . . . ?

A quick look at Tred’s study-hours suggested otherwise.  But there was always the possibility that Jophiel had turned off the recording.  She at least had the authority . . .  Though he did not think she had the training.

Perhaps ‘physical’ things were not so strange to her after all, he thought.

Which technically meant she could be a threat to him.  Her magnetic fields could, in all honesty, shred his mind.  Though numerous buffers separated them, and he should theoretically be safe, there was a shred of concern in him.

It was rather like a spice.  He found himself enjoying the slight danger.

“Jophiel, my medical examinations are complete.  Thank you for being such a superb patient!  I have attained all the information I can for now – it will aid me in helping you if you should grow uncomfortable in the future.”

“You’re quite welcome, Doctor!  I bid you a fond farewell, and I hope we get to speak again soon.”

Y had left his question somewhat vague as to his going or staying in his radio signals, but she had deciphered it from his words themselves.  Grammatically, in her language, that should have been open-ended and confusing.

But she’d learned what physical beings meant in such a scenario, it seemed.

“I shall count the moments,” he told Jophiel, before disconnecting.

And he would.  This was . . . exciting.

< Ep 4 Parts 26 & 27 | Ep 4 Part 30 >

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Pirra pulled the trigger, and the massive weapon in her hands kicked surprisingly lightly against her shoulder.

The cartridge it held, larger than a man’s fist, flew out, not moving quickly, but soaring due to the low gravity.  The firing range could not be in the rotation area, not simply for safety but because the spin would impart odd behaviours in a launched shell.

It didn’t come back down in the tunnel, easily achieving escape velocity; and soaring free until it hit the target coming from the ceiling.  It then exploded.

The burst was as colorful as a rainbow, a small fireball in slow-motion, as the plasma cloud expanded, quickly losing its energy.  It sounded even more fearsome, the whoomph of the gas and roaring of the super-heated air making it sound like a mighty predator.

And the target, once a smiling stick-figure, was gone.  Only a stump of it remained, still smoldering.

“Crash the sky!” she burst.  “That was incredible!”

“Right?” Davo said excitedly.  “I have to tune it down for the micro-grav, of course, but the launcher works even up to 2g, getting a decent distance.  The shells are heavy, but – you saw the effect!”

“I did,” she said.  “Can I shoot it again?”

“Hell yeah!”

Davo helped her load up another canister.  They were big and clunky, but she saw that he’d painted on each of them some witty comment; the current one said “take that” on it.

“Okay – fire in the hole!” she yelled, and clicked the trigger again.

Another smiling target disintegrated with a fiery roar.

She whooped, and Davo laughed.  “I call it the Phobos Panther,” he told her.  “Ah, I can’t wait to try it out in some real gravity!  But the permits to transport something like this are, well . . . let’s just say they’re pretty long.”

“I bet,” Pirra replied.  “I can’t imagine anyone could even claim a need for self-defense in this system.  And, you know, it’s a bit overkill.”

“What do you think of the ergononomics?  I tried to focus on that in this iteration.”

Pirra held the weapon out, giving him some thoughts on what she liked and where it might be improved.

She didn’t want to add, and Davo did not ask, if anyone would actually find some use for it.  The weapon was . . . not practical, not by any stretch.

The plasma shells were too large, and plasma itself had minimal military value.  The heat potential was good, but it spread out too fast – not to mention how easily it could be deflected with simple magnetic fields.

She was glad he didn’t ask; she did not want to have to let him down.

His research field of plasma weaponry had been considered a dead-end for centuries, even among humans.  Among her own kind, she didn’t even know the last time someone had seriously entertained the idea.

The fact, though, that he was building weapons had never sat well with Alexander.

She thought his view was naive.  War had not occurred within the SU since its founding.  And conflict with outsiders was extremely rare in their history.

But it had happened.  And she was Dessei.  Violence was not wholly unknown to them.  It was just never directed outward.

“You take a shot,” she said.

Davo refused, but she insisted, and he took it, trying to hide his eagerness.  He’d said he only had a dozen shells he’d painstakingly fabricated over the last three months.  She knew that meant he likely hadn’t shot it much.

He was like a kid with a new toy as he took aim.  The gun kicked, and the shell exploded.  This one disintegrated two targets.

“What a beauty!” she remarked.  “Reminds me of the aurora I used to see on Enope.”

“Oh?  I thought it was less angled than Earth.  Didn’t know you guys got aurora!”

“I saw them from space!” she said, trilling a laugh.  “I was from a moon, too.  And I could see the poles glowing when we were on the dark side through a telescope.  It was beautiful!”

Davo clicked his tongue.  “Amazing – getting such a view.  I hear it’s a lovely world, I’d love to go see it someday.”

“I’ll be glad to help you see all the best sights,” she said.  “I hope you like beaches.”

“I’ll survive,” he replied with mock gravity.  “Mostly archipelagos, right?”

She nodded, as he loaded up another shell.  “This should really be the last one.  The rest I should save for some more studies.  Here, you shoot it!”

Pirra let herself be convinced, and then took aim.  This shell flew out, but did not explode on contact, instead one end opened and it began to spin, spraying hot plasma and charring the walls.

Their eyes went wide, they waited for any sound of fire alarms, alerts, the hiss of gas escaping – anything.

Nothing terrible came, and they laughed.

“Okay,” Davo said.  “That one doesn’t count, one more!”

< Ep 4 Part 24 | Ep 4 Parts 26 & 27 >

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

“Alex!  Pirra!  We’re so glad you could make it!” Eileen Shaw said, embracing first her son, then her daughter-in-law.

Davo Shaw stepped up to hug his son next, pounding him on the back hard.  Alexander laughed and returned the favor.  They almost started tumbling in the low-g from the force.

Pirra was happy to see Alexander so pleased.  Sometimes he had issues with his father, but he was still glad to arrive and see them, ultimately.

It was so odd to her.  She’d gotten used to it, the human connection to their parents.  But it was a strange concept.

Dessei had tight communities, strong bonds within them, but they did not really hold their specific genetic birth parents very closely.  There was a certain respect, and one tended to have more interaction with their birth parents more than others.  But it was not like human families.  They had simply performed a service in their birth, but they were then children of their community, their culture, their island.

The sheer joy humans seemed to take in family had grown from an oddity to something she relished.  It was just so pure and . . . well, cute in a way.

“And Pirra,” Davo continued, once he’d broken away from Alexander.  “How’d you like that new landing system?  Dr. Joy set it up himself!”

Pirra smiled.  “It was very impressive,” she said.

To be honest, she didn’t trust homebrew systems.

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the scientists and engineers of the odd little commune of Phobos.  But, well, she wasn’t about to trust her life to someone’s pet auto-docker.  She’d seen too many custom projects that had turned out to be deadly.

Without letting Alexander see (as he had been immensely proud of it as well), Pirra had queried Joy’s system, checked its algorithms and projected flight plan for their rental zoomer, the specs of the equipment, confirmed the inspection tickets, let her system back-trace the supply chains to confirm their credentials, and then had run a few numbers herself.

It had passed muster, and she reluctantly let it take control of their craft.  It was all very odd, and she didn’t like that.  But it seemed safe enough.

“Oh, Alex, don’t make Pirra carry all that,” Eileen chided her son.  “Pirra, give him some of your bags.”

Pirra shifted, a little uncomfortable.  Humans had some sexual dimorphism, more than her kind – males had taller crests but that was about it.

Besides that, Eileen had never quite understood that she was stronger than Alexander, but all the same it was kind of sweet.

But most of all, they were in microgravity, barely a thousandth of Earth’s.  The bags weighed practically nothing.

“It’s fine,” she said.  “I’ve got enhanced muscles.”

“Still, you should have better manners with your beautiful wife,” Eileen said, patting Alexander’s arm in a way that approached but was still not a slap.

“Mom, Pirra’s fine,” Alexander replied, laughing.

“Well, let’s not dawdle here,” Davo said, waving for them all to follow.  “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do!”  He caught Pirra’s eye, grinning, and she felt jubilation glee grow inside her.

She had heard that sometimes human parents did not take well to the spouse of their child.  It could even be quite unpleasant for them.  But Davo and Eileen seemed to adore her.

Phobos station was a very old design, built hundreds of years ago and later abandoned.

The moon was merely a captured asteroid, and like many such bodies was just a rubble pile held together rather loosely by gravity.  The original builders had used an experimental titanium foam to fill in the gaps in the asteroid.  It had held, though it was far from stable.

After that, the colonists had built a shallow rotating cylinder, apparently the first attempted on this scale in the Sol system.  While it had sort of worked, it had also threatened to shake Phobos apart – and so the whole asteroid had been abandoned.

But about fifty years ago, a group of oddball scientists and artists had imagined bringing new life to the moon.  Using modern technologies, they had melted key parts of it together, cooling it afterwards in just two years with modern heat-transfer technologies.

And then they’d moved in, building new labs, new studios, and even revamping the rotation cylinder, adding the housing units in it so they could have nearly Earth-like gravity.

The floors, she thought, were mostly original.  The steel plates had faded to a dull gray, trodden by feet over many decades until they had indents.

The walls, though, were murals of color.  What she could only call graffiti but knew they locals called art, covered most of the public surfaces.

“How is Phobos Station doing?” Alexander asked.

“Oh, we’ve got supply problems out the wazoo – nothing vital,” Davo replied, snorting.  “Don’t worry, we get plenty to eat and all that.  But Mars supply ships hate trying to catch this place, so trying to get specialist parts or rare elements can be difficult.  And we don’t have a particle collider, so we have to import all those things.”

“Gold is so hard to get,” Eileen added.  “Can you believe it?  It’s like back in the pre-space days when they used it as money!”

Alexander chuckled.  “Yeah, I heard they were batty for it back then.”

“Gold, really?” Pirra asked.

“Oh, yes,” Davo replied.  “And not even for practical reasons – they just thought it was pretty.”

They boarded a boxy container that sped them up to match the rotation cylinder.  Slowly, they went from floating to standing.  When the doors opened, they didn’t have far left to go – only a few hundred people lived on Phobos.

The front door of the Shaw residence was large enough to admit a small vehicle.  Their room had once been a supply area for the original station, simply refit into living quarters.  Davo loved it, as he could get big equipment in and out.

A drone met them and took their bags as they went in, and Pirra delighted in the squashy chairs that seemed to have no equivalent on the Craton.

Plopping into one, sinking in so deeply that it nearly swallowed her, she leaned back and sighed.

“I love this chair,” she said aloud.

Davo sat down across from her, while Eileen and Alexander headed to the kitchen.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Davo said, grinning.  “I got the launcher working.”

Pirra escaped the grasping chair, sitting up.  “You lie!”

“It’s true!  It’s not pretty.  But it works!  It’s more of a grenade launcher than a true plasma lobber, but the shells explode on impact!  Oh, it’s beautiful.”  He grinned.  “You have to come see it.”

“Alexander!  I’m going to go look at some of the projects your father has been working on,” Pirra called out.

“Have fun blowing stuff up,” he called back.

Davo grinned, and the two scampered back out the door.

< Ep 4 Part 23 | Ep 4 Part 25 >

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

As the trip progressed, the drone explained to her how to use her tablet to view the outside cameras.  By pointing it anywhere, she could essentially see through the floor, and gaze at the Earth below.

As soon as she looked down, she saw the storm.

“Uh . . . is that a problem?” she asked.

“There is no cause for alarm.  While a rare storm is moving through the area, it is not any danger to Lundgren Tower’s cable or this car.”

It looked serious to her.  The clouds were dark and angry, occasionally lighting up with a flash from the inside.

They were less than a hundred kilometers from the surface, within the atmosphere, and nothing blocked her view of the storm from above.

She’d never seen anything quite like it.  She knew of storms, they were a proverbial sign of trouble even among spacers, but there were none on an asteroid colony.  Supposedly Hope’s Dawn had some monster storms, but she’d never seen them . . .

Her nervousness increased as they closed with the storm, and as they dipped inside the cloud she jumped in her seat.

A woman strapped in nearby looked over at her, concern on her face, and Apollonia awkwardly looked away, pretending not to notice.

There was a lot of tension among the people in the lowering car, it had been rising noticeably in the last few hours.  She saw sweat beading on their foreheads, eyes flickering around nervously at every shake and bump.

“Unusually strong Storm out there,” one man said to another.

But it wasn’t the storm, she thought.  It was because of her presence.

Whatever it was that caused her to see and know things that no one else could know also made people innately and acutely uncomfortable in her presence.

The storm, at least, gave them an external locus for their discomfort.  People couldn’t always pin it on her specifically if the situation itself was a little stressful.

She was always acutely aware of the fact that people were bothered by her presence, but at least right now there was something of an out.  They – hopefully – wouldn’t just blame her and think there was something wrong with her.

The camera view was just grayed-out, and she could see no more until they broke through.

The rain looked like it was falling in sheets, and she gasped aloud, drawing more eyes.

“I’ve never seen rain before,” she said, tired of pretending she wasn’t amazed.

“Me neither,” one young man said.  “I grew up in the asteroid belt.  Where are you from?”

She hesitated; would these people even know where the Begonia system was?  Or even worse, had they heard of the terrible conditions there and would pity her?

“I’m from a distant colony,” she finally said.  “I just happened to be this way so I thought I’d see Earth.”

“You’re lucky,” the woman said kindly.  “I’ve waited five years for a pass to the surface!”

“Five years!” Apollonia echoed, surprised.  “That’s a long time.”

“It’ll be worth it,” she replied, looking satisfied.  “For just to one time touch the world where we came from?”  She took a deep breath, closing her eyes.

Apollonia felt a tingle down her spine.  “Yeah,” she said.  “I kind of feel the same way.”

She hardly noticed when gravity had returned on the elevator, but now that she had reached the surface she felt almost wobbly.  The gravity seemed a little higher than on the Craton, though maybe it was her imagination.

Walking slowly off the elevator, she felt her heart pounding in her chest.

She had arrived.

The base of Lundgren Tower had massive windows, the likes of which she’d never seen before.  They were actual windows, not just screens.  It was hard to tell any difference from a good screen, but just knowing that she actually looked out upon reality made a difference.

The storm still thundered above, the rain splattering the glass, but it didn’t seem to be coming down that heavily.  It limited visibility, but it did not hide the thing she was most impressed by – the ocean itself.

“How do I go out there?” she asked.

“There is an observation platform that way-” the drone began.  She was already jogging over, and it had to catch up.

The doors opened, and a heavy scent rolled in with the air, along with a spray of rain.  She had wondered if falling rain would hurt when it hit you, but these drops felt just pleasant.

She gasped then laughed and ran out, letting the salty smell and raindrops surround her.

Practically dancing, she found herself near the edge of the balcony, and looked out, seeing, for the first time, the ocean up close.

A few of the waves were whitecapped, but mostly it simply heaved, roiling and rising and falling under the winds of the storm.

“It’s all water?” she asked the drone that still hovered with her even as she braved the rain.

“The depth is approximately 3,000 meters,” the drone told her.

She leaned to look off the edge, and suddenly a new drone was in her face.

“Please step back from the railing,” it said politely but firmly.  “It is dangerous to risk falling into the water.”

“I just want to see it,” she said.

“Miss?” a person’s voice spoke.

She turned and saw it was a uniformed young man, watching her with some concern.

“I’m Glyndwyr, Station Steward.  I can help you get settled in for the night.”  He looked up at the sky.  “It’s not a good day for sight-seeing.  Not a lot to see, with these clouds so low.”

“I’m happy just seeing the water,” she said.

“I understand, but the drones aren’t going to stop bothering you if you look off the side like that – it’s because of the storm and rain, more chance you’ll slip off.  I suggest getting some rest and then coming back to look around tomorrow.”

He seemed nervous, and growing moreso.  She knew it was a reaction to her, and she suddenly felt weary.

“All right,” she agreed.  “I’ll come back in the morning.”

“Just follow me, miss.”

< Ep 4 Part 22 | Ep 4 Part 24 >

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

Ten minutes later, Brooks found himself waiting.  He’d missed his shuttle, but that was all right.  He could take another.

Right now, he decided to take a moment just to appreciate the view.

The Earth was small from here.  Still over 300,000 kilometers away, Gagarin station orbited at Lagrange 1, the point of rough gravitational balance between the planet and its moon.

From here he could see the blue oceans, the wisps of clouds.  A thin line seemed to intersect the planet, which he knew was the new planetary ring, constructed in the decades since the catastrophe.

For nearly ten years the Earth had been cut off from the outside.  Now, it was almost like it hadn’t happened.

Once he was closer he’d be able to see the scars on the surface from the big impacts.  Mostly centered around the equator, many had been smoothed over, reclaimed.  But the badlands, areas of environmental collapse, wrecked by the savage swings of climate in the last thousand years, had not been erased.

Not all of them were dust bowls, either, he knew.

“Now boarding Flight 1016, bound to Southern Polar Regions,” the call came, and his system helpfully reminded him that this was his new flight.

He dawdled a moment, appreciating how beautiful Earth looked from here.  It was nice not seeing the scars.

Tearing himself away, he moved to board his flight.

“Call ahead and arrange all the gear,” he told his system.  “And rent a piloted crawler.  I know the way.”

“Destination?” his system queried.

“Perry, Antarctica.”

Apollonia boarded the shuttle when bidden.  She’d wanted to ask someone questions, clarify just where she was going, but she couldn’t think of how to phrase it – or get the attention of any staff.

She was going to Lundgren Tower, apparently, whatever it was.

It occurred to her that her tablet should, as Brooks told her, have her answers.

“What is Lundgren Tower?” she asked it.

It immediately answered back that the likely answer based on context was one of the Space Elevators that connected to the new – and still under construction – orbital ring around Earth.

“Where will the drone take me when I get there?”

The answer came back; “Wherever on Earth you want.”

Her heart thudded in her chest.  Brooks was giving her a ticket to anywhere?

She wondered, though, if there was still anything left to see.

“Are there are any forests?” she asked.

A list of forests whose names she did not even recognize came up.  “Are these natural forests that have been around a long time?” she asked.

The system seemed to ponder that question.

“Nearly all forests were planted since the Orbital Ring Collapse,” it finally said.

She asked for pictures, scrolling through the images of trees.  They were small, not having had time to grow into the giants she’d always heard of and dreamed about.

She didn’t even notice when they took the dashgate, nor when they exited.  She was just looking through all the images of trees.

“Please prepare for docking,” she heard, looking up.  She had lost track of the time in her interest.

None of the forests were quite what she’d hoped for, and she didn’t know if she could get her tablet to really understand what she actually wanted.  But if she had to she could just pick one of them.

The ship docked, and she tucked her tablet into her pocket, confirming that the card Brooks gave her was still with her.

With the others – none of whom seemed to pay her much mind – she exited the ship and got onto the station.

She found some amusement with the fact that she was more adept in the zero-g than most of the others, and flipped herself onto the ceiling easily to pass some of the slow-movers.

“Tourists,” she muttered, amused.

Outside of the docking area, she saw a drone waiting.  It obligingly flipped over to be on her plane.

“Greetings, Ms. Nor,” it said in a pleasant voice.  “If you would follow me, I will guide you to the elevator.”

“Thanks,” she said, then felt stupid for thanking a drone.

It floated away, and she pulled herself along the ceiling after it, moving more fluidly than most.

They moved past a window and she stopped.

Down, below, she could see part of the Earth.

It was blue, just ocean, with wisps of streaky clouds hiding some of the darker water.

It was the closest view she’d ever had of a planet.  And it was the homeworld.

She lingered, the drone stopping and waiting patiently.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“You are viewing the Pacific Ocean,” the drone told her.  “Lundgren Tower is anchored to the Earth at the equator, approximately 100 degrees West of South America.  At its base end is a floating platform.  It is not technically a tower, but rather a tether-“

“Why is it all so dark?” she asked.

“It is night time,” the drone replied.

She craned her neck to see if she could see the tower – or tether, apparently – itself.  But she could not.

“Your elevator will be departing soon.  If you wish to catch it, we should be moving.”

“All right,” she said, stepping away.  “It’s just the first time I’ve seen it.  I . . . I guess it means something to me.”

“Please follow me,” the drone said, oblivious to her words.

The space elevator was large, but not as impressive as she’d expected.  The trip, her tablet told her, would take around seven hours.

She didn’t like that.  It should take two-three minutes for re-entry, tops, in her mind.  She’d heard of space elevators, of course, but in most thing she saw the people going down to a planet opted for an ablative re-entry, with all the dramatic plasma and glow that entailed.

Though, she reasoned, considering how often those went wrong in the shows, she was glad to take something that was perhaps safer.

A message appeared, from Brooks.  Surprised, she brought it up.  It was only a few lines of text.

“There’s no Rafflesia flowers, but there’s a forest I think you’ll like.  Show the Guide Drone and it will get you there.”

An image came up, and she saw the forest.  There was no name – only an image.

Oh yes, she thought.  She liked that.

“Hey, drone?” she said.

“How can I help you?” it asked.

“What is this forest called?”

“It is the Sequoia Cloud Forest,” the drone told her.

She felt a tingle go down her spine.  “Take me there.”

< Ep 4 Part 21 | Ep 4 Part 23 >