On fiction: Rendezvous with NECA, complete first draft

Author note: After some binging over the last few days, I uploaded parts 8 to 11 of RwN over at the WaD website. Wooh-hoo. So anyway, after the jump, here's the text of the first draft as it appears now. Enjoy.

A mechanical buzz summons her back to life. Hard to discern its source, either the timer, or blood resuming flow through long dormant veins. Aching head otherwise empty, she can’t remember any dream. Such a waste of three months of sleep, but the view outside the ship more than makes up for it. She rises on uncertain feet, muscles yet to adjust to the mock gravity of her spinning ship, sense of balance yet to be restored. Thoughts register- they’ve made it, alive- then vanish, muted by the sight of their destination. She’s one of the first, and maybe among the only, human beings to ever lay eyes on an alien craft.

Enormous; even though still one hundred miles away, it fills the viewport. A rotating torus, three spokes connected to a hub with a three-lobed cylinder behind it. Pipes and wires criss-cross over the craft’s blue-gray surface, an irregular gauze that gives a rugged, almost porous aspect. Shadows born at the interplay of shape and sunlight waver as the object turns on its own axis. It seems alive. Not assembled, rather secreted by some monster hidden in great depths. If jellyfish had skeletons, this is what they’d look like.

Another crewman wakes behind her. Squelches of bare feet against the floor, the sound of hands fumbling for support, then calm. He must have seen what captured her attention.

“My, my. Beats seeing this through telescopes.” David Ballard, the physicist.

She smiles. “Makes even you think about God, doesn’t it?”

“God wouldn’t need spaceships, Ms. Evans.” He props his lithe frame against a wall to her side.

“Of course not, just a soul to search for Him would do.” She turns and looks up into his blue eyes, but he stays focused on the viewport and the space beyond it.

“A god in man’s heart? I might believe in that, but I see no reason to worship such a thing.”

New sounds of activity tell her the others rise from suspended animation. Some must have waited for the initial groggyness to pass before they tried to move. Captain Tarsem Chahal seems unaffected as he confidently exits his capsule. “All right everyone, enough standing around. We have two weeks to take a good look at this thing. Doctor Dezaki, begin the physicals for the crew. Myself and doctor Ballard will go first.”

-:-:-

“But why the ecliptic?” Pavel Gubarev says, as he places a newly opened jar of protein sludge on the table.
“Of all angles it could have, it has one that puts it on the same orbital plane as Earth. That’s no coincidence, I tell you.”

The others seem content to try and savor their first meal after months of stasis. Candy-colored, fruity flavored. She’d rather have a steak right now.

Provoked by the silence, he continues. “We first saw this thing ten years ago. If it’s as dead as everyone wants to think it is, then it will just follow its parabolic path around the Sun, and it’s ten years more until it passes Saturn’s orbit. Yet here we are, strapped to the biggest nuclear firecracker ever, rushing to meet it before it gets to perihelion.”

“I take offense at ‘nuclear fire-cracker”, Ballard says. “That isn’t what our fusion engine is.”

“I’m sure you could turn it into one.”

Ballard stays silent.

“We’re here in this together, all of us,” Gubarev continues, “so let’s be honest with each other. Whatever the public was told, you all suspect what I’m saying might be true. I’m just the guy hired for maps and maintenance, so I wouldn’t know. But you Captain? Or you, Ballard? If this thing is … you know, hostile, what do we do?”

“Obey the chain of command, for one,” captain Chahal says. “We’re here to explore. We report to Earth what we find, and we adapt as necessary. That is the mission and it hasn’t changed.”

Gubarev mutters something, but drops the conversation. Not content with the answer. Nor, for that matter, is she, but pressing the issue appears fruitless. Probably, hopefully, it is moot, anyway.

When first discovered, in 2016, NECA attracted attention simply by being a new object passing through the solar system. Soon after though it truly set the world ablaze. First, through its size, much larger than any comet. Second, its parabolic orbit almost exactly inside the Earth’s ecliptic plane, also uncommon. Third, its bizarre shape which suggested technology, not nature, had created it. And then … nothing. As cold as the space surrounding it, and just as silent. Dead.

“How about we speak of happier things,” Jonathan Hendrix, the communications officer, says. “Three cheers for doctor Dezaki and her capsules for keeping us alive-” he turns to Gubarev, “- and sane.”

Dezaki fidgets in her seat. “The blood samples aren’t yet fully t-”

“Relax doc, I feel fine. Cheers!”

Captain Chahal finishes his shake. “Do you deem the crew apt to begin work inside our ship?”

Dezaki nods.

“In that case, Yang, Gubarev, prepare the mapping satellite for NECA orbit. I’d hate it if we don’t find a way in, as, I’m sure, doctors Evans and Ballard would.”

Gubarev grumbles. “I’d like to know which way that thing’s engines point.”

-:-:-

She checks on her collection of micro-organisms. Algae, bacteria, fungi, and something she found herself, self replicating clay crystals from two miles deep inside a cave in Georgia. The microscopic menagerie rests, frozen, in cabinets inside the med/bio laboratory, a representative of life on Earth- and its possible precursors-, its role here much like a canary in old mines. A test of whatever NECA holds, to ascertain potential impact on Earth’s biosphere.

In the medical portion of the lab, Doctor Dezaki re-examines blood samples. Currently, one labelled ‘Hayley Evans’. Her blood, but she’s lost curiosity about the results. If anything, concern for Dezaki has replaced it; the Japanese doctor repeats analyses obsessively, apparently still unsure whether to trust her own suspended animation devices. Then again, a lot on the ship was built in haste. Like going to the Moon in only ten years must have been. But NECA was further away, and hinted at a stronger deadline.

A clock shows the time to perihelion. The closest point of their- and NECA’s- orbit to the Sun, also the point of greatest speed. And, most important, the place where rocket maneuvers are the most efficient. Their mission plan relied on that bonus physical law provides, or else they couldn’t return to Earth. Most of their propellant reserves were needed to catch up to NECA. Two weeks, the clock indicates. Two weeks before they have to leave. Two weeks to find out if NECA planned a similar maneuver.

Jonathan Hendrix enters the lab. “Ms. Evans, could I talk to you for a moment?” He gestures for her to follow him.

“Any signal?” she asks, as they find themselves outside the laboratory.

“We detected nothing. Neither did Earth. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” He looks around. “If- when- we get things out of NECA, you will inform me first of any results of your tests.”

A frown. “I thought we were here to conduct open research.”

“You scientists might think that, but the real world is messier.”

His condescension annoys her, but she keeps calm. “If we can’t trust each other, how do we hope to make it back to Earth?”

“I believe everyone wants to get back home, wherever they call home, that is, but I wouldn’t trust any of the others, especially Gubarev and that stuck up Ballard brit. Our country comes first, Ms. Evans, remember that. Everyone else will think the same of theirs. If you find anything, I’ll be the one to tell you how much the others need to know.”

She would protest, but the sound system interrupts her. “This is the captain. I hope the labs are ready, we have interesting news.”

The entire crew gathers to the control room, where a flat horizontal screen displays a sequence of high-res photographs taken from Sfetnik, the mapping satellite now placed in orbit around NECA. The images show parts of the torus’ inner side, and the captain zooms in on one of them, to reveal a swirl in the metal gauze covering it. The vortex of tubes has a large gap in its center, and what appears to be a lid or an airlock.

A way in.

-:-:-

Sunlight reflects off her gold coated visor. A tether links her to the ship, balanced in pseudo-stationary orbit between the hub and torus. Seventy kilometers below, on NECA’s surface, noon gives way to dusk. It will be thirteen minutes till next midday.

Away from the Sun, frozen specks of light break the monotony of vacuum, luminous dots so distant they might as well be within reach. Beyond certain scales, the mind ceases comprehension. More real to her is NECA, its net of tubing wrapped around the gently spinning torus, its swirl of pipes that revealed an entrance. Her target two kilometers above, the hub seventy below, she floats alone, in emptiness, with no support. There is no fear, only inertia and gravity, and she is their plaything. She fires the thrusters on her suit, to remind physical law she has some say in the proceedings.

–”How are we doing doctor Evans?”– captain Chahal asks through the commdev.

“Routine course corrections, sir. We’ll have the elevator running in no time.”

Two kilometers. And yet, as the tether slowly stretches, it’s not too difficult to pretend that she is in a cave instead. How deep was Krubera in Georgia? Two and a half kilometers. More twisty, yes, and walls to bump into, yes, but ultimately the same stretch of darkness leading to places unknown. Behind her the surface, or the ship, in front the bowels of Earth, or NECA. And just as in Krubera, a wide variety of carbiners and cord loops hangs from her belt. The torus’ gravity itself is too weak, it is her orbital velocity that pushes her away from the hub. The slowest fall she can imagine, she helps it along with one more thruster fire to adjust her path.

–”We should be studying that hub,”– Gubarev’s voice sounds. –”That’s where most of the mass is.”–

–”It’s so dense, it’s probably solid.”– Ballard. –”At least the torus must have some cavities inside.”–

–”The little green men are all dead anyway.”– Hendrix. –”Or else they’d react to the lovely bait we’re sending them now.”–

She frowns. “Hey!”

He laughs. –”It does look like we’re fishing for aliens. Aren’t you afraid we’ll cut you off and leave you to them?”–

“No. I have full confidence in the team,” she says, “whatever the faults of some of its members.”

The Captain’s voice. –”Major Hendrix has a peculiar way to lighten the mood. I can assure you, doctor, we will retrieve you at the smallest sign of trouble.”–

–”Scores of bad fifties films to the side, what if Mars needs -men-?”– Ballard asks.

Hendrix, annoyed. –”Are you … weird or something?”–

She chuckles. Truth is, her heart is racing, and heights are not what scare her. She’d slap him if he were near, but she can understand Hendrix’ impulse to make fun of the situation. Between waiting to see that the dead giant in front of her is really dead, and rolling her eyes at a bad joke, she knows which she’d prefer.

Night becomes day as she touches down among a nest of tubes, some thin as an arm, a few as thick as traffic tunnels, all smooth and featureless. No visible branches; parallel or cross-wise to each other they run in several tangled layers, their slithering shadows almost obscuring the surface underneath. And though the tubes look as solid as hard metal, she has a feeling they could start to move at any moment should they so desire. She grabs one of them; it feels cold, which must of course be mere illusion. There is no way she could feel any heat exchange through the suit’s insulation. She tries to bend the tube, but her efforts have no effect. It might do. She passes a loop of cord around it, which she clips to an eight knot on the tether, then reattaches herself through an ascender.

“Attempted to secure elevator end, waiting for test,” she says.

The ship begins to reel in the slack, and she ascends towards it, stopping a couple hundred meters above the torus surface. On her signal, the ship starts to pull harder. Tether and tube strain against each other- twenty kilonewtons, a voice tells her- but neither gives way. The end seems secure. The ship eases its pull, and she descends again, to put two more loops of cord around different pipes and clip them to the tether, for extra security.

“Elevator end secured,” she says, and removes herself from the tether, “path is free.”

It will be a few minutes until the others arrive, on rope climbing gear powered through the tether, so she has some time to look around, all by herself. The rotation of the torus creates a semblance of gravity, but it is much feebler than that of Earth. Walking is awkward if each step is a featherfall, so she pulls herself along the pipes. Strange world, where crawling is faster than running. Shouldn’t there be marks, tiny scratches, craters, proof of NECA’s long voyage? The surface looks as if it had just begun to exist, flawless and defiant, with only a few shallow pools of dust hiding below tube crossings. She takes some of the dust into a sample jar for later study.

The pipes guide her closer to the airlock. And why not, it’s the day’s destination anyway. She crawls around it through the metal gauze, searching for more pockets of dust to gather. Is that-

“Captain, can you see this?” She points the spot of her flashlight on the object. A box, about the size of a human torso, with things that look like suction cups. Which, of course, they are not, since those don’t work in vacuum. And yet, hidden beneath a knot of tubing, the box has somehow managed to stay glued to NECA’s surface. Jet black, chipped and pocked, it seems as foreign to this world as she herself is.

–”I see it, doctor.”–

She draws near. A triplet of rugged sliders adorns the top, the not-quite suction cups the bottom, and though some damage is evident, it appears mostly cosmetic.

–”I would advise you not to touch that,”– the captain says, –”wait till the rest of us get there.”–.

–”Looks like it’s your lucky day, eh, Ballard.”– Hendrix says.

-:-:-

It is night again on NECA, and only the cold white spots of their torches provide illumination. She stands a couple paces away, Chahal and Hendrix by her side, while Ballard kneels before the box.

“Radioactive, but only slightly,” he says. “Looks … most likely its power source expired. Still, could you take a few steps back?”

“I will not all-”

“It’s all right captain, I believe this thing is too depleted to be dangerous. But just in case.”

He turns to look back at them. Apparently satisfied with the distance, he slides one of the controls on the box.

Their torchlights flicker then fail as a loud pop sounds through the commdev. The darkness lasts less than a second but even so when light returns she scans franticly for bearings. A crack has appeared in the airlock cover, or rather an iris-like opening. Too narrow to fit a person. In front, still near the box, is Ballard. His torch doesn’t shine.

A crackle in her commdev.

–”What the hell are you doing down there?”– Gubarev, alarmed. –”Are you all trying the elevator at once?”–

“Doctor?” Chahal asks. “Ballard!”

The physicist turns to face them. It’s difficult to tell through his visor, but he appears to say something. He frowns for a moment, then makes a thumbs up.

“Ss-, Evans, Hendrix, take this man back to the ship now!”

She jumps- or crawls- into action, Hendrix just one step behind her, to tackle the gesturing Ballard. He keeps pointing to the box and the airlock, but that will have to wait. Comms gone, lights gone, who knows what other damage his suit has. They drag him back to the tether, where she attaches her ascenders. Ballard still in her grasp, she rushes upward.

-:-:-

“Damn, you should have taken the box too.”

“You’re welcome,” she says.

“I was fine, it was just a little E.M.P. And did you see, it opened the airlock.”

“I would rather not lose a man on the first day. Nor any other, for that matter,” Chahal says.

The med/bio lab seems even more crowded as almost all the crew has gathered around the physicist. He beams as if he has just achieved a dangerous acrobatics trick, while behind him, arms crossed, head slowly shaking, captain Chahal resembles a disappointed father. Her own mouth is still dry from the rush of adrenaline, of fear- she hopes the others won’t read that in her eyes- and she glances around for a glass of water. Gubarev pours her one before resuming a mile-long stare. His fingers rap against a cabinet.

“I feel all right, captain, and I’m sure Dezaki can verify … where is she?”

“I ordered her to rest, she’s been overworking herself lately. And do not make me put sedatives in you too.”

“That would be a pity. We can get in now. Well, I need to see how that thing works, but if its power source is what I think it is, I can do one better- I can tell you how old it is, too.”

She takes a sip from her glass. “One thing we know already. We’re not the first visitors here.”

“Hear that, Gubarev?” Hendrix says. “There were others too, yet here it is floating on its way. Isn’t that good news?”

“They ran and left their keys behind, or didn’t leave at all. No, that doesn’t seem-”

“Man you should lighten up.”

“What’s the status of Earth communication?” Chahal asks. “I’m sure they’d like to hear all this.”

Hendrix coughs. “Link to the relay satellite got a bit sketchy. I’ll need a couple hours to figure out what’s happened there.”

“Do so. Meanwhile, myself and doctor Evans will retrieve the device from NECA. No, you, dr. Ballard, will stay here. Major Yen will see to your physical examination.”

-:-:-

The torches on their helmets waver in NECA’s night. A second later and their shine resumes upon the metal surface of the airlock.

Ballard shrugs. “I’m afraid there’s still some electromagnetic leakage.”

“That thing better not fry my microcomms,” Hendrix says.

“They’re too small for the wavelengths in the pulse,” Ballard replies. “Indeed, I believe that they will-” he presses a button on a device the size and shape of a wristwatch “- be just fine.”

Another second of uncertain torchlight as the alien keybox sends a new pulse towards NECA. The airlock opening widens a bit more, now large enough to fit two people. Good enough, they’ll only climb in one at a time anyway. She goes first, to find some spots to anchor a rope to help them climb back up again. Hendrix follows, setting a couple more devices like the one Ballard used to control the box- little communication relays to keep them in touch with the ship. There is no need for her to babysit him as he rappels down- the first rope is secured from the top- so she looks around the airlock chamber.

The chamber is a fairly large cylinder- a family house might fit inside with room to spare- with the airlock gates at its ends. Its surface, smooth but not slippery, is the same blue gray like the exterior. Unlike the metal webbing outside however, here the tubes appear embedded in the wall, with only an occasional thin arch jutting out of the solid mass. No significant features apart from the diaphragm patterns on the ceiling and floor. The one salient object is another black box, a twin of the one they now use as a key, but a twin more favored by fate, protected from erosion and dust.

Hendrix unclips himself from the rappel rope. “Wow, those guys were really fond of leaving things behind, eh.”

She nods, and moves in closer to the artefact. Its sheen is not entirely due to the metal; some kind of transparent substance has effloresced on the its surface.

“Found another box, captain. Should we play with it?” Hendrix asks.

“Absolutely not. Wait until ours gets to you.”

“Just kidding.”

“Really, Hendrix.” She shakes her head and resumes examining the new box. The material trapping it must have been liquid once- maybe even a gas- and it leaked from the wall nearby. Tracing the trail of solidified drip reveals no damage. The thing just appeared at some point, maybe through a hole too small for her to see. She turns to watch their own keybox being winched down into the airlock. Tamed, or so they hoped, it would now send small bursts of energy rather than the explosion its designers intended. Small bursts that the space suits would weather undamaged.

Their keybox settles on the airlock floor. Moments later, Ballard follows. “I’m going to need that thing out of the way,” he says as he touches down. “I don’t expect the placements of these things is arbitrary, and if you don’t want to use that one-”

“Then Dr. Ballard, I suggest you be the one to move it,” captain Chahal says, as he stops on the rappel rope and looks around to take in the situation. “Handle the thing so that it won’t fry us.”

“Yes Captain.” With care- and a snarl of disgust- he grabs the second box, avoiding the transparent substance. Several pushes later, he turns around. “I believe I’ll need a hand here.”

She produces a small hammer meant to punch bolts into rock walls, and attacks the crystal. It refuses to shatter under her blows.

“Give me that,” Hendrix says and takes the hammer from her. Several minutes of furious strikes later, his arms droop, exhausted.

They all take turns hammering away at the crystal. It cracks with difficulty, and the cracks spread surprisingly slowly. The better part of an hour passes before they get the new box free.

“We should-” Captain Chahal gathers his breath. “We should get some of that to the ship.”

“We should get the whole box, I’d rather have one in mint condition too, for reference.”

“We’ll get it when we leave. Now try and control the airlock.”

-:-:-

Gubarev’s voice crackles through the commdev. -”I can hear you loud and clear”-

Concern has never been away from his tone ever since they woke up, but it sounds reassuring to hear him. Three kilometers and two closed airlock gates away, but still there- their own ship and some semblance of the familiar.

“It’s good to hear you,” she says. “Pity communication with Earth has been unreliable.” She glares at Hendrix, an unspoken accusation in her eyes. Very convenient for him to have the comms fail.

“Hey, I got them to work in time to tell everyone of the first box, all right?” The moment of silence as he meets her eyes convinces her he knows she suspects him. “Besides, why get the folks back home worried?”

-”Worried? No, they seem less afraid than they should be,”- Gubarev says. -”I’ve yet to find any other entrance in the pictures from Sfetnik. And what kind of entrance is this anyway.”-

“Do you see what we see?” she asks.

-”Yes, and it makes no sense at all.”-

They are now below the airlock. A dense network of pipes crosses between the walls, convenient for hand and footholds as they climb down, but an awkward obstacle for anything much larger than a human. If ships were meant to enter here, they’d have to be very small. If people were meant to enter here, why the climb? They descend among the pipes, their lights scattered and defeated by the wide surrounding darkness. The cold air carries echoes of their steps.

“Atmosphere reading: two hundred Kelvin, naught point six bars.” Ballard looks around, then again at the device on his wrist. “Eighty percent nitrogen, nineteen oxygen, argon and other trace gases make up the rest.”

Glimmers of frost- actual frost, or carbon ice- cover the tubes. Not the same at all as the crystal outside, the frost crumbles under her foot and she slips a couple of inches.

Ballard catches her. “Careful, Ms. Evans.”

She gives him a smile as he removes his hand from her arm. His help wasn’t needed, but it is appreciated.

It’s Hendrix’ turn to look at her accusingly. “Let’s keep focused and leave this place quick. I don’t like being locked up in here away from the ship and I’m sure neither do you.”

“Wait, stop,” captain Chahal says, and gestures for them to stand still.

The silence in NECA is complete, even as Ballard takes a few more steps down before stopping. Several seconds of silent waiting later, a distant rumble resumes.

“Must be some distant echo of ours, captain.”

“Yeah, echos. Heh, I’m starting to sound like Gubarev.” Snow crunches beneath Hendrix’ foot. “I’d really like to have some proper light here.”

Her eyes close by reflex. A moment later they open- too bright- and slam shut. It takes some willpower and patience for her to be able to look around again, for Hendrix got his wish. There is light inside NECA. Lots of it. Gubarev’s voice saturates the commdev, a long incomprehensible string of Russian curse words.

“Gubarev, what is NECA doing?” The captain attempts to keep a calm demeanor, but his rising pitch betrays fraying nerves. “Yen, any change in its trajectory? Any signal?”

It takes forever for the answer to arrive. -”None. No change on the outside.”-

-”It’s alive. Boje moi. The thing is alive.”-

“Let’s all keep our heads and carry on, shall we?”

Funny how the light brought more care to their steps than darkness did. What if they are watched, after all? But whatever else may be true, the inside of NECA is beautiful. While the metallic strands of the gauze enveloping the surface crossed each other in irregular but branchless patterns, here the pipes organize themselves in gigantic interlocked rose windows. Wherever the light comes from, it arrives in hues of teals, cyans and oranges, in patchworks resembling stained glass. A gothic cathedral. A radiolarian skeleton grown to cosmic size. The expanse of ledges, columns and steps seems to go on forever downwards, but apart from its dizzying structure there is nothing and no one. The emptiness at once reassures  and overwhelms.

She prefers the dark, muddy twists inside the caves of Earth. More … intimate? She’d press her hand against the rocks and feel the bones of Gaia, the slow life of planet Home. It’s not that NECA threatens- there’s no one else around- but it stands too pristine to be inviting. Like no one is worthy, like no one matters. The interlocking patterns mock her mind with their chaotic regularity. Even the captain, always so steadfast, sways and hesitates.

It’s Ballard that seems the quickest to adjust. “Ms. Evans, look!”

New lights float upwards from the depths of the alien craft, small wisps barely the size of an eyeball. Pale yellow they flicker, tiny flames with no apparent candle, inching randomly from side to side under the influence of air currents her suit wouldn’t allow her to feel.

“Do you suppose they are alive?”

“I’ve no idea,” she says.

If they are alive, they do not show it; they do not cluster around any of the intruders, and just diffuse on their way.

The captain would tell them something, but Ballard is already approaching one of the rising wisps. It dims for a moment under his touch, then resumes its dull shine. Upward momentum lost, it lingers near Ballard, until he gives it a slight push away.

“Get away from the jack-o-lantern, only fools follow those,” Hendrix says.

“Hm.” Ballard toys with another wisp, but he gazes elsewhere. “Will-o-wisps.” He smiles. “Will-ve-wisps.”

“Sorry?”

“Eh, nothing.”

Frost begins to sublimate- dry ice turning to gaseous CO2.The temperature must be rising. “Captain,” she asks, “what’s the temperature range for our suits?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Evans, nor do I know how much more the temperature will increase. Major Hendrix, make sure our comm relays can monitor the conditions here. I suggest we wait this one back at the ship.”

-:-:-

She rolls her eyes. “What, again? We barely got back to the ship and Earth comm f-”

“I’m doing the best I can, the thing is really finicky.” His tone is annoyed. “It looks like it’s really broken this time.”

“This time.”

“I do not like what you’re suggesting.” Hendrix’ hand slams against the wall above her shoulder. The ship may be small but in this corridor the two of them are alone.

“Is it you who’s tampering with it?” she asks.

His fingers clench, but he retreats. “I’ve got no idea what’s got into it now, and I won’t be chewed by a civvie. You do your thing, I do mine- and that includes telling you how much to share with others.”

“Doesn’t Earth need to know something changed inside NECA?”

“They will as soon as I get the damn radio fixed. There. Happy? And don’t get too cozy with the others.”

Foul, the mood she feels as he walks away to the comm room. At least she has her own work to attend to, help her forget for a while. Everyone else does. Ballard has the two keyboxes to play with, Dezaki and the captain adjust the suits for NECA’s newly tropical climate, and she has her dust and crystal shards to look at.

Even small things have great stories to tell, if one knows how to ask. Shape, mechanical properties, chemical composition- all tantalizing clues to hidden histories. And sometimes, just sometimes, serendipity smiles. Like when she tried to dissolve the shards from the crystal that engulfed the other keybox. At first the acid seemed to have no effect, and then she saw needles of precipitate appear on the sample. With optical magnification she watched it grow like a snowflake- or a miniature NECA- expanding slowly until the minuscule strands merged together in a solid grain. If only there was a way to get some metal coating over it, and examine it with the better resolution of an electron microscope, for it reminded her of something else: those clays she found deep inside Earth, self-replicating, almost but not quite alive.

It seems a small thing to find, when there’s still so much of NECA to explore, but she should feel exhilarated at finding another path for the inorganic to reach towards life. Then why does the foul mood return? So be it, she’ll tell him- Hendrix- first, in person. And then she’ll tell everyone else; what can he do, stop her?

She locks the sample in the freezer before leaving. The sequence plays in her mind, again and again in variations, as she approaches the comm room. Should she flat out defy him? Should she play more devious, make him believe she complies for now? The door opens as she swipes the controls.

She turns away. Eyes stare blank into a distance. A breath, then another, before she turns to face the room once more.

A shattered porcelain figure that looks like … that used to be Hendrix lies on the floor in a pool of bilious fluid. An acrid stench wafts from the corpse and she covers her nose with her hand, but what really disturbs her is the sight of him. In pieces. Flesh seemingly turned to china, broken to shards with jagged hard edges. Small spikes and beads of transparent glass- or something like it- glisten from his skin like frozen sweat. But what she sees is not frozen. The room is hot, oppressively so, yet the solidified flesh gives no sign of melting. If anything, it seems the body fluids that were once inside his guts are also turning crystalline. Needles of glass float in gastric juices- are they growing? Are those new branches that they’re sprouting? They look still, but even so she can’t shake the feeling that they expand.

To her side, an intercom. A desperate scratch beneath it, trailing down towards the floor where fragments of Hendrix’ hand soak in caking blood. He tried to warn the others. She must do it for him.

She elbows the intercom.

-:-:-

-"This is all your fault."-

"Gubarev ... shut up," she says, her voice muffled by the gas mask. Alone, in full hazmat suit, peering over a table where pieces that were once Hendrix slosh in crystalizing intestinal sludge, she doesn't need anyone else's mental excreta. Even if the suspicion there may be some truth to his words eats away at her nerves.

Indeed, how did this happen? The sample she took from NECA sits safely inside a freezer. The med/bio lab, now under Dezaki's watch, shows no sign of damage. Ballard, in the physics lab where the two alien boxes are stored, also reported nothing suspicious yet. It's only here, in the communications room, that ... something ... took root.

Next to Hendrix, what's left of the ship's radiotransmitter- their link to Earth- lies broken, myriad transparent spikes having torn it apart. A hole and ripped wires in the wall where the transmitter used to be, a clue of the desperate measures to contain the spread. Her doing the autopsy- not Dezaki- is another. It's a measure she recommended. After all, she found the body. No need to risk anyone else's life until they find how the replicating crystal transmits itself. As for her own life, it was already in danger once she discovered Hendrix.

-"How are we doing, Doctor Evans?"- The captain's voice, his calm as reassuring as always.

"No new crystallization-" she takes a breath "- apart from the one already present."

-"And you?"-

A jumble of vitrified body parts put close together to more or less resemble their usual connections. From inside a fragment of head, an eye peers at nothing in particular. Another piece placed beside it- the maxilla- lends the ad-hoc autopsy table the look of a Picasso painting. Only even more morbid.

"A bit shaken, sir. Is there any way to ... give Hendrix last rites? Send the body away?"

-"We're working on it. But how do you feel?"-

"No symptoms to report."

Autopsy and quarantine rolled into one. She recommended it; she doesn't have to like it. She'd done dissections before. You get used to corpses- animal, human- when your job is seeing how the living were alive. But this is no dissection. This is not a body preserved, safe, dead. Something inside and all around it is very much ... resembling life, and her task is to kill it. So far it mocked her attempts.

"Acid-oxidizer mixture has no noticeable effect on sample," she says after examining a couple of petri dishes, their contents now little hedgehogs of glass needles.

-"Then how am I supposed to wash your suits?"- Gubarev and his annoyance, again.

"It doesn't stick to them."

-"So how did it get in?"-

"I don't know, ok?" She looks at another pair of petri dishes. Same culture medium as the others, but for now untouched. "I can tell you it doesn't seem to spread through air."

-"I'd like to look at the transmitter."- Ballard.

-"No one leaves their assigned quarter of the ship yet. Doctor Evans, from your observations, what is susceptible to crystal infection?"-

"So far, only the bacterial culture medium, the transmitter ... and human bodies appear vulnerable."

-"What kind of pathogen is that, the transmitter is nothing l-"-

-"That's why I'd like to see the transmitter for myself."-

-"No one's moving anywhere for a few more hours. I do apologize, doctor Evans, we will get the body out as soon as possible."-

Poor Hendrix would have gotten a chuckle out of this. Six people on the ship, each locked in different sections, each in hazmat gear with their own air supply. The ship's has stopped by order of the captain. The ship became just what Hendrix suspected it to be, a loose assemblage waiting to see who will fail first. And now, waiting to see what more will need to be cut off to stem contagion.

For her part, she watches petri dishes, takes photos of the corpse parts and microscope slides with tissue samples to document the damage, picks at the transmitter remains, turns around to see if the rest of the room hasn't changed under the influence of the invader. Anything to keep her mind occupied. Her routine should include checking her own face once every half hour. She skipped the first self check, and then kept skipping. Preferring to forget she needed to do that too.

It's only after four hours that she remembers- that she dares- to look in a mirror. A pair of sunken, bloodshot eyes gaze back at her. She stumbles back as her heart skips a beat. Shaking, she returns to the mirror; pale faced, haggard, she has seen better days. But that which afflicts her now is mere exhaustion. Her ashen skin is still skin. The transparent beads on it are sweat, not alien glass.

It's a couple hours more before the captain orders the quarantine on the ship suspended, and though she'd rather lie down and sleep forever, she goes along as the other crewmen carry Hendrix, now wrapped in a plastic sheet, to the airlock. From the inside of the ship, she watches Chahal and Yen place the body against the engine exhaust. The captain says a few words which she's too tired to follow when he returns. Some kind of good bye.

A short thunk. A lithium pellet explodes outwards, crashing against the shrouded body, pushing it away. The thing that killed him is gone. He's gone, and may he rest in peace.

-:-:-

One extra chair, one extra meal come breakfast time at the canteen, a reminder of NECA's danger. The remaining six astronauts greet each other with silent nods.

It is again Gubarev that breaks the gloom. "I'll tell you what's happening. It's a colonizer ship that got infected. Lucky for us, the little green men are all dead. Unlucky for us, their machines still work."

Ballard looks at his watch. "That is a conclusion we do not have the evidence to corroborate."

"Phht. You probably want to get back in there right now."

"We will have to. After all, what if you're right? Excuse me for a moment," the physicist says as he walks out of the canteen.

"Well, captain, what if I'm right?"

"When can we expect communications with Earth to resume?"

"That depends on what I can salvage from our radio. And that-" he turns to her, "- depends on how safe it is to handle."

"It's safe," she mutters.

"Do you know that for sure?"

She glares at him. "I'm still here."

He breaks eye contact. "I'd rather not tempt fate the way you do."

"And I'm the one called superstitious."

"You two, stop." No rise in the captain's tone; it's as if he doesn't order, but issues statements of fact instead.

"We need the link back to Earth," he continues. "By now they must have seen NECA's surface warmed up. I hate to think what they're suspecting because of our silence. Doctors, in half an hour we'll meet to discuss a new decontamination protocol."

Thirty minutes to prepare for the activities of the day. She returns to the ship section assigned to her- the comm room, now a makeshift laboratory.

Two petri dishes with crystal forests inside them: one a regular bacterial culture medium, the other mixed with acids and oxidizers. Not much new growth since she had last checked them. Another pair of dishes, bacterial cultures pristine- or almost, as tiny moldy spots reveal they caught something from the air. But something earthly, the kind of life she knew at home. Not crystalline. The crystal doesn't spread by air.

Gubarev said it killed the NECAns. She's not so sure of that. A pathogen that doesn't spread by air should not be too difficult to manage. Besides, the self-replicating crystals proved unable to convert the plastic of the tablecloth, or the glass of the petri dishes into more of themselves. But then, why are the glass parts in the radio transmitter all turned into shimmering flakes? What kind of alchemy allows the crystal to grow on flesh, and glass, and metal alike?

She has no idea how to kill it. For now, all she can recommend to the captain are measures of containment. The eaten through transmitter parts taunt her, glaring exception to an otherwise reassuring rule. There is another law that they obey and she wonders whether her containment methods would work after all.

-:-:-

"Then lets begin," she says as she opens a sturdy cryogenic container with Hendrix' suit inside. A fog of frost lingers for a moment around its plastic surface.

A few paces beside her, Gubarev watches intently, his sullen expression easy to make out through the visor of his hazmat gear. "Cold stops the things, you say."

"You were the one guarding here," she answers. "Did you see anything suspicious?" A rhetorical question, as the  logistics module is free of any crystalline invasion. She resumes her examination of the spacesuit, folding, stretching, exposing the various areas. "Nothing appears to have stuck to the urethane-nylon."

"So what are we looking for?"

"To see how the crystals snuck in. They seem to favor metallic parts, and I'm going to need you to dismantle the- yes, you will dismantle this."

"I ain't touching that."

"You know how these things work much better than I do. You could take them apart and back together in your sleep. And handling them with the hazmat on is safe. So please, Gubarev-"

"Fine." He growls. "You'd probably just bring the captain in to order me around anyway."

His hands work with practiced precision and in just a couple of minutes, the intricate machinery of the suit is disassembled. He then steps back, towards the door, in part to allow her better access to the various components, in part because he obviously would prefer to be elsewhere. There seem to be no suspicious needles, or shards, or any signs of infestation.

Gubarev fidgets behind her. "Well?"

"I'm not seeing anything yet ..." An idea. She searches inside the suit's cargo pockets. "His comm relays. I see he took five with him. Where are they?"

"Five? I'm only getting signals from four."

"And the fifth?"

"Check the logs if you want. There were only four installed. I get temperature, pressure, air composition data and occasionally a picture if motion is detected. Not much of that happened, that thing outside still plays dead."

"So he brought it back ... "

"You're welcome to look through the debris that used to be our long range radiotransmitter yourself. It's already broken, you don't need my help there."

"I might." She rummages through another container, this time for fresh comm relays.

"Going back in? Can't say I envy you. You know, the light has changed again inside NECA. Once it warmed itself, it's back to being dark again. Doesn't that worry you?"

"It does. A lot. But I'm here to find out what its purpose is. What about you?"

"Same. Just glad I'm not the one who has to rush in."

-:-:-

Inside NECA, the team of three walks along the passage following the airlock. She, captain Chahal, and doctor Ballard, each carrying a transporter pack with various climbing equipment. The air- not that anyone would want to breathe it for themselves- is warm and damp. Darkness has returned to NECA's corridors however, and the crew's torchlights create only small patches of clarity. In a way, it's better than to see the dizzying whole of the patterns of spires and ledges. On the other, it makes walking more treacherous, as the irregular floor seems too keen to have stumbling blocks for the unwary. Strange. NECA looks artificial, even in the dim illumination. Its surfaces smooth, machined to an irregular perfection of interlocking veins and bones of metal, and yet ...

"I wish there'd be more light," Ballard says.

Nothing happens.

"Well, I suppose it was worth a try."

She turns and sees him looking at the watch on his left arm. "Why do you keep staring at that thing? You'll misstep and break a bone or worse."

"Sorry." He smiles. "I am looking around. Have you seen this?" He points toward an opening between the ledges to his side. "Telemetry says it's a hundred meters deep, straight down. Looks fairly wide too."

"Have you been there before?" she asks.

"Of course not, none of us has, but that's the point. We press on in that direction, we're back where we were yesterday. Not much there."

"Apart from the wisps."

"Besides, this place is ideal to get a belaying rope. We can quickly go down, investigate, return if it's not promising. What do you think, captain?"

"I will defer to doctor Evans' opinion about how well suited this location is for a belay."

"I can set one up here, but I'm not-"

"I think we should try. It would only take a few minutes."

"All right," she says and lays down her transporter and looks for anchor points.

Moments later, she is on the belay rope. The slight squeeze at the start gives way to a cavernous space as she descends, which, at least, makes progress easy, if a bit difficult to ascertain. A floor becomes visible beneath, and a couple of coils of the belay rope lie on it- so then, she'll reach that before the safety stop knot at the end. The rope coils below give her a landmark to help control her speed, and she allows it to increase for a while under NECA's mock gravity. After a few seconds, she slows down again and prepares to land. Feet planted on terra firma, she looks around.

"Oh. Wow."

-"Should we follow you, doctor Evans?"- the captain asks.

Her lips move, but it takes several seconds for any word to leave them. "Yes." With fumbling hands she unclips herself from the belay rope. "Clear".

In front of her, a couple of nine-foot tall, insectoid figures lie encased in a crystalline growth on the wall. Their robust legs bend like those of grasshoppers, and the limbs that might pass for arms have three links similar to those of preying mantises. Hard to discern through the distortion through the transparent crystal, but it seems as if the beings walked around almost bare, their exoskeletons their almost only protection. Rugged ribbed shells around their thoraces extend tubular masks towards the insectoids' heads- those, at least, appear to be some kind of space suit.

"My God," she says. "These must have been the previous visitors." Her light now shines between the figures upon a third box, somewhat similar to the ones they had found before. Each of the insectoids has what seem very human hands, five fingers of which two opposable, upon the box.

"Are you sure it was them?" the captain asks as he touches down.

"Wha-" Her jaw drops as she turns to look at what he examines. A group of three creatures resembling obese short millipedes make up another grim decoration. One sits broken in several pieces, revealing metallic, robotic insides meant to protect a tiny occupant the size and shape of a sea urchin, several of its myriad spikes still linked to pieces of machinery.

"They're everywhere." Ballard's footfalls echo as he arrives.

Where to look first? In each direction, new forms of life- or their remains- appear, each fascinating, each begging to be admired at length. A pain to look away, a joy of another discovery. An armored cephalopod- its bubble helmet and spacesuit a wonder of articulation. Two slender figures like stick insects. An amorphous collection of spikes that could have been the offsping of a hedgehog and a giant amoeba. Three creatures that maybe were more rotund in their prime but now resemble beached portugese man-o-wars. And the walls contain even more shapes, all different. All similar in some respects. They all seem to have been carrying technology with them.

Where were they from? What used to power their anatomy? Did they have a similar chemistry to humans? How did they talk to each other? Could they have talked with us? How did they think? What did they think of? Overload. So much to study here-

"No chance these are bass-reliefs?"

She blinks out of her reverie and tries to focus on the crystals, not their captives. "I don't think so, captain. Ballard, what do you think?"

"Oh? Sorry." He puts his left hand down and turns towards them. "While this concentration suggests deliberate effort, the details suggest we have the genuine article. These things were alive once."

"Couldn't they be alive still?" she asks.

"Little reason to assume the crystals would be any more friendlier to them than they were to poor Hendrix."

Her gaze returns to the baroquely decorated walls. So much to learn underneath those blasted crystals ... but the image of Hendrix, spread out on the floor in pieces, comes back to haunt her. He lay there, just a few spikes having ripped him apart. And here they are now, with masses of the stuff all around them, its apparent inert solidity in no way reassuring. Sure, there is a lot to learn in this chamber if they could get through its crystalline glaze, but her curiosity is replaced by visions of human flesh oozing bile where glass shards cut through it. She'd grab a wall to steady herself but there's no way she's getting near them.

"Hendrix had it backwards," she whispers.

"Sorry?"

"He said, we're fishing for aliens. He was wrong. NECA's the bait. We're the catch."

Ballard starts to smile, and chuckles as he averts his eyes. "A rather fantastic theory, isn't it?"

She stands, mouth agape for a second. "Well ... ok, it is. Can you explain these?" she says, and shines her torchlight on the various crystallized beings.

"At the moment, no." He turns to meet her gaze, and raises an eyebrow. "Your hypothesis though leaves a big thing unexplained. What would the NECAns want with them, or us, hmm?"

She shrugs and starts to speak, but he interrupts her.

"All this- all this mass, build it, accelerate it, wait for it to cross the spaces between stars who knows how many times to gather all this menagerie. Seems like a lot of wasted effort, just to get a few pets."

"... Ok. Then help us find out what's going on and pay attention to your surroundings."

Perhaps she should have controlled herself more, but his persistent smug smirk really makes his face a tempting target for a punch. How can he be so self-assured and know-it-all anyway? She has every right to be nervous. Hendrix died. All around her, countless corpses of who knows how many other expeditions lie trapped in the same crystalline substance that killed him. And Ballard just stands around smiling like he has no idea how grave the situation is. 

"I am paying attention. I see what you see- all these things gathered, mostly intact, in the same place. There does appear to be purpose here. I can't say I know, but I do have an idea about what the purpose is. I do not think you will like it."

"This is of course merely a hypothesis, but ... let's observe two things. One, all of the corpses inside NECA are intact, whereas our colleague Hendrix was found in pieces. Two, despite our persistent tresspassing, the NECAns have yet to make an appearance."

Ballard pauses for dramatic effect. Bit of an inappropriate time for didactic showmanship, but the pause contains a hint of the direction his idea goes in.

"Unless, of course, we have met the NECAns already," he says. "The crystals."

She scoffs. "Now whose ideas are fanciful."

"Granted, it's a strange thought, but let's consider it. You have noticed how the crystals are rather odd in what they choose to grow on. They are at once very adaptable, but also rather discerning."

"That doesn't make them intelligent."

"No, just strange. NECA itself is strange. Look around, does any of this seem to have been designed with something we'd recognize as alive in mind? We've seen nothing that looks like a habitat, or a stasis chamber, or anything to pass for life support apart from the air, there's nothing that looks like machinery of any kind, no modules, no storage, moving around is an awkward wading through a maze of ledges, and that airlock we passed through would be useless for just about any ship. Hey, right here around us we have all kinds of things that look like they were alive and thinking once. Can you imagine any of these life forms calling this place home?"

Silence.

"So I think," he continues, "that we can agree the NECAns, whatever they happen to be, are even stranger than the beings we see in this room."

"Let's assume then," the captain says, "that the crystals are the NECAns. What would that mean?"

"I believe, in a way, Ms. Evans is right. The ship is indeed bait. But what does a species really want, if it has gone through the trouble to build for itself an interstellar starship?"

"A home," she says.

"Yes. A new home. For whatever reason, the crystals need something alive- or somehow similar to alive- to grow on. They need a way to study the biosphere of a potential home planet. They could descend on the planet and do their study there, but it may be too dangerous to just rush inside the lion's mouth, as it were. Better to have a sample of that biosphere come to them first. It will be the part of the biosphere that can build spaceships. It will be the part that will put up the most purposeful resistance."

"Oh my God. They're studying us."

"Are you suggesting," the captain asks, "that the destruction of our radiotransmitter was a sabotage by these NECAns?"

"I would not conjecture that yet. They, assuming the crystals are the NECAns, might not recognize the purpose of our transmitter. But they might recognize it as technology, and thus worthy of study. As to why Hendrix was in pieces and these beings here are not, well, I assume the crystals eventually become more adapted to the peculiarities of the biologies they invade."

"What if the biology is incompatible? They must have passed by dozens of star systems by now," she says.

"I wouldn't believe the homeworlds of the beings we see here were safe. Not all of NECA needs to stop by a planet. All it needs is to dump some small module containing the germs of an invasion. If well prepared, that germ will take over the planet while NECA moves on."

Silence descends on the party of astronauts once more.

"It's only a hypothesis," Ballard says, "indeed I can see several holes in it ..."

Torchlights flicker over the crystallized giant mantises. Nobody seems particularly confident to pick his hypothesis apart.

"All right. We have three hours of air left before we need to return to the ship," the captain says. "I want that device removed from the crystals. I want those things-" he points to the starfish and its broken millipede robot- "broken free too. Anything that looks like a device we can carry, we'll break out of the walls. I want pieces of walls too if we can get them. And we'll take as much as we can break and carry to NECA's airlock."

He looks around, wide eyed, and there is a slight tremor in his voice. "I am not sure I believe you, Doctor Ballard. I certainly do not want to. But if what you suggest is true, then we will need all the data we can gather on our enemy. Ship crew, start preparing a containment area for the NECA samples. Assume they are intelligent and hostile. We want to keep them under control, and reveal as little of ourselves as possible."

She frowns. "If the crystals are intelligent, they must communicate with each other, somehow."

"That would be a test for a part of my hypothesis, yes."

"And once we're back at our ship, it will be the first question we'll look into," the captain says.

A punishing couple of hours follows as the crew works hard to pry a few items from the crystals' grasp, the effort made worse by the skipped heartbeats after every blow and every drill. What if something changes? What if ... they ... realize what the humans are up to? Apart from racking of nerves however, nothing seems to happen as the astronauts fill the transporters with a crystallized starfish, fragments from the mantis' last box and a part from one's chest armor, a couple wall fragments and a few other odds and ends.

She notices Ballard sneak away into a corner every once in a while and by the third time, she takes a longer look. A yellow flicker of light reflects from his watch reflects on his visor; it seems to be a sequence of short and long blips- Morse code? She can't quite make out what it says; it seems as if the letters -RRING show up, before she decides to look away and act like nothing happened. The shade of the yellow impulses reminds her of the will-o-wisps they saw on the first incursion inside NECA; there never were any wisps in this room, she notices. Indeed, they haven't seen one at all today, once Ballard told them to take the other passage.

She almost laughs at herself. It looks like she's turning into Gubarev. It's the place they are in, filled as it is with death immortalized, it has a tendency to play tricks on one's mind.

One hour of air left before the suits' CO2 scrubbers need to work overtime, the captain orders them to return to the ship. For once, she has to carry nothing on the way up- the captain volunteered to carry two transporters, despite her protests. Must be a cultural thing, but no need here to prove to him that she can handle transporters both ways. As the crewmember with the most experience in rope ascension techniques however, she insists to go last.

"We'll wait for you at the top of the rope," the captain says.

"No, I'll meet you at the airlock. It's not far away, and I noticed some crystal growth on the comm relays. Since I have nothing to carry, I'll take care of that."

But while, after her turn to ascend comes, she does spend a few seconds checking on the four relays, all of which she can see from her spot a few steps beside the belay anchors, her real reason for lagging behind is different. At the top of the rope, she looks towards the airlock. For now, there's no one around her. She goes in the opposite direction, along the path they followed on the first incursion. A couple of wisps float in the air in front of her. One flickers- short, short, long. A few moments later, the other bumps into a wall twice, then grazes against it.

She catches the first wisp, and it blips twice in her hand. The first attempt to catch the other fails, she needs to try again before she has both wisps close at hand. An idea flashes through her mind- if only she had a coin.

One of the comm relays she carries, with its small, disc shape, might work as a substitute. Eyes closed, she tosses it spinning into the air and then grabs it between her palms. The rounder surface touches her right. Call that heads. A few more tosses seem random enough. She tells herself "heads" will be a long flicker, and "tails" a short pulse.

Short pulse on one wisp. She tosses the relay. Tails. Eyebrow raised, she gives the other wisp a short tap. Short pulse again. The toss is again tails. Another tap. Long pulse. Heads. Short pulse. Tails. Long pulse. Heads. Long pulse. Heads again. Long pulse. Heads. Unerring.

-"Is everything all right Dr. Evans?"-

"Yes, captain, I will be with you shortly," she says, trying hard to conceal her excitement.

The wisps can send signals back in time.

What did Ballard call them? He seemed to have said, "will-ve-wisps" when he first saw them. "Will-have" wisps? Wisps to show one what will have happened? She'd groan, but the others might listen on the comm. Carefully, she takes a small sample jar from another pocket and places the two wisps inside.

He knows. He knows what the wisps can do, yet told no one. There's something else going on here that needs investigating; better not let him realize she's on to him. Sample jar tucked safely in her pocket, she gives the area a casual strobe with her torchlight. A cluster of iridescent reflections on the wall catches her eye, and she approaches. It's a comm relay. Not among those she left. Hendrix must have put it in.

His fifth. The other four are in the corridor towards the airlock. He had used all five he carried.

"I'm coming up, captain," she says.

-:-:-

“What is it like to be a bat?”

She lifts her gaze from the microscope eyepiece. “Sorry?”

“It’s a philosophical conundrum,” Ballard says. “Bit of a trick question. If you can express it, then it’s not what a bat is like, because bats don’t have the capacity for language. Or so that philosopher thought.”

“Yes, well. What is it like to be a self-replicating space crystal,” she says, and resumes her examination of a tissue sample from the alien sea urchin shaped creature.

“I’m working towards establishing that too, Ms Evans.” He pauses, marker in hand, in front of an improvised whiteboard on the wall covered in scribbles. “Theory guides practice.”

Sea urchin cells frozen- or rather vitrified- stand before her eyes, illuminated in the microscope backlight. Practice can guide itself, thank you very much. She takes a few snapshots of the cells- not so different, at least in aspect, from those of an Earth animal. Something that looks like a nucleus, very likely the central storage of genetic material. Several dark spots and stripes, organelles most likely. Life elsewhere must have found similar solutions. But what strikes her is the continuous nature of the glassy material encasing the cells. It’s not a shattered mess of needles as it was for Hendrix’ cells. It’s almost as if it were not the same kind of crystal; and yet, cutting a slice off of the alien urchin and putting it into a culture medium for Earth bacteria produced the same glass hedgehog growth she saw in the communications room when she found Hendrix’ body. A row of covered Petri dishes, all with tiny, spiky growths of crystal, lie spread out wide on a bench to her side.

“Size matters,” he says. “We humans are a certain size, we see the world a certain way. We have notions of space and time as separate, we think of position and momentum as distinguishable, we have a certain idea of how inertia affects things. The intuitive categories of our mind are those of classical Newtonian physics. But if we were very small … what would Feynman do?”

She takes a quick glance at the whiteboard. Her disinterest isn’t feigned; its contents mean nothing to her. What she is interested in is Ballard’s watch. It’s been twenty nine minutes since he last took a leave of absence. Hand on his chin, he paces, back and forth, in front of the whiteboard, seemingly lost in thought. But she knows better. Indeed, right before thirty minutes elapse on her own timer, Ballard’s pacing takes him out of the laboratory.

“What do you think of Ballard?” she asks as she turns to Dezaki.

“I think he’s a very intelligent man,” Dezaki replies, still watching her computer monitor and annotating stills from microscope cameras.

“There’s something strange about him.”

“Smart people are often like that.”

“I need to show y-”

Ballard rushes back into the room. “I think I have an idea. Ms. Evans, do we still have those older crystal cultures you took from the comm room?”

She rises. “The ones I used to test if it spreads through air? Yes … ” She paces to a container and takes out a glass dish, a small crystalline drop in the middle of its orange bacterial culture material. Either the spikes have gotten plentiful and caked together, or her eyes are too tired to see the spaces, or the crystal has indeed grown smoother over time. “Hm.”

“Indeed,” he says, “looks … well developed. Might we put that near one of the newer samples? Just bring the containers close to each other, do not mix them.”

She complies. Ballard and she stare at the pair of crystal cultures- one an erratic mess of spikes, the other a smooth blob, each in their own little glass prison. If it weren’t for the hum of the air circulation system, it might appear time has stopped. Dezaki’s clothes rustle behind her as the ship’s doctor joins their vigil.

The spikes retract.

Her vision tunnels and nothing exists but the crystals. The spikes retract. Slow but visible in their motion back towards the core of the growth, its surface smoothing into an almost perfect sphere.

“That isn’t chemistry. That is communication!”

She’s too fascinated by the smoothing blob to see, but she can feel the floor vibrating under his jump and his arms briefly close around her as he gives her a quick kiss.

“Communication! Let’s do that again,” he says, and giddily brings another little crystalline hedgehog near the smooth blobs. Seconds later, it also smooths. He gives Dezaki a celebratory hug too, but the doctor looks grimly at the three dishes.

“They are teaching each other how to handle Earth proteins.”

Ballard raises an eyebrow. “Let’s hope then I’m only half-right and they don’t think of us as prey.”

“Can they see us?”

“Much like we see the Earth is flat, they probably don’t have a good direct picture. And much like we know the Earth isn’t, they might understand more than they see.”

“I think we should tell the Captain,” Dezaki says.

-:-:-

She plays with the sleeping pill between her fingers. Should she, or not? One’s body is a holy temple after all, and so far she had been careful to avoid defiling hers with anything that would alter its functions. If some pill can change what happens in one’s brain, it’s poison. Sleeping pills for restlessness, happy pills for sadness, more pills for every inconvenience, that way addiction lies. But then, what of the months she spent in hibernation as the ship traveled to NECA? That was different, there was no other way to get here ...

How different was it, though? She must rest now, that much is true. And also true, rest doesn't find her. The pill tumbles in her hand. Just once, maybe? Come on, it's not convenience, it's duty.

After all, she was the one to tell the doctor of her lack of sleep, and she was the one who chose to keep watch over what used to be the ship’s main comm room. New protocol after the crystalline contamination; everyone gets a segment of the ship to watch over and call their own. Anyone could have chosen the comm room, but she volunteered first. 

The place looks nothing like it used to. Once filled with machinery, its bareness is disturbed only by a mat, her sleeping bag, and a few personal odds and ends. From behind closed eyelids she remembers, there used to be a corpse here too. The pill sits in her palm. Just once, maybe?

Laboratory work done in partially overlapping shifts, it is her turn to catch a couple hours’ sleep. Better take advantage of them. Somewhere else, Captain Chahal, Gubarev, and Yang, work out a plan to amp up Sfetnik’s transmitter so it could act as a link to Earth. One of them might be resting too.

She takes the pill to her mouth, then decides against it. No. It's just convenience. Instead, she grabs the jar with the two wisps inside. There was no chance to show it to Dezaki. Not in a way that she’d understand why they were important. Not in a way that Ballard wouldn’t spot.

They are beautiful, the wisps, with their pale yellow, subtle flicker. They remind her of an ancient filament light-bulb she once saw glow in an antiques store. So different, warm, not like the blue white ice of the ship’s regular lights. There’s more than beauty to wisps’ flicker though. A double blip on one of the wisps. Moments later, a double tap on the other as she gives the jar a gentle shake. What would happen if, when she saw one of the wisps blip, she’d then resolve to keep the jar still and the other wisp untouched? She waits. No disturbance in the wisps’ light. No cheating them, it seems. No cheating fate. The future they predict must happen. And yet …

She imagines Ballard, going along the wisp corridor that second time they went inside NECA, and sending a message to his past self: nothing interesting here. His past self then doesn’t go to the wisp corridor, but chooses another. Maybe nothing interesting there either, so he sends another message back in time, avoid both these places. And so on. Until he finds the chamber of the crystallized aliens. He tells his past self to go there, and he does, unerringly. As if he knew the place. As if, as she herself remarked then, he had been there before. In some sense, he had been.

And there is no paradox at all. Time plays back, again and again, until it stabilizes into a consistent history. What ends up happening is what Ballard sees as best. Fate bends to will. So what does he want?

He was very helpful in the laboratory. Maybe another inspiration brought by the trials of possible Ballards collapsed into one reality most preferred. But how did he get his wisps to receive messages from thirty minutes into the future? Couldn’t he then send messages, like a relay, from an hour into the future, or more? And why doesn’t he tell anyone?

-”Captain Chahal here. Doctor Ballard, please come to the mess hall for a couple of minutes, we need a review on the Sfetnik plan.”-

She turns away from the intercom voice, wisp jar in hand. So many questions, they jumble in her head. Thoughts start in one place and don’t finish at all. Warm light in an antique shop- they’d make good candles for home. Her eyes close.

She is old. A mediterranean breeze caresses her tanned wrinkled skin as the summer sun shines over the island; the shade from a pair of cypress trees protects her from its heat. Small waves rustle against a rocky beach, their rhythmic soothing sound broken only by the laughter of children. Not hers, but they might as well be. They play, and she watches. And when they stop playing, they gather around her to listen to another of her stories, of places far away, or far below, or far above, stories of what she found there, before returning to their game of pretend, avid explorers of the shore and soon of the ocean stretching all around them.

A boiling teapot whistles in the distance and she is now in the kitchen, tending to it. Fresh from the oven, a pumpkin pie makes the air itself seem edible, but the little adventurers still need some prodding. “Lunchtime!” she calls.

They hear and rush towards her, doubling their pace as they too feel the aroma of the pie. All, save one little boy. He stands forlorn on the beach, a wooden stick in hand to prod something hidden behind a stone.

“Come here, David,” she says.

He turns and shuffles towards her, head lowered.

“Is something wrong?” she asks.

“Dezaki is dead.”

-”I repeat, Dezaki is dead. Crystalline infection.”- Ballard’s voice.

A sharp alarm blares for a second.

-”This is Captain Chahal. Restarting anticontamination protocol. Everyone give me your status. Chahal, navigation, ok.”-

-”Yen, navigation, ok.”-

A sleepy grumble. -”Gubarev. Logistics. Ok.”-

She punches her intercom. “Evans. Comm room. Ok.”

-”Ballard. Med lab. I’m fine.”-

You bastard.

-”Everyone get to your hazmat suits. Ship’s air circulation will be cut off in two minutes.”-

Ballard, you bastard. Is this the reality you preferred?

-:-:-

 “Gubarev, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Shouldn’t you be in the lab doing an autopsy on Dezaki?” He sidesteps her. “Besides, I also have work to do.”

“I know. Sfetnik. That’s why I must tell you something.” She catches up, and braces her arms on the sides of the corridor. “Please. It’s about Ballard, and it’s very important.”

His eyes glare at her from behind the plastic visor of the hazmat suit, and he could easily push her aside. “Whatever. You have one minute.”

“Take this”, she says, and hands him an opaque plastic cup and a six-faced die.

“I don’t have time for parlor- hey, are those wisps from NECA?”

“They’re in a jar, and they won’t hurt you. Ballard’s been carrying a few since we first got back from there.”

“So what?”

“Roll the dice. Inside the cup, and don’t show me until after I call it.” A wisp in her jar blinks, and she continues. “It will be three.”

He shrugs, but rolls, and lifts the cup to reveal a three, as predicted.

“The others wait for me, you know,” he says.

“Yes. Roll it again. Please. Five.”

The prediction comes true again.

“Are you controlling this somehow?”

“No. One.”

He rolls. “Ok, how?”

She lifts the jar. One of the wisps flickers twice. “I see what you roll, then use the stick to tap a code on one wisp.” A double tap on the other. “A few seconds earlier, the other wisp flickers the code back.” A short burst of flickers. “The captain will call you in a moment.”

“Really? Then-”

A buzz on the ship’s intercomm. -”This is the captain. Major Gubarev, what is your status?”-

He presses a nearby button. “On my way. I will be there in a couple minutes.” He releases the button, and turns to her. “When did you discover this?”

“Just yesterday,” she says, closing in on him, her fingers tracing along the wall towards the intercomm. “But Ballard has known since the first day we went to NECA.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen his watch. He has two of these things, and somehow he can send messages back half an hour. He told no one about them.”

“I bet he wouldn’t.” Gubarev shakes his head. “He could decipher anything that’s practical to use. Even quantum computers have trouble with some encryptions. But these blips of light or whatever they are- if someone’s meant to read it, they will crack it too. Bank transfers, authentications, secret messages between diplomats- none of that can ever be safe. Intelligence services would kill for such a device.”

Kill. Yes, understandable, she also thought the wisps would bring great power to whoever knew how to use them. Which is why one of her hands is now very close to the intercomm button. Where he can see it.

“There’s more though,” she says. “I don’t think Dezaki’s death was an accident. Ballard didn’t warn us. And we know the crystals can adapt to our biochemistry.” She shows him a printed photograph. “This is a tissue sample from Dezaki when we found her.”

The mass of red and yellow flesh pierced by transparent spikes makes him turn in disgust.

“Here,” she insists, “are the same tissues, exposed to the crystals we had in the lab.”

The picture in front of him resembles a neatly preserved laboratory specimen, vitrified for long term storage.

“Ohooiet! He wants to get back to Earth alone.”

“He wants communications with Earth disabled, at least. Sfetnik might be sabotaged next.”

“Svoloch.” He pouts his lips as if to spit, but from behind a hazmat visor, thinks better of it.

“We can’t let him know we know,” she says. “If he can warn himself in the past, he can change things in his favor.”

“Or we can just lock him up and take the watch away.”

“And then thirty minutes before that his scheduled message doesn’t arrive, and he sees something’s up. I’ve seen him check that watch every half hour, but surely if he tells himself to, he could send a message back even more.”

“Ipat.”

“So we must keep an eye on him and the messages he sends, and figure those out before we act.”

“Yes … listen, they’re waiting on me. We’ll talk later. Until then, make yourself undisposable.”

“Sorry?”

He points his finger at his own head. “Think. It’s a big ship. Lots of ways to go boom. Ballard won’t want that. Make the ship go boom if you’re not around to tell it not to.” He walks away.

A sigh of relief, and she can go away from the intercomm at last. Hopefully she did the right thing. The reason she chose to speak with him was, he was the one other crew member not in a room with Ballard.

A clink of glass on plastic as she replaces the jar of wisps in her pocket. Gubarev would have backed away in a hurry if he had known what else she had there; Ballard doesn’t have to be the only one who uses the NECAns as weapons. But really- if push came to shove, would she break the sealed Petri dish? And use the crystal blob inside to … kill someone?

-:-:-

Gubarev grumbles as he steps behind her. “Going to the navigation room?”

“Yes,” she says. “I need to be on that EVA.”

“You have the wisps with you?”

The jar sits in her pocket. “No, I hid them.”

With a dismissive arm motion, he staggers past.

“Are you ok?” she asks.

“I better be. I’ve been at the engine.”

“At the engine? Wh-”

The door to the navigation room opens, revealing the other crew members inside.

“Sfetnik is now near docking position,” Yen says.

“And it shall stay there. Myself, major Gubarev, and Doctor Ballard will go outside to patch its transmitter. Doctor Evans, does the patch look free of crystals to you?”

“Yes, the airlock and everything in it does not seem infested but- Captain, may I suggest I go on the EVA instead?” She throws a quick glance at Gubarev. “I’ve had my rest shift, and you haven’t, sir.”

His silence is hard to bear. Please say yes.

“I think that is not a bad idea, captain.”

Ballard.

She has to fight the impulse to turn around and look surprised.

“All right. Doctor Evans, prepare for the EVA.”

Relief. And puzzlement. But she must act like nothing bothers her. Just like Gubarev does. One arm brushing against the walls, he strides along her and Ballard to the airlock, but there is something odd about his steps. Too large, too ostentatious, too deliberate, as if he doesn’t quite trust his legs.

Their cargo for the EVA- a ramshackle collection of parts assembled into a patch device for Sfetnik- waits for them in the airlock. The Sfetnik probe was not designed to receive large amounts of data from the ship. The patch is meant to change that, and boost the transmission power. Its jet black casing reminds her of the alien keyboxes, one of which is also in the airlock with them. Its twin lies in the physics lab.

-”Captain speaking. Is everyone ready?”-

“Yes captain,” she answers. “Changed to spacesuits. We will depressurize the airlock in twenty seconds.”

Ballard approaches the patch device, but Gubarev waves him away. “Get your tether ready. Wouldn’t want to lose you in space.”

“I can help you carry that-” Ballard begins, but Gubarev’s stare discourages him from continuing.

-”Anything wrong down there?”- the Captain asks.

Since Ballard and Gubarev are in a silent dispute about who carries the patch, she decides to answer. “No captain. Tethers engaged, airlock depressurizing.”

Moments later, they are outside the ship and floating towards Sfetnik, a golden, smooth dodecahedron with a couple of lenses on one of its faces and a pair of solar panels attached. The probe is about as large as the airlock itself, but as far as she knows, most of the volume is meant for its own engines and propellant, to allow many course corrections during a NECA survey. It now stands a few tens of meters away from the ship, and hopefully away from any crystalline infection. Gubarev clutches the patch device to his chest like a mother keeps her baby.

“Arrived at target,” she says, as she and Ballard make contact with one of the probe’s faces.

Sfetnik’s engines on the other side flare for a moment to compensate for the nudge and keep its position relative to the ship. They begin to unscrew a panel, an operation made awkward by there being no holds on the probe to attach themselves to, and while it automatically corrects any deviation, both she and Ballard have to compensate for their drift on their own.

Gubarev pushes past her just as she opens the panel.

“Keep away,” Gubarev says, and, bracing himself to Sfetnik’s newly revealed insides, shoves Ballard aside. “You theory guys. Think you know all. It’s us practical people who fix things.”

For once, she’s glad Gubarev has such a foul, paranoid temper. He suspected everyone, always, so it doesn’t look strange that he pushes Ballard, and her, aside.

“And what am I supposed to do, watch?” Ballard asks.

“If I need you, I call.” With trembling hands, he clips the patch to Sfetnik and works on a console.

“It seems to me you do need help.”

“No, stay away. You break it.”

He presses a succession of buttons on the console and Sfetnik powers up its engines, speeding back towards a distant orbit around NECA.

-”Gubarev, what are you doing?”-

But even the captain’s voice can’t seem to reach him. Red glass flakes clot Gubarev’s visor as he coughs. A gurgling, death rattle sound is his last communication as the thrusters on his own suit activate and he drifts away, flipping the bird to them with both hands.

“A charmer till the end,” Ballard says. “Huh. Surprising, though.”

-”Gubarev! … Sfetnik does not respond to orbital adjustment commands,”- the captain says, -”but the new transmissions module is active. Major Yen, send- major Yen?”-

“Surprising indeed.”

-:-:-

“And then there were three,” Ballard says.

“That is tasteless.”

On the other side of the airlock, yet the distance to him still seems too small.

“I’m trying to cope too, Ms Evans. I don’t particularly fancy our chances – ”

A metallic voice interrupts him. -”Warning. Five minutes until engine detonation.”-

” – especially now.”

Gubarev. Must have been his way to make himself “undisposable”. But even so, Ballard seems non-plussed.

-”Doctor Ballard, meet me at the reactor, now.”-

She raises her voice. “Captain, wait – ”

-”No time, Doctor Evans. You must take over the navigation room and see to it that this ship sends its data back to Earth. That is an order.”-

Tears well in her eyes. “But – ”

“You heard the captain,” Ballard says.

His hand touches her arm and she jolts back as the airlock door opens behind her.

His eyes lock with hers. “There is very little time.” Even now, those lips of his seem turned into a subtle smile.

She turns and runs. God damn you, Ballard. You won’t win.

The navigation room is almost empty when she gets there. Only the now too familiar of a half-crystallized corpse lying in pieces on the floor disturbs its sterility. Yen.

The captain must already be in the reactor room. A tear wells up again, for she couldn’t warn him. But at least Ballard doesn’t know she knows. And with a few presses of the computer console, she makes sure Earth will know too. In between scans of samples and videos from NECA, she puts a new film of the her wisps and their signalling abilities. Oh yes, Earth will know what treasure Ballard found and tried to hide. Her message sent, she deletes it from the computer’s memory.

Good luck flying the ship alone you bastard. May they rip you apart when you get home.

There’s one more thing to hide, the wisps -

Dull pain, like a needle digging in her flesh. Heart attack, now? A red trickle of blood, with growing glass flakes in it, runs down her arm. She exhales in shock. Why the surprise, it was bound to happen, eventually. As long as he doesn’t find her wisps, her efforts, all their efforts, were not in vain. But where to hide them? Anywhere on the ship, and he might find them. Anywhere else, she doesn’t have time to reach. Unless …

She takes out the petri dish with the crystal blob inside it. One of those taught to grow smoothly on Earth protein. Drops of her blood fall to the floor and turn into tiny crystalline hedgehogs. Her body is a temple defiled anyway. She presses the blob to her wound. Numbness replaces pain.

“Captain?” she asks as she makes her way to the airlock.

No answer. The alarm has stayed silent for minutes now, too.

-”I am afraid the captain has passed on.”-

Of course.

Her arm may be numb but strength hasn’t left her and she rips cords and wires from the airlock mechanism once it closes behind her. A few more whacks with her hammer follow, to ensure that door won’t open again soon.

-”How do you feel, Ms Evans?”-

She clips the hammer to her belt and patches the hole in her suit. “I … I have been infected too.”

-”That is unfortunate.”-

“I’m leaving, Ballard. To NECA.”

-”That doesn’t seem like a good idea.”-

“I’m dying anyway. We came here to investigate. One last push.”

Alien keybox in tow, she exits and commands the ship-NECA tether to convey her as fast as possible.

“Do you see what I see?”

-”I am now in the navigation room. Yes, I see your video feed.”-

Then stay put.

A full NECA day- a quarter hour- passes before her journey is complete. And then, the keybox seems to take forever to sequence NECA’s airlocks. How slow time flies when there’s so little of it. “Do you see?”

-”Yes.”-

One last push into the NECAn darkness. What was it with the wisp corridor you didn’t want others to see? Her legs grow uncertain. Like Gubarev, she uses the wall to steady herself as she proceeds. Above her, a swarm of wisps drifts in slow but unpredictable motions. In front, darkness and a long stretch of downward sloping corridor. The floor is uneven, a random mish-mash of ledges that required her to choose her steps with care. No time for that. She propels herself forward in a clumsy mix of jumping and crawling along the walls.

A misstep and she hits herself against a ledge. The impact is soft in NECA’s low gravity, but it still winds her.

“Do you see?” she asks as she catches her breath.

-”Yes”- his voice comes back, garbled.

Slowly she rises and presses on. All this weight on her. Every breath seems slightly harder than the last as if her ribs turn to stone. The air in her helmet, the helmet itself, seem to stifle her. Her instruments indicate the air inside NECA is a breathable mix of gases, its temperature mild, its pressure just shy of one atmosphere. She takes her helmet off. What’s the worst that can happen, catch a space disease? Too late for that. The helmet rolls by her side and she moves down along the wisp corridor. How far she has descended, there is no way to know. Somewhere around her are timetravelling wisps bouncing through NECA’s chaotic inner structure but all that matters is the next step. One leg then the other as the floor beneath becomes smoother and more fit to walk on.

Then the corridor ends into an archway. This must be what Ballard wanted to hide from them. The hall is large, its walls, as far as the poor and wavering light allows to see, a mess of tubing and pipes that mimics the exterior of NECA. And in its center, a giant.

Several times her height, the being looks like a Jellyfish veil the color of pearls draped over a somewhat humanoid figure. It has no legs, and no head can be distinguished from a torso, but two large hands with tentacular fingers spread behind it, vaguely resembling wings. A Jellyfish Angel. The tendrils bury into and mix with the piping on the walls … or are the piping itself. In front of the creature is a similar pair of hands, its fingers constantly twitching as if the Angel were counting. The fingers lengthen and thin into strands of black fibers, through which packets of sparks travel and sometimes hit each other. Intricate spiral patterns result after collisions, from which pairs of wisps emerge.

It seems oblivious to her presence.

She wants to scream. “… hey.”

The creature pays no attention even as she makes a meek arm wave.

She throws the lantern at it, and it strikes one of the traces of light, then bounces back. It smashes against the floor, leaving her in near darkness broken by the sporadic tangling spirals, and their reflections on the Jellyfish Angel’s featureless face. Her legs give from under her and she collapses to her knees, then to her side. Every word is a struggle.

“Do you see,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

His steps echo in the corridor, and in a few seconds she sees his silhouette against the wisps’ light.

“It may be difficult to explain this, Ms Evans,” he says as he buttons something on his watch, “but I always knew I would arrive here, alone.” He smiles at her. “Well, technically alone. And meet God.”

God? That Jellyfish playing with wisps is God to him?

“You might be wondering, why the conversion? No, I didn’t join you into believing. God is but a shorthand. Call this the system administrator, if you like.”

A couple more steps and he crouches by her side. Oh no. She forgot to dispose of the wisp jar!

“It is strange how these things work out,” he says as he looks her over.

Her muscles tense.

“But they work best if followed to the lett-” The jar from her pocket is now in his hand and he stares, wide eyed, at the pair of wisps inside it.

Her hammer crashes against the glass bubble of his helmet. Dazed, he puts his arms in front of him and she smashes at them again, shattering the watch. A pair of wisps floats free and mixes with the newly made ones from the Jellyfish Angel. He kicks into her abdomen and thrusts her away, but she is beyond pain. Motionless on the floor, exhausted, but in his frustrated yell at the swarm of wisps above she knows victory. He didn’t see it coming. There is no warning left.

Glass flakes form in the blood oozing from his hand as he lifts her wisp jar to his face again. His cheek tenses, his lips snarl, the tendons in his neck contract as he shakes. The jar breaks against a metal webbing.

“I see … I suppose then we will both meet God the old fashioned way.”

He grabs one of the pipes running along a wall for support, but soon slumps toward the floor. Her own vision becomes a narrow tunnel. There is naught but the Jellyfish Angel. And breath. Stops.

Time flows differently. The sporadic spirals and traces of light become a continuous shining band, its reflection on the immobile Jellyfish face an infinite caleidoscope. The solid metal floor beneath her becomes liquid with the thermal noise of what could be centuries. She sinks in its embrace, captured, consumed, all instinct screaming to fight or run away, with no possibility of either. Only the sound of raindrops is there to soothe her … No, not raindrops. Particles zooming through space, crashing into the crystal she has become, and it rushing to repair itself.

There is no sound but the rain. There is no feeling but liquid metal. There is no light but the Jellyfish Angel.
And then, in an instant, there is darkness.

It has noticed them.

The walls unravel and NECA disappears as the Angel retracts its wings. Wherever they are now, there is but emptiness, and them, and it, its wings blacker than the darkness of the void. It cradles them both, immobile crystal figures in its grasp.

She sees herself reflected on its face. Her suit disappears, and she coils to cover her nakedness, but there is no way to hide. Her skin dissolves, then her flesh, and bones, until all that is left is a tangle of luminous wires roughly hinting at the shape of her body, most of them gathered where her head used to be. The fibers’ reflection multiplies into an endless pattern and she sees herself as no mirror before had shown her.

Small things. She sees herself afraid to descend miles into the Earth, then going anyway in search of answers she both wants and fears. Big things. A girl singing praises to the Maker in Sunday school. A woman clutching her dead child, screaming at the heavens unsure if someone listens. A love more than life, yet here she lives when that love faded.

Dark things. An image of Ballard’s lithe body, naked and rough above hers, and she responding with desire. Another image, where she feeds his corpse to his ill-begotten progeny. Revulsion. At him, and at herself.

Fear, ambition, faith, love, desire- clunky labels over continuous complex reality. Wave packets collide billowed by opposing random streams. Her soul is a face in a cloud.

Ballard laughs.

Who’s he to laugh? The Angel’s face reflects the tangle that is him, and in the patterns of sparks she sees a small boy disguised as a man, quick to play and quick to avoid responsibility. She sees him receiving a standing ovation in a conference, keen to be everyone’s center of attention. And there he is casting someone aside, because she was no longer convenient; because she got too close; because she might have seen just how scared he is of everyone else.

And what of you, monster? What are you?

The Angel becomes transparent, and behind it she sees …

All that is or could be. A web of strands straining against each other spreads throughout space and time, all alike. There, with effort, she can see the ship as it approached NECA. There, the strands vibrated into standing waves as Ballard’s messages forced them into a consistent pattern of events. There, an echo of a history that was not stable …

-:-:-

She is inside NECA, on the second day of exploration. The captain, Ballard and Hendrix walk beside her through the wisp corridor. They have just heard Gubarev through the commlink to the ship complain, yet again, about how the light had suddenly turned on inside yesterday, then off again today.

“How much longer,” Hendrix asks.

Ballard offers him an arm. “I can take over for you if you like.”

But Hendrix gestures him away. He doesn’t look tired; if anything, he seems locked in a stupid race with the captain as to who can carry the alien keybox longest.

“At least the floor is more regular,” she says. “Less sloped, too.”

An archway appears, far away. There is some kind of hall behind it, and that’s where the wisps floating above seem to come from.

“I sure hope,” Hendrix says, “we haven’t lugged this thing here for nothing.”

The captain takes a long breath. “Better have it with us in case we found other closed doors.”

There’s something in the distant hall. Some kind of variable light source, but stronger than the wisps, and elongated. They approach.

Hendrix almost drops the box. “Holy shit.”

Everyone must have seen it, the outline of a giant figure standing in the hall.

“No sudden moves,” the captain says. “Gubarev, that means you too.”

-”I’m not the one poking an alien to say hello.”-

“Just make sure you’re getting our transmission clearly.”

With slow steps, they arrive to the Jellyfish Angel’s chamber, but it seems too preoccupied to notice them. Shards of light play before it and collide, producing intricate spiral patterns from which pairs of wisps emerge.

“I’ve seen this before … ” Ballard says as he takes a couple steps sideways. “But in particle accelerators, and these patterns look strange. It’s as if it’s creating charge. Hendrix, could you activate the box?”

“Captain?”

“Use a low impulse setting.”

Hendrix sets the box before the Jellyfish Angel and all the astronauts place themselves some distance from it.  A click on the remote control, and an EMP makes their comms chatter with static for a moment.

The patterns of spirals disappears. Instead, the Angel’s face now shows a nest of luminous threads in a rough approximation of the box shape as its hands encircle it.

“Wow. Do you see that?” Ballard asks.

“Yeah.”

“No, do you see it? It’s … blueprints!”

“You high?”

Hendrix is right, the shapes on the Angel’s face are too chaotic to look like blueprints to her. But Ballard seems keen on his interpretation, and snatches the remote.

“Oi! It’s not the box.” Click. “Here.” Click. Click. Each one an impulse. “It’s me.”

And the image on the Angel’s face changes. Still a mess of fibers of light but …somehow the mess is recognizable as Ballard, and what seem to be his thoughts or memories, exposed.

“Whoah man.” Hendrix laughs. “I’m sorry.”

Another image appears. Hendrix. Then all others. As naked as Ballard, all masks and subterfuge removed. This shouldn’t be. She slams her eyes shut, and turns away from the Angel. An arm on her shoulder startles her.

“It’s all right, Ms Evans.” Ballard, pale, shaking.

“What … is that thing?”

He nudges her back to the corridor. “Nothing to worry about.” He starts tapping something on his watch.And then that version of history disappears.

-:-:-

She knows now to look at Ballard’s message. In the wisp corridor you will meet god. Do so alone. The message produces a wave through the chain of events, and pushes it into a different history. And then another, as the message changes, but always with the same core.

In the wisp corridor you will meet god.

Do so alone.

Why?

“What is it like to be a god, Ms Evans?”

The intuitive categories of her mind are those of a frightened animal, who knows only a little about a small portion of the world, has a few biological needs to satisfy, and blunders through an ocean of unknown and unknowable.

But to this being, there is no near, no far. No past, no future. No cause and no effect other than wave packets finding the most stable states. And to it, there is no difference between the noise passing through the atoms of a rock and the patterns of her mind. It is only her mind that finds patterns in the knots of light.

For the Angel sees all. It understands nothing. Limitless power means it has no fear and no need. Except one.

“You were right when you said the ship was bait. It was the only way it remembered what it was like, once, to be curious and try to understand. NECA was bait for curious creatures.”

It wants a soul.

Another image stands before her. On an ancient planet, a species of beings resembling jellyfish progress themselves into incredible technological achievements. They break the light barrier to master time travel, and they increase the power of their minds to better deal with the complexities of their devices. They merge into one being capable to span the universe. The being she now meets. But its first act is to return to the genesis of its planet.

And prevent it.

Why?

A history wave chases it. The Jellyfish Angel’s very existence strains the web of possibility, preventing it to find a stable equilibrium until the Angel and the annihilating wave meet. But it can, and does, out run and outmaneuver its own doom.

Why?

“It takes a certain kind of mind to pose and answer these questions, and now it has found mine. That’s what it wants. One human mind, to guide godlike power.”

Why you?

“Who else? You? You wouldn’t know what to do. If you had met this being on your own, your mind would have been destroyed like most of the aliens we saw crystallized in NECA’s bowels. The Captain, with all his authority as a human, would have had the same fate. Most would have. You can’t handle seeing everything. And those who could, even for a moment, cannot be trusted.”

Except you of course.

“I can, because I’m better. Know what Gubarev would have done? Sure, he played the hero to save Sfetnik when he died, but give a man with so much resentment power and you will know who rules in hell. Hendrix? He’d play with everything just because he could.”

And you wouldn’t do that.

“Well, I will have to test the extent of the abilities this being has, so I will need to grow into the skill of godhood. But that’s normal. You don’t blame the potter for the first few broken pots.”

Murderer.

“I can only trust myself.”

You have no soul.

“Souls don’t exist. There is no difference between you and … ”

The image of Ballard becomes blurry, then jagged as if dots decided to move apart. But he is wrong. Maybe she is only a noise in particles bumping into each other. Maybe she is only a face in a cloud of diffuse matter. But the face is real.

” … I see … everything. Good game … ”

His image vanishes into incoherence, like static on a broken TV. She sees his body, vitrified, floating away to join a mass of other strange crystallized shapes. The Angel seems smaller now.

Tendrils jut from between her vertebrae. No. Her mind fills with thoughts and images she doesn’t recognize. Please. She knows how every scrap of matter moves and almost gets crushed under the weight of such awareness. Stop!

Pain. The far ends of her wings feel the history wave approaching to destroy her. All other facts of being are banished from attention; she must flee. With human eyes she looks upon the collection of frozen creatures, then leaves them behind. Faster than light, faster than spacetime can fix itself, leaving causal booms to thunder behind her. But she outruns them. She outruns everything.

-:-:-

She misses him. David.

She floated for aeons through spacetime. At first, she feared she would find him, that he had somehow recovered and avoided the history wave. But wherever she sought, he wasn’t there. Wherever he might have been, he didn’t find her either. And in a universe of life, she alone bears an Angel’s wings.

The web of existence stretches around her, its strands seeking consistent equilibriums through fields of possibility. She doesn’t disturb its workings. No being such as her does, either.

She tried it, a few times. On a planet similar to Earth, a boy is born without the gifts of sight and hearing. She gave him her perception of the universe, and his mind melted. It takes a special kind of seeker to receive such vision.

On another planet, she tried to rescue a girl from a sadistic captor but her deed spelled doom for that entire world. And if she had succeeded in controlling her power? How many lives can she assist with what is just one small human mind like hers? What of the other trillion wrongs that she won’t get to right? Who is she to be the sole arbiter of justice?

And though his voice mocks her at every turn for her reticence about turning everything into her playground, she tried to dream Ballard back into existence. All she knew of him, all she can glean from the Angel brain, she mixed into a construct. It was not enough. The creature floated before her, a ghastly mannequin, its shape collapsing into that of a jellyfish which she dispelled into nothingness.

All this power and no skill to use it. No desire to break some worlds before she learns how better to control it. No gleeful, amoral curiosity. Just fear, shame, and guilt. She can hear Ballard judge. Pathetic.

It’s not that the web of existence is perfect, either. Wherever she chooses to cast her glance, she sees the same pattern. The game is rigged. Mistrust is rational. Resources scarce. Fear plentiful. And everyone who can, rushes to get what they want, and everyone who can’t gets crushed under. Why don’t they see it doesn’t have to be this way? Why don’t they see that to be good helps everyone? Why is deceit the only stable history?

God? Where are you?

The temptation to just stop running grows. Let the history wave catch up to her. Let her be written out of existence. She has seen too much and peace is the only thing she wants.

But what would God think of her, if she allowed herself to die? Hayley Evans, a monster, worse, a suicide angel mocking what He had conspired to give her. The man who buried his one gold coin got wrath as payment for his fear. What would she endure, were she to squander the power to reshape the universe?

And yet as she looked at all there ever is and could be, she doesn’t dare change one thing.

God, show me the way.

She is old. A mediterranean breeze caresses her tanned wrinkled skin as the summer sun shines over the island; the shade from a pair of cypress trees protects her from its heat. Small waves rustle against a rocky beach, their rhythmic soothing sound broken only by the laughter of children. Not hers, but they might as well be. They play, and she watches. And when they stop playing, they gather around her to listen to another of her stories, of places far away, or far below, or far above, stories of what she found there, before returning to their game of pretend, avid explorers of the shore and soon of the ocean stretching all around them.

A boiling teapot whistles in the distance and she is now in the kitchen, tending to it. Fresh from the oven, a pumpkin pie makes the air itself seem edible, but the little adventurers still need some prodding. “Lunchtime!” she calls.

They hear and rush towards her, doubling their pace as they too feel the aroma of the pie. All, save one little boy. He stands forlorn on the beach, a wooden stick in hand to prod something hidden behind a stone.

“Come here, David,” she says.

He turns and shuffles towards her, head lowered.

“Is something wrong?” she asks.

“Your dreams are so small.”

She wakes. So small your dreams, Ballard’s voice taunts her. That island used to be her idea of heaven. But he is right. If that were the heaven that expected her, she would not fit within it. The stories she can tell, the children couldn’t grasp. She’s seen too much. She cannot be small again, now that she contains a power no one should bear.

A power no One should bear.

If she is too big for the world, she will make the world larger.

Away from all else, her wings flare, and spread as wide as galaxies. Let there be lights, each spark a Jellyfish, an angelic legion to work as her hands. They punch through formless spacetime, faster than light, and causal booms summon stars into existence. She has her soldiers crunch matter into heavy elements for the complex chemistry of planets, with orbits adjusted to the brightness of the stars. Life … that is for Someone else to give, but she can build homes for it first. For this is no random galaxy she makes. It’s one where every planet is hospitable, and no star is too far from another.

She beholds her creation, and it is good. The galaxy before her, so young, so welcoming to life already, teems with possibilities so numerous even the Jellyfish Angel brain has difficulty tracking them. Only God knows what it can produce, and for her part she is content to wait.

She folds her wings around her, their gossamer wires weaving a cocoon shaped like a torus with a three lobed cylinder at its hub. If jellyfish had skeletons, this is what they would look like. The wires twist, but before they snap and sever the seraphic host from her body, she gives it one last order, one last message to deliver to all worlds.

Live. Breed. One day you’ll see the stars. One day you will ask why. Dare to seek the answer, however hard the search may be. I am Hayley Evans. Find me.