Neural Pulse, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I brandished the stun spear, then pressed its twin prongs against the figure and thumbed the trigger on the grip. With a muffled crackle dampened by my helmet, the figure crumpled, inertia dragging its limp form across the ground to carve a furrow in the earth.

We slunk closer, like wary cats, to the overturned machine. Its six metallic legs—narrow, jointed, eerily reminiscent of flesh-stripped limbs—splayed rigidly to one side. As Jing crouched, the oval beam of his flashlight skated over the reflective metal.

“Did you see it make a move to attack us?”

“If you wanted me to waste time weighing pros and cons before stunning anything that approaches,” I snapped, my voice edged, “you should’ve let Dr. Halperin carry the spear. But if someone does come at us with ill intent, she’ll try to reason with them.”

I handed the stun spear to my friend. After she wedged it under one arm, her gloved hands reclaimed the multimeter.

“If you’re going to mention me, use my title.”

Jing traced a gloved finger along the machine’s bronzy carapace.

“A robot.”

Its compound eye—a clustered dome of hundreds of bulbous diodes protruding from the chassis—glowed with amber light. Metal groaned inside the machine, the casing shuddering. We lurched backward. A sound like a steel ball grinding through clockwork innards erupted from its core. The robot righted itself. Its six spindled legs flexed, hoisting it upright before it marched between us, the amber light swaying as its gait stabilized. The container trailing us calculated a collision course with the machine, and pivoted sharply aside.

The robot led us to the sarcophagus mounted on the wall. It halted in front. We encircled the machine, dousing it in the beams of our flashlights. A flexible appendage—an antenna resembling that of some insect—emerged from the robot’s compound eye, probing the air until it brushed the sarcophagus’s casing. The robot froze.

Mara aimed her multimeter at it. Behind her helmet’s visor, an eyebrow arched. We waited as if standing before a melting block of ice, anticipating the trapped creature within to stir.

The robot retracted its antenna back into its chassis. It maneuvered its six legs in a choreographed pivot, spinning 180 degrees before trudging toward the rear of the dome, imprinting circular tracks into the sandy earth. We hurried after it.

“You plan to introduce us?” I asked.

“Would you chat with one of our robots?” Jing replied. “They likely programmed it with just enough intelligence for maintenance tasks.”

“Kirochka, stop it,” Mara said.

I stepped ahead to block the robot’s path. Stretching out a leg, I planted my boot like a barrier over its compound eye. The machine shoved against my limb, its legs thrashing. When Mara gripped the robot’s base and lifted it, its own limbs scrambled for purchase in the air.

“Heavy?” I asked.

“Like a materializer.”

She hobbled, cradling the machine, to the cargo container trailing us. Jing opened it. Mara placed the robot upside-down inside. She straightened and puffed audibly while she lighted the interior of the container as though expecting defiance. Five seconds later, she secured the lid. Behind her visor, she narrowed her eyes and exhaled sharply.

“Why bother?” I asked.

“It’s alien tech, dimwit. Who knows if they stumbled on some revolutionary method while building a maintenance bot.”

The muscles of Mara’s mouth, which I’d assumed were atrophied, curved upward. But if any hangar employee discovered the burner was missing, it would erase that smile and the ones to follow.

We were advancing toward the ramp when a muffled series of thuds distracted us. The container trailing behind us shuddered as if someone inside were thrashing against its walls. After a few seconds, it grew still.

“Poor thing,” I said.

“They programmed it to maintain this facility,” Mara replied. “We didn’t kidnap a child.”

We gathered at the summit of the ramp and lit the descent. They’d polished the curved slope of rock but left the walls raw, as excavated: overlapping sheets of smoke-gray stone, streaked with clay-colored veins like rusting metal. The angles of some outcrops neared ninety degrees, threatening to snag and tear our suits. Under my flashlight’s beam, the rock looked powdery, like the walls of an apartment abandoned for decades.

Jing and Mara stared at me as if awaiting permission to proceed. I took a few steps down the ramp to prove it would hold under our soles. Caterpillar tracks had littered the floor with crusts of dirt. When I turned, the beams of their flashlights whitened my vision.

“Stay close.”

Jing and I descended shoulder-to-shoulder, though our opposite shoulders grazed the rock walls, while Mara lagged behind. The Geiger counter shattered the silence with its crackling.

A different kind of excitement thrummed through me, distinct from the tension that had gripped me when nailing a difficult landing or overtaking another racer on a curve. What awaited us underground? How would I react to what I’d see? During missions where I’d had to land in clearings amid alien vegetation, the scientists and soldiers had infected me with their enthusiasm, but their expedition ventured forth without me. I kept the ship running in case we needed to flee, and to stave off boredom, I’d invent dangers.

“They bury their living spaces,” Jing said, and I couldn’t tell if he’d been speaking for a while. “To shield them from explorers, weather, and meteorite impacts.”

My flashlight traced with inky curves the fissures between slate-gray rock layers. In some veins, bronze-like flecks sparkled like sequins. Our beams painted shadow-drawings across the curved wall and central pillar, while five meters down the ramp, a wall of blackness loomed. How many intelligent creatures could tolerate living in this darkness?

“Mara, what kind of rock did they excavate here?”

“What’d you say?”

I glanced back, but my friend was gone. I hurried up the ramp until I collided with the woman’s outstretched fist—she’d been mapping the route as if planning a documentary.

“You vanished,” I said.

“Surprised?”

I ran my fingers over the streaked protrusions on the wall.

“I was asking about the rock.”

Mara studied me with her feline eyes, as if deciphering a joke.

“Do I look like a geologist to you?”

A couple of minutes later, as we descended, a roar of machinery assaulted us. A work shift starting at some factory. We froze mid-step, staring at each other, dazzled by the intersecting beams of our flashlights. The ramp and walls vibrated. My helmet filled with a thunderous noise, like a rock crusher grinding stones.

My ears rang, and I wanted to jam my index fingers straight into my eardrums. I hurried down the ramp, determined to stop whatever was happening.

I reached a landing that opened into a rectangular basement carved from raw rock. Four metal pillars braced the ceiling, and to the left of the entrance gaped an abyss. About twenty meters below, my beam illuminated a quivering mound of bronze-colored crushed stone.

Jing wandered dazedly. I stepped ahead, gripped the shoulder of his suit, and yanked him back. When the xenobiologist noticed the chasm, he rubbed my helmet like it was a dog’s head.

We edged cautiously toward the precipice—the source of the roar. From the ceiling of the cavity hung a fluted metal column, greasy and gleaming, terminating at the bottom in a massive drill bit. It spun relentlessly, pulverizing rock and spewing debris.

My eardrums throbbed. The floor trembled, threatening to hurl one of us into the abyss with the next violent shake.

A few meters from the edge stood a pedestal topped with a control panel. A hexagonal button jutted prominently. Crowded into the corner was a wardrobe-sized machine, forged from the same bronzy metal as the sarcophagus. A feeder tube snaked from its side. I leaned in: rubble had piled up at its base. At the machine’s front, I found a door, and when I opened it, the lattice of guides and tubes inside reminded me of a materializer.

I swept my flashlight beam across the rest of the basement, searching for hypersleep chambers, but the room was barren.

Mara, her face contorted from the noise, aimed a multimeter at the pedestal’s panel. Jing hunched nearby, staring at me through eyes narrowed to slits, his mouth twisted as if he’d bitten into a rancid almond. Someone’s voice crackled over the radio—drowned by static.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

I feel like I need to apologize for the quality of this story’s beginning. The translation improves upon the original prose, but I can’t do much regarding the rest of the awkwardness. I’ve even had to remove a few sentences whose meaning was lost to my current self. I considered removing Mara’s cryptic “If you’re going to mention me, use my title,” which I’m not sure what it refers to, and felt like an odd thing to say regardless. These days I wouldn’t write such a story, as I’m no longer in the same headspace.

Anyway, I hope that at least one person out there is getting anything out of these first few parts. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the worst first act of the six novellas I wrote back-to-back all those years ago.