Neural Pulse, Pt. 5 (Fiction)

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

I stepped up to the panel and slammed the button with my palm. At the bottom of the precipice, the drill slowed its revolutions, grinding less and less rock until it stopped. The ringing in my ears faded. Maybe when we flew back to the station, I’d need to go to the infirmary to get my eardrums stitched up.

Mara breathed deeply.

“Whoever lives here is a deep sleeper, or their evolution forgot about ears.”

We spread out nearby as we adjusted to the still ground. Our beams swept across the precipice walls and the drill, which had crushed chunks of a rust-colored ore vein. Around the drill, a hundred loose rocks lay piled up like gold nuggets.

Mara lowered her beam about ten meters down the precipice wall. The oval of light picked out a bronze disk hanging like a shield, made up of spinning rings. Between the shield and the rock wall, telescoping appendages extended, unfolding like an insect’s legs. The telescopic arms ended in pincers. The robot glided down the wall, its rings coordinating to counteract gravity.

It reached out its appendages towards the piled, football-sized rocks, then clamped its pincers around several. The robot ascended the wall calmly, rotating and spinning its rings, until it reached our level. It moved sideways towards the edge of the precipice. We retreated out of the appendages’ reach in case it meant to throw the rocks at us, but the robot approached the wardrobe-sized machine and dropped the rocks it held into the feed chute, like sugar cubes into coffee. The machine powered up; the cavity behind its door lit up. It sounded like an industrial fan.

We crouched down in front of it. Inside, a maintenance robot identical to the one we had stolen was materializing. When it was done, the robot pushed the door open from inside and, exiting, tumbled down the drop between the machine and the rock floor, tipping over.

“I don’t know what kind of intelligence we’re dealing with,” Mara said, “but we’d better lower our expectations.”

In moments, the robot righted itself. Its legs moved in sequence as it stumbled away toward the ramp, swinging a honey-colored beam before it. The machine disappeared behind the ramp’s pillar.

Mara stooped to study the materializer’s interior. She shook her head, then returned to the precipice. The crab robot that had hoisted the material had returned to its post on the wall and camouflaged itself as a shield.

“Too big,” Mara said, “besides, we’d risk falling. Let them retrieve it when we reveal the discovery.”

She peered into the mouth of the feeder tube and pulled out a piece of rust-colored mineral, the size of an orange. Under our beams, it sparkled like sequins. As she turned the rock over, the arm pinning the electroshock lance to her side relaxed its hold; the lance fell and rolled away. Mara stooped, muttering. Her forehead gleamed with sweat. She picked up the lance and straightened.

“Should we dismantle the materializer?” Jing asked.

“If we had time to spare, perhaps. Someone will do it—us, or whatever team the station dumps it on. Standard model, I guess. Not many alternatives available.”

Mara scanned around until her beam fell upon the container waiting several meters away, analyzing our movements. She lifted the lid. Before dropping the mineral inside, she turned it over between her fingers.

“Perhaps it’s a stable isotope in an unusual crystal structure.”

Jing approached and narrowed his eyes at the bronzy reflections the mineral gave off. He slid his fingers over his helmet, near his chin.

“Don’t you recognize it?”

She shot him an irritated look I knew well.

“A couple of hours ago, I was in my pajamas getting ready for bed. Now I’ve ended up tens of meters underground inside an unknown alien species’ outpost, stressed out because the station mustn’t know we jumped the gun. Give me a break. I’ll take the mineral back and analyze it properly when I have time.”

Jing raised his gloved palms and smiled. Mara dropped the mineral; it clattered against the kidnapped robot’s casing. She secured the container’s lid.

The ramp descended into another sublevel. As we went down, the oval beams of our flashlights bleached the uneven, curving wall.

A certainty washed over me that treasures awaited below. In the past, I had approached each exploration as if we were studying ancient ruins that some beasts used as nests. But here, we had broken into a dwelling, and we would burst into a basement where a dozen aliens might be bustling about.

We emerged into a room the size of a private hangar. The ramp ended on this level. Our crisscrossing beams illuminated a void. The floor was marked with the dirt and dust tracks of treads, which reached the far wall as if the machines had parked there. We found them resting against a side wall like sleeping gorillas. Construction robots, two meters tall and as wide as a person and a half. Their arms ended in pincers. Two dirty tires encased in treads served as legs.

We clustered before the robots. A compound eye bulged from the front of their casings. Jing sighed. He wandered to the back of the basement, which, unlike the side walls, terminated in a wall of polished rock. The oval beam of his flashlight scanned it from top to bottom, perhaps searching for the hint of another passage. The xenobiologist spoke, his tone somber.

“What did they intend to do here? Use it as a warehouse in case someone organic—of their species, I mean—visited this star system?” He paced through the basement like a buyer assessing a house. “No hypersleep chambers, nothing to suggest they planned to accommodate anyone who breathed and needed to eat.”

Mara clipped the multimeter to her belt.

“Perhaps it’s part of a repeater system. No. They would have put it in orbit to prevent atmospheric interference. But it sends a message home, which I imagine includes the coordinates. To a civilization that might exist hundreds of light-years away, or that might have died out.”

“And which I’ll never know. What interested them about this dead planet?”

The robots’ treads were stained with crusts of earth. When I scratched one, it crumbled onto the padded palm of my glove.

Mara tracked Jing with her gaze as he wandered in oval patterns.

“Perhaps they dispatched automated vessels programmed to scan multiple star systems and, if they discovered any promising environment, transmit the information back home. But what they consider valuable might elude us. We know this mineral interests them.”

The xenobiologist halted and faced us. His shoulders had slumped.

“I came to interact with intelligent beings. This hole lacks biology.”

“I didn’t know we’d meet robots,” I said.

Jing forced a smile and sighed.

“I’m sorry. I’m being unfair. I appreciate that you included me. Someone was listening when I complained about other xenobiologists monopolizing opportunities, something that bothers me more than I let on. We’ve stumbled upon an abandoned ruin, but perhaps another day we’ll have better luck.”

Mara, rigid as a pillar, pierced me with one of her inscrutable expressions.

“Are you more satisfied?” I asked.

“We’ve encountered obsolete technology. Ordinary at best. Counts as field experience, provided I’m not demoted or fired for accompanying you on a looting expedition.”

“I take full responsibility. At worst, I’ll be the one in trouble.”

“But you don’t care about that.”

“We’ve explored a facility no human had ever seen.”

Mara twisted one side of her mouth.

“You know I don’t do this for the thrill. It triggers my migraines.”

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

The exposition featured on this part feels too heavy-handed to my current self, all these years later.