Neural Pulse, Pt. 7 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Jing appeared to my left. His profile regarded the object with the expression of someone wishing they were ten kilometers away.
I placed a hand on the shoulder of his suit.
“Some kind of exotic creature?”
The xenobiologist closed his mouth and shook his head.
We waited for a while, in case the artifact reacted to our presence, before settling. Mara scanned the struts with the multimeter. Jing circled a strut and approached her.
“A power source? A generator?”
“No. These struts are fed by the external wiring.”
“So they do more than just support the artifact?”
“Support the artifact? It floats between them. And the outpost has more than enough power from stellar energy. Batteries are full.”
Mara crossed her arms. The artifact’s undulating veils were mirrored in her helmet’s lens.
“Let’s see. The aliens built the outpost at the base of this crater because they detected a vein of that mineral, which they used to build the robots and, I imagine, repair damage.”
“You think they dug this thing up?” Jing said.
“That the algorithm the robots follow to maintain this installation stumbled upon the artifact while drilling the vein, dozens of meters below the surface? I think they found the artifact on another planet, or adrift in space. Maybe they were programmed so that if they found a strange artifact, they should settle on a nearby planet, call home, and wait for their owners to arrive.”
How would we take the artifact? I imagined prying it from the struts with the crowbar, but were they even holding it? The veils of purple and pink energy floated like some weather phenomenon forming between fronts of cold and hot air.
I crouched down to the artifact’s level, and when I leaned in to make out the details, my lens bumped against something. I startled as if a lamp had fallen on my head while I slept. I had felt an invisible shell. I slid my gloved palms over the curved surface. Solid and uniform like a crystal ball. The struts were holding it.
I pressed my helmet’s lens against that invisible shell, which held firm. Inside, the undulating energy membranes crisscrossed like ghosts. If they represented some pattern, it surpassed my ability to recognize it. When I focused on a point on the membranes, some overlapped, but when I shifted my gaze, those same membranes receded into the background of the image.
My eyes ached. My mind complained with an animal alertness, unable to reconcile the tangle of energy with the dimensional combinations under which it had evolved. I was contemplating vastnesses of space, miniature universes.
At one point on the undulating membranes, I glimpsed microscopic seams between which an image was forming. My face, just as the bathroom mirror would show me. Skin bronzed by several stars. In those eyes staring back unblinking, irises the color of clear water speckled with navy blue. The curves of those lips, chapped by temperature changes mission after mission, had parted into a slit. My wheat-colored hair tucked behind my ears except for one loose lock.
The face receded into a black background. My ears bothered me as if air were pressing on the eardrums from inside. The undulating membranes distanced themselves from my full-body reflection, that floated in the blackness. The reflection wore my threadbare flight academy t-shirt, the one I slept in, and my pajama shorts. Beneath my shapely calves, bare feet stood on a void.
The reflection tilted its head. It turned and looked around. It ventured into the darkness, growing dimmer with each step, while groping as if searching for a wall, until, reduced to a miniature, the reflection merged with a black vastness.
A whiteness dazzled me. I glimpsed above me two people in gold and white spacesuits. Their lenses reflected the beam of my flashlight. I had sat down on the floor and leaned my back against a wall.
An avalanche of anguish overwhelmed me. I felt lost in catacombs, stalked by shadows looming a few steps away, silently promising to tear me apart.
I slid the heels of my boots on the floor until I stood up. I stumbled to the opposite side of the basement, away from the figures in their spacesuits. As I distanced myself like a frightened horse, the wave of hatred those shadows focused on me eased. Behind the lenses, I made out the faces of Jing and Mara. What were they doing here?
In the center of the basement, the struts held an invisible shell, and the energy membranes it contained mutated in watery undulations.
“Kirochka, what’s wrong with you?” Mara asked.
“I don’t know.”
The woman approached, and a tumult of shadows closed in around me. I screamed in a sharp tone that had never left my mouth before.
“Get away!”
Mara and Jing looked at each other as if to ascertain if the other thought I was joking. The woman faced me, frowning.
We find an unknown artifact and you decide to stick yourself right up against it. What else could I expect from an imbecile like you?
A presence orbiting my consciousness had spoken to me, sounding at times from the left, from the right, from ahead, from behind. I shuddered as if frozen. My heart anticipated a bombardment.
“Who said that?”
As Mara and Jing approached, the ring of shadows stretched their hands towards me, wanting to snag my skin with their bony claws.
I raised a palm and warned them, shouting an interjection. Why were they approaching? Did they want to distress me?
You wander through life assuming everything will turn out fine, that whatever happens you’ll know how to save yourself and land ready to repeat the adventure. But you reveal yourself for what you are. An incapable idiot.
Mara took two steps back. She scanned me as if shrapnel from an explosion had riddled me and she were assessing the damage.
“There’s a before and after you touched the artifact, Kirochka. Specify what’s wrong with you.”
Her voice, filling my helmet via the radio and pouring into my ears, irritated me like a scratching fingernail. I wanted to demand she lower her tone or shut up. I gripped the sides of my helmet. I longed to take it off, cover my face with my palms, and breathe deeply.
“How did I end up against the wall?”
“You leaned in to look inside the artifact. Half a minute later, you backed away hunched over until you hit the wall and slid to the floor. I thought you were playing one of your jokes on us. For a while, you just looked around absently.”
I remembered wandering through a growing blackness until I had disappeared. After a cut, Jing and Mara had loomed before me. The blackness had spilled from the artifact and embodied itself in shadows.
The woman fumbled with the instruments clipped to her belt as if they hid an answer.
“Have you really forgotten?”
“That thing affected me, Mara,” I said gravely.
She crouched beside me and rested a forearm on her knee. She squinted against the wash of my flashlight beam.
“Who told you to play around with an unknown artifact?”
I endured the anguish, an acid corroding my chest, but the shadows pushed me against the wall, grabbed my undershirt through the suit, clenched my hair into a fist, covered my mouth. I jumped sideways, away from Mara.
“I told you to get away. Why are you approaching again? Didn’t you understand me?”
The woman, still, lost the color in her face. She glanced towards the energy membranes the artifact contained.
You enjoyed walking along the edge. Your races. You volunteered for risky missions because you live for that excitement, and the more you consume it, the more you need to risk. But you slipped on the precipice and plunged off.
A presence crept through my brains, slid down its slopes, separated the folds, and nested in the sticky warmth.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “Nobody asked for your comments.”
Mara stood up and backed away, holding me with her gaze. She unclipped the multimeter, along with another meter I didn’t recognize. Jing watched as if waiting for a doctor to revive someone. The woman distanced herself from the artifact as far as her arm could reach, and analyzed the invisible shell.
“It’s not emitting anything.”
“That you know of,” I said. “Maybe it emitted something and stopped.”
In the stretching pause, instead of silence, I found those shadows silently repeating how much they hated me, that they would torture me to death. Wherever I looked, I glimpsed shadows.
My spine shuddered in chains of tremors. I slipped away to the corner farthest from Jing and Mara, and the shadows diminished.
The woman wrung her gloved fingers as her gaze pierced the artifact’s energy membranes.
“Can you explain? What changed?”
I took a deep breath and relaxed my voice.
“When you get close, I feel several shadows swollen with hatred draw near as if to suffocate me. From this corner, they wait at a certain distance. And someone is talking to me. Someone in my head.”
“In what voice?”
“None. Like another consciousness stuck to mine.”
“Do you understand what it’s saying?”
I nodded.
“Nothing good.”
-----
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.
Today’s song is “Climbing up the Walls” by Radiohead.
Jing appeared to my left. His profile regarded the object with the expression of someone wishing they were ten kilometers away.
I placed a hand on the shoulder of his suit.
“Some kind of exotic creature?”
The xenobiologist closed his mouth and shook his head.
We waited for a while, in case the artifact reacted to our presence, before settling. Mara scanned the struts with the multimeter. Jing circled a strut and approached her.
“A power source? A generator?”
“No. These struts are fed by the external wiring.”
“So they do more than just support the artifact?”
“Support the artifact? It floats between them. And the outpost has more than enough power from stellar energy. Batteries are full.”
Mara crossed her arms. The artifact’s undulating veils were mirrored in her helmet’s lens.
“Let’s see. The aliens built the outpost at the base of this crater because they detected a vein of that mineral, which they used to build the robots and, I imagine, repair damage.”
“You think they dug this thing up?” Jing said.
“That the algorithm the robots follow to maintain this installation stumbled upon the artifact while drilling the vein, dozens of meters below the surface? I think they found the artifact on another planet, or adrift in space. Maybe they were programmed so that if they found a strange artifact, they should settle on a nearby planet, call home, and wait for their owners to arrive.”
How would we take the artifact? I imagined prying it from the struts with the crowbar, but were they even holding it? The veils of purple and pink energy floated like some weather phenomenon forming between fronts of cold and hot air.
I crouched down to the artifact’s level, and when I leaned in to make out the details, my lens bumped against something. I startled as if a lamp had fallen on my head while I slept. I had felt an invisible shell. I slid my gloved palms over the curved surface. Solid and uniform like a crystal ball. The struts were holding it.
I pressed my helmet’s lens against that invisible shell, which held firm. Inside, the undulating energy membranes crisscrossed like ghosts. If they represented some pattern, it surpassed my ability to recognize it. When I focused on a point on the membranes, some overlapped, but when I shifted my gaze, those same membranes receded into the background of the image.
My eyes ached. My mind complained with an animal alertness, unable to reconcile the tangle of energy with the dimensional combinations under which it had evolved. I was contemplating vastnesses of space, miniature universes.
At one point on the undulating membranes, I glimpsed microscopic seams between which an image was forming. My face, just as the bathroom mirror would show me. Skin bronzed by several stars. In those eyes staring back unblinking, irises the color of clear water speckled with navy blue. The curves of those lips, chapped by temperature changes mission after mission, had parted into a slit. My wheat-colored hair tucked behind my ears except for one loose lock.
The face receded into a black background. My ears bothered me as if air were pressing on the eardrums from inside. The undulating membranes distanced themselves from my full-body reflection, that floated in the blackness. The reflection wore my threadbare flight academy t-shirt, the one I slept in, and my pajama shorts. Beneath my shapely calves, bare feet stood on a void.
The reflection tilted its head. It turned and looked around. It ventured into the darkness, growing dimmer with each step, while groping as if searching for a wall, until, reduced to a miniature, the reflection merged with a black vastness.
A whiteness dazzled me. I glimpsed above me two people in gold and white spacesuits. Their lenses reflected the beam of my flashlight. I had sat down on the floor and leaned my back against a wall.
An avalanche of anguish overwhelmed me. I felt lost in catacombs, stalked by shadows looming a few steps away, silently promising to tear me apart.
I slid the heels of my boots on the floor until I stood up. I stumbled to the opposite side of the basement, away from the figures in their spacesuits. As I distanced myself like a frightened horse, the wave of hatred those shadows focused on me eased. Behind the lenses, I made out the faces of Jing and Mara. What were they doing here?
In the center of the basement, the struts held an invisible shell, and the energy membranes it contained mutated in watery undulations.
“Kirochka, what’s wrong with you?” Mara asked.
“I don’t know.”
The woman approached, and a tumult of shadows closed in around me. I screamed in a sharp tone that had never left my mouth before.
“Get away!”
Mara and Jing looked at each other as if to ascertain if the other thought I was joking. The woman faced me, frowning.
We find an unknown artifact and you decide to stick yourself right up against it. What else could I expect from an imbecile like you?
A presence orbiting my consciousness had spoken to me, sounding at times from the left, from the right, from ahead, from behind. I shuddered as if frozen. My heart anticipated a bombardment.
“Who said that?”
As Mara and Jing approached, the ring of shadows stretched their hands towards me, wanting to snag my skin with their bony claws.
I raised a palm and warned them, shouting an interjection. Why were they approaching? Did they want to distress me?
You wander through life assuming everything will turn out fine, that whatever happens you’ll know how to save yourself and land ready to repeat the adventure. But you reveal yourself for what you are. An incapable idiot.
Mara took two steps back. She scanned me as if shrapnel from an explosion had riddled me and she were assessing the damage.
“There’s a before and after you touched the artifact, Kirochka. Specify what’s wrong with you.”
Her voice, filling my helmet via the radio and pouring into my ears, irritated me like a scratching fingernail. I wanted to demand she lower her tone or shut up. I gripped the sides of my helmet. I longed to take it off, cover my face with my palms, and breathe deeply.
“How did I end up against the wall?”
“You leaned in to look inside the artifact. Half a minute later, you backed away hunched over until you hit the wall and slid to the floor. I thought you were playing one of your jokes on us. For a while, you just looked around absently.”
I remembered wandering through a growing blackness until I had disappeared. After a cut, Jing and Mara had loomed before me. The blackness had spilled from the artifact and embodied itself in shadows.
The woman fumbled with the instruments clipped to her belt as if they hid an answer.
“Have you really forgotten?”
“That thing affected me, Mara,” I said gravely.
She crouched beside me and rested a forearm on her knee. She squinted against the wash of my flashlight beam.
“Who told you to play around with an unknown artifact?”
I endured the anguish, an acid corroding my chest, but the shadows pushed me against the wall, grabbed my undershirt through the suit, clenched my hair into a fist, covered my mouth. I jumped sideways, away from Mara.
“I told you to get away. Why are you approaching again? Didn’t you understand me?”
The woman, still, lost the color in her face. She glanced towards the energy membranes the artifact contained.
You enjoyed walking along the edge. Your races. You volunteered for risky missions because you live for that excitement, and the more you consume it, the more you need to risk. But you slipped on the precipice and plunged off.
A presence crept through my brains, slid down its slopes, separated the folds, and nested in the sticky warmth.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “Nobody asked for your comments.”
Mara stood up and backed away, holding me with her gaze. She unclipped the multimeter, along with another meter I didn’t recognize. Jing watched as if waiting for a doctor to revive someone. The woman distanced herself from the artifact as far as her arm could reach, and analyzed the invisible shell.
“It’s not emitting anything.”
“That you know of,” I said. “Maybe it emitted something and stopped.”
In the stretching pause, instead of silence, I found those shadows silently repeating how much they hated me, that they would torture me to death. Wherever I looked, I glimpsed shadows.
My spine shuddered in chains of tremors. I slipped away to the corner farthest from Jing and Mara, and the shadows diminished.
The woman wrung her gloved fingers as her gaze pierced the artifact’s energy membranes.
“Can you explain? What changed?”
I took a deep breath and relaxed my voice.
“When you get close, I feel several shadows swollen with hatred draw near as if to suffocate me. From this corner, they wait at a certain distance. And someone is talking to me. Someone in my head.”
“In what voice?”
“None. Like another consciousness stuck to mine.”
“Do you understand what it’s saying?”
I nodded.
“Nothing good.”
-----
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.
Today’s song is “Climbing up the Walls” by Radiohead.
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