Neural Pulse, Pt. 9 (Fiction)

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

I edged a handspan of my helmet over the side of the embankment, to keep watch on the entrance of the shell of hexagonal panels. With the planet’s rotation, the star’s descending angle had lightened the blackness of the opening to a steel gray. I waited, lying prone, sunk a few centimeters into the sandy earth. From the gloom within the dome, I sensed the hollow vastness, the floor furrowed with the scars of ruts where maintenance robots had engraved circular tracks.

My helmet’s indicator notified me it had located Mara’s signal. I took a deep breath and waited for the woman to emerge. As if an army were cresting a hill, I sensed the shadows approaching. My heart hammered, and blood roared in my ears. I would stay out of sight.

From the gloom at the dome’s opening, a spacesuit frayed into view, venturing onto the esplanade, the containers following. I scooted sideways so the embankment hid me, and avoided breathing heavily lest the radio transmit it.

I peeked out. The woman and the containers had disappeared. And Jing? I had lost his signal.

Mara’s measured voice burst into my helmet.

“How goes it, Kirochka?”

I flinched, stirring the sandy earth, feeling the urge to leap up and sprint. Shadows were approaching from the opposite side of the embankment. They would surround me, press in on me, crush me against the earth until I suffocated.

“Something like that,” my voice trembled. “I’m in the cabin.”

“See you in a moment.”

What was keeping Jing? How could I wait for him to show himself? I had to seize the chance to break the artifact before Mara could stop me.

I scrambled up, slipping, spraying spadefuls of earth. I crossed the esplanade and plunged into the dome’s gloom. After descending the ramp about ten meters, I remembered to switch on my flashlight. I sprinted in a descending spiral, bracing a gloved palm when needed against the central pillar or the uneven rock wall. I filled my burning lungs with fresh, recycled air. My leg muscles throbbed.

A honey-colored light bathed me the instant I tripped. The maintenance robot tumbled through the air and bounced off the wall. I cartwheeled down the spiral, slamming against the excavated rock as my flashlight beam flared white off every surface my helmet struck. I slid prone down the ramp, bracing myself against the central pillar with my hands to stop.

I coughed. Sat up. My body’s tremors made the flashlight beam quiver. I shook the dust and sandy earth from my gloves. They were scuffed. Bristling fibers poked through the padding.

A chill ran through me from head to toe. I checked the oxygen levels on my lens. No leaks. On my vital signs display, my pulse fluctuated in the triple digits.

When I got up, I descended the ramp carefully, but within seconds, I was running. We had stolen the other robot, so I wouldn’t trip over that one.

The lens indicator alerted that it had locked onto Jing’s signal, and I slowed my pace. I breathed through my nose, but sweating as if in a jungle, I had to flare my nostrils to their limit to draw in enough air. I felt my way down the spiraling ramp.

I reached the entrance to a basement and peered in, exposing only a handspan of my helmet. I had expected to find the first sublevel, with the exposed mineral vein and the materializer, but I must have rolled past it tumbling downhill. Two of the construction robots lay gutted, and the third was missing an arm.

I hastened, walking just short of a run, to the back of the basement, where my flashlight beam mingled with the artifact’s tangle of levitating energy. I leaned against the curved, ribbed metal of a strut and scanned the entrance ramp. Perhaps Jing was dismantling the materializer on the first sublevel. Mara would have discovered I had deceived her.

I hunched before the undulating membranes of purple and pink energy. I probed the invisible shell containing the energy, as if hoping to find some crack through which to pry it open like a pistachio nut. I threw a punch, but the shell held. My hand ached as if I had struck a wall. When I gritted my teeth and struck again, a jolt shuddered up from my hand to my back.

I backed away. Bit my lower lip, refraining from growling. Jing would hear.

I took a running start and kicked the shell. It held. I kicked and kicked it until I slipped and fell flat on my ass. The radio would transmit my panting.

I swept the floor with my flashlight beam, searching for something that could help. I peered through the doorway to the adjacent basement area. Deserted. I ran to the dismembered ruins of the robots with their viscera of cables and circuits. Jing had left behind his crowbar and a meter. I gripped the crowbar.

I positioned myself in the middle of the basement and aimed my flashlight at the artifact. I brandished the crowbar, sprinted, and delivered a heavy blow against the shell, but the impact jarred the crowbar from my hand; it struck my shoulder and clattered to the floor. I trembled, seething. I hunched over, drew myself in, clenched my fists, and a growl escaped my lips, exploding into a guttural scream. My eardrums ached.

“Kirochka,” Jing said over the radio, startled. “Do you need help?”

I picked the crowbar up off the floor. I struck the artifact again and again, gasping for breath between each blow. The shell resisted as if, instead of being made of some penetrable material, I faced a repelling energy field. It would prevent me from breaking through, just as on a microscopic scale, atoms would never truly touch.

I leaned a forearm against the artifact, suppressing a gasp. Behind me, several shadows burst into the basement like an invading army through breaches in a rampart. I scrambled around the strut to my right, putting the artifact between myself and the spacesuited silhouette blocking the exit. My flashlight beam dazzled Jing, while his forced me to squint. The shadows coalesced into a wall, blocking my escape.

Here you are, of course. Acting on your own, against the majority decision. When I met you, I sensed you were unbalanced. That thing has damaged you because you’re too stupid to realize you should keep your distance from an unknown object, and now you intend to deprive humanity of a discovery that could lead to unimaginable technologies. You’re a miserable egoist, whatever your name is. An idiot who can barely pilot, clinging to that frigid scientist because no one else would bother paying you any attention.

I lashed the artifact with the crowbar. The phalanges of my hand screamed as if the blows had opened some fissure, yet I struck and struck again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Jing circling the artifact. I was dizzy, short of breath. The shadows flowed together shoulder to shoulder, hemming me in between them and the infinite volume of rock at my back.

A jolt shook my neurons, bleached my vision white. I shook my head. I pressed the tip of the crowbar against the invisible shell and, trembling down to my toes, leaned my weight onto the artifact as if I could force open a crack through which that tangle of energy would spill.

“You’ll break it, despite what your colleague decided,” Jing said.

“No, I’m just hitting it with the crowbar to see if it sounds like a gong.”

“You were right. Taking the artifact to the station would be madness. It should stay here, studied only by a small group of scientists, in quarantine. Never mind who gets the credit. But if you break it… maybe you’ll prevent a disaster.”

I coughed, spraying the inside of my visor with saliva. The air inside my helmet had grown sauna-hot, and my body was slick with sweat. I gripped the crowbar with both hands, spread my legs to brace myself, and lashed the shell. Each blow resonated through the fibers of my arms, making them vibrate like taut strings.

Deafened by a torrent of noise from which screams and roars emerged, the shadows surged against me. They climbed onto my back, pressed me down against the artifact. Through the suit, their bony claws seized my thighs, dug into my breasts, clamped against my head like a vise, probed my mouth, clawed at my uvula. I roared and lashed at the shadows again and again. With each impact, my arm muscles caught fire.

The shadows flew away from me at tens of kilometers per hour, as if ejected into space during a decompression. I stood on two trembling legs. My vision had clouded red. The crowbar hung from the end of my limp right arm, and when I let it fall, it bounced with a muffled thud.

The red haze was evaporating. I blinked, panting. Sweat dripped onto the smoked lens as the material struggled to defog. I leaned against the artifact’s invisible shell, which supported me solid as no object humans could ever build.

My vision cleared. Jing lay supine on the floor, his visor shattered. Behind the breach in the dented helmet, an eyeball had sunk into a gory mass of black hair strands, pulped flesh, cartilage, and bone. Chocolate-brown blood had spattered the rock and welled from the pulp of his face as if from a sponge, filling the helmet’s bucket.

-----

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 “Gyroscope” by Boards of Canada.