The Last Human IV - Ch. 15 - First Contact (Patreon)

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***

Everything in the Dam, it seemed, was made of the same black metal: the high arches that ribbed the vaulted ceiling with shadows, the steep, almost menacing walls and all their alcoves and sculpted columns, even the floor was polished to a black shine. Even the light fixtures—recessed bulbs and hanging chandeliers—were coated in a thin, black paint.

Poire felt that he had walked these halls before, not so very long ago. These were the same black walls, the same polished floors of the Black Library, the Historians’ home that once orbited Cyre. Everywhere he looked, the same brutal architecture soared up and swallowed the light.

Only, instead of Historians, with their squid-like heads, the people who walked these halls were human. Clusters of workers in gray and reflective orange ambled toward their next job. A woman in a white coat pushed through a throng of workers, apologizing as she rushed from one hallway to the next. She stopped only a moment ot consider her direction, silver augments flashing in her flesh as she looked left and right. A team of sweeper constructs, on their way to sweep and polish the alcoves, beeped softly around the edge of a crowd of milling scientists.

The Old Man stood just outside the crowd, obviously out of place in his metallic-shining clothes, yet invisible to everyone but Poire. “This way,” he said, and slipped among the traffic—his body melding through the groups.

But Poire couldn’t get his legs to work. Couldn’t tear his eyes away. Couldn’t close his gaping mouth. How long had it been? How long since he’d seen this many humans in one place?

Or this many humans, at all?

The hall was crowded with them, and more walked through all the time, as if being near so many humans was completely normal. As if this moment was not even worth noticing. Some carried cups of steaming liquid (is that coffee? Do they all drink it?), talking and nodding with each other. Some were bleary-eyed, or wore bored expressions. Some smiled, and some stopped to say hello. A ring of laughter came from down the hall, not one laugh, but many together, and Poire thought it was the strangest, most glorious sound he’d ever heard.

A man with a brown uniform and a mop resting on his shoulder whistled some song Poire had never heard. He bobbed his head back and forth, legs kicking a little in time with his music. A troop of assorted maintenance droids followed behind him, like some mechanical dance troupe, zigzagging around people’s feet. The people didn’t even look at it, as if they didn’t notice it was there.

It was all just so … alien.

And beautiful.

“Hey,” the Old Man’s voice cracked over the crowds. “Don’t get stuck. This isn’t what we came for. Turn left, and start walking.”

The Old Man was nowhere in sight, but his voice still echoed down the hallways. It seemed to fill the place, not echoing against the ceiling, but somehow coming down from it. Raining upon Poire like a force. None of the people looked up, or seemed to hear it at all.

“We don’t have time to do this all over again,” the Old Man said. “You’re about to miss it.”

Poire started to push through the crowd, when a man walked right into him. Poire gasped, but the man’s body sank right through his. The only sensation was a subtle disorienting wrongness in the pit of his stomach. He tried to avoid the rest of the people, but there were so many of them...

It took every ounce of willpower he had to avoid standing there, gawping at each of them, studying their faces, the way they walked, the sound of their voices—or just their breath. All in one place. He sucked in his breath, and charged through.

A few hallways down, construction supplies littered the floor. Tall panels of the walls were missing, revealing immense, radiating collections of pipes and ductwork and wires running together in thick lines. A pair of constructs with swiveling heads and long, extending arms dug around inside one open wall, while a flying drone supervised their work. This drone was odd—it wasn’t powered by a repulsor, but by a whirring set of rotors that kept it in the air, hovering and buzzing like an insect.

“Emorynn!”

A man was shouting down the half-dismantled hallway. Beyond the open panels and sheets covering building supplies, a man hammered his fist on a bulkhead door. “You don’t know the risks! Exposure is dangerous, Emoryn! Are you listening? I know you can hear me!”

The door’s frame looked like it would survive the depressurization of the entire station. It was sealed shut, its massive lock engaged. The man was wearing a lab coat (spotted with burn marks and an old stain), wearing the frayed expression of someone who, after a long day of work, finds some great mess waiting for him back home.

The Old Man stood next to him, his hands clasped behind his back, patiently inspecting the man, like he was watching an animal at a zoo.

Without looking up, the Old Man said, “His name is Astor.”

“This is the Astor?” Poire asked. “As in, Sen’s partner? The one she waited for?”

“Oh, good. You remembered. Yes, this is the same Astor. The one who started the xeno-procreation program. And … the one who created us. You, and me, and all the children in all the Conclaves. You might call him our father. Or maybe grandfather is more appropriate.”

The man in the lab coat—Astor—gave one last thump of his fist, and slumped until his face was pressed against the door. “Everyone is worried about you, Emorynn. Please. You need to let me in.”

Silence.

The man slammed his fist one more time on the door, as if to say “Fine, you’re on your own.” And he marched off, fuming and muttering to himself.

“How did Astor know the First Prophet?”

“They met here. The First Dam. Most of the greatest minds of the last generation passed through this dam, at one time or another. Emorynn’s parents helped build the dam, you know. The material used to slow the radiative energies of the Light was developed by her own mother. Now…” The Old Man stood where Astor had been standing. “For some, having a physical form is a curse. Fortunately,” the Old Man said, “Not us.”

The Old Man stepped into the bulkhead door, leaving a pale fog so thin, it was almost not there at all. But if we’re not really here, Poire wondered, why do we leave a trace at all?

Poire placed his hand on the door. He almost tripped (on what?) as it went through. Then, he slid his head in. Temporarily blinded by the thickness of the door, he stepped through. And then, blinded for another reason.

A great glass window was the only barrier between him, and the shifting, brilliant expanse of light. Jagged, almost geometric bolts crawled across the sky, like lightning in slow motion, folding back and forth and spiraling into a hexagonal eddy before shooting off at a hard angle. The way it moved, in stuttering stops and racing starts, made it seem as though it could ignore distance itself.

Glittering gas billowed from the edges of the slow lightning, forming clouds as wide as continents. And there, at the center of all that light and all that motion, hung the Scar—a wound in the fabric of space.

The Scar twisted with colors that flickered and warped through the spectrum of visible light, and beyond. Shades that should not appear next to each other fuzzed together, glowing brighter than the sun. Ever-morphing refractions—jagged polygons, or dripping cones, or other nameless shapes—rose in infinitely descending rings that made Poire feel dizzy just to look at. It felt as though the Scar was reaching for something.

Behind the glass, wires trailed down from suction cups, and fed into blocky, home-made appliances, probably built from scraps gathered around the dam. The appliances were arrayed in a semi-circle, with a nest of blankets tucked between the appliances and the sheer glass walls. Half-empty food packages and empty wrappers littered the floor.

Someone had painted in giant, white words on the glass, the word “HELLO” across one window. A paint brush stuck out of a bucket of long-dried paint. Underneath the letters, there sat a woman. Cross-legged, and hunched forward, with her forehead propped against the glass, as if she couldn’t bear to lift the weight of her body any longer. Her fingers dragged across the glass, weak and longing. Her hair hung in long, unwashed strands, dark circles ringed her eyes, and, judging by the stains on her clothes, she didn’t smell so sweet either.

“Ah,” the Old Man said, “Just in time.”

“For what?”

But the Old Man held up his hand to silence Poire.

“I’m here,” the woman said, her throat rasping from overuse, “Can’t you see me? Can’t you know me?”

A bolt of geometric lightning dragged itself across the great void of space, slicing through the clouds of white fog. It stretched across the great void of space, questing for the Dam. But each time a tendril touched at the metal, some kind of reaction occurred, and the whole twisting, jagged stalk of energy collapsed faster than it had spawned. More bolts spawned in its wake, sprouting through the misty clouds that half-covered the Scar’s dizzying depths.

With the last ounces of her strength, the woman hauled herself up to one knee, though her whole body trembled with the effort. She thumped her fist against the glass, “I know you’re there! I know you see me! You see everything!” Her last words strangled in her throat, became a furious cry as she smashed her fist against the window, and then a yelp of pain. “Talk to me,” she sobbed, cradling her hand. “Please.”

The bolts of slow lightning grew and grew, and touched the dam, and dissipated, making room for new bolts to fork out from the Scar. A silent storm, held back by a pane of glass. The only sound was the steady, unremarkable beeping from the appliances, and the girl’s ragged breath as she walked on her knees to one appliance (a box with a series of small dishes aimed at the Scar), and, standing on shaky legs, she flicked a switch off. Then on. The dishes flickered, their shallow bowls filled with a foggy, white light. Almost like vapor.

Her eyes flicked back and forth as readouts poured into her personal holographic display, visible only to her. “Why not?” she said. “Why doesn’t it do anything?” She flicked the switch off and on rapidly, her long, clingy hair shaking back and forth with the furious effort.

“Work. Work, damn you!”

Her head jolted up, as if she’d heard a sound from beyond the glass. Poire heard nothing.

She screamed at the glass, “I know you’re out there!”

The flickering sound of the appliance’s dishes was her only reply.

She spread her lips, and clamped her jaw into an agonized grin, and threw her head back.

She didn’t see the clouds of mist, billowing from the Scar, tremble. It was an instant movement—impossibly fast—as thousands of miles of cloud reconfigured themselves. Not disappearing, just shifting in a single jump.

She opened her eyes, as if she had felt something change. Her gaze fixed on the Scar, her pupils dilated, both pupils growing, then shrinking to two fine points, as if she was seeing something in the distance grow very, very bright.

“Oh,” she said.

Forks of slow lightning twisted together, wrapping themselves into bundles, melting into each other until huge columns of energy swirled like currents gathering in a stream thousands of miles long.

The stream leaped forward. It shoved at the Dam, and breaking and feeding into the Dam, shoving all its energy. Where it touched, Light and clouds blasted away like heat from a blowtorch. The lights in the room flickered. An emergency alarm blared. Black plates began to rattle from the ceiling, slowly covering up the glass window.

The stream was focused on her. It shredded itself on the Dam, becoming nothing more than a tiny, silvery thread that pierced through the glass with a singing, sizzling whistle. Radiating rays of light filled the observation room, becoming glittering mist as the silver thread twisted and touched the place between Emorynn’s eyes.

She gasped. Her body went rigid. Her fingers clenched at nothing. Her mouth opened in a rictus grin, and she hissed, “I see it. It’s everywhere. It’s everything.”

She laughed. She groaned. Her teeth clenched. “Wait,” she said. She raised her hands to block the silvery string of raw energy, but it simply passed through her palms, as if it was made of something other than matter. “Wait. Too much. It’s—it’s too much!”

Emorynn’s veins glowed through her skin. White tendrils of energy radiated from her feet, and licked out from the crown of her head. Glowing and white. Her body looked wrong in that light. Like she was herself, but she was also someone else. Many someones—an infant, a middle-aged woman, a pale corpse, dust. All Emorynn, all in the same place.

The silver thread of Light snapped. Emorynn, the real Emorynn, fell to the floor.

She did not move. Not even her chest. Her skin, once so pale, began to turn blue.

“She’s dying—” Poire knelt next to her, his hands passing through her shoulders. “We have to help her!”

But the Old Man just held up a finger, commanding Poire to wait.

Emorynn gasped, her chest lifting off the ground as if she’d been hit with a jolt of electricity. Spluttering and sucking down air, she glanced around wild-eyed. “What?” she asked. “What?”

Poire struggled to form the same question. “What was that?”

“That was Anu,” the Old Man said. “The alien. And she just made first contact.”

***

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