“Rose?”
Rose was refilling her empty glass when she thought she heard a man’s voice in the room. She froze for a second but quickly relaxed. She shouldn’t be drinking anymore, although she couldn’t recall ever having hallucinations in the past when she was drunk.
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Chills went down her spine. Someone was speaking to her, and she knew that voice too well. A voice she hadn’t heard for five years. Not when she was awake, at least.
Nick will never hurt me, she reassured herself, if he’s indeed my Nick. Still, facing a ghost alone in a room buried hundreds of meters underground was not easy.
“I’m not a ghost.” Nick seemed to know what she was thinking. “I’m Nick’s brain copy. He created me before he died, although,” he said with self-mockery, “as far as I’m concerned, I am Nick.”
Now it was clear to Rose that the sound came from the bar counter. She gathered her strength and stood up. Nick’s image had appeared on the front side of the counter, or more accurately, it was showing underneath the glossy surface as if a miniature Nick had been trapped inside a glass container.
“Nick?” She walked tentatively toward the counter. “Is it really … you?”
“As I said—”
“Forget the brain copy!” she yelled. “I want to know if it’s you!”
She surveyed his image. He looked exactly the same as he was five years ago, wearing the plaid shirt she gave him for his fortieth birthday. The deep-set eyes conveyed a businessman’s prudence and calculation, but when he smiled, the sunshine would melt the ice hidden in the corners of your mind.
It seemed he was also looking at her, although it wasn’t obvious how he could accomplish that. “You didn’t change much, Rose …”
“What kind of body lotion do I like to put on after showers?” she asked warily. She had never heard about brain copies. She needed to make sure this “guy” wasn’t a fraud.
“You never put anything on your body, lotion or perfume,” he said decisively.
Then he must be Nick, but how did this happen? She sat on the floor so that they were roughly at the same height. “I still can’t believe I’m talking to you, Nick. So you’ve been here for all those years? Why didn’t you tell me before you made this … this brain-copy thing?”
Nick sighed. “A long story. When we bought the house from Victor, he once showed me this room. He said it was first discovered by a group of miners before the house was built. At that time it was simply a cave with this counter inside. The miners must have considered it strange, but they were too desperate to care about things that did not present immediate financial values. Over the two centuries his family sort of passed the information on. They were able to come down through one of the mine shafts, but I guess most of them weren’t interested.”
“Who built the elevator?”
“Victor. He also renovated the room. He came here frequently and tried to figure out the secret of the counter, but …”
“But I didn’t like him.” Another woman’s voice sounded in the room. “Especially when he drank too much.”
Next to Nick appeared the image of a woman. She had long maroon hair running in big waves, crystal-blue eyes surrounded by thick eyelashes, perfectly tanned skin, perfect everything, yet as a whole she looked like a doll or a robot.
“Nice to meet you, Rose.” She gave Rose a mechanical smile.
“Who is she?” Rose asked her husband.
“I’m Eve,” the woman said. “From Megrez, the central star of what you call the Big Dipper. It’s funny how you humans invented constellations. We are actually a lot closer to you than to most of the other stars in the Ursa-Major Constellation.”
An alien, thought Rose. So what she saw was probably not Eve’s original appearance.
“And she’s twenty-five years …” Nick said. “Sorry, twenty-five hundred years old. Or older.”
“It’s not polite to talk about a woman’s age, isn’t it, you Earth people?” She turned to look at him, her voice half reproaching, half flirting. “And you forgot to introduce me as your wife.”
“I don’t remember we ever had a wedding.”
“Why would that matter? I’m with you, I’m inside you, all the time.” She wrapped his arm with hers.
“So was the cancer that killed me.”
Rose looked away from the two, not knowing how to respond. Her husband’s soul had been trapped with another woman’s in the past few years when everyone thought he were dead. He wasn’t enjoying his company, but it was better than being dead, wasn’t it?
When she looked back, she saw Eve pouting her lips and staring at Rose and Nick back and forth. “Okay, you two are the true lovers.” She then said to Rose, “You know how he cursed you the last time you fought each other?”
“Enough!” Nick bellowed at her. He glared at her for a few seconds before he heaved a long sigh and said in a softer voice, “All right, Eve. You’re my wife, my heart, my bladder. Can I have a few minutes alone with my ex?”
Eve twirled around and strode away, a set of sofa identical to the one in the room emerging ahead of her as she walked. She sat down, picked up a magazine from the sofa, and engaged herself in reading.
“Where were we …” Nick rubbed his forehead with a hand, suddenly appearing to be embarrassed. “Okay, so I had sort of forgotten about this room since then, until I received my death sentence. For a while, I kept thinking, what is it like to be buried underground, forever? I know it sounds silly … Then I remembered this room and decided to take a look. I even thought, why not just stay here and never go back again? It’ll be easier for everyone, and … and what’s the difference?”
Rose’s eyes were filled with tears. He never said similar things to her when he was “alive”. He had remained strong through the last minute of his life.
“I have to say, she scared the hell out of me when she started talking.”
Eve looked up from her magazine, seemingly wanting to add something, but decided to keep reading.
“So she offered to make a copy of you?” Rose asked.
He nodded.
“How did she do that?”
“I don’t quite remember …” He squinted, thinking.
Two curved light beams appeared in the middle of the room, connecting the two ends of the bar counter, kind of like what people typically draw to illustrate the magnetic field surrounding a magnet. The distinction was that the two beams, one in blue and one in red, were not in parallel. Their paths both went through Rose’s head where they seemed to be crossing each other.
“Just like that,” said Eve. “These are two different types of lights, individually stable. When they intersect each other, however, their phases at the intersection will become extremely sensitive to the local electrical field. By examining the phase delays at the receiving end, and changing the intersecting point, we’ll be able to figure out your cortical activity. Of course, when we actually do it, we use thousands of pairs simultaneously. I guess you people would call it non-invasive electrophysiology?”
Rose knew nothing about electrophysiology. “Are you making a copy of me now?” she said with alertness.
“Ha ha …” Eve laughed. “You wish! Polygamy is not welcome in my world.” Then she saw Nick’s reproaching gaze and resumed her reading.
Rose shook her head. “I can’t imagine she’s been here almost as long as our entire written history.”
“She can switch into a hibernation state when she wants to… Anyway, initially I had no intention of copying my brain. Then through talking to her I learned they were up to something. I mean, those Megrezese. I knew it was related to Comet 195F, and something’s going to happen after it enters the inner solar system. They started the plan when they came to Earth twenty-five hundred years ago, but no matter how I pressed on, she refused to elaborate.”
Rose glanced at Eve but didn’t say anything. As a brain copy of one of the aliens, Eve’s job was to supervise the mission and must have been told to keep the secret. But as a lonely woman, she had to let out enough information to entice a desirable partner.
“That’s why I had asked you to support the Rosetta project, and left the letter with my lawyer. I was hoping that a few years later, I could acquire more details about their plan—”
“Wait!” Rose interrupted. A vague idea stirred in her mind. Twenty-five hundred years … She frowned. She had just heard it mentioned by somebody. Nick said it when he introduced Eve, but before that, somebody else had also talked about it. On the TV, maybe? Did the news anchor say the comet had a period of twenty-five hundred years?
She looked back at Nick and his eyes confirmed her suspicion.
“The comet is actually from Earth.”
* * *
“What do you think they’ll have us do?” Matt asked after Devin had finished talking to Kenton.
“I don’t know.”
Devin didn’t smoke, but at the moment he had an impulsion of lighting up a cigarette. Even Kenton wouldn’t be able to answer the question. An emergency meeting had been called for among NASA’s Administrators and Deputy Administrators. But what else could they suggest besides taking more samples and finishing all the measurements, which the lander was already doing? The drills could keep boring into the device, but it would get them nowhere unless they dig the whole thing out, take it apart or bring it home. For that they had neither the time nor the tools.
“I’d like to walk around a little bit,” said Matt.
Though nervous, Matt’s gait also gave away a trace of excitement. Devin could understand. This was the young man’s first mission, a supposedly humdrum trip merely for the completion of their comet database. Now for sure they were going to make a unique discovery, if … Devin didn’t want to continue his thought. What was he worried about? The possibility of not being able to make home used to be his worst fear, which was reasonable for anyone with a similar career. Yet today, there lurked a presage even scarier than that.
He sat down beside the lander and studied the soil-composition report. It was just like the earth except for the high percentage of water in the form of ice, but it would be similar to a place after heavy rainfall. Another anomaly was the large amount of bacteria living in the soil. He shook his head. What was going on? Then he noticed the fluctuating waveform showing on the panel again, and this time there were perhaps more than one talker given the complexity of the signal.
He typed his port name on the panel and immediately heard the woman’s voice.
“That makes sense!” she exclaimed. “We thought the last time the comet passed by Earth were twenty-five hundred years ago. But in fact, that was the time it was born! How did you guys manage to send such a large chunk of earth to space?”
“Not any chunk,” said another woman with apparent satisfaction. “Your house is located where the comet used to be. Nick, you once told me you had a feeling of nausea before you entered this room, right? You must have inhaled a bunch of anti-gravity bacteria.”
Nausea … Devin remembered his earlier sickness. He didn’t feel like vomiting, but he was wearing a spacesuit and probably didn’t inhale much.
“Anti-gravity bacteria?” a man asked. “What are you talking about?”
“I believe you’ve also invented certain anti-gravity matter. It usually takes a lot of energy to create a small amount.”
The invention of anti-gravity matter had set a milestone in human’s space era, Devin acknowledged. With embedded anti-gravity materials, the Rosetta Spaceship weighed only a little more than a compact car.
“When we were out for mining on a planet or a moon,” the alien woman said, “sometimes we’d like to bring large chunks of minerals home. It was impractical to create enough anti-gravity matter on the go. For a long time our scientists had been working on solutions to make the production quicker and cheaper. Then someone came up with a genius idea. Why not have the material reproduce itself? In nature only one thing can do this—life.”
“You mean,” said the first woman, “to create bacteria using anti-gravity matter? Is it … compatible?”
Devin didn’t find it incredible, though. As an astronomer, levitation was a topic he had been contemplating lifelong. Speaking of anti-gravity, people tend to focus on inanimate techniques, such as ultrasound, magnetism, or ionocraft. They have neglected the fact that, throughout history, the majority of levitation occurrences were observed with humans. Almost every religion has legends of one or more “saints” who were said to be able to lift themselves up when they wanted. People still can’t come up with scientific explanations, but life and anti-gravity are certainly not incompatible.
“I don’t know the details,” said the alien, “but we managed. The critical part is, those bacteria can feed on regular compounds obtained from the environment and duplicate themselves into more and more anti-gravity bacteria. So normally we would lay out some seeds, and let them form into biofilms as they grow. Originally it’s slow, as if nothing were happening. But since it goes exponentially, all of a sudden you’ll have layers and layers of them underneath an area, perhaps more than the total number of stars in the entire universe, strong enough to crack up a chunk of dirt from the ground and whoosh it up to the sky.”
Devin took a deep breath as he tried to imagine what had happened on Earth two thousand five hundred years ago. It must have been spectacular—the power of life!
“We’ve also manipulated their genes so that those bacteria could only survive and split over a certain time period. But just as life typically is, there are always mutations that—”
“Enough of your fancy technology!” The first woman interrupted. “What do you want? Why did you do this to us?”
“Do you know why comets have been considered ominous signs in several of your ancient cultures?”
“It’s a time bomb,” said the man. “The timer is set by the period of the comet.”
“But I just watched the news!” the first woman argued. “It’s heading to Earth’s orbit but will stay far from us.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t change its course.”
The alien’s words struck Devin’s head. Change would require remote control, and control may not be impossible considering the fact that he was listening to their conversations right now.
* * *
“I don’t understand,” he heard the first woman saying. “For some reason, you guys wanted to kill us, but with your technology couldn’t you have done it otherwise? Why would you bother to create a comet and make it attack us now?”
“Believe me, it’s for your own good.” There was fear concealed in the aloofness. “And we didn’t do this only to you. Around the same time we also set up a comet for another planet, what you call Mullos 17b.”
Mullos 17b … Whenever Devin tried to recollect memories of his last mission, he felt like hitting the visible part of an iceberg. There was more hiding under water, but he found no way to approach it.
Nevertheless, something assured him that the planet would not be impacted by a comet. There existed a certain entity that had the power of instantly vaporizing a comet, although he couldn’t tell what it was.
“For our good?” The first woman was indignant. “Are you doing us a favor by …”
“Devin!” Matt’s call suppressed the conversation. “Come here!”
Devin typed on the panel to remove the extra channel and walked over to where Matt was standing. The tether connecting the young man to the lander had apparently reached its limit.
He stood next to Matt and looked forward. There was a hole in the ground ahead of them, approximately two feet in diameter. It was perfectly round with some dark metal serving as the interior surface.
“I’ll go take a look.” Devin began unbuckling his tether.
“No, please let me do this.” There was determination in Matt’s voice.
Devin paused and studied the young man’s face, which reminded him of the first time he taught Sarah to drive a car. He showed her again and again until she finally yelled, “Dad, you just have to let me try it!”
“All right. Just a quick look. Take some pictures and come back.”
Matt disconnected his tether and edged toward the hole. With his headlight on, he knelt down and examined the hole. “I see some kind of disc valve at the end … In fact, I think it’s moving … turning … Looks like it’s opening up…”
“Back away!” Devin shouted, but it was too late. A gush of yellow gas spewed from the hole and blew Matt up to the sky. Spinning like a top, his figure quickly diminished from Devin’s view.
“Matt?” Devin called. “Are you all right? Matt?”
There was no response. He must have been knocked out. The vibration had also sent Devin away from the surface, and he was once again floating like a kite.
“What happened?” he heard Connor asking.
“You have Matt’s current location?” Devin could no longer see him. “Go get him, quick!” The ship should be able to retrieve Matt, but Devin was worried about possible damages to his spacesuit or oxygen supply.
Now there was no question that the comet was under someone’s control. Hovering above the surface, Devin could see several other “engine exhausts” scattering around, spurting the same yellow gas with various intensities. The comet had been turned into a spaceship, or more accurately, a giant bomb, as had been predicted by ancient prophecies, a hex that would bring an end to our human civilization.
He pulled on the tether and gradually descended. He would need to confirm with Connor about the comet’s trajectory before he could finalize the conclusion, but it was time to start planning for the worst. What could he do if the comet was indeed on the way to Earth?
As soon as he reached the surface, he checked the screen on the lander. Those people were still talking, but he had no time for that. He looked around desperately, knowing there existed nothing that could help him dig out whatever was buried underneath or compromise those exhausts. But he had to do something! After all, he was physically present on the comet. He must act quickly before the comet had fully changed its course …
“Devin, I got Matt!” Connor’s voice mixed with heavy breathing sounded in his helmet. “He’s passed out. I’m trying to undress him, but he looks okay … What happened exactly?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Devin said solemnly. “Connor, could you take a look at the comet’s trajectory? And tell me if it’s turning in the direction of Earth.”
“What are you—”
“Please! I want you to do this now!”
A minute later, he heard Connor’s voice again, “Yes, it is. But … I don’t understand!”
Devin sighed. Now his last hope had been shattered. He gathered himself and briefly explained the situation to Connor, who, according to the silence, must have been dumbfounded.
“Connor, I know this is hard to accept, but the whole world is in our hands. Could you think of anything in the ship that may…”
An idea struck him as he said the word, ship. No, nothing in the ship would work. But the ship itself would! If he flew Rosetta at a high speed and crashed it onto the comet where the lander was located, he should be able to damage the controller buried beneath the lander, and the comet would hopefully no longer turn in the Earth’s direction.
He explained the idea to Connor and expected to receive objections, but after a moment’s silence, he heard Connor saying, “I’ll do it.”
“No,” Devin said firmly. “You told me your wife’s pregnant again. My kids are both in college. I’ll do it. You and Matt stay in the emergency capsule. You should be fine till they come to pick you up.”
As he said the words, he saw Rosetta appearing in his view and drawing near. He looked away from it and surveyed the black curtain embellished with numerous stars. When he was a young child he had always dreamed of becoming an astronomer, to own a ridiculously large workspace rather than an office cubical. He had even thought of dying in space when he was “old enough”. He smiled. How old is old enough? They say, when a soldier dies in a battle after spending years protecting home, he wouldn’t feel too bad.
This was Devin’s last battle. Considering the outcome it would bring to him, and to all the people in the world including Tracy and their daughters, no, it wasn’t bad at all.
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