Getting
up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the
vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just
calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those
army boys.
They
came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone
inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally
admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask
me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome
party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the
police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important,
but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.
We
jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle
paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich
tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but
they were our only ride.
Inside,
time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events
backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every
moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous
events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever
getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?
They
told me.
Not in
so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you
to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips
are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my
backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out,
retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.
Together,
we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low
orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing.
No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole
in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident
from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over
New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from
sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God,
I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m
talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded
to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the
creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we
found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even
though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out
for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and
sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.
We were
heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove.
They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves
crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me,
my sister and I, are jumping… in…
The sun
hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and
cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the
barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only
thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.
The
inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we
didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing
an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first
one to talk to an alien species…
They aren’t better than us. They
make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was
something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality.
Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.
You’ve
been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be
wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light,
beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which
naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just
kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m
not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to
our minds!
I’m
sorry, have we met before?
Alive…
yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are
the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re
also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are
anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a
quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you
were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew
you.”
Dimensions lie in layers over them,
baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as
well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.
I knew
we had to bomb the thing.
My wife? She had divorced me the
month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and
sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like
a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew
it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to
prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God,
right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so
hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my
secret, and I wasn’t having it.
No, Maria, the dishes are in the
sink.
These things… see, they aren’t
eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a
species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and
before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in
attoseconds.
They
showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see
inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that
every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They
showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to
contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.
Sir, I
don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.
Our
power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes
are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous
apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would
have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human
mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia,
with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of
kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.
Kindness
requires a soul.
So yes,
I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame
me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with
another species.
But I
stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the
billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension.
Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following:
the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply
can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t
survive it.
I see.
You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we
can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?
I think
it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be,
that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh
of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever
seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I
can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.
You
think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound
into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like
candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.
We are so lucky. Where am I? They
will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us
all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and
depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this
single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are
everyone.
I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if
I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the
landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to
stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.
My mother says it’s time to get up.
I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my
fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards
are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The
guards are talking backwards.
I bet you’ll find them quite
illuminated.
