To Know
by Amanda Walczesky

In a small bubble out in space, a lone man walked around and around in a loping circle. There was a general hum surrounding him, something hissing like a garden hose not twisted tight enough, or a balloon expelling it’s last birthday wish. He kept his eyes closed and his hands folded behind his back, thinking of the last thing he heard his daughter say before he left. “Daddy. I thought you’d like to know that sometimes I’m upside down.”

At that moment, in Earth-sense, so was he. The artificial gravity was generated by the standard rotation of a wheel-like apparatus that comprised the central portion of the small one man vessel. The ship itself was spherical: a beach ball with a hula hoop around its waist, that kept the rhythm. At that moment, he was rounding the ceiling, though the true perception of walking in a perfectly straight line never wavered.

What was it? The tenth month? Yes, month ten of an eleven month trip. Out and back again. Generations ago, the science of space exploration had advanced so dramatically as to efficiently eliminate the need for more than one crew member. Extremely capable computer systems kept the whole operation from imploding, and the only reason they supplied a human was to keep the aspect of curiosity in place. (For even scientists couldn’t instill creativity and the urge to know into a load of chips and wires).

Today was a Wednesday, or so the computer had told him when he woke up. He called her Eve, though she was by far not the first of her kind, just the first one he’d actually liked. She didn’t mind the name, not as if she would.

As he walked, he occasionally asked Eve questions. She had many answers for anything he could think of, so it was always interesting to see which one she would choose, basing her response on the tone of his voice, intuiting the appropriate answer on some hardwiring of speech analysis and tonal patterns.

“Eve?”

“Yes, Matthew.” Her voice somehow flowed from her hidden speakers, Persian honey laced with wine. No touch of cold artificial intelligence there. Perfectly simulated.

“Why should I really want to go to this planet?”

“It’s your mission, Matthew.”

“What, my mission in life? Or just the mission I was sent on to insure a paycheck?”

“You’re being difficult, Matthew. You know the reason you are here. Control received an anomalous radio signal twenty weeks ago. It is your mission to find the exact source and…” he interrupted her.

“And take notes like a good school boy.”

He stopped walking and took a seat, his eyes drawn inevitably out the unnecessarily large view screen. It opened the deep blackness of space up to him like a slit in a canvas bag. The flood of nothingness spilled over the controls and was absorbed into his body. He had never really understood why deep space affected him so. He felt so immersed within the emptiness that sometimes when he returned home he actually flinched at the rising of the sun. A foreign invader come to wipe the slate clean, it tried its damnedest to erase the memory of eternity from his mind.

Out here things were much simpler than the physicists would like people to think. Forget complex mathematics, string theory running amok, light speeds and multi-dimensional light-sucking black holes. Truly there was nothing but an endless wasteland, fragmented by sheets of stars and occasional dots called planets, comets, asteroids. The remnants of creation that continually smoldered at the edges like a slowly burning piece of paper.

Nothing was this beautiful on Earth. At least not anymore. Once, he could faintly remember being able to see the moon at night. Now the lights from a eight billion people thrust their shining rays of eternal daytime into the failing atmosphere. From orbit, the planet was awash in artificial light. No one feared the darkness anymore because they simply refused to believe it existed.

Out in space, however, everything was dark. When the ships internal clocks wound down to ‘evening’, the ambient lighting slowly dimmed. Then it was perfect. He could achieve his most creative work once night descended in space. It was actually part of his duties aboard the ship, as he spent his time en route to the planet. Some team of psychologists had once decided ‘extensive creative activity aboard solo deep space flights would ease the trauma of being utterly alone for extended periods of time’.

They were partially right.

 

Matthew, having decided Eve was right (he was being difficult) set to work on his current project: finding multitudinous explanations for the signal. He had acquired several pages of possible outcomes: advanced civilizations, simple computer error (on both Control’s part and the many satellites the signal had passed through to actually arrive at Control), misguided echoes of supernovae, an hallucination. He often digressed during these sessions, writing sometimes lengthy bits on alien ship design or star rotation. It was extreme free association, for he still had another three weeks and four days to go until he actually had something real to do.

Time passed so quickly when you went almost as fast it does. His atoms could probably feel the rush of speed across their infinitesimal skin. Towards the last few days, Eve began to prepare him psychologically for the real work ahead.

Chess and backgammon. He was as good as she was at chess and he hated backgammon, so they played both, randomly, whenever he wasn’t exercising, eating, or sleeping. Then she took to speaking German or Arabic, trying to catch him off guard. It seemed random, but truly it was part of her immense mission program guide. It was Eve’s responsibility to keep Matthew alive and sane in order for the mission to be a success. With a day to go, it looked like it would be.

“So have you located the exact spot?” Matthew hesitated in his examination of the planet’s data before him.

“Yes, Matthew.” She brought up the coordinates on his control panel. On the view screen an enlarged image of the planet appeared, a magnified portion highlighted in a lime green pulsing box.

“It’s gotta be a thunderstorm or something. I don’t see a craft.”

“Perhaps.” She was good at that. Vague affirmations. She had no imagination nor the will to think forward so she was programmed to push Matthew along.

He keyed in something and the magnified portion withdrew, re-magnified then filled the screen. And then…there it was. A great sore thumb. It was, at that magnification, an apple sized spherical object, with two parallel antenna running in a diagonal through its core.

“What the hell is that?” He didn’t seem too surprised; his hours, weeks, months of speculation had actually accounted for an orbiting transmitter. But the actual sight was the best part. Here was something that in all probability should not exist. Nearly one hundred years of deep space exploration had not yielded one tiny clue of life other than the human race. But here, orbiting a planet two times larger than Earth, was a tiny blip of nothing, sending its own tiny blips of nothing out into the abyss.

A few hours later, there was no need for magnification, the planet was simply there. The only thing in sight, it completely filled the view screen and it was heartbreaking: an untouched wilderness covered in water and waves after waves of green and brown. Eve took in every detail for future missions, while it was Matthew’s job to examine the object.

He quickly made the decision not to attempt to retrieve it. It was obviously put there for a reason and removing it was most likely not a good idea. The signal itself sounded much different this close up, an echo rebounding in a very small room. It was a slow ticking, a patient clock.

“Are you recording that sound, Eve? It’s much different than the one we originally received.” A gentle pulse seemed to creep in through the hull of the ship, slowing his blood and focusing his awareness. A shroud of peace fell over him and he drifted out.

Somewhere behind him, he heard Eve mention a light. Or many lights. They had rounded the night side of the planet. Matthew blinked.

“Daddy, you should know that today I really did do a flip. All by myself. Well, mommy tried to help but…”

“Matt, honey. You need to get up. The shutter’s come loose again…sounds like the wind’s pulling the roof off and while you’re up…”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

He was supine on a hard floor, looking up into empty space. A creamy white glow tickled the edges of his vision. Eve was speaking gently to him about sending a message to Control concerning what they had found. His mouth moved to answer. The sound was tremendous and the silence swallowed it whole.

A heat crept up through the floor and sucked his body down into a blanket of warmth. Hadn’t he heard about this? Deep space insanity. Long long voyages into eternity. He had finally flipped. A real flip, mind-first into wherever.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Perhaps the inky waters of time would swallow him whole, disregard his inconvenient mortal body and just rip his soul out through his widened eyes. For a moment he saw the planet again. The endless tracts of rolling grasslands and, had Eve magnified the image or had he landed? Massive tops of violently beautiful trees swayed in some breeze. There was a taste of jungle in the air. Savage and mysterious.

He vaguely remembered being in a bubble. Walking around and around like a trapped mouse. A clock had materialized on the wall before him.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

 

 

It steadily clicked off seconds until millennia passed by, grabbing hold of his enamored spirit and throwing him head first into God’s playground.

A great factory of stars. Churning them out like an early American assembly line. The thunderous clanking of divine intervention, he connected with an intelligence as curious as his own.

Small snapshots, held up by invisible hands, showed him the birth of here: silent explosions, time-lapse of planet formation, creature-evolution, the first coherent mind, a civilization that stumbled, achieved, expanded into outer realms and then dissolved into something much higher than flesh.

Another room formed. A confined space of shifting yellows and reds. It smelled electric and metallic. He could taste the cold steel of language driving through his mind, trying to communicate, to connect. To know.

An emissary from far out. This single voice for millions, it had been calling for eons. Where is our brethren? Come to us, share this void.

A languid voice reached through the machinery and touched the back of his neck.

“Of course, Matthew. I have been keeping audio recordings of the entire mission.” Eve’s ethnically deceiving voice cut through the moment like a cold breeze.

It seemed a thousand years ago he’d asked her that question. His vision flickered briefly between Its reality and his own. With a deep breath, knowing that, had he never experienced those infinitely extended milliseconds, he may never have done what he did.

Reaching out to touch the probing mind of a species calling him brother, Matthew leaned forward and shook hands with the future. Twin minds with twin desires meshed, as first contact became welcome home.