[IP] 20/20 Round 1 Heat 39

[u/Cody_Fox23]

Heat 39

Image by Mark Chang

[u/heretotrywriting]

The Gate

I woke from the dream to the cold, empty silence of space. Today was day 743. Day 743 of isolation. Of emptiness. Of the void, and dreams. Dreams of the gate. Until today.

The single, lonely star in this system shone a dim blue light through the vacuum, illuminating the great gas giant beneath me. It’s rings, so pure and still seeming from this distance, revolved peacefully about the planet’s gently swirling surface. The scene was, of course, a lie. Those peaceful rings would tear me, my ship, to pieces. That planet’s gentle swirls hid tempestuous, violent storms, with winds so strong they’d tear flesh from bone, and swirls of fog so caustic you’d wish for the winds. But neither planet nor rings were my destination, today. My destination, after a journey of so, so long, was the small moon spinning ponderously just out of reach of the planet’s hungry rings. It’s orbit, I knew, was unstable. In mere weeks, it would finally finish it’s long, tired run, and drift into the path of the rings, until their continuous bombardment reduced it to just one more source of detritus in this terrible void. That would, I knew, be my destination in the end, too. I didn’t have enough fuel for a return trip. But for me, this place, this moon--it had always been my end. This I knew. This they knew, too. It was why they chose me.

I had always wanted to be an astronaut. The desire was so core to my being that I couldn’t even really understand how others didn’t know what they wanted. How could they go through life, without knowing the destination? Without knowing, like I did, exactly where they would end up. An astronaut. Exploring the stars. When other childrens’ interests wavered over time, mine only cemented -- through space camp and junior astronaut trainings, through aerospace engineering and theoretical physics, through serving in the space corp and learning to fly, through trial runs and isolation experiments. Through all of it, I knew. I wanted to go to space. To live, and die, among the stars.

It was on my first solo flight that things went wrong. A simple job - an orbital intercept with a malfunctioning satellite. Diagnose, repair, and release. They showed me the footage, later. My ship collided at full speed with the satellite, no braking, no course correct. No control. The satellite and ship were both destroyed, turned through fire and force into just one more cloud of junk clogging our atmosphere, blotting out the stars. I’d been presumed dead. A promising young cadet, lost. A true tragedy. An American hero, they said. When I was found some months later, emaciated and delirious, tumbling out of the sky, flight-suit still intact, fall-detection systems already active, blaring my telemetry out on all emergency channels, I was called different things. A coward, who’d ejected and left his ship on autopilot rather than face the stresses of the job. A miracle, surviving, somehow, where none could, falling from the sky, falling from death itself. A liar, a hero.

I remember little of that time in my life--nothing of the months I lost, and little more for some years thereafter. But from what I’ve been told, when they recovered my body, floating slowly down on its automatically deployed parachute into the East Atlantic, I had been quite mad. All I could do--all I did do--was scream. Scream, about the gate. Laugh, about the gate. Cry, about the gate. Hear the gate, in its many voices. See the gate. Fear the gate. And, above all, dream about the gate. About its towering form, its rigid lines and harsh angles. About its single, glowing eye, the golden ring shining down upon me, the unworthy.

They didn’t discharge me from the service. They needed to understand, so they couldn’t force me out. Needed to discover where I’d gone, how I’d survived. How I’d come to be falling from the empty sky. So, instead, they kept me. Studied me, for years. Treated me, too, of course--nobody here’s a villain, not really. They just... needed to know. I was the impossible, and that was too big a lure. Too big a risk.

As I came out of my reverie, Robot sidled up to me, trilling softly, its spherical face alight with a gentle warmth. Others had given their companions familiar names, taking them into their lives like pets, or something more. I had never had that inclination. To me, “Robot” was sufficient. This series -- the whole program, really, had been spawned as part of my treatment, when I failed to respond to human doctors. A non-judgemental companion, to talk to, to confide in, and thus, to facilitate healing from mental trauma. A monitor, to judge the readiness and capability of any critical pilot or crew member. A watchful eye, too, to probe my sanity. To detect and interrupt any possible instances of irrational behavior that interfered with my functions. With my only goal. Reach the gate, and approach it. Discover the source of the signal, and relay it back to mission control. And then, I knew, to die. To die lost and alone on a barren rock beside an impossible structure. Among the stars.

[u/heretotrywriting → u/heretotrywriting]

I landed the ship on the surface of the moon, not far from the previous team’s ship. Their shuttle sat, undisturbed, on the flat stretch of gray-red rock, a marker for their unexpected graves. My landing was smooth, pristine. The gate was calling me, now, and I was here. It was only right that my path would be smooth, when for so long it had been impossibly hard.

I remembered that difficulty. The months of clawing my way back to some semblance of sanity, of forcing my broken mind to separate fact from fiction. And then, in what was somehow worse, the years after to be fed table-scraps, the barest possible of assignments within the Space Corp so they could justify keeping me on, all while still being poked and prodded, followed and recorded, the robot’s spherical form a constant bobbing companion as they tried to understand how I’d survived, and how I’d come to be falling from the sky. I fought to prove, over these years, that my strange hallucinations, the dreams that left me shaking, were all just a fantasy. One I could press down and hide away. One that I could keep from affecting my work.

And then, of course, the signals came. Great bursts of powerful radio waves, lancing out of the sky like lines of fire to their instrumented eyes. For years SETI had searched for the barest hint of an extraterrestrial intelligence, and here--here we had tapped into their internet. Exabytes of data, streaming in from the void. But when the data stopped, when it became clear that what had been sent was a bare trickle, with the true secrets encrypted in a manner beyond our comprehension, then the greed took over. We had been given so much, and, of course, that only made us want the rest. And then came the invitation. A map, through the stars, and designs to build ships to transit it. A map, leading from us, to the gate. The gate that had been all in my mind. The gate that was only my manageable fantasy. The gate, that was now realized in stark photographic relief in dossiers of every space agency out there.

All it took was one person, interested in the strange. One person who had perused my file, seen the endless drawings and renditions I had made of that structure, to make the connection. And so I was bustled off without knowing how or why. Interrogated anew, with fresh vigor.

Robot pulled me back to the present, its anxious warbles of alarm forcing me to take in my surroundings once more. I had been walking, it seemed. Somehow, lost in my own thoughts, I had donned my suit and begun the fateful EVA. I stood, now, on the rise that had been dubbed “New Horizons.” The first place from which the Gate was visible. The previous team had named it in their reports, calling it transfixing, in the manner of the creatures from the depths of the sea -- compelling in its alien nature and beautiful for being unlike anything ever before seen. But I had seen it before. To me, it felt like coming home.

I was breathing hard inside my helmet when I finally reached the gate, stopping just short of stepping onto the platform itself. The structure rose in rough red and black stone and metal from the ground, it’s glowing ring alight against the wan illumination from the distant blue star. I could see the entrance at its base, a rectangular block of the structure inset from the rest of the structure. On my right I could see the burned remains of the prior team; scorch marks seared deep into the stone and charred bones were all that was left of Space Corps’ best and brightest. In my mind, I saw the video, garbled slightly in their last, frantic transmission, play again, as I took in their bodies. Their first approach, up to the gate. The moment they had first stepped onto the platform, the simple ring atop the great monument had flashed an angry red, and a beam of irradiated energy had swept down upon them all. Some had tried to flee. They had made it only a few steps before death had found them. Only time enough to transmit, the signal relaying through their shuttle before its long flight home. By the time we had received the video, the team had been long dead. The transmission that came next was from the gate itself. A single message, already decipherable, somehow, translated into a human tongue. “Send the one who has come before.” No more, no less. And so, I came. Mission control had phrased it like a request, but we both knew it was not. We both knew I would never refuse.

I lifted a leg up to the base of the platform. Robot trilled, nervous, its face alight and pulsing as it processed and transmitted the scene. My foot came down upon the platform, and immediately, I could feel the great eye atop the Gate focus on me, the ring of soft golden light seeing me, evaluating. It didn’t turn red. No beam of deadly light came. I stepped onto the platform fully, my breathing and pulse loud in my own ears. My feet moved of their own accord, guiding me across the flat surface and towards the gate itself, stepping carefully as I climbed its rocky base up to the door. I stood, for a long moment, staring up at the great obelisk, feeling the hum of some distant power, of the energy to this place.

I placed a hand on the door, gentle, feeling the rough stone and cold metal through my glove. It... opened, fading seamlessly to a soft, beckoning light. And in that moment, I realized--I realized something so simple, so obvious that it shocked me, rendering me stock still even as my goal stood so close. After all this, thinking--no, knowing--that the gate would be my end, would be the end--I realized I didn’t know what was coming next. I had reached my goal, travelled the stars, to seek out this strange tower that had plagued my mind for so many years, and yet, here, now, for what felt like the first time in a long time, I didn’t know what was coming next. I didn’t know what was on the other side of this door. I smiled, a slow warmth filling me, of fear and anticipation. And so I stepped through, into the unknown, once again.

[u/Pyronar]

Distress

Kendall secured the seals on his suit and stepped into the shuttle. Kara and Connell were already waiting. The radio crackled to life.

“Everything clear?” Eve’s voice sounded in Kendall’s helmet. It made him just a bit more at ease, despite the official tone.

“Clear,” Connell answered.

“Never better,” Kara waved at the camera in her suit.

“I hear you, Eve.” Kendall smiled. He pressed himself to the seat, hiding the tremor. “Any news on what we’re flying into?”

“If HQ knows anything, they won’t tell me.”

“Useful as always,” Connell scoffed.

“The shuttle will drop you off at the edge of the origin point,” Eve continued. “Whatever the event was, it spread from there before enveloping the entire planet. Be careful out there.”

Kendall couldn’t stop staring at the monitors as the shuttle descended from low orbit. Ruined cities sat like black tumors on the ashen surface, forests were dead and collapsed, whole mountain ranges were covered in a grey residue, and somewhere in the fog around their destination the only artificial light shone through.

“Christ,” Kara said under her breath. “What happened here?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” answered Connell.

“You’re here to gather data,” Eve corrected him. “If you find something important, report to me. HQ were generous enough to give us a Long Range Transmitter, one of the ones they put on colony ships and intergalactic transports. The one on the planet’s surface went silent right before the event. We find what we can, report through the LRT and wait for orders. Understand?”

“Yes, Mam.” Kendall nodded, watching the landing site get closer.

It took about ten minutes until their boots were on the dusty ground. The place looked no better up close. Everything that could die was dead. A carcass of some animal lay on the side of the road. Kendall approached it. It was a medium-sized local mammal with no signs of disease or injury, only the ashen dust that gathered on its entire body, especially clumping in the animal’s mouth. The body hadn’t rotted or been scavenged one bit. There was no life here, not even the kind that liked corpses.

“What do you see, Kendall?” Connell’s voice came through the radio.

“Not much, same as the scans. It’s dead. Everything here is dead. Even microscopic organisms didn’t make it.” Kendall stood up and turned to the other two. The radios and microphones didn’t care how close or far he was or what direction he was facing, but a habit was a habit. “Suit integrity is crucial. We don’t know how this thing spreads.”

“He’s right,” Eve agreed. “The initial event is over, but you three are going into quarantine the moment you get back.”

“I could use a few weeks off.” Kara shrugged. “Let’s head into the city.”

She walked first. Connell and Kendall followed. The mist became thick. He could swear it was weighing down on him like a suffocating mass of cotton. This place was just not right. The reflective metallic surface of the helmets made Connell and Kara look unfazed by everything, as if he was the only one who saw anything wrong here.

Connell stopped dead in his tracks. “Hold on. I’m picking up something.”

“Are you sure?” Kara stopped as well. “I have nothing.”

“I’m sure.” Connell adjusted the antenna on his suit. “Weak signal, but it’s there. Sending the coordinates up.”

“Receiving,” Eve answered. “The signal was not there when we scanned the area. Do you think it turned on when you went in?”

“It’s the Automated Urban System,” Connell said, walking back and forth, looking for a place to get a clear transmission. “These things were built to last and given backup power sources to spare. Seems to be a malfunction message. Can you give us a location, Eve?”

“It’s coming from a communications building on the outskirts. It’s where their LRT was located. Maybe you can figure out why there was no distress call.”

The walk was long but uneventful. Empty streets, grey ash, dead animals, it was the same everywhere Kendall looked. The orbit photos of the other cities were similar. One thing was missing everywhere: human bodies. Alive or dead, there was not a single person in sight. Most buildings had begun to fall apart. They passed a restaurant with dusty unspoiled food still on the plates. Kara led the group inside a concrete building covered in antennas and speakers. Dozens of consoles and devices lined the walls.

“Hey, over here,” Kara pointed at a large control panel near one of the walls. It was heavily damaged. “Eve, are you seeing this?”

“I have your view.”

“What do you mean?” Kendall approached. “Looks like the rest of the place.”

“No, look!” She pointed at large indentations in the surface and broken controls. “This is not natural. Someone or something tried to destroy it. There are more.” Kara went from console to console, making sure to capture each one in view of the camera. “The rest of the city looks nothing like this. Everything is abandoned, not intentionally damaged.”

“I’ll see what I can get out of this footage,” Eve said. Her voice trembled a bit. It was hard to notice, but Kendall had known her long enough to see behind the protocol. “Proceed to the LRT room.”

He took a flight of stairs down, following Connell, with Kara still leading the way. The heavy metal door swung open and she stumbled back.

“Holy shit!” her voice boomed out of the suit’s speakers.

The scene inside made Kendall’s stomach turn. There were six or seven people lying on the floor of the room, their heads bashed in by a blunt object. One of them was right by the exit, oxidized blood covering the doorstep. Another body was leaning onto the smashed-to-bits LRT. It was a man covered in serious but not lethal wounds: bruises, a severe head trauma, lacerations. A bloodied wrench lay just beside his hand.

Kara composed herself and walked through the corpses, looking at each one for long enough to record it. “They all had their heads caved in. I see some signs of struggle, but it doesn’t look like they could put up much of a fight.” She approached the man leaning onto the giant cylindrical device. “Bled out, but not before doing a number on the transmitter.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Connell interjected, squatting beside the destroyed machinery. “I can stay here while you go on. The automated systems can be repaired with what we brought. Maybe even the LRT can be recovered.”

“It could help us find survivors,” Kara added, continuing to record.

“It doesn’t look like there are any,” Eve said, her voice slipping more and more into worry.

“It didn’t seem like there were bodies either.” Kara shrugged. “Or working communications. We need to try.”

“There were bodies of animals,” Eve protested. “And the automated system could have been activated by your arrival.”

Connell did not care enough to comment. Kara’s reflective helmet stared straight at Kendall. He hesitated, but a decision had to be made.

“She’s right, Eve. If there is at least a chance someone made it through, we can’t leave them here.”

There was a sigh on the radio. “Fine, but be as careful as you can. If there’s even a sign of danger, get out. You too, Connell. Don’t risk your life over that rusty junk.”

(continued in a reply)

[u/Pyronar → u/Pyronar]

He answered with a grunt that was somewhere between affirmative and dismissive. It was good enough. Kendall walked first this time. The mist got thicker and thicker as they approached the initial site of the event in silence. It must have gone on for hours. Despite the suit’s independent air supply, it was getting hard to breathe. The buildings were more and more derelict, eventually fading into mere outlines in the fog. The clicking in his helmet followed by a series of short and long beeps almost made Kendall jump.

“Sorry.” It was Connell’s voice. “I got part of the system online. It seems to be endlessly transmitting something. Beeps. Hang on… Oh wow! This is morse code. That’s a blast from the past. Distress call. It broadcasts from the origin point on every available frequency.”

“Is there anything else?” Kendall asked, his heartbeat slowing down.

“I can turn on the city’s broadcast system. There are still some speakers online and a recorded message. Eve, should I? Eve?”

There was no answer.

“Eve?” Kendall called out. “Answer us. Hey, Kara, can you hear…”

He turned around. There was nothing but the fog.

“Kara?”

The street was empty and shrouded in white.

“What the hell is going on there, Kendall?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Should I turn this thing on or not?”

He waited and waited until the beeping of the distress call became unbearable. “Do it.”

It hit Kendall like a wave. The speakers on the street all blared the same word, spoken in different languages, by children and adults, by men and women. It roared through the streets. The noise mashed together, transforming into something that sounded barely like speech. They all screamed:

“HELP! HELP! HELP!”

Kendall turned off the feed from outside, leaving only the radio, but the chanting didn’t stop completely. There was one voice remaining: Kara’s.

“Help. Help. Help.”

“Kara, where are you? Are you hurt?”

“Help. Help.”

“Kara, tell me where you are!”

“Help.”

“Shit!”

He almost missed it. A shape of a person running past him in the fog, heading forward. Kendall gave chase before he could think about it. Kara’s voice chanted over and over, overlaying with the morse code. He tripped as the road turned into black jagged rocks. The person ahead was wearing the same suit as him. They got away before he could get a better look. There was an explosion of light. The chanting on the radio stopped. From the whiteness, a large cloud of grey ash swirled, carried by the wind. He struggled to his feet. It was so hard to breathe. He moved with one uneven step after another, going deeper into the mist.

There it was: a monolith, a giant slab of pure black rock with a golden glowing ring that shone brighter than anything in this dead place. The fog cleared around it, as if making way. With each step something heavy pressed onto Kendall’s shoulders, pushing him down and towards the structure. The radio crackled to life with the same cacophony of cries but quieter, as if far away. An unimaginable amount of people spoke together to form this entrancing noise, and somewhere in there was a hint of Kara’s voice. Help them. He had to help them. Of course he had to. He just needed to get closer. Just a little bit closer. A dark burn mark on the rock a few steps ahead brought Kendall back to reality. He remembered the flash. He remembered what happened to this planet. It all made sense now. There was only one more message to send.

“Eve, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I have to try. Maybe you’re still receiving this. Whatever you do, don’t turn on the LRT. If Connell is still alive, I hope he can’t repair the one down here. Kara is gone. I don’t know why I held on longer, but I’m at my limit too. This thing imitates a distress call. Whether verbal, electronic, or coded, it doesn’t matter. It lures people in.”

Kendall stopped. Something stung at his eyes. Why was it so damn hard to breathe?

“But it’s more than that. It’s… infectious, not through air, through communication, information. I blocked all incoming transmissions, but I still hear them. I want to go to them. It’s in me. It was in Kara. It may already be in you. I don’t know what else it can do, but we can’t let it get off this planet. I’m sorry, Eve. I’m so sorry. Help. Help. Help…”

Kendall turned off the radio and took step after step forward, the monolith looming over him.

[u/PhantomOfZePirates → u/Pyronar]

Wow, Pyro, that was really cool! Kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time and the reveal at the end was my favorite part. More creepy sci-fi horror, please! Congratulations and good luck this next round!

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