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The men walked through the deep dark, and when they got to the ship its lights were off, but the gantry was open.
They took a moment outside the ship to check themselves over—and make sure the rifles they’d brought that’d work underwater were loaded.
Then they walked up the stairs and—I tapped the tablet screen so it would pause. “Do you see that?” I asked Ceph.
“What?”
“The writing around the door is different.” I gestured around the screen with my fingertips, then hopped back to my camera’s view from earlier in the day, spreading my fingers on the screen to zoom in. “They got different circles than you did. There’s one here, with four others surrounding it, one big one and three small ones—whose life is that?”
Ceph made a thoughtful sound. “We already know it can control its presentation.”
I grunted, and started playing the show again.
What followed was somewhat incomprehensible, because right after they got inside—and the spaceship stayed dark for them—they started acting weird. One of them started jerking, like something was wrong with his nervous system, while another tried to pull his umbilical cable apart with his hands. The man who owned our camera was buffeted to the side as another...punched him? And then two of them began to wrestle.
“What are we watching, Elle?” Cepharius asked me, with rising concern.
“I have no idea,” I said, as the screen went black.
We watched two more, which only enacted the scenario we’d seen from different points of view, but the outcome was always the same.
Four men went in, and none of them came out again.
And, oddly, none of them used their weapons.
“We are not going back in there, Elle,” Ceph said.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I hear you. And—I’m scared too. But think about it this way: we’re already ahead. Whatever lives inside there decided not to kill us.”
“And what did they do wrong, hmm?” he thought, imperiously.
“I’m not sure. If they’d been here for months, like Donna said—maybe it had to let them in, to stop them? Or it was an instinctual thing?” I stood up and started pacing in my room. “Maybe it was acting like, I don’t know, a white blood cell?”
I sensed his utter confusion, tried to share a few biology texts with him, and then felt him give up.
“What are we in this example?” he asked.
“Bacteria—but the good kind that you want around. Like they sell for your stomach on commercials.” I knelt in front of the window again, looking out at blackness. “They didn’t get the same invitation we did, Ceph. They didn’t get any lights.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better about continuing.”
“I know,” I said, because I could feel his qualms in my mind. I sat back on my heels. “But as nervous as I am about all this Ceph—and I am, really—I just want to believe that all of this is happening for a reason.”
I thought it at him, and then I groaned. If I could’ve gone back thirty seconds in time to punch myself out I would have.
“I take that back. I never want to think that. I want everything to be chaos all the time, because if shit happens for a reason I’m gonna need to throw down with someone about it, you know?”
I felt a blanket of Ceph’s calmness wrapping over my mind. “No, I do not know. But—I am with you Elle of the Air, regardless.”
“Thanks.” I leaned forward and let my forehead thunk against the glass.
I wasn’t an idiot, and I didn’t believe in deterministic behavior at large scales, least of all from an alien species.
No, my real problem was that I didn’t want to stop running forward—because the second I did, I knew my past would catch up with me.
“Come on, let’s watch the last one,” I said, reaching back into the bag, but it was at the bottom, and the lovely piece of coral I had been given had A) probably been killed by bringing it into my atmosphere, way to go Elle and B) been broken up in transport, when it’d gotten roughed up by me dropping the bag and making it rattle around with the data sleeves.
I pulled it out—but it wasn’t coral.
