by Prabhavathy, I B.A., English
23rd September 3088
On her last day on Earth, Dr Charlotte Carter didn’t want to catch the subway home. It would be stifling in there with early evening commuters and she had had enough of people for a lifetime. Instead she left the SPECTER Space Station, rounded the block and ended up at the isolated old Autowalk. The Autowalk that snaked across the city had been built way back in 3028 for transportation of goods and people, but after almost 70 years of more efficient commute inventions, its purpose had been limited to shuttling everyday produce and essentials across the metropolis. She stepped onto the Autowalk and sat down on one of the large metal crates that was being held on to the Walk by magnets.
They were crossing the bridge over the channelized Savaport tributary and she was looking down through the suspension cables when she noticed it. Graffiti .Water was gushing under the bridge but her ears could only hear the words screaming off the canal walls:
THE WORLD ENDS IN 3108
Big red letters. A woman pulling at her lower eyelids. Rolled up eyes and hair on fire. Her breath caught as she noticed more graffiti. All over the canal walls. Her hands flew to her phone and within seconds she was online with her secretary back at SPECTRE. “Send a wiper team to Savaport. Graffiti. All the way down. Get Andrew on it. Now,” she said, her face numb. The world, to Dr. Carter, had ended a long time ago. About 14 years ago to be exact, when the hushed whispers of government leaders became common knowledge. The sun was dying. Faster than they had predicted. The sun would swell and engulf the earth in exactly 34 years, they said. The effect was terrible to say the least. The dying world’s last fight for survival was birthed then: Mission Life.
Mission Life65: Twelfth assessment of sustenance and detection of life in ZGI650, ICARUS. Result: positive
Mission Life88: 24th September 3088. 04:00 GST. Headed by Dr. Charlotte Carter, attempts to achieve direct contact with life on planets orbiting ICARUS, eliminate the primitive existing species and secure planet ZGI650 for people of earth. Upon success, Mission Trail88 beings at 16:00 GST.
Mission Trail88: 24th September 3088, 16:00 GST. Transportation of earth beings to ZGI650
An early night followed soon after she got home. She had quietly eaten her dinner on the terrace and had watered the plants on the windowsill of her one bedroom microflat. She now stood gripping the railing on the balcony, looking at the stars without motive. As she climbed into bed that night, realisation struck her. She would never look at them from Earth again. She threw off her covers and went to take a second glance. Reginald Carter’s picture, the one in which he had his arms around her waist, went without even one.
____
24th September 3088
The fall-through was the easy part. Portals had been conceived in 3001 and were since developed to ensure least discomfort; all you had to do was fall into them. However, it was the destination that was the problem. Located 35 light years away, the ICARUS system was a little farther away than the usual commute and they didn’t have the time to make a journey that long by space shuttles. The world’s most brilliant scientists worked at SPECTER but still hadn’t come up with a way to travel faster than light, butthey had managed to do something very clever -- create artificial controllable stimulations of black holes: space portals.
A black hole that could transport a person 35 light years across space required tremendous energy. The government had sanctioned off the very last traces of radioactive resource for these missions. Charlotte Carter knew very well that the state had charted separate missions for her and the rest of the world. She would go first with their mechanized army and secure the land. The portal would close up after her immediately to prevent backflow of any extraterrestrial life. Only upon completion of her mission would Mission Trail88 commence, letting the people of earth onto to their new home: ZGI650. This meant she would still be there when the second portal tore through space; an incomparable force that would disintegrate her and, ironically, would give hope to millions. She knew she was going to die that day, when she stepped into the heavily guarded portalling cubicle at SPECTRE. She inhaled, smiling queerly before falling into it.
----
For a few minutes it was just her body stretched and suspended in darkness. This kind of darkness wasn’t just black -- it didn’t have a colour. Her body struggled to sense if her eyes were open and she twisted it reaching for land. Her suit clamped down on a hard surface just then and a crackling voice came through her radio...
“Carter, we are detecting life forms 200 metres away! Watch your four o’clock. Armament coming through in: Three… Two… One.” A pause. “Ready to fire, Ma’am.”
Her eyes snapped open for real this time. The land is a barren blue; just her, the killer drones and the planet’s peculiar azure gray sand. Suddenly, her radar starts beeping away crazily.
“Hey! Woah. Woah!” comes a cry. Carter almost shoots down the half-naked old man who’s running towards her with his hands raised and palms out. He wasn’t there a second ago. Her body freezes at seeing a human. This wasn’t foreseen. The mission specified the elimination of the predicted primitive creatures, not someone whom she suspected was her street drunkard’s aging doppelganger. The people down at the SPECTRE were probably just as taken aback. She could hear Andrew muttering in disbelief through her earpiece. The land is barren except for the black blue sand that surrounds them. “Who are you?” she demands aiming her EM-Gun at him.
“My name?! You’re the one trespassing. Let’s hear yours first” he said, defiantly crossing his arms.
The radio buzzed at the same time. “Buy us some time Carter. The President will have to make a call about this situation”
She hesitated for a second. “Charlotte Carter.”
The old man just stared at her as if he was still waiting for an answer. Suddenly his tense face loosened up and he took a tentative step towards her. “... Lottiepie? Is that you?”
It had been years -- no, decades -- since the last time someone had called Charlotte by that nickname. “Who are you?!” she yelled, pointing her engaged gun at him.
“I am the fourth son of ICARUS. Forged in fire and sea, azure Lord of Vision, I am Xenus,” he thundered. “Unfortunately ZGI650 to you, I guess,” he added dejectedly.
“How do you know me?” Carter went on, unfazed. Xenus lifted a hand and cobalt quicksand rose along with it, accumulating together a few metres away. When the shapeless blob crystallized it was the clearest lens she had ever seen. She unconsciously took a step towards it and was rewarded with the most shocking of sights. Earth, 35 light years away, glimmered upon the lens’ surface in high detail. That wasn’t the shocking part -- the sun that hung heavily in the background was of a normal size; it hadn’t started to die. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t the present.
“What is this? Some kind of trick? This isn’t present-day earth. You cannot fool me”
The lens liquefied to a blob and reformed again. This time zooming through space and time to focus on a silent late-afternoon scene. A little girl was drawing with crayons, sitting on a rundown porch. It triggered an odd reaction in the back of Carter’s mind.
“The last time I saw you dear, you were 10 years old. Look at how you’ve grown” he said, half to himself.
Suddenly it hit her. The light from Earth took 35 years to reach Xenus. ZGI650. Whatever. Right now, from this planet, she was seeing the light Earth had emitted 35 years ago. She was looking at her past. This girl; it was her.
“I am called the lord of visions for a reason, Lottie. I have watched Earth for long,” He said softly. The lens fell to the ground just as Carter’s guard went up.
“Well, not for long anymore. The sun is dying. The world ends in 3108. That’s in 20 years,” She laid the blow harshly.
He was silent for a while. The planet’s minimal gravity seemed to collapse and then return. When he finally reacted he pointed afar into his right at a huge planet. “You see old Martha there? She’s going to die within this millennium too. Fears she hasn’t done anything fruitful throughout her life. Never gave rise to life. No mineral stash. Not much gravity. Nope. Just a ball of ash, ol’ Martha,” He rambles, looking a little off-guard and out of breath himself.
Carter tries to make a quick call on which one of them is going insane. “Who -- what is Martha?” She prompts.
“Marthelia. Daughter of Narca. The strongest of us all, despite what she believes. Meteors, galactic explosions, she’s been through it all,” He said vividly pointing. “Ah, right. Planet GD45, MIDAS to you. You see, planets have life too. I’m just an embodiment of that life; humanized by your brain for logical perception.”
Charlotte Carter sat down. Spacesuit and all. Xenus hopped a little and sat down a little farther away than he had intended after glancing at her beeping gun. They stayed like that for a while.
“You know this -- Martha? You guys a thing?” Carter finally asked, not believing the words coming out of her mouth.
“WHAT?! No. Martha? No.”
Somewhere behind him, a sand dune exploded. She chose not to comment.
“She’s been through a lot. When you’re around for that long you watch friends shatter and become a mass of lifeless rocks floating around space. I don’t want to add to that pain.”
“She’s a few eons older than me,” He added sheepishly.
“Wait, what do you mean ‘add to her pain’? I thought she was the one who was going to die soon,” Asked Carter suddenly, trying to keep up with the cosmic drama
“Oh yes, darling. But I’m popping off sooner. Maybe a few centuries if I’m lucky.”
“What?! But that’s not possible. The people of earth are being transported here of all places because you have the highest survival chances!”
Xenus frowned and faced the direction of the system’s star ICARUS which suddenly looked huge and unsettling. He pulled a lens out of the soil and a purplish planet showed up on it. It was the nearest one to the centre-star out of all the planets that orbited it.
“That was Markus. First born son of ICARUS. My eldest brother,” he said, his tone neutral.
Even as she was about to question -- “Was?”, the planet in the vision lens began to smoke and burn. The centre-star -- ICARUS, she realised -- flared, grew in size and engulfed the hissing planet. She could see Xenus himself, four planets away, watching his brother become fire and ash. The lens fell. There was silence.
“That was two centuries ago. So yes, it is possible and inevitable,” He said slowly.
A dark veil of thoughts descended upon her. SPECTRE had worked on this mission for almost 30 years. How had they missed this basic decision-swaying fact?
“Xenus. You can see into the past right?”she asked.
“Well, not exactly. I just focus the lens on a distant place in space which is receiving light now,” He said, shrugging.
Carter stood up. She shot the ground-control linking unit with her gun before speaking.
“3010. December 1st. 6 p.m.. Spectre space station, ground vault. I need to see what happened,” She said, her voice cracking.
Xenus stood and raised his hands in front of him, pulling a lens out of the ground. He closed his eyes as he perfected the focus, and a dull looking room took form. He swiped his hand and the picture rapidly flew through time.
“Stop,” Carter said suddenly.
Two figures had entered the room. The computers came alive with pictures of the solar system. The sun looked normal. Technicians were clicking away at their boards and then, abruptly, the pictures morphed. The sun grew, Mercury fell into the fire and then Venus. Sharply dressed figures came into the picture. Carter recognised the four immediately. Anyone could have recognised them. The four founders of SPECTRE; they had been the harbingers of doom in 3010, but right then they looked pleased. Of course they would -- they were planning a heist that would rock the foundations of the world.
“Projection net successfully opened. The projection is up,” Said a sober-looking scientist. An image cast itself between Earth and Venus and turned incandescent. An engorged sun. Carter fell to her knees.
Why. Why all this trouble? In a moment of extreme cliché, the bad guys proceeded to explain everything evil and horrid that they had done.
“The sun will continue to grow. The government will be advised to undertake space missions to discover life sustaining planets soon enough. Our first planet will be ZGI650 somewhere in the 3080s. But we have intel that that planet will die within a few centuries upon arrival and so we will be forced to move again; thus bringing yet another planet into human governance. Continuing in this way, people will start to support our cause. Nobody has ever fussed over getting more resources, more freedom and more power. Planetary land acquisition is the next greatest revolution,” Ronin Lee, co-founder, announced to the small gathering of suited people.
Just as Carter started gasping for breath, her radar noticed high EM activity. She was turning around to study it when abruptly everything went dark. Somewhere far away she heard a voice screaming her name. Something was wrong.
She tumbled out of a swirling vortex, her eyes snapping open. Familiar faces filled the mission room at SPECTRE. People were helping her take off her suit. She limped a little over to her gun, engaged it and pointed it across the room. “Call the president. NOW!” She grunted, wiping her bleeding nose.
The government had shut down SPECTRE a week ago. The word was out. The effect was terrible to say the least, but at least it was the truth. Machines were beeping away around Charlotte. It had finally happened. She had been put in a hospital. She chuckled. “To the grave now,” She muttered looking at the tubes clinging on to her veins.
Apparently she had never made it to planet ZGI650. The portal had simply reverted. Which meant that everything she had seen was a product of deep sleep hallucinations induced by improper portal travel. Carter refused to believe that.
“Ma’am you have visitors.” The pretty nurse interrupted her thoughts by opening the door to let them in.
Colleagues (the innocent ones), neighbours, policemen and government heads; it was a diverse bunch. After a long hour of handshakes and receiving congratulations she was about to return to her bed when she noticed a young man lagging behind. He was talking with the nurse, gesturing wildly. The nurse looked very amused as she set Carter’s medicines on the nightstand and left with a nod, closing the door behind her.
Carter glanced at the man questioningly and jumped. “Xenus?!”
“Heyyy! You know my name!” He slurred a little.
Carter stared, speechless.
“You don’t recognise me, ma’am? I live on your street.”
She stared a little longer before scrambling out of her room and racing through the corridors. The shocked man called after her. For a while it was just her sprinting across the infirmary in her hospital gown. She didn’t stop until she found the nurse.
“Ma’am! What are you doing here?”
“What’s your name. What’s your name?!” Carter gasped.
“Martha. Jesus. It’s Martha Brown.”
Carter’s cackles carried through the late afternoon air.