Anomaly (27 page)

“Where are we?”

At first, Teller thought it was Cathy that had spoken, but these were his words. He felt as though he was trapped in a dream. He had no idea what was real and what wasn't.

Teller got to his knees and slowly stood up.

They were standing on the edge of the intersection. To one side stood the traffic lights that had once turned upside down. The sections of buildings that had been torn loose by the anomaly were back in place, the glass in the windows was intact.

He turned. Flags fluttered in the breeze in front of the United Nations building. There was no disconnect, no gaps or cracks. The intersection looked as it had a week before. There were no NASA trailers set to one side under the shade of the trees, no police line set up in the distance, no portable generators, no makeshift tents, no barricades.

“Where is everyone?” Cathy asked. “Was all this just a dream?”

Teller walked away from her, not for any reason other than to convince himself this was real, that he was standing in the middle of an abandoned New York intersection next to the United Nations.

A coke can lay in the gutter next to a fast food wrapper. Teller remembered marveling at how the crushed, empty can had defied gravity, staying inert as the concrete slab had rotated through the air over the course of a day. Back then, it had been hard to believe the coke can wasn’t stuck in place with glue. Without thinking too much about it, he kicked the can. There was something about connecting with reality, the feel of his shoe making contact with the can and the noisy flight of the can as it ricocheted off the gutter and skidded along the road. To his surprise, the can curled upwards in flight before peeling to one side and sliding back toward him.

“Hah,” he cried.

Cathy seemed to sense it too. She jogged over to join him as he walked over and picked up the can.

“Do that again,” Cathy said.

“Spoken like a true scientist,” he replied.

Teller walked toward the invisible boundary surrounding them, marking what had once been the circumference of the concrete slab within the anomaly. Although the view before him suggested there was nothing in his way, he understood this was an illusion, that they were on the inside of the anomaly looking out, but what they were seeing was a construct of the intersection as it had been on the day the anomaly arrived. He turned slightly, throwing the can at an angle so it skidded around the inside of the gigantic sphere that exposed the presence of the anomaly. The can rolled awkwardly along the invisible surface before falling back to the concrete some thirty feet away.

“Teller,” Cathy cried with alarm, and Teller's eyes widened, his mind racing at the thought he'd missed some critical point. “Look at your arm!”

She was right. He'd been wounded in one shoulder, had a bullet tear open the other bicep and had another bullet graze his thigh. Moments before, he'd struggled to walk and couldn't have picked up the coke can let alone thrown it, but there was no sign of his injuries.

Teller was speechless. He stood there as Cathy rubbed her hands gently over his shoulder. Blood still marred the torn material, staining his shirt. Her fingers played with the bullet hole, touching softly at his skin beneath.

“How does that work?”

“I ... I don't know.”

With those three words, Teller felt liberated. He'd tried so hard to understand. He'd tried so hard to resolve all he was seeing with the anomaly and make sense of the interaction, but he'd finally conceded that this interaction was alien to him, unfamiliar and full of unknowns. It felt good to let his mental guard down with Cathy. It was OK not to know. It was healthy to realize he didn't have all the answers.

“Do you think this is real?” she asked. “I mean, this is New York. If this was real, there would be cars driving around, people bustling by on the sidewalks. It's like we're on a movie set or something, waiting for the director to shout, Action.”

“Action!” Teller called out.

Cathy smiled, shaking her head.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he replied. “And I think you're right. This isn't real.”

“So, it's a dream then?” she asked.

“Not a dream, at least I don't think so. I mean, honestly, I have no idea, but my arms feel normal. Somehow, this thing, this anomaly has healed them. I think that's real. But what we're seeing ... I don't know. Maybe it's something familiar, something to put us at ease, to help us relax.”

“OK, Mr Alien Dude,” Cathy called out, looking up at the sky. “If you're listening, I have one word for you: Tahiti. If you want people to relax, put them on a beach in Tahiti.”

Teller laughed.

“I'm not sure it works quite like that,” he said.

“So how does it work?” Cathy asked.

“I don't know, but maybe you're right. Maybe we need to ask something intelligent of the anomaly.”

“Like what?”

“Like, show us where you came from?”

Teller wasn't sure if he blinked or not, but suddenly there were stars bursting through a pitch black night.

They were standing on the edge of a canyon, looking at a galaxy stretching across the sky. Instead of the few thousand stars visible from Earth there were millions of stars caught in a spiral, seemingly frozen in place as they swirled around a glowing, bulbous galactic core. They were orbiting the core incredibly slowly over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Jets of superheated gas streamed out of the poles of the warm, yellowish galactic core, curving overhead, reaching lengths several times the width of the galaxy.

“They're from a satellite galaxy,” Teller said, explaining what he was seeing to Cathy. “We have these too. Miniature galaxies like the Magellanic Cloud orbiting the Milky Way, although miniature is a relative term. They're miniature in terms of their size compared to the Milky Way and yet they still hold hundreds of thousands to millions of stars. Sometimes they're the remnants of ancient collisions between galaxies, caught in the oscillating process of passing back and forth through the main galaxy. Other times, they're in orbit around the galaxy in much the same way as a planet orbits a star. In this case, I'd say the creators of the anomaly originated from a host planet that orbits a star in an orbiting satellite galaxy.”

“It's beautiful,” Cathy said. “I don't know if you'd ever tire of seeing that in the night sky.”

She was holding his hand. Standing there beside her, Teller wasn't sure if she was holding his hand or if he was holding hers. He had no idea when they'd first touched or who had initiated such a personal act, but it was wonderfully human. In that moment, Teller saw the contrast between them, noting how they complemented each other. The galaxy was a beautiful sight, but he couldn't have said that, it took Cathy to say it before he could see the galaxy in that light. Teller squeezed her hand, affirming her sentiments.

“Yes, it is.” he replied, reveling in the simplicity of those few words.

Cathy sighed.

The landscape before them was barren. There was no grass, no trees, no signs of life as they knew it, but Teller was aware that on Earth even the most barren of dry, frozen desert landscapes harbored an abundance of microbial life despite appearances.

“We're not actually here, right?” Cathy asked, crouching down and watching as sand ran between her fingers.

“No. What we're seeing is hundreds of millions of light years from Earth. I think this is another projection, a kind of virtual reality that appeals to all of our senses, not just sight.”

Teller turned over a rock with his foot, half expecting some alien insect to scurry from beneath. In the soft light, the underside of the rock looked the same as the surface. From what little he could tell, there wasn't even any moisture clinging to the rock.

Various black silhouettes marked rocks and boulders scattered across the terrain. A broad, gentle rise stretched out to one side, reminding Teller of the eroded meteor craters on Mars.

The canyon before them looked impossibly deep, something akin to the Grand Canyon on Earth. Dark shadows hid the valley floor, but the meandering nature of the canyon walls left Teller wondering if this too was the result of water erosion over tens of millions of years.

As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, the heavens above seemed to brighten, leaving Teller in awe of the spiral galaxy above. It was no wonder the creators of the anomaly had been a star-faring species, having watched that sky for countless generations, they must have been as inspired as the ocean-going explorers on Earth were to explore new territories.

The stars were surprisingly crisp, and as there were no clouds in the sky, Teller got the impression this must have been a cold, dry and possibly high-altitude desert on their planet, ideal for astronomical observations and not unlike the Atacama desert in Chile. He wondered about the rest of the planet. There had to be lowlands and oceans. He wondered about the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the strength of gravity, and where macro-life abounded. Far from the planets of science fiction, where only one environment pervaded an entire planet, like the fictional ice planet Hoth or the desert planet Tatooine, he wondered about the diversity of ecologies found here. Were there jungles? River deltas teeming with life? Rolling plains? Dense forest canopies? Rugged mountain ranges? Ice-laden polar regions?

A soft glow emanated from behind them. Cathy noticed it first, turning away from the spectacular view before them. Teller followed her motion, reluctantly pulling himself away from the grandeur of this far flung galaxy shining down on such a mysterious world.

“It seems our host has arrived,” Cathy said.

Teller was well aware they were still within the spherical structure of the anomaly, and yet the concrete slab within the intersection had covered a huge area, giving them plenty of room to move around within their artificial view of this alien world.

A pinprick of light appeared about thirty feet above the uneven terrain, roughly where they'd first seen the lithium glowing within the anomaly in what seemed like another lifetime. Teller and Cathy walked over and stood beneath this tiny star.

“Nervous?” she asked.

“In a good way.”

They stood close to the brilliant light. Teller found he couldn't stare straight at the miniature star. It wasn't blinding like the sun, but it had the intensity of a stage spotlight, making it uncomfortable to look at. When the light vanished, it took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness and recognize that something was standing there facing them.

Cathy tightened her grip on his hand, whispering, “Nervous yet?”

“A little,” Teller replied, lying. His heart was thumping in his chest. At a rational level, he knew this creature meant no harm, that through some sophisticated feat of nanotechnology it had repaired the tissue damage from his gunshot wounds, but emotionally, this was a monster lurking in the dark. He was trying to come to grips with the grotesque alien before him, looking to distinguish limbs from trunk, or a head rising slightly above the torso, when the creature shrank and a familiar view appeared of a man.

“Is this easier to accept?” the man asked.

His facial features were almost plastic. Neatly combed black hair lay swept across his brow, with not a strand out of place. His eyes were soft, even in the low light it was apparent they lacked the glassy reflection of real eyes, while his clothes were either skin tight or some kind of body paint.

Standing there, Teller quickly realized that if these creatures had wanted, they could have replicated any living person in unquestionable detail. But that they hadn't, and that they had produced a facsimile that could have been a department store dummy modeling clothes was quite profound. They wanted him to be comfortable, but without being too condescending. There was just enough alien to retain the realization that he and Cathy were talking to someone from another world.

Teller wanted to say no to his question. Intellectually, he wanted to see these creatures for what they were, but the word that passed his lips was, “Yes.” And that was no surprise, really, he thought. The alien had even adopted his light skin tone, subtly putting rest to the irrational tribalism that haunted the races of man, where suspicions arose over nothing more than a dark pigment. Teller could sense the degree to which this star-faring species was adapting to make the two of them feel comfortable, and they did, but that made him feel somewhat ashamed. He disappointed himself, and yet he understood his reactions were natural, instinctive, human.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“It is interesting to us that you would ask,” the man replied, apparently speaking of himself in the plural. “The anomaly, as you call it, is alive, but it is closer to a machine in your thinking. As far as names go, our name would be meaningless to you, translating to nothing more than grunts and disjointed vowels and syllables, and even that would be a poor translation. We are a representation of a species that has long since ceased to exist. What you see here of us is a facsimile, commissioned to search for intelligent life and learn.”

“To what end?” Teller asked. “If your parent species is extinct, what is the point?”

“What about you? Is your parent species still present?” the plastic man asked. “Or have they too passed into obscurity? What is the point of your existence?”

It was a good point, Teller thought, and one often lost on Homo sapiens sapiens, who so often acted as though humanity stood independent of the animal kingdom, when humanity was an extension of life on Earth, a species that had thrived and adapted where others like Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis had fallen.

“So you’re their children,” Teller replied, finding himself naturally gravitating to the plural.

“We are all children of the stars,” the plastic man continued. “Your world is a surprising contradiction, a conflict of opposing ideals.”

“Yes, it is,” Cathy replied, surprising Teller with her boldness. As a reporter, she was probably more comfortable than him with being put on the spot, and Teller didn't mind that at all. By answering, she'd given him some time to think. By agreeing, she'd shown their willingness to concede to human frailty.