“Sorry.”
No one spoke for at least a minute. The sensor finally broke the reverent silence.
“Upper part of their living quarters, like an attic? Maybe that is why nobody’s here.”
“Maybe this is the nursery and these are the offspring. Or it’s the pantry and we’re looking at the canned goods,” Raul said. “We need the living room so we can say hello to whatever lives here.”
They walked along the inside of the Torus in the direction of its rotation. In the distance, where the floor curved upward and was blocked by the ceiling, they could see a faint green light. Moving closer, they noticed the green light came from a hole in the floor about two meters across. There was no ramp or stairs. Raul guessed it was some sort of an air vent. Aki allowed her air sampler to take another small sample of the atmosphere.
“What does a barn even smell like?” Raul asked sarcastically.
The Contact Team approached the edge of the hole. Aki crouched, peering over the side. What she saw below looked like a deranged jungle gym. Countless gray branches extended in all directions from the central node. The gray arms were porous on the surface, like coral, and as thick as Aki’s torso. Seemingly lacking a consistent design, functionality, or even shape, the branches veered in all directions through the chamber. The cells pressed together tightly like a cluster of bubbles.
Aki attached an anchor to the edge of the hole and then connected a tether cable. She lowered herself down to the closest branch. Despite her thick boots, she could feel the texture of the surface beneath her feet. The way the surface wobbled, Aki felt as though she were standing on the back of a whale. She was grateful that the hard-shell suits had been reengineered to be much more flexible. Once her footing was stable, Aki looked around the cavernous room.
The branches twisted in all directions, forming irregularly shaped frames. This created an odd optical effect that made Aki feel like she was standing inside tessellations, uneven planes that lacked variety, homogenous everywhere she looked. She was unable to see more than about twenty meters in any direction. The pale green light emanated from the walls of the chamber. Given the very weak gravity, Aki was spatially disoriented and felt dizzy.
Something stirred in her peripheral vision. Then she saw nothing.
She replayed the last few seconds from the helmet camera’s recording. The motion appeared to have occurred outside of the camera’s field of view.
“Everything all right?” Joseph asked.
“Sorry for the silence. Everything is fine. You can come down.”
Raul made his way toward her.
“Do you know what this looks like?”
“Something out of yet another cheesy twentieth-century space horror movie?” Aki asked.
“Actually, it was a rather respectable film involving Isaac Asimov. To me, this all looks like a living neural network. If I didn’t know any better I’d say the reason we’re not seeing any Builders is because this is a Builder. Well, its brain, at least.”
“If this were the density of its neural network, it would not be the fastest thinker around,” Aki said.
“Maybe it’s not in a rush. It has time to siesta,” Raul said.
Aki adhered another reel of fiber-optic cable to the branch beneath her feet. She connected the end to the long run of cable that they had been adding to since entering the ship.
“Where do we go?” she asked.
“Keep going...uh, downward,” Raul answered. “What do you even call directions on something like this? Spinward?” He pointed in a direction.
“Good as any. Let’s do it,” she said.
They made their way along the network of branches that twisted through the chamber.
“The interface design of these sensors is horrible! Does it read Edgar Allan Poe too?” Raul exclaimed. He sighed and glanced around. “I don’t know what’s worse—being human and knowing we’re crawling around inside an alien’s brain, or being an alien knowing that three humans are stomping inside your head,” Raul said, stepping past her and lowering himself down further.
Aki was concerned that Raul’s defense mechanisms might dull his reactions. She was concerned that he was crossing the line between staying calm and becoming complacent.
“Stop. Wait,” he said.
“What do you see?” Joseph asked, noticing the fear in Raul’s voice.
“It’s not the brain, unless this cobra is slithering along its axons…”
EVEN THOUGH THE
image from Raul’s helmet camera was traveling at the speed of light, it took several minutes to reach Earth. When it arrived, millions of viewers who were watching his feed shrieked.
Moving as quickly as she could to Raul’s location, Aki thought this was it: what she had been waiting for her entire adult life. She had trouble breathing.
Lifting one end up from the ground, the creature looked to be four meters long. A bulbous appendage at the tip appeared to be its head. The face was covered with a shiny pink material that looked like exposed muscle tissue. Its appendage was crowned by a ring of white fur that extended away from the face to cover the upper side of the rest of its body. The fur was wet and matted down with a transparent and viscous paste.
Two enormous eyes, resembling those of a Philippine tarsier, bulged, unable to turn in their sockets. Every ten seconds or so, its eyelids would close and slowly open again. No other openings in its face were visible. It had no neck. Its furry mane surrounded its face and extended back, connecting directly at what would be the equivalent of shoulders. It looked like a headdress depicted on a sarcophagus. The upper portion of the body below the face was flat and wide, similar to a cobra, as Raul had described it.
It had two thin arms the length of human legs, each containing two sets of joints resembling elbows and wrists. At the ends of each arm were four long, lithe fingers, one of which appeared opposable, like a thumb. Its arms and elbows were folded inward with its hands joined at its chest.
The upper part of its torso had several bones pushing from under its coat. The bulges could have been shoulder blades and collar bones, to the extent that either descriptive term made much sense when applied to such alien anatomy. Aki wished for a moment that she had studied up on zoology, veterinary medicine, anything that might help her make sense of it. In the center of the Builder’s chest was a vertical opening that most likely served as a mouth. To the left and right of the orifice were smaller vertical slits, two on each side, like gills on a fish. The area below its chest resembled hardened scales, which continued down to the stomach. Everything below was pressed against the ground, becoming thinner as it extended back, giving the creature a serpentine appearance. The upper side was covered with the moist white fur that extended down from its head. It was about three times as wide as it was high, like a large, furred tongue. The creature wore no clothing or accoutrements.
Slithering from one branch to the next, it gradually approached Raul. Joseph lowered himself down and stepped into its path. Joseph had not carried weapons, for fear of sending the wrong impression to the Builders, but the Marine was skilled in close quarter combat and other martial arts.
“Try not to make moves that appear hostile,” Aki said.
“The fact that we’ve broken in may have already painted us as unfriendly.” Raul stood still.
The alien life-form continued closer. In the last few meters it veered right onto a separate branch, sidewinding its way alongside the three of them, most likely considering them intruders. Then, as if they were not even there, the creature continued along its way and left.
The Contact Team followed. Another being emerged from below. Its fur had a yellower tinge, but otherwise appeared identical to the first. Aki turned on her external speaker, the volume low.
“Hello,” she said in as friendly a tone as she could muster. She extended her arms wide. The swollen eyes of the creature lolled in Aki’s direction. It looked right through her. Then, just as the first had done, the long snake ignored their presence and left.
“Our first intergalactic encounter and we get blown off like panhandlers on a street corner. You think these dudes built this flying doughnut?” Raul asked with as much levity as he could muster. Aki saw sweat dripping down his face.
“Its developed head and opposable thumbs indicate tool-making, intelligence,” Aki said. “And we have seen two now. They are social animals. To one another anyway.”
“Yeah, but what’s up with the cold shoulder? Now I’m convinced that these guys must be related to Natalia.”
“They have been ignoring us for decades. I do not find it surprising. Consistent, methodical behavior is a trait of advanced intelligence.” Aki asked the
Phalanx
for a status report on the alien vessel. There had been no changes to the ship’s movement.
“The exobiologists should rethink the implied meaning of extraterrestrial intelligence,” Raul said, calmer now.
“If our distant ancestors had not made the evolutionary jump from living in trees in the lush jungle to roaming the dry savannah, we may never have started standing upright, much less conceived of novel tools or forming complex cultures. If this is their living room, I’m wondering how they missed that transition,” Joseph said.
“Their home world does not have a savannah.” Aki moved more quickly, trying to catch up with the large furry snakes.
“If they were as intelligent as people, they would know enough to wear clothes,” Raul said.
“Curiosity goes hand in hand with intelligence,” Joseph said, keeping pace with Aki. “It looks like their apathy is a fact we’re going to have to accept. I had originally thought that if they had no interest, it was because they were completely different from us. Those creatures may have looked odd, maybe even grotesque, but they aren’t all that different.”
Aki agreed. They were obviously organic beings. There was no part of their physiology that could not be likened to some part of an organism from Earth. It was also clear from the atmosphere in their ship that their metabolic system was also similar.
“Are we going to assume those fuzzy worms are the Builders?” Raul asked.
“We should for now,” Aki answered, trying not to look at the clock ticking down on the screen inside her helmet.
ACT III: JULY 31, 2041
8 PM GMT
AKI, RAUL, AND
Joseph continued lowering themselves through the jungle of branches until it ended abruptly against the curved interior surface of the Torus. On the inside of the Torus’s outer wall, small sandy beaches were surrounded by dark pools, small dunes with pools of black liquid undulating beneath them. The jungle was ten meters overhead, hanging inverted arches forming a hollow tunnel that curved along the circumference of the Torus in both directions.
“This looks like the bottom,” Aki said, peering down at the beach. “Do you think they will attack us here now that we are out in the open?”
“The giant slugs? Hardly, but it would look cool on video,” Raul said, though the question had been directed at Joseph.
Aki found a branch that dipped close to the surface and climbed toward the beach. She was turned around enough that she had no idea if she was going ecliptic north, ecliptic south, or some other direction. The sandy substance coating the interior of the Torus hull was lightly packed, like diatomaceous earth. Dust like silica scraped away with her steps, soft enough that she left footprints where she walked. The ponds were anywhere from about two to ten meters wide and no more than a meter deep.
Lying in groups of two and three along the shorelines of the two ponds closest to them were about two dozen Builders, each partially submerged in the dark liquid. The Builders were stretched out on their stomachs, resting their upper bodies on their forearms as if they were sphinxes. They made no noises, no movements. The highly sensitive microphones in the team’s helmets were able to pick up intermittent noises that sounded like rasping, labored breaths. Aki could not tell if those faint noises were being made by the Builders.
“The pool deck on a luxury liner. Bet they used a photo of this beach on the brochure when they recruited for the six hundred–year cruise,” Raul said.
Aki looked closely at the builders, trying to discern differences between individuals that might suggest sexual dimorphism or age-related physical development. She could distinguish nothing beyond slight variations in size. The shortest ones were about three meters long. She wondered if they were the youngest, even though she had a hard time imagining the youth of any species being so lethargic. One of the Builders stirred from what Aki thought was sleep, turning around to fully submerse itself into the oily pond. It reappeared on the opposite side, crawled from the liquid—then, stretching toward the branches, slowly pulled itself into the canopy before disappearing into the jungle.
Aki, Raul, and Joseph began walking along the direction of rotation.
“Should we walk the full length and see what we find?” Aki asked. “I wonder if this beach stretches the entire circumference of the Torus.”