Blackness of Space

The space station was pitch black. Power was out. Backup power was out. What remained was just a residual crackle of electricity that barely lit up a few LEDs on the various panels on the walls. Still if you knew the place as well as this crew did, it was enough to navigate by.

They floated down the quiet corridors listening to the metal ping and pop as the sun heated the outside of the giant tin can they were in. Something had happened to the various wires in the main electrical sections, forcing the station into automatic lock-down. That closed all the windows shades with reinforced slats that protected against micrometeorites. While that seemed to be the safest option in the event of a power outage, it wasn’t the most practical.

Finding the nearest spacesuits they methodically put them on in the disorienting darkness. As another power saving measure, the built in lights on the suits wouldn’t turn on till someone was in them. As the first person finished clicking the last piece in place the room was suddenly flooded with highest intensity light. The automatic calibration of the light was directly proportional to the lack of other illumination in the room. While that might be appropriate mid-mission, it was painfully bright in the small reflective alcove that they were currently in.

After a bit of fumbling around with manual overrides the headlamp was set to soft glow and the ambient omnidirectional suit panels were set to chemically fluoresce. It was decided then and there that everyone would get into their suits, to set the brightness to lowest and then uncouple the last internal connection so the whole power-pack would still be in standby mode.

That would leave them the most total work time as one suits brightness was sufficient for the whole team since they would be sticking together. They could use the magnets in the boots to walk to their destination, but it would be faster to keep floating. Now there was enough light to do more than just navigate, they could launch themselves faster down each corridor.

That was almost a mistake. Half way down the third straightaway a clear gooey substance floated menacingly in the dancing lights of the lead crew-member. A quick reaction stopped them from crashing through it and they all stopped to get a better look at the situation.

Suits came off standby and the area was flooded with light. A hundred clear spheres of gel made the flashlights paint skittering patterns on the walls. The goo reacted to the new stimuli as black specks in the stuff all moved around to the sides that were facing the humans. Sinister lines grew from the pea sized spots that the black flecks had coalesced into. As the web of lines joined a force pulled the various blobs together into a single basketball sized shape.

In the center the clearness suddenly shifted to an opaque pink that twitched as though it was reacting to a hundred tiny shocks.

It hovered in the light, seemingly moving it’s focus from one crew-member to the next. Then without warning it launched itself down the hallway away from them.

“Should we go after it?” asked one of the crew “And if we catch it, then what?” asked another.

“I don’t know, maybe it...” started the first “Enough” said the ranking officer “We still have a disabled station, that’s first priority.” Some slow nodding and they all began to launch down the corridor again, though this time more carefully.

The crew normally got along better, but the situation had people on edge. They were supposed to buckle down and follow protocol during emergencies but the thought of alien life had pushed them a bit too far.

“I wonder if that thing was what got the electrical system” said one of the crew as they drifted toward the last corner. “We’ll see soon enough” said the officer, trying to keep everyone on task.

The power panel was a mess. More of the clear goo, but this time it looked burnt, and for lack of a better word – dead.

Again the lower ranked crew debated among themselves. “I bet it did it on purpose” “No, this looks like it was just dumb and hungry” “Facts only” said the officer, getting a bit annoyed at the disruptions to the work.

The goo was causing a few of the circuits to short out, so getting the system dry should fix things quickly. “Any suggestions” asked the officer, already thinking ahead to the next step. “Blast it out with air?” said the first crew “Almost.” “A pressure differential?” said the next. “Exactly. Seal the box, get a vacuum pump on one end and force at least 3 atmospheres of pressure at the other end. We want it clean, but not enough to suck the connections out.”

It was a medium sized job, but pretty straightforward. “What’s preventing it from coming back?” “One thing at a time” said the officer.

As the goo was blasted away the mood improved. “Get that stuff to the lab” said the officer “and run some electricity through it.”. The panel was opened up again and the breakers reset. The main computer came back to life and lights came on throughout the station. Reinforced slats clunked and whirred back out of the way and things started to seem normal.

It was hard to tell where the creature had disappeared to, apart from a few panels with a bit of slime, there wasn’t any trace left on the station.

The lab work had come up mostly empty. The samples had degraded fairly quickly, before any but the most elementary of experiments could be finished.

For the moment, all they could do was log the videos from the suits and pass on the report to command.

---

Bolon had left the space station a few cycles ago. The strange images and impressions from the bipeds still fresh in the pink brain fluid that it had coalesced in it’s normally clear body. It was difficult to project into 3d space with only one dimension of time. It thought about examining the power system of the humans and it was there. Pain. It thought about the lights. Pulling together and drinking in the electromagnetic waves. It felt some nearly dead parts of itself being examined. It pulled them apart.

The thought remained though. These lifeforms were intelligent. It knew that the environment they were in was artificial and outside the spacetime dent of their rock sphere. The noise of that dent was immeasurable. So many minds all together in one place, yet barely communicating with each other. So many of Bolon’s kind had dismissed it all as just background static. An aberration borne of stretched out dimensions in such a confined loop thread.

There was no long term cohesion to the patterns. Some echos as some waves were rebroadcast over the spacetime dent, but never in an organized way. Bolon thought about the mixture of gasses that filled the small habitat and it moved it’s focus away from the humans. A strange sensation as it focused after the pain. Gasses moving and taking with it the dying parts that were caught in the humans electromagnetic metal plate. Surely that was the way to communicate with these beings.

Bolon drank in the impression of the EM waves again. It grew black specks to convert the impression into other patterns. Shapes. Bipeds. The thought echoed across the time-loop it had crouched into. Bolon twisted the impression again. Time flowing through knots and reflecting the light through a hundred tiny spheres of gel. Surely this was how they communicated.

Trying again and again to leave the bipeds with a different visual pattern seemed to put them on edge. That much Bolon could sense. It left a single overriding shape as it’s final impression of the cycle. The alien exerted itself to reflect the electromagnet waves into a different colour.

Insight. So that is how their minds worked. The spacetime knots shuddered and reformed. Bolon left an echo of itself in form around the space station. The humans seemed more interested in their pain-vacuum bridge. He left the space-time shunt open as long as possible, but it only seemed to put the humans more on edge.

Bolon triangulated the interference with the bits of itself that were still in the other parts of the station. He saw them trying to analyze bits that were left in the aftermath of the electrical experiment. He drew back the life from those segments and tried to focus on the panel. Pain. But perhaps that was how to communicate. The humans seemed drawn to the panel.

Cause and effect seemed to slide around Bolon’s mind. It realized it was interfering with itself. The panel drew the humans to the light sensing self, but away from it as well. The space-time knots were forming and Bolon did not like them. Pain, Confusion. Dancing lights that set people on edge.

He couldn’t see why the humans didn’t shunt themselves into the awareness of them following Bolon after the dancing lights. It would collapse the other timeline and Bolon could reform it around that point. He focused on the crew with the light sensing organ to try and let them know the projection of the other time-choice was a stable paradox.

Bolon focused on the hive mind of the others like him. “You are breaking them” “They do not split awareness” “Look. A repeat wave”

Bolon focused on the space outside the habitat of the isolated humans. An EM wave impression of the dancing lights encounter. How did Bolon know this? The pain. How their non-selfs work. The panel was the answer. Bolon sacrificed a bit of his self manifesting to learn the language of the panel. Jolts. EM as communication. Pink. Brain.

The knot folded back on itself and it was stable. Bolon had figured out the repeating wave language of the bipeds. Now to see what the new paths would bring.