(Writer’s notebook)
| Book I English | Libro I Español | Libro II Español |
This text is extracted from my personal notes. It corresponds to a draft and, therefore, it is not a fully finished or edited book.
I wanted to publish it in this shortened format so that the readers of the first book in the series can, after four years, know how the story of THE OBJECT ends.
As a draft, it is not perfect but it is complete for, although it does not include much dialogue and the plot is merely outlined, it resolves the main mysteries and rounds out the narrative. Therefore, I have no plans to edit this second “book” beyond its current state.
However, I hope you like this fresh and quick-reading format.
Florida, November 2023.
Early morning, a derelict urban park next to a lake, covered in fog. Broken, dirty toys, crushed soda cans, and other trash items are strewn about tall trees, balding lawn patches and wildly grown bushes.
A pair of disheveled, long-haired, and bearded men rummage through the scattered trash heaps, quickly picking at them with their long sticks, as if in a rush or scared to hang around for long. After a few minutes of plaintive dialog, they stop and focus in the distance.
Blurred by the thick mist, they see what appears to be a man and a woman slowly walking towards them. Instinctively, the scouts raised their sticks in a defensive posture.
March 4, 2026. Day 1
Three teenagers ride on the bike path along the manicured streets of Nocatee in North-East Florida. The morning is clear and pleasant. Not a cloud in the sky — something that is less frequent in Florida than many people believe.
But not everything is sunny in that portion of the “Sunshine State.” Our bike riders spot a commotion a couple of blocks to their right and steer toward it: thick smoke billows in the sky and a large fire is visible at the point of origin. Police sirens merge with the fire engine lights, surrounded by a thin crowd of onlookers.
The firefighters are trying to control the situation while police ensure that nobody crosses their control lines.
The lone girl in our triad of bicycle riders approaches a policewoman to ask what that’s all about, but is dismissed with a “move along, kid, there’s nothing to see.”
Suddenly, People start screaming as they scatter in panic. An ominous turbine-like, rattling sound can be heard coming from the fire and a few minutes later the girl sees something she’ll never forget.
A kind of metallic tornado deliberately engulfs whole groups of people at terrifying speed, forming red clouds as its victims are shredded into vapor. The cops shoot at the thing without effect.
Very soon it reaches the teenagers who had been frozen in horror. They turn their bikes around to try to flee and hear how everyone in the scene gets slaughtered as they furiously ride back to their homes.
Day 9
Sonia Rogers, head of Project Attica, sits in her office looking intently at her huge computer monitor which is divided into twelve small windows, each containing the face of a member of Leadership (the supra-governmental organization behind Earth’s response to the Visitor Ship), conferencing from around the globe: U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Norway, Hungary, Russia, and China.
She’s updating Leadership on the status of Earth’s fight against the Swarm’s invasion. The attacker had landed along with the remains of the Theseus in Northeast Florida and shortly after started wreaking havoc, making copies of itself and extending its reach from town to town. Thankfully, it was advancing more slowly than initially feared, but already swarms had been spotted on multiple locations across the U.S. and casualties are piling up. So far, around 20,500 people have died and another 41,000 are injured.
Countermeasures are improving. Beyond the already tried-and-true implosion grenades and thermite flame-throwers, there’s been some success with ceramic micro-woven nets that capture each swarm for up to fifteen minutes before being breached. Tests are being conducted on a new form of sonic blast weapon that seems promising.
Sonia assures all of them that further plans are quickly being put in place to end the nightmare once and for all.
Day 64
Commander Jim Ackerman’s home in Virginia Beach, U.S. Maggie Ackerman — Jim Ackerman’s 4-year-old girl — plays on the ground of their backyard, a gentle wind rocking the swing behind her.
Her dad and aunt Tess come out of the house through the sliding glass door. The dad — wearing his military fatigues — approaches her with hesitation. Her aunt remains a few steps behind.
Kneeling, Commander Ackerman explains that they’ve called him to go away for a short while, but that her aunt will take care of her in the meantime. The girl looks up at him and asks where he’s going and when will be back. The dad doesn’t say, he gets up and looks back at the aunt who, by now, has tears in her eyes. He then turns to the girl and kisses her forehead before picking up his rucksack, leaving the house thinking of how much he misses his wife in moments like these.
//
Kyle Santiago is having a TV dinner in his one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gloomily watching YouTube clips of the Swarm sowing destruction across America when the telephone rings.
It’s Sonia, wanting to recruit him again. They have prepared a new mission to the Visitor Ship and everything is ready for him.
She says that, unless they get back to the Ship and find a way to stop the Swarm, Earth is screwed. This is humanity’s only objective now, all scientific considerations must be set aside in the desperate search for the survival of the species.
To say that Kyle is reluctant to return to Project Attica’s headquarters and join this mission would be an understatement, even though he had been feeling confusingly guilty about not having detected any of the Swarm’s particles onboard the Theseus.
Nevertheless, she makes it clear that there is no time to waste. And that Hannah will be joining them. He’s (very positively) surprised by this revelation given how Hannah blew the whistle on the Ship to The New York Times, but he immediately accepts Sonia’s invitation.
//
Day 70
The Plesetsk Cosmodrome is surrounded by the usual cold, gray day. Kyle is escorted to a large conference room where delights in seeing Hannah. He guesses that recent events were of such magnitude that all other considerations became nil when compared to the need of finding ways to deactivate or destroy the Swarm. Even whistleblowing, political intrigues, and assassinations had been put aside.
They both embrace warmly if a bit dryly given the sad circumstances behind their reunion.
Hannah and Kyle aren’t alone. Around the conference room sit several of their surviving colleagues who also greet him warmly — Chen Liu the Chinese military intelligence leader, Raúl Carter the special forces sergeant, Valentina Dyakova the medic, and Boris Vasiliev the pilot. Kyle is glad to see that Raúl and Valentina are still as flirtatious as ever. It’s a great reminder of humanity’s resilience on the face of evil.
Sonia introduces them to two new faces: Commander Ackerman — Colonel Turner’s replacement — and an enormous and heavily tattooed viking by the name of corporal Mattheus Birgisson.
//
The new and returning crew members are taken to the training facility at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome where Lieutenant Armand Bisset is, once again, waiting to instruct them.
He explains how the mission to the Visitor Ship was put together in record time, barely two months after the Swarm crashed. It helped that many more countries contributed to the effort this time, and that the new craft — named Aegeus — is much smaller.
It will only carry eight crew members instead of twelve on the Theseus, have a much smaller payload without scientific instrumentation, and no lunar lander.
The crew’s equipment had been greatly improved since the last endeavor. The video cameras are now part of a diadem headgear to be worn under their helmets. They know that the Ship’s atmosphere is breathable, so this time around they will mostly not wear helmets.
In the improbably scenario that they encounter the Swarm onboard the Ship, the weapons had been redeveloped after the experience of fighting it on the Visitor’s Lunar base. Rifles are simpler, having done away with projectiles of different sorts and the flamethrower capability in favor of a single, but most effective, form of attack: sub-sonic microwave blasts that disrupt the coordination between the myriad particles that form the Swarms. With each blast, many of the particles are also permanently disabled.
After the explanation, they all go to the firing range to check and learn how to use the new equipment and weaponry.
//
Day 73
Bundled up but happy to spend some time together, Kyle and Hannah stroll around the Plesetsk base the night before their scheduled return to the Visitor Ship. There is still something between them, but they prudently repress it.
Their conversation ranges from remembrance of their fallen comrades to how to best approach researching the Ship’s database this time around.
They walk up to the giant Angara rocket that will take the Aegeus to its still enigmatic destination. An uneasy mix of anticipation, fear, and determination causes them to shiver in the cold starry air.
Day 78
After the jarring launch, the now-familiar trip to the Moon, and the unnerving EVA (aka spacewalk) from the Aegeus, Kyle finds himself once again standing at the entrance to the Visitor’s immense hangar, having left Boris and Chen onboard their craft as was by now customary since the Theseus mission.
Not long after crossing the invisible membranous shield separating the void of space from the atmosphere, gravity, and pressure inside the Ship, the crew — Hannah, Raúl, Valentina, Ackerman, Birgisson, and Kyle himself — set out to start their mission. Removing his helmet, Kyle breathes a foreboding but exciting atmosphere and feels like a veteran going back to an infamous but familiar war front.
Their goals are to find a way to turn off the Swarm. Only secondarily, if time allows, to determine what happened to the Visitor civilization and understand that ancient society’s objectives behind their space exploration.
Ackermann gives the order to line up single file and march toward the control room following the tracers the first crew set up months before.
//
After a very long trek through the Ship’s interminable corridors, the crew arrives at the control room complete with the single Visitor crewman’s cadaver from the time of the Theseus, still crouching in the far-right corner of the room. He had been the key to uncovering the very human nature of the Visitors. Valentina approaches the cadaver to further study it.
Overcoming his apprehension, Kyle moves up to the central pillar console and once again starts feeling like an abject failure. True, they had translated most of the Visitor language and uncovered many facts about their culture and purpose. They knew that the Swarm was a weapon developed by the Visitors themselves in what was assumed to be a long internecine war against a separate political faction. However, nobody ever found direct indications that the Swarm can in fact be disarmed or disabled.
The entire Project Attica scientific team, Kyle included, had been mystified by the tone of the Visitor texts. Their prose had a religious, ritualistic character unlike the operational, militaristic, or engineering jargon they had expected.
For a civilization so advanced, the Visitors seemed completely uninterested in science. This conundrum is the primary source of Kyle’s frustration even though he’s still hopeful that this new mission will yield better fruit. Because he understands the Visitor language, this search can be more directed.
//
With some trepidation, Kyle activates the navigational interface by placing his open hand on the pillar’s surface. Immediately, the control room comes alive with the now familiar three-dimensional immersive interface, almost like an operating system, providing access to all the text and video files in the Ship’s archives.
While Commander Ackerman, Raúl, and corporal Birgisson remain vigilant, Hannah, Valentina, and Kyle film every one of the files each of them opens but find no mention of the Swarm’s disabling mechanism — or really anything at all about its functioning. It was referred to almost routinely and casually, as a weapon or a tool. The Visitors called it by a name they couldn’t yet translate: Tenogheen.
With renewed preoccupation, Kyle asks Valentina and Hannah “what do you guys think will happen if they can’t defeat the Swarm on Earth?” Hannah replies that “we might need to get thousands of people aboard this vessel to try to leave our planet and save our species.” Kyle dearly hopes it doesn’t get to that.
After a long day at the controls, learning as much as possible, Kyle and Hannah are exhausted. Ackerman, Raúl, and Birgisson could use some shuteye as well. The team decides to walk to the area where the Visitor crew had their quarters and try to rest.
Day 79
After a very short, uneasy, and restless night of non-sleep in one of the Visitor Ship’s forlorn crew quarters, Kyle wakes up to join the rest of the team to continue searching for answers.
Even though between both missions they spent many hours aboard the vessel, they were only ever able to explore a third of its five square kilometers of corridors and rooms. Valentina suggests an expedition to areas yet uncharted and they proceed with caution, placing orientation tracers as they go along.
Sadly, after several hours they find nothing beyond empty corridors and rooms, with the occasional butterfly robot gliding by, utterly unconcerned by their presence.
Chen suddenly breaks the silence through the intercom to tell the away team news coming directly from Leadership and having to do with the Swarm’s progress across the world.
The monstrosities have infected most of the continent by now, killing hundreds of thousands in their wake. The refugee crisis alone is staggering.
The team’s frustration and sense of urgency in their mission are jolted and the grim news sends them inevitably back to the contents of the control room in a desperate search for a way to stop the carnage.
//
Already manipulating the files in the control room, Hannah turns to Kyle and asks him to come over and look at a video she had just opened, intrigued by its mysterious label. It read something like “rite of energy.”
Sonia from Earth, Chen and Boris in the Aegeus, Ackerman, Raúl, and Birgisson join Valentina, Hannah, and Kyle and what they all subsequently watch is seared in their memory.
Some sort of master of ceremony — a shaman — wearing a grotesque mask and dressed in very regal and colorful attire, enters a large auditorium, and begins to address a crowd of a couple of hundred very naked men and women.
As the man talks, a sweet and eerie melody plays in the background, in slow crescendo. His speech is suddenly not directed at the audience anymore. Rather, it is comprised of poetic, repetitive invocations to someone who is not present and who he is summoning while looking down.
Kyle turns to Hannah and says “this whole thing is nothing short of infuriating. I almost wish we had brought along an expert in religious studies because I’m at a loss.”
“Or a poet!” Hannah says, only half-jokingly.
“I’m with you, I can’t help but to feel useless in the face of such an inscrutable culture. I hope Leadership hasn’t made a horrible mistake in sending two irreligious left-brained people like you up here again,” Valentina banters.
“Amen!” adds Raúl, winking at Valentina.
The music reaches a climax and morphs into a highly rhythmic and complex drumbeat. Dozens of people, who had been swaying to the words of their shaman, turn to each other and begin to engage sexually.
Watching the large debauchery projected in 3D in front of the whole team embarrasses Kyle. To be looking at such overt, uninhibited sexual behavior next to Hannah — a married person he’s attracted to and with whom he almost had intimate contact a few months prior — was simply too much.
On the other hand, he couldn’t help but become aroused by the proceedings, a fact that in itself is mortifying because the creepy music, the shaman’s chant, and the pervasive fondling all combine to a dreadful effect.
At last, Hannah breaks the spell gesturing to get past that specific moment in the video and saying, “let’s fast-forward, shall we?” Everyone immediately agrees.
Next, they see a kind of totem float toward the shaman who faces it with arms open. The music stops and the crowd disengage to look at the totem, breaking into a very eerie and plaintive chant.
To the team’s surprise, the totem shatters and in its place the air sort of rips, letting a dreadful green light shine through the tear. Three enormous and hideous creatures emerge from the luminous breach. Hannah and Valentina gasped in horror, physically turning away their faces.
The beasts are hard to describe. They resemble insects with some humanoid aspects and are now parading around the stage. They slowly move toward the audience selecting two women and a man by nudging them roughly. Several people yielding helmets and spears capture the chosen audience members and put them in chains.
They are then taken through a side door into the now infamous flooded room where they are strapped onto a contraption after which their bodies become extremely immobile, except for their heads and faces, which contort uncontrollably as if they were undergoing terrible sufferings.
The guards return to the room and the scene goes from bad to worse. The three monsters begin physically consorting with many of the people in the audience who, rather than being horrified by it, appeared to relish their slimy touch.
Hannah turns to Kyle in disgust. “The hell was that? These people must have been off-the-hook nuts to casually be filming porno-snuff movies like this!”
Ackerman simply says, “this is no joke, we really need to watch where we are going from now on.”
//
Back at their quarters onboard the Ship, the team regroups with the Aegeus and Sonia.
The entire episode had profoundly disturbed and disappointed all of them. They had somehow hoped that a civilization as advanced as the Visitors’ would move beyond the basest human instincts. But that wasn’t the most disturbing part of it all.
Those three monsters were.
What were they and what purpose did they serve? Where did they come from? How did they enter the room? Were they onboard the ship all along? Are they still here!? Did they somehow teleport from far away? Was that chant designed to summon them and, if so, to what effect? How could evolved humans eagerly consort with something so hideous? It all was baffling.
Day 80
After another mostly nightmarish rest period, and tormented by the need to stop the Swarm back on Earth, the team returns to the file system onboard the Ship to watch more recordings. Several hours into it, they open a long clip of a very different nature than most of what they had seen so far.
For one thing, the action takes place on what appeared to be Earth and its Moon. Hannah is pretty convinced of that. The long and the short of it is that they now know for a fact that the Visitors had indeed been fighting a long, devastating war between world factions — something they had long suspected.
But that’s not all, at least one of the factions must have decided at some point to abandon our planet. Perhaps they weren’t the victors. In the video, they witness what can only be described as a massive exodus. Hundreds of thousands of people hurriedly boarding triangular ships, replicas of the one they stand in.
Whole families — refugees really — awkwardly carrying their possessions. Guards check them, unceremoniously confiscate their possessions, and send onboard the ships. In the distant background, all the way to the visible horizon, many other craft levitate to the upper atmosphere departing from Earth.
The camera now follows the ship in focus along its trip into outer space and, after a “flight” of just a few seconds, it’s clear that the destination for all these refugees is the Moon.
The Ship gingerly approaches the Moon’s surface as a giant triangular hole opens to swallow it. Other ships are departing from the Moon, seemingly away into the Solar System, away from their enemies and the Swarm.
Hannah ventures that the Ship that returned to Earth the previous year — and which they currently occupy — had probably spent eons of fruitless searches for a habitable planet and finally given up after all its passengers died and based on its programming — or the decision of whatever entity was driving it. Hopefully, some of the other ships were more successful in their searches.
Heartbreaking scenes follow, showing thousands of scared people being unloaded inside a Lunar base very similar to the one Kyle and crew visited during their first expedition.
//
One more night to spend onboard the Visitor Ship. That is literally the last thing Hannah wants to do and, contrary to her moral compass, she decides to go to Kyle’s room. She just needs to chat, to feel the warmth of friendship and human touch. She wanted to momentarily forget everything that happened in the last year.
Seeing her forlorn face, and after a somewhat awkward overture, Kyle lets her in. They talk for hours about their predicament, but also their hopes for the future, their families, their lives back on Earth.
Eventually, they fall sweetly asleep in a candid embrace.
Day 81
A couple of hours later, Kyle is awakened by what he thought was a scream. He dislodges himself from Hannah’s embrace and moves to the door to try and hear more clearly, but there are no more noises.
Raúl comes out of his room as well because he too had heard the scream. They wake up the rest of the crew and notice that Birgisson isn’t in his room. Ackerman doesn’t know where he might be and he certainly didn’t give him any orders, he assures.
They call Birgisson, but no response comes. After a few minutes of this, they decide to break themselves into two groups.
Kyle and Hannah will go to the control room in the off chance that Birgisson might be there. Ackerman, Raúl, and Valentina will go to the hangar and the crypt.
Two hours later, they all meet at their quarters again without having heard or seen Birgisson. It is time to alert the Aegeus and Project Attica.
//
Sonia is in her office, updating the rest of global Leadership on the progress made to-date (or lack thereof).
Birgisson was lost. Obviously, he must be somewhere on the Ship, but they can’t reach him through radio and haven’t located him, although they keep hope of him coming back to the fold if, somehow, he left voluntarily. They are now actively trying to investigate whether there might be a hostile entity on the Ship that could have attacked the corporal.
The exploration crew hasn’t found new information about the Swarm or how to possibly deactivate it.
The bulk of the logs they’ve examined contains a baffling mix of domestic trivia along with almost incomprehensible cultural manifestations of a religious nature. Nothing technical, no blueprints, manuals, instructions, formulas, procedures, or anything of the sort. At least so far.
After a very short debate and based on the dire need to stop the Swarm which already covered the Americas and is feared to reach other parts of the globe, Leadership decides to continue the Aegeus mission for as long as supplies and resources allow.
There must be more to the Visitor Ship than private diaries and prayer books.
Day 82
A new day, hopefully the last onboard the blasted spaceship. Chen and Boris watch their comrades from the Aegeus’ command module. They are worried but joke a bit to take the edge off.
Kyle retrieves a text file labeled “to the Wall.” He thinks it could be coordinates or procedures for steering the Ship to some destination and that maybe it’s worth reading. Chen agreed and so did Sonia, so Kyle opens it and starts reading out loud the few words that comprised a kind of rhyme.
Boris, who had been apprehensively observing the entire time, suddenly realizes something and screams “Kyle, stop reading!”
But Kyle is already pronouncing the last word and can’t process Boris’ command fast enough.
The control room surrounding them suddenly vanishes and they stumble in place, surprised. The room now features milky-white walls, floor, and ceiling. The database file system is replaced with a 3D stellar cartography interface.
“Guys, did you see that?” Kyle asks through comms. Nobody replies. The rest of the team also try to re-establish a connection with the Aegeus or Sonia’s team, without success. Maybe it’s just some sort of technical glitch, they hope.
“Kyle, look at that orange vector among all those the star clusters on the interface,” says Hannah in a whisper to prevent the others hearing their conversation.
“Um, OK, what am I supposed to see?” Kyle responds.
“I hate to tell you this, but it looks like the Ship has plotted a path to the HD1 galaxy…30 billion light-years away” Hannah hesitantly explains.
Kyle is not too alarmed because he feels like they haven’t moved, but then he remembers that they wouldn’t notice any motion given that the Ship controls gravity and, likely, does the same thing with other kinetic forces like inertia.
After a beat, they both realize that they had started traveling to this “Wall” place, that the room’s white surfaces somehow might represent their motion, and that the small triangle plotted along the orange interface vector appears to be moving past the Oort cloud.
Kyle and Hannah stood there for a minute, amid their uncomprehending colleagues, taking it all in and breathing increasingly fast because of the immensity of a bitter realization: in a matter of ten minutes, they have traveled over two light-years. They also appear to be accelerating at a constant rate. In the next couple of minutes, they’ll reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth within four light-years.
Unless they find out in a matter of seconds how to stop and, hopefully, reverse their progress, they will lose all hope of ever returning to the lives they once knew.
//
Day 82 (Earth time)
Hannah breaks down and Valentina goes to comfort her. Kyle frantically works the database to find some way to stop the Ship.
He’s trying to remain calm and rational. The trip commenced exactly when he finished reading that file a beat after Boris alerted him to stop. So, naturally and improbably, Kyle believes there is causality between his reading and the Ship’s powering up. So, the first thing he tries is reading the “harmless” little rhyme again. Nothing appears to change.
Hannah, still plaintive, explains to Ackerman, Raúl, and Valentina everything that transpired and the predicament they are in
“What do you mean we are traveling faster than light? How the hell did that happen?” Ackermann asks. And Hannah embarks on the most painful lesson she ever had to give on relativity and space-time. It takes a moment for it all to sink in, but when it does the expletives start flowing.
Raúl hurls insults at Kyle and Hannah for being so stupid as to careening them across the universe unwittingly. Ackerman starts banging the wall with his fists, screaming.
Kyle tries to defuse the situation by assuring them that both Hannah and he are going to find a way to solve the problem. There must be a simple way to redirect the Ship, they just need to find the right words.
Ackermann eventually calms down. This is no time to turn on each other, he mumbles. They need to work together to figure out how to turn the Ship around just as easily as they sent it to wherever it is they are now going.
But at this point, several more minutes into their accelerating stellar progress, even that possible eventuality no longer would mean that they’d be able to return to their former lives.
With the room finally quiet, Kyle and Hannah continue to look for more ways to control the navigational system among the hundreds of thousands of files stored onboard.
//
Chen and Boris freeze for a second after their view of space right across their seats in the Aegeus, suddenly appearing empty. Sonia’s screen in her Project Attica office also shows the void of space where the immense Visitor Ship was just a second before.
Boris and Chen run to the side portholes and with sinking hearts realize what happened. The visitor ship was no longer there. It must have accelerated instantly to a crazy-fast velocity so that nobody saw it moving and communication with their crew mates went out of range immediately.
“It’s not there, Sonia. The ship’s gone” says Chen.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” asks Sonia.
“Gone, gone. It left the lunar orbit, and we can’t find it anywhere,” replies Boris.
Sonia freaks out and picks up the phone, ordering whoever is at the other end of the line to immediately point every observatory on the planet to scour the Solar System. She’s told that would take time and she replies that we don’t have time.
One hour later, every astronomer in the world is looking for the Ship, but they find nothing. Not in the next hour, not in the months that follow.
//
Day 83
Maggie is having her breakfast, lovingly prepared by auntie Tess. They are both playing “I Spy” and for her next turn, the girl focuses on her daddy, pictured in one of her school drawings.
The doorbell rings and Tess wonders who it might be this early in the morning. She opens the door and loudly gasps as she sees two military personnel in formal uniform, while Maggie asks “auntie, auntie, who is it?” in the background.
//
Day 86
Onboard the Visitor Ship, the team’s supplies are almost depleted. This is a concern, but they know that in some of the videos the Visitors could be seen eating and drinking by somehow materializing food out of thin air. The prevailing hypothesis being that they remotely manufactured items from an atomic/molecular repository located somewhere onboard.
By now, they are also utterly convinced that certain words have direct physical effects on the Ship, so everyone works around the clock to uncover patterns of speech to tap into any food and water sources. They also try “telepathy” and gestures at the walls of the mess hall, like they did during the Theseus mission, to no avail this time.
They don’t yet know how to navigate the Ship and their difficulties are compounded by the fact that everyone is mildly dehydrated and pretty much stopped talking to each other. The soldiers are furious with the two “stupid eggheads” who ruined their lives. So, to say that the mood is somber would be an understatement.
//
Day 88
The team’s watches still tell time according to their internal mechanism…a time that is meaningless for all intents and purposes, but which at least gives them a familiar framework to judge how long had passed since the Ship started its frightening travel.
It had been a full week, and they are hungry. Worse: thirsty as well. They had also consumed the few provisions that they carried from the Aegeus as an emergency. Raúl and Valentina suggest that maybe they should all look for guidance elsewhere on the Ship…and hopefully find Birgisson as well, in whatever state he may be. Why this exclusive focus on the control room?
Kyle smugly replies that since there was a control room, logically, all necessary instructions should be there, or something in it should point them in the right direction.
Raúl responds that “logically” Kyle shouldn’t have read that blasted paragraph out loud to begin with, and yet here they are. So no thank you very much, he’ll follow his own intuition and look elsewhere.
Both Raul and Valentina leave to search for more clues.
//
Day 89
Everyone is asleep in their quarters.
Kyle is alone in his room, awake and thinking when he hears Hannah’s voice beckoning…”Kyleeeeee?” His heart skipped a beat in anticipation and was about to jump from the bed when he sees her come in suggestively, wearing just a tank top and panties…and not saying much.
Kyle’s eyes bulged while he wondered what made Hannah forget Peter, her husband, so quickly whenever she had been inconsolable just days earlier.
Granted, there had been problems in their marriage, and this was the third time Hannah and Kyle had stumbled into an intimate situation of some kind. They were able to control their impulses the first and second time.
Will he be able to this time around?
Hannah caresses Kyle’s face and gently bumps against his body. They start kissing, getting fully undressed, her face chiseled in a fearsome expression. He follows her lead back into bed.
What the hell anyway. After all, everyone’s relationships were long dead. This is a new start for him and Hannah, who’s always been sweet, kind, smart, and determined all at once.
That’s why Kyle is taken by surprise when she starts getting rough, pinching him, slapping his face, and biting his lip hard with a guttural grunt.
Kyle finally pushes her away and shoots up in a sweat, panting.
Hannah is nowhere to be seen.
He’d been dreaming all along. He felt quite embarrassed. The dream was so real. The Hannah he conjured up wasn’t the same person as the Hannah he knew. What did that reveal of his own personality, that he portrayed her like that in a dream?
//
Day 112
After much effort, the crew finds the right sequence of words to generate food and drink and everyone except Raúl and Valentina feels relieved. Those two aren’t thrilled, though. To them, the recitations sound oddly like charms, witchcraft.
The “spells” were also hard to pull off. Often, the food or drink they produced was disgusting. The quantities of nourishment were barely enough for a bird most of the time. Many trials and errors were needed before something edible in reasonable portions could be obtained.
The team is beginning to feel like they’ve been in that awful spacecraft their entire lives. Beyond the good news of being able to summon food and water, they are facing a possible future where surviving might be more grueling and tedious than a quick death.
Time is spent in expeditions looking for Birgisson — without much hope — and otherwise exploring the city-sized vessel only to confirm — if confirmation were necessary — how devastatingly monotonous it is.
There still is no sign of engines or equipment of any kind.
The team gets going once again, crisscrossing the hellish spacecraft, past the crypt where the entire Visitor crew had been buried — all except the corpse in the control room, of course…he had been the last one to day with no-one to entomb him.
After hours of walking, they start to feel fatigued, particularly Kyle, Valentina, and Hannah. Ackerman tells them to get inside one of the open, empty rooms nearby and rest while he remains outside to stand guard.
Raúl offers to join him, but the Commander asks him to go eat something instead. Himself, he isn’t tired or hungry and nothing is going to happen anyway. He takes position next to the door frame and maintains a half-hearted vigilance posture.
//
After a while and bored out of his mind, Ackerman starts thinking of his daughter Maggie. He knows that Tess, his sister, had taken care of her — it was still hard for him to imagine they had been long dead. Tess loved the child as if she was her own, but still, with him gone for decades and her mother dead…
Her mother. His wife, Franka. He even has trouble remembering her voice just four years after she died giving birth. He feels rage, so much rage that tears run down his face. As he is getting more and more immersed in the memories of their sweet life together…
…Franka appears around a corridor bent.
He jumps and aggressively shakes his head — he must be tired after all. Gotta get a hold of himself! He looks back at the corner and she is still there!
Reality slips away, everything is a dream. He starts walking to where she’s standing, but a second later she runs away, disappearing behind the corner.
He picks up pace and turns the same corner, sees Franka impossibly far at the end of another long corridor. She looks back as if summoning him to join her and disappears again. He follows at full gallop, mystified but excited, turns the new corner, and comes to within inches from her red parted lips.
He’s startled and she embraces him, moving her thumb across his lips. He is transfixed, scared, but somehow hopeful.
And that’s when he sees Raúl coming to join them. It is not a welcome intromission. Years without seeing his wife and now this moron comes to talk to him. Ackermann prepares to dismiss the sergeant.
However, Franka suddenly and in an impossible maneuver jumps from him, crawling across the wall, onto Raúl and is now kissing the sergeant while sloppily getting naked.
Raúl’s hands are all over her and Ackermann screams in rage, lounging at the soldier who, at the last second, barely evades the Commander’s blow. Ackerman’s momentum carries him past Raúl falling onto the floor. He quickly gets up and turns to charge again, but Raúl is alone. No sign of Franka. The spell has somehow been broken.
Kyle, Hannah, and Valentina heard the commotion and were running toward them, in time to see Ackerman charge Raúl who was panting and asking what in the world got into him.
The Commander can’t quite explain himself, mumbles an apology, and orders everyone to go back to their quarters.
As they walk back, Raúl begs the rest to stop saying those bloody incantations.
//
Day 116
Raúl has suddenly and inexplicably vanished.
Everyone else looks at Ackerman who shrugs his shoulders but insists on the fact that he doesn’t know where the sergeant has gone.
The team starts calling him on the radio without getting any response. It was Birgisson all over again, so they search for their comrade throughout the Ship, but can’t find him.
Valentina is Raúl’s good friend, and she’s deeply alarmed. Hannah tries to calm her down, much like the Russian had done for her the day of their departure to the edges of the universe.
As they search the Ship, they come across the control room and confirm that their vessel is nearing the Messier 4 globular cluster, 6,000 light-years away from Earth.
//
Day 118
As he sleeps, Kyle is woken up by distant but constant moans. He leaves his room, following the noises and, eventually, arrives at a room with two body bags next to each other laying on the floor.
Walking up to one of the bags, he realizes in horror that it is the source of the moaning noises and that something inside it is moving. Recoiling, Kyle composes himself and kneels to zip open the bag, at which point he can see that Valentina is cuddling with Raúl’s decomposed cadaver. She then turns to look at him with a vacant stare and an odious, blood-stained grin.
Kyle shudders and wakes up in his bed drenched in sweat yet again. Looking around, there’s no sign of body bags or Valentina.
Day 121
By now, they all realize that the more they try to feed themselves with incantations, the crazier they all are getting. Hannah had been picking at her skin with a pocketknife and is covered in open sores, wounds, and deep cuts. Ackerman is constantly angry, sometimes exploding in loud bursts of ire that go on for hours. And they haven’t found either Birgisson or Raúl.
They all agree to reduce the recitation of spells to the absolute minimum and to renew their search for ways to get back home.
They wondered how the Visitors were able to withstand their daily use of spells and still function. Valentina Dyakova, much like his missing friend Raúl, is a deeply religious person. A devout Christian Orthodox in her case. She offers a theory: it had to be through societal-wide human sacrifice offerings…something to do with the submerged rooms and the suffering captives. They were thoroughly corrupt as a people. She’s sure of it.
And yet, they need nourishment to survive. Valentina herself, as soon as she gets back to her room starts a long sequence of tries, using different word combinations that have worked at times in the past but almost never more than once.
After at least an hour and a half of this nonsense, she materializes a sort of porridge that tastes OK, along with some green liquid reminiscent of rice water. She gulps both down and nods off into a dreamy state, half awake and half asleep.
She hears one of her favorite songs of all time drifting in from the distance. Donna Summer’s “State of Independence,” oddly.
“State of life, may I live, may I love / Coming out the sky, I name me a name.”
Getting up she walks away from her room, into the dimly lit eeriness that completely surrounds her.
“Shot to the soul the flame of Oroladian / The essence of the word / The state of independence.”
She keeps her exploration to the areas where they had placed tracers, wouldn’t want to get lost for such a stupid thing as a song she’s probably imagining anyway.
But the song beckons from a new part of the Ship, and it’s so beautiful!
“Sounds like a signal from you / Bring me to meet your sound / And I will bring you to my heart.”
Later on, the team notices they hadn’t seen her for several hours and start to worry. After many hours traversing the Ship’s corridors and several encounters with the “benign” butterfly bots, they return to their quarters empty-handed.
//
Day 127
Having lost all traces of Valentina as well, the three remaining expeditioners are increasingly vigilant, never leaving each other’s side. They couldn’t imagine what was making people vanish inside a sealed spaceship, big as it may be. Why wasn’t Valentina responding on the comms? Why didn’t the others? What had happened to them?
For Kyle, Hannah, and Ackerman, several days without eating or drinking after having reduced their incantations had been rough, but at least they are slowly regaining their sanity.
The Commander has an idea: they could try to find the liquid tank (aka punishment room, aka rite compound) and see if the liquid is potable. Kyle and Hannah think the idea is disgusting, foolish, and nonsensical, but the soldier decides it couldn’t possibly hurt to try.
Contrary to their arrangement of always being together, they agree that Kyle will go to the control room to continue searching for ways to get back while Ackerman and Hannah look for the “chamber of horrors.” It takes them nine hours walking and placing tracers on walls but, eventually, they come up upon the auditorium-like area where the Visitors’ orgy had taken place, next to which they’d seen the sealed tank containing their prisoners.
Almost literally dying of thirst, Ackerman enters the larger chamber and looks for the door to the tank which is blissfully open! Not a drop of its orange liquid is seeping out of the tank. Doubtless, this is protected by some kind of force field.
The Commander decides to plunge into it compelled by thirsty desperation, as Hannah tries to persuade him to simply taste the liquid first because it might not be potable after all. Without paying attention, Ackerman goes in holding his breath.
But he doesn’t come out.
Hannah anxiously waits for over 10 minutes. She realizes that, by now, the Commander must have drowned. Nobody can keep their breath for that long.
She wonders what to do. She’s no hero and doesn’t quite know what could be inside the tank that may have made it impossible for Ackerman, a trained soldier, to survive. Her chances are way worse, in her estimation.
Tentatively, she goes up to the open door and tries to look through the dense liquid to find any clues as to where her colleague might be and how his body could be rescued.
With some difficulty she focuses on four pillars which, upon strained examination, reveals to be Ackerman, Valentina, Raúl, and Birgisson completely still and stiff, shackled to some sort of machine, with their heads shaking uncontrollably and their face horribly contorted.
Hannah leaves the auditorium in a hurry, screaming at the top of her lungs, and an hour later arrives at the control center, out of breath, to tell Kyle what she saw.
After her story and astonished, she hears Kyle say that “we may have found the Ship’s engine room after all.”
And that sentence became the obituary for their heretofore deeply held scientific skepticism.
//
Day 132
Kyle and Hannah are alone aboard the Visitor Ship, hurling at unimaginable speeds across the universe to the most distant star system ever recorded: HD1.
The navigational interface is clear: much like a GPS mapping system, the triangle representing “their” Ship was still accelerating towards the edge of the universe.
They have lost several pounds and are weak with hunger and thirst, but determined to minimize how often they resort to the magnanimity of the Ship’s controls (or builders) given the results they’ve experienced so far.
They spend much of their time in either one of their adjoining rooms, talking about how much they both miss their lives. It’s like they are not quite dead but not alive either, sealed in that awful interstellar tomb. They continue to monitor the Ship’s progress.
Kyle is still attracted to Hannah, but their circumstances are so dire, and the memory of her lost husband so recent, that he noticed how they stopped being emotionally available to each other.
A bit of good news is that they finally found bathrooms, showers, and incantations to operate them. They expelled a mist that surrounded their bodies thoroughly cleaning them. Comfortable, but at the price of more incantations and fluctuating mental health.
What a desolate and strange fate. Who would have imagined when they first met that they’d be condemned to serve together a life sentence in the farthest exile imaginable.
The most incontestably dreadful fact is, however, how they feel torn about the need to continue to rely on the sufferings of their comrades to potentially propel themselves back to Earth, while also being compelled to continue with the awful spells and their ensuing hallucinations to survive long enough and guide the Ship back home.
Day 138
Fifty-seven days into their interstellar trip, something incredible happens — incredible even for them, who were accustomed to their minds being blown on an hourly basis.
Their inexorable progress toward HD1 (“The Wall,” as the Visitors had dubbed it) continues and the navigational system is showing the Ship getting very close to its destination. This gives them a bittersweet hope. At least, the first leg of their trip has ended.
The Ship’s interior illumination suddenly changes tone becoming a more intense orange, almost red. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the control room turn for the first time in almost two months back to showing the stars, a very different firmament to the one Hannah knew so well. They notice the Ship’s 3D display icon decelerating and then, suddenly, the display is gone.
After a few minutes, they arrive at a sort of gate glowing red — an arch big enough to swallow several of their ships. It features strange markings around it, unlike those of the Visitors, and floats in space undisturbed. They don’t see anything (or anyone) else nearby.
They are too worn down, paranoid, and worried to even have this wondrous marvel awaken their scientific curiosity.
Their ship passes through the gate, and they see what could only be described as a glass wall on the other side, stretching in all directions without end. They know it is the limit of the universe. How? Hard to say, other than they are certain that’s what it is.
Most troubling, they start to hear blood-curdling cries. Where are they coming from? Inside the Ship, surely, but who’s screaming? Is it their long-suffering comrades? They had never heard noises coming from their chamber before.
The screams get louder as the Ship approaches the glass wall. They can discern myriad, faint, enormous black holes on the other side of the wall, opening and closing, distorted, contorted, blurring in and out. Like faces pressed against the glass.
The screams are so loud and the view so unsettling that they spend countless hours (days?) intoning any incantation that appears even tangentially related to navigation. This makes them quickly descend into a feverish state of madness, but it must be done.
At the last moment, when they start to believe they are doomed to die in that God-forsaken place, Hannah says something that makes the room turn white again and the 3D display show a new vector.
This time it takes her a while to figure out what their new destination is since their point of origin is so different from what she studied back on Earth.
Their new destination is in the Corona Borealis system.
Not Earth.
But at least the screams and visions cease. That’s something.
Exhausted, they collapse into each other and onto the white bottomless floor.
//
Day 684
For a year and a half, Kyle and Hannah used the Visitors’ powerful words to steer the Ship trying to go back home. They went from one place in the universe to another until they finally found an incantation that sent them back to the Moon’s orbit.
In this time of desperate journeying, Hannah and Kyle studied much of the archives and found out that the Ship doesn’t travel faster than light. It travels by wholly preternatural means instead. This renews their hope that perhaps the laws of relativity hadn’t applied to their journey after all. Dare they dream of a possible return to their families and friends?
Also, even though the Ship is controlled by spiritual forces who can travel anywhere in the universe instantaneously because they are outside space-time — like those three creatures summoned by the shaman in the video — humans are material beings so both the Visitors and them need some vehicle to go around the universe — fast as it may have been, it wasn’t instantaneous either.
Nowhere in the universe did they find evidence of life, much less other civilizations, except for that enormous gate which, for all they knew, might have been built by the Visitors themselves, even though its markings were different.
The thing is, they learned all this while under the influence of the very charms they had to use to maneuver the Ship. In their diminished mental and emotional states, after months of fighting, clawing at each other, crying, consoling each other, being famished and thirsty beyond anything they could imagine, Kyle and Hannah are in no position to fully trust what they had learned along the way.
For all they know, they could have convinced themselves that these were facts rather than the ravings of two lunatics.
//
Day 726
Kyle and Hannah had plenty of time to learn how to pilot the Ship’s shuttles. With some difficulty they manage to land it in the middle of Pioneer Park in Kaleden, Canada—home to Hannah’s family. They leave the shuttle carrying with them meager provisions and weapons, without knowing what to expect.
Before landing and along their flight path, they saw that Kaleden was relatively unchanged. The buildings appeared dirty, with many broken windows, but still standing. The streets were mostly deserted and overtaken by vegetation and trash, but they were still there. Their elation had been mixed with uncertainty, fear, and the by-now familiar hallucinations — Kyle for one saw whales swimming up Highway 97 and 500-feet tall buxom Munich Festival waitresses carrying beer across the Shaka Lake.
Not five minutes after they started walking away from the shuttle, they see a couple of people coming their way through the morning fog. They crouch in fear but in their incantation-induced paranoia, decide to start shooting at the strangers, just in case. Thankfully, they miss and in no time several more people join the first two and reduce Kyle and Hannah from behind. They are then taken prisoner to some sort of sparsely populated camp.
The locals are dirty and disheveled and very scared of the new arrivals, whom they put in confinement right away.
Kyle and Hannah regain their clarity of mind and calm down as the effects of their time onboard the Visitor Ship wane over a few days. Their captors agree to free them.
Kyle starts asking questions of their now hosts and is told that it’s 2028 — only two years after their departure to HD1.
Hannah is ecstatic to receive this news. Kyle too, of course, but she regains such hope in being reunited with Peter, Caleb, and Paul that she immediately decides to leave and start looking for them. After all, they had chosen to land in Canada over a week ago precisely to make it easier for Hannah to find answers to whatever might have happened to her family.
With great sadness and some relief Hannah says goodbye to Kyle. They will always remain friends, but their shared shame and traumatic experiences formed a wall between them.
It is better this way, thinks Kyle. He doubts he’ll ever see her again. Or want to.
Kyle is concerned with her safety in the deeply transformed society the Swarm left in its wake, but he has his own, much longer journey ahead.
//
Day 734
For the next several days, Kyle keeps regaining his strength with the help of his hosts. There is no electricity or running water, and food and drink are scarce, but definitely better and more abundant than on the Visitor Ship.
Kyle is only too happy to help them in their activities. He had been posted as a sentinel, recruited to build new tents out of found materials, rummage for supplies, and more.
Along the way, he learns much about what had happened to the planet in their absence. Apparently, all swarms had ceased their destructive activity after crushing much of civilization. Without anyone understanding why, they pulled back to the landing site in Florida and remained activated but immobilized. Nobody has ever dared to go there again.
Kyle wonders whether unbeknownst to them any one of their incantations onboard the Ship might have put the Swarm on hold after all. Just pure speculation. When it came to the Visitors, the more you learned the more you realized you knew almost nothing.
He doesn’t often dare to think about the larger team, but he dearly hopes their comrades still up inside the Ship had a quick death: Raúl, Valentina, Ackerman, and Birgisson. He feels unclean for having depended on whatever the Ship extracted from their dear colleagues to crisscross the universe on their way back home.
Kyle will make it his new mission in life to find a way to recover their bodies from that obscene Ship now orbiting Earth—something that might not be immediately possible if, as he suspects, civilization everywhere is in ruins and Project Attica, Leadership, Sonia, and all the rest are now living in the proverbial caves.
Kyle will never be quite the same.
END OF AUTHOR’S NOTES
Copyright © José Antonio Martínez Salmerón. All rights reserved.