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| Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software |
When Brooke Prieto, Sharice Prieto, Mirage, and the newest member of their
group, Belahkay Teal arrived inside the heliosphere of Alpha Centauri B,
they immediately figured out why the vonearthans had chosen not to colonize
it. All stars and other celestial bodies are valuable. They contain
hydrogen, helium, and other elements, which can be used to produce energy
and/or construct useful structures. Lots of science fiction stories only
care about worlds that are naturally habitable, but that doesn’t really
matter. With sufficiently advanced technology, anything can become
habitable, even if that only means breaking it all apart to make enclosed
spaceships. Nothing in the universe is completely useless, including
Toliman, except that there’s something different about it. There’s something
eerie about it. The closer they got to the star, the worse they felt, and
there was no escape from this. Mirage was an early general intelligence
turned transdimensional observer god turned android. Sharice was an
unregulated AI turned android. Brooke was a human turned android. Out of the
four of them, only Belahkay was alive with nearly all biological components.
They were all capable of manipulating their sensory inputs to varying
degrees, but not in this case. The sickness took hold of them all, and made
them all feel the same.
According to the exploratory records, a single probe was sent to the star
system. This happened at the same time that they were being sent to Proxima
Centauri and Rigel Kentaurus. These were the three closest stars to Sol, so
it made perfect sense. While the first two received later vessels, as well
as passengers, Toliman was abandoned after the first probe. The reason for
this was never publicized, but since there were hundreds of billions of
other stars in this galaxy alone, no one really bothered to question that
decision. Not even Mirage knew the answer, but her educated guess was that a
time traveler had something to do with it. Travelers come from all time
periods, and while the majority of history can be attributed to normal
people making whatever decisions they feel they ought to, a few events were
ultimately caused by someone who knew how specific decisions would turn out.
Of course time travelers made certain decisions all the time, but in this
case, we’re talking about deliberately driving the course of the future with
profound and more obvious choices, or with big nudges.
For instance, to travel at something called fractional speeds—which is to
say, a significant fraction of light speed—an object in motion must
accelerate from a stopped position. This works with anything. A car can’t
just suddenly go from zero miles per hour to 60 miles per hour with no
intervening speeds in between. Except it can, as long as it can manipulate
time and space properly. It was a time traveler, or perhaps a team, who
first introduced the humans to this concept, and vonearthans have been
taking the feature of interstellar travel for granted ever since. It’s not
instant, but it’s impossibly fast. They don’t have to accelerate or
decelerate at nearly the same rate as normal physical laws would suggest,
which cuts down on travel time. Mirage was sure that Toliman was just like
this. She thought a time traveler needed the star system for something, and
made sure that no one would come here until they were ready. That might
still be the case, but there was more to it. There was something wrong with
it. There was something wrong with people when they came here.
Every atom in each one of their bodies was telling them to leave. They felt
nausea, chills, muscle fatigue, dizziness, and fear. This place was
frightening in an indescribable way. If they were on a planet, they would
say that there was something in the air, but in this case, maybe it was in
the radiation? They couldn’t tell, and they didn’t want to spend too much
time trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, fate had other plans for them.
They couldn’t leave, because one of the symptoms was a complete loss of
motivation. Had Belahkay waited even one more minute, he may not have made
it to the stasis pod, which saved his life. Because the other three stopped
where they were, and didn’t move for the next five years. In that time, the
little jumper ship they took from the planet of Bungula drifted throughout
the star system until it finally happened to come close enough to the
nanofactory that Mirage sent there years ago. Their real ship dispatched a
tugboat to tow them into the hollowed-out asteroid. It wasn’t until the
hatch was sealed behind them that they were released from the spell.
Brooke stood up, and emulated a deep breath. “What the hell was that?”
Sharice couldn’t stop shaking her head. “It was bad, it was bad, it was bad,
it was bad. We can’t go back out, we can’t go back out, we can’t go back
out.”
“We have to,” Mirage reasoned. “We can’t live here forever.” She composed
herself, and approached the console to get some answers. “Whatever was doing
whatever it was doing to us can’t reach us through the walls of the
asteroid, but that might not always be enough. We have to take our new ship,
and get the hell out of here.”
“Is the ship even finished?” Brooke questioned.
“Of course it is.” Mirage tapped the button to open the forward shutters.
Before them was the interior of the asteroid. A shipyard was built here, and
in the center was a beautiful shining vessel. It was small for a
transgalactic ship, but it wasn’t possible to look at anything else in the
room. The hull was a dark royal purple, with perfect curves, and no sharp
edges. “Ladies...say hello to the Iman Vellani.”
“Unique design,” Brooke noticed.
Sharice was admiring the ship as well before looking over her shoulder. “The
human. Is he okay?”
The Prietos ran down to the other side of the jumper to the stasis pod.
“Vitals are okay,” Brooke said as she was looking through the interface
screen. She released the door, and had to catch Belahkey before he fell to
the floor.
He took a moment to catch his breath, and shake off the feeling of dread.
“At the risk of sounding like a cliché, are we there yet?”
“Yes,” Sharice replied, “and now we’re leaving.”
“Good.” He shivered again. “What the hell is wrong with this star?”
“Mira?” Brooke asked. Belahkay was still having trouble walking, so she was
carrying him down towards the control area. “What’s wrong with Toliman?”
“I don’t know, but...it affects everything. The Vellani, it’s...damaged.
There are parts of its operational code that I didn’t write.”
“Can you repair it?” Sharice asked her.
Mirage sighed. “Not here. The effects of the...” She didn’t know what to
call it.
“The Nulls,” Belahkay suggested. If it affects you as well as me, it’s not a
real disease. It’s something new.”
“The Nulls,” Mirage echoed. “The shielding of this asteroid appears to be
protecting us from the symptoms, but it’s really just suppressing them. I
can already feel myself losing motivation again. We can’t stay here for even
a day.”
“But if your ship is broken.”
“It’s not broken, it just needs to be reprogrammed” Mirage contended. “I’ll
fly it manually until we can do that. This will work. We’ll just point
ourselves away from the star, and go. But just to be safe, Belahkay, you
should go back into stasis.”
“No. I’m with you.”
“It’s your choice. I’m not your boss.”
“Aren’t you, though? Sharice asked as Mirage was walking away.
Mirage didn’t answer. While she went off to prepare for things in their
shiny new ship, Sharice teleported Belahkay over, and then started to ferry
all of their belongings. It thusly fell to Brooke to distribute antimatter
bombs in key places in the asteroid. They weren’t really bombs, but
antimatter was inherently unstable, so if you wanted to turn some of it into
a bomb, all you had to do was find a way to disrupt the magnetic field that
was keeping it from touching matter, and preferably do so remotely. They
could imagine some intrepid explorers in the future, who couldn’t understand
why this star system was off limits, coming here to figure things out. They
too would become trapped, but if they were organic, it could result in their
deaths. This could still happen, but at least there wouldn’t be anything
left around here to make it more interesting and inviting.
Once everything was done, they convened on the Vellani, and prepared to
launch. They left the jumper where it was, because it was no longer of any
use to them. They had everything they would ever need right here. Mirage
commanded the airlock doors to open, and then shot out of there as fast as
they could. They immediately started to feel the effects of the nulls again,
but now that they knew what they were up against, they were able to fight
against it. If they were to stick around much longer, the sickness would
probably win again, but they weren’t planning on doing that. Even if they
did lose all hope, and become unable to escape, they wouldn’t last much
longer. The antimatter containment pods were programmed to fail on a timer,
rather than be detonated remotely. It had to be this way, because what if
Brooke lost her motivation to trigger the chain reaction while she was out
here. And anyway, there should have been enough time to get sufficiently far
away. The resulting explosion would be large, but still mostly limited to
the scope of the asteroid. The pods they used weren’t full to the brim with
antimatter, and it’s not like they needed to destroy the whole solar system.
So the question was, why did that happen?
They were more than far enough away from the asteroid when it exploded, but
the annihilation didn’t stop there. Bursts of energy started to pop up in
all directions, much farther than they should have. It was like there was
more antimatter in the area than they expected. But that couldn’t be
possible? Antimatter wasn’t just floating around all over space. It was
short-lived, because whenever it came into contact with ordinary matter,
they would annihilate each other, particle by particle. How was this still
going on? How could they stop it?
“We can’t stop it,” Mirage explained to Belahkay, who probably should have
been placed back in stasis. “But we can protect ourselves.” She tapped on
the controls, and boosted the EM shield. It was a simple enough feature that
every starship had. While time travelers had access to things like a
teleportation field for dust and micrometeoroids, that wouldn’t help them
with things like solar wind and cosmic radiation. Still, the electromagnetic
shield wasn’t usually turned up to eleven, because it didn’t need to be. In
this case, it did. The Vellani was made out of matter, and if those
explosions got any closer, they would all be vaporized instantly. The EM
shield held, but it wasn’t enough to protect them from the devastating
effects of what they had done. Something started to pull them back towards
the host star, and they couldn’t do anything about it.
“Can you boost the propulsion?” Belahkay offered. He was holding onto the
center console since artificial gravity had been turned off. The other three
could magnetize their feet at will.
“All available power is being diverted to the shield!” Sharice replied. “We
would be destroyed if we started using it for anything else.”
“If we fall into that sun,” he reasoned, “we’re gonna be destroyed anyway.”
Mirage was watching the screen as the explosions all began to approach the
star. It too was made out of ordinary matter. “There is no reality where
we’re not destroyed! Everything living on Bungula is dead too! It’s over! We
fucked up!”
The ship continued to fall into the sun at an accelerated rate, and soon,
the four of them lost all will to care about it. They just sat there, not
worrying about anything, not willing to do anything to fix it, which was
okay, because there wasn’t anything to do except accept their fate. In the
blink of an eye, Alpha Centauri B was gone, as was the newborn starship Iman
Vellani, and its crew.
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