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They found themselves an ice cave to hole up in to get out of the wind. They
were not going to die anytime soon, but it still wasn’t comfortable. Ramses
and Leona got to work, trying to figure out what was wrong with their suits,
but really, there was nothing they could do. None of their technology was
working. They couldn’t even activate sensors to find out why. Nothing in the
natural universe was known to do this. There could be interference,
which made certain technologies malfunction, but they wouldn’t simply not
turn on, full stop. Marie and Angela volunteered to take a short hike to
higher ground to search for any sort of artificial settlement. Their
comms devices didn’t work, but they would signal trouble using their
empathetic connections. Those were all organic, so they were functioning
fine. They didn’t find anything, though.
When they were mere seconds from midnight, Mateo walked outside, threw a
rock he found up into the air, and watched it go up. When midnight hit, the
rock didn’t fall down. It simply disappeared. He found it near his feet,
covered in a layer of snow, which told them that their patterns had not been
suppressed. During the interim year, nothing had changed. They couldn’t turn
anything on, or access anything from their pocket dimensions. If it required
power, it was off limits. Ramses was at a loss, so they decided to go
exploring to see if there were any resources here. Their advanced substrates
would keep them alive for a while, but not indefinitely. They still needed
to find food, as well as fuel to make a fire so they could melt some snow
for the water. Except that was dangerous too, because there could have been
contaminants, or it wasn’t purely water ice in the first place. No one was
panicking, but they were all worried.
“Look!” Romana announced. The sun was setting, and they could see a little
bit of the night sky. Flashes of light were appearing in an artificial
sequence, proving that they couldn’t have simply been meteors, or some other
natural phenomenon. So there were people here, but they were only in
orbit, or maybe others were just a few miles out of view. As they were
watching, they spotted a fiery object much larger than the others. While
they faded into the atmosphere, this one continued to plummet towards them
until a parachute burst out of it, and it slowly drifted down to the
surface.
“Wait!” Leona warned as they began to walk towards it. “It could be a
trap. It could be an explosive device. It could be anything.” Even if
it wasn’t, that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. It could be waiting for
their approach so it could disperse a toxic gas, or some other creative way
to kill them. All the way out here, they couldn’t rely on the afterlife
simulation as backup. This could be it for them.
“We have to look at it, Lee,” Olimpia reasoned. “If they wanted to blow us
up, they would have sent a missile that we couldn’t dodge. It’s not like
there are any police to get them in trouble.” She led the group a few
hundred meters away to see what it was.
It was a small capsule, still hot from the descent, but cooling rapidly.
Mateo opened the little hatch on the side to find a rolled up piece of
paper. There was also what looked like a compass, though of no familiar
design. There were no electronics here either. He unrolled the paper, and
examined it alone at first. “It looks like directions.” He looked up, trying
to get his bearings. “Written in kilometers,” he added as he handed it over
to Leona. “About eighty-three of them to the destination.”
“Still could be a trap,” Leona said. “Maybe they don’t want to kill us, but
harvest our organs, or something. That’s why they didn’t send a missile.”
“Either way, we’re obviously going,” Olimpia reasoned. “We can escape a
trap, but we can’t escape the nothingness. Yalla.”
