Interitus Omnia

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But what about a billion screams? What about hundreds of billions of screams? What about scores of civilizations innumerable erased without a trace? Do you think we could hear their screams?”

As his question hung over the lecture hall, Dr. Robert Francis Kline leaned away from the microphone, his fingers pitter-pattering against the lectern in his pause. The silence gave the hundred or so University of San Diego students a moment for their desperate fingers to catch up as they feverishly tapped out class notes on their laptop keyboards.

Something resembling a smirk crawled across Dr. Kline’s creased face. There were spots of gray in his wispy brown hair, but he still possessed a light in his eyes he’d carried since his youth—since the moment he first gazed with wonder at the stars. His nasal voice, jerky movements, and social quirks were perfectly befitting a man who often walked the line between science and what might be deemed conspiracy theory. Sporting a pair of wire rim glasses and a brown tweed suit jacket he purchased at a Macy’s department store in Detroit in the late eighties, he leaned into the microphone and resumed speaking.

“I don’t mean literally, of course. We all know that soundwaves cannot travel in a vacuum. But, when we look to the night sky do we hear the cries of lost civilizations? Do we see what remains of their worlds on a nightly basis without ever knowing it? Ancient man was obsessed with the stars. In many ways, our ancestors understood them far better than we do now. Stonehenge. The Parque Arqueologico do Solsticio. El Infiernito. Nabta Playa. There are countless examples of ancient civilizations who had no known contact with one another constructing strikingly similar archaeoastronomical structures all across the globe. We’ve studied them tirelessly and concluded—with reasonable explanation—that these were spiritual sites; they were some kind of burial grounds; they were sacred places; they were, for lack of a better term, calendars of some sort. All good theories. All wrong. You see, ancient man knew something we don’t. He understood something we have forgotten. Our ancestors looked to the sky and they saw the end. How? I don’t know. But they saw it and they preserved what they saw in some sort of ancient archaeoastronomical code in an effort to save this world from whatever destroyed the ones that came before. That is what is so fascinating about these places. These structures weren’t merely religious sites or calendars or burial grounds—they were warnings. And now, it is up to us to decode them and solve the mystery they left behind before all that remains of our memory is a hollow shell floating through space. That is what I’ve dedicated my life’s work toward and if you’re in this class, that is what you will immerse yourself in for the next four to five months.”

# # #

What kind of name is Billie for a girl anyway? All through elementary school, the name had been a source of constant teasing. It had made middle school unbearable. So far, high school wasn’t looking much better. And it wasn’t as if she could just go by her middle name. Her parents could have named her Billie Ann or Billie Marie or Billie Kate. Billie Elizabeth doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, although it would have been preferable. No, of all the options on the table, her parents blessed her with the middle name Dodge. Dodge is not a name. It’s a verb—and not even a cool verb. It literally means “to get out of the way.” She was fairly certain they had chosen her name on a bet. But, one way or another, she was stuck with it. Billie Dodge Parker. She sounded like a serial killer. Or an eighties rock star. Or a car dealership. It was inhumane.

There was always something slightly depressing about this time of year for Billie Dodge Parker. The start of school. The inevitable end of summer. It wasn’t as if she did much of anything during the summer anyway. Perhaps that was what bothered her—the feeling of missed opportunity passing her by. But that was life in Vista West, a small town just outside Casper, Wyoming. Ironically, once she got past the first month or so of the schoolyear, autumn was actually her favorite season. But the second week of August—that was hell.

Though she pretended she didn’t care, somewhere inside she had long yearned for the normalcy of family camping trips and meals at the dinner table and a Friday night movie and whatever else regular families were supposed to do, but it was hopeless dreaming. Her father worked between sixty and seventy hours a week at a meat packing plant and could still barely make rent. When he came home, it was straight to the bottle. Billie was painfully aware he was far from perfect, but at least he was there. Her mother left them when she was in second grade and was now God knows where. Her grandma Celeste wouldn’t even speak her mother’s name anymore; she just referred to her as “that slut.” Billie didn’t blame her. She’d even caught herself saying it from time to time; though, if her father ever heard her, he was sure to cuss her out for it.

Billie had made something of a second home of her grandma Celeste’s house. Since her dad worked late hours, most days she’d bike there after school, her red hair flowing out from beneath the stupid helmet her dad insisted she wear. In a lot of ways, it was Billie’s grandma who could take credit for raising her. At first glance, Celeste looked like the classic image of a grandmother; but a rose tattoo on her right shoulder that typically went concealed was a hint of the fiery spirit that lay beneath her unassuming, sweet exterior. As every good grandma must, she had a cookie jar, and would offer Billie to take from it whenever she came over. To Billie, it seemed sometimes like her grandma treated her as though she were still a small child; but she was alright with it. Celeste lived in a two bed, one bath home built in the fifties a few blocks from the school. It was small and dated, but nice enough. She still owned the old family farm property she grew up on, but no one had lived there since the family Celeste’s elderly mother rented it to moved out in the early nineties. Now the windows were boarded shut. Billie’s uncle had long pressured her grandma to sell the property to developers, but most of the structures on the property were built by hand by Celeste’s father and she couldn’t bring herself to see a bulldozer raze them, even if nature was already taking its course with the buildings. Billie was alright with her grandma’s decision. She, too, had fond memories playing in those fields when she was younger and life was simpler. For all the frills of money, there’s something to be said of sentiment. Sometimes, Billie would just sit out there under the shade of an old oak tree and watch the sun set as the breeze moved through the field. It was calm. It was quiet. It was serene. Her problems—whatever they might be on that given day—could not find her here.

Her bicycle leaned against the oak tree, Billie sat in the grass. The first week of the new school year was behind her. She had homework, of course, but she would worry about that another time. Her teachers had been asked by the district to do what they could to get her school’s grades up so they had been pretty lenient with late homework over the past year or so anyway.

It was then, as she sat under the oak tree, that she noticed something unusual: what appeared to be a black spot roughly the size of a baseball in the grass only a few feet away. Immediately, she rolled to her knees and shuffled over to the black spot. At first, she suspected it was the work of some sort of grubworm. But upon closer inspection, she ruled out that possibility. The black spot was not raised out of the ground; but instead, appeared almost slightly depressed. She grabbed a nearby twig and poked the black spot. The surface had something of a crispiness to it; but once she had broken through, the inside was softer—almost gooey. She pushed the twig deeper, but once she was about an inch in, she hit dirt.

Billie pulled out the twig, grabbed her phone, and snapped a picture. She quickly texted it to her friend Caleb along with three question marks. He was into all kinds of weirds stuff like this; if anyone would know what the black spot was, it would be him. Billie put her phone in her pocket and hopped on her bike. The sun was getting low and she wasn’t supposed to bike at night. Her dad would be home soon; and she needed to beat him there.

# # #

Dr. Kline closed the door to his updated, seventies-era, oceanside condo and flicked on the lights. He set his keys in a dish by the door, strolled into the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of sherry. After a sip, he carried the glass to the living room, intending to sit down for an hour or so of reading before his wife arrived home from work. But as he entered the room, Dr. Kline noticed a figure in the dark, sitting in his preferred reading chair. The professor froze in place. With the pull of a chain, the lamp next to the chair lit, illuminating the highly-decorated military uniform worn by the stoic intruder.

“Good evening, Dr. Kline,” the man in the chair greeted.

“What are you doing in my home?” Dr. Kline muttered, almost too low to make out.

“Doctorate in astrophysics from Columbia University, master’s in archeoastronomy from Cambridge, almost twenty years as a research fellow at MIT. You’ve had quite the career, Robert,” the intruder remarked. “So what are you doing teaching? You clearly have a passion—and, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe it’s grading term papers.”

Dr. Kline mulled the question for a moment before answering, “I love explaining the things I care about most to the next generation. Taking the knowledge I’ve collected and imparting it to those kids is one of the greatest gifts I can offer to our society.”

“There’s no need to lie here, Robert,” the man in the chair replied with a shake of his head. “The truth is you’ve been rejected at every turn.”

Dr. Kline hung his head and tapped his finger on the condensating sherry glass in his hand.

“I’ve seen the application letters,” the man in the chair continued. “I’ve seen the research proposals. I’ve read the query letters for four or five books. You are here because no one will listen.”

“It’s a little more complicated than—”

“They’ve told you you’re crazy,” the man in the chair interrupted, his voice raising in intensity with each sentence. “They’ve told you to stay quiet. They’ve told you to let it go. They’ve told you you don’t belong in their halls of academia because what you’re pursuing is some kind of pseudo-science not worthy of such intelligent minds. That’s why you’ve been rejected! That’s why you’ve been ostracized! That’s why you’ve been defunded! That’s why you’re teaching to a room full of kids who work at Taco Bell instead of leading a research team of qualified professionals to answer the questions you’ve been asking your entire life!”

“What do you want?” Dr. Kline asked with a tinge of resentment.

The man in the chair stood, towering over the professor, and looked him dead in the eye.

“I want your help—no, I need your help,” he explained. “The world needs your help.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Hernandez. I am here on behalf of the Department of Defense to recruit you to assist with a matter of preventing significant global catastrophe. Dr. Kline, this is not the sort of thing you can say no to. The success of our endeavor may very well hinge on your cooperation. So, what do you say, Dr. Kline, will you come help me save the world?”

# # #

“What did it feel like?” Caleb asked as he followed Billie across the farm property to the place where she had seen the black spot one day prior.

Billie brushed her breeze-tossed red hair out of her face and shrugged.

“I don’t know, it was squishy—but the top was kind of hard.”

Caleb wrinkled his nose.

“And you’re sure it’s not just mud?”

“For the hundredth time, it’s not mud, okay?!” Billie exclaimed, exacerbated.

Caleb threw up his hands.

“Okay, alright, it’s nothing to get upset about,” he replied calmly. “Just saying—it sounds like mud.”

“You saw the picture I sent, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well? Didn’t it look weird?”

Caleb cast his eyes to his feet and shook his head.

“I mean, sure…” he agreed half-heartedly.

After a few more steps, Billie stopped and pointed.

“There,” she said. “Now, does that look like mud to you?”

Caleb crouched down and inspected the black spot. It had grown significantly since the night before and was now about the circumference of a basketball.

“No…that’s not mud,” Caleb admitted. He looked up at Billie, “Is this what it looked like last night?”

“Yeah—I mean, mostly. Just, it was smaller,” Billie answered, a little shaken by how serious Caleb’s tone had shifted.

“How much smaller?”

Billie held out her two hands and tried to make a circle with her fingers.

“About like that.”

“So it’s growing…and fast.”

“What do you think it is?” Billie asked.

Caleb stared at the black spot and shook his head.

“I have no idea…”

# # #

Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Hernandez led Dr. Robert Francis Kline through the bowels of the top-secret Dwight D. Eisenhower research facility in Washington, DC. Wherever they went, they were met by teams of researchers dressed in white lab coats scurrying every which way.

“Six months ago, we completed the first successful manned mission to Mars,” Hernandez recounted as they walked.

“I saw the coverage, it was remarkable,” Dr. Kline said.

“What you saw on TV wasn’t the half of it,” Hernandez replied. “While those astronauts were up there, they collected samples—rocks, soil, and well, something else.”

“Something else?”

Upon reaching a sealed door, Hernandez and Dr. Kline stalled.

“Doctor, what awaits us on the other side of this door is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Hernandez cautioned.

Dr. Kline shrugged, “Well, let’s have a look, shall we?”

Hernandez scanned a card and the door opened. They entered the room, passing a number of swarming researchers before there came into view a glass case in the room’s center. Inside the glass case, some sort of black substance was suspended in a vacuum.

“We call it Interitus Omnia—the destroyer of all things,” Hernandez explained. “We know very little about it; but what we can say with some certainty is that it did not originate on Mars. We believe this sample is only a fraction of what is actually out there somewhere in deep space.”

Dr. Kline peered into the glass case.

“What is it?” he muttered.

“What is the opposite of life? Death. What is the opposite of heat? Cold. What is the opposite of light? Darkness. What is the opposite of energy?”

At that question, Dr. Kline’s eyes were peeled away from the alien substance and settled on Hernandez with a look of concern. Hernandez pointed to the glass case.

“This,” the lieutenant colonel continued. “This is the opposite of energy. That is the best we can describe it. Once it comes into contact with any matter, particularly that which contains life, it spreads to it and begins to eat away at it like rust on an old Buick. Once the process has begun, there is no reversing it; and there is no stopping it. It will consume everything it touches as it moves through a world like a cancer until that world can no longer support life. Whatever isn’t killed by Interitus Omnia will die as the planet becomes uninhabitable and will be consumed post-mortem. By our analysis, we have reason to believe that this substance did not come from nature but was concocted perhaps as a weapon or some kind of doomsday device. It was released thousands of years ago on a distant world. It’s possible whoever or whatever unleashed this evil didn’t fully understand how catastrophic it would be. Then again, perhaps whoever it was truly wished to end all life everywhere. Either way, what we found on Mars is only the beginning, and when it starts to spread, it spreads fast. Your theories on ancient civilizations’ knowledge of the demise of other worlds may be the key to whatever slim chance we have at saving ours.”

“You want me to figure out when it will reach earth?” Dr. Kline deduced.

“We’re afraid it may already be here,” Hernandez corrected. “We want your help to figure out how to stop it.”