New Worlds Challenge

Chapter 1: Hot Mess. Cold Snap.


Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. What they don’t say is “Everyone can hear a scream in a spacesuit.” Unless you’re at the Emu, where they say it a whole bunch. Mostly in the final minutes before a leap, but also pretty regularly throughout orientation and training. Sometimes this refrain came with a nakedly intimidating eyeball-to-eyeball stare-down, other times with a smirk and a knowing look at a co-worker. Either way, whatever impact this threat or mantra or “in joke” was meant to have on Oslo, it had been utterly worn away through repetition, even to his overly-sensitive emotional radar. If it was anything to actually worry about, he reasoned, they would have covered it in the training. And they hadn’t, so…. just one more thing to add to the list of social exclusions he’ll eventually recall with a spasm some random sleepless night in the future. “Fuhgeddaboudit!” said Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco, (1997, Director Mike Newell, for Sony Pictures, Run Time 127 minutes). And so he did.

Which is why, when the neon green counter hit zero and Oslo leaped for the first time, he screamed in a way that scared him almost as much as the experience itself; a sound that was somewhere between an opera-singer warming up, a horny bullfrog and a man gargling custard. If you struggle to imagine those sounds being strung together, it’s probably because you’ve never been sub-atomically phased across 1,800 light-years of space in less than a second. This is quite likely, as before Oslo, only a handful of civilians ever had. Even the military tally was a fraction of the combined forces now sequestered at the Emil Mancer Universal facility. The actual leap is near instantaneous, the act of crossing folded space not being too dissimilar to stepping through a doorway, if you ignore the mind-melting amount of energy, technology and precision it takes to make it happen. But it takes the human brain a good 20-30 seconds to process the event, every second of which is usually spent screaming, writhing and evacuating your bowels at the ingress station.

“Every. God. Damn. Time!” punctuated Larris, hammering percussively on his console with one hand as he held his headset at arm’s length with the other, his shoulder instinctively hunched against the ear that was now ringing painfully. He cast a quick eye around the control suite, spotting a few others who hadn’t been quick enough on the draw, fingers crammed into tender ear canals, but didn’t feel any better for the company.

“And yet, he never learns.” drawled Hetty with undisguised condescension, stooping to lift her own headset off the top of the console, where she’d left it in plenty of time to avoid a similar fate, but keeping her eyes fixed on the electrochromic glass partition that spanned almost the whole length of the suite. Nobody liked Hetty. Nobody had ever liked Hetty. Maybe it was her oddly-shaped nostrils that meant you couldn’t help but see up her nose at all times, or the way she always looked at everyone with permanently-raised eyebrows, as if daring you to speak. Or maybe it was her zero-filter way of talking, as if she were narrating everything that was happening around her, and to hell with anyone who didn’t like what they heard. Whatever it was, anyone who met her, even for the first time, even after only 5 minutes, just instinctively wanted to say “Oh shut up Hetty!”

“Oh shut up Hetty!” spat Larris, almost before she’d finished speaking, betraying just how regularly he’d succumbed to that instinct. “Some of us have to actually DO something around here! Standing there with your clipboard like the Queen of Shiva.”

“It’s ‘Queen of Sheba’ you cretin.” muttered Hetty absent-mindedly. “Shiva is a Hindu god…”

“Shut UP Hetty!” the Chief Engineer cut her off, half-turning in his swivel-chair for effect, but not wanting to actually look at her and her ever-moist nostrils if he could avoid it. The erstwhile NASA Flight Director ignored him as she reached around his shoulder to flick a switch on one of the panels, wrenching her eyes away from the partition just long enough to register a reading before returning to glare at the glass, its uniformly dark grey face showing nothing but a diffuse, shadowy reflection of the team of specialists around her.

On the other side, still hidden from everyone’s view, was a chasmic hanger. Despite there being over a thousand spotlights spread around the improbably large space, there were still large pits of darkness in some areas, construction beams and venting and wads of inch-thick cabling disappearing into them like black holes frozen in time. Much of the ceiling, as high as the Eiffel Tower is tall, was unlit, with only the odd section glowing faintly in the dull red of its emergency beacons. It gave the whole place an eerie feeling of being incomplete and fragmented, like a bombed-out cathedral, open to a starless night sky. At the very centre of this monstrous cavern, suspended in a messy web of steel ropes and spars, and dwarfed by the environment, despite actually being the size of a small house, hung a framework box. Not much more than a re-enforced platform, cubed and cross-supported for structural integrity, it seemed a ridiculously simple construct for the role it played in such an eye-wateringly advanced scientific marvel. But despite a no-doubt equally eye-watering price tag, it essentially acted as a giant baseball mitt for the pod, which just moments ago had blipped into existence. Accompanying this arrival was a display of light so furious, so assailing, that no human had ever been able to look at it, nor equipment record it, other than in spectrographic approximations. But if it were possible to watch it, to witness it actually happening, you’d see something so brief that it registered only as a memory, leaving an impression of an all-consuming intense white flare with ribbons of rainbow-coloured plasma thrown outwards in all directions, every inch of the floor, walls, ceiling and contents of that immense expanse now fully revealed in blisteringly stark relief. Shortly after the visuals you would get hit by the mother of all sonic booms. Imagine the pressure change you’d get descending to the deepest void of the ocean floor and back in the blink of an eye. “A little bit like a camera flash, and a little bit like standing in the eye of a nuclear explosion.” one quote had read, when news of the first successful leaps had finally been released to the media. It didn’t do the event justice by a long stretch.

With something so incredibly powerful happening, you’d expect everything to get cooked, with beams glowing red hot, cascades of sparks pouring from the ceiling, the floor molten. But actually what happens is the complete reverse. In that split-second of contact with the launch facility back on Earth, housed in a twin of the gargantuan hanger, across a barely-conceivable distance in space, the ambient temperature is instantly reduced to around minus 455 Fahrenheit. As close to absolute zero as you can physically get. As Larris and Hetty began running the many, MANY diagnostic routines in their temperature-balanced control room, everything back in the hangar fizzed and crackled and screeched terrifyingly as the intense cold ripped through the facility. Huge billows of mist materialised out of nowhere and rolled lazily around each other in the void. Every piece of scaffold was infested with countless tiny, jagged blue and white ice crystals, still forming and expanding out wards from the centre point. Blast-marks were mapped in thick frost across every flat surface, and the echoing reverberations of the boom still hammered on the invisible ceiling, now lost in the fog and the dark.

One thing you wouldn’t have heard is screaming. At least, not out there in the hangar. Even if you’d been standing right there on that suspended platform, and pressed your ear to the ice-encrusted pod that had appeared at its centre a moment before, now nestled, slightly askew, in a dense, dirty orange-brown lump of expanding foam, you’d have heard nothing from inside the capsule. Outside a choir of pings and twangs were the only sound, as the surrounding equipment struggled to recover from the cataclysmic cold shock. But if you’d looked through the ice, through the thick, lensed glass of the pod hatch, through the window of the egg-shaped helmet beyond that, just underneath the black-out visor that covered the occupant’s eyes, you’d have seen a mouth gaping wide, tongue rippling, lips trembling, throat red-raw and stretched to breaking point, noiselessly screaming, like the very soul was being sucked from his insides. “Poor bastard.”, you’d whisper. “How the hell d’you end up here?”.

-****-

“How the hell did I end up here?” Oslo had whispered, 1 month (3 days, 9 hours, 54 minutes) earlier, standing in the wings of the Millennium Dome, (Greenwich Peninsula, London, England, Planet Earth, Population: 7.753 billion), tugging over and over on his shirt sleeves, and jutting his chin against the collar and tie that clutched at his throat. Philosophically…maybe even existentially speaking, this question might have had some merit, at some point. Why am I here? Why do I do what I do? If I had my time over again….etc etc. We can all waste our time coming up with answers to that kind of bullshit. An over-sized glass of red and a far-away stare, sifting through years of doubts and regrets and stupidities for nuggets of enlightenment. Zero chance of success, but it’s a process, Oslo supposed: a very ‘human’ thing. But this was not one those moments, and for Oslo, the question “How the hell did I end up here?” was as rhetorical and pointless as it could possibly be. He knew exactly how he got here. He knew in explicit detail every decision he’d made that had led him to this point, from the time he’d squinted in curiosity at the full-page announcement in his monthly magazine to now. He could recount every conversation he’d had, with himself or any other, as he’d ruminated and debated, imagined and planned and eventually plunged. He could map every movement he’d made from his fixer-upper on Jubilee Street (Tower Hamlets, London East 1, nearest tube stops Whitechapel and Stepney Green, sold as seen), to his shared warehouse studio (4.2 kilometers south-east as the crow flies, rent due in 19 days, check all windows before leaving) to the sticky black squares of the Dome’s mobile staging he stood on right now (R. Finlay Hire Co. Call 0333 81 33 77 for a free quote).

Oslo stared out onto the stage, watching the three stately, satin-gowned women glowing in the stage-lighting, hands clasped across their waists, two with fixed smiles projecting out to an audience beyond his line of sight, one delivering a well-rehearsed script: all with eyes slightly screwed against the merciless beams of the follow-spots. A change on the giant screen behind the presenters drew his attention, as it switched from the now omni-present Kepler:Futures logo to a giant photo of his face.

“Oh God…Jesus…” he panicked, physically recoiling from the sight of his blatantly forced smile magnified to the size of a bus for the scrutiny of the 12,000 people now seated in the auditorium, and millions...no, billions more watching at home. One more thing to add to the nightmare vault. Because that’s the thing with a photographic memory; people think it’s all about acing exams, remembering people’s birthdays or counting cards in Vegas. But they don’t think about what it’s like to live with it. It's a condition! After the party tricks are done, and it’s just you alone in bed, with every guilt-ridden moment, every awkward silence, every foot-in-mouth blunder filed away in your mental Roladex popping up one after the other in excruciating detail, for no goddamn reason whatsoever, it’s absolute hell! Of course his mother had sold it to him as a ‘superpower’ when he was a kid. But that fallacy hadn’t lasted much past his 7th birthday, when the jealousy and name-calling had begun in earnest.

“But let’s hear more about that from someone who knows a lot more about art than I do! Ladies & Gentlemen…” the gala hostess' voice took on a rapturous tone.

“Oh Jesus God fuuuuu…..” Oslo drilled his thumb into the palm of his other hand as waves of fear and desperation washed over him relentlessly, and sweat trickled down his face and back.

“Please would you put your hands together…”

Oslo pulled a few final sips of water from the complimentary bottle he’d been handed by the stage exec minutes before, though it did absolutely nothing to stop the dry ache in his throat.

“..for Kepler Prime’s newest addition, and the Tate Modern’s much-celebrated resident artist back here on Earth, the wonderful Mr Oslo Crockett!”

Oslo’s feet surprised him as they instantly took their first few paces towards the podium that had just been vacated for him, but the roar from the crowd was so sudden and overwhelming it actually froze the newly-famous artist in place for a few moments, and it took a smile and a gesture and a firm hand on his back from the stage hand to regain his momentum. He’d never heard such a terrifying sound in his life, and hoped he never would again.

-****-

As the sound of his own screaming filled the inside of his helmet, it was the sheer claustrophobia of it that traumatised him the most. The actual noises he was making were so alien that his brain dissociated from them entirely after a few seconds. But whatever pain and discomfort Larris was cursing about in the control room several football-pitches’ distance away on the north wall of the building, he’d seemingly forgotten what it was like to be pod fodder. Pressed into a custom-made gel-filled form that fitted snuggly against every discernible part of his body, and then clam-shelled into the transport mount, the sensation was nothing short of being buried alive. Having your head in a separate, detachable helmet did nothing to allay the trapped-animal instincts that even the most highly-trained fought to control, and when you screamed, the sound was projected into the centre of your skull in temple-splitting stereo.

Regaining consciousness was what triggered Oslo’s opera singer impersonation, as his body tried impotently to flail it’s way out of the gazillion dollar techno-coffin he’d woken up in. The way everybody’s body does. But it was what happened next, the bullfrog phase, if you recall, that set him apart from every single human being that had made the fantastic journey across the known universe from Earth to Kepler 452b up until now. Greater minds, and certainly greater bodies had passed through the Fold. Everyone had their own story, their own description of the experience, some beautifully descriptive, some dogmatically predictable, the ‘closer to God’ lot, and some unapologetically short on specifics, preferring to keep the secrets the ordeal exposed to themselves. But it was always an interpretation. No-one could actually tell you what they saw as it happened. No-one could tell you where they were, or what exists in that fraction of an instant when you are neither on Earth nor its cousin exoplanet. Just as dreams immediately start to fade upon awakening, so the bombshell of raw interaction with the cosmos was so overpowering, so complex, that all anyone could do was tell you what they felt like after it was over.

But Oslo was different. Oslo could remember: remember it all. He knew he couldn’t process it, and like his childhood hero Johnny Mnemonic (1995, Director Robert Longo for Tristar Pictures, Run Time: 96 minutes, Notables: Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, Ice T) he spent days recovering from the record-breaking ‘download’ of information, regularly losing consciousness, or being overwhelmed with vertigo-like symptoms, to the enormous concern of the rest of the crew. In the periods of time he was awake and functional, Oslo wandered the orientation lab in a daze, splintered visions projected onto the plain blue-grey walls of the medical unit, and incoherent, unidentifiable noises mixed with a raging tinnitus that smothered the voices of anyone trying to talk to him, reducing everything into unintelligible mumblings. He’d tell them, eventually, what he saw. It was all there, to be reviewed, to be unpacked, explored, understood. Once he regained his strength and composure. And if he felt like it. But there was something that kept him awake, despite his persistent exhaustion, something that made Oslo feel like even now, nearly a week after he was pulled limp and shivering from the pod, a part of his mind was still screaming. It wasn’t what he saw that scared him.

It was knowing that something had seen him.