Noumenon Infinity Read online

  Its stark color and glow gave it a phantom quality, as though it couldn’t truly interact with the world, just exist within it, like a ghost.

  Drifting steadily, as though on a conveyer belt, it took the open doors for the invitation they were.

  Tan only hoped he wasn’t inviting a wolf into the house.

  “Okay, Mrs. Tan?” her ob-gyn asked. She held her patient’s hand and rubbed the top of her spine while monitoring the intravenous line that sent an anesthetic to Mrs. Tan’s lower half.

  “Yes,” Ming-Na said, mouth feeling dry. As the drugs worked their way into her system, the nerves below her belly button went numb, but not dark. Now, her body felt heavy. A different sort of heavy than it had these past few weeks. It was a dead weight on her now. Still. There was no sense of a life within, which stole her breath away.

  A swift sense of claustrophobia—of being confined to her own body—made her skin crawl. She didn’t want to give birth, didn’t want the baby out. She wanted out—to give up her skin and bones and find new ones.

  Relax, relax, relax, she told herself. Be strong, be strong, be strong.

  She looked at the heart rate monitor, which showed two beats, both rapid, both robust.

  There’s life in there. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.

  “Shh, shh,” her doctor said—like she was soothing some animal. Ming-Na squeezed her hand hard, digging her nails into the doctor’s wrist. Her ob-gyn hissed, but did not pull away. Her eyes widened as she caught Ming-Na’s glare, registering that she’d caused offense without, apparently, having even the slightest idea as to what she’d done.

  A contraction came again—a heavy cramping in her uterus. It was less painful this time, but she still felt like parts of her were being stretched and released like a rubber band. There was a downward punch to it, and she thanked every deity she could think of for birthing chairs. If she’d had to fight nature by lying on her back just to make the doctor comfortable, she was sure she would have murdered someone.

  “Your baby’s coming quick,” the doctor said. “Really wants to get out here and greet the world.”

  Ming-Na hated the infantile gibberish but would endure it. She would endure this process and she would endure whatever was outside these walls. She, and Orlando, and their daughter would endure.

  The glowing white orb drifted into the bay. Now that it lingered next to their own shuttles, Tan got a better feel for its size. It looked like it could pop open and consume one of their crafts like one of those plastic toy eggs, but only barely.

  “Close the doors,” Tan ordered, his commanding voice now a whisper. “But don’t repressurize the bay. If there’s anything alive in there, I want them to get the message. We’re tolerating their presence, that’s it.”

  The manager still looked like he wanted to protest, but did as he was told.

  Hopefully closing the bay was the right thing to do. He didn’t know anymore. There was no outline for this—first contact wasn’t even close to a mission parameter. The probe had come to them like a gift, and so they’d enclose it in their hands, accept it. But it also reflected the convoy’s current position—hemmed in on all sides, surrounded by the unknown. The message would be twofold.

  The bay doors weren’t quick. As they pressed in on one another, they left the probe plenty of time to dart away should it or its pilot think twice.

  The orb seemed to pay its slow capture no mind.

  After a few more moments, once the hangar was sealed, the sphere descended to the decking, its touchdown feather light, if indeed it was touching the deck at all.

  “Still vacuum in there?” Tan asked.

  “As you said,” the manager answered.

  “Good.”

  “What do we do now?” Böhm asked.

  “We wait.”

  Wait for what, though? What if it’s a bomb and we pocketed it like a shiny pebble? What if it just wanted an easy way past the hull and starts tearing into Pulse’s insides, hacking us open like an autopsy patient? What if we become guinea pigs? Curiosities?

  What if what if what if what if—

  What if Ming-Na has complications? What if she starts bleeding, and I’m not there to—

  She asked you to be here. She doesn’t want you to wait, she wants you to act.

  “Do these control the bay lights?” Tan asked, pointing at a set of switches.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Assuming they sent that thing here to learn and not to destroy, we need to give them a sign. We need to communicate.”

  “Wait!” Böhm shouted, pointing harshly with his walkie. “Look!”

  A portion of the sphere glided back, a triangular section, which swooped over the surface and around to the opposite hemisphere, to reveal a darkness within.

  After another moment, a long brown appendage tentatively stuck itself out, as though testing the waters.

  “Ready? With the contractions, don’t fight them. And breathe. One, two, three—push!”

  Ming-Na did what her body told her, not what the ob-gyn shouted at her from somewhere about her nether regions.

  Bearing down, she bunched her face, scrunching her nose, clasping her eyes shut. It felt like the pushing halted in her abs. She knew it continued down, but the anesthetic made it seem distant. The nursing gown stuck to her arms and chest, a thin sheen of sweat making her entire body clammy. She couldn’t see between her legs, but she didn’t want to. That would make it harder, make it hurt.

  The contraction stopped and she gasped. A medic barked at her to breathe evenly, but she gulped air instead. Why was childbearing such a war? Why did the doctors act like they were on one side and the mother was on the other with the baby in the middle? They were all supposed to be on the same team.

  A new contraction rolled over the dying flutters of the last. Trying not to bite her tongue, she clenched.

  Something dropped in her belly, like her internal organs sliding lower.

  “She’s crowning,” the ob-gyn said excitedly. “A few more, Mrs. Tan, you can do it.”

  I know I can do it. Women have been doing this since the dawn of time, of course I can do it.

  Another push, another slide.

  She wondered if she should be hearing tiny baby-bleats by now.

  “Keep pushing. Almost there.”

  So close, she thought, speaking to the baby. You’re teetering on the precipice, you just have to sway forward a little. Just a little.

  She imagined it, could see her daughter as a woman—an amalgamation of many beautiful baby pictures she’d perused while pregnant, but grown—with her toes dangling over the side of a cliff, arms outstretched to embrace the wide sky above and a winding river below.

  She realized it was the Xi River—a river she’d loved. Its waters were calm, inviting. Now it was so far away, so real and yet so lost.

  Ming-Na shuddered.

  Her grown daughter swayed, almost falling. She just needed a push, and she could soar.

  “Come on, come on!” encouraged the doctor.

  She bore down again, roaring with the effort.

  In her mind’s eye, the woman looked over her shoulder, smiling at her mother. Ming-Na could see her own hand reaching out—it was old and wrinkled—to settle in the small of her daughter’s back.

  “Fly!” she cried, then shoved.

  The brown, nearly black appendage was swiftly followed by an equally dark body, covered in what looked like a fine sheen of sweat from the way it glittered gently in the bright docking lights. The creature was long and thin, with four limbs of nearly equal length. It stepped sideways out of the capsule, its prominent head roughly as large as its torso.

  Its muscles were evident, clearly flexing beneath its skin as it moved—it wore no pressure suit, and yet did not shy away from the vacuum.

  The head was covered in a helmet or face mask of some kind. The covering seemed to claw into the creature’s head, the flesh buckling around the seam. It created a shining black blankness where Ta
n assumed sensory organs lay. Once free of its ship, the thing touched down lightly on the deck—too lightly, given its apparent mass and the strength of the bay’s gravity. It drifted, like a feather, down onto all fours.

  Tan had to swallow his revulsion. It wasn’t that the thing had any distinctly disgusting qualities about it, but he found its movements deeply disturbing. It had somewhat familiar proportions. Four limbs, a thin neck, a round head (or, at least, the helmet gave the impression of roundness), and no tail. But it had an extra joint in each of its legs, and all four of its limbs terminated in hands, with clasping fingers meant to grasp substrates instead of merely balancing atop them. The strange way it bent, along with a chameleon-like hesitance to its steps, turned Tan’s stomach. The thing was disturbing in a way one finds figures in a horror movie disturbing. There was something familiar to its construction, but unexpected in how the pieces shifted relative to one another. The incongruences between what his instincts told him to expect and what he was looking at sent shivers of repulsion through his insides.

  And the creature was not alone. After it came a new shape, one that looked at first like it wouldn’t fit through the aperture of the craft. This one was spiny and white—white like its shuttle, with an iridescence that sent small flashes of rainbow glittering through the many stiff hairs covering its bulbous form. It walked bipedally, as far as Tan could tell. But, the means of its locomotion were well obscured by the spines; it could have been sporting any number of limbs at its terminus.

  It, too, wore a mask, which looked to grip its small head like a clenching hand. Parts of it wound around the back of its skull, digging into the hairs there in a way that appeared uncomfortable. It followed the other, some small device in hand, which it raised overhead.

  “Ask the bridge to run continuous general diagnostics of the bay,” Tan ordered his aide. “We need to be sure they’re not interfering with the ship’s functionality in any way.”

  “Yessir.”

  The aliens didn’t seem to realize they were being directly observed. They strode around the deck like they were walking on air—only occasionally did they appear to be experiencing the ship’s gravity at its full force, which sent another jolt of disturbia through Tan. He had to turn away from them after a few moments, his inner ear revolting at their apparent disconnect from the ship’s physics.

  “Look, look!” said Böhm after a few minutes. He stared out the window, jaw slack just like the bay manager’s. The two of them didn’t seem to share Tan’s unease, and were instead fixated on the forms with utter fascination. “Something else is coming out of their pod.”

  A thick tough-looking claw clamored against the side of the pod’s doorway, as though searching for a handle it could not find. Eventually a second claw joined it on the opposite side of the door, and the two leveraged the body out.

  At first Tan took it for a hefty, exoskeletoned creature. It had six limbs—all clawed—and walked with all of them, its bisected abdomen slung low in the middle, nearly scraping across the decking. It was the same size as the others, but everything about it moved with a much more mechanical gate, one that still seemed more natural than the other two figures’.

  When one set of its limbs ran across a narrow tract in the body, moving out of alignment with the other four, he realized it was mechanical. Was it a robot, or was there an organic creature inside?

  For a long while, Tan did nothing but watch. The bridge kept pinging Böhm for instructions, at a want for something to do other than monitor the bay’s basic functions (which had not changed). They wanted to signal the creatures.

  “They don’t know we’re here yet,” Tan said. “We wait. I want to see if they become cognizant of our presence on their own. Meanwhile, we need to look for signs of possible hostility.”

  It wasn’t that he didn’t share in the bridge’s eagerness to make contact. The aliens were here, there was no hiding from them, so why not push forward? But he reminded himself that patience was prudence. They could learn a lot simply by observing, by keeping themselves out of the equation for as long as possible.

  “How are they communicating?” the manager asked.

  The three creatures clearly appeared to be conversing with one another, if the synchronization of their movements was anything to go by. But the bridge insisted there were no radio frequencies in use, no communications they could patch into. If their helmets allowed for verbal or visual communication, that was unclear.

  The clawed mechanism wandered over to the bay’s inner doors, clearly noting their function.

  Tan stiffened. The clamps on the ends of its six legs looked like they could do real damage to the interior walls—slice right through the metal if they wanted.

  If it started ripping and those decks were decompressed, they’d need to act quickly to try and detain the creature.

  “Put quarantine measures on standby,” he directed. “We might need fire doors, understand?” His aide gave him a shaky thumbs-up and executed the order.

  The fire doors sported twenty thick centimeters of galvanized steel. Surly that would hold the thing. Surely . . .

  The whole ship seemed to hold its collective breath as the mechanical creature raised one claw. But though it tapped at the bay’s hall entrance, it did not try to force it open.

  They must realize we’re worried about decompression and contamination, Tan thought. Even if they haven’t noted what we are yet.

  Fifteen more minutes passed, then twenty. The three creatures crawled across the surface of each shuttle, pulling at it, jumping up and down on its roof, performing unknown diagnostics.

  Tan’s nervous system slowly grew more accustomed to their movements. The fact that their shifting bothered him at all was curious. Glimpsing a new, strange animal had never bothered him before. He’d watched plenty of documentaries on the oddities of the ocean, land, and air. And none of the most alien-looking Earth life had given him the creeps quite like these three—the long thin one in particular.

  Just as he felt his heart slow and his breath become steady—as he was becoming acclimated to their presence—they surprised him in a new way.

  Once they’d thoroughly explored the bay’s deck, they decided to explore its ceiling.

  They didn’t put on jet packs. They didn’t climb the walls with suction cups or handholds or spider’s web or grappling hooks. They didn’t sprout wings.

  They floated.

  Perfectly in control, they moved seamlessly upward, like balloons escaping a child’s grasp, until they oriented themselves to the new position with ease, their feet all coming to rest soundly on the hangar’s ceiling tiles.

  The three humans in the control booth had no words. They didn’t gasp, or exclaim, or make any other indication that they were shocked by this new development.

  In truth, Tan wasn’t sure he was shocked. Their movements had seemed strange to him all along. Why shouldn’t they be able to defy the pull of gravitons?

  And then, the dark-bodied one pulled up short.

  It had noticed them.

  With a little hop, it left the ceiling and floated once more, flipping over, reorienting itself downward to match the three humans in the booth. As it moved closer, it maintained its elevation, even with the level of the control booth’s windows.

  “Oh my god,” Böhm said, his voice cringing as his whole body recoiled, balling up. He put his feet on the chair’s seat, drawing his knees to his chin.

  “Stay calm,” Tan directed, holding out a steady hand in Böhm’s direction, as though the force of his will could keep his aide tethered safely to the seat. Stay calm, he said again silently, when he felt his pulse quicken and his knees shake.

  Of course, it had to be the one that gave him sickening palpitations. That had to be the alien that came closest.

  It stopped a few feet away from the glass, long flutes on its back—flutes Tan hadn’t noticed until now—fanning out behind it, almost like an air break, except there was no air. It tilted its head
curiously, lolling it first in one direction, then the other, then—to Tan’s disgust—dropping it over, almost one hundred and eighty degrees from its standard resting position.

  On its elbows (elbows—two joints on each limb) were small braces, he noticed. Those and the mostly featureless helmet were the only clear signs of clothing. He couldn’t help it as his eyes roamed its form, trying to determine a sex, as though such a thing would be easy to discern—or even meaningful—on a creature not from Earth.

  After a moment of head-spinning, it inched forward, clearly curious.

  Tan did not draw back, though there was a strange tug at his heart and spine—almost like the invisible tether that bound him to Ming-Na was calling him away. Instead, he pushed right up to the dash, crowding against it, leaning toward the window.

  As the creature came forward, the details of its body came into view. The shine he’d mistaken for a layer of wetness resolved into fine round scales. They were button-sized, and domed, most of them deep black with the brown of epidermis barely a pinprick between them. They looked like they’d be smooth to the touch. The musculature was miraculous, so well defined, each long and taut. Despite his earlier unease, he now wished he could see its face. His mind, thankfully, didn’t impose any sort of fantasy onto the blankness of the helm—he didn’t want any preconceptions coloring his view when they were finally face-to-face.

  It continued forward, now only centimeters away. His previous revulsion was completely overridden by fascination.

  This is an alien, he said to himself, mind finally catching up with the events unfolding before him. This is real. They are real.

  And they are here.

  He leaned farther still and found it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t close enough to the glass, he needed to be as near to this being as possible.

  He hoisted one foot onto the console and the manager let out an irritated “Hey!” but let his protest go no further.

  In contrast, Böhm leapt from his seat, looking to give his captain a boost up.