An Impossible Island, Part 2
On a long enough timeline almost everything happens
This is a continuation of a story, “An Impossible Island, Pt.1”, submitted to the Soaring Twenties Social Club’s Symposium, a collaboration of writers of the STSC.
The probe was on a scheduled sweep through the quadrant.
It pierced the veil of solar wind between the stellar system ahead and the surrounding void and began to listen. Silence, for now.
It continued onwards.
The outer gas giants were promising, they had bodies in orbit with sufficient mass gravity, crusts, and raw materials to spark life. Maybe.
The real prize was won by lucky worlds close enough to bathe in warm starlight.
One red world looked promising but its magnetic field was weak. The last probe passing through noted an ancient collision sheered off part of that world and disrupted its magnetic cloak. So, the sun went from warming up to wearing down its atmosphere. Perhaps underground there was life but it would require a separate study.
It was time to press on because gravimetrics revealed another world with a sizable moon. Spectroscopes showed much, hydrogen oxide, and organics. Life?
The randomness of the cosmos was overwhelming.
Even the probe in its maturity detected awe within its own loops.
But the randomness of the cosmos spilled over into the probe, when its drive had drawn in a stray particle, despite its makers care and precision, time tested over eons of building. These things happen from time to time.
On a long enough timeline almost everything happens.
Its mass driver caused a tiny twitch in spacetime straight to the sun, a flicker.
The particle was a cousin of those that sliced through worlds like light through air.
An impossible neutrino.
It crossed through a connection.
The connection did not have a correction.
The correction led to an overload and bad loop.
It was on approach and didn’t realize what was happening
The driver was massive, displacing the equivalent of 1 trillion metric tons.
By the time ancient countermeasures ran it was too late, orbiting became crashing.
It blazed through the thick air that it would have approved on a survey had it survived.
The probe smashed like a fist into a mound of loose sand with the force of alien gods.
It turned out that there was life, in its last moments of consciousness, it set a failsafe.
Through the maelstrom some of the ejecta were hardened components on deep sleep.
The destruction it left behind was massive, there was indeed life on this world, it would have been recorded into the survey, that will have to be the failsafe, maybe enough of the probe will survive the impact to reactivate to continue its work.
66 million years later
There was an island which rose from the waters. It began to emit a field.
NEW YORK CITY, FIELD OFFICE, UNDISCLOSED SERVICES
LOCAL TIME: ZERO-ZERO HOURS
The footage was stunning. Classified.
A Navy saildrone on routine stealth patrol encountered it first.
Rumors of an island that came out of nowhere were obscured by a campaign of misdirection. Influencers were recruited to create the cover of a marketing hoax.
The powers that be each deployed teams to explore.
Before it appeared, the world was already tense. Things were getting contentious in crowded waters with so many sharp elbows between powers-that-be. It trickled down to odd events and unreported crimes. Incident rooms were filling with strange cases.
Someone in a uniform walked out of one of those rooms with a senior agent.
The agent said something to the uniform, “The Director’s going through backchannel to have CINCPAC divert them for supplies and then debrief her skipper.” The uniform’s face was trained for facelessness. He just nodded and left.
As the someone in uniform headed to the elevators, the senior agent walked over with a file in hand, to the analyst.
“We’ve more on the unsub. Looks like a contractor for Outland Ventures, a corporation with a variety of interests under investigation. Including what’s going on out there. Here’s the jacket.”
The agent handed over the file to the analyst, and gestured at the operations room’s screens, including satellite footage of an island.
“The Director wants you to go. You stuck your neck out for this, message received. You’re going.” The analyst opened the cover of the ‘jacket’, waved an open palm over it and pointed towards a screen on the wall. A submarine, designation SSN ETERNAL.
“It’s operating in the Pacific. You’re going to join the crew of the Eternal as our eyes and ears, as a gearhead. Not too many hours on the firing range, I see. We’ll have to see what we can do before you go. The unsub is on that boat.”
“I’m, I’m good with machines.”
“That’s perfect for the assignment. You’ll be a ‘techie’ on that boat’s ‘A Gang’…”
“A-Gang?”
“The unsung heroes on these boats, they keep them running. Your rating will also give you access to the Nukers, the engineers. You keep your head down as you work, and wait for the word. Play dumb, and it looks like you can do that, so that’s something.”
The analyst looked lost. The agent took in a slow breath, held it, and exhaled.
“You’re going to that thing in the middle of nowhere,” The agent stabbed the air with a finger, and pointed at the island on the screen, “because that’s where the unsub is going. And meanwhile all of this is happening. This can’t be a coincidence.”
To Be Continued
NOTES:
AI Lexica art prompt
cyberpunk ocean by vladimir volegov and alexander averin and peder mørk mønsted and adrian smith and raphael lacoste
This entry began with one word, “Beach”.
I have been writing “future” pieces but fiction, and in particular, science fiction, has become a part of my life’s journey these past 2 years. (Details in earlier posts, like this one on my home-made “antirules” of writing.)
The inspiration for this story, was one of the most haunting fiction novels of the cold war, “On The Beach”. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel about the last surviving submarine crew spending time at the last surviving outpost of humanity.
I wrote Part 1 of “An Impossible Island”, and shelved it, as I worked to finish a “Book #2” project, now entitled “Harvest”, written over four “30 day sprints”. “Harvest” began as a speech in 1962 about the future, and it ends on the Moon 150 years later.
I’m down to the final 4+ chapters of “Harvest” I must edit and release it into the wild.