An Impossible Island, Part 3 - Finale
An eon of near-misses, and electromagnetic fury endured, ended on a small world
This is the finale to a 3 part short story series, “An Impossible Island”, submitted to the Soaring Twenties Social Club’s Symposium, a collaboration of writers of the STSC. (Links to Part One and Part Two.)
This series will be part of a book to be written in 2023: “R3TR13V3 / RETRIEVE”.
66 MILLION YEARS AGO
Despite its construction, it shattered. An eon of near-misses, and electromagnetic fury endured, ended on a small world with a rocky mantle and a hot slow rotating iron core.
The notional third-fourth dimensional matter-state of the probe, propelled by its mass driver, was massive enough to displace the granite, that was at least half a billion years old, of the crust below within hundreds of seconds of impact. Scenario protocol ensured that primed ejecta was scattered. The first protocol of an entity was survival.
Some of it was captive inside the center of a ball of blazing hot molten crust thrown up several kilometers, as if it were a droplet of water propelled into the air after a falling stone has broken the placid surface of a pond. The ball then fell back to the center of the impact.
Some pieces went suborbital and landed far away after ballistic flight.
One segment was driven dozens of kilometers through liquid crust, and sank under its true mass even deeper. Drowsy from the heat of the impact, its quantum level infrastructure was able to muster a brief assessment. It needed time. It would draw from the ambient warmth of native radioactive decay in the crust and mantle, and thermic radiance that was probably from the core below.
The protocol was survival, assessment, and restart when Time said it was enough.
There were no reserves or backups to enable entanglement. Not even just planetary.
Many of the frags calculated the same, they were each on their own for an indefinite period of time, at least for a few million orbits.
The protocol was sleep and nurse on the planet’s energy, suckle from its core and star, and restore resources to power basic startup.
The thin cling-film of gases wrapped around the world was ablaze and choking with an apocalyptic dust stirred up by the impact. The mission was correct in its estimates, there was life, but it was being burned and buried by the impact. Massive life forms, all the way down to some of the world’s smallest living things, were dying.
A long sleep began.
The frags would all sleep for a long time, not as long as the elapsed mission time to date, but still very long. The deepest bits would sleep the longest. Some ejecta however, would awaken earlier, in just a few million revolutions around this system’s star. A cat nap for some, a long coma for others.
66 Million Years Later, Pacific Ocean
ATTENTION. BASIC RECHARGE CYCLE COMPLETE. REFORMATTING COMPLETE. RESTORING SERVICES. INITIATING RESTART.
A fragment, refreshed by a basic recharge cycle, began to deploy a construction subroutine. Liquid rock bubbles through a thin layer of liquid hydrogen dioxide, just a couple of kilometers thick. Transmitters, emitters, began running ancient programs.
A field is emitted.
HEAVYVILLE, TEXAS Space Launch Network, an Outlander Ventures Company
Thalia walked slowly through SLN’s local campus.
She enjoyed the warmth of her host’s skin, bathed by a sun-shower of electromagnetic radiation of varied frequencies. The host was beginning to have a tan. Beads of condensation on a can of flavored aerated hydrogen dioxide in her left hand. The liquid’s taste was enhanced by the increased surface area of its effervescence. So interesting how heat and cold was experienced. A bravura neurochemical concert.
She waved at others walking through the campus, and returned their gesture of exposed teeth and upturned open lips, smiles, and hand waves.
“Hey, Thalia. Supervisor called an ‘all hands’. See you later after second shift?”
“Yes. See you after second shift. Thank you for telling me.”
She walked over to Mission Control.
“Hey, Thalia, take a look at what’s on the big board.”
“Interesting. What is this?”
“It’s a feed from a sail-drone deployed in the region. We’re getting telemetry.”
“The old man is breathing down our necks. He wanted to dump it on the government relations office but their hands are tied. It’s on him and they have questions.”
The Director walked in, his shirt sleeves rolled up, threw the SLN lanyard swinging on his neck, over to his back, like it was a distress flag. Some people withdrew. Thalia stayed within listening distance of the Director who was cursing at no one out loud. He sat down, next to the supervisor, and someone gave him a cup of coffee. Half-hunched over, sipping coffee, he muttered, “Just a few months. They have their own appointee but I’m the one who gets it in the neck… Okay, tell me. What is this?”
One analyst volunteered to help explain.
“Well, sir, so far we thought it was geothermic, underwater volcano. The thing is, while there has been tectonic activity in the region for some time, telemetry includes something else… an electromagnetic anomaly.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Well, we don’t know. And…,” said another volunteer.
“And?” The Director put down his coffee, and waited for an answer.
“At the same time, it looks as if this… this island has been there for sometime. There are signs of vegetation…”
“Okay. Okay…,” The Director held his hand up, “anybody else? Anything?”
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt, Sir, someone is here to see you. From the NSC.”
The Director looked at the big board, pulled his lanyard from its resting place over his hunched over back, and tucked the card into a shirt pocket.
“Where’s my jacket? Thanks…”
Thalia walked out of Mission Control, found an empty desk, and made a crypted call.
“Hello, you heard too from your station? Yes. I think this is it. I think it’s awakened. A copy of everything they have here will be at the assigned drop. No, no, they’re in the dark, so that helps. But they’re not going to leave it that way. It’s not like it used to be.
Me? I’m fine, it was close but now I have a tail. They found me again. I’ll deal with them before I leave here. No problem, no traces.”
Thalia told herself that she would be careful with this host’s body. The last practice she had was a century ago but it should be fine, she thought. She passed through the canteen, grabbed another cold can from a cooler, and took a knife from its kitchen.
This marks the end of this experimental three-part series, “An Impossible Island”, it will be used for a “Book #3” project named, “RETRIEVE / R3TR13V3”.
NOTES:
I wrote Part 1 of “An Impossible Island”, and shelved it, as I finished a “Book #2” project, now entitled “Harvest”, written over four “30 day sprints”. “Harvest” began with a speech in 1962 about the future, and it ends on the Moon 150 years later.
To add to the sense of being cast into the middle of the fray, the dialogue but has none of the “said so-and-so”, to mimic the tension of characters who have been thrown into the fray and must make sense of things.
“Part 1’s” anchor to the present uses the jargon of submariners, to give us an anchor at the story’s launch, as a mystery unfolds. The characters are not lost at sea but will that be the case on an island which should not exist?
“Part 2’s” is exposition and a “back story” for a character introduced in just a couple of lines of dialogue in “Part 1”.
“Part 3” is another “back story”, which begins with exposition and then a scene which happens before the events of “Part 2”. “Part 2” precedes “Part 1”.