The Drift
Cora stood still at the edge of the shoreline and watched the sol set for the 827th time. A crust of muck covered the edge of her boots, occasionally washed off by the acidic sea water that now seemed to cross the boundary ordained by the tidal cycles with more belligerence than she expected. She moved a step back, and watched a deep imprint of her standard issue all terrain boots on the ground emerge. As she watched, tiny black dots started to emerge from the cracks, eventually turning into a swarm that now completely covered the imprints. In about 35 ticks, the black dots started fading, or was it the ground itself? Either way, she watched in amusement, how yet again, this strange swarm erased her footprints, reverting the spot back to its greenish-brown form, now a bit darker than before, thanks to the dusk. She lifted her eyes to the brilliant deep blue — almost purple — atmosphere, and the sol, a white dwarf — now quite blue — on its way out for the day. She shook her head and realized she was getting late for her walk back to the station. One last look at her feet, and in anticipation of the inevitable swarm, she turned back.
The beacon glowed silent, a warm yellow in the thick darkness, now almost impenetrable, save the narrow wedge cut open by her head mount, bobbing and weaving its way through the knee high morass. Cob, her recon drone, whizzed over her head, syncing her current coordinates with the orbiter, and mapping out the path ahead in as much details as allowed by her HUD. She had no worries as long as the sky remains free from those notorious bulbous clouds. She smirked as she vaguely remembered something that Nered had once told her, back in Tyrol 17, about how Humans had penetrated the far flung corners of the galaxy and beyond, but hadn’t been able to fight the usual troubles of an attenuated signal. It was almost like how the Gen1 had preserved the signals from the earliest Voyager crafts, encoded with algorithms that were light years ahead of the actual message.
“LREP Bravo, calling Lurker3, calling Lurker3, you’re drifting. Please synchronize. Over.”
The crackle startled her back from reminiscences of gilded gravity-tuned corridors and warm soups, smack right in the middle of potential trouble. A quick look at her HUD and a moment’s physical orientation later, Cora realized something really was wrong. Cob looked alright, still hovering with that familiar buzz above her. Her narrow band pathfinder showed a clear cut path through the dense vegetation, and it looked alright. She turned on the wide beam, and then it struck. She had crossed the morass and now stood on solid ground. This clearly could not be possible. At the edge of the inlet, where the muck dried out to solid ground, her exosuit would’ve alerted her to orient her profile. The traction would’ve changed almost instantly. Her counterweights would’ve shifted to a lower rev. Clearly, none of that happened. Her perplexed face glowed light orange in the middle of a terrain that was not on her map.
“LREP Bravo come in, this is Lurker3. There seems to be a recon error. Coordinates visible, no updated route map in sight. Please advise. Over.”
Cora knew the standard protocol well, and did what she was supposed to. She logged out of the loitering profile when her brief stay at the shore ended, and had synced all the way to Levinson springs. That’s when she had started reminiscing.
“Damn it!”
Cora cursed in a hushed voice, lest the command overhears. They haven’t responded yet. She tried again. A strangle crackle and nothing more. The garbled message could mean only one thing. She looked up, and sure enough, a swarming mass of bulbous clouds was closing in quite rapidly on the clear field of stars. Was that Nered’s chuckle she heard? She must be dreaming things. Commander Dror had warned them before their descent, to always make sure the profiles are synced with their immediate thoughts. The firmware updates were almost 89 days away, and till then, they had to do with the usual wait-breathe-sync cycle. Subtle hormonal variations, changes in tactile senses, fluctuations in the neural cycles, all of these had to be manually synchronized to the hub. Ignoring the protocol could allow profiles to wash over into each other, and even potentially sever the data link between the orbiter and the individual. Even the command logs would be useless, garbled by the fail-safe mechanism to prevent leakage. Cora shuddered. She should’ve stopped and synchronized when she resumed patrol. Was her data link severed? She cursed, louder this time. She was already in a lot of trouble, and command would’ve answered her in clear English, not in garbled noise, had they really heard her. They didn’t. Or did they? She looked around. Her eyes were supposed to dark adapt. But it suddenly seems so much darker. She couldn’t even spot the brown-white rocky ground. And then, a drop of rain fell on her helmet.
Cora panicked and in her fit to run, stumbled over a jagged line of rocks, tumbled and dropped to the ground with a thud. Breathing quick and heavy, she tried propping herself up with the suit’s assist. Nothing happened. Not a whir of the motors, no vibration in her knee pads. The suit now lay like a coffin on the ground, as she stared at the dangerously close rocky ground illuminated by her helmet’s glow, and tried in vain to rise against the gravity and now steadily growing rain. Beads of sweat now mixed with droplets of tears, Cora cried helplessly in the corrosive rain. Soon, the outer layers would start developing micro tears, and patches of the carbon-fiber would peel off. Gradually, in a matter of hours at most, the rain would find its way into her hazmat suit, and then into her body. As thoughts of impending death loitered around her body in the rain and thunder, she suddenly heard a strange piercing sound, followed by a crash and a muffled explosion around 60 feet from her. Cob had crashed and burnt. Through her tears and the foggy HUD, she tried gazing up, straining her neck, trying to locate the crash site. A faint purple glow flickered somewhere in the shrubby forest to her east. “Shouldn’t be very far, only if I could get this damn suit up from at least my knees”, she thought. She was growing weary from the effort, and desperately wished for the crackle to turn into the familiar voice of Lea from the command center. Perhaps they’d already deployed one of the M.A.R.S Drones docked into the bay. Marion systems had docked here 22 days back, now in their 6th drill run off the Locker bank approximately 40 miles east from her location. Their drones have been plying in and out twice daily to and from the station out into the offshore site. Cora could dial up Mark from her unsecured line. He should be just finishing his duty for the night by now, Cora thought. She remembered how he had chalked out a plan for a trip inland in one of their pods. They’d been planning to reach Mons Eridanus and explore the area. Mark had initiated a proposal for a research pod, and had placed Cora, Rupert and Gronn on the team, as recce and support crew. A risky play, which could threaten Mark’s job and even his life in the tribunal, if this trick had been discovered. But that’s just classic Mark. Always up for some shenanigan, some extra adventure. Wouldn’t he find her if she called him?
Cora shuddered back into senses when her systems glowed red, indicating a drift from her profile. Her cortisol levels were spiking, growing rapidly as she realized she’d done it again. A second desync would almost surely snap her links. They’d done it back in the workshop, and she remembered when Lea fell off from the simulator mount when her systems failed after the second drift. Even the instructor couldn’t conceal his smile.
Damn it! She’d drifted off again. A beeping alarm now rose to a monotone, rising to a crescendo, masking her desperate howls. She shook, groaned, screamed in agony as she tried lifting her heavy body and her corroding suit against the gravity and rain. Nothing yielded, save her knee pads cracking away from the mount, and some mud from around her arms and feet. Cora went silent. This wasn’t mud.
In her moment of intervention, she felt a strange movement under and around her body. A temporary lightness, a swaying of the shell. Her body was rising, slowly against the rain. The alarm still screamed, but she had tucked it away behind this strange new sense of motion. The red all over her HUD indicated no change in her suit’s status. The motors were burnt out, and the Oxygen pellets were depleting fast. And yet, now she was slowly getting lifted by something or someone beyond her immediate view. The winds had grown stronger, sweeping mud into her visor. And that’s when she spotted the black dots. Swarms of these black dot-like creatures had been descending with the rain, from their incubation sites in the clouds. Streaming across the dense atmosphere into the rocky terrain beneath, engulfing the land in a dark curtain of sorts, these swarms had covered the ground and penetrated deep into its arid, rocky core. The acidic water would erode the rock, creating deep gashes and cracks on the rock, assisted by these swarms that seemed to embed themselves into the ground like a part of their organism. Through time, the ground would come alive, the muddy exterior acting as a shell for the swarms that seemed to protect it in a strange dance of alien symbiosis. In the heightened awareness in her rise, streams of thought weaved themselves into a coherent spread inside Cora’s mind, revealing the apparent truth of what she had been experiencing. The lights flashed completely red, the alarms blared away in maximum intensity, reached a crescendo, and then suddenly, all was silent.
Cora stood up. A calm ran through her body, as if a distant, vaguely familiar rain, from a planet epochs away, had seeped into her skin. A memory, so primitive, that it almost seemed unreal. Scenes and voices crept in like timid yet curious creatures from a dense, dark, unexplored foliage. The darkness of the night didn’t seem intimidating anymore. As if a slowly rising tide of diffuse blue light had dared to cross that borderline, creeping in through the inlets, crossing the morass and finding fresh ground, inundating her cold, distant mind with warm, acidic sea. Cora gazed at the iridescent forest ahead. Strange looping limbs spawned needle-like leaves, and a foliage of geometries that seemed vaguely familiar and yet unyielding in their strangeness. Well tread paths opened up into the forest. The ground looked soft and alive. Cora remembered Nered, Jod, Kire and many others back at the Mothership. She didn’t miss them, rather, she felt a moving urge and a tinge of sorrow at not being able to let them see and feel what she did. This eclectic world that had just invited her in, seemed like a home she’d left aeons ago. As if a different face, a different mind, an altogether different person had suddenly slipped into her body from across a wide chasm of time. Or was it the other way around?
Cora turned east, and faced a faded orange sunrise. A wall of receding blue separated a past discarded like soiled clothes from a present basking in a warm, homely sun. She unlatched her knee-pads, her sealed joints, her exosuit — without any trepidation, and took a long, deep breath. A strangely familiar air rushed into her lungs, flooding her cells with a vitality that felt like homecoming. She marvelled at the rising sun, an orb of white dangling in a gradually brightening sky. She stood on a hill, overlooking a wide, curved stretch of beach, lined with greenish-brown vegetation, and the wide open sea. She’d swim across its ripples and waves, dive in and witness the majesty of underwater life in the times to come. Perhaps she’d walk inland, to a vaguely familiar place in the foothills around the volcano, now perhaps overgrown with vegetation and inhabited by wildlife. A sense of conviction swept through her mind. She had to do it. For the ones who had gone, and the ones who will. A belonging, a way to re-live the past. She dropped her suit to the ground, soaking the warmth of the sun with her weary, bluish skin.
Tiny cuts and gashes on her arms and legs, now visible in the light, hurt her still. She held them up against the sun, and her veins stood out like deep blue tributaries cutting through a rigid blue wall. Meandering through her tissues and bones, the capillaries joined, broke off and twisted around in an apparent embrace. Her feet planted in the soft soil, there was no more trepidation or fear of strange lifeforms. She never looked back at her exosuit, now a mangled, corroded heap, a remnant of a familiar, now alienated life. She took a last look at the crashed drone. This radio silence would last for a long, long time. Steady swarms of black dots seeped into the wounds, and sealed them shut, as she spread her limbs and set off downhill to the sea.