Darkness

Ch.8: The End of the Line

~~~Earth. Again.~~~

"What do you mean?" Miller loomed over his colleague, squinting at the screen. Miller was a tall twig of a man who shared his daughter Kathrine's somewhat messy approach to style. His hair was an often uncombed dark brown, and the stubble on his chin was proof he shaved as little as he could get away with. Though he was required by dress code to wear a collared shirt to at least appear professional, his team joked that the day he showed up with it ironed and tucked in would most likely be at his funeral.

"I can't realistically read this any other way," The colleague answered, motioning towards his screen. John, having a last name no one could seem to pronounce properly, was a pudgy man. He wasn't much older than Miller, but he already sported a set of laugh-lines in the corners of his eyes. His sandy hair was also permanently a bit disheveled, but unlike Miller, it was more or less purposeful. Being in active denial of his ever-worsening bald spot, he was months overdue for a haircut, "Something, someone, is on the other side."

The squinting continued for nearly another minute, and a few glances were shared between the group. The air around them had taken on a slight haze. More than a few cigarettes had been lit since the disaster, and the doorless entrance wasn't doing much to air things out. But ventilation was energy they didn't need to waste. Smoking wasn't usually allowed in the room, it was bad for the equipment, but Miller wasn't about to deny his team what little bit of relief they had left. Besides, he figured, either this became the biggest discovery in modern science, in which case they could just replace whatever a few cigarettes had managed to damage, or the company would find itself buried in lawsuits and fines, and a little bit of smoke would be the least of their worries.

"On the other side?" Miller pressed, "You're suggesting that someone else not only has a prototype nearly identical to ours, but that it's somehow...linked to ours?"

John wiped his brow for the tenth time in the past few minutes, "If you have a better way to read this, I'm more than open."

No one did.

"Then maybe it's in error" Dr. Moore suggested, "A fault in sensory data?" Despite the hours of stress, not a wrinkle could be seen on her shirt or black dress pants. Even her loose bun of black hair still seemed oddly immaculate. This was all in sharp contrast to her painted nails, always sporting whatever bright colors or patterns her young girls had chosen. This week was sparkly neon green and blue.

"Roberts, Auster, and Franklin double-checked," John's chair creaked as he turned back to the screen, "Either we're finally losing it, the equipment's bugged, or what we're getting isn't wrong. Though, losing what's left of my mind might be preferable at this point."

"Ok," said Miller, "So someone else has a prototype." Years of keeping secrets apparently didn't pay off. It didn't surprise him that another country would find a way to catch up, he just didn't expect it so soon. "Who's on the other end? Did we unscramble the location?"

"That's the thing," John said, "Everything's working fine, it didn't give us the wrong coordinates."

More unsure looks were passed around in silence.

"Something is on the other end," John reiterated, "And that something is..." Very far. Not on the planet, according to the numbers. Not in the solar system.

In his mind, Miller could imagine the tether, as if it were a thin string stretching from their prototype all the way to the supposed twin prototype, and every person and object who was taken were all tangled up in the thread. It of course didn't really resemble a string, but the metaphor had its uses. Space was a dense forest of background noises, and just like if a long string were to be stretched through a jungle, there could be any number of things that could bump into the line. These small vibrations were easy to ignore. But then the string gets a sharp pluck, or better yet, in true tin-can-telephone fashion, they hear through it, a shout. And, that was something far harder to ignore.