Secrets of the Antiwave

PART 2 | Chapter 8: The Bridge Appears, Pale at Midnight

People always wondered why I was the only one seen walking in and out of the SMO. Even on the rare occasion that Rutherford decided to appear at a press conference, she always used some alternate exit only known to her. Reporters were perplexed. Surely there must've been a hundred-man team in hiding. How else could we maintain such an enormous building?

In truth, there were only 13 of us, or rather, 13 humans. The vast majority of the SMO's staff was composed of domestic automatons: scuttlebots and hydro-rovers kept the halls polished and clean; eight-armed axle-pillars repaired hard-to-reach wiring, and a latticework of knives, funnels and pipes prepared our cafeteria meals. Xu and Jackson even created a ceiling-rail transport system, for carrying heavy equipment between rooms. But now, without the credits to pay for our two-tome electricity bill, the SMO's corridors were quickly littered with grey-steel corpses, frozen in tasks they would never complete.

Because I was sick of hearing my voice so often, and the team had no interest in politics, our televisions were hardly ever used. Initially we had no idea of what was going on. Naturally, we went to ask Rutherford. But on the day that everything went to hell, she was nowhere to be found. All of her belongings were still neatly arranged in her dorm room, several books were left open on her desk. It was like she'd vanished into thin air.

Eventually, we found out about the Jovian War, the MFC, and the calamity that followed, though we still had no idea as to where Rutherford had gone or why. As far as we knew, she had no relatives and no home outside of the SMO. We had no way of finding her. It even felt like she didn't want to found, there was some sort of unspoken significance in her sudden disappearance, as though it was meant to be.

Prophecy or not, the rest of us were in a very bad way. Rutherford had been the heart of the SMO, and the facility's extremities were already decomposing. We stayed. We continued the project. I mean, what else could we even do? To abandon hope was to abandon everything, most notably, the melodious celestials. After lifetimes of searching, after all the crushing isolation that the space-faring human has ever felt in their lonely, stargazer's heart, we weren't about to let our only chance of contact slip away forever.

Imagine two lovers who had lost each other after a grand and senseless war. Fifty years later, they were alive but not living, lost without their other half. One of them would travel from their faraway home and return to the city of their youth, staying for a single night. The bridge appears, pale at midnight, where summer once lasted forever. And there the loveless-lover would stand, staring down at the river's black-marble waves, desperately expecting the silence of the night to disappear, to fade away, replaced by the presence of their beating heart. If one hoped hard enough, perhaps life would be poetic again?

But after a long while of waiting, the wind would blow a little harder, a little colder, and they'd head back home, brushing past a faceless figure in a trench coat. And several minutes later, the faceless trench-coat would be waiting by the bridge as well, dreaming themselves into fading memories, before the wind reminded them that they were old. No one in the city would hear them sigh, but they would sigh. They would sigh the sigh of Shakespeare's tragedy, the sigh just before an atom bomb explodes, the silent tragedy -- powerful enough to tear apart a soul forever.

We weren't about to let that happen.