“No, no, no, and furthermore, NO!” Figaro shouted and stamped his limbs on Alix’s shoulder. “The station can’t be empty, dammit! We didn’t come all this way for an empty station!”
“Dude, just look around! The place is a ghost town!” Alix gestured at the surrounding recreational lounge. Nothing but empty chairs, an empty reading nook, and empty tables. They had come across this same emptiness in every room, lab, and office that they’d checked so far since they’d finally made it back to the station.
It was maddening. Figaro was right, he and Alix had made it through being kidnapped by aliens, held captive in their subterranean city, spiraling into madness due to hallucinogenic glowing beetle juice, and traversing an alien forest with almost no tools for several days. Alix liked adventure as much as the next guy or gal, but this was ridiculous. This was supposed to be the part where she got to finally kick her feet up and take a rest, not the part where she had to investigate the mass disappearance of her colleagues.
“We’ve only searched, what, half of the first floor? Maybe everyone’s upstairs!” said Figaro.
“Second floor is mostly private quarters. It’s the middle of the day.” Alix set the Polyminia flower she’d been carrying on a nearby table for the moment. Its purple and blue petals were a stark splash of color against the dull gray of the table and chairs. She’d intended to win Lyle Rathan’s affection with it, but that couldn’t very well happen if he was nowhere to be found.
There were a few dark-tinted windows lining the lounge. Alix could see the trees rustling outside as a breeze passed through. Sitting on one of the beanbag chairs was a remote to the large screen at the front of the lounge. Alix picked it up and switched the screen on.
“This is no time to catch up on your TV, Boss!” Figaro snapped as he leaped down from her shoulder to the table.
“I’m checking what people were last watching. Could be a clue, like if there was some sort of evacuation advisory from Asteria HQ,” said Alix as the screen flashed to blue.
“Oh God, you mean they might have left the planet entirely?” Figaro wailed. “Oh sweet Christmas, they’ve ditched us, left us to rot on Deimos X while they go vacation in Venus!”
“Calm down,” Alix said to him. She fiddled with the remote buttons some more as the screen continued to flash blue, which it was not supposed to do. “If they really did evacuate off the planet for some reason, we can always fix up the comms and send out a distress signal. We won’t be stranded.”
“So you know how to fix and operate the comms system?”
“ . . . I’m sure there’s a manual laying around.” Alix set the remote back down and walked to the screen. She tapped at it aggressively. “Work already!”
“You’re an engineering whiz, alright,” Figaro scoffed. He extended his eye lenses and scanned the room, scurrying around. “Maybe this is a surprise game of hide-n-seek?”
“There we go!” Alix stepped back as the screen stopped flashing blue. Instead of switching to an advisory or station-wide announcement, it simply displayed a random Earthen entertainment channel. The channel was streaming a replay of a recent Zena Starr concert. Neon blue lights swirled around the blonde pop star as the crowd cheered and waved glowsticks in the air.
“Ooh, some clue.” Figaro hurried toward Alix and folded two of his limbs. “What’s this supposed to tell us, that everyone ditched work today to catch a Zena Starr concert?”
“It’s a dead end,” Alix admitted with a sigh. She reached for the remote again, intending to turn the screen off again. Before she could push the off button, Zena Starr’s airy voice and enchanting smile were replaced by a black screen. The same static hiss they’d heard on the intercom played from the screen speakers. For a split second, a single word in grainy white letters flashed on the screen.
RETURN
“What the hell?” Alix said. She and Figaro both stared at the screen, which flashed the word again as a grating, mechanical voice spoke the word from the screen speakers.
RETURN
“That’s the same message I got when the station pinged me back,” said Figaro. “Even the same voice.
“But who sent it? And what does it mean?” Alix asked, eyes still fixed on the screen as the word flashed again.
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
“What, you think I know?” Figaro threw half his limbs up in a helpless gesture. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
RETURN
Alix quickly pressed the off button and turned the screen off again, banishing the repeating word. “That’s enough of that.”
“I think I’ve got the heebie-jeebies,” Figaro said with a shiver. “Do you have any idea how creepy something has to be to give a robot the heebie-jeebies? Do you?”
“Please, I’ve seen you get spooked by the AC switching on,” Alix said blithely, though she was creeped out by the message as well. It surely had to be some minor malfunction of the screen and comms. Maybe a virus placed by someone as a prank, despite the fact that messing with station systems could well cost them their job. A very risky, very twisted prank.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“We need to find the others,” said Figaro. “All their stuff is still in the rooms and offices. There’s no way they all just left. We can do it systematically. I say we search the basement level first, then the rest of this level, then the second.”
“Alright, sounds fair.” Alix grabbed the Polyminia flower back off the table. She waited for Figaro to crawl back up to her shoulder, then walked back to the closest elevator. She pressed the call button and watched in bafflement as the elevator doors opened, shut, opened, shut, opened, then shut again as the elevator screeched up to the second floor. “Uh . . . let’s take the stairs.”
They went to the stairwell and began their descent. The stairwell was a dull white, from the walls to the steps to the ceiling. As they walked down, the lights continued to flicker. There was an intercom positioned in the stairwell walls. Every few steps Alix took were punctuated by a sudden pop of static from the intercom, followed by the faint, mechanical repetition of “return”. Though the security cameras didn’t move or beep, Alix had the eerie feeling that she was being watched.
Figaro was also on edge. “Are you positive your raygun’s out of charge?”
“Yep.” Alix pulled it from her utility belt and clicked the trigger a few times to demonstrate. “It’s dead.”
“Don’t suppose you know where we can steal a new one right quick?”
“No! Well, I mean, yes, we could raid the armory downstairs, but come on. What could possibly be in the station that we’d have to shoot?”
The intercom fizzled again and Figaro shuddered. “I don’t know, man, ghosts? I just can’t ignore the similarities between our situation and every horror movie I’ve ever seen.”
Alix reached the final step of the stairwell, right in front of the door that led to the rest of the basement level. Between the strange little malfunctions she was seeing in the station, the eerie hush of the stairwell, and Figaro’s words, Alix couldn’t ignore the dread coiling in her chest. She took a breath to steady herself, swung open the door, and stepped into the basement level. In the wide, white hall, the lights continued to flicker before half of them sputtered out entirely.
The basement level of the station was primarily used for storage. There was the field supply room of course, filled with all the tools one may need for a field mission, like grappling hooks, filtration flasks, steel traps. Alix and Figaro checked this room first, as it was right across the hall from the stairwell. Alix went straight for the drawers that held the flashlights, pulling the biggest one out from the top. She tucked the Polyminia flower safely into her belt and turned the flashlight on. She swept its fluorescent halo throughout the empty space of the supply room as Figaro’s eye lenses extended to scan the room. Green lit up his eyes.
“Aw lord,” Figaro said as he looked at the dark corners beyond Alix’s flashlight. “Night vision is useful but it makes everything a thousand times more creepy. I feel like a cryptid’s about to hop out from behind the shelving units.”
“Someone should be on duty here,” said Alix, sparing one last look around the supply room before stepping back out into the darkened hall. “There’s supposed to be someone on shift all hours of the day to check things in and out, except during major events like a full assembly or something.”
Next was the rarely-used armory, supplied with tranq guns, rayguns, and other small weapons given to researchers on field missions in the event of an emergency. The automated lock on the door was malfunctioning, clicking the door open and shut until Alix propped the door open with a chair from the supply room. The armory was also empty, the rayguns all hanging in neat rows along the wall in charging stations. Alix took the opportunity to switch hers out for a fully charged one, just in case.
They continued on through the main hall, checking rooms one by one. Some held specimens being stored for study. There were labyrinths of shelves displaying the frozen or vacuum-sealed bodies of various animals and plants collected for study, as well as jars holding organs, pinboards for insectoid wings, vials and tubes of DNA and blood samples. Seeing lifeless versions of the vibrant network of organisms Alix had only just been living amongst served to make the atmosphere of the rooms even more unnerving.
One shelf was lined with skull specimens. Alix pointed her flashlight at it. Each skull was neatly labeled, but Alix didn’t need labels to identify them. There was a malar skull, a talozi skull, a parvolope skull . . .
“Ooh, our new friends from the underground wouldn’t like this,” said Figaro, pointing at the Aexon skull in the middle. Its eye sockets were empty abysses, staring back at them in accusation. For a split second, Alix wondered if it would be better if all the humans fled Deimos X. This was the Aexons’ planet first, after all. They were now the only known sentient species on Deimos X. She and her colleagues were merely the accidental invaders.
The intercom above crackled.
“RETURN . . . RETURN . . .”
Alix hurried out of the room and shut the door behind her, muffling the already-faint voice on the intercom as her heart pounded in her chest. She looked around. They were halfway down the main hall now. Up ahead, the hall lights were still working, though they’d dimmed to a spectral glow.
“Do you hear that?” Figaro asked her.
“Hear what?”
“Up ahead, at the end of the hall. There’s noise.”
Alix went quiet and listened, turning to look down the very end of the hall. The room there was the largest in the whole level, designed as a sort of assembly hall. It was intended to be used for presentations with the whole station staff in attendance, but was rarely used. Meetings were typically conducted between one or a few departments and held in conference rooms in the first level. Anything that needed to be communicated to the whole station was sent out to everyone’s inboxes and personal comms via the station intranet. Come to think of it, the only time Alix could remember them actually all being in the basement assembly room was their first day on Deimos X, to celebrate the station’s official first day in operation.
From the crack in the double doors of the assembly room, Alix could see that the light was on. As she listened, she caught snippets of a faint, muffled voice speaking from within.
“Someone’s talking . . . they must be having a meeting in there.” Alix let out a breath. “Oh, that’s where everyone is. Oh man, thank God. I was starting to get freaked.”
Alix switched off her flashlight and began walking toward the assembly room doors, feeling a thousand times lighter.
“Yeah . . . but something’s still weird,” said Figaro quietly. “When the hell do we ever use the assembly room?”
“Maybe it’s a meeting to address all these new malfunctions,” Alix said, gesturing to the lights. “The station being on the fritz is everyone’s problem.”
As Alix got closer, the voice grew louder, saying something about unexpected difficulties and occasionally taking long pauses. It was a male voice, gravelly and serious. It sounded like Director Werner’s, the chief manager of the station.
“Unfortunately, even the best safety managers can’t foresee every possibility . . . even ones that will probably lead to a massive lawsuit, God help me . . .”
Alix put her hands against the doors.
“Sometimes, things fall out of our control, out of our reach . . .”
Alix pushed against the doors. They were heavy and swung open slowly.
“But what’s important, as we move forward from disaster and tragedy, is to honor the memory of—”
Director Werner stopped abruptly as Alix stepped through the open door. Alix blinked, taking a moment to adjust to the bright lights of the assembly room. There were several rows of seats in front of her to accommodate the few hundred who worked and lived in the station, all of whom had turned to stare at her with dropped jaws and wide eyes. Beside the doors were two tables with food and drinks, including a black-frosted sheet cake on a black platter. In fact, everything seemed to be draped in black, from the tablecloths, to the curtains on the presenter’s stage up front, to her colleagues’ clothes. On the presenter’s stage, Director Werner stood behind the podium in a neatly-pressed black suit, his gray beard groomed. He stared at Alix in utter shock. On the wide-screen behind Director Werner, a slideshow was playing. A slideshow of pictures of Alix, fading in one by one. Written at the top of the slideshow was ‘ALIX DARING, A TRUE EXPLORER AND A BELOVED FRIEND.’
Alix stood speechless as understanding dawned.
She had just crashed her own funeral.