Z had been documenting her daily excursions down Tunnel A, describing the spirited street scene she saw through the headpiece. As she approached the Chandelier Room, she instinctively reached for the helmet camera controls that would record her explorations. Today, she would take-off her helmet in the main room, then set it down and point it toward the antechamber where she planned to decipher the controls on the Elder’s desk. Then she stopped herself. She knew what she planned to do, and what the camera would show: Elizabeth Nasri groping around the top of a desk, slapping at symbols only she could see. What would that accomplish except to make her look deranged? She left the camera off.
Against one wall stood the desk where they had found the Martian's body. Z walked to it and sat in the Martian’s chair, looking at the markings on the desktop. With the aid of the headpiece, she could see icons and writing like molten silver on its surface. These don’t look like controls, Z thought. It doesn't look like he was operating systems from here. Was he a leader? A scholar? Maybe just a caretaker. She took out her tablet and sketched the writing as accurately as she could.
Then she started pressing the markings, running her fingers over the lines and sweeping her hand across the surface. Nothing happened. On the wall behind her were outlines of uniform squares with symbols on each. She pressed against those to see if she could get them to open or move or make a sound. It was as useless as trying to open a door depicted in a painting.
From a corner of the Chandelier Room, the Elder watched this leader try, unsuccessfully, to open his records.
“She is unable to read the language. She is ignorant of our history. We have passed-on nothing.”
He walked quietly through the doorway of the antechamber. Z gripped her head in her hands, as if to push the stones of the headpiece closer to her brain. With a gentle wave of his hand, the desktop changed to a map of the city. Z looked up with a start to see the Elder leaning over her shoulder and looking into her eye. He pointed to a place on the map: the Chandelier Room.
Z nodded. “Yes. I know what that place is.”
He then traced a line back into the Terminal and down another tunnel, far into a section of the city they had not yet explored. His finger stopped at a rotunda. Z grabbed her tablet and began rapidly sketching the major waypoints of the directions. Then the Elder was gone and, so too, the map.
She was glad to have a clue to follow, but angry at the seeming gamesmanship of the Martian, the Elder, whatever he was. If his ghost lives-on, she grumbled, she could learn from him if he would only stay around. As it was, she could only follow his directions and hope something would come of it.
...
Z entered 3A, pulled off her EVA suit, and sat cross-legged on the floor against a wall. Colin was taking a break and Dunlap was running calculations. They both looked beat. “The Elder is back,” she announced.
Dunlap looked up from his work. “You must mean the apparition, right? We have the real guy outside the door in a storage compartment.”
“Yes, it was the avatar. I was in his antechamber when he appeared at my shoulder. He drew out a map to another part of the city. I think he’s sending me down the rabbit hole.”
Dunlap, still calculating, reflexively asked, “Do you want company on that trip?”
Z shook her head. “No. It’s more important for you and Colin to stay on track, here. The Elder has other plans. I have to do the advance work and I’ll let you know if I need back-up.”
Colin smiled. “Thanks for that, Z. We don’t really have a lot of time. Besides, you’re the only one of us who can see these Martians, so it’s not like we drink much from the punchbowl. But if you need us, you know where we live.”
The plan made sense to Z. Time was limited. The task list, between engineering, scanning, and archaeology, had grown. She knew they needed her to take things off their plate, not add to them. She had to take sole responsibility for this. She dialed-in Nori and Ellis downslope, briefed them on the latest encounter with the Elder and her plans for journeying into a new part of the city. “Noriko, you’re next in line if something happens to me,” she added before signing-off.
The next shift, Z held her regular status update with Colin and Dunlap in 3A and then prepped to leave. For this expedition, she would need to wear the headpiece, inside her helmet, for hours on end. It was a concern for her, and she purposely avoided detailing her plan to MCC, lest they deduce the risks—that the added exposure might damage her brain; that she might get disoriented in the visual atom-smash of reality with Martian surreality. She would have to navigate a tangible world while also digesting and reacting to a phantom world that brushed past her moment by moment.
She suited-up and left 3A. Each time Z put on the headpiece and left the airlock, she saw the same scenes unfold. The mass exodus was always in progress when she exited the airlock. Clearly, the Terminal was the locus for transportation into and out of the city.
She was now headed to a new unknown.
Z followed the Elder’s directions to an archway and tunnel leading out of the Terminal. Initially, this tunnel looked no different than the one that led to the Chandelier Room. As Z moved further along it, though, the nature of the cityscape changed. In contrast to the energy and drama associated with the Terminal, down this tunnel she encountered shops and cafes with people mingling at a leisurely pace.
She stopped at a stone wall to watch a family—woman, man, three children of ascending ages—seated at a table, eating a meal in the small courtyard in front of their house. By concentrating, she could shift her perception from the recording to the present—the table and stools were gone. She stepped into the family circle. They ate from communal bowls of what looked like lentils and spices, dipping flatbread into the mixture then lifting it to their mouths, the children being less careful with the process. There was a tenderness to the scene and Earthlike familiarity that gave her a pang of homesickness. Even in the ghosted overlay of the recording, she could see the bright colors of glaze on the bowls in the center of the table, the weave of the cloths they used to wipe their mouths, the grain of the table. The table—it looked like wood! With the recording making it difficult to focus completely, she could not be certain, but the table appeared to be made of small fibrous blocks… of bamboo. Of all the things she had come across since discovering the city, the wooden table surprised Z the most. It was proof that the Martians had been to Earth and back. Was there trade between the planets?
Z walked farther through the crowds in the plaza, then over to a café where she knelt down only a foot away from an apparition—a handsome man with almond eyes and a full mouth. He looked extraordinarily relaxed, given the turmoil in other parts of the city. He gestured in graceful, sweeping motions with his hands as he talked with his friends. When others talked, he smiled and nodded and looked up at the ceiling of the plaza. Z sat herself inside the apparition and looked up through his eyes. On the ceiling a dot, like a star, winked at him.
Was he connected to that light? she wondered.
Her progress along this new artery flowed from constricted tunnels to expansive open rotundas and back. Focusing on the recording playing into her temples, she could hear the sonic changes between the muffled sound inside the connector and the murmuring of a hundred conversations reverberating off the domed ceiling above the open plazas. She imagined people travelling through this city as they do in cities on Earth, traversing many neighborhoods just to shop at a particular store, meet friends in a café, or pick up groceries for a meal. Travelling a distance would create a visual and aural rhythm from tunnel to rotunda to tunnel to rotunda. Entering a tunnel for the third time, Z knew her destination was next.
She emerged onto an elevated walkway encircling an atrium. The plaza beneath her was filled with people, some seated in groups around tables, others in conversation. After registering the purposefulness of the people at the tables in the plaza, Z realized she was looking at a giant workspace.
She descended a wide, straight stair from the second storey. People passed her, deep in discussion, on their way to offices in hallways dotting the circumference. Z stopped at the base of the stairway and took in the scene. It was easy to be sucked into sightseeing; she was surrounded by a strange new world and Z thought how enjoyable it would be to sit down and casually observe the patterns of people going about their lives. But she reminded herself that this place had a meaning in their story, which is why the Elder had sent her there. She looked closely at people as they worked. There were diagrams and writing floating above the tables. If only I understood their language, she thought, shaking her head.
She looked for any clue to the relevance of this location. There were few people wearing the relaxed expressions she had noticed earlier. People here were clearly monitoring something. The tables where groups congregated were covered with symbols as the Elder’s desk had been. She watched as one person wrote onto a display with her finger, then pushed the display across the table at a co-worker. The co-worker, looking at her own display, stopped the motion with her hand, then grabbed it with her finger and merged it with hers. She focused on it for a moment, then winked at the sender. Then she shot the display back.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Along the periphery of the room Z noticed workers entering and exiting an opening in the floor. It was a Conveyor, judging from the speed that people rose and descended. She headed there, passing through ghosts along the way, and skated down through the portal into a darkened room nearly as large as the one she’d just left. In the center were more tables and work groups and, encircling the room, a large, seamless image that revealed the moon on one side and a slice of Earth on the other.
It was a familiar sight to Z and immediately she knew this must be from one of their spaceships in orbit. “So, what’s the story here?” she asked as she walked around the room. “They’re in communication with the ship, I assume. I can hear chatter, but of course I can’t understand a thing. But I can sense the tone and it feels like agitation to me.”
A woman stood in the center of the room, talking to someone on the other end of the transmission. She made statement after statement each with a slightly percussive note to it. Then the response came back, equally percussive. The commander spoke a word sharply, then expanded a screen display above her open hand. She drew symbols on it, then pushed it to an aide at her side, who walked away.
This was the first discord she had seen from anyone in the recording—at least she assumed that by the tone of the dialog. Z looked up at the serene view of the clouds and blue waters of Earth and the dark swath of the terminator across the planet. The Earth shined like a polished glass orb, the colors of green and rust and blue made more brilliant because the night side was so dark.
Dark. Completely devoid of the lights of civilization. That couldn’t be—the Earth she knew was covered in lights at night. Z realized she was looking back in time. It was a breathtaking sight, the Earth unsullied by pollution, unbranded by humanity. Down there in the dark and light, she thought, were nomadic tribes. She wondered what she would find if she could land on that planet so much younger than the one she knew. Then the ionization she was so accustomed to seeing during reentry began to lick at the edges of the image on the screen until soon the entire circumference of the room glowed.
Z was losing track of time; the scene stretched on and on. This was a new experience. The Elder had pointed her to this place. Now, she waited in the glow of plasma for the recording to reset so she could watch again. She walked to a row of workstations where people monitored readouts. There, in a frame on the table, was a depiction of the sphere of Earth with the entry path delineated. She watched the space ship arc across Africa, eastward, then looked up at the glowing images lining the circumference of the room. She saw a glitch, and then another. The image started to break-up into digital snow. She looked back to the readout; the single path of entry had scattered into multiple paths. The trails spread as they traced across the globe, some of them flickering out. Z knew this pattern: the ship had broken-up on entry.
In the center of the room, the commander stared, unflinching, at the screens, now going blank. Then the unmoved expression turned to an unfocused gaze. Then she turned briskly toward an exit at the back of the room. Z sprung after her, following on her heels. She tingled with adrenalin. What had she just witnessed?
The commander strode deliberately down a hallway, workers bowing and nodding in salute as she passed. She entered a large doorway, Z following, and stopped at the top row of an expansive amphitheater filled with people. The commander quickly surveyed the room, then walked purposefully down the main aisle and climbed the steps to the stage. She turned to the audience, chattered a proclamation at them and thrust her outstretched palm into the air. The entire theater roared back. Then she knelt on one knee and lowered her head. Behind her played the recording of the last moments of the ship burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. After a moment’s silence, she stood again and conjured a leaf the size of the stage. It was wilted and spotted; the color almost drained from it except for red-stained veins. She walked across the leaf, pointing to its deformations.
Z felt a chill. She realized she had not been watching ghosts from the moment she descended into the control center; every vision had been clear and opaque. She was more deeply embedded in the recording; but what recording? She hadn’t seen it reset in a long time. The giant leaf she saw on the stage was a thought, conjured in the head of the commander and placed in the minds of every Martian in the theater. She was drawn to the leaf and she suddenly felt emotions she hadn’t expected. Sadness, worry, and fear. For what reason?
The image of the leaf subsumed all other thoughts—a hallucination she could not control. She could see at a microscopic level the damage that had been done and she understood: bacteria were killing it. The desiccated veins of the leaf filled her mind, the sense of danger filled her heart. The veins changed into a pattern—a map—of the City of Ghosts, and the red death of the bacteria oozed through its streets.
She understood. Now she understood.
She had to leave; to get beyond the reach of the hallucination. Z stumbled to the rotunda, and sat on a bench. Her head hurt. She wished that she were not wearing an EVA suit, so that she could cradle her head in her hands. She had crossed a threshold. The headpiece had reached deeper and the story it communicated was more vivid and visceral than any ghost dream she had experienced before. She closed her eyes and cleared her mind. She breathed deeply and felt the coolness of the air as it flowed through her nostrils, down her trachea into her lungs. She focused on those breaths for a minute, then opened her eyes to a rotunda full of Martians, just as real-looking as the people in the theater had been.
Z never thought she would risk running on the Conveyor, but she was running now and the proportional acceleration was propelling her through the city with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. She shot through the next rotunda without thinking and entered another tunnel. When she emerged from that into a central town plaza, she noticed that no sounds of conversation reverberated off the dome. She stepped off the Conveyor and looked around. There were Martians, but fewer of them. Then she saw the cart. On it lay several corpses, emaciated corpses, some of them children. As she watched, a Martian man barely more than a skeleton himself, carried another small child from a doorway toward the cart.
Hopeless. Fearful. Crushed. Deep emotions descended on Z as she watched. She turned to an archway forty feet away and began to jog toward it, not knowing exactly why that seemed such an obvious thing for her to do. She ran down a hallway past empty rooms—these should have been bustling with activity, she thought. The end of the hall led to an atrium with four levels of meshed resin platforms. Each platform carried hundreds of plants and nearly all of them were wilted, stunted, brown, and dry.
This is part of the lesson, Z thought, the compliment to the commander’s lecture. This is what the bacteria did. She walked out on the platform and looked at row after row of limp plants. This could not be real, Z realized. She waved her hand through the plants the same way she could walk through the Martians. But she had to take samples back for study; she knew the planter pots would remain, even though their contents had perished, millennia ago. She picked three containers, laid them in the bottom of her utility pack and clipped it to her waist—they would have stored the bacteria and plant residue.
Z made her way back across the plaza, onto the Conveyor and into the tunnel. This final rotunda before she would reach the Terminal was where she had seen the family. She stopped where she entered the space. It was devoid of life, still as a tomb. Z crossed the plaza to the front courtyard where the family had held its daily meal. The table was there, a tablecloth was draped over a stool. She carefully entered the apartment. She saw cooking utensils, cushions on the floor, sandals by the door—but the family was gone.
Z stood in the doorway, feeling the energy drain from her, despondent. She looked out over a large rotunda that had been noisy and ebullient barely more than an hour prior; now all that life had disappeared. Then the Elder stepped out of a doorway and walked slowly across the plaza. Z walked toward him.
When they reached the center, the Elder spread his arms as if to encompass this vacant world. He slowly turned and gestured as if recognizing houses where friends dwelled, shops and cafés he might have frequented, then he came around to face Z. For the first time, he looked deeply into her eyes and she felt his sorrow. Then he brought his hands together and all light, everywhere, went out.
Z stood still, enveloped by the blackness of the underground. Her heart ached for the people she had seen, now long dead. She realized that, in the utterly opaque blackness, she might join them.
Then the ceiling began to glow with golden light. The Elder was gone.
...
Z felt numb as she exited the tunnel and crossed the Terminal. She couldn’t shake the feeling of dread she retained from her encounters, as if the bacteria were a problem threatening them in the present day. Though the experience had been jarring, the revelation it conveyed could have been expected: the Martians had visited Earth and, pretty clearly, had brought back specimens. Bringing wild specimens into a closed environment like the City of Ghosts could easily spread contamination and break down the fragile ecosystem of the City. The bacteria killed their food source and likely caused a famine, judging by the condition of the corpses.
The dull throb in her head came not just from the events she had witnessed but from her circular analysis of what was happening to her. The Elder had sent her there to learn that story. Why had this vision been so much more realistic than previous recordings? Was the experience truly more real or was the headpiece communicating with greater strength? Or was it reaching deeper into her brain? Obviously, the Elder was teaching her their history; was her mission leaving before the full story was finished?
As she approached 3A, Dunlap and Colin rushed to meet her. Dunlap gave her an awkward hug through the EVA suits. “You’re back! You’re alive!”
Colin added, “When the lights went out, we were sure you had grabbed the wrong wires somewhere and fried yourself.” Then he, too, gave her a fumbling hug.
Z turned to face Dunlap. “I know how the Martians died.”
“More visions?”
Z gently shook her head. “I need to get this headpiece off.”
She stored the samples she had taken and, once inside 3A, described what she had seen, more as a history lesson than a retelling of what she had gone through. She was not prepared to tell them about the lifelike experience or the intense empathy that had flowed through her; she did not want the crew to know that there was more power to the headpieces than an AR display. There was too much to finish in the final sols before lift-off. She could not let her explorations become a distraction—especially when no one else would be able to verify her experiences.