Chapter 97: Charity

The station had been installed on a flat, open piece of ground, an overhang that overlooked almost everything except the two abrupt peaks that surrounded it and were lost in the clouds. Those, located due north, did not block the sun. From afar, in the silence, Ada had heard the wind turbines creaking.

The guy on his chair had not moved. Coming out of the woods, Ada raised a hand with a friendly “hey there,” but he was looking elsewhere. The silence flattened everything. When she was two steps away, she saw that the man’s face was leaning to the side. He was no longer breathing. He was dead, too, and yet he looked intact.

She pulled a badge off the sky-blue suit of the corpse. The letters had strangely faded, washed out. Fair enough. Around the base, she found a makeshift cemetery. No grave for the unlucky ones-about fifteen-but some good soul had put them in a suit with a visor, backs to the ground, with a Catholic cross for all of them.

She looked around. From here, a magnificent view of the ocean, which had become the graveyard of countless generations of ships.

The base door was firmly closed with a piston that could be unlocked by pulling a lever. The door yielded without resistance.

No smell in the air. Light entered through bay windows, but when Ada flipped a switch, everything worked. A table, numerous mysterious scientific instruments. Kutkh rolled toward something that looked like a fridge and meowed ... Ada opened it and discovered intact food, wrapped in plastic with blank labels.

“Stop whining, Kukth,” she said, “the fridge is warm, we don’t know how long this stuff has been here.”

She still put some energy bars in her pocket and opened one for Kukth, who devoured it. The food looked like it had just come out of the store. The beds were unmade, but nothing seemed messy.

She turned on the central computer and the private LE units. The electronics worked, but nothing booted. For an instant she told herself she was in limbo, in a dream where every written trace, every life, disappeared. Could it be the Empyrean Gates that had plunged Caliban into this lifeless world?

On the table, there was a large chest with a post-it on it. Nothing on the post-it. Super useful, guys, Ada muttered as she tore off the paper. The chest contained several layers of lead and a container with the first written traces:

Stasis container, Masmak Industries

The object was complicated to open, set in several layers like an onion, with electronics to unlock. And at the bottom of all those layers, yet another electronic gizmo, with a dangling plug.

Without really believing in it, she plugged it into an appropriate port on the central computer. The machine finally woke up, displayed a few lines of code, then a video message on the screen. One sees a guy in front of the wind turbine, outside. The scene was more or less identical ... there were a few fewer ships in the ocean.

The man speaking had a young, handsome face, messy hair, an adventurer’s beard; his tone was feverish; he seemed optimistic and desperate at the same time.

“If you’re seeing this message, it means I’m a fucking genius,” he began.

Really, Ada thought, hitting pause and going to fetch cans and snacks from the fridge. She settled into a chair and resumed playback.

“I’m David Ilsner, from the Ilsner expedition, under His Highness of Masmak...”

“Never heard of you,” Ada commented.

“We landed with a pre-built base, two days ago, June 28th, 2528...”

“Two hundred years ago, you hear that Alpha? The guy’s completely out to lunch.”

“There is ... on Caliban ... a strong power. Something radiating. It’s unknown. I called it the mess machine. Or rather the anti-mess machine. It concentrates our thoughts into a foggy something. It empties our brain. We turn into vegetables. No sentient or even sensitive life is possible, that’s why there are no animals here. I think it’s a thing that absorbs entropy ... enough to empty our skulls, not enough to rejuvenate us. A Transient thing, of course. Well, the whole team is in vegetable mode. I don’t have anything to do performance boosts, and they’re going to die of hunger, of thirst; anyway they’re not really here anymore...”