Black and Light

Once upon a time, there was light…

I open my eyes and a blinding white light steals my eyesight away from me. I’m in a tunnel? What’s happening? Woah. Now my head is spinning. No, wait. Everything is spinning! Was this the end? Something is pulling at me! Where am I? Help me! Somebody help! Please! My ears! I can’t hear anything! I can’t see anything! Am I breathing? Was this death? I didn’t want to die. No, not yet. What would happen to the space expedition? 

And then there was darkness. 

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

June 17, 3001 Day before departure of spaceship E10340 

I was chosen. We all were. We were “different.” Gene mutation or whatever. At first, it was fun. Exciting, even. But now, I wish…

I wish so many things.

But most of all, I wish to be normal.

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

“We’re getting pulled by an unusual amount of gravitational force. The spacecraft can’t resist it. We’re going down! I repeat, E10340 is in immediate danger! Hello? We need backup!” I hear Jeri’s voice, and Teri’s and Keri’s but the triplets sound distant.  I hear Lade, panicked and scared. But I feel something. Like a rival power. Something battling my darkness. What was it?

And then blinding light.

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

I open my eyes and a sharp pain spreads throughout my right shoulder. Good thing I’m a lefty. 

“Just pull it out fast and swift. Hurry! Do it before she wakes up. You know she doesn’t like seeing blood.” 

My whole right arm feels like it's on fire and I feel a tug and then something pulls out of my skin. 

¨What the h-,¨ My soul almost leaves my body as I see a blood-soaked jagged piece of metal in Lade’s hand.

“Oops! She woke up,” Lade flashes an apologetic smile at me before properly disposing of the metal. 

“Sorry Thea, the spaceship crash-landed. We had some damage to the top right part of the ship, including your cabin. The initial landing wasn’t that bad, but then after landing that part of the ship skidded and crashed into something,” Lade and I follow Keri out in the hallway as she talks.

“The control room is fine though right?” I try to keep the panic out of my voice but fail miserably.

“Why? Are you scared?” Lade pokes me in the arm, knowing despite what was in it a few minutes ago, the pain would already be gone.

“Give her a break, after everything she’s been through, I wouldn’t blame her for being panicky,” She says it so simply like she’s talking about the weather. 

But only I knew what it was like. My body might be here, but my mind was still in the fire. Traumatized, unable to focus. I hope they understood my silence wasn’t because I wasn’t comfortable with them, it was because of my mother fake mother who didn’t care about me. Who gave me away as soon as she found out I was one of them. No. I wouldn’t allow myself to think about her. I had done enough crying and sobbing and pitying myself. 

“Yes, the control rooms are fine. Jeez, Thea, you should look at your face.” 

“Thea, you need to take better care of yourself. Look at the dark circles under your eyes. Have you even been sleeping?”

“Just because my family abandoned me doesn’t mean you have to be all motherly towards me, okay? We need to know what happened. All I remember seeing was a blinding white light and then I woke up,” I don’t want to tell Keri the truth. If I did, she would probably make me sleep for two days straight. 

When I thought about everyone in this group. 

People who I had just met 1 week ago, I wondered why they even cared how I was doing. Why weren’t they like her? Why didn’t they just abandon me and leave me to rot? Just like she had done? Maybe they were waiting for the right time. As soon as I began to trust them, they would betray me. Just like she had. No, I wouldn’t let it happen again. They were all traitors.

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

Page 1 of 9

Info about the second group sent to a mysterious black hole after the first group failed; 

List of Group 2 of gene-mutated homo sapiens sent to space to explore E100Q:

-Alixe

-Jeri, Teri, and Keri(identical triplets)

-Althea

-Lade

-Kazak

The last group of gene-mutated homo sapiens has not returned when sent to E100Q. Subjects were told their destination was G657H.  There is a 91% chance Group 2 will not return to Earth. 

This information is top secret and none of these documents should not be shared with the public.

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

We get to the control room and I spot Teri and Jeri there.

“Where’s Alixe and Kazak?” Lade asks them as we settle into our seats. 

“Analyzing where we landed,” I put on my glasses and put my jet black hair into a messy bun.

“Why do you wear those glasses? You know there’s so much tech nowadays,” I raise my head and see Keri looking at my clear glasses. 

My acquaintances, I refuse to call them friends, couldn’t hide their confusion at my 20th-century vintage glasses. I had found them in my grandmother’s attic and had begged my mother-who-didn’t-care-about-me to ask the doctor for lenses for my prescription. She had finally given in and gifted me with these glasses on my thirteenth birthday. 

“Are you going to answer, or are you going to ignore us, just like you did the entire time before the ship crashed?” I flinch as Lade raises an eyebrow, challenging me to say something. 

“I like the comforting weight of them on my nose. I push my glasses back and press my thumb to the finger ID to check into my screen. 

“Since you’ve finally stopped playing the silent game, do you mind if I ask you why you wear that gold necklace all the time?” Why did they not understand I needed to be alone?

“My little sister, La-,” I stuttered at her name, “Lavia had given it to me when they had when they took me away.”

Lade sucked in a breath, knowing he’d taken it too far. 

“I remember her telling me she had saved up money in her piggy bank for months, and spent it all on this,” I fingered the last gift I had gotten from the people who pretended that I didn’t even exist after they found out I was one of The Eliks. 

“I’m sorry,” he says in a low voice.

“Not your fault.”

“Do you guys know where we are?” Keri asks her sisters. 

“We were trying but the GPS isn’t working.”

I examine the GPS.

“What? I don’t understand. This is the latest model and the technology is supposed to be great,” Lade looks at Jeri and Teri frustrated.

“We know, but the image just says loading and then never loads.” Teri flicks her short dark brown hair behind her shoulder. 

“Did you try to contact Earth?” Keri questions them.

“Obviously! But there’s no signal yet,” Jeri. 

And then the image materializes. Words and letters form together along with an image. We were on planet TTY1F01.

“No way,” I breathe out, then in. It wasn’t possible. There was no freaking way in tarnation.

“We’re in TTY1F01,” Teri reads from the signals. 

“But that’s all the way-,” Keri looks around frantically as if that could change the name that Jeri had broadcasted onto all of our screens.

“That’s all the way across the universe. How did we get from on the way to planet G657H to all the way here?” 

“If we knew, then we wouldn’t ask you, Lade,” Teri’s voice is calm, but we all know there’s nothing calm about what had happened.

“There were no nearby planets or anything. Even if there were, their force wouldn’t be enough to push us off course. It just doesn’t make sense,” Jeri’s confused face makes me want to curl into myself. She was the expert. If she didn’t know what happened, what would we do?

“Maybe we should check the place we were at before all this happened,” I curl my hands into fists, then uncurl them. I couldn’t let the anxiety get to me.

“Oh, so you do talk,” Teri casts a glance.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

“Get the images from the very second before we came to the other galaxy,” I told them.

“Aye, aye captain,” Lade jokes, trying to fill in the silence that had cast over us like an eerie blanket.

Numerous images from every camera pop up onto the big screen ahead. 

“No, do the 360-view,” I can’t believe I just said “No” to somebody after ignoring them for so much time.

He moves the image in a circular motion using the finger-tough motion pad. 

“Guy, I see some-,” I get cut off by a breathless looking Alixe and a red-faced looking Jeri.

“Guys, you have to see this. Like, ASAP.” 

They don’t wait for our answer, just leave as fast as they came in. We hurry to catch up with them and they step into their spacesuit tubes. I watch mesmerized as the suits attach themselves to their person and the door to the tube opens.

“What are you guys waiting for? Hurry it up!”

I step into my tube, holding my breath because I’ll never get used to this as the required items to venture into an unknown planet as the suit clicks into place on me. All our suits are black with all essential items in a pack and fresh oxygen in a tube in the back. My helmet, the last thing on my spacesuit, comfortably sits on my head while the wires attach themselves to my head for communication. Oxygen pumps through my pack into my lungs.

We step out and Alixe enters the codes to open the spaceship doors. 

My breath gets taken away at the sight in front of me. There are jewels everywhere. Diamonds, mostly, but there were rubies too. And emeralds, opals, even jacinth. And they were…

Glowing, I realized.

“It’s beautiful,” Keri sounds dazed. Beautiful wouldn’t even begin to describe it. Because of the vast variety of colors the gems were in, the light coming out of them was colored too. It reminded me of stained glass. A distant memory comes to my mind. 

My foster mother holding my hand as we entered the Aachen Cathedral in Germany. 

I push the hurtful memory away. Traitorous mind. Remembering things that are meant to be forgotten.

I focus on the view in front of me. It was… it was breathtaking, mesmerizing. 

“What is this place,” Lade says this like a statement instead of a question, and that’s when I notice the building. No, not a building, a dome. WIth light leaving its windows.

“Somebody lives here,” I send my thought to the others. I point to the structure that appears to be not too far away.

“Aliens?! We should get out of here!” The high-tech suit sends the message exactly like it sounds in Lade’s brain, urgent and panicky.

“No! We can’t leave! Not before we find out what this place even is. We should go check out the building thing,” Alixe’s thought sounds excited but a little nervous at the same time.

“Thea, what were you saying inside? Right before Alixe and Jeri burst in?” I can’t believe Keri even noticed I said anything.

"I'll tell you when we get back inside," I reply.

*********

“What? I don’t see anything?” Keri leans forward ahead.

“Zoom in, Lade! Look! Right there! Do you see that?” I point my finger at the suspicious thing I had spotted right before Alixe and Kazak had burst in,

The scanner beeps and the words E100Q appear. 

“Blackhole-”

“Does that mean-”

“The black hole-”

“Did we get sucked into-”

“GUYS!” They get silent at my voice. I wonder if they’re all regretting that they took me with them. They were all sad faces and sympathy when I first came. It doesn’t matter, I don’t want their fake sympathy anyways.

“I did not think you were even capable of speaking so loudly. You always speak so softly and quietly all the time,” Lade says, and Alixe nods in agreement. I notice all five of them are staring at me.

I take a deep breath.

“I think that we should do this calmly. One person at a time. I’ll go first, and then one by one we can all share our thoughts,” I look everyone in the eye, “This is what we know. We were near a black hole while traveling to G657H and then we saw a bright white light. We appeared next to the planet TTY1F01 and got pulled into its orbit. We find glowing gems here and a dome where light is coming from. That means, there are people there.” 

“That’s probably the most she’s ever said to any of us,” Jeri plays with her nose ring, “So, what now?”

“Okay, this might sound crazy, but doesn’t that mean that the black hole was like a portal?” I wait for their response.

“Does that mean all black holes are portals, or is it just that one?” Teri speaks first.

“Guys,” Keri looks from up from what she was reading at all of us, “Another spaceship, 2 years ago called S314B09, disappeared from the exact place where we left from and nobody ever heard of them after that. And 2 years before that another spaceship disappeared at the same place. 

“So that means the people in that dome could be group 1,” Lade looks at each of us, confirming our suspicions.

“But how do we get back to our side of the universe? We don’t have enough energy to make it that far!” Alixe says in an urgent voice. 

“If we came from a black hole,” I say, an idea forming in my head, “I know this sounds crazy, but that means a white hole would be our way out of here.

“A white hole..” I can almost see the gears in their heads turning. 

“What now?” Kazak asks, “What about the people in the dome?”

“I have an idea I think we’ll all like,” I smile for the first time in months.

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

Once upon a time, there was darkness...

This time when I was plunged into the weird phenomenons of science, I was ready. I was a different person than before. That girl was broken and couldn’t trust anyone. That girl was gone, replaced by a newer, better, happier girl. Ready to bring change to this unfair world. To the world who believed people who were different didn’t deserve to live. 

And then there was light...