The Entity

The smell of rotten eggs woke Harper from a dead sleep. Or maybe it was the waves of intense nausea. Her innards felt like they were being stomped clean, like dirty laundry in a remote, rural stream. Through eyes weary and half-shut, Harper watched a red light pulse. It filled the space around her with spasmodic, blood-hued flashes.

Uggghh… Moving wasn’t high on her list of priorities. Her head was heavy. It felt like a pumpkin propped on a toothpick, and inside sloshed thoughts and images that threatened to fuse together but, instead, bobbed haplessly in the groggy backwaters of her mind.

She closed here eyes and turned to lay on her side. Too difficult. She motor-boated her lips.  

That's when the poem began. The absurd wordplay could have come straight out of the dusty vaults of Captain Beefheart. The strange sonnet danced on the tongue of some faceless woman as it corkscrewed into Harper’s consciousness, like a stream of buttercream frosting atop a cake.

Harper grasped at it. It evaded her clutches, verbal confetti in a breeze.  

“Roll bed. Feel free to pull and retest it.” 

What in the world?

“Toad said, its feet avulsed. Infected.”

Whoever was speaking whimsically sliced and diced words, the way those theatrical, knife-juggling chefs at the vintage Japanese restaurant chain (whose name escaped her) diced sushi. The vowel scheme, however, remained curiously consistent.

“Road bled. A vehicle dissected.”

She struggled to make sense of it. But she was no poet. She never had the knack. It was a god-given talent, she was always told, and, in her life, she had never taken seriously even the slightest inclinations towards being an artist. When she was young, however, she dreamed of being an astronaut. She recalled how the stars outside her childhood bedroom window would whisper to her at night. They would tell her of her destiny, of her future living in their midst. 

“Joe fled. The bees on skull reflect it.”

As a matter of fact, now that she thought about it, she had a faint recollection of donning a spacesuit at one time: one limb at a time, into the suit, a silent dance, a sacred ritual, all in preparation for sleep. 

Again came the verse. But this time, the words cut through the mental murk and dripped with a sobering clarity.

“Code red. Debris on hull detected.”  

Oh god, she thought.  

Harper blinked herself awake. She swam up through the mental soup, lifted a hand and pawed at the mask that was pumping oxygen and hydrogen sulfide into her lungs. She finally pulled it off and the smell of rotten eggs disappeared.   

Harper grumbled. She slipped the IV from her arm and threw it somewhere next to her. She hoisted open heavy eyelids again and glimpsed the hyper-sleep chamber. The space was tight, just big enough for an average sized adult. A glass door lay above her, and on the other side of it, the flashing beacon intermittently bathed the large cryo-room in that haunting crimson glow. Between the scarlet pulses, the room would descend into darkness, lit only by the feeble lights of the keyboard panels which stretched across the room, under monitors that were inert and black with sleep.    

The red alert continued to blare in her ear as Harper attempted to move her legs. She was numb from tailbone to heels, a result of the three year hibernation. The nifty LSD-style dreams were one of the perks of hyper-sleep too — a side-effect of the hydrogen sulfide. The gas slowed her metabolism, helping her body withstand the long trip on the scantest of nutrients. The rotten egg smell was just another bonus.   

“Christ, Cheryl, enough with the goddam code alert, please,” Harper mumbled.

The onboard AI turned off its alert protocol, which, to Harper, had sounded like word-salad just a moment before. The rhythmic red light clicked off too, which immerserd the room in the twilight-like glow of the the keyboard lights.

“Welcome back, Captain Gordon,” Cheryl said, in an amiable female voice. Harper responded with a guttural noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a moaning.

The door above her hissed open. The air in the room permeated her nostrils with the trademark aseptic smell characteristic of sterile environments. She sat up in her cryo-bed, hitching forward gently on wobbly arms. Her blonde-dyed dreads fell down around sandy-brown shoulders.  The white tank top and blue underwear she'd climbed into the cryo-bed with had lost their snugness, despite the small army of electronic muscle stimulators that dotted her body.

Harper filled her lungs with the cabin’s perfect mix of earth’s atmosphere, taking in a deep breath and stretching her limbs, which were coming back to life — slowly. For the time being, they moved like gum in molasses.  

She shook the cobwebs from her head. “Status report,” she said.

“All systems are nominal, chief.” 

“Really?” Harper tipped her head back and rolled it on her neck.  “Then why wake me?”

“Well, as we crossed into the Perseus Arm, the ship picked up debris on the starboard-side hull.”

Harper arched her back, getting in a good stretch. She moaned in pleasure. “What kind of debris?” 

“I’m not sure. My analysis didn’t match it to any known life forms in my database.”

“Life forms?”

Cheryl paused. “Yes.”

Harper shook her head. She needed a hot cup of coffee, one big enough to be hauled around on a dolly. With loads of cream. And sugar. And a jelly donut. She’d kill for a jelly donut.  

“What kind of life form?” she said.

“That’s just it, I don’t know.”

Harper sucked her teeth. “How long has this… lifeform been clinging to the ship?”

"Three days."

“Three days? Why didn’t you wake me earlier?” Harper said, furrowing her brows.

“I would’ve but… I ran the calculations: the debris posed no threat to the integrity of the mission.”

“And what changed?”

“It started… growing.”

“Growing?” Harper shook her head again and held up a hand. “Do you have an image?”

“Yes.” 

A picture of the ship’s hull came up on a nearby screen. The image moved easily across it until it came to a stop at a series of bumps. The bulges were backlit, providing a hazy profile view. They were covered in what looked to be hair. And the hair was… moving, like it was grasping at things in the void. The protrusions were dark, maybe black, or purple. Maybe even a deep red. From the camera’s vantage point, it was hard to tell.

“What the hell?” Harper squinted and leaned towards the screen. She swung a spindly leg over the edge of the cryo-bed, touching a toe to the floor.  

“Careful, Captain. Your muscles. They’re not —. ”

“I know. I’d make a scarecrow jealous. I’ll be fine. Shut off the gravity, will you?”

Cheryl slowed the spinning of the main bay of the ship, causing Harper’s belly to lurch. She belched in her mouth. Another delight courtesy of the space-trekking business. “How big is it?” she asked.

“When it first attached itself to the ship it was roughly three inches in diameter," the AI explained. "It remained that size for three days. Today, within the last two hours, in fact, it more than quadrupled in size.”

“Quadruple?” Harper thought for a moment, wiping a lock of dreads from her eyes. The fuzzy mass moved slowly as it slid across her face, the artificial gravity wearing off. “So, a foot across now,” she said.

“Give or take, yes.”

“And you don’t know what it is?” Harper asked flatly.

“No. It’s not coming up in any known databases."

Harper nodded, processing the information. Inside, her belly was waning towards full queasiness. Her body had lifted off the mattress. She grabbed a handrail that was attached to the cryo-bed to stabilize herself.

“Chances of it covering the ship?” she asked.

“I can’t say for certain. It could continue to grow at this rate, or grow erratically, or not at all. But if it does grow unchecked, I don’t see how it wouldn't."

Harper nodded. “So, at this rate, how long?” 

“By my calculations, it could cover the starboard side in four days, and reach the starboard booster in five. That’s my real concern.” 

Harper bit down on her bottom lip. Her gray eyes twinkled in one of the panel lights. “Yea, we can kiss maneuverability good-bye then.” 

"Exactly."

"And probably our asses."

"Bingo."

Harper fixed a blank stare at the screen as her mind sifted through alternative scenarios. She settled on two options, both fundamentally uncomplicated, neither very good. One: abort the mission — but that would mean the end of decades of hard work and the dashing of a life long dream. Two: sticking it out — and possibly getting it wrong. Dealing with this... entity poorly, though, could mean hurtling out into space. For an eternity.  

Fun, she thought.  

She chewed on it a while longer.

“Apprise Houston of our status," she said. "Then prep my suit. I’m going for a walk.”

“I can’t clear you for a walk for at least 48 hours and not before a full physical, Captain. The effects of the hyper-sleep —.”

“Override,” Harper said. “Directive twenty-four point four.” The crisp edge of authority was sharp in her voice.

“Counter override, directive eight-alpha. Captain, I cannot in good conscience let you —.”

“Goddam AI, just…” Harper steadied her breathing. Her pulse throbbed in her ear and she had raised a clenched fist, unknowingly, ready to slam it against something. “Override,” she said, “directive two-four-two-seven. You will not keep me from checking on that debris. Unlike you, I have a heart and lungs and a brain, and along with all of those things — which are near and dear to me — I want to get my ass out to the California Nebula, then back home to Earth. Waiting 48 hours to check on this thing is not an option.”

A silence bloomed between them.

“The sarcasm is unnecessary, Captain. I may not have the same parts that you do, but I don’t want to die out here either. You’re not the only one who contemplates their mortality.”  

Harper rolled her eyes. These things had become far too life-like.  

“Protocol overridden,” Cheryl continued. “You've got your space walk, Captain. But I think it's a bad idea.”

****

After her stomach completed a few back-flips, Harper adjusted to the zero gravity. She was in the belly of it now, floating along the starboard side of the Caelum, tethered to its polymer skin.  

Her suit was bulky. Under the earth’s gravitational pull, in her condition, it would have been unwieldy. But in the vacuum of space, she moved gracefully in it, like a Mylar-clad athlete.  

“Coming up on the foreign object debris now,” she said.

“Roger,” Cheryl responded. 

Harper wasn’t sure what to expect. She had been with NASA for 32 years. Fresh out of the candidate program, she was one of only ten women who were accepted into the program. More than three decades later she’d been to Mars and captained three voyages across the solar system. And in all those years, not a single person had encountered an alien life form. Yes, they found bacteria within the crust of Mars. But had they made contact with anything larger than microscopic organisms, ever? No. It had never happened. And here she was, on the verge of discovering a new species.  

She couldn’t tell if she was excited or nervous. Maybe she was just terrified and in complete denial — the potential downsides, despite the monumental discovery, were especially grim.  

Harper pulled herself around the hull using the handholds that speckled the ship’s shell. She spotted the silhouette of the debris and pulled herself closer. When she swung herself around and on top of it, Harper found a cluster of spiny, spherical objects. They were purplish-black and each was roughly the size of a tennis ball. Long, slender spines radiated out from every organism’s center, reminding her of sea urchins back home — the little critters that gathered in tidal pools along the crisp Northern Atlantic shores. But there was a glaring difference: the eye at the center. Each of these creatures had an eye that took up at least half of its body.  

The sight sent a shudder through Harper.  

“Christ, are you getting this?”

“Crystal clear on this end,” Cheryl said.  

“What the hell are these things?”

“I don’t know, chief.”

Harper leaned in. The set of eyes looked into hers, sending a qualmishness bubbling through her belly.  

The irises were yellow stippled with green specks. The pupils were as black as the emptiness around her. But they moved. The spiral-shaped openings revolved, and spun in a swirling pattern.

Harper stared at them in awe, her respirator humming rhythmically in her helmet.

"Captain?... Captain, are you okay?"

“What?... Yea... I’m gonna get a sample.”

“Be careful.”

Harper paused. Her eyes narrowed. Ok, mom.

She prepared her drill and the empty bag that was typically used to hold drill bits. Crude tools, she thought, for collecting a species that will break science. But NASA hadn’t planned on her bumping into an undiscovered life form on this trip. She had to make due.

She pulled herself closer. The cluster of eyes followed her every move, squishing and squirming in their body-sockets. She held the drill over the tiny creatures.

“Here goes nothing,” she said.  

She wedged the tip of the drill bit under a specimen on the edge of the group. The bit hardly slipped beneath it. She shifted the bag further up her shoulder, then tried with both hands. Still, nothing.

“Damn, these things are stuck on here good.”

“Take your time.”

Harper shook her head, again. Yes, mom.

Out of some deep-seated Pavlovian habit, decades in the making, Harper nearly flicked on the drill. Christ. She chuckled. Then asked herself if she was nuts. She took a deep breath.

Harper gripped the top edge of the animal with her free hand and slid the drill bit under the other side again.

She pulled on it.  

Ouch!

Harper recoiled in pain.  

She looked intently at her glove. It couldn’t be, could it? She flipped her hand over to get a better look. No way. It felt like the creature had bitten her. Through the Mylar, through the Dacron and through the Teflon-coated glove. 

As she tried to process the queer sensation, the sight of the ship began teetering in her view. The critters and their curious eyes started spiraling in a blur further and further away. She was tumbling into unconsciousness, and she knew it.  

Harper's mind gradually became alert again amidst the blackness of catatonia. The profound silence there felt like it pervaded her very soul. An image crystalized. It crackled with color. It was a moving picture of a black hole swallowing up space debris. Among the flotsam, trapped in the thing's maw, was the Caelum. And undulating across the ship from tip to stern was a purplish-black skin, glowing, rippling, with eyes, thousands of eyes along it, peering back at her.

Harper’s breath caught in her throat.

She watched the black hole suck in the ship, spinning it across its aperture, and down towards the chute of its endless belly. Inside the black hole, Harper could feel something, a being or a consciousness. It spoke to her in a deep, wordless rumble. A piece of it, a feeling maybe, or possibly a warning, slithered across the vivid vision and touched her, the sensation rifling across her chest. It pulled at her. Harper screamed.  

“Nooo!!”

She jolted awake. Her respirator was whining in her helmet. Her chest heaved with ragged breaths. Harper looked down to find herself floating several yards above the Caelum, her tether at full length. Her head was pounding again and she felt weaker than when she emerged from cryo.  

She peered down at the ship. The colony had spread. The creatures had commandeered nearly the entire starboard side of the ship.

“Captain? Are you okay?? Captain?” Cheryl said.

“Yes, yes…" she muttered. "The… the creatures, they’ve… taken over the… how?” Her voice cracked with anxiety.

“You’ve been out for more than three days. I tried to wake you, but there wasn’t much I could do from here.”

The hairs on the nape of Harper’s neck stood on end. She needed to be back on the ship. She needed to get ahead of this. She reached for the tether. Her arm barely moved at her command. Harper tried the other: a similar incapacity.

“Captain,” Cheryl said tentatively, “between the hyper-sleep, your unconsciousness and going without food for as long as you did, your body is terribly weak.”

Harper blinked uncontrollably, her mind grasping at the situation, trying to make it all stick.

“Slow movements, Captain. Take your time.”

“We don’t have time.”  

“Time is all we have now.”

Harper gnashed her teeth. Her insides burned. She wanted to scream.

She could hear herself breathing, the respirator purring in her ears. Stars twinkled all around her. At length, she collected herself. 

Cheryl was right. Mother-jokes aside, she was always right. Harper took a deep breath and reached out for the tether. It seemed like an eternity, but all she could do was move, go through the motions, try.  

While stretching for the life-line, something below caught her eye. A long row of the prickly creatures, a bit smaller than the rest, were pulsating. They were mid-inception, giving birth to themselves. They encircled the colony, a fresh layer of lethal interlopers — their amber-colored eyes wet and fully formed, their spines stunted and still fleshy.  

Harper’s jaw tightened as a heat rose like a halo through the top of her head.  

“You bastards!!" she screamed. "You goddam… sons of bitches…” Her voice fell to a whisper. She bit her lip, holding back sobs.  

The blanket of eyes looked up at her coolly, following each of her labored movements. They glowed and they squirmed. Then swiveled in their thorny sockets.