Voices of the Void Read online

  Voices

  of the

  Void

  By

  David V. Stewart

  ©2019 David Van Dyke Stewart. All rights r­eserved. This work may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, for profit or not, without prior express written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious; any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by David Van Dyke Stewart.

  Voices of the Void

  Andrew walked down the gallery, watching the slowly bobbing reflection on the waxed floor from the bright artificial windows to his left. Looking out as he entered the wide, clean foyer, it was hard to believe he had just stepped through a grit-caked airlock that opened into darkness. Comfortable furniture lined the walls in bright colors, upholstered in a synthetic material made to look like weaved cotton. The rubber-soled boots of his EV suit even squeaked as he walked; the dust collection system was still working at full capacity. The automated maintenance system was top-of-the-line; it would be years before it needed its own round of repairs, and the reactor that powered the colony would likely take centuries to die. Andrew reminded himself of this as he looked at the details of human life around him.

  This section was the school. A book sat on a nearby work table, closed and abandoned, ignored by the robots and machines that cleaned the room… Andrew couldn’t guess how many times they had passed it over. On a nearby bulletin board, there were pinned a variety of drawings depicting scenes that were more-or-less earth-like: children playing on grass under a yellow sun, rain and rainbows, castles and cars on busy streets. Odd, considering that it was likely none of the children had ever seen Earth, any other garden planet, or even a bright yellow sun for that matter. Andrew paused and looked around himself, and thought it likely none of them ever would. But there was a chance, or else he wouldn’t be here. He spied on one of the nearby desks another drawing, and his eye became fixed on it.

  He walked toward it, looking down at the floor of artificial maple, each section printed to be as unique as real wood, and saw a black scuff mark that had stood up to the passage of the cleaning machines.

  Andrew looked up and felt suddenly queasy.

  The large room was full of children of all ages, sitting on the neat couches or working at tables. From a distant hall, a teenage boy careened toward him on old-fashioned rolling skates. A young woman – a teacher, by her professional dress, stood at the entrance to a nearby classroom, her arms crossed seriously, though she smiled slightly as she watched the youth. Her light brown hair blew around her shoulders as the boy passed her. Another teacher – a middle-aged man – slipped behind another door, pretending not to notice the boy.

  The young teacher called to the teenage boy, “Astin!” and though he knew she was looking to the rebellious youth, Andrew could have sworn the teacher caught his eye. “Astin what do you think you are doing?!”

  She’s pretty. The thought careened into his consciousness unbidden, though not as unwelcome as other sentiments that intruded so. Andrew could suddenly see the details in her eyes, as if he were looking into them just centimeters away. They were blue, and reflected the artificial day of a skylight above in a bright white halo.

  The image disappeared as Andrew came back into himself. He flinched as the boy on skates tried to stop in front of him, but tripped, scuffing the floor with the rubber brake on his skates, falling onto his side and sliding away, grunting softly. He slid into, or rather, through, Andrew.

  And then the vision faded. The sounds of playing children turned to hallow reverberation, and the beautiful teacher turned translucent as she stepped toward him, intent on helping the fallen teenager. Then she was gone.

  “Damnit,” Andrew said to himself, forcing the word out of his mouth. His visor was fogging up with his rapid breath. He checked the computer on his wrist and, seeing that the air was clean and clear, he pressed the release button at his neck. His helmet and visor split into tiny ribbons, then disappeared into his collar. He breathed deeply.

  “Damn fool, getting distracted like that,” he said aloud to himself. With the helmet removed, he was suddenly aware of the reverb of his voice in the empty room and the soft clicking of a fan’s bearing somewhere in the ventilation system. The wonder of the vision was quickly replaced with his usual sense of unease. He looked down and checked the receiver of his rifle – an antique weapon, but one that he knew functioned better within atmospheres than his plasma gun, which he kept slung on his back. It was toggled over to auto. Andrew shook his head and toggled it back to safe, distrusting his instincts.

  He stepped toward the picture on the desk, hoping to provoke another vision (which he had, ironically, intended to avoid by staring at the faux-wood floor), and hoping also that if he were to slip back to the past, he could, with his wits more about him, actually look for his quarry. He let his rifle hang and picked up the picture. It was of a castle, colored with grey pencil and highly detailed, but there were little modern colony buildings instead of a medieval village surrounding it.

  Probably better if I don’t slip back, he said inside himself. I need to find her in the present. A past vision does nothing. A void echoed back, and Andrew sighed.

  Andrew looked to the manila door from which he had seen the young teacher emerge. It was shut. He could see through a small window a few empty desks. He felt a strong compulsion to open the door and look around, provoke another vision.

  She’s likely dead, his voice said to himself. He knew the voice – part of his fractured self – was right. They had played too long at that once already. Andrew nodded his head.

  He couldn’t control the power, at least not yet, but he was beginning to understand what would cause it to present itself. Perhaps in the future, he would be able to look back in time at will, not be thrust into it at the behest of some echo in his brain and lose all sense of what “the present” meant. Perhaps… but such experiments would have to wait.

  Andrew put the picture back down and stepped away from the desk. He walked through the open school toward where his readout said the primary elevators were. This sector had to be empty. He walked down a long and narrow hallway, the rustle of his suit and his soft steps the only sound.

  When he reached the elevators, he noticed the doorway to the dormitory overflows was open. The lights were shining brightly all the way down a long, straight hallway. He could only see the first few doors, and they were all shut.

  Andrew looked back at the slick steel doors of the closest elevator. A glowing panel above indicated that the car was paused on the sixth level. He tried to remember how deep things went, information he gathered while pouring over the technical details of the plant during his trip to the planet, but his memory felt hard to access.

  “Probably goes pretty deep, but not from the dorms, yeah?” he said aloud, listening to his voice die in the artificial, fabric-lined corridor. He slipped his right glove off to operate the computer panel and call up the elevator. After hurriedly going through the motions, he brought his rifle around and touched the trigger, feeling the familiar steel against his fingertip. He let the weapon fall back into its bungee sling and tucked his glove into the belt of his suit.

  The lift moved slowly, and Andrew could hear the sliding and grinding of the pulleys above, shaking off old, dry dust. He glanced over at the dormitory again. He stepped toward it, seeing more of the plain blue doors appear around shallow recesses in the hallway.

  “Hello?” he called loudly. “I’m here from…” He paused and thought about his employer. His mission from Saul Toro was not officially from the Iber Colony Counsel. “I’m here to help. Is there anyone out there?”
He brought his rifle back up and shouldered it, intending to fire a shot, but then thought better of it. “Anyone alive?”

  The elevator doors opened, and he glanced at an empty and pristine car. He turned from it and stepped toward the dormitory hallway. A tall computer panel stood next to the open blast doors. Andrew saw that it could be used to page the rooms, but also saw, since this was an overflow dormitory, that only certain rooms could be paged. He could go through the list, one by one, and make sure there was nobody simply hiding from him.

  “What would they be hiding from?”

  Part of his mind answered to him, almost against his will. A single word – a concept – from a sector of himself he had, for reasons of sanity, maintained little contact with.

  Wr’t’lra’a The word drew itself out, all guttural nonsense, but in the image remained. Wrtla, a voice inside said back.

  Could it be? He thought. Could there really be more of them? The situation seemed to fit, but then again there were many things in the universe that could swallow a colony of humans whole. But leave everything so perfect? No! They walked away. They walked down. To it.

  The sliver of his former self that had surged forward seemed to cry wordlessly after its interjection, demanding to become one with the other pieces of Andrew’s mind. The self he was before – his memories, his identity – had something more to say, but it had been touched too deeply by the ancient unknowable void. The hunter he had created out of the shards of that contact asserted itself and shut the old, broken Andrew away. His old consciousness was now an echo – useful if needed, but safely locked up.

  Andrew took a quick picture of the room list with his computer and stepped into the dormitory hallway. It was carpeted and clean. He brought up the list on the screen attached to his left forearm. Normally he would use the heads-up display on his helmet, but he had removed it to breathe the air of the place.

  “J-115,” he said aloud. A sliver of his mind touched his consciousness, and he felt a pang of dread again. He frowned and focused as he walked to the first occupied dormitory, bringing his rifle forward in its sling just in case. He found the door unlocked, and it pushed in with a slight squeak of the hinges. Automatic lights flickered on, revealing a Spartan flat.

  “Anyone home?”

  As he expected, silence was all that greeted him.

  He stepped in and looked around briefly. In the bathroom a toothbrush sat perched on a deep sink. A personal computer sat on a table near the made bed, dead and unplugged.

  Andrew took a breath and listened to his own thoughts.

  It would take a long time to check every room. The dread returned, and tapping on the edge of his current consciousness was an idea he didn’t want to consider. It tapped again, and he groaned, wondering if it were prescience or just his imagination.

  He stepped out of the empty flat and continued down the hall.

  “I’m checking each one, so you might as well come out if you haven’t. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  The whir of a fan in a vent was all that responded. Then there was a sudden click, and Andrew brought up his rifle, quickly clicking off the safety. A few paces in front of him, a small door in the wall opened up, and a cleaning robot emerged. It began its daily chore, turning and running along the edge of the hallway, sucking up the dust that had collected in the last day.

  Andrew chuckled and stepped forward, then was assaulted by a vision and a ringing in his ears. He reached to the wall to steady himself, but the wall wasn’t there.

  He was suddenly inside a large flat, stepping toward a partly open door. A smell was stuck in his nostrils like dried mud. It was a rotten smell, and he knew what made it. He pushed the door wider, looking only down the sights of his rifle, knowing that it would not save him from the horror. The lights flickered on, and his mind was fracturing further, seeing further, as if the vision could not be contained within a single moment.

  He screamed as he saw a crib; the scream did not stop him from continuing forward and seeing what remained inside the simple wooden bed. Nausea scraped across the back of his head, his neck, his ears, down his throat. He could smell his own bile. He screamed with every piece of himself, screamed and bled and cried and collapsed.

  Then he was standing back in the hall. The cleaner had moved one door down. His prescient self was still screaming, and though the images remained, preserved like endlessly looped video files, the screams began to slowly fade, responding to the subtle push he gave to that part of his mind. Soon it was a dull roar in his mind: echoing, distant, and yet not gone.

  “No reason to continue,” he said, his voice dry like reeds. “They walked away. Those that could walk away.”

  He turned away from the hall and ran back toward the elevators. As he did, the screaming finally stopped. The vision of the dead, forgotten child, seared into his retinas, burned into his memory forever, suddenly waned and began to disappear. By the time he reached the lift, the images had nearly evaporated, becoming a dream after waking, or a half-memory of a blurry photograph.

  He knew what he had seen, though. His future self had seen it, and by warning him, had destroyed the vision in a paradox created by his change of course.

  He stepped into the elevator. He ran his hand through the menus on the computer to run the car down to the industrial center, which was level six. The last place this elevator went. From there, he would test the fears and desires of his former mind. Already that part was raving, calling to him. The doors closed. Andrew kneeled and began preparing himself. He checked every magazine and battery he had. He tested the light on his front rail and affixed a bayonet to his front lug. He checked his plasma gun and made sure it was slung right where he would want it.

  Lastly, he reached in his pocket and felt for the grenade he had rigged up specially to explode immediately upon setting the fuse. He would not feed the old Andrew to a Wrtla, whatever might happen. The finality of that decision gave him courage. He knew not whether there was a journey beyond his life through limbo or purgatory, but wherever he might go, he would go as himself.

  Taking a breath, he checked his wrist computer. His vision blurred and focused. It was 10:00 hours. He tapped the computer, sure something was wrong. Perhaps it had reset the time when he had entered the mining facility, syncing with the central chronometer. Toro had given him the codes.

  “It can’t have been three hours already,” he said, reassuring himself. Visions, especially those of the future, were always instantaneous.

  He toggled the safety of his rifle, finding it on semi and feeling disconcerted by the fact until he remembered that he had meant to fire a warning shot down the hall.

  “I’m getting out of practice,” he said to himself.

  The elevator slowed and the lift doors opened. He stepped out and looked down several wandering hallways which led to the lowest level of housing. Like the top floor, there was an open foyer near the elevators, but this one was clearly designed with an industrial purpose in mind. Desks and computer terminals lined every wall. Like the first floor, these were left in a state of mid-use. Some monitors still showed open documents, the image of words and draft lines burned forever into the machine, which carried on refreshing the same still image week after week. Caged doors opened off the main hall into equipment rooms and other repositories like lockers and materials storage.

  A few wide sapphire windows were set in the walls, gazing out into an abyss that once was likely the well-lit beginning of the mine. The darkness beyond irritated a part of Andrew, but he resisted the urge to shine a light out one of those windows and see the rock for himself.

  Andrew walked past all this, shining his light into dark corners, following his map to the next set of lifts, which would take him down into the mining area. Once again, there was no life other than the artificial buzzing of machines engaged in their daily maintenance tasks. He skipped the dormitories, knowing that if they were not empty, they would contain things he did not wish to see.

  He paus
ed as he passed a workstation, noting that a half-eaten donut remained by the keyboard, nearly desiccated. He wondered why no pest had wandered by to claim it, but then he remembered the planet’s desolate surface. There would be no unwanted life in the colony, save for the microbes that came along with the colonists themselves, and he had already seen those at work on the corpse-

  “Of the baby,” he said aloud, and shivered. The image was dim, nearly gone, but he could imagine the horror well enough.

  He paused as he turned away, noticing a few pieces of rubbish in the workstation’s wastebasket. He looked around and saw, as he expected, no trash in any other basket. The robots responsible for waste management were working well, except for this one. This one contained a number of food wrappers and grease-stained napkins that the robots for some reason could not detect.

  I guess the systems aren’t so autonomous after all, he thought. He walked on into a wide hallway, brightly lit and floored with a composite pebble. The walls were smooth and sound absorbent. He held his rifle aloft as he rounded a bend, then found the next set of lifts. He checked every corner as he approached, his sense of foreboding growing strong again – telling him that he faced danger, and also that he was on the right track.

  The lift cars that serviced the mine were, as Andrew expected, both away deep in the various digs. He looked out a nearby window. Like the others on the bottom level, it was one of few in the facility that was not made to artificially create a sense of sunlight on a garden planet. He could see running lights going down a long series of rails and cables. The lifts would slide along these, going diagonally into the mining area. In a few places, the lights were flickering or dead, and Andrew knew he had come to the end of the well-designed automated habitat created for the human miners.

  He took a look at the computer panel by the lifts and noted where the cars were. One was on sector four, the other past it on sector five, which he assumed was deeper in the infinite rock of the well-named planet Gibraltar. He thought it curious that the lift cars were not on the same level, but then remembered he was operating on a set of assumptions that were, in all likelihood, bunk. It was his precognitive side’s worrying about his original mind – that “Old Andrew” he kept contained and away from consciousness – that was leading him to believe in a… whatever you could call it. A demon?