The Lighthouse
They knew the pattern of the dying stars like their own bionics. Shimmering extensions of themselves. Malfunctioning. Sputtering out, only unlike the smooth, twitching aluminum fingers and spray-coated forearms, the stars couldn’t be repaired. Once the glimmer was doused in the encroaching dark, it was gone. One less beacon in a growing mass of nothing.
Of course, when I say they knew, just like that, in the past tense, it isn’t for dramatic effect. It’s because I refer to the people who watched at this post centuries ago, not the tall woman with a half-metal face whose post I replaced. As I sit here, staring into the void at the edge of known space looking for gods-know-what, there are no stars. Not anymore. This docked beacon, self-sustained and floating like a buoy, sits as a mediator between the dappled neon expanse of civilization behind me, and the absolute darkness of the unknown before me.
The Lighthouse has watched over the years as countless ships jet themselves out into the expanse. Some return, pulled by the light and radio signals offered by my post like an invisible rope, tied to a point of reference. Some, well, I can’t say what happened to them. They appear like a blip on my screens. Rendered models of their physical shape. I would speak with their pilots, wish them well, relay any information gathered from their scanners and then, like a sudden switch flipped by something unknown, the model would disappear.
In the video logs kept by my predecessors, they would speak of the moment when they saw a star disappear, like watching a bulb the moment it fizzles out with a final zap of current. Chilling theories emerged. Theories about time, and a pattern to the disappearances, and that something was eating them, or worse, blocking their light, and how when time caught up to the Lighthouse, when the thing that had blotted the disappearing stars long before the image caught up with the distance through space, it would devour the Lighthouse too. I can’t say whether I believe them, or if the darkness had eaten their minds and the stars, as with all things, died eventually.
However, I can’t confirm it as mere fantasy. Out there where there are no longer any stars, their eons-delayed light eaten so many light-years ago, how can I be certain that the laws which hold our civilizations together, the anchors that moor our atoms to our forms, even apply out there, in the drifting nether that can’t be seen. The edge of the universe.
This is my addition to the history of nothing, my duty to record what I see here, watching the edge of space, a human alarm waiting for the thickening blackness to tell us something that would give body and form and voice to our most primal fear: the fear of the unknown that waits, quiet, in the unseen.
When I was younger, I lived in a small, compact flat with my family. It was prefab, like most living quarters were as civilization expanded beyond the central metropolitan systems. That being said, the space was kind to us. On my home planet the sun beat down hard during the day and the nights were utterly frigid, but the climate controls and the air-tight titanium of the structure kept our little family at a constant 70 degrees despite the planet’s attempts to kill us.
My parent worked during the day and, sometimes, when the grounds were tough and the weather ran foul, they would come home later than usual. The sun would dip under the western horizon and the surface of the planet would disappear into darkness. When I would go to sleep alone, the lighting would turn off. It was in these moments when ordinary sounds became horrors to me. It wasn’t that the warping of metal, the brush of curtains, or the high tinkle of glass were, in and of themselves, frightening. It was that I was the only one in the house. I was the only reason for noise to exist, so when the prefab made a sound, whatever the sound, I would feel it on the places where I still had skin, like a ghost passing through me. I was alone. There shouldn’t be any sound — anything — but me.
I’m reminded of those lonely, high-nerve nights sometimes when I’m out here at my post. The outer darkness is so completely dark that anything, even a mote of floating dust that lodges itself on my screen, evokes a reflexive alertness. Some days I swear I see things that shouldn’t be there. On the scanners or through the thick glass of the viewing room or even, sometimes, in my quarters. Solitude, like darkness, can do strange things to the mind.
Sometimes I pull out the old video logs just to hear another human voice. I remember one person in particular. Not because their story was unique, but because it wasn’t. Theirs was merely the first time I had heard the story that I would hear repeated in uncanny similarity by the holographic ghosts of the others just doing their duty, recording their stories, the things they saw out there. After that first time, I didn’t watch another log for weeks.
I will tell you about it though in case you wonder why I feel so confidently that I am going crazy. The recorder clicked on as it did with every cataloged video. Their hair was stone-gray. Their face was about 30% bionic, running from the top of the left cheek and taking up most of the jaw. It was common to augment the mouth first. That piece of biological machinery eroded fastest and was, in some ways, the most necessary. They spoke in whispers at first, hiding their sound from some imaginary thing that I couldn’t see.
This is what they said:
“I’ve been wondering for a while now, well, whether I’ve been going crazy out here. I honestly don’t know how I’m keeping it together.”
Their voice picked up in confidence as they continued.
“I saw something today.”
They paused here, breathing to calm themselves.
“Out there in the blackness, there was this weird flash that was, and I swear I’m telling the truth, it was a black flash, and I know what you’re thinking…how do you see a flash of dark against…well…something that is already dark, but that’s the only way my eyes could describe it. There weren’t any missions or expeditions that day. No ships expected. Always the hope of some lost vessel coming back from that maw of disappeared stars but that’s a fool’s hope. I didn’t think much of it, but I saw it again a few times and, each time, I could swear it grew bigger and…took shape. What shape I can’t put words to, but it felt…it felt like it was watching me. Not with eyes, just…watching somehow.”
I shuddered as the voice continued.
“I was in the viewing room when it flashed so I went back to the scanning room to note it in my log and I just caught my scanner out of the corner of my eye and I’ll be a fool but the spot on the scanner said that it was, well…sentient. A life form. I flipped. I called my superior, pulled up my report and…it was gone like it had never been there. Worse than that, there was no record of a life form ever having been there. I started getting dizzy, so I went to sleep but I woke in the middle of the night to a sound. An odd, high-pitched puling that sounded like it was coming from the kitchen pod. I went in there. Lights came on like they should at any movement. I saw nothing. Clearly there couldn’t have been anything in there because it would have tripped the lights before me, but then I turned to go, and I thought I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Of course, when I turned around there was nothing there. I couldn’t sleep at all after that, so I went back to the scanning room. I don’t know why but at one point I look down at my scanner and the life form is there again, but this time…it’s…it’s not out there. It’s in here. In the kitchen. In my kitchen. On this dock in the middle of nowhere.”
They were clearly shaken by the retelling and paused to gather themselves before continuing.
“…I scramble to call my superior again and, well…I never saw or heard…whatever that thing was again but I’m not much longer for this post. They’re relieving me. They think I’m going nuts. Not fit for observation or analysis due to lack of sleep and paranoia. Their words. I come out here and finally see something worth seeing and they relieve me. What’s the point? I mean, I wasn’t sleeping but that’s beside the point. I honestly think my superior just didn’t want to be getting false alarms every other day but, who’s to say? I don’t know. If you’re watching this, just…there’s something out there eating the stars. They aren’t just dying. I don’t know what it is but…it’s out there and it’s watching us.”
The recorder clicked off like every other video, but the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up. The strangest thing about the video log is that, if you watch it closely, there’s a dull shimmer in the background around the halfway mark. They’re not the only crew to tell stories like this either. Not everyone sees it or hears it. I certainly haven’t seen anything yet, but sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of, well, it’s not really night ‘cuz everything’s dark here. It’s always night here, but sometimes I’ll wake up with the feeling that something’s watching me.
Sometimes I’ll go out to the viewing room and I’ll swear the entire shroud of starless dark seems to be aware of me, watching me silently, but I never had cause to believe it was anything but my lonely, warped mind. That is, until now. Today, I look out into the utter dark to see a ship. Not a ship venturing out into the black maw to catalog the celestial patterns. Not a ship that sought to name the nameless space. A ship returning.
Then it happens. There is a shape in the darkness behind the ship. Like the person in the frightening video-log I cannot put words to it, but I somehow feel that it looks…well…sentient in some indescribable, utterly monolithic way, like the stars that those before me had seen weren’t really gone, just shrouded behind a great form that seemed to throb and pulse before my eyes, darker somehow than space itself.
I try to shake off the feeling of terror, passing it off as a hallucination, and in a moment of realization I stood utterly still. Frozen. Why was there a ship? No ships had ventured out there for months, and no ship had stayed shrouded in the darkness for more than a few days before coming back, and why was my scanner, which had been faithful to this point in tracking anything and everything, utterly blank, like it could not pick up the presence of the spacecraft at all. I think I’m going crazy now.
Then I see it. The scanner shows two living forms. Neither of them is on the ship.
I am one of course, but the other form, according to the scanner, is standing right next to me…
