three
AS IT turns out, Robby doesn't eat or sleep, or even get up to use the bathroom. Atom doesn't dare go to bed in case he misses his chance so he stays up all night, pacing the halls, running idle system checks and taking a full inventory of everything on the ship while keeping one ear and one eye fixed on the open cockpit door.
Finally, after taking stock of his entire food storage Atom exits the kitchen and heads down the hallway to peer into the cockpit and finds the pilot seat unoccupied. He checks behind him before creeping the rest of the way to breach the doorway.
Empty.
Atom drifts further into the room and checks every corner, but finds no sign of Robby.
His hands find the console. Fingers cover glowing buttons and meters, and fly across the keyboard. Quickly, he types out a course adjustment and gives the computer permission to run it through the system. The ship hisses audibly as it corrects its projection. At that, Atom's stomach lurches.
And his hands twitch.
The tendons in his neck spasm. Cold vines shoot up along the insides of his skin.
Robby is in the doorway when Atom manages to turn around.
Robby, and a hundred black shadows. Sharp, gnarled blackness engulfs the entire far wall. Protruding from two separate points where Robby's hands would be, if he had any. His gloves are off and his substance seeps from those two openings in sharp cascading crystals, expanding around him in a web of blades.
It stops just short of making contact with Atom. It shudders and gleams and smells of sulfur and carbon and something else entirely and overwhelmingly unrecognizable.
"I need to make a pit stop," Atom says, around the ice in his mouth. His mind spins against the glaciers threatening to tear it apart. "There's an abandoned radio center nearby. I need to send a message. To my Commander." To tell him about you, he doesn't say. "It won't take very long."
The structures begin to writhe again and Atom nearly blacks out. He breathes through his teeth as each spike dissolves and spins away, back toward Robby and the inside of his suit. The last of it morphs into thick jagged hands that reach up to pluck his gloves from the air.
When the gloves finally click back into place, Atom exhales, expelling some of the chill from his lungs. Robby recedes back through the doorway and out of sight.
Atom scrubs his hands over his face. A bruise on his cheek throbs at the contact. The ghost of Maverick's fist grinds its knuckles into that aching stain. And it grounds him back to reality.
The radio center wasn't a lie, but it'll take a few days to get there. Days that Atom doesn't want to waste, but what choice does he have now? Exhausted, Atom resigns himself to keeping Robby on board, for now. He leaves the cockpit and heads to bed. On his way by the equipment room he spots Robby, floating among the spare suits. He's still there in the morning when Atom wakes up, and the next day, and the next.
-
CRAWLING AROUND a large orange-pink gas giant in the Duco System is a tiny moon named Tycho. Repurposed as a communication outpost, Tycho had once been an essential part of deep space radio broadcasting. However, its secondary purpose, one not known to the general public, had been to scan deep space for any signs of extraterrestrial communication. And after yielding zero results across its 30 years of service, the outpost's funding was cut, and the station crew was ordered to hastily relocate across the stars to a different station, and took with them most of their broadcasting equipment.
In their rush some larger devices were left behind with the intention of being picked up at a later date. But less than a year later the world saw a breakthrough in deep space radio transmission and it became more cost effective to build new equipment rather than send a large retrieval ship way out here for a bunch of outdated junk.
Now Tycho houses a semi-functional, hibernating ghost town. From above it looks like any other broadcasting outpost. Atom carefully steers their ship down into the heart of its gray city, sprouting with concrete facilities and radio towers and super massive satellites. To his left, Robby remains safely secured to the passenger seat and makes no comment.
After the landing is complete Atom pulls his ID card from the control panel and fully powers down the ship.
"This ship won't take off without one of these. Stay here or get out and stretch your legs, but if you're not back here in an hour I'm taking off without you."
Robby makes no move to leave his seat, so Atom sets off without him.
Within walking distance of the landing zone is a small parking lot full of solar powered vehicles. Atom finds them in working condition, and decides to borrow one to drive across the lumpy brown surface of Tycho towards the first radio tower. Unsurprisingly he finds the tower entirely dark. A black shape rising against the star-bright sky. The tower’s interior, he finds, is just as dark. Not a single emergency light offers to make his job any easier.
The entire outpost must have been manually shut down, including the backup generators. A temporary setback, but not a significant cause for worry.
Atom climbs back into the jeep and heads to the solar panel field on the outskirts of town. Manually he opens the shutters on each massive panel and works up a sweat in the process. The junction of muscle and metal in his leg aches at the movement.
Once enough columns have been opened Atom enters the nearby power shed and flips the switch on the generator. It makes no noise or any other sign of recognition for Atom's needs. He sighs. It'll take some time for the solar panels to heat up, so Atom finds a chair and sits down to wait in the dark room.
In the still, lightless room his mind drifts to Robby, and he recalls Novo; The encounter and subsequent blackout, and waking up back on his ship in the infirmary. If all Robby wanted was the ship, why take Atom aboard? Why not take his ID card and dump his body back out the airlock before taking off? Craning his head back, Atom tries to spot his ship from the open doorway. But a suited figure steps into sight, blocking his view.
Atom rolls to his feet.
"Atom Belov." says the Keeper. "You are a wanted criminal. A traitor to humanity. I, Unity Keeper Bellarosa, have orders to apprehend you."
Atom draws his sword.
"We can do this without the weapons." She says.
"I won't go peacefully."
Bellarosa shifts to rest a hand on the hilt rising above her shoulder, but she does not draw. "Why are you doing this?"
"Answer this and I might answer you: How did you know I was here?"
"An encoded message was sent out from Base Violet. No one has any reason to go there, except someone like you. I came here because I thought you might need to send another encoded message, and you would be looking for places with easy access. I waited here for several days. And here you are."
"Here I am."
"Why are you doing this?"
"If I tell you, will you let me go?"
"No."
"Then one of us must die."
"They say you are in possession of a world-ending bomb. Is this true?"
"Maybe."
Bellarosa shakes her head. "What have we done to deserve death at your hands? What has humanity done to deserve your extinction?"
Atom rolls his shoulders and lowers his sword. "Endless wars. Wealth hoarding. Global pollution. We all contribute. We all have failed."
Bellarosa's sword remains sheathed. "And what about all the good things? Love, science, art? Are they worth nothing to you?"
"There will be plenty of that, in the final days. It'll be a time of true peace. The likes of which humanity has never seen."
"It will be a time of terror and despair. You must know that."
"Earth will be Unified. That is my duty as a Unity Keeper and I intend to see it through."
Again Bellarosa shakes her head. "Our duty is to keep people safe. You will be killing us all."
Atom sighs. "Go home, Bellarosa. Walk away from this. Spend the rest of the time you have left with your loved ones."
"If I walk away, I will have failed my duty."
"But you'll be alive. That's what you value, isn't it? Life?"
"I value the life of every human. Not only those alive today, but the ones who will come after. Who will have to witness the end you intend to bring upon them. The ones who will all die. At your hands. I cannot let that happen."
And so Atom rushes her. She steps back and slams the door in his face. Atom keeps running and throws his body against it. His bones jolt with the impact but the door swings open. Bellarosa throws something heavy at him, a power cell by the looks of it. The wind gets knocked out of him and momentarily Atom loses track of Bellarosa. Clumsily he gets back on his feet and finds her merely watching him.
"Leave." He rasps. "Go back to Earth. Or draw your sword."
"I don’t want to kill you." She says.
"Then turn your back. Pretend you never saw me, and we can both walk away."
Bellarosa raises her hand. And pulls a wide flat sword from her back, its blade the length of her forearm. She holds it diagonally across her chest for a moment. A mark of farewell. And shifts into a ready position.
Atom waits for her to engage the first attack.
She melts into a blur of movement. Atom sidesteps and deflects with his longer blade. Each instance of contact rings out into the night.
In the wide empty stretch of rock between giant metal towers are two specks of white. One stands, bowing over the other. Panting, back bent, hands on knees. While the other lies motionless. Red stain blooming. The outdoor lights come on with a shudder, flooding the courtyard in a clinical blue-white glow. Bright as daylight. Atom’s shadow fans out in a circle of six.
Alone, again. Atom slides his sword back onto his hip. Uncurling his spine he sees the face of Planet Oroill, watching him. Serene clouds swirling by.
Atom hobbles back to the car and climbs in, slamming the door. He finds himself shivering, despite the internal temperature regulator of his suit running as it should be. He waits for it to pass. It always does.
He presses the on button next to the wheel and drives back to the radio tower. Once there he makes quick work of setting up the equipment and opens a secure channel to his Commander. Once it connects his hands freeze on the keyboard. The black screen burns into his eyes. He blinks. And begins to type.
: Is there a possibility other lifeforms could be affected by this mission?
It takes 20 minutes to receive a response. When it arrives it painstakingly rolls across the screen one tiny blue letter at a time.
: There are no other sentient beings in our corner of the universe. Did you come across something that made you doubt otherwise?
Atom reads the message three times. He swallows. Too much time has passed. He has to make a decision. Again he thinks of Novo.
: No. I've had a lot of time to ponder hypotheticals.
: That is unnecessary. Follow the mission as it was planned.
: Yes, Sir. My will has not wavered. Humanity shall heal. May the light unify.
: And swallow every shadow.
Atom closes the connection and wipes the activity log. He stands. And exits the radio tower. He takes the jeep back to his ship. It continues to hum for a short while after he turns off the motor, clicking and settling back into silence. Like a set of lungs rattling their last breath.
Stumbling out of the jeep he spots Robby standing near the ship with his back turned. His helmet is tucked under one arm and the place above the neck of his suit is empty. The darkness overflows past the rim and hangs low on the ground around his feet.
Clouds of shadows, immune to light.
"Hey," Says Atom. "I'm ready to go. Are you coming with me?"
The headless, bloodless, colorless creature turns towards him. The shadows rise ever so slightly.
"I'm done here. I don't need any more pit stops. We can go straight to the galaxy center. Takeoff is in 10 minutes."
Atom climbs onto the ship and gets it running. He straps in and sets a timer and waits. Robby enters the ship with four minutes left. His helmet is back in place when he secures himself to the passenger seat. And Atom almost thinks he looks human.
-
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.01.2487. General supply request.
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.07.2487. Eight new personnel, requested.
Earth to Violet, Incoming. 03.07.2487. Request for personnel denied.
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.12.2487. [REDACTED] [MESSAGE NOT SENT]
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.14.2487. Four new personnel, requested.
Earth to Violet, Incoming. 03.25.2487. Two new hires are en route.
Atom shuts the plastic-covered worklog and tucks it into the storage mesh beside his sleeping chamber. Seconds before, a distant clanking noise had broken the silence aboard his ship. Eager to find something better to do than read the pristine worklog salvaged from Base Violet, Atom takes up his sword and heads out into the ship to investigate.
Ears pricked, eyes scanning for movement, Atom keeps his back to the wall and peers into the cockpit. He finds it empty. Locking the door behind him Atom maneuvers to the console and checks all active systems. Nothing wrong there, so he checks the cameras. Nothing amiss there either.
He double checks just to be sure, flicking through each scene and raking them for any inconsistencies. On the last screen he catches a view of the far airlock, rarely in use for its inconvenient distance to any storage bay. Today he finds the airlock open.
But the system readings assure Atom that the bay is correctly pressurized, and not in danger of leaking oxygen. An error? Possible, but Atom doubts it. He leaves the cockpit and heads toward the far airlock bay.
When he arrives the airlock is, indeed, open. Attached to the ship is a small escape pod, only big enough to house one body and a simple navigation system.
Atom finds nobody inside it, and moves on. Slower now. Around the corner he crawls and arrives just in time to see the Infiltrator. Another Unity Keeper. A sword extends from his arm towards the center of Robby's chest. Robby, weaponless and anonymous, doesn't bother to dodge and instead lifts his helmet just as the tip of the sword tears through the front of his suit. The Infiltrator doesn't stand a chance under the mass of Robby's cold shadow, set loose upon his unsuspecting human body.
Atom approaches at the click of a helmet locking back into place. With the air now clear of danger Atom sees the Infiltrator hanging limply in the air. "Did you kill him?" He asks.
Robby says no. Atom checks anyway. He removes the man's glove and feels for a pulse. Rapid movement drums against his fingertips.
Taking him by the shoulders, Atom drags the body around the corner and through the airlock and into the small escape pod. He straps him to the far wall and removes his helmet. He takes his knife from its hilt and doesn't pause to watch the blood bubble free from the man's severed throat. He shuts the airlock and punches the eject button.
He feels Robby's presence at his back. He turns. He does not look at his reflection in Robby's golden visor. "It's safer this way." He says. "He would have come back for us."
With the task now complete Atom heads back to his room and plucks from the storage mesh his only source of reading material. He opens the work log to its very first page and starts again from the beginning.
-
DAYS LATER Atom wakes with a yawn in the passenger seat of the cockpit. Robby sits across from him in the pilot seat, silent as ever. Atom's stomach growls in place of a greeting and he makes his way to the kitchen for a quick meal. He takes his time in the bathroom afterward, wiping down his entire body with a hygienic towel. He brushes his teeth and shaves his face and when he drifts back to the cockpit Robby is still there. Except now his hands are on the nav sticks, and they are pulling.
Atom curses himself.
"Robby, what are you doing?" Atom floats closer and doesn't recognize any of the numbers on the destination screen. The ship tilts under Robby's command.
"Where are we? No—where are we going? Robby, we had a deal—"
Robby firmly points to him and then the passenger seat.
"You are not taking my ship."
Robby points to another screen. The route tracker. The coordinates of the galaxy center are still set as the main destination, though now there is a fresh row of numbers listed as a detour below it. The distance to this detour steadily counts down. And it isn't far at all.
"You are not taking my ship." Atom repeats. This time Robby nods, and physically pushes him towards the passenger seat. This time Atom obeys.
"Can I know where we are going? And why?"
Robby mimes taking off his helmet. This is the only answer Atom gets from him, as if the meaning is obvious.
So Atom buckles in and keeps his eyes to the window, searching for anything that might be familiar. When a white-purple globe fills the view Atom doesn't recognize it. The star chart offers no name for it, either.
Robby guides them straight through its atmosphere and thick layers of spotty clouds to a land alien to Atom's senses. When they land, Robby removes Atom's ID from the console and hands it over. Atom pockets it and follows Robby off the ship.
Together they step out into a world glowing in lavender light. Purple fog dances across Atom's vision, dimming the sun but not blocking it entirely. The ground below his feet is a vast lumpy blanket of glittering snow.
It almost reminds Atom of home, until his footprints reveal the snow to be a thin dusting of silt on jagged white stone.
Robby begins to walk down a gentle sloped curve towards a strangely tall hill in the distance, and Atom follows. Very quickly Atom notices Robby's slow and careful footsteps. Not knowing the reason for his caution, Atom chooses to copy his route instead of exploring on his own. The hill, when they come to it, is actually a cave. Albeit a shallow one.
Robby throws a quick glance around its icey walls and starts walking to the next rising arch of white.
"Will you tell me what we're doing here?" Atom asks. He doesn't expect an answer, but Robby throws a look at him over his shoulder. Then he stops, and crouches to set his hand on the ground.
Curious, Atom approaches as Robby sifts some of the silt onto his palm and stands up. He lifts it to Atom's visor and Atom blinks, trying to focus on the small grains of stone arrayed on the white material of Robby's glove. The specks continue to swim in front of his eyes and that's when Atom realizes it isn't a trick of the light. The specks are actually moving. With tiny translucent insect legs. They aren't grains of ice or sand at all. They're bugs. Dozens of living creatures, small enough to be mistaken for clumps of salt. Or snow.
Startled, Atom descends to all fours and holds his head just above ground. Sure enough, the rocks are teeming with the creatures. Though they move slowly, and Atom wouldn't have noticed them on his own.
The sight fills him with questions but Robby moves on. Atom hurries to follow. The next cave they approach is much bigger. Its mouth towers several stories above them, and descends to an unseen depth.
Robby seems to approve of it, because he sits right down at the mouth of it, facing outward. When nothing else happens, Atom decides to explore the rest of the cave. It goes on for several dozen yards until it sharply narrows to a single point on the rough stone floor.
Having exhausted all his options he returns to Robby and takes a seat next to him.
Lavender sunlight bends across the ground as the low fog rolls along the hills. The sight and accompanying silence pull at Atom's eyelids until succumbs to the feeling and lays down to doze. A touch on his leg startles him.
He has his knife against Robby's chest before his mind clears.
"Sorry," He says.
Robby shakes his head and points outside the cave. Atom turns to follow the gesture just as the clouds part and a spear of sunlight slips through. Like tears in cotton the clouds separate and golden light pours down through the cracks to illuminate the bright ground in waves. Like the touch of dawn after a blizzard.
And in the midst of every patch of light, Atom watches transfixed as more of those tiny insect creatures seethe out from the porous rocks to bathe on the surface.
And then from above plummets a giant spear of ice. It lands just at the mouth of the cave and rattles the ground underneath. The spear is followed by a giant head and from that giant head rolls a long pink tongue. It scrapes across the ground and scoops of great clusters of the translucent bugs, feeding a mouth dripping with icicles. Moving on to the next patch of sunlight, and the promise of a meal, the creature reveals the rest of its massive body. Standing on four legs and easily towering hundreds of feet tall, the thing resemble nothing seen on Earth. Its body, coated in ribs of ice, steams in the sunlight. Two smooth antlers rise in an arc high above its long, narrow, ice-covered head, and jagged frozen appendages stick out from every inch of its torso in senseless forms. Like a deer that has fallen asleep in a den of its own shed antlers, and awoken to find them frozen stuck to its hide.
A smaller version of the first creature prances in its shadow, sharp hooves scraping against the ground with each jump. The clouds shift the course of light further on, and the pair of them follow it, grazing on the bugs that rise to absorb its warmth.
Atom doesn't dare to blink until they dip beyond a hill and disappear from sight.
Minutes after the sun has been tucked back behind thicker clouds, ice begins to fall from the sky. This at last causes Robby to retreat deeper into the cave. Atom stays to watch the icefall but the sound of it hitting the ground soon grows deafening, so he follows Robby into the darker quieter part of the cave. There he finds Robby waiting for him. The icy interior walls of the cave glow with a faint blue light around him.
"Thank you for showing me this." Says Atom. "I... didn't know there was life on other planets. I believed in the possibility, but... We've been searching the galaxy for so long, and never found anything. Not a scrap of evidence." His voice echoes against the walls and Atom feels foolish at the admission. He clears his throat. "This place is... beautiful."
Taking a few steps forward, Robby places himself directly before Atom and gently presses a hand to Atom's chest. Just hard enough to make solid contact. Atom wonders if the gesture means something to his kind. He looks at the accompanying spot on Robby's chest. He remembers the feeling of his knife piercing the fabric and finding nothing made of flesh or blood.
"Would you like me to mend your suit? Duct tape isn't the best long term solution. I have a fabric repair kit in my pack."
Robby fingers the edges of the tape and regards Atom. Then he takes a step back, and reaches for the latches on his helmet. He hesitates. And then he lifts it, and Atom watches transfixed as Robby sheds the rest of his suit.
The white fabric lays discarded in a pile on the stone floor and before him stands the silhouette of a man, tall and large and masculine and otherwise featureless in the light-absorbing substance that is his skin. And beyond that. His everything. Most notably, he isn't a loose cloud of dark matter anymore, but a single body housed in a distinct humanoid shape, with dark flesh that appears solid to the touch, except for when he moves, leaving trails of himself in the air that quickly drift back to be absorbed into the main body.
With two bare hands Robby gathers the suit and hands it to Atom, who takes it slowly. Robby still hasn't dematerialized by the time Atom retrieves the repair kit and glaces back up at his partner.
Resolving to process this new visual information later, Atom pries off the duct tape and slides the suit between two halves of a square portable fabric mender. He inserts two fresh cartridges of silver-gutted dacron and white kevlar, and aligns the weaving window in a rectangle around the first tear. While the device does its work, Atom asks a pressing question.
"Are there more people like you?"
When he looks at Robby he receives a simple nod.
"So, I know that you understand the need for communication. And you are not the only kind of your species. Do your people have a language?"
Robby nods again, although this time after some delay.
"There are many things I want to ask you. Things that can't be answered with Yes or No. Could you teach your language to me? Is that possible?"
Robby looks down at his hands, and back at Atom. They watch each other for some time.
Atom notes that his skin isn't entirely black. Barely perceptible tones of blue and purple swirl under the reflected light from the ice-blue cave walls. Like smoke trapped beyond paper-thin glass.
Then Robby opens a hole in his face—Atom has to strain his eyes to see it—and ejects something onto his palm. He holds it out to Atom. A matte black marble, the size of a large blueberry, sits on the center of his hand. It secretes dark matter in rhythmic pulses.
"Is this how you communicate?"
Robby doesn't confirm or deny this, but raises the marble to Atom's face. It taps against the glass of his visor. Robby mimes placing it in his mouth and again holds it out to Atom.
"You want me to swallow it?" Atom blinks. "If I do, will I be able to understand you?"
This time he gets a nod.
"Okay, I'll bite. But I can't take my helmet off like you do."
Robby cocks his head to one side and shifts closer. Gently he takes one of Atom's hands by the wrist and releases the lock on his glove. Atom watches him twist it free.
The air is frigid on his bare fingers, but even that doesn't compare to the coldness of the marble Robby presses into his palm. It stings when his hand curls around it, cradling it in a cocoon of his warm flesh.
From the center of his palm a tiny vibration begins to build. It runs up along his arm and shoulder to the rest of his body. And with it come waves of... Curiosity. Excitement. Loneliness. The last of which douses his insides with ice. Reverberating against the cave walls of his heart. When Robby raises his hands again to Atom's helmet, he is frozen. And can only hold his breath as Robby flips the locks.
Shoving his fist to his lips Atom slips the marble between clattering teeth and Robby lowers the visor as soon as his fingers are free. Rolling it around his tongue, he finds it tastes like nothing.
So he swallows.
Robby tugs his glove back onto numb fingers. Atom watches the motions and feels no different than before.
Then his breathing starts to pick up. His heart pounds in his throat and the pit of his stomach burns while the rest of him becomes increasingly cold. Adrenaline rushes through every vein in his body, fire-hot. Hundreds of colors flash before his eyes with every second. Numbness begins to fade in favor of ceaseless tingling. He wonders if he is being electrocuted. Or dying.
From far, far away, a voiceless man says his name with concern. Blinking sweat from his eyes Atom cranes up to stare at Robby. All he sees is a dark blur and Atom doesn't know if Robby has lost hold of his solidity or if Atom's eyes are giving up.
Through clenched teeth Atom pleads for it to stop. And it does, all at once.
Atom sucks air in with greedy gulps and marvels at how every one of his muscles feels like gelatin. He watches Robby physically retreat, moving his human silhouette to the far side of the cave.
A beeping in Atom's ears indicates moisture present in his suit. After a few attempts he manages to sit upright and crawl to the wall opposite from Robby. Leaning against it, he regards Robby's stiff posture.
Atom grunts through his teeth. A wordless groan is all he can manage at first. "Too much." His strained voice pushes out into the space between them. "Too much, too fast. Can you... speak slower?"
Through blurry eyes Atom sees Robby cock his head to one side. A moment later, his fried nerves are soothed with a balming wave of calmness. It seeps through each of his limbs and coaxes away his tension and pain. Atom knows with a clarity akin to breathing that this wave comes from Robby.
This signal, this feeling that permeates every cell of Atom's body, is his language. Atom tentatively hones in on it, retreating from his spacial awareness and tightening his senses on this invisible hand in his chest, caressing his heart rate. His visual awareness slips even further when a thin sheet of white befalls his open eyes. Beyond it, the cave becomes a smear of shadows and color. Senseless in their design. Another sheet covers the first, and another, until that is all he sees. A perfect slate of blank colorless light. And he feels no fear. That fact raises alarms from deep down. It continues to build and the sheet begins to waver. He sees Robby's silhouette against the crystalline walls of the cave. Willingly, and with great effort, he pulls the fear apart, string by string, until again he is encased in a cocoon of nothingness.
Slowly, a single blotch of black ink spreads from the center of the sheet. It bleeds outward in spindles and overlapping lines until a solid image takes form. The image of a man, as Atom understands the word. Tall and broad shouldered and entirely black, with no face. Atom understands. The image burns into his mind over the sound of a name spoken in his own language.
"It's you." He acknowledges.
Without making a sound The Shadowman says Yes. Atom feels it as a pleasant ripple coursing through his body. A single quick shock of muted pleasure. Then Robby's self projection dissolves. The sheet is blank once more.
Distantly, Atom hears whispers of the rain's assault on the world outside. But his eyes remain shrouded. Robby waits. Atom understands, once more.
A pressing question leaps to the forefront of Atom's mind. "Where did you come from? What does your home look like?" Atom asks.
The sheet switches to a deep black. Unmarred and smooth and vast. White pinpricks break apart the vacuum ocean with increasing frequency. Stars. Familiar. Easy. Three red circles burn in a cluster in front and above him. Too dim to be suns, too large to be stars. Atom slides his eyes elsewhere. Near the bottom of his vision, colors that Atom has no names for bloom out of the darkness and wear the shapes of strange flora. And all around, plumes of dark matter break apart the bright colors and blur against the night sky. Obscuring stars and towering flora alike.
A flying creature darts out of one such growth not far from his face, and Atom moves his head to follow the movement. He turns. And keeps turning. And sees all around him in every direction as if he were physically transported to Robby's planet in the last few seconds without realizing it. The illusion might have been cause for alarm if the sound of rain wasn't present to ground him. The ground under his feet is dry and the sky above empty of any clouds. The sound of rain is his tie to reality. To the cave. To his body.
Hungrily he takes one last sweep of the projection. Questions dance in his mouth. Not knowing the words with which to ask them, Atom swallows and steers his mind in a different direction.
"What brought you to my galaxy? How did you get here?"
The following images move quicker, and make less sense. Still images of technology he does not understand. He sees a spaceship and does not recognize the model. Robby stands in a corridor of the ship. Naked. Standing, not floating. Tied by gravity to the floor. A large window behind him opens to the darkest depths of space.
Next, he is shown a planet he does not recognize. Blue and purple and bustling with life. Next, a yellow planet ravaged by sand and dust and teeming with flying insects. Next, a planet coated with a deep red ocean. Thousands of shadows shimmer just under the surface. Dozens of planets with increasing strangeness flash by. And on every single one of them Atom can see Robby, laying across their surfaces, suffusing with rock and water and all manner of substances.
At last Atom recognizes one of the planets. Rocky and sweltering and heavy with double the gravity of Earth. Kepler-452b. Located in the Milky Way 1,402 light years from Earth. Decades ago a small human city had attempted to function on its surface. It was successful, until funding got pulled, and everyone was left to die. Atom had visited the ruins only once, some ten years ago. Now he sees Robby bathing in one of the boiling springs rich with natural minerals that had once been a terrific tourist attraction.
Next, he sees Dovinski-22V, And the research facility that grows out of its surface like a cancerous tumor. Base Violet.
Everything slows down as Robby's strange ship lands next to the facility. Atom's view hangs over his shoulder as Robby disembarks from the ship and comes face to face with humans.
The foot of his ship floods with nervous scientists and rigid security guards with massive metal weapons.
At first they try to talk to him. A hundred questions bombard Robby's senses. Atom hears it as indistinguishable noise. Robby's bare hand reaches out to touch the nearest body. The humans retreat. Guards come forward and shoot at Robby with those massive portable machines. Robby is unaffected by their weapons. The humans realize this and scatter to safety.
The facility goes under lockdown. Vents in the wall of the landing bay open and suck Robby's... entire substance through the walls and spit him out into a small featureless quarantine room. Vacuum sealed.
For a long time this is all Atom sees. An eternity stretches within this suffocating prison. These six walls that feel too small to house Atom's body. He begins to feel nauseous, and dizzy, and hysteric. Finally, just as Atom is about to pull the plug and swim back to the surface of consciousness, all goes dark and the vents snap open. Atom feels more than sees Robby exit the room. He emerges in a dimly lit hallway. Washed with emergency orange floor lights. All around him corpses paint the walls. No longer fresh, but not quite as degraded as when Atom had seen them. Robby examines the nearest splatter. He places his hand against the fleshy carnage and recoils in confusion. The transmitted memory cuts to the landing bay. Robby's ship is gone. The human ships are unfamiliar to him. He cannot activate them. He can glean no information from the long-dead human bodies. He is alone here with no way to go back home. Trapped. Alone. Trapped. Alone. Until—A millennia later—A new ship lands in the hanger. Atom sees himself on the other end of a long dark corridor. Sword in hand. Frozen in frame.
The sheet falls. Atom reunites with his body and finds it heaving for air. Hyperventilating.
He forces his lungs to slow down. The cave walls gradually stop spinning. Placing both hands on the hard stone ground he pushes himself to his feet and staggers to the center of the cave. Robby's head tilts up to face him.
"Why have you not killed me?" Atom demands. "After what they did to you—"
Robby tugs up every shared memory of subduement, of forced slumber under his hands. Of dark cold dreams. Atom's limbs feel heavy with remembrance. He nearly reels with the force of it.
With no ounce of gentleness Robby projects to Atom a crisp image of a corpse. Unmistakably it is the corpse of Atom, clinical in its presentation and detail. With his limbs dismembered. His spine perforated by hard black spikes. Viscera dangling between icy branches and steaming with still-hot blood. The image is laced with distaste. Revulsion too severe to be his own.
So it isn't a matter of inability. Robby is perfectly capable of killing Atom. Is more than capable of it. Had even threatened him with it, once. But he won't do it. Because the thought of it sickens him.
No kill. Only sleep. Robby persists.
"Why then have you not sedated me, dumped me somewhere, and taken my ship?"
Robby stands, and meets him in the center. He stands less than a foot away. Looming taller than Atom has ever seen him. And he ripples. Atom watches Robby lose solidity. And shake. And wide-eyed Atom doesn't believe it when he is hit in the chest with vapors of curiosity, of fascination, of potent loneliness. They pierce through his suit, through him, and anything else Atom wanted to say catches in his throat.
He can only blink dumbly at Robby and wonder if he knows the shape of his own feelings, identical in their name and depth.
As soon as they come the feelings retreat. But Robby does not. And Atom's own twisted soul does not settle. Does not fall quiet, not after being so mercilessly awakened. It rages, pounding against his ribcage, his prison.
Following a hunch, Atom unlocks one of his gloves. The cold against his bare fingers is biting, but nothing he can't handle. For now.
Robby stands stock still as Atom raises his flesh to Robby's chest. Scarred fingers come into contact with a murky surface. Smooth as stone and cold as night. At first, the cold battering against his brain is painful. Confusion dismantles him. Tiny black spiders race across his eyes so he shuts them out and focuses on his own curiosity, fascination, and loneliness. That pit of black-blue ice stuck in his stomach, wrapped in ropes of light, cautiously clamouring about for something—For anything—Praying for--
For—
Connection.
Typically buried deep under layers of duty, subordination, and iron shackles of control, these feelings run wild. And for a moment Atom allows it. A symphonic cascade of tangled emotion. Shoulders tremouring with the relief of release. Until it peeters out. And the rush in his mind smooths over to lake-stillness.
Opening his eyes Atom sees his arm embedded wrist deep in the dark mass of Robby's chest. Strangely, it feels warm. The rest of his muscles feel raw with exertion and exhaustion threatens to pull him under dead on his feet. Before he pulls out, Robby's voiceless words caress his fingertips.
We are alike, he says. With wonder and excitement and confidence.
Atom nods, and limply pulls his glove back on before his legs give out and he sinks to the ground. Never in his life has he felt so tired.
Sleep claws at him and Atom has no energy left to fight it. His body hits the hard ground and the momentum tosses his mind into a dark dreamless slumber, unmarred by thought or sound or sight, accompanied only by a gentle awareness of another body, unlike his own yet hovering nearby nonetheless. Never straying from his side. Blanketing Atom in his shadow.
Finally, after taking stock of his entire food storage Atom exits the kitchen and heads down the hallway to peer into the cockpit and finds the pilot seat unoccupied. He checks behind him before creeping the rest of the way to breach the doorway.
Empty.
Atom drifts further into the room and checks every corner, but finds no sign of Robby.
His hands find the console. Fingers cover glowing buttons and meters, and fly across the keyboard. Quickly, he types out a course adjustment and gives the computer permission to run it through the system. The ship hisses audibly as it corrects its projection. At that, Atom's stomach lurches.
And his hands twitch.
The tendons in his neck spasm. Cold vines shoot up along the insides of his skin.
Robby is in the doorway when Atom manages to turn around.
Robby, and a hundred black shadows. Sharp, gnarled blackness engulfs the entire far wall. Protruding from two separate points where Robby's hands would be, if he had any. His gloves are off and his substance seeps from those two openings in sharp cascading crystals, expanding around him in a web of blades.
It stops just short of making contact with Atom. It shudders and gleams and smells of sulfur and carbon and something else entirely and overwhelmingly unrecognizable.
"I need to make a pit stop," Atom says, around the ice in his mouth. His mind spins against the glaciers threatening to tear it apart. "There's an abandoned radio center nearby. I need to send a message. To my Commander." To tell him about you, he doesn't say. "It won't take very long."
The structures begin to writhe again and Atom nearly blacks out. He breathes through his teeth as each spike dissolves and spins away, back toward Robby and the inside of his suit. The last of it morphs into thick jagged hands that reach up to pluck his gloves from the air.
When the gloves finally click back into place, Atom exhales, expelling some of the chill from his lungs. Robby recedes back through the doorway and out of sight.
Atom scrubs his hands over his face. A bruise on his cheek throbs at the contact. The ghost of Maverick's fist grinds its knuckles into that aching stain. And it grounds him back to reality.
The radio center wasn't a lie, but it'll take a few days to get there. Days that Atom doesn't want to waste, but what choice does he have now? Exhausted, Atom resigns himself to keeping Robby on board, for now. He leaves the cockpit and heads to bed. On his way by the equipment room he spots Robby, floating among the spare suits. He's still there in the morning when Atom wakes up, and the next day, and the next.
-
CRAWLING AROUND a large orange-pink gas giant in the Duco System is a tiny moon named Tycho. Repurposed as a communication outpost, Tycho had once been an essential part of deep space radio broadcasting. However, its secondary purpose, one not known to the general public, had been to scan deep space for any signs of extraterrestrial communication. And after yielding zero results across its 30 years of service, the outpost's funding was cut, and the station crew was ordered to hastily relocate across the stars to a different station, and took with them most of their broadcasting equipment.
In their rush some larger devices were left behind with the intention of being picked up at a later date. But less than a year later the world saw a breakthrough in deep space radio transmission and it became more cost effective to build new equipment rather than send a large retrieval ship way out here for a bunch of outdated junk.
Now Tycho houses a semi-functional, hibernating ghost town. From above it looks like any other broadcasting outpost. Atom carefully steers their ship down into the heart of its gray city, sprouting with concrete facilities and radio towers and super massive satellites. To his left, Robby remains safely secured to the passenger seat and makes no comment.
After the landing is complete Atom pulls his ID card from the control panel and fully powers down the ship.
"This ship won't take off without one of these. Stay here or get out and stretch your legs, but if you're not back here in an hour I'm taking off without you."
Robby makes no move to leave his seat, so Atom sets off without him.
Within walking distance of the landing zone is a small parking lot full of solar powered vehicles. Atom finds them in working condition, and decides to borrow one to drive across the lumpy brown surface of Tycho towards the first radio tower. Unsurprisingly he finds the tower entirely dark. A black shape rising against the star-bright sky. The tower’s interior, he finds, is just as dark. Not a single emergency light offers to make his job any easier.
The entire outpost must have been manually shut down, including the backup generators. A temporary setback, but not a significant cause for worry.
Atom climbs back into the jeep and heads to the solar panel field on the outskirts of town. Manually he opens the shutters on each massive panel and works up a sweat in the process. The junction of muscle and metal in his leg aches at the movement.
Once enough columns have been opened Atom enters the nearby power shed and flips the switch on the generator. It makes no noise or any other sign of recognition for Atom's needs. He sighs. It'll take some time for the solar panels to heat up, so Atom finds a chair and sits down to wait in the dark room.
In the still, lightless room his mind drifts to Robby, and he recalls Novo; The encounter and subsequent blackout, and waking up back on his ship in the infirmary. If all Robby wanted was the ship, why take Atom aboard? Why not take his ID card and dump his body back out the airlock before taking off? Craning his head back, Atom tries to spot his ship from the open doorway. But a suited figure steps into sight, blocking his view.
Atom rolls to his feet.
"Atom Belov." says the Keeper. "You are a wanted criminal. A traitor to humanity. I, Unity Keeper Bellarosa, have orders to apprehend you."
Atom draws his sword.
"We can do this without the weapons." She says.
"I won't go peacefully."
Bellarosa shifts to rest a hand on the hilt rising above her shoulder, but she does not draw. "Why are you doing this?"
"Answer this and I might answer you: How did you know I was here?"
"An encoded message was sent out from Base Violet. No one has any reason to go there, except someone like you. I came here because I thought you might need to send another encoded message, and you would be looking for places with easy access. I waited here for several days. And here you are."
"Here I am."
"Why are you doing this?"
"If I tell you, will you let me go?"
"No."
"Then one of us must die."
"They say you are in possession of a world-ending bomb. Is this true?"
"Maybe."
Bellarosa shakes her head. "What have we done to deserve death at your hands? What has humanity done to deserve your extinction?"
Atom rolls his shoulders and lowers his sword. "Endless wars. Wealth hoarding. Global pollution. We all contribute. We all have failed."
Bellarosa's sword remains sheathed. "And what about all the good things? Love, science, art? Are they worth nothing to you?"
"There will be plenty of that, in the final days. It'll be a time of true peace. The likes of which humanity has never seen."
"It will be a time of terror and despair. You must know that."
"Earth will be Unified. That is my duty as a Unity Keeper and I intend to see it through."
Again Bellarosa shakes her head. "Our duty is to keep people safe. You will be killing us all."
Atom sighs. "Go home, Bellarosa. Walk away from this. Spend the rest of the time you have left with your loved ones."
"If I walk away, I will have failed my duty."
"But you'll be alive. That's what you value, isn't it? Life?"
"I value the life of every human. Not only those alive today, but the ones who will come after. Who will have to witness the end you intend to bring upon them. The ones who will all die. At your hands. I cannot let that happen."
And so Atom rushes her. She steps back and slams the door in his face. Atom keeps running and throws his body against it. His bones jolt with the impact but the door swings open. Bellarosa throws something heavy at him, a power cell by the looks of it. The wind gets knocked out of him and momentarily Atom loses track of Bellarosa. Clumsily he gets back on his feet and finds her merely watching him.
"Leave." He rasps. "Go back to Earth. Or draw your sword."
"I don’t want to kill you." She says.
"Then turn your back. Pretend you never saw me, and we can both walk away."
Bellarosa raises her hand. And pulls a wide flat sword from her back, its blade the length of her forearm. She holds it diagonally across her chest for a moment. A mark of farewell. And shifts into a ready position.
Atom waits for her to engage the first attack.
She melts into a blur of movement. Atom sidesteps and deflects with his longer blade. Each instance of contact rings out into the night.
In the wide empty stretch of rock between giant metal towers are two specks of white. One stands, bowing over the other. Panting, back bent, hands on knees. While the other lies motionless. Red stain blooming. The outdoor lights come on with a shudder, flooding the courtyard in a clinical blue-white glow. Bright as daylight. Atom’s shadow fans out in a circle of six.
Alone, again. Atom slides his sword back onto his hip. Uncurling his spine he sees the face of Planet Oroill, watching him. Serene clouds swirling by.
Atom hobbles back to the car and climbs in, slamming the door. He finds himself shivering, despite the internal temperature regulator of his suit running as it should be. He waits for it to pass. It always does.
He presses the on button next to the wheel and drives back to the radio tower. Once there he makes quick work of setting up the equipment and opens a secure channel to his Commander. Once it connects his hands freeze on the keyboard. The black screen burns into his eyes. He blinks. And begins to type.
: Is there a possibility other lifeforms could be affected by this mission?
It takes 20 minutes to receive a response. When it arrives it painstakingly rolls across the screen one tiny blue letter at a time.
: There are no other sentient beings in our corner of the universe. Did you come across something that made you doubt otherwise?
Atom reads the message three times. He swallows. Too much time has passed. He has to make a decision. Again he thinks of Novo.
: No. I've had a lot of time to ponder hypotheticals.
: That is unnecessary. Follow the mission as it was planned.
: Yes, Sir. My will has not wavered. Humanity shall heal. May the light unify.
: And swallow every shadow.
Atom closes the connection and wipes the activity log. He stands. And exits the radio tower. He takes the jeep back to his ship. It continues to hum for a short while after he turns off the motor, clicking and settling back into silence. Like a set of lungs rattling their last breath.
Stumbling out of the jeep he spots Robby standing near the ship with his back turned. His helmet is tucked under one arm and the place above the neck of his suit is empty. The darkness overflows past the rim and hangs low on the ground around his feet.
Clouds of shadows, immune to light.
"Hey," Says Atom. "I'm ready to go. Are you coming with me?"
The headless, bloodless, colorless creature turns towards him. The shadows rise ever so slightly.
"I'm done here. I don't need any more pit stops. We can go straight to the galaxy center. Takeoff is in 10 minutes."
Atom climbs onto the ship and gets it running. He straps in and sets a timer and waits. Robby enters the ship with four minutes left. His helmet is back in place when he secures himself to the passenger seat. And Atom almost thinks he looks human.
-
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.01.2487. General supply request.
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.07.2487. Eight new personnel, requested.
Earth to Violet, Incoming. 03.07.2487. Request for personnel denied.
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.12.2487. [REDACTED] [MESSAGE NOT SENT]
Violet to Earth, Outgoing. 03.14.2487. Four new personnel, requested.
Earth to Violet, Incoming. 03.25.2487. Two new hires are en route.
Atom shuts the plastic-covered worklog and tucks it into the storage mesh beside his sleeping chamber. Seconds before, a distant clanking noise had broken the silence aboard his ship. Eager to find something better to do than read the pristine worklog salvaged from Base Violet, Atom takes up his sword and heads out into the ship to investigate.
Ears pricked, eyes scanning for movement, Atom keeps his back to the wall and peers into the cockpit. He finds it empty. Locking the door behind him Atom maneuvers to the console and checks all active systems. Nothing wrong there, so he checks the cameras. Nothing amiss there either.
He double checks just to be sure, flicking through each scene and raking them for any inconsistencies. On the last screen he catches a view of the far airlock, rarely in use for its inconvenient distance to any storage bay. Today he finds the airlock open.
But the system readings assure Atom that the bay is correctly pressurized, and not in danger of leaking oxygen. An error? Possible, but Atom doubts it. He leaves the cockpit and heads toward the far airlock bay.
When he arrives the airlock is, indeed, open. Attached to the ship is a small escape pod, only big enough to house one body and a simple navigation system.
Atom finds nobody inside it, and moves on. Slower now. Around the corner he crawls and arrives just in time to see the Infiltrator. Another Unity Keeper. A sword extends from his arm towards the center of Robby's chest. Robby, weaponless and anonymous, doesn't bother to dodge and instead lifts his helmet just as the tip of the sword tears through the front of his suit. The Infiltrator doesn't stand a chance under the mass of Robby's cold shadow, set loose upon his unsuspecting human body.
Atom approaches at the click of a helmet locking back into place. With the air now clear of danger Atom sees the Infiltrator hanging limply in the air. "Did you kill him?" He asks.
Robby says no. Atom checks anyway. He removes the man's glove and feels for a pulse. Rapid movement drums against his fingertips.
Taking him by the shoulders, Atom drags the body around the corner and through the airlock and into the small escape pod. He straps him to the far wall and removes his helmet. He takes his knife from its hilt and doesn't pause to watch the blood bubble free from the man's severed throat. He shuts the airlock and punches the eject button.
He feels Robby's presence at his back. He turns. He does not look at his reflection in Robby's golden visor. "It's safer this way." He says. "He would have come back for us."
With the task now complete Atom heads back to his room and plucks from the storage mesh his only source of reading material. He opens the work log to its very first page and starts again from the beginning.
-
DAYS LATER Atom wakes with a yawn in the passenger seat of the cockpit. Robby sits across from him in the pilot seat, silent as ever. Atom's stomach growls in place of a greeting and he makes his way to the kitchen for a quick meal. He takes his time in the bathroom afterward, wiping down his entire body with a hygienic towel. He brushes his teeth and shaves his face and when he drifts back to the cockpit Robby is still there. Except now his hands are on the nav sticks, and they are pulling.
Atom curses himself.
"Robby, what are you doing?" Atom floats closer and doesn't recognize any of the numbers on the destination screen. The ship tilts under Robby's command.
"Where are we? No—where are we going? Robby, we had a deal—"
Robby firmly points to him and then the passenger seat.
"You are not taking my ship."
Robby points to another screen. The route tracker. The coordinates of the galaxy center are still set as the main destination, though now there is a fresh row of numbers listed as a detour below it. The distance to this detour steadily counts down. And it isn't far at all.
"You are not taking my ship." Atom repeats. This time Robby nods, and physically pushes him towards the passenger seat. This time Atom obeys.
"Can I know where we are going? And why?"
Robby mimes taking off his helmet. This is the only answer Atom gets from him, as if the meaning is obvious.
So Atom buckles in and keeps his eyes to the window, searching for anything that might be familiar. When a white-purple globe fills the view Atom doesn't recognize it. The star chart offers no name for it, either.
Robby guides them straight through its atmosphere and thick layers of spotty clouds to a land alien to Atom's senses. When they land, Robby removes Atom's ID from the console and hands it over. Atom pockets it and follows Robby off the ship.
Together they step out into a world glowing in lavender light. Purple fog dances across Atom's vision, dimming the sun but not blocking it entirely. The ground below his feet is a vast lumpy blanket of glittering snow.
It almost reminds Atom of home, until his footprints reveal the snow to be a thin dusting of silt on jagged white stone.
Robby begins to walk down a gentle sloped curve towards a strangely tall hill in the distance, and Atom follows. Very quickly Atom notices Robby's slow and careful footsteps. Not knowing the reason for his caution, Atom chooses to copy his route instead of exploring on his own. The hill, when they come to it, is actually a cave. Albeit a shallow one.
Robby throws a quick glance around its icey walls and starts walking to the next rising arch of white.
"Will you tell me what we're doing here?" Atom asks. He doesn't expect an answer, but Robby throws a look at him over his shoulder. Then he stops, and crouches to set his hand on the ground.
Curious, Atom approaches as Robby sifts some of the silt onto his palm and stands up. He lifts it to Atom's visor and Atom blinks, trying to focus on the small grains of stone arrayed on the white material of Robby's glove. The specks continue to swim in front of his eyes and that's when Atom realizes it isn't a trick of the light. The specks are actually moving. With tiny translucent insect legs. They aren't grains of ice or sand at all. They're bugs. Dozens of living creatures, small enough to be mistaken for clumps of salt. Or snow.
Startled, Atom descends to all fours and holds his head just above ground. Sure enough, the rocks are teeming with the creatures. Though they move slowly, and Atom wouldn't have noticed them on his own.
The sight fills him with questions but Robby moves on. Atom hurries to follow. The next cave they approach is much bigger. Its mouth towers several stories above them, and descends to an unseen depth.
Robby seems to approve of it, because he sits right down at the mouth of it, facing outward. When nothing else happens, Atom decides to explore the rest of the cave. It goes on for several dozen yards until it sharply narrows to a single point on the rough stone floor.
Having exhausted all his options he returns to Robby and takes a seat next to him.
Lavender sunlight bends across the ground as the low fog rolls along the hills. The sight and accompanying silence pull at Atom's eyelids until succumbs to the feeling and lays down to doze. A touch on his leg startles him.
He has his knife against Robby's chest before his mind clears.
"Sorry," He says.
Robby shakes his head and points outside the cave. Atom turns to follow the gesture just as the clouds part and a spear of sunlight slips through. Like tears in cotton the clouds separate and golden light pours down through the cracks to illuminate the bright ground in waves. Like the touch of dawn after a blizzard.
And in the midst of every patch of light, Atom watches transfixed as more of those tiny insect creatures seethe out from the porous rocks to bathe on the surface.
And then from above plummets a giant spear of ice. It lands just at the mouth of the cave and rattles the ground underneath. The spear is followed by a giant head and from that giant head rolls a long pink tongue. It scrapes across the ground and scoops of great clusters of the translucent bugs, feeding a mouth dripping with icicles. Moving on to the next patch of sunlight, and the promise of a meal, the creature reveals the rest of its massive body. Standing on four legs and easily towering hundreds of feet tall, the thing resemble nothing seen on Earth. Its body, coated in ribs of ice, steams in the sunlight. Two smooth antlers rise in an arc high above its long, narrow, ice-covered head, and jagged frozen appendages stick out from every inch of its torso in senseless forms. Like a deer that has fallen asleep in a den of its own shed antlers, and awoken to find them frozen stuck to its hide.
A smaller version of the first creature prances in its shadow, sharp hooves scraping against the ground with each jump. The clouds shift the course of light further on, and the pair of them follow it, grazing on the bugs that rise to absorb its warmth.
Atom doesn't dare to blink until they dip beyond a hill and disappear from sight.
Minutes after the sun has been tucked back behind thicker clouds, ice begins to fall from the sky. This at last causes Robby to retreat deeper into the cave. Atom stays to watch the icefall but the sound of it hitting the ground soon grows deafening, so he follows Robby into the darker quieter part of the cave. There he finds Robby waiting for him. The icy interior walls of the cave glow with a faint blue light around him.
"Thank you for showing me this." Says Atom. "I... didn't know there was life on other planets. I believed in the possibility, but... We've been searching the galaxy for so long, and never found anything. Not a scrap of evidence." His voice echoes against the walls and Atom feels foolish at the admission. He clears his throat. "This place is... beautiful."
Taking a few steps forward, Robby places himself directly before Atom and gently presses a hand to Atom's chest. Just hard enough to make solid contact. Atom wonders if the gesture means something to his kind. He looks at the accompanying spot on Robby's chest. He remembers the feeling of his knife piercing the fabric and finding nothing made of flesh or blood.
"Would you like me to mend your suit? Duct tape isn't the best long term solution. I have a fabric repair kit in my pack."
Robby fingers the edges of the tape and regards Atom. Then he takes a step back, and reaches for the latches on his helmet. He hesitates. And then he lifts it, and Atom watches transfixed as Robby sheds the rest of his suit.
The white fabric lays discarded in a pile on the stone floor and before him stands the silhouette of a man, tall and large and masculine and otherwise featureless in the light-absorbing substance that is his skin. And beyond that. His everything. Most notably, he isn't a loose cloud of dark matter anymore, but a single body housed in a distinct humanoid shape, with dark flesh that appears solid to the touch, except for when he moves, leaving trails of himself in the air that quickly drift back to be absorbed into the main body.
With two bare hands Robby gathers the suit and hands it to Atom, who takes it slowly. Robby still hasn't dematerialized by the time Atom retrieves the repair kit and glaces back up at his partner.
Resolving to process this new visual information later, Atom pries off the duct tape and slides the suit between two halves of a square portable fabric mender. He inserts two fresh cartridges of silver-gutted dacron and white kevlar, and aligns the weaving window in a rectangle around the first tear. While the device does its work, Atom asks a pressing question.
"Are there more people like you?"
When he looks at Robby he receives a simple nod.
"So, I know that you understand the need for communication. And you are not the only kind of your species. Do your people have a language?"
Robby nods again, although this time after some delay.
"There are many things I want to ask you. Things that can't be answered with Yes or No. Could you teach your language to me? Is that possible?"
Robby looks down at his hands, and back at Atom. They watch each other for some time.
Atom notes that his skin isn't entirely black. Barely perceptible tones of blue and purple swirl under the reflected light from the ice-blue cave walls. Like smoke trapped beyond paper-thin glass.
Then Robby opens a hole in his face—Atom has to strain his eyes to see it—and ejects something onto his palm. He holds it out to Atom. A matte black marble, the size of a large blueberry, sits on the center of his hand. It secretes dark matter in rhythmic pulses.
"Is this how you communicate?"
Robby doesn't confirm or deny this, but raises the marble to Atom's face. It taps against the glass of his visor. Robby mimes placing it in his mouth and again holds it out to Atom.
"You want me to swallow it?" Atom blinks. "If I do, will I be able to understand you?"
This time he gets a nod.
"Okay, I'll bite. But I can't take my helmet off like you do."
Robby cocks his head to one side and shifts closer. Gently he takes one of Atom's hands by the wrist and releases the lock on his glove. Atom watches him twist it free.
The air is frigid on his bare fingers, but even that doesn't compare to the coldness of the marble Robby presses into his palm. It stings when his hand curls around it, cradling it in a cocoon of his warm flesh.
From the center of his palm a tiny vibration begins to build. It runs up along his arm and shoulder to the rest of his body. And with it come waves of... Curiosity. Excitement. Loneliness. The last of which douses his insides with ice. Reverberating against the cave walls of his heart. When Robby raises his hands again to Atom's helmet, he is frozen. And can only hold his breath as Robby flips the locks.
Shoving his fist to his lips Atom slips the marble between clattering teeth and Robby lowers the visor as soon as his fingers are free. Rolling it around his tongue, he finds it tastes like nothing.
So he swallows.
Robby tugs his glove back onto numb fingers. Atom watches the motions and feels no different than before.
Then his breathing starts to pick up. His heart pounds in his throat and the pit of his stomach burns while the rest of him becomes increasingly cold. Adrenaline rushes through every vein in his body, fire-hot. Hundreds of colors flash before his eyes with every second. Numbness begins to fade in favor of ceaseless tingling. He wonders if he is being electrocuted. Or dying.
From far, far away, a voiceless man says his name with concern. Blinking sweat from his eyes Atom cranes up to stare at Robby. All he sees is a dark blur and Atom doesn't know if Robby has lost hold of his solidity or if Atom's eyes are giving up.
Through clenched teeth Atom pleads for it to stop. And it does, all at once.
Atom sucks air in with greedy gulps and marvels at how every one of his muscles feels like gelatin. He watches Robby physically retreat, moving his human silhouette to the far side of the cave.
A beeping in Atom's ears indicates moisture present in his suit. After a few attempts he manages to sit upright and crawl to the wall opposite from Robby. Leaning against it, he regards Robby's stiff posture.
Atom grunts through his teeth. A wordless groan is all he can manage at first. "Too much." His strained voice pushes out into the space between them. "Too much, too fast. Can you... speak slower?"
Through blurry eyes Atom sees Robby cock his head to one side. A moment later, his fried nerves are soothed with a balming wave of calmness. It seeps through each of his limbs and coaxes away his tension and pain. Atom knows with a clarity akin to breathing that this wave comes from Robby.
This signal, this feeling that permeates every cell of Atom's body, is his language. Atom tentatively hones in on it, retreating from his spacial awareness and tightening his senses on this invisible hand in his chest, caressing his heart rate. His visual awareness slips even further when a thin sheet of white befalls his open eyes. Beyond it, the cave becomes a smear of shadows and color. Senseless in their design. Another sheet covers the first, and another, until that is all he sees. A perfect slate of blank colorless light. And he feels no fear. That fact raises alarms from deep down. It continues to build and the sheet begins to waver. He sees Robby's silhouette against the crystalline walls of the cave. Willingly, and with great effort, he pulls the fear apart, string by string, until again he is encased in a cocoon of nothingness.
Slowly, a single blotch of black ink spreads from the center of the sheet. It bleeds outward in spindles and overlapping lines until a solid image takes form. The image of a man, as Atom understands the word. Tall and broad shouldered and entirely black, with no face. Atom understands. The image burns into his mind over the sound of a name spoken in his own language.
"It's you." He acknowledges.
Without making a sound The Shadowman says Yes. Atom feels it as a pleasant ripple coursing through his body. A single quick shock of muted pleasure. Then Robby's self projection dissolves. The sheet is blank once more.
Distantly, Atom hears whispers of the rain's assault on the world outside. But his eyes remain shrouded. Robby waits. Atom understands, once more.
A pressing question leaps to the forefront of Atom's mind. "Where did you come from? What does your home look like?" Atom asks.
The sheet switches to a deep black. Unmarred and smooth and vast. White pinpricks break apart the vacuum ocean with increasing frequency. Stars. Familiar. Easy. Three red circles burn in a cluster in front and above him. Too dim to be suns, too large to be stars. Atom slides his eyes elsewhere. Near the bottom of his vision, colors that Atom has no names for bloom out of the darkness and wear the shapes of strange flora. And all around, plumes of dark matter break apart the bright colors and blur against the night sky. Obscuring stars and towering flora alike.
A flying creature darts out of one such growth not far from his face, and Atom moves his head to follow the movement. He turns. And keeps turning. And sees all around him in every direction as if he were physically transported to Robby's planet in the last few seconds without realizing it. The illusion might have been cause for alarm if the sound of rain wasn't present to ground him. The ground under his feet is dry and the sky above empty of any clouds. The sound of rain is his tie to reality. To the cave. To his body.
Hungrily he takes one last sweep of the projection. Questions dance in his mouth. Not knowing the words with which to ask them, Atom swallows and steers his mind in a different direction.
"What brought you to my galaxy? How did you get here?"
The following images move quicker, and make less sense. Still images of technology he does not understand. He sees a spaceship and does not recognize the model. Robby stands in a corridor of the ship. Naked. Standing, not floating. Tied by gravity to the floor. A large window behind him opens to the darkest depths of space.
Next, he is shown a planet he does not recognize. Blue and purple and bustling with life. Next, a yellow planet ravaged by sand and dust and teeming with flying insects. Next, a planet coated with a deep red ocean. Thousands of shadows shimmer just under the surface. Dozens of planets with increasing strangeness flash by. And on every single one of them Atom can see Robby, laying across their surfaces, suffusing with rock and water and all manner of substances.
At last Atom recognizes one of the planets. Rocky and sweltering and heavy with double the gravity of Earth. Kepler-452b. Located in the Milky Way 1,402 light years from Earth. Decades ago a small human city had attempted to function on its surface. It was successful, until funding got pulled, and everyone was left to die. Atom had visited the ruins only once, some ten years ago. Now he sees Robby bathing in one of the boiling springs rich with natural minerals that had once been a terrific tourist attraction.
Next, he sees Dovinski-22V, And the research facility that grows out of its surface like a cancerous tumor. Base Violet.
Everything slows down as Robby's strange ship lands next to the facility. Atom's view hangs over his shoulder as Robby disembarks from the ship and comes face to face with humans.
The foot of his ship floods with nervous scientists and rigid security guards with massive metal weapons.
At first they try to talk to him. A hundred questions bombard Robby's senses. Atom hears it as indistinguishable noise. Robby's bare hand reaches out to touch the nearest body. The humans retreat. Guards come forward and shoot at Robby with those massive portable machines. Robby is unaffected by their weapons. The humans realize this and scatter to safety.
The facility goes under lockdown. Vents in the wall of the landing bay open and suck Robby's... entire substance through the walls and spit him out into a small featureless quarantine room. Vacuum sealed.
For a long time this is all Atom sees. An eternity stretches within this suffocating prison. These six walls that feel too small to house Atom's body. He begins to feel nauseous, and dizzy, and hysteric. Finally, just as Atom is about to pull the plug and swim back to the surface of consciousness, all goes dark and the vents snap open. Atom feels more than sees Robby exit the room. He emerges in a dimly lit hallway. Washed with emergency orange floor lights. All around him corpses paint the walls. No longer fresh, but not quite as degraded as when Atom had seen them. Robby examines the nearest splatter. He places his hand against the fleshy carnage and recoils in confusion. The transmitted memory cuts to the landing bay. Robby's ship is gone. The human ships are unfamiliar to him. He cannot activate them. He can glean no information from the long-dead human bodies. He is alone here with no way to go back home. Trapped. Alone. Trapped. Alone. Until—A millennia later—A new ship lands in the hanger. Atom sees himself on the other end of a long dark corridor. Sword in hand. Frozen in frame.
The sheet falls. Atom reunites with his body and finds it heaving for air. Hyperventilating.
He forces his lungs to slow down. The cave walls gradually stop spinning. Placing both hands on the hard stone ground he pushes himself to his feet and staggers to the center of the cave. Robby's head tilts up to face him.
"Why have you not killed me?" Atom demands. "After what they did to you—"
Robby tugs up every shared memory of subduement, of forced slumber under his hands. Of dark cold dreams. Atom's limbs feel heavy with remembrance. He nearly reels with the force of it.
With no ounce of gentleness Robby projects to Atom a crisp image of a corpse. Unmistakably it is the corpse of Atom, clinical in its presentation and detail. With his limbs dismembered. His spine perforated by hard black spikes. Viscera dangling between icy branches and steaming with still-hot blood. The image is laced with distaste. Revulsion too severe to be his own.
So it isn't a matter of inability. Robby is perfectly capable of killing Atom. Is more than capable of it. Had even threatened him with it, once. But he won't do it. Because the thought of it sickens him.
No kill. Only sleep. Robby persists.
"Why then have you not sedated me, dumped me somewhere, and taken my ship?"
Robby stands, and meets him in the center. He stands less than a foot away. Looming taller than Atom has ever seen him. And he ripples. Atom watches Robby lose solidity. And shake. And wide-eyed Atom doesn't believe it when he is hit in the chest with vapors of curiosity, of fascination, of potent loneliness. They pierce through his suit, through him, and anything else Atom wanted to say catches in his throat.
He can only blink dumbly at Robby and wonder if he knows the shape of his own feelings, identical in their name and depth.
As soon as they come the feelings retreat. But Robby does not. And Atom's own twisted soul does not settle. Does not fall quiet, not after being so mercilessly awakened. It rages, pounding against his ribcage, his prison.
Following a hunch, Atom unlocks one of his gloves. The cold against his bare fingers is biting, but nothing he can't handle. For now.
Robby stands stock still as Atom raises his flesh to Robby's chest. Scarred fingers come into contact with a murky surface. Smooth as stone and cold as night. At first, the cold battering against his brain is painful. Confusion dismantles him. Tiny black spiders race across his eyes so he shuts them out and focuses on his own curiosity, fascination, and loneliness. That pit of black-blue ice stuck in his stomach, wrapped in ropes of light, cautiously clamouring about for something—For anything—Praying for--
For—
Connection.
Typically buried deep under layers of duty, subordination, and iron shackles of control, these feelings run wild. And for a moment Atom allows it. A symphonic cascade of tangled emotion. Shoulders tremouring with the relief of release. Until it peeters out. And the rush in his mind smooths over to lake-stillness.
Opening his eyes Atom sees his arm embedded wrist deep in the dark mass of Robby's chest. Strangely, it feels warm. The rest of his muscles feel raw with exertion and exhaustion threatens to pull him under dead on his feet. Before he pulls out, Robby's voiceless words caress his fingertips.
We are alike, he says. With wonder and excitement and confidence.
Atom nods, and limply pulls his glove back on before his legs give out and he sinks to the ground. Never in his life has he felt so tired.
Sleep claws at him and Atom has no energy left to fight it. His body hits the hard ground and the momentum tosses his mind into a dark dreamless slumber, unmarred by thought or sound or sight, accompanied only by a gentle awareness of another body, unlike his own yet hovering nearby nonetheless. Never straying from his side. Blanketing Atom in his shadow.