Luminous Matter

By Zackary Russell

Dear Marybeth,

It was supposed to be a simple experiment.

Well, nothing is simple about trapping dark matter. Still, the theory is sound, the experiments are straightforward, and the daily routines are predictable. And since we’re so far from civilization, we had to schedule everything out, just like they do for missions on the ISS.

There weren’t supposed to be surprises. And this goes beyond how screwed up our experimental timeline is now.

The biggest shocker is who I find myself agreeing with and who I don’t—can’t—agree with.

It started around midnight with an anomalous radiation spike. I thought we were going to die. I still do, but for different reasons.

We expected interference from the uranium a kilometer above our heads, but this was off the charts. Yusuf checked things out immediately, grumpy as usual. After ruling out environmental dangers, he went to bed. There wasn’t any radiation leakage in the lab or our shelter. It looked like data collection errors, and Yusuf was too tired to care.

Of course, I couldn’t blow that off. I wasn’t going to let Chelsea start the morning procedures and blame me for calibration problems.

Plus, I didn’t think we had caught anything. None of our models predicted this.

It wasn’t until 2 a.m. that I realized the trap had been sprung. I knew from every readout this had to be wrong, and I wish to God I could do this all over again and just reset that blasted trap. But, half-asleep as I was, I automatically logged the result and started error-checking. Even the idea of a false positive was interesting, since it meant a new way to refine the detector.

When the narrowband scanner dropped to the voice band, I got my first stab of fear. There was a non-random pattern to what was playing back. It was obviously cohesive. I thought our phone system had to be interfering, or Kaden was playing another awful prank. How I thought either one of those was more likely than… Anyway, that’s when I widened the bandwidth.

And I heard a voice.

He was talking to me like he was an inch from my face. The tone was calm but forceful. Commanding, really. I admit, I ran and hid for a while. I’m ashamed to say, Marybeth, that I had no bravery in that moment.

I came back when I didn’t hear the voice anymore. The trap was still full, and I quickly moved the spectral analyzer away from the auditory band. I saw a few other peaks and tuned to slightly above the UV line.

Then, bathed in static, a face appeared on the screen.

It was like one of those Roman statues. Pristine. Imposing. Ghostly. And looking right at me. Through me. The same voice as before came through, even louder and more direct. Now I was the one who was trapped.

“Shall you also exalt your throne above the stars of God?” he spoke.

My first actionable thought was to tell Chelsea. She would later latch onto this line from the voice—the first of many pronouncements––that got stranger and scarier along the way. Chelsea would propose that this was an “extrasolar intelligence.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, but the reason I thought of Chelsea first is because I knew she’d reach for an astronomical explanation. I wanted to entertain a theory that was safe—relatively speaking. I needed solid ground under my feet in that first, horrible encounter.

An alien would at least have been something we had a frame of reference for. It was the most sensible thing to grasp at.

But then the voice delved deeper, reaching into the darkest things in my life. The hollow eyes drilled into my own. He knew the secrets I had kept from the rest of team. The ugly kind of secrets no one talks about. He knew the regrets I have concerning you, Marybeth. In less than sixty seconds, I saw the truest, most unflattering picture of myself. There was no denying any of it. My only regret now is not seeing Kaden get the same treatment.

But he got much worse.

You might have guessed—I did not sleep at all. Anywhere I moved, the face followed me. All that could be done was collect as much data as possible. I had hopes we were just being hacked, even though the polar satellite wasn’t overhead like it is now.

Yusuf found me again after sunrise, or what amounts to that down here. At some point beforehand, the face had disappeared. The spectral distortion lines remained, but my nighttime visitor did not. I tried to play back a recording of the voice to Yusuf, but nothing worked. Finally, I just told him. Most of it, anyway. Yusuf was quiet for a while, then raised his palms, muttering how this would bring about God’s blessings. He was catching on, but I wasn’t.

After Chelsea showed up and produced her inevitable alien theories, Kaden found us. He said he had seen some automated EM alerts concerning the dark matter trap in the middle of the night and gotten an idea. Without saying much else, he started a program.

That’s when he fell dead before he could rip that thing out of the trap, before we even knew Kaden’s plan. Before we understood anything.

We learned later that Kaden had scripted out procedures for extracting the energy source. He had plans to sell it to a weapons manufacturer. Of course his immediate thoughts were war and money.

The last few hours are pretty hazy for me from trauma, from sleep deprivation, and from listening to endless debates between Yusuf and Chelsea. In a sense, they were both right. We had captured a real-life angel, and it was the most alien thing we could imagine. And now, they’ve cowered before his voice, too.

If we survive this, I’m done with dark matter. In every sense.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zackary Russell grew up on a steady diet of STNG, Myst, The Wheel of Time, and Discover magazines. Favorite books include A Wrinkle in Time, The Three Body Problem, and The Expanse. He dives into wild speculation that connects with the deepest parts of our souls. His current project: a YA sci-fi centered on the bonds that transcend deep space. Find Zackary on his author website, but he mostly hangs out on Astro Twitter.

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