Pixel

Nellie held both hands over her mouth to quiet her heavy breathing. Her temples throbbed in sync with her heartbeat. Sweat dripped from her forehead onto her tank top. She crouched, resting her head against the cold metal workbench behind her. Hanoi waved a hand at her wildly from across the room. He was on his belly underneath another bench.

“What the hell is it?!” he whispered, panicked.

Nellie shook her head and shrugged, but didn’t dare answer.

Down the hall, another scream rang through the outpost. It sounded like Moony, the last of the outpost’s security detail. His scream cut short, and then, absolute silence.

“Fuck!” Hanoi whispered, putting his forehead to the ground. “What do we do?!”

Nellie pried her hands from her mouth and exhaled slowly. She tried desperately to focus, but her mind darted in all directions.

She had taken the job on this remote, dark-space asteroid to escape the chaos. Out here, there were no other planets for light-years, no stars in the sky. Not a single speck of light. “You can only see the stars that are in your own galaxy. The rest are simply too far away,” Hanoi had explained. It was something Nellie had never even considered before she’d left Earth. It seemed bizarre, a jet-black empty sky all the time, but all she had to do was look up in order to believe it. Everything was simply too far away. Nellie had come to this lifeless asteroid, hurling through unexplored space, chasing the promise of total isolation. She’d found it in those first few months, but now, somehow, even this far out, the chaos had still found her.

Nellie & Hanoi caught their breath and sat silently, listening for any further signs of what was happening.

“Did you see it?” she asked.

“I don’t know what I saw…” Hanoi replied. “I heard screaming. Ran toward the mess hall to see what it was. And then I watched Jessa collapse in on herself!”

“What?! What do mean?”

“She folded in on herself! As if there were a black hole in her belly. Standing there one second, crushed into oblivion the next!” Hanoi was getting louder as he explained, gesturing with his hands.

“Shhh!” Nellie reminded him.

She couldn’t visualize what Hanoi was describing. She hadn’t actually witnessed what had happened to her partner, Tevi. Tevi had called on the comms to warn Nellie to hide. Screams had interrupted the call mid-sentence. That was it. Nellie, like Hanoi, had run toward the danger, but before she’d made it to Tevi, Hanoi had crashed into her and pleaded with her not to go that way. They had doubled back to her workshop at a full sprint.

“Can we get to containment?” she asked Hanoi.

“You want to go back out there!?!” he pleaded, his face still buried in the grease-stained panelling of the workshop floor. “I watched Jessa die, Nellie. What the fuck is going on?”

“It’s our best chance, I think…” Nellie said, looking backward over her shoulder and down the hallway. She took a breath and shuffled across the room to Hanoi as quickly as she could. “That’s the protocol. If anybody else is still alive, that’s where they’ll go.”

Hanoi looked up at her, desperate not to move.

“Get there. Get in. Seal it off.” Nellie put her hand on Hanoi’s back and nodded in reassurance.

“Yeah, and we hope like hell whatever it is can’t get past the gravity seal,” he replied.

Nellie got to her feet slowly, staying low behind the workbench.

“Fastest way there is back through the mess hall…” She knew Hanoi was barely on board with the plan as it was. Now she was asking him to go directly back to where he’d seen whatever had happened to Jessa.

He nodded silently, picking himself up onto his knees.

“If we get separated or something goes sideways, we double back here again and figure out something different…” Nellie grabbed a wrench off the workbench and handed it to Hanoi. He took it but gave her a face as though he didn’t think it would do him any good.

“Any better ideas?” she asked.

He shook his head, “No.”

“We run on three…” Nellie whispered, taking a step toward the door.

“One…”

Hanoi made the sign of the cross on his chest.

“Two…”

Nellie grabbed a scrap of metal for herself and clung to it with both hands.

“Thr…”

Just as she was about to bolt, she hesitated. The lights in the hallway flickered and then went dark. She looked over at Hanoi. He had stopped dead in his tracks. A look of panic set in on his face.

 

Nellie squinted her eyes, searching for what Hanoi was staring at. The hallway was pitch black with the lights out. There were no footsteps. There was no sound at all.

“What? Where?!” she whispered in panic.

“The dot. I’ve seen it before. With Jessa.” Hanoi choked out the words, shaking, overcome with fear.

“I don’t see anything!” Nellie said, searching the darkness.

“End of the hall. Waist high. Just floating there,” Hanoi said, his voice barely audible now.

Nellie searched the darkness in front of her. There was nothing there. And then there was. It was a speck of dust, a single grain of sand floating in the darkness. Her eyes couldn’t quite make sense of it. A tiny dot that was the absolute purest light. It slowly began moving toward them. Was it moving toward them? Nellie couldn’t tell. She had no frame of reference. The dot wasn’t getting any bigger.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Hanoi panicked. His whisper turned into frantic crying. “What do we do, Nellie!”

Nellie still couldn’t make out what she was looking at, but she responded to Hanoi’s hysteria by throwing the scrap metal in her hands down the hallway.

It never hit the floor.

As the metal tumbled through the air, the tiny dot zipped forward to meet it. In a moment, the metal crumpled like a tin can, folding itself in half, over and over, until it ceased to exist.

Nellie took a step back. Hanoi screamed. Nellie watched in horror as the single spot of light moved swiftly through the darkness and disappeared into Hanoi’s stomach. She turned and ran before he was gone. The sickening sound of bone and flesh compacting filled the workshop behind her as she rushed out the door.

“God, I’m sorry, Han,” she said without daring to look back. She could barely see a few feet in front of her, but still ran at full speed through the hallways of the outpost.

“Why are the lights out?” she wondered as she rounded a corner into the mess hall. There was no sign of Jessa here, or Tevi. There were no signs of anyone else. Apart from her panting, the mess hall was still. For a moment, it felt like just another night when she’d gone for a snack after waking up and not being able to get back to sleep.

Nellie’s knees buckled, and she nearly fell as the emergency power kicked on. A loud hum filled the room. The iron wall panels shuddered. A dim red backup light faded on and lit the door on the far side of the room. She bolted toward it.

“Containment. Get to containment…” she thought to herself.

 

“The instruments can’t make sense of it,” Duggey said. “It has no dimensions. Or if it does, our instruments aren’t hi-res enough to detect them.”

Duggey was the outpost’s resident savant slob. He was undoubtedly a genius, but his scraggly facial hair and slovenly physique hadn’t changed since his teenage years. Mica, his engineering partner, played the role of his big sister. She stood at least two feet above everyone else on the station. In contrast to Duggey, her uniform was crisp, and she always buttoned it all the way up to her collar.

Mica rolled over to inspect Duggey’s screen. “But we can see it. How does that make sense?”

Duggey shrugged. He leaned forward and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. “It’s like it only has one dimension, but still exists in all three of ours…”

“It moves around fast enough…” Mica replied. “I’ve lost track of it again.” She turned back to her own monitors to scan the security feeds.

“Maybe it’s a really advanced 1-D being?” Duggey ruminated. “Aware of, able to traverse through, but existing outside our dimensi…”

Mica pushed her hand firmly over Duggey’s mouth to shut him up. A loud thud sounded on the door down the hall.

Thud, thud, thud. It sounded three more times. Something was trying to get into containment.

“Did it find us?” Mica mouthed the words without making a sound. She didn’t remove her hand from Duggey’s mouth, but he leaned over and scrolled her mouse, continuing her scan of the security camera feeds. Only a few of the cameras still operated under emergency power. They couldn’t see the corridor that led to containment. He shrugged again.

Mica slowly removed her hand from his mouth and asked for reassurance, “It definitely can’t get in here?”

“I don’t know…” he whispered. “Nothing about this thing makes sense. I dunno what it can or can’t do…”

They heard the gravity seal release with a loud hiss and a low, descending tone. The manual lock unlatched. Then the 36-inch thick door swung open slowly, its rarely used hinges squealing.

They stared at each other in panic.

“…Hello?!…”

A voice echoed down the hallway. Duggey’s expression turned to confusion. Mica glared at him, wide-eyed. Again, he did his trademark shrug.

“…Anybody else make it here?…”

They remained frozen.

Then Nellie stepped cautiously into the doorway.

“Nellie!” said Mica, rushing to grab her around the shoulders. “You scared the shit outta me!”

Nellie smiled, relieved, and hugged Mica back, grabbing her midriff. “Thank god. I was worried I might be the last one left.” She squeezed Mica and then took a step back. “Do you guys have any idea what’s going on?”

“Alien in the outpost,” Duggey said bluntly, “can’t make much sense of it.”

“It just got to Han,” Nellie said, looking down at her feet. She fought the urge to fall apart.

Mica & Duggey hung their heads, too.

“He was the only other one we weren’t sure about,” Mica said.

“We had been eyeing the monitors until the main-power cacked out on us…” Duggey added, gesturing toward Mica’s monitors.

“…Everyone else?” Nellie asked.

The other two nodded.

“I’m sorry about Tevi…” Mica said, hugging Nellie one more time.

Nellie didn’t seem to acknowledge what Mica had said. “We’re safe in here, right?”

“Duggey thinks so,” answered Mica.

As Mica loosened her hug, she saw all the colour drain from Nellie’s face. Horror replaced it. Mica turned to Duggey just as a single, tiny pixel floated up off his screen and hung in the air, directly in front of his nose. A tiny speck. The purest light. It was in the containment room. It was an inch from Duggey’s face. No one dared move.

 

Duggey slowly raised his right hand to Nellie & Mica, as if to say, “Stay back”. The tiny pixel remained, floating where it had stopped. Duggey swallowed.

“I wonder what it sees…” he whispered to himself, tilting his head slightly.

“I wonder how things look…”

The floating pixel inched back slowly as Duggey stared. Nellie & Mica didn’t breathe. Everything was pure silence.

Duggey continued to examine the speck just beyond his nose. It really looked pixelated, as though someone had magnified a dot that was smaller than an atom, as though they blown it up a thousand times to make it visible to the naked human eye. It was garbled. Digitally zoomed. Out of focus.

Duggey breathed. A long, slow breath. And then he spoke again, “It’s gotta be some new alien speci…”

Before he finished his sentence, Duggey brought down his raised hand against the back of his computer monitor, knocking it forward onto the floating pixel. He needed a distraction. The screen tipped, fell, and collided with the speck. Immediately, it began to collapse in on itself. In a second, the glass and plastic became a car crash, edges folding over one another, electronics compacting in a grating crunch.

Duggey was quicker than he looked. He stood and ran, pushing the others forward ahead of him. They all rushed down the hall in shock. The sound of further collapsing matter in the containment room chased behind them. Something else fell. Metal creaked.

Mica got to the door first and fumbled with the manual release on the inside. “Where are we going?”

“Away from here,” Duggey said without hesitation. “Docking bay.”

Nellie nodded and helped Mica push the gravity-sealed door as it released. She looked back down the hall but couldn’t see anything. Suddenly, the entire wall of the containment monitoring room crumbled at its edges, like tin foil being compacted into a ball.

They ran back through the mess hall and then took a left through the labs, toward the docking bay.

“You can fly one of those expedition pods, right, Duggey?” Nellie asked, gasping for air as she ran.

“Think so,” he replied, jumping over a table.

The entire outpost was lit solely in dim red of the emergency lights. This made it surprisingly easy to lose one’s bearings. Nellie almost got turned around as they darted through each of the three labs, but Mica grabbed her arm and righted her.

“Is it still behind us?” Mica called out.

“Dunno,” Duggey said. “Almost there.”

All three of them were tiring, their legs turning to jelly. Again, Nellie could feel her heartbeat in her temples. Sweat stung her eyes. Every muscle in her body tensed.

Finally, they came to the docking bay door and, with some fumbling, Duggey opened it. All three expedition pods remained docked.

“You were right… nobody else made it…” Nellie said as she waited for Mica to open the entry hatch of the first pod and climb in. Mica nodded solemnly, climbed inside, and shuffled over to make room for the other two.

Duggey climbed into the chair at the helm and started frantically flicking levers and pushing buttons.

“What can we do?” Nellie asked, wanting to help.

“Strap in,” Duggey said. He pulled a large lever, and the expedition pod hummed to life. The small ship shook as it got louder. Nellie buckled herself in, slammed down the entry hatch, and stared out the small porthole window. She scanned the darkened docking bay for any sign of the dot.

Nothing.

A sense of relief slowly set in as she saw flames and exhaust swell out beneath them. They were taking off.

Mica leaned forward as far as her straps would allow and hit Duggey on the shoulder. “You wonderful man!” she said, laughing. “You did it!”

Duggey joined in the laughter and held both his hands above him joyously. All three whooped loudly. Elation filled the pod. “Look, no hands!” Duggey said, looking back at Mica with an earnest smile.

Mica sat back in her seat and let out a long exhale. The ship continued its upward trajectory off the asteroid and out into space. “Whew,” she said, turning to Nellie and offering her a smile, too.

Nellie grinned and nodded. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back on her headrest. The pod still shook forcefully, but she could feel the tension in her body release. She stayed this way, eyes closed, until the vibration mellowed and the engine quieted.

“We made it… I can’t believe we made it off that rock…” Mica shouted. Nellie heard another slap on Duggey’s back. She heard Mica enjoy another deep breath.

“And it’s beautiful up here…” Mica said.

Nellie breathed deeply, too.

“…look at all the stars…” Mica continued.

Nellie’s eyes shot open.

She turned to look out the porthole in the entry hatch. Stars. Hundreds of them in every direction. The expedition pod was floating through a sea of them. Individual grains of sand, tiny pixels, all floating in the darkness. Little dots of the purest light.

“There aren’t any stars in this system…” she said.

Mica’s jaw dropped. Duggey looked down at his radar display. He studied the icon that represented their ship. The radar showed no stars around it.

Nellie grabbed his headrest and screamed, “There aren’t any stars in this system!”