A Message From the Invisible Spectrum

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But I heard you cry. You were the kind of girl who puffed your chest out in situations where most children would break down. But when you jumped off the airlock and your tiny, six-year-old body drifted into speckled darkness, you couldn’t help it.

And I couldn’t either. I was a mess of tears and snot. Your safety cord was bolted to the wall beside me in three places, but I held on with both hands. “Just a little further,” I said.

You were seven months old when we moved into the U.S.S. Scoresby. I had just been dishonorably discharged from the Lunar Army, and your mother had died two years earlier. Draw the line if it suits you. The Scoresby's oval-shaped halls and monochromatic dorms had been abandoned in Titan’s orbit following the Great Solar Flare. The blast had fried onboard life support, and almost half of its hundred-thousand passengers died before the escape pods were ready. Media outlets called it the space-age Titanic, spawning the nickname “Titan Titanic” along with countless films and video games released across the galaxy. The ship had been fully repaired and restored by the Peace Corps to be a safe haven for stellar vagrants. But its reputation kept even the most desperate away. There were never more than ten or twenty inhabitants at a time. I guess I was just that desperate.

Our closest neighbor came along when you were three. Chao was a portly woman with rainbow socks and an umbrella. Why she had an umbrella on a space station we never asked. Every morning, she played solitaire in the mess hall while the food dispenser refreshed. And in the evenings she stopped by our room and knocked three times. I’d open the door and she’d hand me a plate of leftovers, then we would have the same conversation:

“Your daughter is so blonde,” she’d say, then point to my mud-brown military buzzcut with a cheeky smile. “Where’d she get it?”

That was back when you wanted it long in the back and short in the front. When I told you the style was called a mullet, you scrunched your nose, waved your hand, and said, “ewww! A mullet is a stinky fish!”

“Her grandmother,” I’d say to Chao. “Like a lot of things.”

Last Wednesday, for the first time in three years, Chao didn’t visit. I checked the mess hall first, then her room. I knocked on her door three times to no response. Then again. And after the third attempt, I tried the handle and found it unlocked. Countless books and clothes covered the floor of her room. Posters of her favorite musicians from Mars, her home planet, covered the walls, some hung more thoroughly than others. Dozens of empty meal rations covered the countertop. She lay motionless, tangled in the darkened clutter of her bed. Her eyes shone wide and full of agony. I turned on the ceiling light.

And then I saw her shadow on the ceiling.

It was as though her corpse lay on a glass table with a light underneath, but there was no light. The only light I could observe came from a spherical fixture on the ceiling I'd turned on. But it dimmed behind the shadow with spectral shimmering. I had never seen something so mundane become extraordinarily uncanny. I traced her shadow’s trajectory back. Titan lay in that direction, with Jupiter beyond. Something emitted a light that shone through walls, but not corpses.

I came back to our room and sat on the olive carpet. You knew instantly something was wrong. I couldn’t do anything around you without you knowing. You saw things that were invisible before you could read. You crawled into my collar. “What’s wrong daddy?” you said. I lied and said Chao had moved to another station. I’m sorry. There are many things I should apologize to you for: our living situation, the lack of children your age, the way the rations taste like "wet paper," as you put it. But the worst thing I've done is lie to you. So for that, among everything else, I'm sorry. Maybe you’ll understand when you get older.

I spent the following Thursday in the Analyzation Room: a large series of computers and screens that monitor everything from air quality to gravitational anomalies. Derek, a young man from Mercury’s satellite colonies who lived two halls over, helped me look over the readings. Without a proper expert, we were left scratching our heads. We wandered through numbers we didn’t understand, hoping for anything out of the ordinary.

“Hang on,” Derek said and pointed to a graph with an enormous spike on Wednesday, followed by a downturn to normalcy on Thursday. He expanded the date range on a sliding scale until another spike appeared: the date of the Great Solar Flare.

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The alarms would sound in the event of another flare.”

“Can you tell what this measures?” Derek asked.

I looked around: various colors and unrecognizable symbols. “I must've missed this day in science class,” I said.

“I don’t even know what class this would’ve been," he said.

Then I saw “EUV” on one side of the chart. I had seen that anagram before. I racked my brain and tried to think as far back as possible. Mrs. Dierdrick, my fifth-grade science teacher, came to mind, standing before a rainbow-colored graph projected on a white curtain (Lunar Outposts weren’t known for their opulence).

“Extreme Ultraviolet!” I shouted. Derek jumped. “Sorry,” I said.

"What is that?" he asked.

"Something to do with the electromagnetic spectrum, I think."

"You're smarter than you let on," he said.

"Just with big words and colors. Can we find the origin of the spike?"

"That I can do," Derek said. "I ran radar during my surveying days on Neptune." He operated the keyboard and trackpad through several screens. Eventually a diagram of Titan appeared, with Jupiter looming in the background. On Jupiter, a small pocket of light appeared, with an "X" overtop.

"From Jupiter?" I said. I looked out the window on the far wall, providing a full view of the giant red planet. The light had gone straight through Titan, then. "Nothing's on Jupiter. It's a swirling mess of gas and storms."

"There's a lot we don't know about it," Derek said. "Survey teams have never made it to the surface."

"We could take an escape pod down and find the source. Put the coordinates in the autopilot system.”

"A suicide mission."

"If that thing is emitting EUV waves, we're all doomed. It'll kill the rest of us before a rescue team could get here."

A tear came out of my eye, because I already knew what I was going to do. I was going to serve my shipmates, no matter the cost. My Commanding Officer from boot camp came into mind, screaming, "your life means nothing! You serve the people!” as I throw myself into an obstacle course, loaded down with full munitions.

From the airlock, you reached forty feet out and turned back to give a thumbs up. You were still crying, but in a tough way. I told you it was okay to be scared. At fifty feet out, I transferred your safety cord to the Scoresby’s main hull through an automated system. You were looking forward the whole time, at the stars. Keep looking, I thought. Aren’t they beautiful? You didn't turn until I slammed the escape pod's airlock shut around me.

"What?!" you yelled. "What are you doing?"

"I will send a message in the intercom system that explains everything," I said. “I love you.”

Then I turned my mic off.

That was ten minutes ago. Derek had pulled you in by now, and was explaining things as best he could. Derek is a good guy. I hope so.

Now I'm barrelling through Jupiter's atmosphere of red mist and The explosive on the pod is armed to my detonator, or it will explode on contact if it comes to that.

I'm sorry.

The pod shakes. Red mist streams over the front window. Lightning strikes everywhere. Ammonia crystals batter the hull. I hold on to my seat harness, squeezing my eyes shut.

The shaking gets violent. I reopen my eyes in the center of the Great Red Spot, a massive blood-colored storm. I fall further. Wind screeches. The exterior solar panels screech off. The window cracks. I grip the detonator tightly, finger on the red trigger.

A massive sphere floats at the bottom of the cloud, the size of a small planet. It burns bright green like a star. The light dims as the escape pod nears, making the clouds crimson-black around it. A smaller light moves at the center of the sphere:

Chao walks into view. I am less than a hundred feet away and see her eyes are white-hot, tinted the same green as the sphere. They stare at me coldly, but I feel searing heat from them. My shadow flickers on the rear wall of the pod.

I pull the trigger.