The Pulse

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. If it wasn’t for the radio waves traveling between the Captain and her crew mate Damascus, no one would have heard the final tones of his mortal frame. Space itself would absorb into its quiet infinity the cracking sound of his helmet’s faceplate along with whatever he exclaimed with his final breaths knowing that nothing he could do at this point would stop the vacuum from joining him to it.

The Captain held a low orbit in the shuttle and kept the channel open and tried to talk Damascus through the blinding conditions of the early entry of Prion in to the ‘Fields’. Prion’s orbit took it yearly through an edge of space with debris fields that hadn’t been drawn into orbit around anything and during that season all interested parties seek to get off world. The way the phenomena occurred each year if you were standing on Prion was as if passive fields of debris and cloud slowly moved toward the planet before becoming blackout condition storms and bombardments. But in truth the fields were quite static. It was Prius hurtling through the space till it took a swing each year upsetting the fields from however they had settled from the previous year.

Why anyone would seek to explore this environment is a unique history of its own. Prion was the site of a curious singularity. There was something below the surface that transmitted a unique frequency pattern. It wasn’t a radio transmission or a sound but more of a pulse where there is no reason a pulse should be. Long range Outrider manned probes first detected the ‘Pulse’ in 2052 and by 2057 we had our first boots on the ground. By 2059 our first attempted fortified Xplore site was destroyed when Prion passed through the fields. Many earth scientists theorized on the phenomena’s pattern, possible origin and significance. It would give 28 pulses 13 times and the take a fraction of a day rest before beginning the cycle anew. The entire cycle took the exact span of one earth year. It was now 2061 and the Captain and Damascus were there to find out.

Everything they discovered in the year they had been on site leading up to entry into the fields led to more questions than answers. The surface turned out not to be the surface for one. All of the topsoil was just accumulation of mass from the interplay of gravity when Prius passed through the fields each year and gathered more of the particulate. But beneath all that at around a kilometer was some layer that was harder than anything known on the periodic table. No drill could penetrate it nor even scratch it enough to take a sample.

The Captain and Damascus should have been off planet weeks ago but risked staying into the beginning of the fields season because of a breakthrough at their excavation site. They had engineered a device that would mimic the frequency of the pulse. At first they would respond with alternate pulses but when Damascus decided to try and match the pulse at the exact precise moment that it occurred something new happened. After Damascus matched the pulse with the device the pulse began to shift location.

It slowly ascended outward from the deep interior of the planet and closer to where Damascus was trying to discern the surface element. Damascus now believed that whatever was below the surface was not only alive but intelligent and rather than focusing on breaching the surface with drills, sought instead to make some kind of clear communication or contact.

It was new territory. Standing on a heavenly body that had gravity but no atmosphere. Hurtling through space along with every other assemblage of mass. Dust to pebbles. Pebbles to stones. Stones to boulders. And all these like stray pitches out of nowhere from the space.

The current readings were impossible. The pulse was just below his feet and the readings indicated that the impenetrable surface could be no thicker than an eggshell. Here Damascus stood. On the true eggshell thick surface of Prion at the edge of the fields season. With the Pulse directly beneath his feet. A quiet crack in his helmet threatening oblivion and all this leading up to the years final pulse before the pause.

The radio fluctuated as if between stations but didn’t yet break and though I wasn’t there to hear it and I only recount the tale, there words spoken that only the Captain heard.

“Is this a true story father?” Hera asked when she saw him closing the book for the night. “It’s hard to say darling.” He replied, “It happened many thousands of years ago it’s hard to know. Some people think the pulse was always in the earth and activated suddenly. Some people think it came from Prion. There are no records from the time before the pulse was first detected inside the earth. The first series of pulses short circuited every satellite dependent device on the planet. The digital global infrastructure crumbled. As did all the transport networks and information caches that relied on them. Most of civilization crashed and only a few independent sustainable communities on the fringes of the planet survived to continue the human race. This is an old book. Translated into our language from languages that are no longer written or spoken. All we know is that somewhere near the end of the old earth the Pulse changed everything. The Pulse informed our new calendar. It changed human language. It changed travel. It was harnessed to assemble matter out of thought and sound. With it we built everything we know. Even this printed book is a simulation of what a book might have been let alone its contents.

“Can we read the second chapter?” Hera pleaded. “No kiddo it’s time for bed. Tomorrow is a planet wide celebration of the first Pulse. And the Cabinet of Art and Time is staging a play at the new Olympic amphitheater.”

“Did your crazy friend write the play?”

“He’s not crazy Hera. He’s just a savant of sorts.”

“What’s a savant father?”

“Oh, he just perceives and translates the pulse in a different way than we do.”

“Will he be there tomorrow?”

“I should hope so, it’s the opening of his new play, and I have it on authority that the play begins on Prion just where we left off. I just wanted to catch you up to speed on the story. I also wanted to show you these.” Hera’s father holds up two rectangles of thickish paper.

“What are those father?”

“Well, my writer friend calls them tickets. They will allow us to attend the amphitheater for the event.”

“Are we going to pulse there tomorrow?”

“Actually love, I was thinking we could walk.”