The above video (Part 1) is the account of astronomer Arthur Albright regarding the coming of an interstellar object to the solar system.
The story below (Part 2) is the account of Penitent Seeker 10041. Both stories have been selected from Annex A-5187R.
It is so very quiet in the dark. This is a truth I have known since the moment that my punishment was ordained, since the instant they separated my remorseful brain from my sinning body, and placed that meaty cradle of my self into a newer, faster, colder form; one capable of withstanding the stoic onslaught of deep space. Knowing something and FEELING it are quite different, however, and I did not truly begin to feel the effects of that long and endless silence until I was finally sent hurtling across the great void on the eternal journey that was to be my penance. The Council of Seeking, those who decided that THIS would be my sentence, warned me about that boundless, clinging hush. They said that the experience of such abiding silence was necessary so that I might know the consequence of its opposite, so that I would truly learn what happens to those, like me, who speak when they ought not to – and so that, through overwhelming absence, I may better understand exactly what noise I was meant to seek.
After all, it was not without purpose that I was sent alone, blind and bodyless, into the darkness between stars. As with all punishments in my culture, this sentence had its utility – a central, redeeming quality, something that those back home, those who retained their bodies and senses, would benefit from. Through experiencing such endless, maddening silence, I was compelled to seek the sound of advanced life, that rarest of songs, echoing through the void. Seek it, find it, record it, and report it – then move on to the next.
I thought I had finally gone mad when I found the first muddled, warbling signals separating themselves by way of a rhythmic pulsing from the endless sea of cosmic background static. But no, my neural instruments confirmed it was not the echoes of my decaying sanity. It was speech, song, argument, and agreement all traveling outward from a central source, riding on the backs of steadily decaying radio waves… but to me, it was nothing short of salvation. After so long hurtling through the cold and lonely silence, I had found that which I was meant to seek – the nascent whispers of a species who dared to call into the void to see what might answer. I adjusted course, for the first time in what felt like an eternity and hurtled onward toward the source of my rapture.
I could feel them watching me with their primitive metal eyes from the moment I entered their solar system. Opposing tides of relief and disappointment neutralized each other in my mind when I saw how rudimentary their technology truly was. Not only could they not stop me, not destroy me, they couldn’t even truly understand what I was. They must have thought me a simple hunk of oddly-behaving interstellar material the way they so wordlessly gawked at me as I hurtled toward them. They only attempted to communicate with me once I had made my intention to visit their world obvious by way of my adjusted trajectory. My, how quickly THAT silence broke.
They called out to me as I approached, first with words, then briefly with their harmless weapons, then with words again. I never answered. It was not my job to speak, only to listen. To learn. So that is what I did. For an entire orbit of their planet around its star, I circled their world, tapped into the clear, uncluttered source of their culture’s transmitted reservoirs of data and information, and drank deep.
Indeed, I even got more than I bargained for when I found a craft made by beings only a few degrees more advanced than those belonging to the mostly planetbound beings I was studying, a craft that entered their planet’s orbit unbeknownst to the subjects of my studies and vanished the instant it realized that I was there too. It spent barely a moment in range of my listening, but that was enough for me to learn more about what these other visitors were – and where I would be heading next. Yet, for all that I gathered, for all that I heard, my thirst for noise and knowledge could not be slaked. For the moment those crystal streams of glittering information crossed my metaphorical lips, they were siphoned away, sent hurtling across the dark back to the eyes and ears of those who sent me. Knowledge and discoveries that were for me to find, but not for me to know or enjoy. The sort of empty meal that leaves only a deeper craving in its wake. Only a gnawing want for more.
So I left, with little more ceremony than that with which I arrived. Those beings of the loud, primitive world faded into the dark behind me as I followed the breadcrumbs left by my next target, to the source of the faint noise I had tapped into as it echoed off the craft which so briefly came to meet me in orbit around that archaic little world, no doubt hoping to also observe it and its tiny little beings. I have no doubt those beings watched me go in wonder. No doubt at all that they believe me little more than a mystery of the cosmos, one that they will someday solve, in their own time and on their own terms.
They are wrong.
For as the subjects of my studies watch me go, those who sent me their way approach them from behind. My people will not be seen until they wish themselves to be, and then, when the time is right, they will come in countless shining shapes, cutting blinding lines across the shadows of space. They will be many, and they will be one. They will be all, and they will be none. And unlike I, they shall not come in silence. They will not greet the people of that small, watery world with an all abiding hush – but instead with a roaring, howling thunder, like the low rumble of an earthquake growing louder and louder and louder… until all who look upon them are swallowed whole, and made to know the consequence of their planet’s shouting, once and for all.Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s story from the Archive in Between! If you’re reading this story, that means you’re one of the Archive’s most valued supporters, and for that, you have my eternal gratitude. If you’d like to further support the Archive, consider sharing our stories with anyone you know who may enjoy them. Thank you so much again, and remember to always stride safe!