“This was my house,” Somber says.
The bubble has touched down on in front of a high cylindrical building whose design is repeated up and down the street.
Everywhere, the group has seen signs of this planet’s end. People overwhelmed by a tsunami of emotional terrors. People, driven to act out those emotions, turned on each other or on themselves.
Keri is the first to turn away from the sights. William looks, but Adam feels his shock. He’s not trying to pay attention. He’s just staring, unfocused. Jaycee steeled herself as best she could, but soon she buries her face in William’s chest, hiding from what she can no longer stand to see.
Of anyone, Space Bug seems entirely untroubled.
Adam reaches out to him, quietly. “Hey. Is this… how are you reacting to this?”
The insect-like alien turns and studies Adam carefully. “Ah. This is - familiar. My species lives. But being among them is terrifying. I am a mutant, a variant, a corruption. I speak, I use tech. They don’t understand me. And I can’t predict anything they will do any more. We are unlike each other. But they look like me, so I think - they will be like me. But they aren’t. I have been told about your ‘zombie apocalypse’ movies.”
They sweep one of several arms outward, indicating the carnage beyond the bubble. “It is like that. To be ultimately alone.”
Adam frowns. But he has no idea what to say, or how to help.
Somber seems to be catching onto the reactions of their passengers. “Permit me to show you another view. My memories,” they offer.
The scene outside the bubble changes. Adam can tell what’s been done - Somber is projecting their memories onto the inner surface of the bubble, like a three-dimensional movie. But it looks real.
Somber had been involved in Concordance business. Now, they flew low, landed on the street, and entered their home. They greeted their two spouses - on this world, reproduction and family structures involve three people, not two. They greeted their children with joy, and listened as the kids recited their daily adventures.
The planet had a thirty-eight-hour day, but the people here only slept for six or seven hours at a time. Dinner came before sunset, then first sleep. Then people woke up for night activities - family time and togetherness. Then second sleep, then morning.
Somber had finished breakfast and was enjoying their traditional drink of efjah-juice when the warning came. Their Shard notified them of failure in the containment vessel. Every Concordance Agent on the planet had plugged into the vessel, worried as they were about what was being done to their planet. But Somber was the only one left whose allegiance still lay with the Concordance.
Their affective shields were up. Instantly, they threw similar shields around their own home.
“Don’t go anywhere!” they shouted, to their spouses and to the children who were already heading out. “Don’t leave the house for any reason!”
Both spouses looked baffled, at each other and then back to Somber. But Somber had no time to explain.
The memories shift and change as they flash through space, arriving at Orion Schema.
Somber landed in the midst of other Agents, conferring about their business or moving about the station.
“Coordinators! Summon the Coordinators!”
The Coordinators of the Concordance appeared, and Somber rapidly explained. They had brought with them data from the containment vessel, and presented that.
The Coordinators disappeared, and Somber waited tensely. They wanted to flash back to their home planet, to check on what was happening, to ensure their family’s safety. But the only people who could solve the problem were here, and they were delaying, and the fear and the uncertainty rose–
Minutes had passed. Somber could only imagine what was happening, while these people deliberated. It was infuriating!
“The matter has been handled,” came the message from the Coordinators.
Somber tried flashing back to their home world. It didn’t work. They tried again. It simply didn’t work.
“Coordinators!” they called. And they were summoned into closed conference.
“The matter has been handled,” is all they would say. No question would yield any other answer.
Somber teleported to their home star. They streaked through space, outward and outward. The other planets - the twin asteroid belts with the inner radiance of their radioactive elements - the Great Father gas giant, revered by Somber’s distant ancestors as a god, with its distinctive vertical ring. But no home world.
The only witness willing to testify to its fate was gravity. The planets swung about in their old orbits. But with a whole planet gone, they were beginning a dance that would take millennia. They would find new orbits, cover the evidence in time, but not yet.
Adam struggles to find a source of hope.
“So… your family could still be alive?” he asks.
Somber answers by guiding an orb of power into the house. What it sees is shown on the bubble-vessel the group inhabits. Two spouses and five children, frozen in time.
That they are alive is little comfort when the group sees their faces. The contortions of the mouths, the shape of the eyes, the ways the fingers are spread out like talons, the clear tension of every visible muscle. Keri chokes back a cry.
“Most people on the planet are likely still alive,” Somber answers.
Adam is struggling to control his tears and his fears. But a memory shocks him into action. The circumstances that brought Earth’s containment vessel to his attention - Charlotte’s adventures with Devon Crowninshield.
Ghosts–
“Somber, give me control of the bubble for a moment,” he says.
Somber raises a curious eyebrow. But Adam feels control shift to him.
He drives the bubble into the ground, and down, and down - no longer in the physical, but into the psychological universe of the underworld. It is a place most Concordance Agents won’t know how and where to go. But Adam is fast learning that much of the limits on his power is his belief in what’s possible.
At the spiritual center of Somber’s homeworld is a cocoon. Souls by the tens of thousands are frozen in the act of streaming toward it, enlarging it.
At the center of the cocoon is a nascent presence. It is a new god - or an old one, being overwhelmed by the influx of negative emotion. Adam can’t tell. But he can feel its defining quality from here.
Cruelty.
The end of Somber’s homeworld is birthing a devil.
The bubble rests again in orbit around the peaceful blue-green-white of Earth.
“We should go home,” Jaycee says in a weak, queasy voice.
“Yeah.” Keri can’t muster anything any more.
The sickened human visitors teleport back, one by one, leaving Adam, Space Bug and Somber in the bubble.
The alien speaks. “On my world, our dominant ethical system doesn’t align with ‘good’ or ‘evil’ the way yours does. To us, it’s natural that someone will do what they feel compelled to do. If you are starving, you will naturally seek out food, even if you steal it from someone else. To us, ethics is about how you respond to someone else’s actions. We recognize three basic responses. You can support someone else’s action, you can oppose it, or you can attempt to transform the situation. Of course, you can do nothing, but then there’s no ethical dilemma and no need for the philosophy.”
Adam knows what he’s being invited to ask. “What are you gonna do about all this?”
Somber’s smile is artificial, broken. “I will go to war with the Concordance. I will use this negative energy - on Earth, from my world, from anywhere I can get it. I will shatter the barrier that keeps my homeworld locked away, so the universe can see what the Concordance did. I will do whatever it takes to expose them. Until they can no longer deny the truth.”
Adam takes this in. “And your invitation is for me to make one of those choices. Stop you. Join you. Or do something that invalidates your crusade. Like changing the Concordance.”
Somber nods. “I must do what I must do.”
Adam leans in, face tightened in worry. “You saw that place! You saw what’s being born down there, in the afterlife - something that’s going to emerge, and cause all kinds of new horrors! If you do this, you’re going to cause so much more harm!”
“That’s going to happen anyway,” Somber points out. “Where else is this happening in the cosmos? What other vessels must have already ruptured? Or are getting close? The Concordance will lie about those - cover them up. They must not be allowed to continue. Only the truth will achieve that.”
“There has to be another way,” insists Adam, and yet no other way comes to mind however hard he tries to think of one.
Somber’s smile becomes the slightest bit authentic. “I have lost hope of that, Adam Amari. But I could be wrong. If you find a way, do what you must.”
The smile fades, and their eyes narrow. “But if you fail, do not oppose me. Or I will see that it is your world that serves as the lesson I wish to teach.”