Bea Cannon - A Small Gray Dot

Nevertheless, my suspicious mind wanted to know: when did they include English in their universal translator? To me that said they’d known about us for a while and made their plans a long time ago. Perhaps it was to ensure the Binqua who came to Earth would have the language at ready hand to study but that indicated they did have some type of faster-than-light communicator, or something faster than ours, and were watching our broadcasts, and if they could receive, could they also send?

I was kind of at a place where I wasn’t certain if I wanted to know if we could’ve been alerted but on the other hand, my gut was talking to me and I needed to at least rule it out because that would mean… I didn’t want to think about what it would mean.

I sincerely hoped my intestines were wrong. But, I couldn’t get around the fact that even if they couldn’t have given us a heads-up, they certainly weren’t trying to be benevolent benefactors now. They showed up to make a profit from our misfortune and, in the end, decided they wanted our entire planet – sans us. That displayed a real lack of good intentions. Definitely not friendly.

Morgan’s face clouded over as she eyed me. “You think they might’ve chosen not to warn us when they could have?”

“I believe it’s possible,” I said. I looked at the doctor. “Can you bring those files up now?”

“Why, yes I can.” He turned around to the computer and clicked his mouse for a couple of seconds and a file appeared. He opened it and a mass of strange script that looked like nothing I’d ever seen, appeared on the screen. He clicked on an emblem at the top and the script resolved into English.

Morgan and I leaned over his shoulder. There was nothing there pertaining to Earth, only to the anomaly.

Dr. Bennett said, “This is the first page I read but there’s more.” He moved the curser down and clicked on a dot in the left corner and more data popped up.

Nothing there, either. He kept going and nothing other than what he’d already told us came up. My insides eased a little. They were being rather coldhearted toward us but at least it seemed that they couldn’t have given us any warning.

The doctor sighed with what sounded like relief, and said, “This is about all of it, Tennessee. There doesn’t seem to be anything about that in here.” He started to close the file.

Suddenly Morgan said, “Stop! Wait, what’s that?” She pointed at a concentric circle showing at the bottom of the last page. I hadn’t noticed it.

The doctor said, “There’s one at the bottom of each page. I clicked on the one on the first page during my initial look at the file, and nothing happened. I assumed it simply denoted the bottom of the page so I didn’t try any of the others.” He shrugged. “But it won’t hurt to try another.” He moved the mouse over it and another file sprang up. Startled he said with a rueful shake of his head, “My mistake. One should never simply “assume”.

He clicked through the pages of the file but they all seemed to pertain to some kind of information on how to make a type of device, the likes of which I’d never seen. I supposed if I were to read through the instructions I might be able to determine what it did but I wasn’t interested. The doctor was, but he could check it out later.

“Go back to the other pages and see if any of those circles open,” I said.

He went back to the second page since he knew the circle on the first one didn’t open. The second one did but it contained schematics of another type of machine. The doctor kept going. He got near the end again, and I began to relax.

He clicked on one more circle and the first page of the file that opened described how to predict the anomaly, which I didn’t understand since it was a long mathematical equation but the doctor said he’d be able to decipher it. A list popped up that held predictions of when and where it would appear in the future. We didn’t go through the list, because there were over fifty pages. Then there were longs pages that listed when and where it formed in the past, a list that seemed to go back thousands of years. We didn’t try to look at much of it, though I was sure the doctor would as soon as he had the chance. He keyed in Earth to see if the translator was good enough to bring it up. It did.

And, there it was.

As we read the information, a chill crept into me. I felt sick. They could have warned us. No, they didn’t have spaceships that would’ve reached us in time but they did have a communications device that could span the universe almost instantaneously. They also knew our languages and how to broadcast on our frequencies. And, they knew about it hundreds of years before it appeared here. They even had a method of shielding from it. The doctor did a quick scan of a few of the places on the backlist and as far as we could tell, the bastards never warned the inhabitants of any of those worlds, either.

They could’ve saved billions of lives – trillions if you counted the other unwarned worlds – but had chosen not to.

I felt as if I’d taken a physical blow to the gut. I glanced at Morgan and she had blanched white. Tears poured down her cheeks.

“My mom and dad,” she whispered in a broken voice. “My gram and grampa. Maddy screamed and I woke up and ran into the kitchen and they were all in pieces, all dead. The lights wouldn’t come on and it was so foggy outside… Maddy tried to call the police but she couldn’t get anybody. Nothing worked.” She slumped back into her chair and looked at me with hurt eyes. “They could’ve helped us but they didn’t. They could’ve saved our families, all our people…”

I rolled my chair beside hers and took her into my arms and she began to sob. She leaned into me, shaking, and I began to stroke her hair. Yes. I knew how she felt.

My chest tightened and the images walked through my mind.

My bride, the love of my life, three days before our wedding lying on our bed, her beautiful brown eyes staring into eternity before I closed them and bundled her shattered body into a homemade shroud. I knew.

My mother, scattered on the hard tiles of the kitchen floor, her warm and loving heart stilled forever, placing her severed body into a shroud. I knew.

Fighting flies as I ripped the pieces of my kind and generous father from the sun-cooked deck to put them into a makeshift shroud. I knew.

Digging their graves.

Burying them.

Finding my eighteen-year-old cousin in a morgue.

My sister on a plane that fell from the sky.

I knew.

Five billion people that no longer existed.

All the shit of the last seven and a half years.

Oh, God, how I knew what she was feeling.

And now they intended to finish the job.

We had to find a way to stop them.

“TENNESSEE? MORGAN?”

I looked up. Dr. Bennett was sitting there watching us with a stunned expression. He hadn’t suspected at all. He pulled out a handkerchief, removed his glasses, and wiped at his eyes. I guess he had his own dark memories of that day.

“Sir?” My throat was tight and my voice came out low and rusty.

Morgan’s shoulders stopped shaking as her sobs died away. She lifted her head to peer up at the doctor with reddened eyes.

His throat clicked audibly as he swallowed. He got up. “Come, I think you both could use a drink. I know I could.”

I could, and Morgan nodded. We followed him down the hall where he took us past an elaborate dining room, and into a large kitchen where Morgan and I settled on leather barstools at a center counter made of dark stone. He reached under the counter and came up with glasses. He placed three on top. Then he went to a door at the side and came back with a never opened bottle of Chevis Regal, the twenty-five-year old blend, a scotch that was expensive even before the Event.