Bottled Lightning: A Short Story Read online

  Bottled Lightning

  by Philip Harris

  Copyright © 2014 by Philip Harris

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author or publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or extraterrestrial, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-9938887-1-7

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Humble Nations

  Copy editing by Carol Davis

  Published by Philip Harris

  http://www.SolitaryMindset.com

  Bottled Lightning

  TIME NO LONGER PASSES for my wife. I sit with her in the medical centre, the only sound the soft whirring of the machines that line the walls of the room and the occasional clattering of a cart as some other patient is wheeled through the long term care facility. The panel beside her stasis capsule is covered in switches and dials; interfaces to the machines that regulate her temperature, feed her nutrient-dense fluids and extract them when she’s done. But it’s the string of red digits that run along the top of the panel that I stare at, day after day.

  This morning the number was 4,873,124,901.

  Now it’s 4,201,678,348.

  Technically, that ever-changing number tells me how many nanobots are currently circulating through my wife’s body, but to me, it’s a score. As the nanobots work to repair her failing organs they replicate and the number goes up but as they win, as her body begins to recover, the number drops. When it reaches zero my wife will open her eyes again.

  The doctor visits us every two weeks to tell me that we’re winning, that the nanobots are doing their job. But I can see the sorrow in her eyes, the pity. This is the sixth doctor we’ve had and they get younger all the time.

  Lisa smiled yesterday and my heart joined her in stasis, hoping against hope that this time would be different, that this time she would wake up. Then the smile vanished, replaced by a lopsided frown as the nanobots waged war inside her brain.

  I watch as the number drops to 4,097,871,468 and for the first time in months I feel a surge of optimism. Deep down I know it’s unwarranted, that there’s a long way to go, but I can’t help myself. I stare at my wife’s face, looking for signs of the playful, adventurous woman I fell in love with and praying that this time I’ll get a chance to tell her I’m sorry.

  ***

  We found the cave three months into our journey across the Tharsis Montes volcanoes, on the southern slope of Pavonis Mons. Our Mars trip was a mix of scientific survey and adventure holiday but so far our time as part of a UN Survey Team hadn’t quite lived up to our naive expectations. Truth be told, I think we’d come to Mars hoping to make a world-changing discovery and were disappointed that all we’d done was monitor the life signs of the dilapidated rovers as they crept slowly across the surface of the planet. It was driving us insane and we’d leapt at the chance to leave the safety of the base at Gale Crater to explore. It would make us the first humans to traverse all three of the Tharsis Montes volcanoes — a modest claim to fame, perhaps, but it would be enough to earn us some funding and we might get to see something more interesting than a valve pressure warning light before the shuttle arrived to take us back to Earth.

  It was Lisa who spotted the tunnel, a circular shadow a kilometre or so off our chosen route. She didn’t bother to point it out to me, just veered off across the mountain, our Explorer rattling and groaning as she accelerated across the rocky surface. I reported our detour to the disinterested radio operator back at the base and updated him again when we reached the entrance and it became clear that the shadow was more than just an intriguing geological formation. Lisa was already strapping herself into her environment suit by the time I got off the radio.

  Our suits were big and slow, the servos wheezing as we moved into the tunnel, and I wondered when they’d last been serviced. I turned on my lamp and it flickered to life, sending shadows darting down the tunnel. The passage ran horizontally into the mountain, perfectly level as though it had been drilled rather than forming naturally. The walls and floor were smooth and glassy. I’d never seen anything like it and as we walked I took photographs to document our discovery.

  Neither of us spoke, preferring the grumbling of the servos and the reassuring hiss of the oxygen system to the sound of our own voices. I was beginning to think the tunnel would continue forever, or at least beyond the range of our oxygen tanks, when it opened up into a huge cavern. The floor was flat but the walls curved up high above us and I felt like we were standing inside a giant tennis ball that had been cut in half. I flicked my lamp upwards but the darkness swallowed the beam before it reached the ceiling. Like the tunnel we’d just travelled along, the walls were almost completely smooth, just a subtle rippling providing any texture at all.

  The air inside the cavern was filled with dust. It’s something you get used to very quickly on Mars, and you tend to ignore it until something gets clogged up, but this was different. The dust hung motionless in the air until we moved through it. Then it would scatter ahead of us in waves as though it was water and not dust.

  “We should take a sample,” said Lisa, her voice crackling across the radio, making me jump.

  She laughed softly as I unbuckled a titanium sample canister from my belt and unscrewed the cap. I pressed a switch on the side of the tube and its vacuum pump shuddered into life, drawing the dust out of the air and into the container. As I filled the canister, Lisa started walking across the cave.

  “Hold on,” I said. “We should stay together.”

  She laughed. “You worry too much.”

  I sighed, finished taking the sample and hurried after her. I’d almost caught her when I saw a flash of light, like a tiny blue spark, off to the right.

  “Did you see that?” asked Lisa.

  “Yes.”

  There was another burst of blue sparks about thirty metres ahead of us. They exploded from nowhere, then drifted slowly towards the floor, fading into nothingness as they fell.

  “We should go,” I said.

  Lisa didn’t reply.

  “Lisa, this dust is probably combustible. If one of those sparks sets the dust alight, the whole place will turn into an inferno.”

  “Shh. Turn on your external audio.”

  I did as she asked and listened. After a few seconds I heard it, a crackling sound, quite different from the interference we got over our radios.

  “Sounds like someone crushing cellophane,” I said.

  The crackling noise came again, longer and louder this time. As the noise grew, two more bursts of light appeared, each larger than the first.

  “I’m going to take a look,” said Lisa.

  I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again and followed her; once Lisa got an idea into her head it was impossible to shift.

  The sparks appeared again and again as we moved towards them, building and feeding off each other until they formed a constantly shifting ball of electric blue lightning. Every few seconds a stream of sparks would reach out from the cloud for a moment before separating to drift slowly towards the ground.

  A couple of metres away from the cloud, caution finally got the better of Lisa and she stopped.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We need to take a sample,” she said, removing a canister from her belt.

  “Of what?”

  “The sparks. I think it’s the dus
t, catching fire. Static electricity build up, maybe. I should be able to catch some of them as they fall.”

  I tried to protest but Lisa had already unscrewed the canister.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said as she moved towards the sparks.

  As Lisa reached out with the canister the lightning grew brighter, turning white at its core. For a moment, I thought the metal had triggered some sort of chain reaction. Then the cloud of lightning disappeared, sucked almost instantly into the canister. Lisa slammed the lid shut and sealed it.

  “Did you see that?” she asked, staring at the container in her hand.

  “What? You got the sample.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t turn the pump on.”

  ***

  Lisa and I stood in the isolation lab at the Gale Crater base, once again inside environmental protection suits. These ones were smaller and lighter, intended to keep pathogens out rather than protect us from the hostile Martian atmosphere.

  The lab was small — there was just enough space for three people to gather round the steel work table in the middle of the room. Anyone else that wanted to see what was going on had to be content with watching through the rectangular viewing window that took up most of the north wall. Beyond the window lay the monitoring station and the controls for the array of video, heat, motion, radiation and chemical sensors that kept watch over the lab and its inhabitants.

  As far as anyone knew, the isolation lab had never been used. Before we could even bring our sample canisters into the base we’d had to move several boxes of accumulated junk out of the lab and run a full emergency decontamination cycle, dousing the room in caustic chemicals in the process. It was a minor miracle that the lab’s systems still worked and the first time we’d passed through the airlock I’d half expected dust to come out of the disinfectant sprays instead of the normal bright green foam.

  But everything worked and the techs had checked the potency levels and given us the all clear to bring the canisters inside. Now both tubes were sitting in a metal tray on the examination table. A technician watched us intently through the observation window. It’s been a long time but I think his name was Daniel.

  I’d already opened my canister to find it full of ordinary dust. Whatever strange properties it had possessed in the cave were gone. Now it was Lisa’s turn. She smiled at me and winked, then turned to Daniel and gave him the thumbs up.

  I could see the excitement on her face as she picked up the canister but to her credit, she managed to control her impatience and her movements were careful and deliberate.

  “It feels empty,” she said.

  I felt a pang of disappointment, tinged with unexpected relief.

  Slowly, Lisa unscrewed the cap on the container but before she could tip its contents onto the metal tray, a stream of sparks, similar to the ones we’d seen in the cave but brighter, flowed out of the canister. I could hear the accompanying cellophane crackle and the dust from my sample shifted and expanded, rising up to fill the metal tray it was lying in. The stream lasted ten, maybe fifteen seconds before ending as abruptly as it had begun but the sparks remained, becoming a crackling ball of blue lightning hovering three feet above the table.

  Lisa put the canister down and we both backed cautiously towards the exit.

  “Any guesses what it is?” she asked.

  I glanced towards the technician. He was frowning, running his fingers across the control panel as he adjusted the monitoring systems, trying to work out exactly what he was looking at.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but we should get out of here.”

  For once Lisa agreed with me and she hit the red exit button. The door behind us slid unsteadily open and, without taking our eyes off the cloud of sparks, we backed into the decontamination chamber. The door rolled shut and I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. As the decontamination cycle kicked in and we were drenched in thick green foam, Lisa voiced something we’d both been thinking.

  “Do you think it’s sentient?”

  High pressure steam burst from nozzles in the ceiling, washing away the foam and drowning out any further conversation. We waited for the steam to clear as the computer ran its final checks. I always hated this bit, the not quite knowing whether you’d been infected with some incurable alien disease; the growing certainty that a glitch in the computer’s systems would sentence you to a lifetime of isolation while the world searched for a cure for a disease that didn’t exist.

  Then the green light came on to signify the all clear and we clambered out of the environment suits.

  Daniel was waiting for us in the observation room.

  “What the hell is it?” he asked.

  I shrugged and moved past him to the control panel. “Anything interesting on the sensors?”

  “That’s the thing — according to the sensors, there’s nothing in that room,” Daniel replied.

  “What do you mean?” asked Lisa.

  “Exactly what I said. It’s like the room is completely empty. Everything was normal at first. I was getting your heat signatures, your movements, everything. Then you opened the canister and it all just . . . vanished. Even the video feed is just static.”

  “The sensors blew?”

  “That’s what I thought but it doesn’t look like it. There’s still some residual noise and the diagnostics came back clean.”

  I scanned the control panel. Daniel was right; whatever the blue lightning was, it was masking everything in the room.

  Lisa appeared at my side. “What do we do now?”

  “We do this the old fashioned way. We watch and wait.”

  ***

  “You’d better get up here, Alex. You need to see this.”

  It was Lisa.

  I checked the clock next to our bed and adrenaline flooded my system. We’d agreed to spend four hour shifts monitoring the lab but it had been less than two hours since I’d left her. Something had happened.

  When I got downstairs, Lisa was standing in front of the observation window, staring into the room beyond. She’d dimmed the lights and it took me several seconds to work out what I was seeing. There was a man standing on the other side of the glass.

  “Who went inside?” I asked, joining Lisa by the window.

  She shook her head. “No one.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I was watching the lightning and thinking how boring this was turning out to be when it just seemed to fade away, as though it had run out of energy. I checked the sensors and when I looked back he was standing there.”

  The man was roughly six feet tall, his body muscular and hairless and as far as I could tell, naked. He was standing a few inches away from the glass, completely motionless.

  “Look at his face,” said Lisa.

  I did as she suggested and for a moment I thought I recognised the man’s hard, rugged lines from somewhere but then they changed. His skin rippled, his nose widening slightly, shifting position on his face as his lips thickened and his chin became more pronounced. His skin darkened and his hair changed from a mousey brown to a thick, dark black. The only constant was his eyes. Fiercely blue, they seemed to glimmer in the dark.

  “That’s Eric Jones, the lead singer from Eternal Rabbits,” said Lisa.

  I didn’t recognise the name. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s who he looks like. Before that he was the lead actor from that detective show we watch, and before that he was Johnson Harvey, the stand-up comedian I like.”

  “But how is that possible? If that’s the thing from the cave, how does it know what a comedian from Earth looks like?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  Lisa gasped and took a step backwards. The man’s face had changed again, someone else I didn’t recognise but that Lisa obviously did.

  “That’s Mark Linkbacher,” she said.

  “The Mark Linkbacher? The guy you dated before we met?”

  “Yes, but his nose was different.
He broke it when he was playing football. I never liked the way it looked. Alex, what’s happening? How does it know what my ex-boyfriend looks like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lisa looked across at me, her eyes sparkling. “This is incredible,” she said and walked over to the control panel.

  I looked at the man behind the glass. His head turned towards Lisa, watching her as she tweaked the video feed, trying to get some sort of image.

  ***

  “I’ve decided to call him Adam,” said Lisa.

  “Adam?” I said. “That’s very . . . biblical.”

  “It seemed appropriate somehow.”

  “He looks more like a Derek to me. Or a Norman, maybe.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes. “He seems to have stopped changing now. He looks familiar but I don’t know who he is. He’s kind of hot, though.”

  Now it was my turn to roll my eyes.

  It had been three days since the arrival of whatever species was housed in the isolation lab and we were getting nowhere. The sensors in the lab were still refusing to pick up anything and all our attempts at communication had been ignored. All our strange visitor did was watch Lisa as she moved around the observation room and when she wasn’t there, it just stood waiting for her to return.

  “Alex,” said Lisa. “I want to go inside the lab.”

  I started to protest but she interrupted me.

  “I know what you’re going to say, that it’s too dangerous, but we don’t have any choice. It’s going to be three weeks before communication with Earth opens back up and we don’t know if he’s going to last that long. He doesn’t eat or drink, he doesn’t sleep. For all we know he’s dying and he’ll be gone by this time tomorrow. We may never get another chance like this.”

  Lisa was right. I’d been thinking the same thing. “I’ll go in,” I said. “I don’t want you risking your life.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, and you know it. You’ve seen how he behaves. For some reason it’s me he’s interested in and I need to be the one to go inside. You can stand in the decontamination chamber. If there’s any trouble you can be my knight in shining armour and charge in and rescue me.”