Excerpt:

THE CONTAINMENT PREDICAMENT, Pt. 1

It was then—when the phosphorescent veil cast by the lunar climax reflected across the asters—that he realized he had lost track of time. In a meadow purely monochrome and exotic such as the one he stood upon, it would be normal for anyone to drift amid the dance of unusual colored lights; for him, however, it was indulgent. After all, he had never stopped to contemplate beauty in any of the regions he had explored throughout his sector of work. He was there for a reason: his mission. And his mission here had already ended.

Certain that on that telluric planet there was no trace of the origin of the entity he had been tasked to inspect, the supervisor activated his visors to relocate his ship and head back to it. He crossed the meadow of asters with his gaze fixed on the digital map marker projected onto his lens, completely ignoring the impossible landscape unfolding beneath his hips. Truly, he had never possessed that human knack for curiosity—for losing oneself in wonder, or simply, for feeling.

The first sector of the system where the Agency found itself stranded had already been entirely explored by him. It contained only two Jovian planets, three moons, and the telluric planet from which he was about to depart. Next would be setting a course for the fourth sector, since the second and third were the research targets of other Agency supervisors. It was usually strange for three supervisors to be in the outer field beyond the space station at the same time, but this was a special situation. Days earlier, all communication with the two adjacent solar systems had been lost—something merely impossible given the technological quality New World provisioned to its industries. And yet it happened, and the Agency had to act. Losing communication between space stations could cause coordination failures in the containment of anomalies affecting New World, something that could have been easily resolved by sending engineers between systems—if not for the fact that the localization system indicated the positions had changed completely. All of this, combined with the impossibility of locating one another due to the communication blackout and the maps’ failure to triangulate even the precise positions of their own stations, led them to the conclusion that they were adrift in space, unable even to return home.

Communication with the central base on the Agency’s home planet remained intact, but they could not determine the new whereabouts of the three missing space stations. What was clear was that this was not a simple software issue; something else was happening, and it was only logical to assume the influence of some entity. An anomaly.

“I see you’ve had no luck here either, Supervisor,” said a voice over the radio intercom. “The others haven’t managed to pick up any sign of the anomaly either.”

The supervisor did not bother to reply.

“Since you’ve finished with the first sector, you should return to the station for an equipment replacement,” the voice suggested again—this time with more noticeable warmth.

Silence remained the supervisor’s answer. But the owner of that delicate female voice did not allow the discomfort to dominate the channel.

“Supervisor.”

“I’m here,” he finally replied, his gaze lowered, lost in the ground-anchor lever.

“You’ve gone more than forty-eight hours without replenishing energy or changing. Your visors are deteriorated by the extreme climate, and your oxygen pumps need recharging in less than half a day. I know you’re aware, and I don’t need to remind you. Return to base.”

It was more than clear the supervisor preferred to follow his own plans, yet something within him was fascinated by receiving orders—especially from that voice. There was something so calming in the intonations transmitted through the communicator that he often found himself drifting into those directives. Still, the feeling was buried beneath his sense of duty, which never allowed distractions. Until then, he remained a person defined by his work, someone who—by all indications—had never felt anything special for anything at all, not even for something as touching and endearing as that voice.

Even so, he followed her recommendations.

“Operator Selena.”

“Yes, Supervisor?”

“You’re right.”

He finally lifted his gaze and removed his visors along with the scarlet beret. He raised the anchor lever and indicated the return route to the space station on the monitor. The ship levitated, hovering a few meters above the ground for several seconds, then slowly ascended until it reached a sky clear and utterly devoid of clouds. The planet’s strange colors wrapped around it in the distance until, with the activation of the thrusters, it seemed like just another star in that cosmic mural visible from the aster field. And so, another planet was crossed off the list.

The station—massive in form and unyielding in appearance—made the supervisor feel at home. The station had always been his dearest home, or rather, the only one he remembered ever having. For a decade and a half he had devoted fifteen-hour days to inspecting anomalies at that space base, and for him, that meant everything. In a place like that, routine was difficult to vary. He moved from his small three-square-meter room to his workstation after sleeping his captivating five hours a day. At his post, he received a list of new tasks for the shift—mostly field investigations in various sectors of the system—which he would report upon returning to the station. It was a simple life, but it sufficed. Anything would be worse than returning to his apartment on New World, a place filled with memories and grime. A dump. He couldn’t afford any renovations or improvements and relied solely on the government’s common leisure services: popular television, a daily fifteen-minute ration of lime-heavy water, and packages of mossy food with protein traces from some native caterpillar, delivered by droids to every resident of the buildings in the putrefying pit called “Capital.”

Now the supervisor no longer had to worry about the drastic reduction in lifespan he had been suffering due to conditions in the Capital—though it wasn’t as if he worried much about living at all. On the station, that floating dysmorphic cube with layered walls that offered the failed illusion of creative design and the color of raw concrete, the lives of space workers were better than any king’s when compared to the common caste on New World. The primary difference was food: freeze-dried rations and a few canned goods prepared in the industries of the home planet. Supervisors and other ranks lived in small but apparently comfortable rooms, furnished with a military cot, a thin blanket, and a slim pillow—elements deemed more than sufficient by the workers themselves. They needed no leisure services; they had time only to sleep after long shifts and a few minutes for hygiene. As for the view, it was considered incredible compared to the communal pit below: a labyrinth of wide corridors that seemed endless, whose incandescent lighting enveloped all four sides of the structure, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. With no windows to contemplate what lay outside and no change in that incessant monotony, the station’s labyrinthine corridors were all the supervisor ever saw on his walk from room to workstation—and now, they guided him from the docking bay to the nearest water service (this time not lime-heavy) he could find before the meteorological conditions of the explored areas irritated his throat further.

After leaving his used equipment in maintenance, the supervisor went to his workstation: a small cubicle with a desk and a green-toned monitor—the only contrast to the room’s monochrome. The area was filled with station workers moving frantically from one end to the other, papers floating carelessly in the air, and a screen with red letters displaying an announcement that still seemed impossible: “84 HOURS SINCE LAST COMMUNICATION.”

Without giving it more importance than necessary, the supervisor sat to fill out the reports for the sector he had just explored. He could have done it after surveying the next sector, but since he was at the station, he preferred to seal the task. His calm—or rather, indifferent—attitude was uncommon among any workers at that moment, especially anomaly supervisors. He typed with focus; the only thoughts skating through his neural connections were of finishing as quickly as possible to head for the fourth sector. Even the memories of the places he had visited over the past forty-eight hours stirred no emotion. He had walked on moons tinted with impossible colors by neighboring nebulae, Jovian planets with golden asteroid belts reflecting on lagoons over which he glided in his ship—and above all, that aster field where his mind, for just a moment, had been able to rest. Something he deeply denied and refused to accept.

“What would she look like?” he wondered out of nowhere, a flicker of disbelief crossing his face. Why would he ask that? Obviously, he meant the appearance of the owner of that sweet voice he hadn’t heard since docking. A bead of sweat traced his cheek—again, his mind had led him astray. He should not think of her at all. For his own good.

He tried.

Suddenly, memories of his former life on New World surfaced. He had been alone in the season before qualifying to serve the Agency, but before becoming miserable, he had had a small family—two people bound by marriage. He never thought of it, though lately those memories attacked him, especially when that voice spoke to him through the intercoms scattered across his workplaces. Life with her had been simple. Married since sixteen, their monotonous routine consisted of surviving however they could in the capital’s rot. A few bills from the government’s biweekly stipend afforded them the same life he later had alone. Their diet came from the monthly supply box: urban fungi adapted for consumption, canned larvae—hailed by the New World Empire as the true and only protein source to immeasurably improve quality of life—synthetic milk, and a couple of nutritional bars whose wrappers never listed their composition, yet they ate them all the same. Medical supplementation was an obvious dream for their neighborhood and all capital districts. At first, medicine wasn’t needed, but when a strange malaise fell upon her, the supervisor cursed not having joined the Agency sooner—at least then he might have helped her, even if they had to sacrifice the electricity service that only lasted an hour a day anyway.

The illness soon incapacitated her completely. Bodily paralysis set in, clearly attacking her lungs. It began with weakness in her diaphragm’s ability to assist ventilation, and without access to external respiratory devices, little by little—and sooner rather than later—she became the victim of a strange ailment never diagnosed. In the blink of an eye, for the first time in twenty years of marriage, the supervisor found himself incurably alone. He did not cry her death; in fact, he handed her over to mortuary services with incomparable coldness. He had never nullified his emotions like that before, but that death marked a before and after in his character.

Until that voice made him remember. And more than the terrible final months spent trying to encourage his wife as she petrified in their bedroom, he remembered how her delicate, feminine aura contrasted with the putrid hell they inhabited. He then thought the owner of that voice must resemble his first love—though it was not romantic. He would never indulge such emotions while working for the Agency. It was more a calming presence, something to keep him steady during expeditions into deep space.

As his fingers typed automatically and his mind spiraled through ideas, hours passed in the cubicle—until a small alarm tone from the intercom beside his monitor brought him back.

“Supervisor,” the device said.

It was her again.

“Your gear is ready for pickup. You may return to the field. I hope the time you spent at the station helped you recover.”

Papers floated chaotically again; clerks and supervisors ran more frantically than before; keystrokes from other cubicles grated on the ears; and the red light of emergency report alerts flashed intermittently.

“Yes, Miss Selena,” the supervisor replied after a contemplative pause. “I definitely needed a moment to rest. I’ll head to the fourth sector.”

“Safe launch, Supervisor,” the voice said.

The speed with which he moved from the cubicle to the docking bay betrayed his eagerness to escape the station’s disastrous chaos. It seemed the only way to clear his mind was fieldwork—so it was clear he had lied to Miss Selena.

In the blink of an eye, he was traveling at superhuman speeds through the cosmos. Incredible hues of heterogeneous chromaticism reflected like neon lights across the cockpit. The ship—rudimentary and stripped of paint—drowned in those auroras, taking on a dreamlike, astonishing aspect, while beneath its platform the nearest planet’s asteroid belt shimmered with metallic light, as if solar waves rolled beneath his feet. At some point early in every journey, the deafening roar of the thrusters softened into an underwater echo, and the ship’s seismic vibration ceased entirely as maximum velocity was reached to minimize travel time. When that happened, the magic of outer space awakened something—unacknowledged—deep within the supervisor. He would never tire of what he could not see from the station. After all, why were there no exterior views there?

“For the same reason you’re lost in thought,” he told himself. Distractions were not permitted.

“TWO HOURS TO DESTINATION. SECTOR FOUR. FIRST LANDING ON: LUNAR BODY OF PLANET REGISTERED UNDER CODE 0330.”

The cockpit monitor announced it in a robotic, anticlimactic voice. The supervisor thought it wouldn’t have hurt for such information to be delivered by the operators—by Miss Selena, in his case—but things were as they were, and he had to stop thinking about it.

No further distractions crossed his mind after that notice, and time seemed eternal. He landed on a rocky hill on that fog-choked moon. The monitor warned of toxic weather and how conditions would affect his oxygen pumps, causing a greater-than-usual depletion of up to two percent per hour. He fitted the ventilation filter mask, adjusted his beret, and took the rugged GPS to guide him once he descended the hill and the fog obscured his view. When he opened the hatch, its screech and the fierce gust that swept into the ship irritated him and made him feel uneasy—but these were occupational hazards.

The rappel descent was turbulent due to wind, and as expected, once on the ground he was blind. He tried using the special technology of his visors for a general view, but the terrain scanner generated by the GPS worked best. It produced a digital image detailing every aspect of the terrain, which he transferred to his mask lens. He would use the visors only if he needed infrared assistance, though he didn’t expect to encounter anyone—ship detectors had already indicated the lunar body was incompatible with life. A relief.

Studying celestial bodies for signs of anomalies was, in principle, a simple task. Every known anomaly caused interference in portable sensors the Agency provided to supervisors and special field agents. These sensors were affixed to exoskeletons or suits, as well as to ship scanners, which triangulated interference signals and designated them “sectors.”

The search for anomalies was empirical. Little was known of the infinite kinds of entities, but it was known they could be tracked and ultimately contained. Containment itself was another matter—its difficulty the opposite of tracking. Supervisors located them and reported key characteristics so a containment plan could be devised, where the Agency’s special field agents would direct them—sometimes by force—into a portable gate they carried, which connected directly to a pocket room: fragile within, yet from without, once sealed, impossible to connect to our reality. In this way, all the en—

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