Hell Off-World

“Amy!” Blaine cried in distress.

Blaine dropped his knife and sprinted after his crewmate without a second’s delay. Although he had seen Amy vanish with an orange glow, when he ran through the portal, he simply found himself on the other side of the triangle of flesh. Seconds later, there was an inhuman groan from the cocoon above him, but Blaine paid it little mind.

“Amy! Amy can you hear me!?” Blaine demanded over his comms. He checked his data pad, but he was only getting three return signals.

Looking back at the portal, Blaine saw that the flesh that made the gateway had thinned slightly and lost some of its pigmentation. The translucent veil was barely visible.

“Blaine! What happened?” Theresa demanded, as she abseiled down her rope to join him, in response to his outburst.

“Amy! Amy, she’s gone! She’s just...” Blaine babbled, gesturing to the archway.

“Alright, calm down...” Theresa ordered, sharing Blaine’s anxiety but dealing with it much better. “What do you mean she’s gone? Where’s she gone?”

Before Blaine could answer, Atlas came falling from the upper floors, carrying Monty on their back. They bent their knees and spine on impact perfectly, landing without so much as a sound.

“I’ve lost contact with all of Amy’s equipment. What happened?” They demanded, calmly.

Blaine pointed his palms at the ground and took a deep breath.

“Okay, you guys aren’t gonna believe this, but these things...” He gestured to the flesh triangles. “Were portals a second ago...”

“Portals...?” Theresa asked, unsure of how sceptical she should be, after all they had seen so far. Portals were an idea which had been looked into by scientists for centuries, but the only progress had been a machine the size of a skyscraper, which could propel a subject a few feet in one direction.

“It’s true.” Atlas said, looking straight ahead. “I’ve downloaded the camera feed from Amy’s visor, from before she was cut off.”

“She put her poking stick through it, and it just vanished and came back again.” Blaine elaborated. “We should have called everyone else down... but she fired her drone into it, and the next thing we knew... something pulled her in.” The crew was silent for several seconds, as they processed the information. “There’s more...” Blaine went on, quietly. He picked up his knife. “As the cable was unwinding, I tried to cut it... but she got pulled in at the last...”

Without waiting for him to finish, Atlas snatched the knife and studied it closely.

“Whereabouts did you cut her?” Atlas asked, coldly. Blaine drew a line on his own hip to demonstrate. “The cut alone won’t kill her, it’s not deep enough to be debilitating.” Atlas said, determining the depth of the cut by the traces of blood on the knife.

“So how do we get her back?” Monty asked, mostly rhetorically, but optimistic that someone would at least have an idea.

“Okay...” Theresa started pacing back and forth. “You say she put her stick through there and it came back again?” Blaine nodded. “Alright then, long term plan- we wait for the portals to open again. I don’t know where they came from, but I won’t believe that they only exist to send one person somewhere else, once. When they reopen, we’ll send a wireless relay through and get a message to Amy’s visor. If she can reach the portal on the other side, we can get her back, if not, hopefully we’ll at least be able to talk to her. In the mean time, Atlas, were you able to make any headway on the alien language?”

“I’m afraid not, but...” They trailed off.

“What?”

“I’ve just had an idea, excuse me...” Atlas returned to the upper levels.

“Okay... Monty, you stay here and watch the portals. Blaine, go back to the ship and bring it here, and use the Tank to melt a hole in the wall right there.” She pointed at the nearest wall. “We’re gonna be working on this all day, but we’re still not pulling another night shift.”

“What!?” Blaine was clearly outraged.

“I want Amy back as badly as you do, but we can’t help her if we kill each other tonight! Now are you going to follow orders, or do I need to do your job for you?” Theresa scowled. It wasn’t the first time she had had to pull rank on her son.

Blaine snarled and made his way up the stairs towards the door they had come in through. Theresa followed him from a distance, and went a different way towards Atlas, who had opened a panel on one of their forearms and was making adjustments to one of their sensors.

“Atlas, tell me about this idea of yours.” Theresa ordered. The crew knew that she never liked to be kept in the dark.

“Well, it occurred to me that I’ve been taking a somewhat 2-dimensional approach to finding examples of alien text.” Atlas replied, without deterring from their work on the sensor. “I’ve been assuming that there are no examples of written language because they’ve all decayed, but what if they didn’t use a written language?”

“The creature we saw last night didn’t have eyes...” Theresa continued. “Or if it did, it wore a mask over them.”

“Precisely. If the natives were blind, then they must have communicated indirectly in another way.”

“Like by touching!” Theresa realised.

There was an insectoid race in the United Galactic Empire which was almost entirely blind. They were able to use data pads which translated information to their native language by generating textured surfaces not unlike braille.

“Or pheromones, or electronic charges, there are several possibilities.” Atlas continued. “I’m going to scan the surfaces for any anomalies which seem deliberate.”

The day wore on with frustratingly little progress. Monty paced between the portals, occasionally throwing pebbles through them, in the hope that they might have re-opened. Half an hour after Blaine left the spire, the sound of the Comet’s engines could be heard from outside, and not long after that, a large circle of red began to show on the wall, as it was bombarded by the Tank’s lasers from the other side.

Atlas continued scanning and inspecting every surface in the spire, even running as thorough a scan as they could on the air the crew was breathing, but they found no patterns which coincided with any speaking pattern used in the Empire, or even any theoretical means of communication the android generated. Atlas’ processor began overheating, mandating them to stop calculating, before they even considered giving up.

“Atlas?” Theresa began, worriedly. She received an alert on her data pad whenever Atlas experienced hardware difficulties. “Pace yourself. Like I said to Blaine...”

“Amy could be dying!” Atlas snapped, loudly, surprising the captain. “And I can’t do anything, because even if these stupid, cryptic natives left instructions to the portals all around us, I’m too dim-witted to figure out how to read them!”

There was a long silence. Even though she knew Atlas felt emotions, Theresa couldn’t remember the android ever losing their temper before.

“Go to the ship, refill on coolant and recharge.” She ordered. Atlas lifted a finger like they were about to say something else, but Theresa stopped them. “NOW.”

Because of their level-headed nature, Atlas had never been issued an official order from the captain. Losing Amy was making them feel things they had never felt before. In the 420 years since rolling off the assembly line, no one had ever treated them like a friend in the same way Amy did. As Atlas approached the hole in the wall, Blaine had recently burnt, they considered what possible means of communication they might have overlooked. Outside, they saw the suns disappearing on the horizon. Forty-one minutes to sundown.

If the natives had been blind and hadn’t written their language, then how could they have recorded information? How could they converse directly with each other? What if... If Atlas had a mouth, a smile might have crept across their face as a new idea dawned. What if they were the same thing? Atlas raced into the ship and into their and Amy’s room.

The robot’s hands were a blur as they pulled beams, cables, soldering irons and processing units from storage space all around them. With their arms piled high with equipment, they raced from the ship and dropped it all carelessly at the base of the spire. Still moving like a character from a comic book with super speed, Atlas arranged the beams to form a tripod, pointing a set of radio dishes skywards, all connected to a miniature computer mounted to the base. Atlas took a power cable, and connected each end to the device and a socket underneath the Comet, respectively.

“What’s this?” Atlas jumped as Blaine walked over, having returned the Tank to the Comet’s hangar. “Didn’t know you could do that...” Blaine continued, in regard to Atlas being startled.

“Well I’m allocating all of my available processing power on this. I’m attempting to translate a language spoken in a format unprecedented in the UGE, I can’t exactly be dwelling on my surroundings...”

“You must be pushing yourself...” Blaine remarked. “You never abbreviate.”

“That’s why I told them to refill their coolant and recharge.” Theresa sternly stated, exiting the spire with an agitated Monty behind her. “The suns are going down, I want everyone in the ship, now."

“Captain, I’m on the verge of something here!” Atlas defended themself.

“You’re on the verge of a meltdown! Literally!"

Atlas’ hands kept tuning the equipment they were working on, but they knew the captain was right. They had been ignoring damage reports and warnings on their internal display since before they left the spire, and if they overheated and had to reboot, there was every chance they would lose the memory of what they had been working on.

“Nobody touch this...” Atlas ordered, before racing back into the ship.

Atlas emerged five minutes later with condensation seeping from the back of their head, and the device Amy had attacked Blaine with pressed to the centre of their chest. The crew had gathered around Atlas’ machine, but honoured their order not to touch it. As they approached, Atlas explained.

“When we arrived here and first noticed this civilisation, I detected a minor electromagnetic disturbance and dismissed it as a natural phenomenon. I have a theory that it was, in fact, a vast network of information.”

“You mean like the internet?” Monty asked. The internet had evolved and expanded dramatically over the space age, but had kept its name. “I thought that was what you were scanning for. You said it was too random.”

“Too random to be the work of computers.” Atlas corrected. “An exchange of words, maps, pictures of cats, it’s all very basic and easily detectable for a machine like me. What I suspect, is a network of thoughts and feelings. Like the internet, but for the brains of the creatures that lived here. That’s how they communicated, and that’s where we’ll find the information we need to save Amy!”

They crew had all been wearing hopeful expressions as they listened to Atlas’ plan, but they slowly faded as they grew more and more sceptical. It was several seconds after Atlas concluded, that Monty broke the silence.

“Atlas...” He began, carefully, his translator picking up on his nervous hand gestures. “I don’t know a lot about psychology, or even how it would relate to a robot mind if I did... but...”

After Monty trailed off, Blaine took over. “You’re losing it dude.”

“It does seem fairly farfetched...” Theresa agreed.

Atlas looked between the three of them in disbelief, although unable to show it on their visor. “And they say robots are the ones without imagination...”

“Imagination is fine, Atlas, and if a planet-wide telepathic network exists anywhere in the universe, it would be on this bizarre planet, but I’m not hearing a lot of evidence to back this theory up.” Theresa said.

“Well it won’t be a theory for much longer.” Atlas replied, focusing on the machine, connecting a wireless relay to the computer, with which they immediately connected.

Before any of the crew could continue their discussion, Atlas let out a constant, high-pitched shriek, that made their three companions shield their ears in distress. The sound lasted less than three seconds.

“What... was...” Blaine began, as the ringing in his ears faded.

“The data in that electronic field, converted to audio.” Atlas said, calmly.

“Jibberish.” Theresa forcefully stated.

“Captain, if these organisms are even remotely similar to humans or Greywolves, then hearing an auditory representation of a single creature’s inner monologue would be incomprehensible, the sheer number of thoughts they’d be thinking, on various levels of consciousness. That was an entire planet’s worth of brains you just heard.”

“Theoretically...” Theresa elaborated.

“It could take me a few hours, but I’m confident that by then I’ll have a working understanding of the natives’ entire language, and then I can start downloading all of their information, piece by piece.” Atlas said, excitedly.

“Well again, sundown is in less than one hour, by which time I want everyone in the ship, sealed in their rooms, and either asleep or powered down!” Theresa sternly retorted.

“Captain, please...” Atlas pleaded.

“No! Remember last night? I’m not putting the rest of this crew in danger for such a shaky lead.”

“Okay, hear me out...” Atlas reasoned. “I’ll write a programme that causes a forced shutdown at the slightest alteration of my personality matrix, which lasts until sunrise.”

Theresa frowned thoughtfully. “Swear to me that you’ll actually do that.”

“I swear.” Atlas replied, honestly, writing the programme as they spoke. The captain was right again, of course, she had almost died, the previous night, and it had been mostly Atlas’ fault.

“Okay, everybody on this crew who can’t fully recharge over the course of a few seconds, head to the kitchen and eat something. We need to prep the ship for a night shift, which means maximising the sonic replusors, calibrating the door locks so we don’t kill each other and producing the sedatives we need to keep tentacles out of our brains while we sleep.”

As the organic members of the crew retired to the ship, Atlas sat down cross-legged and delved into the labyrinth of data the receivers were picking up. Almost immediately, they began to notice subtle patterns, some streams of data that were identical, others that were very similar. Atlas was mildly irritated that the crew had been so sceptical of them when they were so rarely wrong. To be fair, Amy’s disappearance was making Atlas act irrationally, which had made it a bad time to stumble upon a scientific breakthrough, but stumble upon one, Atlas had.

Atlas’s hard drive was beginning to reach capacity with the billions of short streams of seemingly nonsensical data they were collecting. The patterns were becoming clearer and clearer the more Atlas delved, like reaching the end of a Sudoku puzzle, or it would be, if Atlas couldn’t solve them as soon as look at them. They had already identified several pronouns and conjunctions, and full sentences were beginning to take place.

With all of their focus working on the language, Atlas was taken by surprise when they heard a noise, forcing their focus back onto their immediate surroundings. Without their noticing, the suns had set, and the sky had been pitch black for almost five minutes. Atlas stood up and spun around, scanning their environment for body heat again. Three results came up, as Atlas turned to face them, they saw two of the cephalopodic creatures they had seen last night, and one, considerably more welcoming face.

“Amy!?”

Atlas shut down.

-x-x-x-

Several hours earlier, Amy had breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that the interior of the spire, and an anxious-looking Monty had greeted her on the other side of the portal.

Amy stood in place for several seconds, perplexed by the Vampire’s lack of reaction, despite idly looking in her direction. “I’m back!” She tried, nervously. “Monty...?”

From the level above the two of them, Amy heard Atlas’ voice. “… it occurred to me that I’ve been taking a somewhat 2-dimensional approach to finding examples of alien text.”

“Atlas!” Amy called, loudly.

After a worried look at Monty, she ran up the stairs towards her friend. They were deep in conversation with Theresa about translating the local language.

“Atlas! Captain...?”

Neither of them showed any reaction to Amy’s presence. If this was a joke, it was in poor taste. Amy tried to grab Atlas’ shoulder, but as her hand was about to make contact, it dissolved into a vapour matching the colour of her jacket and hand. Amy shrieked and pulled her hand back, causing it to re-corporealize instantly. Slowly, Amy sunk her hand into Atlas chest, and experimented with this bizarre new discovery. Although she felt no pain, nor could she feel anything else in her hand.

“So... what? I’m dead?” Amy asked, to no one in particular. “IF THIS IS THE AFTERLIFE, IT’S PRETTY DISSAPOINTING!” She shouted at the ceiling above her.

Amy’s parents had raised her to be a 7th Level Pastafarian, but she had always thought that people in the fifty-second century should be above believing such ridiculous stories. Nevertheless, being unable to interact with anyone or anything... Anything? As the thought occurred to Amy she realised she was standing firmly on the ground. She experimentally ran over to the railing protecting her from the spire’s central chamber, and placed her hands on it. She pushed experimentally, and her hands turned to vapour. She dropped to her knees and tried to nudge a small pebble. She was relieved to find that it wobbled slightly, but again, her hand vanished before she could move it significantly.

“Well, it’s better than nothing...” Amy muttered. She brainstormed potential ways she could use what little presence she had, to communicate, but drew a blank. If she had body heat, she could use a data pad, but also, Atlas would be able to detect her anyway, were that the case.

On the topic of communication, it finally occurred to Amy to try her visor, but as she suspected, none of its connective capabilities were functional, although it still worked, and displayed the time until sunset, as it had since they entered the planet’s atmosphere and the length of each day had been calculated.

Amy sighed loudly, then noted that her lungs still worked. She held her breath and soon felt the need to inhale, as always, and a touch of her wrist yielded a heartrate.

“Getting some pretty mixed messages here...” Amy mumbled. “You’re alive!” She suddenly said, surprising herself. “I’m alive... Wait, what?”

Amy looked around in alarm, and wasn’t certain if she should be surprised or not at what she saw. Standing on the balcony with her, were two of the tentacle-covered creatures she had seen last night. Although Amy was startled, she wasn’t filled with illogical terror, as she had been before.

“You’re... you’re not gonna hurt me.” She said, matter-of-factly, as though she was correcting something that had been said, to the contrary. “You... You’re trapped here too... and you’re putting thoughts in my head... which is probably one of the least strange things to happen to me today...”

Although it sounded invasive when Amy said it out loud. She found she could clearly feel the presence of the creatures in her mind and, more importantly, shut them out with next to no effort. The two aliens stood perfectly still, with their masks pointed squarely at her. When she let them in, it was like she knew their intentions and thoughts, not like hearing words in her head, like telepathy on TV, but form ideas on her own, except know on another level that the ideas weren’t her own. It wasn’t as though there was another experience Amy could liken it to.

“So we’re all trapped here, all three of us?” Amy narrated, finding it helped to separate her own thoughts from theirs. “Oh more than three? Wow, much more... thousands... the whole city’s population? That’s a lot of people. And where are we trapped? Why can’t my friends hear me?”

Moving for the first time, one of the aliens lifted one of the long tentacles emerging from its shoulder, and started to draw in the air. Again, Amy saw the diagram as the creature drew it, and pictured it in its head. It drew a large symbol, like an upside-down, capital T, then drew another horizontal line, half way up the vertical line, on the left. With another tentacle, the creature pointed at Atlas and Theresa, who seemed to be having a heated argument on the other side of the central chamber.

“My friends?”

The creature marked the new line with a small symbol that she suspected had the meaning of an X.

“This is where they are?”

The creature pointed back and forth between themself and Amy, then made the same symbol on the horizontal line underneath.

“Okay... I think I get it now... This line where my friends are, is the dimension we all come from, and the vertical line is the portal, which sends you down to the red place with the zombie birds, and you can come back from there, but you’re still on this lower level... and you can’t... you can’t get back...” Amy trailed off and her heart sank. She only pitied herself for a second, before thinking of her friends. “Wait, what if my friends get stuck here when the portals re-open?

Although she hadn’t dwelled on the discovery, a combination of deductive reasoning, Monty’s current behaviour, and snippets from Theresa and Atlas’ conversation had led her to deduce that the portals weren’t working for them. Her new tentalcled friends, however, didn’t seem to have shared her discovery. They turned to face each other slowly.

“Something bothering you guys?”

Without another word, or telepathic suggestion, the two squid people lowered their bodies and begun rapidly dragging themselves across the floor with a flailing of their many tentacles. Amy followed them down the stairs to where Monty was standing, looking at the portals, and mildly aware of the hole that was rapidly forming on the spire wall behind him. The aliens reared upwards again when in front of the withered portals.

“They certainly look less active...” Amy noted their thin and pale condition for the first time. She stepped forwards and verified that they still worked for her, by briefly poking her arm through. “That’s a good thing, right? I don’t want my friends getting trapped here too...”

Again, the squids shared a look, then slowly began to advance towards her. Although new to the whole ‘telepathy’ thing, Amy was confident that her new associates were harmless, so put up little protest when they gently lifted her arms, and waved their heads around her inquisitively. One of them pulled unknowingly at the collar of her jacket.

“Hey, whoa... I’ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going...” She joked, nervously.

Amy had a sinking feeling she knew what they were looking for though. She shooed the tentacle away and undid her jacket, turning to show the two of them the blood-soaked shirt, tied around her waist. For a third time, two white face plates silently faced each other for a second. Amy’s heart sank and she didn’t need a telepathic connection to know what they were thinking.

“I’m in terrible danger, aren’t I?” She cringed.

One of the squids responded by taking her arm and slithering towards the portal. Amy wrestled her arm free with relative ease.

“Whoa there, Cthulhu!” She snapped. “When the suns go down, I can talk to my friends, right? That’s how this works? They need to know I’m okay!”

The squid that had been holding her hand leaned towards her intimidatingly. Leaving its face plate inches from Amy’s face.

“Yeah, danger, you said... you thought that already. Lots of danger... Lots of danger... Lots... Not a lot of use for synonyms with telepathy, is there? Look, I don’t know how friendship works on this planet, but humans don’t just vanish through portals without letting their friends know they’re okay!”

Ignoring the second-hand feelings of anxiety in her head, Amy ran towards the hole in the spire, and Atlas, on the other side. It wasn’t that she doubted her new associates' warning, she just really did need to put an end to Atlas’ panic. She had only caught bits of Atlas’ conversations with Theresa, but it sounded like the android was really falling apart.

Moments before she left the spire, Amy’s visor beeped quietly to announce sundown. She leapt through the hole and ran over to Atlas, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with their back turned, in front of a strange receiver device Amy couldn’t imagine the purpose of.

“Atlas!” She called out, hopefully.

Atlas shuddered and shot to their feet, before looking around nervously. As soon as they turned to face Amy, they visibly reacted in relief and surprise. “Amy!?”

Amy had already drawn the breath with which she planned to start blurting out her monologue detailing her new discoveries, when Atlas twitched their head back and forth, and promptly fell forwards and lay motionless on the ground.

“Atlas!?” Amy cried, accusingly. The squid people slithered over and looked at her questioningly and accusingly, which was impressive, seeing as they didn’t have faces. Amy sighed. “Theresa must have had them rig themself to shut down if they saw any more ghosts...” She looked towards the ship. “I could still...”

Another tentacle wrapped around her arm, firmly this time. For the first time, Amy heard a voice inside her head which wasn’t hers. It was a quiet, hissing voice, like that of a reptile, in an echoing room. “We could all be dead in minutesss.”

Amy cast a sympathetic look to the ship, and then back at the squid, and sighed again. “Let’s go.”