Voices

It’s been a long and cold dark winter after GW21991215, or Gigas as I’ve come to call it, entered our solar system and sent the planets zipping off their orbits. As far as anyone or I could tell, before the inevitable collapse of the world order, all of the planets beyond the asteroid belt were sling-shotted off into the cosmos. By some modicum of luck the earth stayed in the sight of the sun. By my accounts of the new sky, the new Earth year is roughly 23 pre-Gigas Earth years. We’re currently in the middle of new “October”, although the dark brown leaves that used to define this season have turned to icicles with temperatures averaging -150C at the edge of Earth’s new elliptical orbit.

Not only a a pre-Gigas year prior I had been assigned, what I thought at the time, would be position of my career. I had become one of the senior research scientists at the latest gravitational-wave observatory. Of course it was decided that the observatory had to be on Antartica. With the lack of human population, and history of little seismic activity, it seemed to be the best place for minimizing noise in the instrumentation. It had even become a little haven for us scientists, with several new observatories occupying the continent. And, although it had been the choice of many horror stories and films (which I never liked anyway) I was never one to take such superstitious things seriously. My mind might be changing.

It’s been 242 pre-Gigas days since I’ve heard from the rest of my colleagues, or at least that’s what the clocks tell me. I used to be able to tell from my sleep cycles, but those have become too erratic to rely on now. It was getting close to pre-Gigas winter holidays, and as had become tradition, the roughly 50 scientists stationed on this frozen wasteland would get together for a party. I drew the short straw and stayed behind to monitor the lab, as there was always next year, or so I thought. It’s fitting in a way, I always told myself ‘if you let your career get in the way of social interactions then you will die alone’ and now I can’t be proven wrong. As far as I know, no-one can prove me wrong. And even if they could, I don’t think I want to know the horrors that the rest of the planet is experiencing. The lab was outfitted to support 6 people for three pre-Gigas years, so I am 99.5% confident I will be the last surviving human on the Earth.

Although the gravitational wave telescope did not survive the initial event, most of the devices used for noise-correction are still working and were ringing incessantly. The tidal forces of Gigas have set off seismic activity all over the Earth, including here on Antarctica. I detected a large epicenter between here and Shackleton where the rest of my colleagues embarked, the size of which would likely create a rift down the middle of the continent. My certainty that I will never see them again only increases with each passing day.

I remember it like it was yesterday when we arrived at the observatory. We were on assignment for a year, so they were to become my family away from home. What is strange to me is that I can’t remember their faces. I remember their names: Emilia, Antoni, Jamal, Brenden, and Mollie. I repeat them in my mind but I can’t picture their faces. I can’t even picture the face of my husband or my son. It’s as if they have been erased directly, like the parts of my brain storing those memories have been excised with a knife. In a grim sort of way it gives me comfort to know that they are all certainly dead by now. The planet is completely uninhabitable, and if I hadn’t been sealed away in this grave then I wouldn’t have been able to continue my work. The work that the voices told me to complete, no demanded me to complete! I am thankful for the opportunity.

During the psych evaluations for the trip, I read about the affects of isolation on the human mind: visual and auditory hallucinations, psychosis, and even physical deterioration. I was never one to mind being alone, but I fear that I may even fall prey to some of these issues. Lights have started to invade the periphery of vision. I tried to create blinders, like you see on horses, to continue my work without distraction but the lights continued to creep in. After about a week, I hardly ever noticed them. I just noticed them now for the first time in months, only because I’m thinking of them.

Although not everything I’ve experienced until now could be tied to the effects of isolation. It was shortly after Gigas that the voices came to me, or rather the urges. The insights that were coming to me were like a wave of euphoria. I suppose my mind interpreted these urges and emotions as a voice pushing me along; a rationalization to make me feel more comfortable in my endeavors. I’m not sure that I would have been able to keep going without these urges. As I stared at the sky the first few days after Gigas it was hard to wrap my head around what was going on, but the voices demanded that I understand. There’s something unsettling but extremely motivating when the culmination of ones life work becomes unfamiliar.

I have been able to keep myself occupied. The data recorded from Gigas has been fascinating. I have already begun writing my Magnum Opus, as you will. I’m sure if my colleagues, or anyone, were around to read it then I would certainly win a Nobel prize.

Nothing about Gigas fits any of the models we’ve put together over the last two centuries for gravitational wave events. The size of it would correspond to a supermassive binary black-hole merger occurring in our neighboring solar system, and of course there is no evidence for such objects. The waveform itself did not conform to any previous models for gravitational wave sources. The typical shape of gravitational wave signal grows with a crescendo, until there is a chirp when the two objects finally merge and release energy like a gravitational bomb. Gigas grows and evolves, with a chaos that that seemed intractable to tame. It has a cadence with an innate beauty. I took the waveform and shifted its pitch into our auditory regime, which I now play on repeat as i continue my work.

Furthermore, our efforts on localizing these events has become impressive, and as far as I can tell there is no single point in the sky where Gigas could have originated from. I have spent months remapping the new sky to the pre-Gigas sky, and even still I have come to same conclusion. There is no point of origin for the Gigas. The waves appear to permeating throughout the entirety of space, propagating from the edge of the observable universe until reaching us.

I had never been religious, or spiritual, but this finding made me feel like something is communicating with me. The voices only confirmed this. When I’m on the verge of my next finding I feel a rush of neurotransmitters that I can only infer feels like the effect of cocaine or MDMA. They pushed me towards my next insight, that the gravitational waves themselves could be a form of communication. Like the effect of our vocal chords moving the air around us, something could be communicating through space itself. The pursuit of such a theory has come with increasing roadblocks. For one, I am trying to analyze one event, which may be a word, or sentence, or even an exhale. It’s like trying to construct the image of a 1000 piece puzzle with only one piece. I am also not a expert of linguistics, but I do have, possibly, the last remaining nexus of computing power on the planet.

Because of the international effort put into this observatory, we have access to a large collection of the languages from around the world, both in written and spoken form. I have no reason to believe that our languages would be even comparable to that of the “Gigantes”, as I’ve come to call them, but I had nothing else to begin my search. I initially, naively, tried to match the waveform of Gigas to any existing spoken language. There were of course some matches, but only led to non-sequiturs like “Becoming Home” and “The fruit down under”. I tried to decipher each of these to find a common thread, but the voices never returned down this path.

I realized that I needed to put everything into my work. I outfit my chair with a toilet to cut down on unnecessary interruptions. I often forget to eat and drink and days go by where I wouldn’t stand from my workstation. But I don’t need food, I need the voices to push me further along! I decided to break down all of the remaining food into a paste and connect it directly to my stomach. Thankfully there was such a kit in our surgical supplies. I found myself passing out from dehydration so I installed a permanent IV as well.

Then the voices came to me again. I realized that underlying each language is a pattern to be perceived. I ran each of the languages through a neural network to understand the links between words. While I could not understand each word on its own, I could come to understand the meanings in context. For each language, given a sentence with one word known I could translate the rest of the sentence. Such an invention would have made me a fortune if the rest of the world still existed. However, I still ran into the same roadblock. I had no word with which to base the rest of the Gigantes language.

I went months without the voices. I came to grow lonely, as my only friend seemed to abandon me. But I would not let that deter me from my work. At first, I tried any all words in combinations. I would play music alongside of Gigas’ tune, to search for correlations between the sounds and songs.

And then it came to me in such a cliche, within a dream.

Falling…

The strange thing about falling is that it is the purest form of motion. I’m not sure I could have moved on my own, but in falling I became weightless. If not for the sudden drop in my stomach I would have thought I was floating within the cosmos.

Perhaps I was.

The darkness around me pierced through me, I couldn’t even see the shell of a form that I was left with if I wanted. The silence was biting, all I could hear was the creaking of my tendons as I waded through the sea of black. Void. If I was in a halfway right of mind I should have been afraid.

Then I felt it.

Like a tugging on my very being, a gravitational tidal wave washing over me. Some people think that that space is ordained, that the playing field is set. But really, it is the interactions between things that define the world around us. Light bouncing off a surface, the touch of someone’s warm hand, the sound of laughter reaching your ears…

The pull and push across my body told me that the Gigantes were around.

And then it got louder, not any sound but the waves of motion across me. I felt like I was going to be ripped apart, atom by atom. Though with every vibration I felt distinct emotions; anger, passion, fear, and love. It felt like a whole novel was imparted directly into my flesh.

I had felt this before. It was the last thing I felt before the world came crashing down around me.

Then there was a simultaneous pull from all the Gigantes, a universality, an intertwine of them all together. A symphonic crescendo entangling everything.

I woke up in a sweat, and disoriented. I had to come to grips with my corporeal body again. I’m not sure that I would be able to get up from the grave that I’ve wrapped myself in, soaking in my own bodily fluids. But why would I need to leave, they had finally given me my last clue! That feeling of being intertwined of everything, it could only be one thing: the Universe itself!

I was able to match up the waveform with the moment that Gigas had hit the Earth and attached it to the word “Universe”. I was surprised at first when the algorithm responded with, “IT IS OURS”, but now I pray that I may meet our creators!