I told one of my friends - James - about some of the adventures I’d had while in my private spaceship, and he wanted to come along for one; so the two of us headed over to Neptune. It was the longest trip I’ve taken yet – definitely not something I would have done alone. It takes the ship 16-and-a-half hours to get there at top speed but because it pilots itself, it turned out to be a pretty fun boys’ trip.
We spent most of the trip on the floor of the cabin drinking. The ship’s AI came over the intercom to tell us we were close, so we got up to survey the deep blue dot. Neptune was mesmerizing - so calming on the eyes. As we pulled in closer we stayed in orbit for a couple hours before deciding to head back.
Neither of us had slept much on the way there, so we were both looking forward to bunking. The sleeping quarters were in a small loft up a short flight of stairs from the ship’s kitchen. I hadn’t actually needed to use them before, but I found them to be extremely cozy and comfortable under the warmth of a blanket. With the ship’s AI safely guiding us back to earth, I drifted off to sleep in no time at all.
“Nick, get up. Get up!” James was leaning over my bunk shaking me awake. The ship’s warning alarm was blaring.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?” I asked him from my sleepy stupor.
“There’s a huge object nearby. The ship doesn’t know what it is,” James explained as I climbed out of my bunk and raced down the short flight of steps and into the cockpit.
Sure enough, a warning flashed all across the dash. We were approaching a massive object that there was no record of previously existing in our solar system. I looked out the front window to see the sun in the distance, but beyond that there was only darkness. I checked the map wondering where we were -somewhere between Uranus and Saturn, although I couldn’t see it. The computer was sure it was there about 2 000 kilometers ahead of us, and it was moving in the same direction, albeit a little bit slower.
I was relieved that we weren’t going to collide with it, but James wanted to get a closer look. I was curious myself, and so I turned off the autopilot and began steering manually towards the object. When we had closed the distance to a thousand kilometers away, I had the computer scan the object to get a better sense of what it might be. It was about three times the size of earth had a thin atmosphere. It was round and solid all the way to the core. It was a rogue planet - couldn’t have been anything else. A planet that does not orbit a star but instead drifts through the void of space on its own.
I had no words - utterly in awe of this discovery.
“We gotta get closer,” James egged me on. He was right - in another week or two it would be gone from the solar system and we would never have an opportunity to look at it again. And so the distance continued to close: 500 kilometers, 300, 100 - the ship’s computer warned that if we got any closer we would get caught up in its gravitational field. James was laughing with excitement. We could now see the outline of the giant sphere eclipsing the sun but even with the telescope we couldn’t make out any details of the rogue planet’s surface.
“Fly to the front of it to get some sunlight on it,” James recommended, and I did as he suggested.
The planet’s surface was a pale blue grey. I instructed the ship’s autopilot to keep our distance from the rogue planet while remaining in front of it. I put the ship’s rear telescopic view up on the main dash and James and I stared at the planet’s surface. For a minute it appeared to be ice and rock, but there was something unsettling about it that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. As I turned my head, I thought that I could see runes carved into the ice of the planet’s surface; they were subtle though - you couldn’t see them from just any angle.
“Do you see carvings?” I asked aloud. I heard no response and looked over to see James giggling silently, staring at the same screen that I had been, but tears were welling up in his eyes like he hadn’t blinked in a while. “Are you okay?” I asked him somewhat alarmed.
“Yeah, yeah.” He snapped out of it, forcing his eyes away from the screen and over to meet mine.
“Okay, did you see those strange runes on the planet’s surface?” I asked him.
“Yo, Nick. We should land on it.”
“Answer my question first - did you see the ruins on the planet’s surface?” I asked again, equal parts annoyed and worried.
James just stared at me wide-eyed, a big open-mouthed smile on his face. “Oh, Nick - how funny would it be if we landed on it?
What was going on? Why did he seem this drunk all of a sudden when we hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in five or six hours? I looked back towards the dash and suddenly I didn’t know where I was; I was in a field of blowing grass, perfectly flat and uniform in all directions. Above my head a red nebula spun into a series of images. Eons of time were passing. I could feel it planets whirled around stars, corpses decayed in moments, the doom of humanity plated over my head followed by the end of the universe.
All that remained was a feeling of immense loneliness.
I blinked and was right back in the control room of my ship. James was leaning over me fiddling with the controls. I wanted to stop him but I couldn’t move or I didn’t want to. A pair of hands wrapped around from behind me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel that they were there pouring warm oil onto the crown of my head and massaging it into my skin. I can’t remember ever feeling that relaxed.
Another of the ship’s alarms went off. We were descending, landing too quickly. Whatever tiny part of my uncompromised mind remained screamed out to me. Whatever was happening was unnatural and very dangerous. I fought through the brain fog as one fights to scream in a nightmare, and with great effort I came roaring back to reality.
“No, James! “Don’t touch that!” I pulled him off of the dash and threw him onto the deck behind. He couldn’t stop giggling; his eyes were taking turns looking every which way like a chameleon, and his tongue flicked at the air strangely through his open-toothed smile.
“But Nick, you said I could.” He pointed over my shoulder and began laughing hysterically.
I have never felt the abject fear that I experienced in that moment watching my dear friend writhe around on the floor of my ship I looked over my shoulder in the direction that his finger suggested. In the corner of the room, I saw myself hanging from a noose. My head was on crooked and my face was blue, yet even with the dead luck in the corpse’s eyes it shared, James’s delirious smile horrified. I took a step back.
“Don’t worry so much, Nick. The Fervent One is here.”
I whirled around to see James standing right behind me, his eyes glazed over but his smile gone. I wanted to scream and move, but I couldn’t. Frozen in place again there was something in my peripheral vision standing in the hallway entrance to the cockpit between me and the airlock; it was humanoid, about eight feet tall. Sometimes it appeared to have fur; sometimes it appeared to have scales. Its face was a blur that flickered, and its arms were extremely long. It dragged its knuckles as it walked.
I struggled tooth and nail to fight through my dysphasia as James walked calmly over to it. My screaming could not have been louder in my head as I watched it turn James inside out, causing him strangely enough to vanish. The creature turned its head to look at me and I could feel that it was approaching me without moving. There was a pain and something sliced down the length of my back, and then a shock as it reached inside to pull my arms over it. I was moving on my own towards the creature that James had called the Fervent One, but to my surprise I walked right past it down the hall to the ship’s kitchen up the short flight of stairs and into my bunk.
I awoke into complete darkness. The ship and the gravity drive were turned off and I still lay in my bed. I stumbled out of the bunking quarters and down to the cockpit. I fired up the gravity drive. I was floating near Mars; about 36 hours had passed and I was dehydrated. I replenished my fluids and made my way into the med bay, but nothing else was wrong with me. James’s coffee mug sat in its cup holder next to the dash and his sweater was still draped over his chair, but there was no sign of him.