No longer here

A short story by Jono Shields.

It had stood in place like this for centuries. Kind of. Its descent was imperceptibly slow.

From a distance now it might appear to be a tower, nearly perfectly vertical, with only the fins peeking out above the dense foliage of the forest. It was only when you got up close you could tell that it wasn’t quite touching the ground yet.

The 200ft object hung in the air like a drop of water frozen in time. It was mottled in moss and the occasional vine, collections of epiphytes claimed their home not the crooks of branches but between metallic vents and larger seams in the metal.

The family didn’t like this thing, mostly because they didn’t know what it was and thus what it was capable of. Pap thought it an ancient building of a great race that came before. Mam thought similarly, although leaned towards it being some kind of tomb or statue. They didn’t like the kids going near the thing. But of course, that in itself only made them more curious.

Perhaps that curiosity might be a useful trait and push us to discover new things that helped us. That’s what Oiyay hoped at least as begrudgingly he tracked his younger sister toward the giant pillar of metal. He had been her age just a few years ago, but remembered no such need to explore more than he knew. He worried that she seemed drawn to it, that maybe something about it influenced her, called her to it.

As Oiyay approached he saw a flash of Kiya’s tan robe as she swung from a nearby tree a into an opening in the structure above him.

“Kiya!” he yelled out.

But no response came.

“Kiya you can’t be in there!”, he yelled again as he started climbing the tree she had swung from.

Still no response, he worried that she had hurt herself in her landing. He climbed quicker. To spot he thought he had seen her om, but he could see her. He could easily make it over the threshold he had seen her enter through, but inside was just a hole going down toward the bottom of the structure, there was nowhere to land inside.

He yelled out again to her and this time a muffled reply sounded from inside.

As the older brother it was his job to protect his sister. He figured he could jump onto the lip of the doorway and try not to fall himself as his sister must have done.

Swinging back and forth a few times to build up momentum, he leapt out over the gap and landed exactly where he meant to, only once there something tugged at him. He slammed into the wall unexpectedly. Disoriented and confused he looked around again, he had been pulled to the right side of the opening.

Down was no longer down.

Looking around further he noticed that what he thought to be a hole was actually a short hallway. He had no idea what he wasn’t looking at, several chambers lined the walls to his right, each with text he couldn’t read.

He heard a scream that he instinctively knew to be Kiya’s. Knowing nothing of what he was getting himself into and still disoriented from change in gravity, he set off as fast as he could to find her. He turned right into another hallway, not sure whether to go up the structure or down. He picked one and hoped he was right. A moment later he stopped. In the doorway ahead he saw his sisters small handing clutching it tight.

As he approached he saw what she saw. A skeleton, lying on a raised platform.

Oiyay put his hand on his sisters shoulder, relieved to see she was unharmed. “Mam was right”, she said, “it is a tomb”. Oiyay took his sister’s hand and gently pulled her out of the room.

“Come on, we should go. We aren’t meant to be here”, Oiyay said to Kiya. we just have a quick look around?", Kiya asked.

“Its dangerous. We should go”, Oiyay replied sternly, he still wasn’t sure if they could leave the same way they came in.

“Pleeeaaaseee”, Kiya begged, “If we take a quick look around now I promise I will never come here again”.

That tempted Oiyay, just a little longer here to know he wouldn’t have to worried about her running of and trying to explore it on her own.

“Okay, but we will be careful and quick”, Oiyay said with best voice of authority.

The two set about exploring the vessel, stil not really knowing what to call it. They backtracked down the hallway, figuring that they could start at the bottom and work their way up as far as they dared to go.

The first room room was much lighter than hallway, even with the mossy growth it was easy to tell that the very bottom of the structure was see-through, light poured in across the two desks that looked out through the curved glass.

Another skeleton sat at one of the desks holding a strange device, a hoop of some sort with buttons and other bits. Oiyay took in the view of the ground a few feet below, still stunned by the way the gravity inside the structure had shifted from the outside.

“Oiyay! Look at this!”, Kiya said as she ran over to him with a piece of paper.

It was a picture, presumably of the one seated at the desk with their arm wrapped around another person.

“They look so funny”, Kiya said. “Why don’t they have any feathers?”. They looked at each other quizically.

“The other one has long features on their scalp though”, Oiyay pointed out… “Actually they don’t really look like feathers, maybe its long fur?”.

Kiya grabbed the photo again and held it up in front of her, comparing the man in it to her older brother.

“Theare similar though, the skin, nose, eyes and mouth are all pretty close”. Not like some of the animals they had seen in the forest.

There wasn’t much more to see here, but one thing that stood out to Oiyay was how bare the inside was, almost every surface was cold and metallic. The floor was different only in that the surface was textured and little windows of light lined the edges presumably to help navigate the structure.

As they traypsed back down the hallway they noticed doorways this time, but most were sealed shut with the same materials the walls were made from. They past the room with the first skeleton and found another unlocked room just a bit further on. This one contained no remains, but instead two booth style tables and a couple of benches odd looking machines made of metal and glass. Kiya ran her hand over them as she walked along.

Without a word their curiosity led them back to the hall and further into the tomb.

They stopped together at a humming blue light peaking through a crack in the wall, unlike the ones on the floor this was a cold but vibrant blue that lit up the whole corridor. As they entered it a feeling of calmness rang throughout their bodies, Kiya and Oiyay’s muscles relaxed and they looked at each other with a sense of wholeness.

As they continued their walk slowed, not to say they took small steps or stepped less frequently. It was like a slow motion, as if each step they took physically slowed down time.

It wasn’t like anything they had ever felt before. Without the overwhelming sense of calmness, they would have surely turned and ran. But something about this, made them want to push on. As they reached the mid point of the light in the hallway, time was almost a complete stand still. For a split second Oiyay thought that d actually stopped, and a moment later they were out the other side of the light.

Looking at each other, they were speechless, if they hadn’t experienced it themselves neither would believe the other’s story.

“We should go”, Oiyay said.

“Yes”, Kiya replied before Oiyay had finished speaking.

They pushed through the blue light as quickly as they could and rushed back to the opening from which they entered.

They stood at the edge, breathing in the forest air, looking out upon their rotated world.

Over the following years the two siblings would return to the floating monument many times in secret.

They would eventually come to learn that it had a name, the Nui4738. It wasn’t a building to house the dead and instead had been a transport ship that crashed here nearly 1000 years ago, its arrival was a culmination of unfortunate circumstances, a failed blockade run to a nation that was the target of a genocidal war, an unmaintained life support system and a brutish captain that made somee bad calls. The crew had died long before entering the planets atmosphere and while that was the end of their story, it would live on in Kiya and Oiyay’s.

This story was inspired by a piece of art by ManavuArt that popped up on my reddit feed last week.