The Devourer

Nikola Stojkovic

The strangest thing was that, with all our satellites, all our scans and spectrums, we never saw it coming. For all we knew it had simply materialized. One day we looked up and there it was. All our attempts since, to understand it, to comprehend, have come up moot. Some are still trying, shut up in government labs somewhere the world over, but the rest of us have realized that we will never know exactly what or why. There simply isn’t time.

There was panic at first, understandably. A thing that wasn’t there suddenly is…well, that’s bound to cause a stir, especially when we’ve come to fancy ourselves the masters of our universe. In reality we know next to nothing, that’s always been the case, but, when you look up at those fancy telescopes, those hulking rockets blasting off like swaggering conquerors, roaring forth into the unknown, you start to think it’s all there for you—a puzzle for you to solve, something to hold your curiosity, to channel your energies and stave off the boredom of the familiar. When you look around and realize that you’ve achieved mastery over all—the ants and birds and trees and oceans—when you can bend it all to your will, you start to look up at that infinite sky and think, “It’s only a matter of time.”

Well, the red timer ticking down in the corner of every TV screen, hitching rides on every available broadcast like a doomsday remora, would beg to differ. It continues to tick, tick, tick, whittling down to nothing, the one thing we are sure of.

It's only recently (relatively speaking) that it occurred to me to write this—a chronicle of sorts… a record. I don’t know why or who for, but it seems the thing to do, though in all likelihood these pages are destined for the same red maw as everything else. I suppose it’s rather silly to reflect on something barely a month old, but when there is no future to consider, you may as well relive the past. So I’ll begin.

Twenty-nine days ago, I and everyone else on the planet awoke to a second moon. That’s what we thought at first. Enormous and gray and perfectly round, it looked identical to our nightly guardian, except that its surface appeared completely smooth and blemishless, and it pulsed visibly, apparent even to the naked eye, so that it must have been expanding and contracting over gulfs of thousands of miles in the emptiness above. Predictably, scientists were scrambling to figure it out. Who what when where why how. They came up empty. The thing resisted all scans, all attempts at understanding. A sort of technological gaslighting was taking place. Our most high-tech instruments, scanners, and survey tools insisted that we were directing them at an empty swath of space, a physical nothing, a specieswide figment of our imaginations. Crackpots and journalists stooping to their level stepped in to fill the speculative void. Everything under the sun was put forth: a dark matter planet, a gate to the afterlife, a celestial-level optical illusion akin to “water on the road.” The fact that it seemed to possess all the properties of a giant egg was seriously discussed on CNN by men with ‘EXPERT’ tacked to their names, involuntarily conjuring to the mind images of a clucking space hen, jerkily flapping its way through the cosmos, pecking on stars like birdseed.

Far from ready to accept the embarrassment of capitulating to a space egg, NASA and the other space agencies dotting the globe unveiled their next salvo: If our technology couldn’t see what we saw from afar, then we’d facilitate a much more intimate exchange. Probes were put on collision course and launched from all over the globe, crammed full of data-sniffing sensor arrays and soil sample chemtests, the basic thought process here being that our scanners couldn’t deny the surface integrity of the entity they were piledriving into at ninety-thousand miles per hour. And maybe that would’ve been true, had the probes actually reached the thing. Instead, they inexplicably veered off course just before estimated atmospheric entry, floating past uselessly, the vastness of space their lonely destination.

Space Egg: 2. Humanity: 0.

At this point, the entire mystery was on the cusp of becoming one moon-sized punchline in the media, a cosmic curiosity to be pointed to and chuckled at on the way home from the grocery store, before interest was seriously renewed by US President Bush III’s suggestion of a manned landing (The minutes of the private meeting between the president and the director of NASA were leaked a few days later. The phrase ‘Saddle up and give that thing a taste of freedom’ was memed into oblivion). It was not something that NASA, normally the picture of caution, was likely to accept, frustrated though it was by a failure to obtain results. But after the first week world leaders got tired of watching multi-million-dollar metal balls roll harmlessly away from their intended target while a cacophony of increased funding requests screeched from the slavering mouths of semi-rabid whitecoats who knew for certain oh please sir this next probe is sure to be successful with just a few more calibrations. And on and on. The president’s suggestion became command. A manned mission was approved with speed. You want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Humanity wasn’t leaving HAL in charge of the pod bay doors this time. Programs didn’t have the crucial human factor: intuition.

The world came together. All current global stellar projects were suspended, and work diverted to preparing a multinational spacecraft with a multinational crew. Remarkably, they got it done in one week, a week that has ironically become known as The Slow Seven, owing to the public’s breathless waiting, and would have been recorded in the histories as such, probably receiving its own chapter, full of uplift and platitudes of global cooperation and mankind’s collective glory when borders and ideologies are discarded. The real win was the friends we made along the way. A few years from now there’d be a movie about it, some memoirs, a bright spot in history to pat ourselves on the back for as a species. Fate instead seems to have slated it solely the cursory mention noted above.

The shuttle launch was prefaced by the inspiring biographies of the six astronauts chosen for the job: an American (Mitch Jones), a Brit (Thomas Crenshaw Jones (no relation to Mitch Jones)), a Russian (Pavel Pavlovich Pavlov), a Chinese (Yue Xin-Jones (wife of Thomas Crenshaw Jones, no relation to Mitch Jones)), an Argentine (Luna Rodríguez), and a Serb (Aleksandar Svemirović). How that last one got in is an interesting story, full of humor and serendipity, that I unfortunately don’t have time to get into here. Their faces flashed the screens all over the world; heroes of the age, boldly going where no man had gone before, even though it was our own backyard, cosmically speaking. No doubt about it, these kids had guts. Just seeing their determination and bravery set people’s minds at ease. Our best and brightest were on the job, with a multinational army of scientists behind them. Humanity’s forefront, its cutting edge personified. What couldn’t they do?

Launch day was tacitly agreed a global holiday for all but the news broadcasters. Mankind’s newest spacecraft, the quick and nimble Hunter 1, was resplendent in the early morning sunrays, proudly reflecting our hope in a prism of brilliant color. With blown kisses and hearty waves, the six most important people in history filed in and sealed the hatch, bantering lightly between themselves on cameras streaming their livelink with Mission Control to billions of wide-eyed watchers. We’d become children again overnight, bubbling awe within our upending stomachs, fidgeting limbs joint-locked to our sides as we did our best to sit still in front of the television, noses pressed to the screen.

The launch went off without a hitch. The shuttle rose, propelled by the rising relief of billions. We would soon have answers. We would soon turn this unknown to our advantage. Adapt it. Use it. That’s what humans did. The world held its breath as the shuttle hurtled toward the pulsating gray orb, now officially dubbed “Object Alpha.”

As Hunter 1 approached, everyone waited for the diversion, the unseen hand ready to rebuff our heroes, cocking back to slap them into the grave black. But it didn’t happen. The astronauts reported nothing; no electronics failures, no system alerts, no attempts to wrest away manual control. Scans from the shuttle proved just as inconclusive as they had from Earth, but the thing looked solid enough up close. They confirmed the surface was smooth—not a cratered blemish, not a ridge or canyon to be seen from the shuttle’s camera feeds beamed back home. What lie looming ahead was a smooth canvas, waiting for humanity’s clumsy-footed brushstrokes. It had mass, that much was certain. The shuttle had shut down propulsion and settled into an orbit. The decision was taken to wait, complete one full rotation and document Object Alpha from afar. That was the first shock. It wasn’t round at all. As Hunter 1 orbited, Object Alpha just kept going, stretching back what could have been hundreds of thousands of miles in perfectly even oblong, essentially an enormous gray twinkie, pulsing in and out. It defied all reason, everything we knew about the universe. All our theories and knowledge, all the confidence in our observations, simply dissolved against Object Alpha’s pulsating bulk, sugar cubes in an ocean.

We would not give up, refused to be outsmarted in our own solar system. This was our house. A landing was proposed, a walk on the surface to truly see what’s what. A vote was put to the astronauts. All six voted aye. It would be executed on the Earth side, in full view, nothing left to chance. The math escapes me, but the pulse was approximately calculated, as best as could be managed with minimal instrumentation. It was decided to approach on the downswing, as the pulse was receding, like landing onto a rapidly descending elevator, much gentler than the twinkie rushing up to pulverize one from the toes up. Preparations were made, the time was scheduled: twelve hours hence. The astronauts were approaching their seventy-second hour, but morale was holding. They had a job to do.

Remember the film, The Day the Earth Stood Still? It went a little something like that, minus all the Klaatu barada nikto. No one went to work that day. Schools were shuttered. The globe’s nighttime half glowed incessantly in the lenses of orbiting satellites. All were awake, yet the silence is what I remember most. Not a passing car, not a train horn, nothing but the livelink audio channel tunneled through the speakers of nearly every television set in existence, crackling with the overloud voices of the astronauts and Mission Control, intoning with a calmness they could not possibly have been feeling, as if aware of the billions of eavesdroppers on the line. Landing was a go.

Like a looming shadow, Object Alpha’s most recent pulse had reached its zenith. The tide was receding. The shuttle engaged thrusters, working up to the predetermined velocity, scuttling after the quickly eroding shoreline. As the shuttle sank towards the gray bulk below, we as a species held our collective breath. Never mind that the landing took fifty-two minutes—I stand by the assertion. We held our breath through the whole thing.

The cockpit was littered with cameras, their lenses disregarding all established norms of personal space, perpetually streaming every lip quiver, cheek twitch, every tired blink, of the six most important people who ever lived. We absorbed their faces, converting their countenances into sustenance for our hope. Through their reactions we tracked the ship’s progress, finding more meaning in a subdued sigh or rubbed forehead than in the digital tracking map airing from the news feeds, saturated in gibbering calculations, its little mock rocket avatar inching across pixelated space.

Then, after a mental eternity, the announcement: “Velocity achieved, landing commencing.” The little pixel-craft was practically on top of the digital gray blob. The safety checks were announced and cleared, the thrusters were shut down, green lights were given across the board. Hunter 1’s team strapped in, sealed their helmets and severed the empathic bridge we had built to them over the last fifty minutes. They descended the last stretch faceless, reflecting our voyeuristic lenses back at us, along with something else. In the corners of their visors, slowly creeping across the glass like a zombie slug, was the ashen edge of Object Alpha. Picture in picture in picture.

And so we turned our attention back to the tracking map as the little shuttle flashing ‘H1’ blipped closer and closer to Object Alpha’s surface, its red pixelated edge mingling, dulling, disappearing, into the dark gray sea. The blip ceased. At first no one reacted. Had it landed?

“Hunter 1, please confirm landing,” crackled Mission Control, tension like a taut whine infused in each syllable.

The livestream was still broadcasting our visored explorers, but they did not respond. Signal interference began to color the image, chopping it up into geometric chunks, then it died altogether, supplanted by a stillborn black screen occasionally streaked with static.

“Hunter 1, please advise landing status.”

A strange pulsing woosh was heard on the ship-feed cameras, like the rumbling waveforms of deep-sea life or the echoing punch of ultrasound. NASA analysts began uneasily uncoiling from their screens, murmuring quietly, searching the gazes of their colleagues. The question in their eyes mirrored those of us watchers. What was happening on the ship?

In answer, a rattling hiss tore through the silence, uncomfortably close to straining breath through clenched teeth. Heads turned suddenly. A voice called out from the static black of the camera feed.

“This is Hunter 1. Landing is taking longer than expected, we’re flying a bit blind here. Visuals obscured, some kind of fog. Communication appears to be holding.” Static crackled over the words, but it was recognizably the voice of Mitch Jones.

“Roger, Hunter 1. We lost you for a moment, but the interference seems to be passing. Proceed with caution.”

A round of cheers went up from countless homes, bouncing through open windows, mingling together, strengthened all the way to the clouds. The faces at Mission Control softened with relief, turned back to their screens, allowing themselves just a flicker of a private smile, but the elation was painfully short-lived. Suddenly, the tiny, pixelated ship surged back to life on the tracking map, encased brightly in red. A roomful of eyes fell on it, expectant. What they saw made them gasp. The shuttle was on the wrong side. It had breached the surface. It was inside Object Alpha.

I suppose Mission Control entertained for a few moments the slight possibility that their tracking was off. Object Alpha had diverted all other attempts at study and scrambled their telemetry thoroughly, but even so, Hunter 1’s flight path and velocity were mapped down to the smallest value, its thrusters and reactor output 99.98 percent calculated. Even if instrumentation crapped out, the shuttle’s capabilities did not. It should have landed already, and yet, according to the audio feed, the Hunter 1 crew were still descending. If Object Alpha’s rim wasn’t solid, was the gray surface perhaps a gaseous atmosphere that obscured some kind of further incased solidity? There was too much we didn’t know, and with variables multiplying by the second, Earth was no longer willing to risk its best and bravest to find out.

“Hunter 1, come in.”

“Should be just a bit further here,” Jones’ voice crackled thinly through bouts of static. “Strange, instrumentation is going haywire. Mission clock on the fritz too. We should be landing…any moment now, Mission Control.”

“Hunter 1, reverse course. Sensors have you pegged too far in!” The mission leader’s voice betrayed an undercurrent of anxiety that fractured its pitch.

“Any moment now, Mission Control.”

“Hunter 1, you have breached the target surface. Do you copy? Reverse course back to unobstructed visual range.”

“Any moment now, Mission Control.”

“Hunter 1, are you receiving?”

“Any moment now, Mission Control.”

With each blip of the tracker, the shuttle sank farther into gray purgatory. What started as mouse-whispers between sweating analysts rose quickly into a cacophony of shouting voices that carried wanton panic through Mission Control and the television sets of seven and a half billion viewers.

Deep now was the tracker blip, much too deep. Hunter 1’s audio feed continued its repeated message, a soundbite key to a hysterical lock, a five-word passcode to the pandora’s box of anxiety bound deep in our chests, dialing up the discomfiture with each repetition like tapping on a screeching microphone.

“Any moment now, Mi-“

Mercifully, someone cut the audio stream to the public. The image flickering before us reverted to silence, forcing our eyes to make up for our ears, sweeping the drained and drawn faces of the Mission Control ground team for clues as they scrambled to reestablish contact. How to describe this moment in emotional terms, in the collective way, the human way, it was felt? Three days before, we were the masters of our fate, Object Alpha a flimsy barrier to the plated spear of fire and metal launched from Earth. We were confident it would shatter—its secrets would pour forth and once unveiled show themselves to be simply the next puzzle pieces given us to toy with, the next round peg to fit into the corresponding hole of the universe. We would figure it out. We always did. So what was this moment now, our flailing spear no longer whistling surely through the skies, our confidence in it reduced to that of a twig thrown against a brick wall? Had we hit rock bottom? The universe had one more lesson in store—one more lesson in humbling, opening our eyes to the dark pit of unknowing, and we, scrabbling in the dark, unaware of its true depth.

Owing to the discordant confusion gripping Mission Control, viewers at home probably registered the return of the Hunter 1 video feed first. In a pixelated geyser rumbling through the black screen, our helmeted heroes appeared again, seated as before, as if no time had passed, oblivious to the chaos back home. The ruckus at Mission Control seized up in choked silence. It was impossible not to feel a flood of relief, a burst dam gushing over droughted land. Efforts were made to hail them, ascertain their status. At this point, the shuttle blip was well within Object Alpha’s bowels and moving steadily through what I envisioned a living counterpart to Geppetto’s expedition within the great whale. Mission Control’s messages weren’t getting through, or at least were receiving no meaningful response, but dammit, at least they were still alive! The audio feed was switched back on for the TV broadcasts and we found the repeated message had thankfully ceased. All effort poured into repairing the comms link that was quite obviously severed. The trouble was no one could figure out what was wrong. Everything was green on Mission Control’s end.

Flashpoints in history often stem from innocuous origins, so I understand. One person can let fall the dominoes of global war. A domestic misunderstanding can bring about the collapse of nations. I even read somewhere that once, a plain old goat was the catalyst for the end of an empire. With such woodcuts etched into the bark of human history, it is only fitting that the flashpoint of humanity’s end began with a glove. An ordinary, standard issue glove, part and parcel of NASA regulation spacesuits for years. A glove designed and manufactured for heat resistance, vacuum sealant, grip strength, but not even a passing thought to what it would bring forth. Well, at the beginning of its career as a space-proof slipcover to four fingers and a thumb, I’m sure it could never have imagined its eventual mantle as harbinger of the end, either.

It made its debut onscreen quietly, unassumingly, floating into frame, confident of its place in the foreground, ready to carry the scene. It drifted thus, inching into the personal space of Mitch Jones, to whose musculoskeletal twitches we had previously attached such empathic importance. He didn’t seem to mind or notice, understandable in the current situation. So the glove was emboldened, continuing its exploration of the physics of zero-gravity. And with the tiniest nudge, it made the greatest statement in human history, coming to rest against the glass of Jones’ visor, transferring its meager momentum. And oh, that it had been floating slightly to either side, slightly above or below. With the gentlest tilt, the helmet took flight, detaching itself from the body of the spacesuit and revealing...nothing. An empty neck. No head, no head.

In the background, coming into focus, other suited pieces of white textile were floating: boots and chest pieces and pantlegs. Six suits, come undone, with nothing inside to hold them. Our frontiersmen were gone, vanished from the sealed confines of ship and sight, never to be seen or heard from again, the preamble to our conclusion.

How had they so cleanly absconded, leaving neither hide nor hair? NASA rotated the cameras about the cabin. Nothing. There was no damage to the interior, no unsealed hatch, nothing out of place other than the six dismembering suits. No one had an answer ready. Instead, we were left to formulate our own theories, orbiting around the same terrifying thought—whatever had happened, wherever the astronauts had gone, it was Object Alpha that was responsible.

Before the shock of floating appendages and hollow suits had had time to wear off, we were plunged headlong into our next crisis. The tracking blip of Hunter 1 was toying with Mission Control once again. It had reversed course inexplicably, a fact confirmed by the live feed’s sudden chaos, as freespirited space paraphernalia came shooting towards the cameras: helmets, boots, rations, and hand tools bludgeoning the lenses in silent assault. The feed went black. The word ‘OFFLINE’ spattered in white contrast, like hot on cold, like our feelings at each changing moment.

The tracking blip was accelerating, tearing back along the trajectory it had come, blipping wildly in ear-rending falsetto. It was just then that orbiting observer satellites reported movement from Object Alpha itself, though that was hardly necessary. We needed only look up.

Rippling like an ocean in a gale, the hulking mass began to stretch like putty in all directions, supplanting moon and stars with formless, depthless gray. Slowly, steadily, without regard, Object Alpha continued expanding until we could see nothing else, plunged into a fog of unplace—our celestial guides snuffed out, deleted from our grasp, leaving us waylaid in stellar purgatory.

Then came the shuttle. Hunter 1 was blown from Object Alpha’s center in a distended puff, leaving no hole or blemish, no scar or telltale mark suggesting its presence beneath the surface mere moments before. Hunter 1 was regurgitated whole, barreling back to Earth in a violent and twisting arc, flailing like a finless fish. It tore to filleted chunks in the upper atmosphere, raining down a meteor shower of horrific beauty, longdrawn and slow-burning, seen from three continents. Meanwhile, our ashen canvas had begun to deepen. The center, sucking in like an endlessly inverted stomach, began to recede, pulling a wider and wider circumference. We were slowly finding ourselves under the globe’s most massive umbrella. It took hours, maybe even a whole day, enough time to confirm, amidst the husk of Hunter 1’s shattered carcass, that there were no human remains, no droplets of blood nor charred bits of meat, not one errant tooth nor ringed finger. Humanity’s forefront had gone into Object Alpha, but they hadn’t come out. And now, Object Alpha was quickly gaining an uncomfortable likeness to a gaping maw: a gray, pulsating cliff face ringing a canyon of impossible depth, black as black can be. It brought to mind a certain quote I have neither the memory to place nor the inclination to look up:

“It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

It hung like that for five days, agape and immobile, lockjaw on a cosmic scale. And that was it. It showed no further movement.

Something akin to ennui, a sort of global denial, settled on the planet, a tacit agreement that out of sight meant out of mind, so long as we didn’t look up. Stellar and military agencies continued to formulate response plans in secret, but officially nations turned their attentions back within their borders and got busy with the till-then-postponed mundanities of governance: hills of paperwork grown to mountains; orders, bills, and decrees awaiting the rubber stamp of bureaucracy; scheduling cabinet meetings previously marked TBD. The president even gave an address touting job numbers added in the last six months. News from another lifetime. Despite all that had happened, all we’d seen as a species to turn our beliefs upside down, to rethink our place in the cosmos, days passed in relative normalcy, the wide gray sky treated as ordinary cumulonimbus, given to releasing buckets of rain any moment. People even made sure to carry umbrellas.

And so that fifth night humans shut off their lights and crawled into bed, careful not to search for moon or stars above. Drawing their shades and tightening their eyes, they slept, warm in their beds. There were outliers, of course: amateur star hunters with telescopes out their back windows; insomniac prowlers unsteadily tramping to their next bar; outdoorsmen in the company of shadowy trees, hooting birds, and howling beasts. We noticed the change, the gray light of night saturated to red, like sunrise dripped through an eyedropper, blotting the atmosphere, growing wetly. We night denizens looked to the forbidden sky and saw the pulsating red glow of Object Alpha, a signal flare across our world. It rippled in the sky, giving off wave upon wave of ruby light, its surface in turmoil as if wracked by hurricane winds.

What had caused this sudden change? Had its instantaneous appearance somehow sapped its energy, and the last month been a slow recharge? Was this Object Alpha at one hundred percent? I can only speculate, reader, for this brings my account into the urgent present. As I’ve been writing, Object Alpha has advanced (grown?) first towards Earth, and then over it, the great maw enveloping everything at a steady pace. Australia is gone, half of South America, Africa up to the Horn, and, as these words hit the page, doubtless even more. We don’t know what has happened to the...the only appropriate word seems to be, consumed, areas. Anyone close enough to see shortly meets the same fate, and all communication with those regions has been lost. As before, Object Alpha resists all attempts at scan and study, repelling the full spectrum of wavelengths, yet somehow remaining visible to the naked eye. We simply know nothing about what could be happening to those who find themselves within the luminous redness, but if Hunter 1 is any indication, then I shudder to think of it.

Hoping to escape, residents of the as-yet-unenveloped hemisphere have begun a mass exodus, a global migration not seen since humanity’s cave-dwelling days. The remainder of humanity is pushing north. Highways are in gridlock and the sky thunders with the incessant roar of plane engines. Canada has closed its borders, stationed its military along all crossings—scared teenagers looking to hitch a ride in one of the many cars ripping through the barricades. I hear Scandinavia, Russia, and the Baltics have sent forth an army of ships to The Arctic, filling their decks with the highest bidders.

North. Get north. What then? Eventually north becomes south. Is it all really worth it for a few extra days? That’s a decision each of us must make for ourselves. I myself write this chronicle from a cabin in the secluded mountains north of Washington. Having neither family nor friends within reach, I write to you instead, reader, whoever, whatever, you may be.

If you come upon this account of Earth’s final hours, if that is what has indeed come to pass, try not to judge too harshly. For our entire existence we have conquered the unknown, met the unexplained with mind and mettle, revealing secrets and turning our learning to the next challenge. Nothing was out of reach, nothing was insurmountable. If there was an answer, a reason, we found it, time and again. Perhaps we would have pulled back the curtain on Object Alpha, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps our successes made us arrogant, complacent, dismissive of that vast mystery above our heads.

We gave it as little thought as the ants beneath our feet, confident that one day, in our eternal existence, we would bend it too, to our will. Perhaps we should have realized that we are the ants in this scenario, the ants of the universe, scrabbling in the dirt around our colony, an insignificance in the cosmos, and this Object Alpha, this devourer of worlds, is lending no more thought to us than we to a bug on the sidewalk, crushed unknowingly under our soles mid-step, on our way to vastly more important things.

Nikola Stojkovic is a graduate student in English at Eastern Illinois University with a focus in Creative Writing. Nikola comes from a film background, having spent the last ten years working as a screenwriter, director, and editor in Chicago. His other creative endeavors include playing the saxophone and the accordion with the Chicagoland Accordion Academy Band. When not writing or playing music, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Jacki, and their dog, Bates.