The Last Gifts of the Universe

by Riley August

Genres: Space Exploration

Synopsis

A dying universe. A search for answers. An adventure at the end of a trillion lifetimes.

When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilisations. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last ones left – and whatever came for the others will one day come for them.

Scout is an Archivist who scours the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals – anything left behind that might be useful to Home and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago.

Now Scout, their brother and their sometimes-fearless, space-faring cat, Pumpkin, must race to save what matters most.

Release date: October 1, 2024

Publisher: Hanover Square Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

1

You would think that while flying against a backdrop of foreign, dying stars, the last thing I’d have to worry about would be cat vomit. But lo, Pumpkin has violently expelled his hastily eaten breakfast. He sits there in the viewport of my cabin, grooming himself while I smack a cat-vomit-removal gel pad on the plush little rug next to my bed. The pad sucks in around the mess, locking in the scent before dissolving: vomit first, then gel pad. It leaves the room smelling like pine, a tree I’ve never seen in my life. I tap the rug with my foot to make sure it’s dry.

“You little shit,” I say, and Pumpkin pauses midlick, his pink tongue curled against his foot. He blinks at me, and then it’s back to cleaning himself.

Pumpkin is smart enough to vomit in the toilet like the rest of us. He simply seems to go primal every now and then, as if to say: But I’m an animal, remember? Once, my brother, Kieran, put a prototype translator collar on Pumpkin. No less than ten colorful and vulgar demands from him for treats later, we decided it had been an unwise decision and removed it within the day. It’s hard not to see every slight the cat has committed since as revenge.

Vomit dealt with, I plop back down at my desk, but it’s futile. I’m distracted now, on top of antsy, and the recompilation I triggered just before Pumpkin’s act of defiance has turned up nothing new. It’s not the computer’s fault. The first—and only—cache we’ve picked up in this cluster is simply bunk. It took half a day to decrypt and then turned out to be so irreversibly damaged that the data print amounted to Wingdings.

This is the reality of Archivist work. Most data caches we find—when we find them at all, and when they’re undamaged enough to actually use—are mathematical proofs for theories our civilization has already discovered; strange numerical sets like financial trends; Hello World protocols introducing us to the species and culture of the civilization that left the cache behind; or, when we are extremely, profoundly, cosmically lucky, a new piece of technology, an answer, something groundbreaking that changes our worlds.

I would spacewalk without a cable for a find like that. I would leap from this ship into orbit in nothing but a shocksuit for the kind of find that led our civilization to the understanding of jump space, which is the only reason I’m even here, seven months and a couple million light-years of travel from our home systems.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not for the fame. It’s for my people and what could become of us if we don’t find the answers we’re looking for. But I don’t think another scan of this broken cache is going to reveal any universe-changing secrets.

I slip on my favorite fleece vest (dark red and cozy) and some slippers (boring, wouldn’t miss ’em if they voided). “Let’s go see if Kieran’s picked anything up,” I say, and Pumpkin descends from his perch to follow.

My cabin door opens at a gentle touch, letting in distant, poppy music and a gust of hot air. Kieran likes it warm. Must be the other half of what makes us half siblings, because I prefer all cold, all the time. Pumpkin agrees with me, majestic orange fur drooping with the heat wave. Space is pretty icy, so we win out most of the time. Kieran can have the shared spaces and cockpit.

Pumpkin trails me through the short hall. We pass Kieran’s room and the toilet, and then we’re in what’s officially called the comms on most spacefaring vessels our size. Unofficially, we call it the den—much homier. It’s the largest open area on the ship, a big dome-shaped center that leads to everything else: the cabins, the cockpit, the kitchen, storage, medical, and the suit-up area before the airlock and the exit.

There’s a holoprojecting table surrounded by cozy benches in the center of the dome. It’s where we could receive in-person (okay, holographic person) messages from the Archivists if they ever contacted low-level archeologists like us directly. Since we don’t get those, and since I prefer to do archival work on my personal computer, we use the table for other purposes. Video games, mostly. And movies. These are not official uses.

On the walls, old-school strings of incandescent orange lights hang between planters full of cacti and small flowering shrubs from home. Most captains would call this an unacceptable fire hazard, but as it’s just me, my brother, and our cat on this ship, no one can tell us to take it all down. What can I say? This is our happy place. We’ll be spending most of the rest of our lives here, so we decorate. Even 

Pumpkin has a favorite part of the padded benches—his own personal seat, which he’s clawed to absolute shit.

I follow the upbeat music to the cockpit, where the ambient lights are set to dim but the cycling of Kieran’s rainbow dashboard shines it all up like a sun anyway. He gives me a lazy salute and takes his feet off my seat. “Morning, Scout!”

“Morning.” I sit, and Pumpkin jumps in my brother’s lap and gives him a good-morning head boop. Beats the hell out of vomit. “Find anything?”

“Weird blip earlier,” Kieran says. Pumpkin’s face has found its way to his cereal. “Just some debris in orbit, pretty sure.”

I slump deeper into my chair. The Waning Crescent’s sensors can do a full sweep from orbit, scanning while a planet rotates through its whole day cycle, which for the planet below is three home-system standard days. It’s nothing compared to the weeks and weeks we’ve spent getting from the last planet to this one, but I’m itchy to be off the ship.

The planet below, designated Planet 357 in the Beta Creon system of the Greerant Cluster (a mouthful, I know), is a slowly rotating, dead gray marble. Its jagged mountains are lifeless. Its oceans are dry. Its skeletal, sentient-made structures stand empty. There is nothing left.

It’s always harrowing, seeing places like this, knowing that our work could be the difference between our own home worlds thriving or becoming...that. But those are the stakes. That’s why we’re here: to find out what happened to not only this civilization but every dead civilization we’ve ever found in the universe. Because as far as we know, ours is the last one left.

Seven hundred years ago, technology gave us the keys to the cosmos, and we flew and teleported and phased out into the stars, arms spread, minds open, ready to meet the neighbors. What we found was a graveyard. Hundreds of once-civilized systems, all absent of life. Not destroyed, not nuked, or glassed, or buried beneath volcanic residue so completely that it would justify a whole world gone dark. Just...lifeless. Dead. And we don’t know why.

The rainbow dash beeps—which is normal, nothing to write home about—but then it beeps again. Kieran starts, and Pumpkin retaliates by rolling off him and taking the cereal too. The bowl crashes to the floor, but Kieran and I ignore it and press together, practically cheek to cheek, to see the information compiling across the tiny screen. The Waning Crescent’s scanners have picked up a cache at last. They zero in on some kind of residual electromagnetic signature or something, I don’t know. Kieran is the tech wizard, not me.

“Finally,” I whisper. I can’t help the relief. When you travel for home-standard months and months, you want to find something, anything. Something more valuable than a dead cache. Plus, it’s going to be great getting boots on the ground.

“Looks like the target’s in the middle of an old city zone,” Kieran says, and begins collating the specifics into a data package: altitudes, air composition, crust stability, annihilation date. 

The usual.

Some of the structures on the gray, lifeless planet are so large that it’s an easy thing to see them, even from orbit. I compare the orbital imagery with some of the terrain far below and think I find the right outcropping of dull white against the gray dust. A massive line of structures like mountains forms a broken circle around a crater that must have once been filled with water, or mercury, or some other liquid thing.

“It’s in a lockbox, I think,” Kieran continues. “Scanners picked it up easy because of the SOS.”

“SOS?” I look at the readings on my own side of the dashboard.

That’s unusual. Almost all dead, spacefaring civilizations we’ve discovered have stored various information in data caches, digital collections sealed in by long-lived electrical equipment our scanners are made to detect. Most caches are barely detectable and therefore stumbled upon, either dug up from ruins or captured from an endless trajectory through space, but the cache down there isn’t just giving out its usual electromagnetic signal. Someone has amplified it, painted it with one of the most recognizable calls for help in the universe. This cache was meant to be found.

I remember the bargains I made with myself just minutes ago about jumping from orbit in a shocksuit or spacewalking without a cable if I were to find something big. I’m trying not to get my hopes up—SOS signals have given way to long-dead, unusable caches before—but I’m failing at it. It’s been a long journey, and I’m ready to find something.

I compile a terrain-and-navigation data package and route it to our suit computers waiting for us near the airlock. Kieran closes the scan and powers down the Crescent’s thrusters so we lock into a stable orbital position.

“You ready?” he asks. He’s beaming because he’s probably ready to hit the ground too.

“Definitely,” I say.

He leans back to look at Pumpkin, who’s licked up all the milk from the bowl and is now considering one of the brightly colored Os. “Time to roll out, Pumpkin!”

“Meow,” Pumpkin says, and lo, we roll out.

 

2

The dinghy lands nice and stable on the flattest piece of concrete Kieran can find within a klick of the cache. The rumble of the nuclear engine fades, and I’m left with that buzzing phantom feeling I’ve gotta shake out of my limbs as I stand. I give Kieran the thumbs-up. The hatch opens, lifting out and upward into the alien air of Planet 357. A chilly draft bursts in, and Pumpkin and I are revivified. Even under his little fishbowl space helmet, his majestic orange fur lifts with impressive volume. Could have been a model, but here he is. Little explorer.

I click the external audio for my own helmet. Some explorers of the cosmos use neural interfaces, which allow for what is essentially telepathy. But we’re archeologists for a nonprofit organization, not the kleptocrats who run our worlds. We’re poor, is what I’m trying to say.

“Give me just a minute for the thing.”

“Again?” Kieran asks, but he takes one sad look at me and walks outside. Pumpkin follows dutifully after, little booties making footprints in the dust.

I have a bit of a new ritual I do planet-side when there’s time for it, and so far there almost always is. There’s no head archeologist to snap at me for holding up the procession across alien ground, no one to bark about breaking the law or, generally, futility.

I get futility. I really do.

I unzip my backpack carefully, but nothing floats out this time or threatens to fly away at a touch. Gravity is always weird in the graveyard. Sometimes there’s none at all—almost zero—like the planet, at having lost all life upon it, gave up on its own too. Sometimes, it pulls me down so hard my knees buckle. Here, it’s almost home-standard.

Extracting a palm-sized, bulky, dull red pouch, I zip my pack back up and follow after my brother, closing the hatch behind me.

It takes a little while to find an easily accessible patch of dirt. It’s mostly urban where we’ve landed, all paved over and fortified except for the massive empty crater we’re walking around. The almost perfectly circular path outlines the dried lake, with other, narrower walkways shooting away from the center like starbursts, toward other crumbled buildings, other crumbled city blocks. Standing like a decaying beacon against the gray sky to our north is a great shorn spire where our ultimate target is waiting. Its piercing upper half is cut off, collapsed to the side of the spire’s base into a bed of smaller buildings destroyed by the fall. We got a good look at the carnage on the way in. Even partly destroyed, the once-spire stands ten times higher than any other building here that we’ve seen, drawing the eye.

We’re halfway across the detritus-littered walkway when I spot it: a section of road so deteriorated that a dusty patch of earth shows underneath. “Found some,” I announce.

Ahead of me by several paces, Kieran and Pumpkin stop. My brother leans over the railing to get a better look at the crater, and Pumpkin flops over onto his side to rest. I crouch beside the lifeless dirt and clear the patch of concrete chips with my hands.

Given that this planet once included an atmosphere similar to our own home’s, I’m tempted to remove my gloves. This is difficult work with the dexterity-limiting puffiness of my suit, but obviously it’s too risky to pull a stunt like that. Kieran would tackle me. The air is far from breathable, it’s freezing, and some of the chemical compounds we picked up with the Crescent’s scanners could cause irritation or possibly a much more dangerous allergic reaction. Taking off my gloves would make this next part easier, but the consequences would be worse for me than the work. Plus, I don’t want to get tackled.

So, gloves on, I go to task.

I uncinch the ties of my dull red bag and pluck out a generous pinch of the seeds inside. It’s an amalgam of species, a mix of several desperate pouches I purchased back home when I learned Kieran and I had been given clearance from Archivist HQ to set out. Technically, our government has declared it illegal to intervene in the development of the local flora and fauna of any exoplanet, but this planet is dead. All the planets are dead. I wouldn’t consider myself a lawbreaking individual, but I’m overlooking this one rule. Because this planet is dead, yes, but maybe it doesn’t have to be forever.

We’ve terraformed planets back home. We’ve made gas giants into cosmic-filtration 

plants. We’ve invented the cure for the common cold—even if it is behind a ridiculous paywall. I’m millions of light-years away from home in a suit that lets me breathe on an alien world. All this, and you’re telling me this world is dead forever?

I plant the seeds a little apart from one another and then fuss with the valves and hoses on my suit until I can release some of the water inside onto the dirt. I give generously. This is the part Kieran has spoken up about. I can feel his eyes on me as I turn the dirt wet-black with my lifesaving stores.

“Scout,” he said when he first saw me do this several weeks ago, on the planet before the one where we picked up that Wingding-filled cache. “I know you’re still upset, but—”

“I’ve got more than enough left,” I told him.

He sighed. “Just don’t give too much. ...