World of twilight

   Somehow, the temperature had begun to drop so fast it was impossible to get used to. The days turned darker and it was some sort of twilight that ruled over the world instead of the light people had enjoyed for so long. No one knew exactly why this was happening but many people pollution and others climate change. But it didn’t matter what humanity thought of the matter, the planet had changed and it was beginning to die faster that ever before. Animals and plants started disappearing forever and people had to build new homes in order to survive. Whatever had happened it was too late to fix it and people had no other way but to endure what had come for them. Many died in the first few weeks.

 Not all people had been created to resist something like this. Most humans had been too comfortable in recent times to even bother to think: “What if everything changes? Am I going to be ready?”. No one asked that and that’s why people just died in the middle of the streets or even killed themselves. They had no idea how to survive, how to keep going, so they chose death over life. But others did endure because they loved life so much they couldn’t just let it go. Some people got organized and created small communities that moved around the globe looking for a better climate and others occupied places where they could live a sheltered life, surviving by eating bugs or whatever there was at hand. They did what they had to do and no one in those groups ever complained.

 In one of those groups, of the kind that migrated around the world, there was a woman named Ylia. Before the transformation, she had a family consisting of a husband and two children. She wasn’t rich but she wasn’t poor either. She had a good life, living in a small apartment and working for a small tourism office. She wasn’t exceedingly happy about her life but it was her family that made her happy and fulfilled. She had always dreamed to go with them to one of the destinations she showed her clients and had been saving for that everything changed. The transformation took her children and then her husband, mad with pain and grief, killed himself when she was out trying to find some food.

 Since then, Ylia decided to start moving. She broke in several abandoned stores and gathered winter clothes and tried to get some food but she could only get her hands in frozen fish. So every night she would make a small fire with some igniting stones and eat the frozen fish, that was always small and tasteless but it was better than to eat nothing. She moved on foot and off the roads, in order to avoid groups of people that had come to realize how much they loved to kill people. According to them, as humanity was already doomed, they only wanted to help by moving on with the process. So Ylia stayed far from roads and turned off her fires when she was done cooking her fish.

 One day, when she was doing that same thing, she noticed a presence near her. It was something scary, as if she was about to be attacked by monsters or something. So she stood up and yelled like mad towards the tall grass around her. Soon, a group of three children came out of the grass. They were all filthy and it was obvious they hadn’t had anything to eat for days. She could see the rib cage of one of them. They didn’t talk, just sat down near her and stayed there. She took some of her fish and cooked a piece for every one of them. To be honest, she did it kind of reluctantly because the fish was not eternal and soon she would have to start hunting or stealing something else. She had to feed herself and know; apparently these ids needed her in order to survive.

 When the light was even dimmer in the world, she knew it was night so she lay down in the ground and the children did the same. She didn’t have anything to give them to sleep better but the only thing she could for them is to ask them to sleep all together, all very close to one another in order to keep the heat. They seemed to understand, so they got close to her and fell asleep fast. It was difficult not to think about his own children, who had no chance against this kind of life, against the destruction of what humanity used to mean and of the world, that had become visibly fed up with every single person. It wasn’t a secret any more that our own world wanted us out fast.

 The next day, Ylia and the children started walking up, through the forest towards the tallest part of the hills that separated the city from the ocean. Her logic was that maybe the ocean creature had not died out yet, so maybe there was a way to catch something to eat before it died or got extinct soon. But having the children with her proved good and bad at the same time.  They were fast and agile but sometimes they got tired really fast and she needed to have a certain rhythm when going cross-country like this. In the mornings she would always tell them that they needed to be fast and never to stop for hunger or thirst. All of that could wait once they were safe somewhere else.

 But they were children and she knew she couldn’t ask that much of them. They were often afraid and even one of them seemed to be closer to death that the other two. She didn’t discuss it because she didn’t want to face something like that again, but it was obvious he wasn’t doing well.  The day arrived when they saw the end of the hills and knew the ocean could not be very far. But then, an arrow flew directly at the sick child, taking his life. The others reaction was slow and Ylia had to push the other two children in order to avoid the arrows that flew their way.

 Hidden behind a rock, Ylia confirmed what she had thought: it was a group of killers and they knew there were more humans to kill. A bit nervous but resolved, Ylia came out of hiding, surprising the children, and took out a gun she had hidden inside her big coat. It was a revolver that she started shooting with, wounding at least three of the members of the killer gang. She was not very good at shooting and new she wouldn’t manage to kill anyone but she was successful in scaring the hell out of them. They all ran, turning back to where they had come from. When they disappeared, Ylia and the children when back to where the kid had fallen and decided to bury him beneath the rocks that covered the hillside. She was about the leave the place when she saw the children doing something she hadn’t seen in a while: they were praying.

 They spent some time there, the children praying and Ylia thinking what their next move should be. She knew she needed a better weapon than the one she had but that revolver was the only thing she could find. In fact, it was that revolver that took away her husband’s life. But had not thought about him when she fired towards the killers. She had not thought of anything. Ylia realized she was becoming like all those people that were just shadows of what they used to be, just killers or machines that lived but not really liked to be alive. Ylia was on that edge but she knew she wouldn’t be there for long.

 With the remaining children she started walking towards the ocean. She knew it couldn’t be too far so she kept on walking, despite the complaining of the children that did not talk but did growl and complain on their own way.  She gave them some hours to rest but then they were attacked again. More arrows fell off the sky, like rain, and landed in one of the children, killing him and on Ylia’s shoulder. She took the hand of the remaining child and ran like mad towards where she thought the ocean was. They didn’t stop for a minute and then she knew the kid wouldn’t survive. She was carrying dead weight and it may be her fault that he was dead. He collapsed a few minutes later, dead too.

 She went on alone, running at times but tired and bleeding from her should. Ylia looked around and then ran and then stopped and ran again. She was erratic and insecure because she knew what had come. Then, she heard the sound of the waves and felt sand that was wet. Her happiness filled her so much that she just ran towards the water and got in the ocean, wanting to swim there and drink the water even if it was salty. But it wasn’t. The ocean was now acidic and she had just drunk a huge amount of poison, not unlike cyanide. Ylia died with a rather disturbing smile on her face and with the realization that she had done what she could but her death and everyone else’s, was already written.

Antares

   Aslana was reclined on her chair, barely looking at all the screens she had in front of her. She had been commissioned with surveying a barren part of the Cosmos no one really cared about. Neither did she, but it was her job and she complied. After the first hour, however, she had bored herself to death by watching the screens with practically nothing showing.

 That had not been the idea she had had when in college, trying to decide what to do next. Antares space station was hiring but becoming an actual astronaut also interested her. People saw them as adventurers and explorers and she wanted that, to feel that she was doing something special.

 She decided to become an astronaut and went to Star City, near Moscow, to become one. With at least fifty others, she trained hard for a whole year but at the end of the process only ten were finally chosen. It had been decided they were the only ones fit for space travel. Aslana was not chosen. Her performance on skill and intelligence tests was formidable but the physical demand of the career had proven a bit too much for her.

 However, her tutors had recommended her to the Science Academy of Moscow, who were about to open a new observatory orbiting Triton, near Neptune. The observatory was located, funny enough, on Space Station Antares. So she had wasted a whole year of her life to do almost exactly what she had thought of doing when coming out of college.

 And now, there was Aslana, sitting on her chair, legs up on the dashboard, looking at Triton through one of the many windows in the space station. Antares was home to about five hundred people and its builders were already trying to get the permission to build another wing to it and get five hundred more to come and live almost at the edge of the solar system.

 Aslana enjoyed it sometimes, and other times she hated it. She loved space and she hated people there. They got to be so annoying, judgemental and hypocritical. Well, there were some people that were very kind and lovable too but they weren't a vast majority.

 Suddenly, an alarm made Aslana fall from her chair. The sound had come from the dashboard, which she hadn't been looking. To be honest, she had fallen asleep for a couple of minutes, tired and bored at the same time.

 She sat down again, combed her hair with her fingers and started tapping and clicking and writing. The signal seemed to come from a quadrant of empty space. Of course, it was not actually empty but nothing really big seemed to be there. Yet, the alarm had been set off.

 She ran all the tests, to know if the signal was actually foreign in origin or a Earth signal bouncing between the stars. After a half hour, she could certify that the pulse, the call if you will, was from deep space. No human had traveled there. There was a science base in Haumea and that was it. That was the farthest place humans had gone from home. But this signal was from deep space and, somehow, it had reached Antares.

 Aslana aligned every dish available towards the quadrant from which the message was coming. The pulse got weak at some point and then strong again. It was like the people, if that word could be used, were having problems keeping up the strength of the pulse.

 When the woman activated the audio machine, she let a loud squeak come out from her mouth. The sound was awful, it was like if a thousand bees and wasps had suddenly entered the station. She screamed because of the volume, which was unusually high. She thought that, for sure, someone in the station might have been woken up by the sound.

 And that reminded her. She should report what was going on immediately. The machines were all recording the event but she needed to send a message to Earth, for them to check the message out. Very large telescopes had been built on the Moon, capable to trace the message more accurately that what little potential the Antares station had.

 - Moon base Tycho, this is Aslana Tromaterova. I'm in charge of the observatory for the night. I have    detected a pulse coming from this space. I'm sending the coordinates encrypted in this message.          Please check. I'm monitoring the event. All tests have been done. Waiting for instructions.

 She sent the message, which would take several hours to reach the Moon. Meanwhile, she started playing with her audio machine to clean up the noise she was hearing. Aslana moved every knob, button and switch and listened carefully. After a while, she thought she had heard something, like a mumbling. She did her best to clean the sound with the computer, but, of course, the distance had disrupted the signal and it wasn't coming clean.

 Then Aslana remembered a class she had received at Star City, when an old german professor had taught the everyone how to clean sound and video feeds coming or going from space stations. He said it would help tremendously on occasions of distress or emergency. One thing he had said was that sometimes video could help clean sound waves. The sound could be translated by a screen and then cleaned properly.

 So Aslana did just that. One of the many screens helped her accomplish something she thought would have been impossible due to the circumstances. After two hours on it, she had finally cleaned the pulse. And the woman was very nervous, unsettled.

 She had not thought of the signal to be dual, to be sound and video at the same time. But it was. Aslana realized she was the first person in History to see the face of an extraterrestrial, a being from another planet. They were different, true, but she could see humanity in them, in their eyes and behavior.

 There was some data being sent on the video feed too. It was on some other language but she could conclude, from the video and some of the statistics, very similar to human ones, that they were on a ship. And that this ship, was in deep trouble. Some of the creatures seemed to be controlling a fire and others ran in several directions.

 Then something happened that almost made her fall from the chair again: the creatures spoke towards the camera, probably asking for help. And Aslana cried, realizing they would die there in the middle of nowhere, only been heard by one human woman so far away.

 The woman cleaned her face and decided to do something useless: send a message. Judging from the distance between her and the quadrant they were calling from, Aslana knew all of them were already dead, probably for many years, maybe even hundreds of years. They had died alone, horribly. So she wanted to honor them by sending a message. She thought her words carefully and then sent the message, which she later sent towards Earth with all the data relating to the event.

 It was important to her to do this. She had been alone half her life and, with this gesture, useless maybe but sincere, she wanted to tell anyone hearing that they would never be alone, not while there were others around caring for their well being.

 When her shift ended, she spoke briefly with her boss and told him she was very tired but that all the data had been sent to Earth and was saved in the station's main hard drive. The boss granted her her wish and, as she laid down in bed, she realized she still had a life in front of her and that she could do whatever she wanted with it.

 - My name is Aslana. You will never know me and I will never know you. But I wanted you to know    you have a friend now and I hope I have one or many too. I'm a human and is probable you won't        understand what I'm saying. But I trust someday you will. And when you do, I want you to know        that we,  I, will always be here for you. We are now bound to each other and I will try my best to        keep this  promise. Sorry for your loss.

The Celestials

I laid there and they came in, down the mountain, pass the stream.

Four, maybe five, walked slowly down the hill. Their limbs moving slightly as their legs transported their big, illuminated bodies closer to me.

No, they're not beings of light: they are made of stars. The deep black skin feels like a familiar fabric, their heads forming a beak and the back arched as if they've had to carry heavy burdens for far too long.

The time is short, but sweet. We hug and we play, all around the meadow and in an old ship, reminiscing of pirates that have never been here.

I never ask where they come from or why do they come to me. The happiness and comfort I feel being besides them prevents me from asking to many questions that do not need to be answered.

More people come down the mountain and join us. I do not know them or maybe  I do but it doesn't matter. The meadow feels like a safe place to be and maybe that's why we're all here.

Then, when standing against the sunlight, I can see a glimpse of who this being once was: a young, tall man. Hair the color of wheat and skin as pale as the moon. Who is he? Again, it doesn't matter.

The creatures stand by us, watch us laugh and eat and play and live. But they, the beings of celestial stuff, remain still, as if moving too much or too fast may break them. And we don't push for them to do anything they don't want to. Because, if they break, we break too.

No eyes to pierce with mine but I still try to see it again, the boy inside the stars. But there's nothing, only the thick blackness of space, splattered with millions of beautiful bright stars and galaxies, quasars and pulsars.

No... Not now... The moment has come when they begin to disappear, as mysteriously as they first came down the mountain. I try to grab his hand but there's nothing to grab anymore.

I wake up, in peace, but still worried. As I stand up, feeling the sheets off my body and the feel of the ground below my feet, there's a thought that dares not to live me.

I never had the chance to say "Thank you". For protecting me in the forever land of shadows, for taking care of my wounded body.

Slowly, my mind begins to erase the feelings and the thoughts done during the dream. But his face, the universal one, stays with me to fight the scolding light of reality.