Second Sun
03-01-2018, 05:48 PM
They warned you that you'd see things your mind wouldn't understand.
You're in a dead forest, in a never-ending winter. The trees are black from past fire and encased in ice, several of their trunks fallen, a lattice of burnt sticks.
You've been climbing across the field of dead wood for hours, but your space suit keeps you warm. It's a lightweight, slim-profile suit that allows you the range of motion to keep moving. Your space suit is orange, the color marking you as a trainee. It's your first excursion to an Earth of the far future.
Everywhere you look, in all directions, you see the frost-blasted sky and the snow-covered ground, criss-crossed by toppled trees. There are two sources of light: The pale circle of the star you know and the harsh white radiance of the phenomenon your instructor called the Second Sun.
You've travelled far from base camp, and you're starting to get worried about finding your way back to the quadcopter in time for extraction. A colored blotch on your wrist measures your amount of exposure. Over the past few hours, it's progressively dimmed from bright green to a more pond-scummy look. You've become infected by this place, the air and soil polluted by a metal vapor, particles microscopic enough to pass through your suit and into your body. HUPs, your instructor had called them - Heisenberg uncertainty particles. You had asked him if HUPs were sort of like a swarm of tiny robots, but he said that they're more like cancer. They'd make homes for themselves inside the tunnels of your cells, and once enough of them had moved in, it would be over for you. Not death, he elaborated, not really - he told you that you'd probably see what HUPs did to human bodies, but that your gut would probably reject your own eyes, your brain would feel revulsion, and you'd be filled with a violent need to unsee.
What do you do?
You're in a dead forest, in a never-ending winter. The trees are black from past fire and encased in ice, several of their trunks fallen, a lattice of burnt sticks.
You've been climbing across the field of dead wood for hours, but your space suit keeps you warm. It's a lightweight, slim-profile suit that allows you the range of motion to keep moving. Your space suit is orange, the color marking you as a trainee. It's your first excursion to an Earth of the far future.
Everywhere you look, in all directions, you see the frost-blasted sky and the snow-covered ground, criss-crossed by toppled trees. There are two sources of light: The pale circle of the star you know and the harsh white radiance of the phenomenon your instructor called the Second Sun.
You've travelled far from base camp, and you're starting to get worried about finding your way back to the quadcopter in time for extraction. A colored blotch on your wrist measures your amount of exposure. Over the past few hours, it's progressively dimmed from bright green to a more pond-scummy look. You've become infected by this place, the air and soil polluted by a metal vapor, particles microscopic enough to pass through your suit and into your body. HUPs, your instructor had called them - Heisenberg uncertainty particles. You had asked him if HUPs were sort of like a swarm of tiny robots, but he said that they're more like cancer. They'd make homes for themselves inside the tunnels of your cells, and once enough of them had moved in, it would be over for you. Not death, he elaborated, not really - he told you that you'd probably see what HUPs did to human bodies, but that your gut would probably reject your own eyes, your brain would feel revulsion, and you'd be filled with a violent need to unsee.
What do you do?
Spoiler