LITTLE FREE GALAXY - Chapter 6
HELP
“I still don’t know where we are,” Jim announced as they continued walking, “but it feels like someone is putting us through a test of some kind.”
Antonia nodded, still holding Jon’s hand. “I was just having the same thought.”
“Oh. My. Gosh!” Arya shouted dramatically. The family stopped and looked over at her. “This is just like an escape room. I love escape rooms!”
Jim felt Antonia shudder next to him. He knew that escape rooms made his wife feel claustrophobic. To tell the truth, Jim wasn’t too crazy about them either, but that was largely due to being stuck in one with seven of Arya’s screaming classmates during her last birthday party.
“Well,” said Jim, “let’s see if we can get some answers and get the heck out of here.”
The sunset-colored hall didn’t just look like a sunset; it felt like the final, lingering breath of a warm July day. The terracotta walls radiated a dry, comforting heat that seeped through the soles of their pajamas, and the artificial clouds swirling above mimicked the slow, lazy movement of a summer evening. But as the family came to the end of the hallway - mercifully, as it felt like they’d been walking for hours - the warmth of their surroundings began to change. It shifted from the organic heat of baked clay to something sharper, something more metallic and vibrating. It felt like the heat of a machine working too hard.
Jim looked at the walls. The terracotta was beginning to become translucent, revealing a skeletal structure of glowing, crystalline veins beneath the surface.
“Does that look familiar to anybody?” Jim asked aloud. He remembered the cover of the Project Hail Mary edition they had found in the library—warm, humming, and pulsed with a rhythm that felt like a frantic heartbeat.
“It’s happening again,” Arya announced, startled. “The room is changing.”
The sunset glow dimmed, replaced by a harsh, flickering blue light that pulsed in time with the thrumming in the floor. A star map appeared in the center of the room - only identifiable because that same, subtitles-in-the-brain phenomenon appeared above the massive, rotating holographic display with the words “STAR MAP” written in English.
As the family regarded the map in awe, it began to distort. The stars spun and blurred into streaks of angry light. What once had been a quiet chamber was jolted suddenly by a sound that made Jim’s hair stand on end.
It wasn’t music, and it wasn’t a voice. It was a cacophony of overlapping frequencies - shouts, static, rhythmic pounding, and high-pitched whines—all layered on top of one another until it became a physical wall of noise.
“It’s too loud!” Jon cried, dropping his stuffed dinosaur and pressing his hands over his ears. He instinctively ran over to Antonia, hands against his ears, leaning sourly against her legs.
Arya stumbled back, her wire-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose. “What is happening?”
Antonia dropped to her knees beside Jon, pulling him into her lap and shielding his ears with her own hands. She looked up at the crystalline walls, her eyes flashing with a mixture of fear and the fierce, protective rage that Jim knew well. “Jim, make it stop! It’s hurting him!”
Jim scrambled toward the holographic star map, the engineer in him searching for an off switch, a terminal, a circuit breaker - anything. But there were no buttons. The map was made of projected light. As he reached into the shimmering display, his hand passed through the image of a dying sun, and a jolt of static electricity surged up his arm, throwing him backward.
Antonia cried out in alarm. Jim groaned as he picked himself up off the floor.
“Look, Dad!” Arya didn’t seem phased by the physical shock her father had just received. She was pointing back at the offending star map.
While Jim was picking himself back up, the map had changed. It now appeared to be zoomed in on one specific star system, showing multiple orbiting planets and…something else. As the family focused on the projection, the overwhelming noise seemed to calm down, like the hushed quiet before the feature show at a movie theater.
“What is that?” Jim mused.
The new shapes on the star map began to resolve into two distinct objects: spaceships. The first was a long, slender cylinder, stark white and devoid of aesthetic flourish. At its rear, three distinct engine bells glowed with a terrifying, steady brilliance. Even in the holographic representation, the light seemed to bleed off the edges of the interface.
The second ship dwarfed the first. Its hull was forged not of metal, but a translucent material that looked almost like obsidian. Where the first ship was long and cylindrical, the second ship was a massive, faceted sphere. Its surface was etched with a dizzying array of hexagonal patterns, without any visible engines or windows apparent.
As the family looked on, a new shape began to emerge directly from the larger, spherical ship. It was elongating with every second, also cylindrical, but less wide than the first ship. It seemed oddly familiar to Jim.
Where have I seen this before? He wondered. Unfortunately, as was becoming common, Arya beat him to it.
“It’s a bridge!” she shouted. “That must be the Blip-A that it’s coming out of. And that other ship must be the Hail Mary.”
Of course, Jim hadn’t seen these ships before. He’d read about them - and recently, out loud, to his kids - in the book by Andy Weir.
Jim tousled his daughter’s hair, proud. “I think you might be right.”
The family watched as the bridge made contact with the representation of the Hail Mary. They waited to see what would happen next.
They waited. And waited.
Nothing happened.
“Umm..” began Antonia. “What are we supposed to do here?”
“I have no idea,” Jim replied. He began to look around the room. Though they had walked down a corridor to get here, he couldn’t find it any evidence of a hallway. A door of some kind must have closed behind them, as all that he could see were the curved, crystalline walls of this circular room. It had a high ceiling, which should have made their voices echo, but the material surrounding them did strange things to the sound dynamics, only causing an echo every fourth or fifth word.
Jim felt a prickly sensation crawl up his spine. He didn’t like this. He was beginning to feel trapped.
Focus, he reminded himself, slowing down his breathing. Focus and figure this out.
“OK,” he started, “let’s review what we know so far. We woke up somewhere different than our house. We used our thoughts to bend space-time to get from one side of a hallway to another. We got served breakfast by a metallic-looking robot who reminded us to be kind. And now we’re here.”
“Almost,” Arya interjected. “We didn’t bend space-time; we wrinkled it.”
Jim frowned.
Antonia walked closer, bringing Jon over to join them next to the star map. “Those don’t seem like malicious or harmful things.” She looked down at Jon, brow furrowing. “Though I hope whoever brought us here will make a bathroom appear soon.”
“Why would they show us this scene from the book?” Jim asked aloud.
“Maybe it’s to represent first contact, Dad,” offered Arya.
That didn’t quite seem to make sense as the full answer. “Maybe,” Jim replied. “But let’s think about what was happening in the book at about this point. Ryland Grace was freaked out but realizing that he had to learn how to work with Rocky to…”
His voice trailed off. That was it - it had to be it!
“What if they’re telling us that they want to work together with us?” Jim proclaimed.
Antonia put a hand on his shoulder. “No,” she said softly, seriously. “What if they’re telling us that they need to work together with us?”
The thought put a pit in the middle of Jim’s stomach. At the same time, a single word appeared over the star map. It was written in some sort of alien script, undecipherable, but the caption displayed unsettlingly inside Jim’s head, projected over the strange text. He saw the stunned reactions on Antonia’s and the kids’ faces and knew that they were receiving the same message, too.
The word was:
HELP.
—
“I don’t like this, Jim,” whispered Antonia fearfully. “I don’t like this at all.”
The scene stayed static for a moment - the Hail Mary, the Blip-A, the bridge between them, and the word HELP above them all. Jim noted that the capitalization of the word was intentional; earlier, when viewing the Three Laws of Robotics, it was clear that whoever was communicating with them understood the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters. This was deliberately intended to convey either shouting or importance.
Just then, a new figure appeared in Jim’s vision. He looked around and realized the others could see it, too. Whereas the translations in Jim’s brain up to now had been words, this was more of a pictogram - a glyph representing two figures outlined by curved lines, one appearing to indicate it was female, and the other to be male. The glyph pulsed with a soft blow glow and seemed to move as Jim moved his field of vision, until it stopped above an open section of the wall with soft, white light pouring out.
Jim chuckled as he realized what this probably was. “There’s the bathroom that you asked for,” he indicated to his wife.
“OK,” she said warily, putting her hand on Jon’s shoulder. “But you are definitely the one taking him.”
—
Jim and Jon emerged from the very clean, very spartan bathroom, reporting that it seemed to be as safe and utilitarian as one you might find in a modern museum. After some assurances, Antonia and Arya went in and took care of business, too.
As she emerged, Arya began bounding back to the star map. “Dad, none of those sci-fi books ever describe what it’s like to go to the bathroom on an alien spaceship!”
Jim laughed at her exuberant observation, but inside, he felt a pang of apprehension. Is that really where we are? he thought. Are we on an alien spaceship? Is this really happening?
“OK,” Jim began as the family reassembled. “It would seem as though whoever has brought us here wants us to help them in some way.”
“They could have just asked!” Jon protested.
“Jon, honey,” Antonia gently reminded him. “Remember the robot who fed us breakfast? Let’s assume good intentions. Maybe this is the only way they can ask us.”
“That’s absolutely right, Mom,” Arya offered. “The Little Free Library, the books, these tests…it’s all beginning to make sense to me.”
“Oh?” Jim regarded her, bemused. “Enlighten us with your theory.”
“Well, I think of it like this, Dad. It’s clear that these aliens can’t communicate with us on Earth the way they can in here - I mean like the words-showing-up-in-your-head thing. They had to get us up here to communicate with us…but maybe the only frame of reference they had for communication was books. So they seeded our Library with books that they knew we would like but that would also help us understand how we could help them.”
Jim’s brain took a moment to comprehend what his nine-year old was telling him. “That seems like an awfully big stretch,” he began slowly. “But…it’s an intriguing one.”
“And so far,” offered Antonia, “it fits the facts.”
“Dad?” this time it was Jon speaking up. He had a concerned look on his face. “What do they want help with?”
As if on cue, the scene in the star map changed. The map shifted, zooming out from the two ships and skewing rapidly across what seemed like hundreds - or even thousands - of light years, specks of light streaking rapidly across their field of view. Eventually, the map settled on one section of the galaxy, zooming in slowly towards a single star. It resolved further into a strange solar system - Jim counted thirteen planets and numerous other irregular, rocky ejecta - and came to rest on one planet, third from the star it orbited.
A new line of alien text appeared above the planet, but there was no corresponding translation in their heads.
“That’s weird,” said Antonia.
“Maybe that’s the planet’s name, but they can’t translate it to a word in English.”
The planet appeared roughly similar to Earth in some ways - blue water, some brown and green land masses that Jim felt safe calling “continents,” white and gray clouds swirling and obscuring parts of the surface. But it was strangely different from Earth in one important aspect:
There was a plethora of shining silver specks interspersed across the surface of both the water and the land. Some of it seemed to glint as the light from the star reflected off of it.
The star map resumed its zooming in, focusing on a continent in the northern hemisphere, roughly halfway up from the equator. They were on the daylight section of the planet, but it appeared as though it was tidally locked to the sun - the planet itself didn’t seem to spin, which meant that this part of the planet never experienced the darkness of nighttime.
Interesting, thought Jim.
As the picture continued to resolve and grow larger, more features came into view - mountains, forests of trees, vast grasslands, rivers. The sensation was like watching a video of a Red Bull skydiver jumping from a plane in orbit and slowly dropping down through the atmosphere.
But something was wrong. Really, eerily wrong.
As the picture resolved on a grassy plain, Jim heard his wife gasp and pull a hand to her face. “Oh no,” she whispered.
Strewn across the grass, with barely enough room to walk between, were thousands and thousands of silvery, metallic pieces - some burnt and charred, some punctured with gaping, ragged holes, some crushed and dented into irregular discs.
And it was clear, as thousands of faces looked up towards the sky, that they were the disembodied remains of the very same kind of robot that had fed them breakfast earlier that day.
