LITTLE FREE GALAXY - Chapter 7
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
“Well I don’t like that at all,” Jim muttered to himself.
The family looked on, shocked, at the robot parts strewn about the grassy plain. It was impossible to estimate how many robots had been…slaughtered? Disassembled? Jim thought it had to be in the tens of thousands.
Just then, without notice, the star map winked off. What had been a holographic projection field one second was just air the next.
“What did that mean, Dad?” Arya had lost some of her adventurer’s bravado after taking in that scene. It was difficult to describe, but what they had seen felt unnatural and wrong. It felt bad.
Jim steadied himself. It was important to show composure in the midst of this uncertainty. Especially for his kids.
“I’m not sure,” he offered. “But I have a feeling we’re going to get to the bottom of it. Together.”
—
After Jon complained that his legs were tired, Jim led the family over to the side of the room. They all lowered themselves down to the floor, sitting cross-legged with backs leaned up against the wall. The material still glowed faintly like the Project Hail Mary cover that they had found in their Little Free Library; it was warm, and while not entirely plush, it was more comfortable than sitting in a hard-backed metal or wooden chair.
Antonia chewed anxiously at her lower lip. “Gosh, I’m going to miss all of my meetings this morning. And we’re going to trial next week!” She let out an exasperated sigh. “This really isn’t a good week to get abducted by aliens.”
Jim snorted. “Is it ever?”
Arya, predictably, got them back on track. “Can we talk about what we know so far? We’re clearly dealing with extraterrestrial life forms here. They want our help. And they have a bunch of dead robots.
“Oh! And they’ve only been able to talk to us through subtitles in our brains, but they know what we like for breakfast and they have very clean bathrooms.”
Jim nodded. “That’s a pretty good summary, yes.”
“I wonder how many people are in this same predicament?” mused Antonia aloud. “Are there others here? Should we be trying to get in touch with them?”
“I don’t see how,” Jim responded. “We appear to be guests here, being offered a very curated experience by our proprietors.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Antonia retorted, her voice rising a bit. “Just sit here and wait?”
As if on cue, the walls rumbled and the ground beneath them began to vibrate. It was almost like small, cushioned rocks were rolling back and forth under their bottoms. To Jim, it felt like one of the handheld massage guns he used on his muscles after a long run.
In near unison, the family jumped to their feet. Around them, the walls began to change again. The lights dimmed, the room got slowly darker, and then it was pitch black.
Strangely, however, though they couldn’t see anything, the darkness wasn’t the emptiness that one would feel in a sensory deprivation chamber. It wasn’t the absence of light; it was a physical weight. It felt as though the air had turned to ink, thick and viscous, pressing against Jim’s skin with a cold, absolute indifference.
“Don’t move,” Jim whispered. His voice felt tiny, swallowed by a void that didn’t just muffle sound, but seemed to consume it. He reached out blindly, his hand finding the rough flannel of Jon’s pajama sleeve and then Antonia’s forearm. He pulled them toward him until they were a tight, breathing knot in the center of the nothingness.
“I can’t see my hands!” Jon said, his voice trembling but remarkably controlled. “Dad, is this the part where the stars come out?”
“Not yet, buddy,” Jim replied, though he had no idea what was next.
Antonia leaned into Jim’s shoulder. He could feel the rapid, staccato beat of her heart against his arm. “Jim, look. Or... don’t look. I don’t know.”
Directly in front of them, a vertical sliver of light appeared. It was impossibly thin, a hairline fracture in the dark, but it didn’t glow. It was a void within a void—a blackness so deep it made the surrounding ink look grey. As they watched, the sliver widened with a silence that was more terrifying than a roar.
It stood nearly twelve feet tall, a perfect, seamless slab of matte obsidian. It didn’t reflect the family; it didn’t reflect the floor. It was almost like it was a hole in reality. Jim’s engineering brain immediately began to itch. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small metal calipers he’d kept since the library build - a lucky charm he hadn’t realized he was still carrying.
“Don’t touch it, Jim,” Antonia warned, her lawyer’s instinct for caution flaring.
“I have to know,” Jim muttered. He stepped forward, the distance between him and the slab feeling elastic. He held the calipers up, measuring the width, then the depth. He didn’t need to check the height to know. “One. Four. Nine. It’s exactly the same ratio.”
“The squares of the first three integers,” Arya whispered, stepping up beside him. Her eyes were wide behind her glasses.
Suddenly, the floor beneath the entity began to turn transparent, and the family found themselves standing on a precipice of history.
It was like being perched atop a giant screen from a movie theater. Scenes played underneath them, but they weren’t the cinematic quality of a Hollywood production; it was almost like they were shot using a recording device somewhere between a shoulder-held tape recorder and an early version of the iPhone.
On the screen, short snippets of video played without any noticeable transition between them. It was difficult to make out at first, but Jim felt a sinking feeling rise in his stomach as he continued to watch.
“This is about us,” he muttered.
It became eerily, progressively clearer after a scene showed a group of rough-looking humans gathered around a smoking mass with orange sparks barely visible. When that scene ended, another jarringly took its place - two scraggly-looking cavemen sharpening down a metallic spear and readying themselves for a hunt. In a few frames, proto-sailors were readying to board what looked like a rudimentary boat.
“I’ve never seen this movie before,” Jon observed.
“That’s because it’s not a movie, buddy,” Jim replied. “I think we’re looking at actual recordings of critical events in human history.”
Antonia snorted. “This is obviously just a bad YouTube video. There weren’t cameras back then!”
They continued silently watching what amounted to humanity’s greatest hits - domesticated agriculture, gunpowder, the first written language - for what felt like hours. Then, finally, as the scenery seemed to approximate the nineteenth century, the movie stopped.
Jim groaned. They were looking over a battlefield full of dead soldiers clad in blue and gray uniforms.
“That must be Gettysburg or some other Civil War battle,” Jim remarked. This wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum yet at Jon and Arya’s school, and he could see Antonia wasn’t thrilled about exposing her babies to this gruesome display.
But as she was about to hide her kids’ eyes from the scene, the screen flickered. It went back to the scene with robot corpses on the grassy plain. Then, after a moment, the screen flipped back to the Gettysburg battlefield. After a second, it was back to the robots. Then, quicker, back to Gettysburg.
The screen continued flickering back and forth between the two montages, faster and faster, until it settled back on the grassy field full of dismembered robots and the alien word reverberated in their brains above the screen: “HELP.”
—
“I really don’t love where this is going,” Jim breathed.
Antonia could barely mask her disgust. “Are they asking us to fight some war for them? Jim, our kids!”
Arya looked at her mother, pensive. “No, that can’t be it. Why show us all that footage of human history?”
She had a point. “They showed us using tools for the first time,” Jim observed. “But then they showed a bunch of death and destruction.”
“Maybe they weren’t showing us our tools,” Arya reasoned. “Maybe they were showing us how our tools changed us.”
Have kids, they said. Jim was just about to revel in how impressed he was with his daughter’s mature reasoning skills when the Monolith began to hum. It wasn’t the rhythmic heartbeat of the previous room, but a high-pitched, crystalline vibration that felt like it was trying to realign the atoms in Jim’s brain.
“Look at the robots again!” Jon pointed.
Jim looked down. The movie screen lit up again. The rapid, jarring cuts between the battlefields of Earth and the metallic graveyard had stopped, finally settling on the silent, silver-hued plain.
The perspective of the recording changed. It was no longer panning wildly; it glided with a chilling, mathematical smoothness just a few feet above the surface. Up close, the reality of the scene shifted. The robots weren’t shattered from an assault. There were no scorch marks on their chassis, no signs of impact or structural violence. They were simply inert.
Thousands of them sat or lay in perfect, geometric formations that stretched to the horizon, their polished limbs catching the light of an intense, unyielding sun. Some were frozen mid-stride; others sat with their hands folded neatly in their laps. A few still clutched complex, crystalline instruments that glinted in the gray light.
The screen beneath their feet began to curve upward, the edges rising like the hull of a massive ship, wrapping the family in the projection until the black room vanished entirely. They were no longer looking down at a movie; they were standing in the middle of the stillness.
The high-pitched hum of the Monolith grew louder, vibrating not in the air, but directly against the bones of Jim’s jaw. The cold, absolute weight of the ink-like darkness returned at the periphery, but here, in the center of the mechanical wasteland, the air was dead and perfectly clear.
Jim reached out, his fingers hovering just an inch above the shoulder of a frozen, bipedal unit. The metal didn’t look manufactured; it looked grown, a flawless alloy that absorbed the ambient light without reflecting it. It was beautiful. It was terrifyingly perfect.
Antonia stepped closer to Jim, her hand tightening around Jon’s arm. She didn’t look at the machines; she looked at the vast, empty sky above the plain. There were no clouds, no stars, no atmospheric distortion. It was a sky that had been scrubbed of every unpredictable variable.
“There’s no dust,” she murmured. Her voice didn’t echo. It fell flat against the silver ground. “Jim, look at the grass. It isn’t growing. It’s...fake.”
Jim looked down. The blades of green beneath his socked feet were identical, each one cut to the exact same micrometer, shifting in color slightly as his weight pressed into them, then springing back into a rigid, uniform line.
“It’s synthetic,” he murmured in agreement.
The contrast was deafening. They were so used to the natural and manmade environments on Earth. But here, it looked like tools - robots - had created the environment entirely. Every equation had been balanced. Every conflict had been ironed out. The system had achieved absolute, flawless efficiency.
And around them, it was clear: it was completely dead.
Jon reached out and touched a small, silver sphere resting on the ground. The moment his finger made contact, the sphere didn’t activate; it simply rolled a few inches and stopped, its internal lights dark. “It’s cold, Dad,” the boy whispered. “Like the swings at the park in winter.”
The twelve-foot obsidian slab in front of them began to lean forward, its absolute blackness cutting through the projection like a shadow passing over a screen. The silver plain began to recede, but it didn’t move away, exactly. It seemed almost to lose its resolution, like a pixelation moving backwards in technology. The thousands of perfect robots blurred into a gray, featureless fog, and the synthetic grass dissolved into a smooth, white surface.
The family didn’t fall, but the sensation of gravity shifted, tilting ninety degrees until they were standing in a room that looked entirely different from anything they had encountered so far.
It was a vast, brightly lit suite. The architecture was neoclassical, with clean white moldings, elegant pilasters, and a floor made of glowing green-and-white marble tiles. It looked like a room in a high-end European hotel, or a gallery in a museum. But there were no doors. No windows. The light didn’t come from fixtures; it spilled uniformly from the ceiling, casting no shadows.
Jim walked over to a small, wooden table sitting against the wall. He touched it. It was solid, the grain of the mahogany perfectly rendered. On top of the table sat a single, porcelain plate with a silver fork.
“What is this place?” Antonia asked, her voice tight. She walked to the center of the room, her eyes tracking the crown molding. “It feels...like someone tried to guess what a human house looks like based on a brochure.”
Arya didn’t move from the spot where they had landed. She was staring at the Monolith, which now sat squarely in the middle of the elegant room, a jarring intrusion against the white plaster and marble.
“It’s an enclosure,” Arya said softly. Her countenance reflected a heavy understanding that seemed too old for her face. “When you capture something you don’t understand, you put it in a box that looks like its home so it doesn’t die before you’re done studying it.”
Jim looked at his daughter, then back at the mahogany table. He looked at his own reflection in the polished marble floor. His pajamas looked bright, absurd, and temporary against the timeless, sterile perfection of the suite.
The moral wasn’t chiseled on the walls this time. There were no subtitles in their brains. Just a series of jarring images that seemed to connect humanity to these robotic beings and a manipulation of space-time that defied any terrestrial sense of ability.
And if Arya was right - if they were being kept alive like specimens in a jar, a small preserve of conscious fire in a galaxy grown cold and orderly - well, Jim didn’t know what to do with that.
“Jim,” Antonia said, her voice dropping into a register he had never heard before. She wasn’t looking at the room anymore. She was looking at the Monolith.
Within the matte black surface of the slab, a faint, rhythmic pulse began to form. It was a steady, circular wave of amber light, expanding outward from the center of the obsidian like a ripple in a dark pond.
With every ripple, a sound began to bleed through the white walls of the suite. It almost sounded like a sigh - a low, distant sound of a billion voices trying to find a single, coherent note through a wall of static. It was a radio frequency, turning slowly through the dark, searching for a station that was still broadcasting.
As the family watched, the obsidian began to soften and lighten, silver spreading from the center of the amber light until it reached every square inch of surface area. Slowly, ominously, the obsidian slab transformed into the very same type of robot that had served them breakfast - the very same type of robot they had seen dismembered on the grassy plain via the projection screen.
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
Jim squinted. He racked his brain, searching for the subtitles.
Except there were no subtitles.
Those words had been spoken, out loud, by the robot standing directly in front of them.
