“This is Phobos One to Doctor Vale. Come in, over.”
​
Doctor Vale powered down the hand excavator and swatted the dust out of the empty vacuum in front of him. Even though space couldn’t carry sound, it still traveled through his spacesuit. “I read you, Phobos One. Go ahead, over.”
​
“Just a routine comms check is all, sir. Over.”
​
In front of him, burrowed straight through the wall of Asteroid Zeta-3-8, was yet another dead end. “Roger that, Phobos.”
​
“You doing okay out there, Doc?”
​
Vale clipped the hand excavator back onto his rig, unhooked himself from the local anchor point, deactivated the electromagnets in his boot soles, and pushed himself off of the edge of the wall. “I am fine, over.”
​
“Are you? You’ve been out there a long while, all by yourself.”
​
Floating through the miniscule mineshaft in Zeta-3-8, Vale returned to the one man work station in the center of the asteroid. “I do not require assistance, especially since I am the only archeologist for light minutes, over.”
​
“You know being a one man team is out of regulations these days, right?”
​
Vale reached his station and pulled up a hardlight map of the asteroid. “Cut the chatter, Phobos One. Vale out.”
​
“Anything for you, Doc. Phobos One out.”
​
Zeta-3-8 came up in the central computer’s hologram as a gray, oblong, irregular rock floating just like the asteroid itself floated above Mars. Its shape was irregular, except for a perfectly round circle in its exact center. Irregular also in that it had been being flung all the way across the system until Phobos One was able to catch it in its tractor beam. That, among other things, was why he was here hollowing the thing out.
​
Vale marked off the section he was previously in as a dead end and filed away the metallurgical and geological findings. It was enough to confirm his suspicions that Zeta-3-8 originated from the outer fringes of the Kuiper Belt, though did nothing to explain what expelled it from there. He logged the theory’s half confirmation into the computer and had the data relayed through a satellite in Martian orbit. From there they were beamed to the edge of the Sol System where Kuiper Station Galapagos awaited the results.
Then another idea came to mind. The perfectly circular hole in the geometric center of the asteroid reminded him of the time he visited Micronesia. The island of Yap was famous for its limestone coins that stood head and shoulders above full grown men. If, due to one of the hundreds of thousands of possible extinction level events that could have befallen humanity, the entire planet’s population was wiped out, what would someone else think about seeing them? What would an alien civilization think?
​
Vale looked up from the confines of Zeta-3-8 through one of the holes he made in what he designated the ceiling and out into the great beyond. Like any Gaian who lived in the same time zone as a body of water or a colonist who visited, he had been to the beach before. Sitting on the beach under Sol’s radiant heat, he spent one empty afternoon looking out at the great, indefatigable Pacific Ocean. Beyond the recreational sailboats and cruise ships, beyond the laughing families in shallow waters, there was nothing but waves. No landmarks to find one’s way, no variation in the up and down bobbing that rendered all but the sturdiest of platforms slave to the elements, nothing but a handful of islands here and there that, while plentiful, were still only a handful to the massive Pacific Ocean, and even then they too were slaves to the elements.
​
“Hey Doc, this is Phobos One again. Your brainwaves are acting kinda funky. You alright?”
​
Vale grabbed a large canister from the work station and jumped up towards the hole in the ceiling. “My neurological activity is nominal, Phobos One. Over.”
​
“This doesn’t look ‘nominal.’ You sure you don’t need help out there? I’ve got plenty of guys with nothing else to do.”
​
He climbed out into the void and activated his magnetized soles. “I just had a striking idea. Over.”
​
“I can tell. Wanna share? It’s pretty lonely up here too, you know.”
​
Vale walked across the surface of Zeta-3-8 towards the perfect circle. “Negatory. I have work to do.”
​
“Whatever you say, man. Phobos One out.”
​
Barring the necessity of magnetized boots, the scene was reminiscent of his first moonwalk on Luna. Out in the open vacuum of the void, he was accompanied by the stars that shone in a swath arching across the celestial plane. But on Zeta-3-8, the galaxy’s stars seemed further away.
​
At the edge of the circle, Vale set the canister down and opened up its hardlight computer interface. Inside were thousands of state of the art minirobots designed for excavation as well as archeological and geological analysis. The model in question was a variant for spatial operations in weak or nonexistent gravitational fields and heavily irradiated environments.
​
After magnetizing the canister to the surface, he programmed a drone to fly over that face of Zeta-3-8 and get preliminary readings of the suspected carving. The small, plastic robot, no longer than his forearm, flew up with the grace of a dandelion seed. The blue hue of its Hall-effect thruster and white hull and tether screamed against the empty, black sky dotted with the centuries old light of epochs’ old stars. After relaying some readings to the canister’s computer, it descended into the circle to continue the process with its invisible rays. Once it was done, Vale had a map of what looked more and more like a deliberate carving. He manually pulled the drone back by its tether to save the canister’s battery and deployed the minirobots. Several panels all over the cannister’s surface popped open and swarms of quadrupedal bots poured out. Like someone’s spilled drink, they ran across the surface of Zeta-3-8 and down into the hole.
​
Vale bent down and picked one up. The space rated model hardly differed from its terrestrial mother variant, the only difference being its white paintjob. It nearly reached an inch long and was half as tall. Its array of antennae, pincers, and laser sensors gave it the nickname of ‘ant’ and its container ‘anthill, though Vale preferred its official name: Geo-Archeological MiniRobot. By Vale’s calculations of mass, the standard GAMR was about four hundred eighty three times smaller than he was. The doctor himself was two thousand six hundred times smaller than Zeta-3-8. Zeta-3-8 was, very roughly, about a trillion times smaller than Phobos. Phobos was about ten million times smaller than Mars. Mars was also about ten million times smaller than the Sun. It took about four and a half seconds for a speck of light, the fastest thing physically permissible by the laws of nature, to traverse the equator of the sun. Nearly thirteen minutes from the Sun’s surface to Mars. Two entire years to escape its gravity altogether. Doctor Vale had become an invisible speck at Phobos.
​
“Hey, Doc, this is Phobos One. Still hanging in there?”
​
Vale placed the GAMR down onto the asteroid’s surface and let it do its job. “Affirmative, Phobos One. What do you need? Over.”
​
“Just wanted to let you know that we did some, uh, diagnostics on the tractor beam and realized that you and your little rock are escaping our grasp. So we’re gonna go ahead and double the beam’s power on our end.”
​
The GAMRs began relaying their findings to the canister’s computer as they scurried and spread across the edge of the perfect hole. “Copy that. Anything else?”
​
“I see you’ve got the Ants deployed. Pretty serious stuff, huh?”
​
Vale stood up and, gripping the GAMR canister for stability, looked leeward beyond the Main Belt and out towards Jupiter. “It’s just a theory. Over.”
​
“Wanna tell me about it?”
​
Jupiter and her moons were easily seen through the telescopic visor modification in his helmet. “This asteroid is too perfect to be a natural phenomenon; a perfect circle perfectly centered on all three axes.”
​
“So you’re saying that something made this?”
​
He began feeling pressure against his spacesuit; it was not the tractor beam, as it had increased power already. “Or someone.”
​
“I dunno, Doc. Colonists don’t normally take to marble sculptures and high arts, you know?”
​
He was being squeezed, and yet his body failed to react. “I never said they had to be human.”
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“Aliens? Now I really dunno. That’s farfetched, even for you.”
​
The vital readouts on his HUD were, barring neurological aberrations, all nominal. “I know, but it could be a step towards solving that great question of ours.”
​
“Are you sure you want it answered, though?”
​
The pressure was deeper than material, radiological, or inertial, and yet nothing was detectible. “I’m not sure we’ll have a choice. I need to get back to work. Vale out.”
​
Vale shifted his focus down towards Mars and Deimos ascending over her waning hemisphere. The two of them, along with Phobos, Zeta-3-8, and himself were all floating around in… in what? Something had been pulled towards the planet and burned up in the atmosphere within seconds, something small and insignificant. The crushing feeling he had felt persisted even with the knowledge that his suit had suffered no punctures and that the nearest atmosphere was all the way down there cloaking the red planet. He looked around at the Void in which every celestial body in sight was floating. Planets had atmospheres, but not the Void. This brought on the realization that he was, quite literally, surrounded by Nothing.
​
One of the suit’s internal gauges, or perhaps the beeping came from the GAMR canister, realigned his attention back to the asteroid. The minirobots were still racing to sweep the entire carving with their lasers and antennae. Vale decided to have a personal look. He tethered himself to the canister and, after testing his suit’s propulsion pack, descended into the carving. He had gone down at a lateral angle with his head pointing towards the narrower tip and his feet towards the broader, almost flat one. The tractor beam on Phobos pulled him until his boots made contact with the bottom edge of the carving. With no core or gravity to establish up or down, the celestial plane that was leeward of Mars was now up.
​
The GAMRs really did look like ants, now that Vale thought about it. How they scrambled along in orderly fashion dictated by the computer’s subroutines, how they swarmed out of the canister, and their general appearance could, combined, probably fool a child into thinking they were real insects. The child could, also, probably be scared into squishing them under his shoe. Despite the durable materials used in its construction, enough weight would eventually force it to give way; a human any larger than an infant would always be massive enough to render its sophisticated internal workings into an insignificant pile of litter. Looking out at Mars, Vale began to wonder what an ant’s last moments were like in such a case.
​
Then an idea, peculiar though it may have been, popped into Vale’s head. He reached over to the hardlight gauntlet on his left wrist and pulled up pictures of the limestone coins of Yap. The images beamed from Gaian servers to the wi-fi satellite in Martian orbit showed the round rocks. Stranded on the beach or further inland, they were weathered and bore a circular carving nearly as perfect as the one he was floating in.
​
“Hey Phobos, I’ve got a question,” Vale asked.
​
Vale looked down at the lunar satellite orbiting Mars closer than any other moon currently known. “Shoot.”
​
“Do you think aliens like sculptures?”
​
A few seconds went by before the answer came. “Kind of a weird question to ask.”
​
“I know. Answer it.”
​
Beyond Phobos’s and Deimos’s orbits, Earth shone as a blue hole in the Great Expanse. “I suppose they would. If they exist.”
​
“But they have to, don’t they? With how many trillions of star systems there are with quintillions of planets orbiting them, there has to be at least one inhabited.”
​
Vale looked up, away from the nearest Ants and Sol’s intense radiance and out towards the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. “What if we’re the one?”
​
“I don’t buy it. Probability says we shouldn’t be out here alone.”
​
From Martian orbit, Jupiter gleamed as a bright orange marble through the plane of asteroids separating the two planets. “Neither should you.”
​
Vale, satisfied with seeing the Ants’ work on that part of Zeta-3-8’s carving, jumped off of the asteroid for the other side. He managed to only clear the circle’s radius before his momentum was snuffed out and he returned to where he started. The dust, gathered on that side of the carving in transit from the Kuiper Belt and held in place by the tractor beam, was blown away by the impact of his boots. He heard a knock through his space suit as opposed to the muffled patting of the layer of space dust coating Zeta-3-8.
​
“Uh, Phobos, I think this asteroid was freshly cut,” Vale said.
​
Even from hundreds of millions of miles away, Vale could still feel how massive the next planet over was. There was no reply.
“Phobos, you hear me?”
​
He had seen the artist renditions in his school textbooks comparing the two; at the proper scale, Mars was small enough to be Jupiter’s moon. Still silence buried the doctor in the Void.
​
“Hey, is anyone there?”
​
Even then, he was still trapped in an intertidal ballet between Mars, her two moons, the asteroid that so puzzled him, and Sol. There was nothing in the Universe to be heard.
​
Nothing but a low pitched beeping from his helmet. A message popped up on his heads up display saying that the Ants had finished inspecting the carving. Vale used his jump pack’s side thruster to move out of the circle; just an arm’s length away from the side of Zeta-3-8 the canister was still on. His helmet also warned him that he was trapped in Phobos One’s tractor beam, but Vale ignored it seeing clearly that he was being pulled away from the carving.
​
He reached out for and grabbed the carrying handle of the Ants’ canister. The tractor beam’s power was much weaker than the gravity of a cosmic entity like Earth, but still enough to pose a danger of being pulled away from Zeta-3-8 and into the Void. With his body dangling towards Mars’ closer, faster moon, he recalled the Ants. The minirobots weren’t affected by the tractor beam. Small as they were, they planted themselves into the asteroid with each borderline microscopic footstep. The swarm funneled towards the canister and scrambled back inside it.
​
The canister’s hardlight holograph gripped Vale’s attention. On it was a 3D map of the sculpture, same as before except with the appropriate archeological annotations. It showed incredible craftmanship in the smoothness of the carving and mathematical precision in its perfect roundness. These aliens, who or whatever they are, certainly had an affinity for artistic perfection that Vale appreciated.
​
“Doctor Vale,” his suit chimed, “message from Galapagos Station.”
​
“Lay it on me.”
​
“ ‘The readouts and data you sent us do not indicate alien origin. For starters, the metallurgical—’ ”
​
“Wait, wait, wait. Repeat again.”
​
“ ‘The readouts and data you sent us do not indicate alien origin. For starters, the metallurgical findings are not consistent with preindustrial civilizations’ sculptures, contradicting several theories you posited.’ ” The message, read to him by his suit’s text to speech software, continued on in cold, scientific ruthlessness, obliterating every conceivable angle of his theories until its conclusion: “ ‘It is our confident postulation that the asteroid Zeta-3-8 was not carved by an alien species, but rather a freak act of nature within or beyond the Kuiper Belt. Reply with questions.’ ”
​
Vale had become many things all at once, many things which, combined, overclocked his suit’s ability to maintain physiological homeostasis. Above all else, he had become confused. What had he done wrong? Were any of the instruments off? Did they know something he didn’t? Was there something he missed? What if they were wrong? Could they even be wrong? Were they comfortable with this information? Did they even understand the gravity of it? Who even were they? Who was he?
​
Vale’s grip slackened to the point that he let go of the Anthill. Zeta-3-8 shrank to the point of a pin, revealing the red giant it floated over, even though Mars herself hardly existed compared to an actual red giant. Mars, just a red dot from beneath Earth’s atmosphere, had reverted to its namesake: a god with unfathomable power that didn’t even register Vale’s existence, for it too was rendered a speck of dust as it looked on at Jupiter and Sol.
​
Phobos received him after he crashed into the tractor beam array. Vale grunted as his limp body crumpled against it and his jump pack slammed into it. The thumping and clanking of his impact filled the silence that reached from the Great Expanse into his space suit. He bounced off at an angle and escaped the beam, only to remain within the moon’s gravity and hit the dusty, cratered ground.
Phobos One was, in comparison to the other lunar bases on the Martian moons, rather bare in provisions and amenities. It had been built in the Stickney Crater by plan with a few buildings and pods scattered out in what could have been a grid if one imagined hard enough.
​
“Phobos One, are you still here?” Vale asked. “Don’t… Don’t leave me out here alone…”
​
He struggled to get up. “Of course, Doc. I’m always here. Don’t worry. You’re never alone.”
​
“I… I need to ask you one more question.”
​
Vale thought he had the wind knocked out of him, but saw on his helmet’s display that the air tank had been damaged; the air tank was at three percent capacity. “Come over to the hub. I’ll take care of you here.”
​
“Sure thing, Phobos.”
​
He wandered around the base until he found a building marked ‘BASE CONTROL.’ With his suit screaming at him about his air tank, Vale cycled the airlock and entered. The control panel inside stated that the entire building’s life support was malfunctioning; failing to pressurize, fill with breathable air, and activate artificial gravity amplifiers. Nonetheless, the door leading into the base opened and Vale continued.
​
Everything was off: computers, monitors, panels, lights, speakers, even battery operated things like flashlights and spacesuits. Likewise, there wasn’t a single living creature inside: seats were all left empty, critical pieces of machinery were all left unmanned, and personal effects had all been abandoned. Not even a veneer of dust had settled on anything.
​
The only light that revealed all of this to him came from the room’s viewport. Through it Vale could see the fading radiance of a supernova some lightyears away, the photons having just started their wake across the Great Expanse and taking rest in Martian orbit. Deimos, rather than be swallowed up by the light of a star now long dead, contrasted herself against the dancing curtains of color that, so long as it was visible to a naked eye, would veil the sheer emptiness it existed in. Or perhaps the stars shone to veil living beings from the otherwise unbroken emptiness and blackness.
​
Deimos grew larger and closer; Phobos delivered Vale and the entire derelict lunar station to her as their orbits closed distance. Phobos herself was barren as if the base didn’t even exist. Lunar rovers lay derelict, airlocks hung half open, and not a single other facility light shone, flickered, or glimmered anywhere. All the light in the Universe beamed down on nothing.
​
“Phobos… where is everyone?” Vale found the base commander’s chair and sat in it. Looking out at Deimos and into the Great Expanse, he ignored the one percent air warning on his HUD. “Hey, Doc, it’s been decided that your judgement is no longer sound or safe. I’m gonna have to take over this operation.” The last air in the tank finally leaked into the room where the Void held domain. “Roger that. Vale out.”