Exo Extract 3: Year One
Exo cover by Michel Vrana.
YEAR ONE
Day 11, Month 4 (Sol Standard)
Tomorrow, we make planetfall. We crowd the viewing port, staring out at our old new home (Gemma winces at my paradoxes). We are too excited to speak. So few of us have had the privilege of seeing this. Neither Gemma nor I can believe we’re here. I think we both expected some last-minute hitch would delay or prevent our arrival.
We’ve seen the pictures and feeds a million times but seeing it with the naked eye is different. That huge expanse of uniform grey on the daylight side is like a shadow cast. The night side is far stranger: it glows, the noctilucence making it a dim star.
To think that tomorrow we will be down there and OUTside, not cooped up in a tin can or under a dome. We will be breathing fresh—not recycled—air. The sense of impending freedom is almost too much to grasp. My hands shake. Excitement or fear? So much depends on us.
“Down there is where we are meant to be,” I told Gemma.
She raised an eyebrow. “Manifest destiny, Carl? We haven’t even landed.”
“Surely, you feel the weight of responsibility,” I replied.
She grimaced. “I’m certainly feeling the gravity.”
I could tell she was suffering. She’s done remarkably to hide it. I took her hand. Stroked it. “Everything will be okay. Down there a new life awaits. The pain belongs in the past. You’ll see.”
My wife stared at our shadowed new home. “I see a world in pain,” she said.
Day 12, Month 4
First impressions: we are prisoners in all but name.
An ugly, sparsely windowed block of concrete, Facility #241 is an edifice devoted to confinement. A substantial compound—holding farm pods and plastofab buildings—at the rear it's surrounded by a high nanomesh fence. To the north, east and west, lie hundreds of square kilos of empty pebble plain. To the south is the thing none of us can stop thinking of yet about which no one dares speak a word.
We were ushered from the carriers that brought us from the Drop Zone upstairs to a canteen—its south-facing windows shuttered to prevent us catching a glimpse of the Caul—and given a brief, cordial welcome by Director Hastings. We were then led to our rooms—Gemma and I have separate but adjoining ones—and, if you can believe it, locked in.
We were told the doctor would see us soon. After three hours, I was near climbing the walls. My feet itched. I couldn’t sit still. The rooms are habitat standard: not what I’d have expected here. A small window looks north. I stared out of my cell at the compound and the pebble plain. I saw no one in all that time.
Dr. Machalek, his large head and face enveloped in shaggy white hair, is a plump polar bear. He’s one of the few who were here in the heyday of MainClan’s investment—before the infighting between the controlling families led to cutbacks. He looks like a man inured to purgatory. His posture is hunched whether standing or sitting as if he is not so much beaten by life as broken by it. He walks with a stick, swinging his right leg awkwardly and hissing pain-wracked oaths. Gemma noted his shrunken pupils, which she says is indicative of opioid use. I told her she of all people shouldn’t condemn a man for alleviating his suffering. “I’m not talking about his leg,” she said.
Dr. Machalek apologised for locking us up and suggested he see myself and Gemma together, after our individual medical examinations. Fitting us all into Gemma’s room was a squeeze. She appeared none the worse for being probed and prodded with his crude instruments. I sighed in relief. Our little secret was safe.
Satisfied with our physical condition (the journey’s fitness regime to build muscle mass was brutal), he asked questions designed to evince how we are being affected by the Caul. Surprisingly, we both seem barely to have noticed anything untoward. He asked about any urges to move around, to escape from our rooms. I laughed, telling him no sane individual could fail to have the urge to break out of these cells. He gave us notebooks, telling us to keep a log of our thoughts. He asked if we’d noticed any unusual smells. I perceived a strong whiff of hot metal when we left the carrier, catching traces of it inside the Facility. It reminds me of my fathers’ workshop.
Next, he gave us a talk about Tess, the suppressant we’ve been taking. I bore the brunt of this lecture, yet it was Gemma who wanted to know exactly what was in it, ingredient by ingredient. “It was in the contract the PA made us sign with MainClan,” I reminded her. “Carl, that was the brochure,” she said. “Now we’re here, I want the truth.” Dr Machalek listed a madhouse’s medicine cabinet of neuroinhibitors, antipsychotics, antacids, immunoboosters, antiseizures, contraceptives, vitamins and I forget what other blunt, inhumane drugs long ago consigned to the medical history books.
“It makes everything foggy,” she told him. He nodded sympathetically. “You will find you stop noticing the side-effects in time.” Gemma’s smile was icy. “Doctor, I don’t want to stop noticing how stupid your drugs are making me.”
Dr. Machalek warned us to be on our guard against unusual thoughts, feelings, or urges. We’ve lived in orbitals or under sealed domes all our lives. For the first time, we were on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. I asked him, weren’t unusual urges to be expected? He scratched his beard. “The Caul is three hundred metres away,” he said. “In the air are compounds to which our pheromone-sensitive cells respond, some we are conscious of and others not. It has an electromagnetic field that disrupts both microelectronics and the electrical activity of our nervous system.” His smile was pained. “You cannot let your guard down. That’s how it gets you.”
I was a model patient and took this unpleasant medicine without protest. Dr. Machalek told me I’d have to return to my room, explaining we had to be monitored for forty-eight hours before given permission to roam the building freely. I told him I was here to work not to roam. When would I get a first proper look at Cluster#66? He scratched his beard. His next words chilled me: “Let’s see how your first month in here goes.” I protested, but Gemma said, disloyally, “Carl, it was in the damned contract.”
Day 15, Month 4
Including we seven new arrivals, we number thirty-two in total. This I ascertained at today’s townhall meeting in the canteen. Only half of us are scientists undertaking research. The rest, including Director Hastings, are here to help run the Facility.
The scientists are supervised by Dr. Carlyle—tall, stiffly middle-aged in her buttoned-up lab coat—who speaks in clipped sentences and couldn’t be less interested in my existence. She introduced herself to Gemma, not even glancing at me. My wife was startled by this interest. Dr. Carlyle had read Gemma’s papers, suggesting they had points in common. I don’t see how. Dr. Carlyle is a meta-materials physicist. Gemma is a topologist. Their spheres of interest are separated by astronomical units.
Few of our fellow newcomers looked like they’d slept. Some carried sick bags. Caul sickness, explained Hastings, should pass. He didn’t say what would happen if it didn’t.
Hastings apologised for the state of Facility#241. MainClan built it when they won the contract from the Planetary Authority sixty years ago. On every wall are cracks. And to think this is our home for—well, who can say? Hastings told us he’d lobbied for construction of a new facility away from the Caul, but MainClan—whose shadowy families war over the purse strings—demurred. Over the years, the Caul has steadily encroached until high tide is now within three hundred metres of us. Such proximity requires extra vigilance. We are on the cusp of the zone where the Caul exerts its strongest influence—its Thanatos. He reminded us that “the Caul fries even shielded microelectronics”—hence all implants being surgically removed pre-arrival. “Analogue beats digital, but most signals get drowned in noise. We call it full-spectrum pandemonium.”
We are free to wander inside the building, but no one is to go outside yet. When I asked how we were expected to acclimatize to planetary life, he looked puzzled. “This, for most of you, is it. We don’t leave the compound. It’s too dangerous.” He added that there were simulations we could use to experience life out there, though they were rather crude. “Nothing like the dream tanks or haptsuits you are used to.”
Three days, and we’ve yet to glimpse the ineffable Caul.
Day 16, Month 4
Unlike everyone else here, Gemma and I are not on MainClan’s payroll. We were sent here by the Planetary Authority. As such, we are treated not as guests to be indulged but as untrustworthy spies. I feel it in the canteen. Suspicious glances. Conversations that dry up when we appear. A frustrating guardedness. Don’t we all want the same thing? We are here because we have a common cause.
Difficult day for Gemma. She was unable to leave her room.
Day 17, Month 4
I have requested a meeting with Director Hastings but he is busy supervising the refitting of Dr. Carlyle’s laboratory. It is easy for her. Her work is here, studying the Caul. Ours will be at Cluster#66. I must put an end to this absurd thirty-day lockdown. I am wasting valuable time. Gemma remains bedridden. Dr. Machalek believes it is Caul sickness. Let him think that. Her stoicism is remarkable. Not once has she complained that the hoped-for improvements have yet to materialize. Nevertheless, I feel retched.
Day 21, Month 4
Gemma complains the suppressant dulls her wits: it takes hours to solve equations that should take minutes. I blame the oppressive atmosphere in the Facility. We’ll feel better outside. But I secretly fear she is correct. My concentration is enfeebled. My mind wanders constantly. I take wrong turns, forgetting where I am going. When I read in my room, I prefer my back to the window. When I told Gemma, she pointed out that beyond the door I’ve been facing lies the Caul.
Day 23, Month 4
Lunched with Hastings. He listened sympathetically to my concerns about site access. I learned that his team is understaffed. “It’s Caul fatigue,” he admitted. “Centuries of study but we’re no closer to figuring out what’s going on. We won the research contract from the PA by promising to put more scientists here. What have we to show for it? Missed targets and missing staff. The average survival time here is now just four years. The average length of stay in all facilities is under three.” I hadn’t heard these numbers. “Defeating the Caul was once our fever dream,” he said, then shook his head. “Now the research grants are in Light drives. If we can’t save our former home, then it’s time to look for another further afield. What scientists worth their salt will risk everything on this hopeless cause? The ones we get tend to be”—he paused, colouring—“ah, out of the ordinary.” I told him it explained some of the oddballs I’ve encountered. “Don’t you vet them?” I asked, but he changed the subject.
I find myself looking at my companions and asking, what have they done to end up here? Like we are all malefactors who have committed some unspoken crime.
Gemma worse today. Even stroking her hand was too painful.
“Do you ever feel like you’re damned?” she asked me.
“You mean your condition?” I replied.
She wouldn’t look at me.
Day 25, Month 4
Before Gemma and I became drawn to it, here’s what we knew about the Caul.
The first discovery of the “invader” that rapidly expanded into the Caul came at the end of the half-millennia Climate Wars. Zones of a “grey toxicity” appeared in ocean abyssal plains. The slightest contact with these “dead zones” meant dissolution: disintegration of any living thing and much inert matter, such as plastics or metals. Observations showed that this dissolution had neither chemical nor biological basis. Instead, it occurred at the subatomic level: an alteration in the fundamental state of matter. Only rock seemed immune. These zones spread, rising from the deeps and transforming swathes of our oceans into grey. Instead of fleeing the zones, marine life appeared irresistibly attracted to them. Whales, singly and in pods, willingly swam hundreds of kilos to their destruction.
Over the centuries the enormous losses of water began to affect the hydrological cycle, and our once blue-green world began to turn brown-grey. Researchers raced to figure out what was turning the oceans grey and find a way to stop it. Meanwhile, mass evacuations and an exponential expansion of intrasystem habitats went from inconceivable via impossible to inevitable. Just two centuries after the grey’s first discovery, the new Planetary Authority declared an end to the Exodus—a few survivalists hung on before eventually succumbing or dying out—and enforced a strict quarantine lest the contamination get off planet. A number of “Facilities” remained to monitor and research the Caul.
Over the course of several human lifespans, Earth—our home—became poisonous to us. Our population, already halved during five hundred years of climate wars, had halved—and halved again.
Today, the Caul occupies two-thirds of the oceans and half the planet’s surface. (Whole-Earth pictures look like mould spreading over an orange.) At its shores, the Caul’s depth is measured in metres, but seismographs indicate that in places it penetrates the upper mantle. There are fears it is affecting core convection. Plate tectonics has ceased. An anomalous wobble has been detected in Earth’s orbit. So far, the magnetosphere is unaffected.
At its liquid surface, the Caul obeys the basic rules of physics: tides respond to the sun and the orbit of the moon, while wind and atmospheric conditions create waves and storm surges. The little life still left on Earth (a few plants, animals, and scientists clinging by their fingertips) continues to be irresistibly drawn to it.
These are the basic and incontrovertible facts any habitat child will tell you.
Ask an adult about the Caul, however, and no two answers are ever the same. The facts, like the blue turning grey, become transfigured by belief. Whether it is an alien invasion, God casting us out, the singularity, a grey-goo scenario, a critical mass of pollution, a manifestation of the multiverse (the Clusters are heavily implicated in this), a parasite or simply the End of Days, the cause of our banishment from Earth is a deeply personal conviction that is the source of division, conflict, anger and, ultimately, despair.
The prevailing scientific view is that it is extra-terrestrial in origin. But of what provenance no one can agree. Some—I imagine Dr. Carlyle is one—insist optimistically that the Caul is a new kind of matter: when we’ve uncovered its secrets, physics and the human race will be transformed. Others claim its effect on the behaviour of living things is evidence of emergent properties due to novel molecular arrangements: it is life, but not as we know it. Lastly, I have read papers arguing the Caul’s waves display patterning markers, suggesting a rudimentary mathematical intelligence is in operation. The truth is no one knows.
In three hundred years, the Caul has come to mean different things to different people. But no one can deny one fundamental truth: our exile. The human race has been ejected from our home. We have been cast out of Eden for the second time. Most scientists have given up hope of ever discovering what’s happening here on Earth.
Three fundamental questions remain as far from being answered as ever:
What is the Caul?
Where did it come from?
And what the hell is it doing?
It is a measure of the Planetary Authority’s apparent desperation that Gemma and myself, neither physicists nor chemists but a bio-mathematician and a topologist, have been tasked with getting to the bottom of at least one of these questions.
Day 1, Month 5
Today, they opened the roof to allow us newcomers our first glimpse of the Caul. We were sent up in pairs, with Hastings and Sarah Blaffer—the head of maintenance, grumpy and gutter-mouthed—to watch us. Gemma is much improved and joined me.
After twenty days of incarceration, fresh air and freedom were a sweet prospect. It is summer. A warm morning, barely a cloud marred the sky. But my first breath had me choking. The air reeked of solder, my eyes watered. Hastings insisted I take the nasal plugs I had earlier waved away. They helped, but not much. The back of my throat still feels burnt. It was a minute before I was able to cross the roof to the waist-high wall, where Gemma was already staring out.
I hesitated. Earth has been under strict quarantine for two hundred years. Many who officially come here never leave, while thousands of previously law-abiding citizens commit criminal acts, crossing the solar system to encounter this entity. Now was my moment of truth. Yet I averted my gaze like a shy virgin. I wasn’t scared, but I wanted to hold on to this moment of before. Only the passage of time will ratify or reject the truth of the matter, yet I was (and remain) convinced that once I looked upon the Caul, I would have crossed a Rubicon. I would be forever altered, everything after would be different.
My eyes fixed on the concrete floor, I stepped over to the wall.
I stood beside Gemma. I put my hand on hers. Together we had sacrificed so much for this. Careers and opportunities, possibly even our lives. I looked up.
Before me, a vast greyness stretched away endlessly. What I saw filled me up. I’d seen oceans of methane on Titan, sulphur lakes on Venus. I’d skimmed through thousand-year-old storms on Jupiter. But this rolling grey liquid, stinking of hot metal, with its waves processing up the slope of the beach and tumbling into a seething white froth that retreated over the pebbles with a volcanic hiss, whose booming and shushing along the huge shore gathered into an echoing roar that to my ears lay somewhere between the angry scramble of white noise and the happy drone of foraging bees, this endless grey which appeared restlessly unstill all the way to the horizon where it met the cloudless azure of the sky in a sharp and distinct break like the very end of the world, this entity horrified me.
Here be monsters!
It was no Caul but a bubbling Cauldron.
Its whole surface quivered, revealing a million shades and shadows. It seemed to speak of some hidden soul shifting beneath. The waves’ roar echoed off the great bowl of the sky.
I quailed before such naked power. My knees shook. And it was all I could do not to vault over the wall, fall to the ground and drag whatever was left of my sorry carcass over the shore to its edge. I wanted to enter it. I wanted to be inside it. I wanted, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life, to be a part of it. I gripped the wall with both hands, terrified of these urges. Thanatos indeed.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder.
“Awful, isn’t it?” hissed Hastings. “You don’t know whether to run into it or kill yourself where you stand.”
“It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” whispered Gemma, whose aesthetic appreciation rarely stretches beyond a finely balanced equation.
“I feel so inconsequential,” I said, stupidly.
“Good,” said Hastings. “If you felt anything else, I’d lock you up.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. The Cauldron was grey but a grey that seemed made up of a multitude of different colours. I could see the yellow of the sun, the shadows of clouds, the browns of the beach, the copper in Gemma’s hair. The Cauldron was every colour but grey. Grey was its camouflage. There was nothing in the literature about this. Not a word. If you will leave description to physicists and engineers, what do you expect? They have no poetry in their souls.
The word no one uses to describe the Cauldron is sea. They always say liquid or ocean or even lake. But it is a sea. There are still oceans of water on Earth, but an ocean can be divided up, made smaller. The sea cannot. It is utterly singular and always itself. It is primordial. The ooze from which all life emerges. The Cauldron is a sea. Entering it, it seemed to me this morning, would be like returning from whence we came. Why does that idea feel so treacherous?
Day 2, Month 5
I didn’t sleep last night. How many times did I get up to check my door was locked? Gemma reported a similarly troubled night. I can’t concentrate. I can think of nothing else. At lunch Dr. Machalek said: “All perfectly normal. Give it a day or two.” He smiled reassuringly, but his dark, sad eyes remind me he’s spent decades here.
Day 3, Month 5
I may have got an hour or two’s sleep. I do not feel refreshed. Twice, I’ve caught myself walking up towards the roof. At least I could work for a few hours today. Gemma is in the throes of a terrible attack. I do what I can to help. She is very low.
Day 6, Month 5
Town hall meeting. Apparently, some staff have been skipping pills. They complain Tess makes them feel unwell. Dr. Machalek was unsympathetic. “Better sick than dead,” he said sternly.
Day 8, Month 5
The published information about the Cauldron is but a drop in the ocean compared to what is held back. After days of badgering, Hastings finally gave me access to the Facility’s restricted library. Some of what I’ve read shocked me.
Since Earth’s quarantine, over ten thousand lives are recorded as being lost. Most are Caulers, who’ve been finding ways to get to Earth illegally. OVER HALF of those who come to study the Caul succumb eventually to its influence. Most walk in before they leave, a few find their way back here illegally and the rest, sometimes many years later and after thwarted attempts to return, kill themselves.
My hopes about why so much research on the Cauldron remains unpublished have been dashed. I’d long believed the truth was too dangerous for public consumption: that the PA had uncovered an unpalatable secret it was keeping hidden.
But that would imply they’d uncovered something fundamental. In fact, according to the library, no genuine progress has been made regarding the Cauldron’s nature. Such a discovery is no less daunting or dispiriting for being so prosaic.
Main can only speculate on the hows and whys of the Cauldron’s siren lure: chemical and electrical stimulation that leads to imbalances in the endocrinal system. Considerable (and ethically dubious) animal research reveals well-documented physiological effects but no clear causes. The list of measured effects unmatched to any concrete causes runs on and on.
Humankind’s dreams of dominion over nature were shattered by the Climate Wars and eradicated by the arrival of the Caul. It is no wonder the consensus is that it is an alien invader.
No new information on the Clusters.
Day 12, Month 5
We have been here a month. We are allowed onto the roof unsupervised. We may visit the compound at the back to stretch our legs. Also, we have all been allocated menial jobs in addition to our areas of expertise. Most involve the farm pods.
It comes from Dr. Machalek, who is convinced a little husbandry will relieve the stresses caused by our proximity to the Cauldron. I was initially unhappy about this. We are PA representatives, not Main dogsbodies. But after a few hours in my allocated pod—crickets—I find myself enjoying tending to my nymphs’ various stages. Daily, I see their transformations as they slough off one shape and adopt another.
I can’t complain. Gemma was allocated the stinky Witchetty grubs pod.
Day 13, Month 5
This evening the whole company gathered on the roof for drinks in our honour. We seven newcomers have survived our first month here. Gemma and I have barely socialised with our colleagues, so it was a relief to finally let our hair down.
Yet even in the Facility they think us mad for coming here. I had to explain why two academic mathematicians toiling with abstractions aboard the D’Arcy Thompson orbital needed to be on Earth. Why couldn’t someone else gather the data we needed?
I told them that only by being in the field could we study actual specimens of ideas that usually only appear in equations. “Carl wants to get his hands dirty,” Gemma explained.
Not for the first time did our Main hosts look at us with scepticism. For most of them this is just a highly dangerous, but well-paid, job.
Caul-modeller Abdel Badawi asked what position Gemma held on D’Arcy. “Head of Research at the Topological Studies Unit.”
“Topological studies—what’s that?”
“Topology is the study of non-rigid shapes,” she explained and talked at length about multiple dimensions, transformations, non-Euclidean geometry, and what we hoped to discover in the Clusters to much confused head scratching.
“Don’t let Gemma befuddle you,” I said. “My wife is so used to thinking in higher dimensions, she forgets the rest of us are confined to those we can see and feel.”
I fared little better explaining biomathematics, however. When I told them I studied morphogenesis, the process by which animal and plant body patterns and structures are formed, they appeared more bewildered than ever.
“But neither the Caul nor the Clusters are alive,” they’d say.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” I’d reply.
Dr. Carlyle was particularly dismissive. A materials physicist, she’s been here for two decades yet, like her forebears, has failed to make a single breakthrough with the Cauldron. Perhaps that explains her brittle demeanour.
“Are you a biologist or a mathematician?” she asked me.
“Both.”
“So much for specialisms,” she declared.
“I always thought physics was mere messy mathematics,” said Gemma tartly.
“Mathematics in the real world,” said Dr. Carlyle. “We’re far past the idea that a few equations will solve the mystery of the Caul, don’t you think?”
“You know as well as I,” Gemma said, smiling waspishly, “it’s maths all the way down.”
The doctor’s necklace is a lazy eight: an infinity-symbol-shaped snake lying on its side and eating its own tail. I say it is a lemniscate. Gemma believes it a Moebius band. Such a minor detail, yet we argued and went to bed not speaking.
Day 16, Month 5
A hot acrid wind blowing off the Cauldron. Petitioned Hastings about visiting the site. I was told no new arrivals can leave the Facility until Dr. Machalek deems it safe. I enviously watch the departing jeeps and carriers visiting the Drop Zone for supplies or to fix glitches.
Day 21, Month 5
Around twenty years after the Exodus ended, the first of the Clusters emerged out of the eroded remnants of Shanghai. For a long time, questions were asked about what was occurring in these semi-submerged ruins. Was Cluster#1 a transfiguration, rebirth or excrescence? Answers remain frustratingly elusive.
Astonishingly, there proves to be little documented research into the Clusters even in the library. There are over a thousand Clusters now and many occupy spaces where Earth’s major coastal settlements once stood: Sao Paulo (#6), New York (#27), London (#89), Mumbai (#165). Ghostly names for changeling cities.
The Clusters are a puzzle and the proposed explanations for their existence are almost as weird as the structures themselves, ranging from Cauldron cities to Earth mustering a geological defence against this invader. While such contrary beliefs intoxicate various religions, science has so far had little to contribute to the conversation.
Why?
Investigating them is fraught with difficulties. Yes, the Cauldron has a deserved reputation for killing off those here to study it. Unfortunately, the Clusters’ rep is just as bad.
As Gemma frequently reminds me, no one who has entered one has ever returned to tell the tale.
Day 28, Month 5
Gemma is bedridden every other day, the pain as bad as before we arrived. She says she’s noticed Dr. Machalek watching her. I think she is being paranoid. Worryingly, she is secretly reducing her dosage of Tess. I found a folded piece of paper in which she is hiding the pills she pretends to have taken. (I have said nothing.)
Day 3, Month 6
This morning Dr. Machalek cornered us at breakfast. “You’ve been concealing Gemma’s condition,” he said bluntly. I was all for dissembling further, but Gemma shushed me. “How did you know?” she asked. “Caul hypersensitivity doesn’t come and go. What is it?” “Nociplastic syndrome,” she admitted. “It’s not in your medical history. How did you pass the fitness assessment?” Gemma smiled. “I’m a good liar.” She explained how she’d suffered from the hypervigilance of her brain’s pain centre for over ten years. The slightest touch is often agony. I saw the horror in his eyes. “But we can’t treat you here.” I swallowed, blurting out: “There are reports of people suffering diseases of the nervous system finding relief beside the Caul.” He huffed. “There’s no medical evidence of that.” Gemma took his hand. “Doctor, my body has turned against me. I will try anything to reverse that.”
Day 9, Month 6
Nothing like the Clusters has been found elsewhere in the solar system. They are not fixed but change from tide to tide. They are a source of infinite fascination and consequently endless exposition. Gemma and I call them Topologies, as Clusters is a poor label for entities in constant flux. Yet for all the Topologies’ fluidity they have a constancy of transformation. Gemma discovered it, her topologist’s mind detecting patterns no one else had seen. It is why the PA offered us this chance. I wanted—needed—to come, but Gemma’s brilliance put us here.
Day 12, Month 6
Finally, Hastings has announced it is safe for us to leave the Facility compound. He added that we should spend no more time outside than is necessary. That is rich. Those who’ve been here a few years regularly fraternise with certain denizens of the shore.
These “wreckers,” many of whom have been here for years—even decades—are tolerated. Officially, they don’t exist. Not all arrive illegally. Some once worked at the Facility. I want to know how they have resisted the Cauldron for so long without Tess to sustain them.
Day 15, Month 6
Intolerable! We are still confined. Hastings says we need a driver. What he really means is that we require a chaperone to keep an eye on us. He promised it would just be a few more days.
Day 16, Month 6
Finally. Nina Chaperelle, a young woman who I confess I’ve barely spoken to, is to be our driver. She knocked on our doors this evening and told us we’d be leaving at 6 AM! Too excited to sleep.
Day 17, Month 6
A day I shall never forget. It is impossible to assimilate everything: my mind races away on wild seas of thought. I must get it all down, in detail and in order, lest I lose its meaning.
We woke at five (luckily it was one of Gemma’s good days) and had eaten, loaded the jeep and left the compound by six. It was a bright, sunny, already warm morning, but we both felt groggy. Gemma blamed Tess. For me it was lack of sleep.
It is only fifty kilos to Cluster#66, but we crawled along at twenty kilos an hour. Our route curved inland away from the Cauldron, so we’d only approach the site when we were directly north of it, adding kilos to the journey. A needless precaution that would curtail our day, I told Chaperelle. “Would you rather stay behind, Prof?” she asked.
It was a three-hour drive through a barren pebblescape. We passed a few pre-Exodus ruins that rose up like spectres—hamlets, towns, an airport. Unable to check the sats for our coordinates or trust a compass for direction, Chaperelle consulted an annotated map, spotting visual clues—huts, derelict rockets, cairns, a fallen bridge—and taking careful note of the odometer. The shell of a cannibalised carrier emblazoned with the logo of the PA was the final marker. Cluster #66, she told us, was directly south. The bottom tip of the continent we once called Africa.
Next, she did something which left us speechless. After carefully facing the jeep south, she took out a length of rope, secured one end to the passenger door, looped it tightly through the steering wheel spokes and tied the other end to her door. Now, she couldn’t adjust our direction. We stared at her in astonishment. “Spend enough time out here, you get to know its little tricks,” she said.
We drove on, Chaperelle taking careful note of the odometer. I was desperate to get my first glimpse of Cluster#66, but there was only a greyness where the pebbled plain met the sky ahead. The brightness of the advancing day diminished, fading as we were engulfed in a pale mist. Visibility shrank to a hundred metres then almost nothing. We halted, immersed in thick, yellow-tinged fog. The whiff of solder was strong. The Cauldron was close.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“We wait,” said Chaperelle boredly. “And hope.”
Ten minutes later the fog thinned and we proceeded again. “It comes and goes,” said Chaperelle.
The fog seemed to be being blown off the Cauldron. It thickened and we halted again. We proceeded in this stop-start manner for another half hour. Finally, we saw the pebble plain fall away ahead. At the top of this slope, we stopped. Chaperelle told us we weren’t getting any closer. “It’s about half a kilo away.”
I stared into the fog. Nothing.
I tried opening my door and found it locked.
“Just wait,” said Chaperelle.
What choice did we have?
I opened my notebook, staring at the blank pages.
Ten minutes later it happened.
The fog began to stream around us. In minutes it had thinned to a patchy mist that allowed us to see quite some distance—up to a few kilos, I estimated.
Through the jeep’s windscreen, I caught my first glimpse of what we’d risked all to see. It emerged piecemeal from the mist. Faint geometric shadows across the pale white sky. Tall and rounded shapes. Great grey blocks. They came or went as the mist thinned or thickened. A sinuous cylinder, with a fluted opening at its top and a sleek tubular growth on one side, rose smoothly up into the heavens. With its long open throat and side-projection it resembled a jug. Shell-like conical structures abounded, their helical surfaces spiralling to sharp tips. In front of them, like foothills, were the dome-like tops of squashed spheres and split tori. The fog drifted and this scene vanished before I finished sketching it. Just as it did, Gemma gasped and pointed further east, where another extraordinary tableau had appeared. Trefoil knots. Morin surfaces. Pleated walls. Annuli. And above it all a huge broken yellow ring a hundred metres in diameter hung unsupported in the air. This six-metre-thick curve floated half a kilo above the shore. What was holding up this half halo it was impossible to tell. I itched to get up close.
I don’t think we spoke for half an hour. I sketched furiously. Gemma photographed. Chaperelle drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
“It’s low tide now,” she said, checking her watch. “Here, the tidal range is big, just over three kilos.”
Twice a day Topologie#66 is engulfed by the tide. The yellow fog swallows it whole and then everything changes. It was literally mind-boggling to think that what Gemma and I were photographing and sketching was unique. Within hours it would be swept away, and a subtle transformation would take place. I’d seen pictures. I’d read reports. But being before it, I simply did not believe it. Nothing so vast, so solid, so unalive could be so mercurial, could it?
I rolled down my window and stared through my binoculars. The fog continued to drift around us. The tori and distorted spheres and twisted bands appeared to be made of some kind of pale ceramic. No one is sure because no one who has ever been inside has returned.
We heard a distant ringing. It was faint but harmonious. Notes floated on the air. Thin, ambient sounds like far-off tolling. I had read about this. The Topologies sing to themselves (or each other). Low-pitch resonances seemed to shift with time. It is believed to be caused by the wind whistling through gaps and holes in the structures. I saw tears in Gemma’s eyes.
Late in the day, the fog cleared. We caught our first glimpse of the Cauldron. Its surface was still, almost glassy. By this point, Chaperelle told us, the tide had turned, and the Cauldron would be re-entering the Topologie, sweeping in at incredible speed.
Finally, we were granted a view of the entire Topologie. It stretched deeper into the Cauldron than I could quite believe. It must be two or three kilos square and seemed to float on the grey like an island. In that moment it appeared fragile, ghostly, a dream fading at the break of day. Diaphanous wisps of mist drifted teasingly between us. Klein bottles. Seifert surfaces. Pentafoil knots. Stellated dodecahedra. Double tori. It was a tumultuous jumble as living as the city it has supplanted. A home built for mathematicians. Topologie#66’s mysteries seemed within our grasp if only we’d step a little closer to investigate them.
The longing to be outside the jeep deepened. I had stopped sketching. I think I tried to open the door again, to roll the window down further.
“No you don’t,” said Chaperelle, reaching back and grabbing my arm.
We struggled and it was only after a sharp rebuke from Gemma that I came to my senses.
“Is it stronger here than elsewhere?” she asked.
Chaperelle shrugged. “Bad all over for me.” She explained she was hypersensitive. For months it had been touch and go whether Dr. Machalek would send her back, facing six months’ orbital quarantine.
“How do you stand it?”
The woman shrugged. “Got a job to do. Wife and couple of kids back on John Muir[CB5] . Focuses the mind.” We stared at her in disbelief. Main’s staffing contracts are for a minimum of ten years. Chaperelle will miss her children’s childhoods. And I thought Gemma and I had sacrificed much coming here.
We watched the Cauldron invade Topologie#66, rising like a grey flood, fingering through this fifty-year-old structure. A structure that has usurped one of Africa’s oldest cities. Millennia of human history bulldozed and mockingly rebuilt and renewed twice a day. The came in at great speed, and with it the dry, yellowy fog. It rolled towards us, higher even than the floating ring, like an atmospheric event. Before we were enveloped completely, Chaperelle turned us around and drove slowly north, the steering wheel once more knotted tight with rope, her eyes scanning the horizon for her markers.
I stared out the rear window, a knot in my stomach reminding me that we were leaving behind the greatest opportunity, or biggest mistake, of our lives.
Day 18, Month 6
Chaperelle unavailable. Developed Gemma’s photos (a bad day). Many blank, though enough good ones.
Day 19, Month 6
Frustrated. Chaperelle assisting Blaffer. Gemma, suffering, remained locked in her room. I have so many questions but most I dare not speak aloud.
Day 20, Month 6
We approached closer today.
Just Chaperelle and myself. (Gemma is still bad.)
I stared out the windscreen, comparing what I saw with my sketches and the photos I had developed. I shook my head, amazed.
Topologie#66 looked the same, yet nothing was quite as I recalled. The tori, distorted spheres, trefoil knots, Whitney umbrellas, Borromean Rings—they had all transformed. The whole structure appeared reconfigured. Renewed. I sketched, took photographs. I talked about this wonder to Chaperelle but she said it sickened her. “It’s wrong, unnatural.” I couldn’t agree more and yet I am drawn to it like a moth to a light.
I sketched the new arrangements when the fog permitted. I ticked off the structures I had noted from our first visit. Unique identifiers allowed me to give names to the more recognisable ones: a tall helical cone is the Shell, an elaborate projective plane is the Bulb, the floating half-halo is the Ring. The open-necked cylinder: the Jug.
During one of the periods when the fog relented, we left the jeep for ten minutes. Together we walked towards the Cauldron. I took my binoculars, my sketch pad. I listened to the singing.
My predecessors claimed that either the Cauldron or the yellow fog creates the Topologies. Yet this does not account for the structures changing shape and place at high tide as if they become unmoored and drift about under the yellow fog’s cloak. I have seen sat photos and time-lapse footage but nothing which has been able to capture the alteration from one arrangement to another. Whether the fog creates the Topologies or not is unclear but what is clear is that it is dangerous. Over a hundred individuals have vanished trying to penetrate the fogs. Just as there is no return for those entering the Cauldron, there is no way back from the Topologies.
As I was looking at it, I, who study the patterns made by living things, was struck by a strange idea. The Topologies are regarded as mathematical megastructures. Yet twice daily they transform. They sing harmoniously. Those who enter them never return.
What if they are more biological than mathematical? What if they are alive?
Day 10, Month 7
We lost Senior Tech Jenks today. No one could find him anywhere. A review of cam recordings revealed the tech outside the west wall at one a.m., heading for the Cauldron. Hastings was visibly upset. He wanted to know why no alarms had gone off when an outside door had been opened. Blaffer’s been telling anyone that will listen that the alarm on the west door had been disconnected. Child’s play for Jenks.
Day 18, Month 7
Gemma and I get out to Topologie#66 twice every ten days.
I grow frustrated by what we have missed. Our maps of the arrangements of the structures are like fragments of a jigsaw where no two pieces lie adjacent to one another. Nothing fits. The layout of Topologie#66 changes twice daily. If we are to make any sense of it, we need an accurate record of every change.
Today, we set up cams to photograph and film the site in our absence. It is but an inadequate solution.
Gemma only takes her pills every three days. Tess, she believes, makes her attacks worse. They also cloud her mind. I am still taking my pills daily, but I, too, feel diminished.
The Facility isn’t helping. The hours people keep are erratic. They talk too much or too little, depending on disposition. They take drugs. There is bed-hopping—sex blots out the Cauldron for a few hours, which for Gemma and I has had the joyous result of rekindling our passion—with all the attendant relationship repercussions when multiple liaisons occur in a small, enclosed group.
Day 26, Month 7
Cams retrieved but unresponsive. I showed Blaffer, who laughed humourlessly. “Prof, they’re fucking fried.” Their shielding was insufficient protection for so long outside. Yet we cannot go out there without Chaperelle and she is monopolised by Hastings.
Day 10, Month 8
Our inability to gather a regular stream of data has become a serious impediment to our work. Gemma explained this to Hastings at dinner. He heard her out, making his usual placatory noises. But she was not to be put off. She demanded action. He poked his food around his plate silently as she spoke. Then he did something I haven’t seen him do in our four months here. He lost his temper.
He subjected us to a lecture on the problems bedevilling the Facility. Problems, I confess, neither of us have quite appreciated. Staff are wandering the corridors in their sleep. He has had to instigate night patrols. A quarter of Dr. Carlyle’s team are suffering from various degrees of Tess hypersensitivity. He has six names on a list of evacuees to the orbiting quarantine station. Main’s new shielding for the lab equipment is proving defective. The list, he said, went on.
Then he pointed angrily outside, where a gale was whipping the waves into a frenzy of tumbling grey froth that attacked the beach. “The Caul has never given up its secrets without a struggle,” he growled. “It has already driven us from Earth and each year it assimilates a little more of our home. How long before there is nothing left to save? We are in a war against this usurper, and we cannot afford to be distracted.”
Topologie#66 was a “damn sideshow.” His job was to ensure Dr. Carlyle stayed focused on the Cauldron. It was his view that any exploration of the Clusters was a diversion from the matter at hand. We were as stark an indication as any he’d seen that the PA had lost its way.
We left the canteen with our tails between our legs. I have never felt so unwanted and disheartened. In silence we went to our separate rooms.
Day 12, Month 8
We haven’t been to Topologie#66 in ten days.
Day 3, Month 9
We are at the mercy of Facility glitches and failures. Chaperelle travels back and forth to the Drop Zone carrying spares. Hastings won’t allow us to take a jeep on our own. The situation is intolerable. Gemma spends hours on the roof watching the Cauldron. I speak to her and sometimes she doesn’t respond as if hypnotised. She takes Tess every four days. I daren’t follow her lead. The Cauldron fills my head if I am not careful. When I look at it, I see hills and valleys rolling endlessly towards me. Nothing else matters. I feel dizzy and must force myself to look away. I often wake in the night covered in sweat. I no longer dream.
Day 10, Month 9
A cold, clear day. Gemma and I were woken early by Chaperelle. She had a day off and said she’d happily drive us to the Topologie. A good day’s study. The mist thinned so much that we approached the edge of the yellow fog bank around the base of the Topologie. It is so thick it is like a wall. One can almost touch the boundary.
Day 18, Month 9
They have brought a copter from the Drop Zone and, astonishingly, Chaperelle is a pilot. Who knew? Well, apparently everyone but me. Chaperelle was driving while waiting for the all-clear from Dr. Machalek and Blaffer. The doctor has judged she’s acclimatised to working beside the Cauldron and Blaffer is happy the copter’s systems are sufficiently robust not to suffer from Cauldron interference. Chaperelle has promised a trip to Topologie#66 in the next few days. I am not holding my breath.
Day 25, Month 9
Utterly breathtaking. I think we saw more in two hours of flight than we have in five months. From the air we saw that the plain stretches as far as the eye can see, at least eighty kilos in every direction. We saw few traces of our former civilization: ruined towns, a pitted highway snaking north. Instead, we saw rockets, huts, and other signs of recent human activity littered here and there. We saw the temple and, of all the unexpected sights, a prairie house. All post-date the arrival of the Caul. (More surviving human structures—roads, buildings, bridges—from before the Exodus are found further from the stormy, advancing shore.)
Chaperelle did several flybys, revealing the Topologie from multiple, elevated angles. One could see its depth. Instead of plotting the Shell, the Bulb, the Jug and the Ring in a line on a flat sheet and using their relative elevations to decide which was closer or further away, we were able to chart their positions in three dimensions. If we had this view every day, if the sat photos were more than grey blurs, we’d be taking first steps towards understanding the Topologie.
The tide turned and the Cauldron rushed in at incredible speed. It was a flood, a rout. I can think of nothing else. The Cauldron has invaded me.
Day 10, Month 10
The damn copter is a curse. Chaperelle is deploying sensors for Dr. Carlyle along the shore. Dr. Carlyle’s team is months behind schedule, and our poor pilot is working round the clock.
Day 19, Month 10
We have behaved recklessly and have been punished, yet I am jubilant.
Early this morning, Gemma took a set of keys from Hastings’ office. In the yard, I opened the gate and before the few who were up knew what was going on, Gemma had driven a jeep out. I closed the gate, and we didn’t look back!
A satisfying day’s work. Without our minder we got closer to the Topologie than we’ve ever approached. We were careful to make sure we always knew where the jeep was parked. One of us was always marking it. We had a couple of hairy moments when the fog thickened and engulfed us. But we didn’t panic. We stayed still. Gemma had been marking the jeep and kept her eyes fixed on that spot. The Cauldron sounded frighteningly close as it lapped the shore. But fog amplifies sound. Eventually, it thinned and we saw the jeep again. We thought about turning back but then the Ring came into view. We gazed in wonder.
When we got back to the Facility, Hastings was waiting. He was furious. We’d broken the rules. We’d stolen Main property. We could have been lost. We were a risk to the Facility and he should deport us immediately. Gemma tried to make light of it but that was a mistake. We are not being expelled, but we are confinedfor an unspecified period.
I’d do it again tomorrow!
Day 29, Month 10
We are still in detention. Chaperelle will “not be available for the immediate future,” even though they are no longer using the copter.
Most of the staff are gearing up for the big day when over thirty Facilities turn on their sensor array, which now stretches thousands of kilos along the coast. It does sound impressive. But they have many problems to fix first. The lasers’ electronics are not robust, and they are running around madly trying to get everything ready.
Day 6, Month 11
We are in shock. Chaperelle is missing.
Later
Hastings called a meeting. The cams indicate Chaperelle walked out the compound gate early this morning. They don’t know where she went. Hastings vetoed any searches. The second disappearance since we arrived and yet this hurts so much more than the first. Chaperelle has a wife waiting for her. Children. Who will pass on the news? What will they say? She’s not dead, just disappeared. Had she feared she’d never return to her family?
Is loss of hope the true tragedy of the Cauldron? It has taken our planet. It has cast us out. This alien entity. Until the Caul, humanity used to be so certain of its place in the universe. No more. We are doomed to be wanderers, orphans who desecrated then lost our home. It took our optimism.
No one knows what the Cauldron is or what it wants. No one knows what happens when you enter it. Why are we even here? We have made no progress. Until we do, it will be impossible to get our home back.
The Cauldron makes you doubt yourself.
Day 10, Month 11
Much excited chatter in the canteen over news that MainClan’s rival FashClan has been observed testing a Light drive in the outer system. A successful demonstration would put other stars (and their worlds) within our reach. “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Dr. Carlyle dismissively. “Their quantum engineering is second rate.”
“Yup,” cackled Blaffer. “Light drives are fifty years away, and always will be.”
Day 19, Month 11
Gemma has been speaking to Hastings daily about our situation. Finally, he surrendered and gave her the keys to a jeep. “Do what you like,” he told her, angrily.
We will!
Day 30, Month 11
Freezing. The pebble plain glittered with frost at dawn. Another good day. We are out every day, from six a.m. to six p.m.. We are told to be back by dusk, but that would mean losing data. Most days we record two tides. We have two fixed positions five hundred metres apart from which to observe the Topologie. When the tides are favourable, we make four measurements a day. We have a dozen structures we can identify and track.
Since we spend our days apart, we have agreed not to approach the Topologie.
I have reduced my dosage to a pill every other day. I feel clearer headed already.
Gemma’s attacks are both less frequent and less debilitating[MOU6] [CB7] .
Day 10, Month 12
Jeep wouldn’t start when we set out to leave late yesterday. It was dark, the wind getting up. We’d been warned a storm was coming. We had no choice but to sit tight. No food and bitterly cold. We snuggled in the back of the jeep for warmth under an inadequate blanket. I locked the doors. We put the key at the bottom of a bag, just in case.
We soon had to retrieve it. Once the tide and fog had receded, we were back out, photographing and sketching. The jeep lights helped us keep our bearings. The Cauldron’s eerie noctilucence is a thin, milky glow, more haze than illumination. Every part of the surface glowed palely, lighting up the undersides of clouds streaming above us. The fog was brilliant, as if electrically charged. Newly emerged structures appeared spectral, to glow like faint phantoms. Behind us, the darkness of the plain was solid. It was the most haunting and magical night of my life.
The Facility didn’t send a rescue party until early this morning. They found us back out photographing and mapping the Topologie on the next tide. Badawi and Blaffer were our rescuers. Neither was cross. In fact, both seemed amused. A loose spark plug, Blaffer explained. “If you’d known what you were about, you’d have been up and running in five minutes.”
Gemma and I exchanged a smile. We know exactly what we’re about.
Day 13, Month 1
Spring, and thoroughly sick of the drive. Our top speed, 25 kph, still puts us in the jeep for four valuable hours every day. While they unravel the glitches afflicting the sensor array the Facility is stifling, oppressive, and gloomy.
Gemma believes MainClan’s motives are questionable. The clan’s controlling families do very well out of the status quo, running countless habitats. If we ever returned to Earth, they’d lose out. Main, she says, isn’t interested in understanding the Caul to stop it spreading. They want to understand it in hopes of exploiting its nature.
Day 19, Month 1
In the improved weather Gemma and I are overnighting by the Topologie. Hastings didn’t even put up a fight when we took an ancient tent from the store. The first couple of nights my sleep was troubled. The roaring of the Cauldron is loud and frightening under nylon. But we will get used to it. We are a versatile species. We can acclimatise to any conditions. Have we not demonstrated this? Besides, it is bracing to be woken by the sight and sound of breaking waves the hue of wet slate.
Day 23, Month 1
I have studied shapes my whole life. My earliest memory is being in the Kang Tai orbital’s Earth Memorial Museum and holding an actual whelk shell in my hand and finger-tracing the spiral from its wide-whorled anterior to its pointed posterior, marvelling at how the spire’s spirals grew smaller and smaller until they were beyond discernment. I (incorrectly) imagined that they continued shrinking, retreating further and further back in the whelk’s life to the beginning of everything. When I put one finger on the apex—the point of origin, the alpha—and my thumb on the aperture’s tip—the Omega Point—I believed I measured a whole world within my brief handspan.
I was a peculiar child. Or so my fathers tell me.
Shapes have sent me across the solar system. I study their origins and relationships, what they tell us about the structure of matter from the subatomic scale up to the filaments of galaxy clusters. Shapes reveal life’s true patterns, its history and evolution. They have led Gemma and me to the shores of the devouring Cauldron. If there is any discernible pattern, it is the cold inevitable order of death.
Only we plan to cheat death.
Day 2, Month 2
We’ve returned from a week away from the Facility. I’ve never felt so alive.
Day 9, Month 2
In the compound at the back of the Facility there is a rusting metal caravan. I spent the evening looking it over.
Day 15, Month 2
Our long absences mean we notice changes in the behaviour of colleagues on our return. People develop tics and odd mannerisms, and no one bats an eyelid. Rose, in charge of comms, drinks at all hours. Fung reports for duty half-dressed. Nothing is said. People pair off and break up repeatedly. There are cliques and loners. We witnessed a physical altercation. In the compound, altars appear and disappear with curious regularity. Is this a slow slide into madness? They blame the Cauldron as if this makes it acceptable. I am reminded of the parable of the boiling frog: a creature unaware of the gradual deterioration of its environment. Gemma says an asylum is no place for the sane.
Day 29, Month 2
Another glorious week by the Topologie. But we are limited by what we can carry.
Day 6, Month 3
We have parked the caravan five kilos from Topologie#66. (A compromise distance agreed with Hastings.) Blaffer had fixed it up for us and we attached it to the jeep. The journey took half a day. But we are here, and I am writing this in our new home. We have supplies for a month. We will get more.
Day 11, Month 4
We’ve agreed: this is our home. We are not going back.
This is the third extract from the opening of Exo and is (c) copyright Colin Brush. Read the first extract here and the second extract here. Find out more about Exo here.
