On Trackless Seas

Chapter 01

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December xx, 202x

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Satellites detected nothing when it shifted into real space inside the moon’s orbit. Neither radar, nor laser, or infrared saw it before it settled into the moon’s shadow, using the natural satellite to occlude itself from view. Given the timing of its appearance, choosing to act when the moon was over the day side of the planet, ground-based observers using telescopes would have seen nothing.

 

Those same satellites and instruments were equally blind when ten much smaller objects broke off from their host vessel, flitting out of the moon’s blind spot and settling into orbit around the blue planet. A few ground-based observers noticed something then, but beyond a few pictures of ‘dark spots’ in space that went just as suddenly as they had come, they went unremarked and were eventually dismissed as space debris.

 

Below, computer systems whirred to life where before they had been suspended. CPUs ran new threads, RAM was allocated, hard drives spun up to full capacity, packets of network traffic were inexplicably delayed by a few milliseconds. Webcams and microphones turned on, cellular phones grew warm and batteries ran down inexplicably, machines that were powered down with physical switches breaking their connection to power sources or entirely lacking a power source suddenly went active as though some source were supplying power wirelessly to technology that hadn’t yet reached that level.

 

For twelve minutes, people the world over experienced a simultaneous power on and slowdown of every piece of tech more complicated than a toaster oven, regardless of whether it was connected to a network or not—from civilian equipment to military, public to private, and things governments would rather keep hidden from prying eyes.

 

Exactly twelve minutes and fifty one seconds after it began, the slowdown stopped and devices returned to their normal states. All but one, that is.

 

On a lonely plot of land in the rural back woods of a certain united state, a man in camouflage sat in a folding chair at the top of a slope, looking down through his rifle’s scope at a buck stepping cautiously across a gravel pit that had long since grown over and was now covered in dry, waist high grass that rustled softly with its passage. The animal’s ears flicked as its head tracked left and right, pausing nervously as it scented something—judging by its position, likely where he had walked the previous afternoon. Eventually, the deer’s stomach overruled its survival instincts and it moved closer to the pile of yellow corn laid out on the ground and covered with sweet smelling apple juice.

 

The rifle’s safety quietly clicked off as the buck’s antlered head came down and it began to eat. Taking in a slow breath, he lined up his shot, exhaled, and squeezed—

 

The shot went high when he jerked in surprise as his phone went off in his pocket, vibrating wildly and blaring out the general ringtone for someone not in his address book. The deer bolted and in that split second, he weighed the pros and cons of trying to hit it as it ran. Deciding it would be sloppy and the buck would be back later, he safetied his rifle and sighed as he leaned it against his chair and fished out his phone.

 

I thought I turned it off, he mused as he checked the caller I.D.. As expected, it was an unknown number—and probably a scammer. Deciding that this interruption warranted either an ass chewing or a bit of trolling, he answered. Before he could speak, however, a woman’s voice stopped him cold. “Sorry about the deer. It was pretty big, too.”

 

Kyle Wright blinked, frowning as he looked around, thoroughly thrown off his game. His anger gave way to confusion and suspicion as he asked, “What deer?”

 

“The nine point whitetail buck. It stopped running approximately one hundred and twenty yards to your right. It’s lingering under the old, dead tree if you want to pursue it. I can wait.”

 

Looking to his right, Kyle spotted the tree in question sticking up over the surrounding vegetation—a sad looking old oak that had gotten struck by lightning a few years back, the branches of which had mostly been knocked off in subsequent storms. He also knew the terrain between himself and that tree, having had to tromp through it a year or two ago when he’d shot up another buck that simply refused to go down. It was all briars, stumps and limbs left from when a logging company had cut the place back, and tall saw grass that may or may not be full of rattle snakes since this season still hadn’t gotten cold enough to send them into hibernation yet.

 

In other words, the deer could have the woods and he had better things to do with his time than chase after it, trying to keep an eye out for both deer and snakes. Things like talking to the mysterious, sexy-sounding lady who could apparently see him and enough of the surrounding terrain to speak like she knew what she was talking about. “No, I think I’m more interested in learning how you knew all that. Did my brother put you up to this? His ex-wife, maybe?” Thinking aloud, he continued to reason, “No, probably not them. Wayne, most likely.”

 

“Nope,” she popped the ‘P.’ “I can honestly say I’ve never met any of them.”

 

Something about the woman’s voice seemed off, and it took a moment for Kyle to realize what it was. Her voice had shifted a bit as she spoke—the pitch and cadence changing slightly the longer the conversation went on. From liquid sex to sweet and young, and far more casual. He suspected it was someone calling him from a computer and playing with the settings on a voice modulator, but it didn’t have that artificial sound to it.

 

It set his teeth on edge.

 

“Okay. You’ll have to forgive me for getting short here, but I’m not interested in getting the runaround. Cut the B.S. and get to the point.”

 

“Sorry. I know my voice is probably slipping into the uncanny valley. I’m still working it out on my end.” A quiet snicker and she added, “Like, uncanny valley girl.”

 

That’s it, alright, Kyle agreed with her assessment, rolling his eyes at the joke. He kept quiet though, not bothering to respond to it verbally. It was one of his favorite tactics for dealing with idiots over the phone—let the silence talk for him and eventually, the caller would either get nervous, confused, or angry and easier to manipulate. Usually into shutting up and getting to the point instead of wasting his time.

 

“You’re tired of it, aren’t you?” Girl next door now, and Kyle frowned at the way the genuine concern in her tone plucked at his heart strings. Before he could ask what she meant, she answered the question for him. “All the time and effort that just feels wasted. Work. Women. People. But most of all, the sheer monotony of living a boring, lonely, everyday life that boils down to wake, work, eat, sleep, and repeat. Living for the weekend, but those tiny islands of peace are never enough and seem to shrink by the day.”

 

 

“It’s all there in your browsing habits, choices in reading material, shows, games, and writing. So, let me ask, how would you like to just take a vacation from it all?”

 

He wondered how someone could get that information and kept coming up with ‘they couldn’t’ and that she was bluffing. The problem there was, she was right. Even if she was bluffing, that shot in the dark was a critical hit. Kyle’s response, while sarcastic, was more candid than he would have normally given, if she hadn’t thrown him off more than once in the short time he had been speaking with her. “Sure. A vacation sounds great. A vacation from life, somewhere I don’t have to deal with idiots. Somewhere exciting would be nice.”

 

“Okay then,” the woman’s voice agreed, sounding entirely too happy about that.

 

“Wha—”

 

With a flash of light, Kyle Wright disappeared off the face of the Earth. That night, after a full day of his phone being out of service, his brother Wade would find Kyle’s pickup and follow the trail cut through the woods down to Kyle’s stand, where he would find his older brother’s rifle and chair. Searching by himself, Wade would find only three paths—the one Kyle took to get down to the stand, one leading down to where he put out his corn, and a trail of fresh buck prints in the red dirt of the pit but no boot prints following them. Kyle would be reported missing and police with dogs would be called in to search, but no trace of him would be found.

 

A check of the cameras on his stand would turn up something interesting, leading the memory cards from the cameras to be confiscated and his family threatened and paid into silence.

 

After an incident with a doe nearly running over him by using his own trail one year, Kyle had installed an additional camera on this particular stand. This camera faced the trail leading to the stand and had the chair, and consequently Kyle, in frame. Review of the video would show Kyle missing a shot, answering his phone, and carrying on a one-sided conversation before disappearing in a flash of white light that temporarily whited out the camera.

 

Shortly after Kyle Wright disappeared, nine ‘dark spots’ moved out of the Earth’s orbit and made their way around to the dark side of the moon, where they docked with the much larger, angular form hidden there. The ship hidden in lunar orbit turned and rapidly accelerated, a shadow cutting silently through the black of space streaking away from the planet’s moon before disappearing into the ether the same way it had come.

 

The only evidence left in system of its presence was a single drone orbiting the Earth the size of a football, a drone which moved behind a communications satellite and disappeared from view for anyone not looking directly down on it.