Wayfarer

A bland landscape stretched far into the horizon. A gray plane, of a gray so uninteresting it felt like staring into a void, the essence of nothingness. The dusty ground was barely distinguishable from the sky, whose color was nearly identical, making the horizon a faint limit you easily forgot as you looked forward. Only an occasional band of a dust cloud appeared as it slowly moved overhead, hinting at an actual sky and not another bland, solid surface.

Nothing felt out of place; nothing picked one’s interest so that one would look at it. The ash and dust were the same here as they were a few meters away, and nothing on this gray world looked like it could spark interest in any way. This emptiness called, however. The utter lack of anything pushed one to contest its very concept: there must have been something else; there needed to be something else. A world where nothing even exists makes no sense; no one would want to accept it. Why gaze upon something if there isn’t anything to see at all?

While the gray sky was fairly even, one could see, if he looked carefully, the flat clouds sliding over the ground. Low. Dry. They weren’t vapor clouds but consisted solely of dust. More and more dust, sometimes falling back on the ground in a dry rain, which one would want to avoid at all costs. This kind of particle stuck to the skin and would have given anyone a grayish look if they spent more than a few hours in this ghost land.

No sound could be heard but the faint wind, sometimes blowing up a few grains of dust and making the most gentle sound. But a new sound could be heard in the distance: a repetitive tap, a low wave shattering the eerie silence reigning over this world. Marking the limit between heaven and earth, a green dot. A blast of color, defying the very concept of this landscape. This green dot kept growing as time passed, detailing itself before finally taking a humanoid form as it moved closer. A young woman was walking. She was draped in a green dress, a perfect color. A green free of any dust, of any grayness. Somehow, the unforgiving dirtiness of the air had spared her dress, put off by an unknown but powerful force.

The young girl was walking with a gentle yet quick foot, not deviating from a seemingly imaginary line. She drew a vector in a place without any direction—a straight line in a messy world. Her eyes were emerald green like her dress, and she looked straight ahead, far into the horizon, but nothing made the point she looked at any different from any other one could see. She clearly had a goal in mind, but what? When one looked more carefully, a hint began to appear: a faint trail, a path of dust barely lighter than the rest, forming the perfect line that the green girl was following jealously without looking any other way. It was wide, somewhat, but where was it going and what did it lead to, only the girl might have known the answer. Regardless, she remained mute, always keeping her eyes on the ground to follow the trail, sometimes looking up to the horizon to see the same gray landscape over and over again, each kilometer identical. She never took her eyes off her goal for long.

Later, she was still walking. Anyone else would ask themselves countless questions about the distance that had been covered and how much time had passed since she first appeared over the horizon, but all usual metrics lost their sense here. Time was an illusion; distance a masquerade completely made up to prevent one from losing his mind and thinking he didn’t make any progress. All the dusty dunes were the same. How could anyone tell if they weren’t circling back to where they were minutes ago? Even the track didn’t help. The path was simply too perfect in such a way that nothing told you if this section was any different from the others you had seen before. It would take anyone a lot of effort not to go crazy in this place, but the girl looked perfectly sane. Her gait was straight, her eyes were determined but rational and constantly alert. She breathed calmly despite her rapid walk, hinting at strong endurance. Her shoes were dancers’. She might have been one in another world or time. She might have been the smile of countless people as she graced their sight with carefully considered swings and spins, warming up countless hearts. She might have been able to put on an unforgettable show. But nobody was dancing anymore in this grim world. Everything had fallen still.

Suddenly, something changed. The girl stopped for a second and looked up. For a while, there wasn’t any sound but the very faint wind caressing her dress. She smiled and started walking again, reenergized. She had heard something. Or rather, she had sensed a change in the wavelengths her ears were so accustomed to: a sound so distant and low it couldn’t be heard but still put pressure on her eardrums. She was closing in on her objective.

It was only much later that what she had sensed finally became audible for human ears: a distant, repetitive signal. This beep came from the direction the girl was heading towards, but it was so diffuse that if the trail didn’t give you a sense of direction, you couldn’t make out where it came from. The heavy atmosphere was scattering the sound so much that it wasn’t possible to figure it out. Still, the impulsion, although seemingly coming from every direction, was extremely clear, even if so distant, and the girl’s rapid walk slowly made the sound grow. It wasn’t loud. It seemed only to serve as information, a beacon of hope for potential travelers. But who, other than the green dancer, might have been traveling these sad landscapes? There weren’t any signs that she wasn’t the first to walk her path. No traces of steps, no man-made objects lying around… But then again, the wind and the everlasting dust would have covered any of these hints in mere hours.

The signal was too repetitive to actually mean anything, but its constant rhythm gave a sense of time to the place, and the young girl seemed even more assured in her walk than previously. A confirmation that her efforts weren’t in vain must have reinforced her determination even more. As for the sound itself, it was almost like a submarine sonar one could hear in movies of another time, without the effects of water smudging its clarity. A crisp clear yet anxiously cold beep. A human couldn’t have produced such a sound, and even a man-made building felt unlikely considering the shiver it gave when you thought about how it sounded for more than a few seconds.

Another unknown amount of time passed by the green girl. A lot of signals had been heard since they had started to become audible, but there was no telling how many. At least one knew a certain period had actually passed—or had it? Were these ever-so-constant sounds even restricted by the nature of time? This beep was the only thing seemingly unaligned with the stillness of the area, along with the walking dancer, but even its very nature spoke coldly. It wasn’t a living signal; it was dead. Devoid of life and any meaning to go along with it. The young girl pressed on, not put off by any of these issues whatsoever.

Her eagerness and speed built up once more when the source of the signal began to appear out of the mist: a tall radio tower. This barebones amalgam of cold metal was a square-shaped building with four facets that one could easily see through thanks to the gaps between the metal frames. At its very top, so high above the ground that it barely lit the dark dust, something—most probably a light bulb—was emitting a red light, and a multitude of antennas were attached to the top of the structure. The former was pulsing at the same rhythm as the sound that had been echoing through the mist for an eternity. The distance made the sound and light bulb desynchronize, but it was now clear that this building was the origin of the signal.

As the radio tower came out of the mist more and more, the young woman stopped looking at the blinking and fading light at its top, instead focusing her attention on the very base of the building: indeed, a kind of cubic metal structure sat at its side, but one couldn’t clearly discern it from this still-long distance. Regardless, the dancer seemed very aware of its nature and seemed extremely interested in its uses. The tower itself looked extremely sturdy, as good as new. Not a single part of the structure was missing; it was perfectly vertical to the horizon and, most surprisingly, free of any trace of dust on its shiny surface. As the structure grew in the sight of the girl, it was clear that the metallic surface was immune to the parasite in the air.

The dancer wasn’t only walking and looking straight ahead anymore, though. She was thinking, her lips moving with the words she was assembling in her head. What she was designing, only she knew, but she was clearly mentally ingrained into it. Meanwhile, she kept getting closer to her objective, which became clearer as it came out of the fog and the distance lowered: the blocky structure on the side of the tower was in fact a workstation of some kind, with monitors and a large keyboard at its center. It was wired directly to the tower but wasn’t turned on. Its circuitry was linked to the myriad of antennas and the cable mess wrapping the tower itself—a rough system on a perfect structure made of metal and sensors apparently sending and receiving data from who knows where. Or at least it did at one time. The building looked dead in every sense of the word. The light at its very top added nothing but eeriness to it—no life.

When she finally got to the tower, she went straight to the workstation. Its large keyboard seemed to be the only way of interfacing with the system, with nothing else but countless monitors strapped onto each other with cables and a light bulb on top of it all, big enough that it could have been the same one from the top of the tower. They were all dead, like the landscape. The large, blocky shape supporting it all didn’t have any openings to access its internal components. The only access to the system seemed to be the unwelcoming keyboard, with its unlabeled keys and gray color. It was only when the girl pressed the button on the top right of the keyboard that everything changed. In an instant, the workstation became alive: the monitors turned on and lit the face of the young woman, staying blank for a while. The light bulb also sprang into action, turning from black to a pale but powerful white color, which lit the surroundings as the machine was booting up. Its internals let out peculiar noises of ancient machinery, and soon enough a small, blinking white rectangle appeared at the top left of all monitors, quickly followed by an avalanche of text reflecting commands being executed in blazing succession. It was fast enough to be impossible to follow, yet the girl didn’t seem impressed in any way. She was probably used to seeing this system working and had witnessed its ignition so many times that she was only interested in her goal rather than the way of achieving it.

After a few seconds, the workstation had finished its first phase of booting up and began to display actual information on its different displays. On the monitor just in front of the keyboard, a console awaiting written commands. To the right, five smaller monitors, all placed asymmetrically in a random fashion. They were all displaying information on the communication network this tower was presumably linked to: a rotating planet’s image and countless red dots scattered on its surface that, according to the legend at the bottom right, all represented a dormant tower. Nothing was happening over the network. Only a single point was blinking orange on the map, presumably representing the tower the girl had just woken up. When everything had finished turning on, the light bulb sitting over the workstation settled on a similar blinking orange, probably indicating the system was now awaiting instructions. The young woman didn’t hesitate a second and began typing with skilled hands. Though the keys were all unlabeled, she easily found her way through each of them, suggesting a long track record of using these contraptions. In seconds, she instructed the machine to set up a transmission—a message to send. A new dialog box appeared on the screen, along with a text window to write into. In the bottom right of the screen, a word count was displayed: 0/2000 words. More than enough for a lot of texts one would want to send, but why was a transmission so limited? Judging by the countless antennas attached to the building and their often very large size, this tower alone could have been able to send a message hundreds of kilometers away, or even satellites, if such a thing even orbited this desolate planet. This limit was surprising for seemingly advanced technology, and whatever the girl wanted to send, it would have to be fairly short.

She began typing.

Dear Nathan,

It must have been a while since you last heard from me. I apologize. I keep forgetting how much time passes as I’m walking here, but apparently, it has been a month since the last time I sent you a letter. I promise I will try to be more consistent from now on, but I can only walk so fast…

Not many things have happened since the last time. There’s nothing new here; not much has changed. I’m thankful the trail has kept guiding me for so long, because I don’t know where I would be if not for this faint indication of a direction.

Even though I spend every minute walking to prepare these letters, I always find the words lacking as soon as I find myself writing. I feel like I have so much to tell you, and yet I keep rambling. Maybe you’re doomed to only hear about my meaningless emotions for the rest of my voyage. Sometimes, I worry I’m never going to see you again. The thought alone is enough to make me lose all hope for a few seconds. It is like my heart is ripped out of my chest every time. Am I even certain you are getting these messages? I might well be sending letters in the ether.

Still, I know eventually we will be reunited. I have to carry on, and eventually we will see each other once again. When or how, I do not know, but I am certain it’s going to have something to do with the towers I use to send those letters. If they can make my texts reach you, maybe they can make me reach you as well. Every time I send you a letter, I immediately check if there are any notes left on the tower’s computer. There’s almost never anything of value in these things. Corrupted files, always; useless notes from who knows who used these decades ago, sometimes. I’ve never seen a single actually insightful file in the drives of these workstations, though I’ve begun to understand what they might have been for after seeing so many chat logs discussing the system. I’ve grown quite good at extracting bits and pieces of information from old systems, you know! I’m sure the Detective Squad back home would enroll me in a heartbeat.

She had the faint expression of a smile for a second or two, but she didn’t stop typing out her text for a second.

I am now certain it was a research network, not just a communication mesh. Sure, the ability they have to send you letters over such a long… gap is a feat for sure, but I’m not certain why they would have gone such a long way to send messages back. I think they wanted to prevent something from happening—something ecological, maybe. This would explain why the landscape is so desolate here, but this is only a theory of mine. I would be delighted to hear what you think, but that will have to wait… I don’t think this technology was invented in our time, or rather, yours, so I will have to figure it out here, by myself.

So far, I’ve found really nothing useful in my reverse engineering efforts. Yes, I mentioned “engineering” without it being a joke targeting you. Amazing, is it not? I’m certain you never thought I would have done that once in my life, yet here we are. I actually had to learn the ropes to figure out the intricate workings of this technology. It’s too bad my attempts haven’t concluded. There is no way to open the workstations. The antennas are nothing but basic ones already found back in the ruins scattered everywhere at home. Everything feels so… standard but out of place. Why does this look vaguely familiar? I only remember so much, but I can’t shake off the feeling… Maybe I only imagined this link to our peaceful era. Regardless, my point is, I still have no leads. My only hope is that the files on one of these towers’ workstations can give me some answers on their functions; perhaps a log from a construction crew that actually contains relevant information instead of random banter, the diary of the inventor, system logs—anything would help at this point.

Other than that, I continued studying the effects of the strange ways of time here on myself. I don’t seem to grow tired or need sleep or food and water, for that matter, as I already told you the first time I managed to send you a message. This hasn’t changed since the last time, just like the strange behavior of the dust found everywhere. It still doesn’t stick to me for some reason, which I already knew. What I didn’t realize until just a while back is the ability for the towers and everything associated with them (the antennas, the computer, everything) to not keep dust on their surfaces either, just like me. It feels like it should stick to everything—it’s so filthy to the touch, the strangest feeling—but it simply doesn’t! Every single grain slides off like water without leaving any trace on my dress. I figured out the towers had the same strange phenomenon happening to them. What is different about us? Or is it the dust that’s strange? I can’t say for sure.

As you can see, I still have many questions. I haven’t progressed in many ways, if not for the fact that this world feels stranger and stranger as I continue progressing. The dust storms are getting more frequent too. It would almost be soothing if it didn’t hide the track from me; these storms don’t have a lot of wind or anything actually dangerous, but they reduce visibility so much that it makes me worry I might lose my way. It hasn’t happened yet, but each storm is sure to bring its own set of concerns.

My memory is getting hazy as well. Though it feels like I’ve been stuck here for only a few days, I know it has actually been much longer. Your face is blurry, I can’t remember your eyes. What conversations did we use to have? What was the date of our wedding planned to be? I’m forgetting it all, even the blue glint of the water shining through the dome… If there was any way you could answer these messages, perhaps you could help me. Help me remember. I’m not losing hope that the next tower might hold the answers I seek or that there might be other hints left lying around. It is just hard to keep track of myself on top of everything else.

In the meantime, I’ll continue walking. Remembering we’ll be reunited someday, somehow, is enough to keep me going. I am sure you will be waiting for me at the end of this journey.

See you soon,

~Asa

Asa stopped typing. Her fingers hadn’t stopped a single time since they spun into motion, and having almost filled the message’s word limit, she looked satisfied with her work. She then spent an eternity reading through it once again, correcting a few mistypes, but she didn’t seem to want to change anything about the actual message. Every word must have come from the heart.

The workstation had been completely silent during her work, which took just a few moments. Only the keyboard had let out a frantic rhythm as Asa typed in her text. Satisfied, she let her elbows rest on the edge of the workstation and let out a contented sigh as she read through her words again. She had accomplished what she had been walking for, but this was just a step on a longer journey. She hadn’t learned anything new and hadn’t progressed in the big picture, even if a new step of her voyage had concluded. Walking, yes, but walking with a goal. Going back, reuniting. The silence was heavy on her shoulders, and for a moment, Asa’s eyes had a look of despair, and her body looked on the brink of collapsing. With a burst of hope, she quickly regained her senses and straightened back up. This was no time to lose motivation. This was time to send the letter on its way.

Asa saved her text and inputted a new series of commands into the prompt. Several interfaces succeeded quickly on the monitors as she jumped her gaze from one to another instinctively. She consecutively adjusted the target of her message with its exact time and destination on the globe, which was now depicted as a beautiful, completely blue planet on the monitors. It was hard to believe the dust she was now standing on was once part of a prettier world, one with more than gray. This blue the monitors were depicting looked faded by the dated technology used, yet it still made a big difference with the rest of the place and the dull, eerie red light still blinking over Asa’s head.

With everything in order and prepared to launch the message, she pressed the “Send” button and took a step back to look up. Both lights, on the workstation and up there at the very top of the tower, stopped blinking red and took a bright and green shine, relentless. Breaking through the near perfect silence that the slight wind and insider machinery of the workstation had weakly disrupted, the tower let out a deafening uproar, which persisted as it sent Asa’s letter. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem quite annoyed or concerned by such a nuisance; on the contrary, she came and sat right next to one of the tower’s four pillars, letting her back rest on the metallic surface. She closed her eyes and seemed to rest in the midst of a loudness that put her at ease. The loud rattle was music to her ears that she could only listen to on rare occasions, as the rest of this world only offered emptiness for all senses. The towers were the only anomaly like her, providing even a slight change from the pattern of gray silence found everywhere else.

She sat there for minutes, maybe hours, until the tower had finished sending the letter and it turned dormant again. The green lights both stopped, the top of the tower once again blinking in its red light and sending its audible, sad pulse. The workstation immediately shut down, as did its light bulb. The tower wouldn’t be usable for a while anymore. The antennas were cooling down after experiencing such a violent load; the metal was still slightly clattering from the heat dilatation, making for a new sound to be heard and disturbing the dull silence that surrounded Asa. She waited and waited for the clattering to fade away, until all that could be heard were the wind and one’s own thoughts.

Standing back up. How much time had passed since the message had been sent? No way to know, but Asa looked peaceful. Communicating with Nathan must have taken a load off her heart. She swiftly walked back in front of the workstation, still turned on and with a new dialog window on its monitors, indicating the transmission had concluded successfully. Asa didn’t know if that meant Nathan had actually received her message, but there was nothing to do except hope at this point.

She spent the next few hundred beeps turning the workstation’s files upside down in search of clues. Every folder had to be scraped for information, every disk needed to reveal its utmost secrets if she wanted to get out of there one day. Sadly, this was yet another setback. This tower was especially empty, without even any chat logs from random people during the construction era. With nothing to read, Asa closed everything and ordered the station to shut down. Every monitor’s and the light bulb’s lights faded away.

She turned around and faced the horizon, her eyes somewhat hesitant. Who knew how long it would take for her to find the next tower and send a letter once again? Such was the terrifying equation she must have been confronted with every time. For a moment, she hesitated. For a tiny second, she lifted her foot and stopped its movement, unsure about it all. Maybe she could search the tower further and find clues she might have missed. Maybe there was a way to dismantle the computer and take a look inside. This feeling didn’t last long, however. She had found everything that had to be found, which meant nothing. She took a deep breath and began walking with the same tireless gait with which she had come this far. Step after step, tower after tower, she would reach her goal; she would reunite with what she had left behind, no matter the cost.

Slowly but surely, she grew further and further away, her features disappearing in the mist. The green dress, which had added some variety to this hellish landscape, faded away to leave only the sad blink of the tower’s signal and its red light.