It was dark, except for where it wasn’t.
But that’s usually how it works, right? Something about this felt particularly true to the axiom, however.
Tanja’s eyes could see that she was surrounded by the deepest and most perfect darkness, the kind that could make anyone hallucinate. The flashlight of her helmet illuminated a strict patch of vision, but the edges abruptly died to deep, uncanny shadows. Something hinted at a room that was emptier than empty; you don’t normally perceive the air around you, but there are still subliminal hints to its presence.
Not here; not in this room. Nothing decorated the cone of light; no sparkles of floating dust, no humid haze, nothing. Lights were harsh and unfiltered; no soft glows, and no blurry edges.
And the quiet felt unreal, broken only by her own breathing, and the soothing drone of her spacesuit’s life support.
If something slammed into the wall beside her, she would never know. It was buried in darkness and silence. Ghost stories meant something different here, in this place of isolating vacuum.
Her sore throat, stuffy nose, tingly neck, and headache had all finally subsided. The only remaining hint of her traveler’s medical coma was her breath, still smelling of nutrient fluid and medical tubing. Her cardiovascular implants couldn’t help that, but she also didn’t really care.
The contact microphones in her gloves sent amplified audio to her helmet speakers, as she grasped a handhold to slow her floating trajectory. It was a gentle, familiar hum, like the idle breathing of a lover. The dark wreck had nothing to sing; this serene ambience was her shuttle’s own powerplant, transmitting into the surrounding structure by virtue of physical contact.
Robots had a way of humbling even the smartest and most-capable mammals in space. Tanja was a guest here, and the computers of her ship and shuttle were her gracious hosts. On a spreadsheet, she had no purpose in this place. There was nothing she could do, that a ship couldn’t do better. She was excess mass; flesh, food, water, and life support.
However, the robots were not aching for resources, and the schedules were not as tight as they were a generation ago. It could be afforded to allow a human to leave hypersleep, and explore some space trash. Small, automated probes searched elsewhere, gathering data which was truly useful. Tanja was a tourist, welcome aboard, mostly here for personal thrill – and field-testing her hypersleep research project – and that was okay.
If it wasn’t, her ship would have forced her to remain in hypersleep.
This scenic wreck of twisting mystery was a probabilistic field, filtered from telescope noise. It was so cold, that it nearly blended into the background, and it was so far away, that it was only a few quanta wide on the sensors. However, some algorithm noticed the same grain in a field of static, and it had caused consistent deviations over time. Two weeks ago, her ship had intercepted this, and observed from a distance, checking for obvious threats before closing the gap. Two days ago, some calculation had decided this was safe enough for Tanja’s exploration, and woke her up. Now, here she was, suited up and curious.
Everything about this was weird. She saw the photos of the wreck’s outer hull, and it was a shimmering sea of rainbow bands, marred by distortions, holes, and scorch marks. Her ship’s computer could probably understand it, but wasn’t able to explain it to her. Her host wasn’t the chatty type. The common explanation was that any attempt to explain stuff to mammalian brains required a certain amount of simplification, but sometimes the simplifications turned truths into lies, so most robots simply didn’t bother.
What was this wreck doing here? The computer said that the deduced purpose was sensible – but complex – and not worthy of further explanation.
Who (or what) built this? The computer said that the creators were an automated transient subsidiary of an automated transient subsidiary, existing only for a few months to achieve some in-between task in a greater plan. The specifics only made sense on a hyper-convoluted scale, so no further explanations were provided.
Were the creators human? No. It was the only certain and simple answer. The creator’s ancestors were human, but the motivations for creating this were divorced enough from human goals, that no humans were worthy of credit.
Tanja hovered in the middle of some sort of hallway, but it twisted and wound in ways that were surreal to traverse. At some point, she came across a gaping hole, opening up to what might be a…hangar? She wasn’t sure if this hole was here from damage or intent. Some details made sense: handholds, guide rails, maintenance panels, and doorways. However, surfaces seemed to be fused in strange places; the seams were difficult to follow with her eyes, and were often harder to see at all. She might have called it “blurry”. Pipes warped around a nearby surface, where the wall seemed to have rolls. She wondered if these were hints of strain damage in the metal, but the pipes seemed perfectly intact, as if the wall was expected to have this feature here.
The nearby surfaces had an uexpected ceramic shine, but were shaped like forged metal. The rainbow banding from outside had returned here, too, especially over the surfaces of the folds, where this shimmer moved as she changed her viewing angle. She wished she knew what caused this, but it took much more than her doctorate in neuroscience to gain the confidence of her ship’s computer.
One report said that the closest match candidate was a hypothetical material, last found in the ship’s library from a seven-year-old network cache. This meant that within those seven years, something had made that hypothetical into a reality, tooled a whole shipyard somewhere to manufacture this vessel, and then this vessel had outlived its usefulness, was abandoned long enough ago to cool down to near-background temperatures, and then remained there until her ship had made the long trip out to visit.
She could look through the hole in the wall, out into the wider room beyond, and stare through a grand aperture, exposing the nothingness outside. Her flashlight could only highlight the edges, but she could see a void full of glittering stars in between.
Tanja didn’t need to visit any of those stars to find alien lifeforms; her local solar system had homegrown ones of its own.