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CONTACT

preview CONTACT Science fiction Science fiction Science fiction Science fiction
Suddenly, the contact was interrupted. My arm was pulled by a human female wearing the same clothing as mine. I could tell the primal fear in her eyes. With her underdeveloped speech she tried to figure out what I just saw. And I could only think about how much I want to take off this suit. ... Water supply in the suit ended a few hours ago. Nadia still has some, but she's very tired, she says she can't go any further. But we can't stop - when the batteries drain, we'll both suffocate. About a week ago our ship was the first in history to land on the Ziffu-0, the oldest, largest and most distant planet in the entire system. More correct to say, the ship was attached - despite the size of the planet, the gravity is very low. Gentle breeze could tear your feet off the ground, so it's necessary to use a system of increasing the suits' weight. After the first seismic wave we lost any contact and now we can't find our way back to the ship, which might as well be destroyed - horizon changes after each impulse. The entire planet is made of millions of separate pieces of dense ground, and the only thing that keeps them together is a viscous soil which loses density at some places so much it turns into a thick heavy gas. Sometimes it seems that there's generally no clear distinction between aggregate states of matter around here. When I stand still in a cloud for a few minutes, I notice how the gas constitutes a vibrating void at the surface of the suit. Small whitish connecting threads appear inside the void, somewhat like a spiderweb. A hope to find the ship quickly faded with each quake, and even the hormonal stimulants produced by the life support system were gradually losing to the growing panic. But I forgot about all of that an undefined time ago. Now I'm frozen in shock, my world is enclosed in three black sockets of the Giant. The remains of our distant ancestor, no doubt. At the time of establishment of eye contact, my mind got filled with warm noise wave, which began to expand from the core, pushing all the parts of my nervous system, leaving a complete information vacuum inside. It seems that since then the entire planet froze, and I couldn't hear my own body. All the muscles are relaxed, like if I'm only held by the ghost's glance. I am absolutely absorbed. He understood me in a split second: he understood all that has brought me to this moment, and all that would lead to another one, he understood, how I became an astrogeologist following in my father's footsteps, he understood how hard my life was in middle school because of my depression, and why my great-grandfather took the blame for a broken chandelier, when his friend was the one to blame. He understood, what I would say to my eldest daughter at the last day of my life, he understood, how I was attracted by the mystery of space, and how I look into Nadia's eyes. My every meaning has become a nonentity. My fears, values, talents, aspirations, my love and ego - everything was explained by the ice cold, perfect logic. I realized I was a simple and obvious mechanism, and all of my uniqueness was just a small link in a straightforward causal effect chain. But it was only the beginning. He showed me what it means to experience a feeling beyond any imperfection. It was an infinitely precise and clear idea, the understanding of which spawned a state of such a revelation, impression and elegance that human nature would be unable to describe. It was a huge world, discovered in between two grains of sand. I have lived countless lives. I possessed endless possibilities, and I used them all: having calculated any possible course of events, filling in the gaps with analysis of all terminal and logically impossible variants. The space of probability appeared as a solid and clear canvas. A moment later, I was able to see how an insignificant spontaneous variations in a vibration that caused the Big Bang will lead to a change in an average
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