Equinox

by Jon Irons

William watched the planet that now filled the porthole of his cabin. From the colony on the moon above, the planet looked like any other. Even from his rapidly decreasing distance, Equinox seemed normal. William supposed it was, if anything, too normal. Regularity was the planet's specialty.

He continued his conversation over the radio. “I should be on Equinox for a few days. If all goes well, I'll stay there, and the Company will move my possessions to the surface.”

His friend on the other end of the connection managed to squeeze concern into her next crackling transmission. “It really makes no sense. Equinox is a one-way street.”

“From what I hear, Angela, it's an express ride to the top of the Company.”

“No one ever comes back.”

He ignored her. “Do you have any idea what the salary is for workers on Equinox? Five times what we make.”

Angela never gave up. “What about Paul? Have you heard from him since he left?”

This gave William pause. “I haven't. But you know how it is. He's had only two days to get settled.” Even so, Paul had always found time to talk to them before.

She was thinking the same thing. “He would have called by now. You know what I think about communications down there.”

The two had been in love long before William had met either of them. Rumor had it that Paul had decided to celebrate a small discovery he had made in the Company research labs by buying a flower for the first woman he saw. Angela was that woman. They had grown closer, but things had changed and by the time William knew them, they were only friends.

Angela, who worked in the communications department, had recently shown him a plot of data traffic to Equinox. As an employee of Equinox Instruments Incorporated, William knew that his employer had its secrets. Then, as now, William had not cared why one hundred percent of transmissions were to the remote tugboats like the one William was on now. To her, Equinox was as silent as a grave.

Angela's concern was touching, but William didn't want his trip spoiled by worry. “Look. If something goes wrong, I'll take the next ship back. They're automated—who's going to stop me?”

He could see Angela in his mind's eye, finding some way to fidget while she came up with a reply. Before she could say anything, William wished her a good night and closed the connection.

It was easy to question one's superiors. Why did they choose to manufacture medical supplies on the moon and send them to a sterilization plant on Equinox? Why not have both in the same place? How did the plant on Equinox have such fast turnaround? Millions of tons of supplies were sent there at thirty-hour intervals. The company, of course, gave suitable explanations for all these questions. William was content to sit in his tiny passenger cabin, alone in the giant cargo ship, and think about what a new job on Equinox would bring.

Some things would be the same. The factories on the moon used the same time scale as Equinox: fifteen hours of day, fifteen hours of night. If there was one thing William liked about Equinox, it was the planet's regularity. A perfectly circular orbit around its sun, with no axial tilt, left Equinox devoid of seasons. Even its moon had a perfect orbit of its own that eclipsed the sun once a day. Equinox was just how William wanted it: a place with no surprises.

Ever larger in his window, the planet was as tranquil as always. It was experiencing its daily eclipse, and the moon's shadow on the planet surface made Equinox look almost like an eye. The Company had refrained from spreading life on Equinox to reduce maintenance costs, and they kept it much as it had been centuries before, when an expedition had discovered the habitable and hospitable world.

And yet... William shook his head at the questions that bloomed in his mind. Angela had always been adept at asking provocative questions, and it seemed to William that he had always been the victim of the doubt that came from those questions. He looked away from the porthole and briefly considered calling her back. But he would be on Equinox in a few short hours and he needed to sleep. He would talk to her when he arrived on Equinox.

The brief nap ended with entry into Equinox's atmosphere. He awoke as the ship shook. While its porthole had a metal shield over it, he had enough experience in interplanetary travel to know what was happening outside. The only excitement he gained from the descent was the knowledge that he drew closer to his new life on Equinox.

The ship landed roughly. William had expected as much; as one of the programmers for the company's automated cargo ships, he knew just how rough management allowed landings to be. What surprised him was the wait that followed. According to the guidelines given to programmers like William, the ship needed a little time to cool down, and after that, the unloading crews would need access to the materials inside. The thirty-hour schedule was a tight one, so the guidelines clearly stated that the automated systems must act quickly.

So why doesn't the door open? There was no handle or other manual control; from his own glimpses into that part of the program, William knew that all inner doors should open by themselves. A brief test of the radio gear he had used earlier proved fruitless; the console wouldn't even turn on.

In the fifteen minutes it took for him to lose his patience, William noticed a few more odd things about his cabin. His window had not re-opened—which, he assumed, came from the same glitch as his malfunctioning door. The air became thick and warm; from the sound of it, no circulation system was functioning.

At last, William brought it upon himself to break down the door. Its thin plastic gave way after repeated kicking. While the task was easy, it gave William the sickening sentiment that he was doing something that no one in a civilized situation should do.

Forcing his way into the ship's personnel corridor only gave him a little more freedom than he already had. He retraced his path from the cabin to the hatch he had entered at Fulcrum Station, before this episode began. The tight, straight corridors met at right angles. There were enough junctions that it would have been easy to get lost. William felt right at home; the lunar station followed a similar design. Thanks to several signs pointing to the hatch, he found his way quickly. He stood half in amazement, half in anger, at the open hatch—apparently, at least one automated system still worked—for he had forgotten that most of the ship's bulk lay between him and the ground. From the look of things, even if he survived careening from various hull surfaces on the way down, the ground was several hundred meters too far away for a jump to end in anything but death.

As he thought of what to do, he surveyed the ship's surroundings: nothing very close, a man-made structure a few kilometers away, and beyond that, the ocean. There was nothing resembling the sterilization factory whose photograph he had seen countless times in corporate literature. However, there was something he noticed about the ground near the ship: odd bundles and forms lay on the sand extending in all directions. He thought he knew what they were, but he wanted to see them from ground level before jumping to such a disturbing conclusion.

Back inside the ship, as he followed signs meant for cargo loaders, William thought about his sudden promotion. His manager had placed him with the programming team that was working on the new cargo ship logic. Delving deeper into the old program code in an attempt to understand his task better, he had found a serious bug.

“All of the references to the sterilization facility's loading machines are programmed to interface with nothing! Like they don't even exist!” he had told the manager.

After considering William for a minute, Mr. Winston had cleared his throat. “I suggest you forget about it. Nothing bad has come of it yet. Maybe there's something you missed.”

“I checked the whole program three ways to hell for additional references, and believe me, they aren't there. I don't know why there hasn't been a problem yet, but at any moment, one of those ships may malfunction and refuse to let the crews on Equinox do their job. The security system is designed to lock the entire ship down; it'll ruin the schedule completely.

Mr. Winston had chuckled. “Security on Equinox was never a priority. But you've already added dummy references to the new code, so we'll keep them, just in case.”

Descending a confining staircase that appeared to lead straight into the lowest reaches of the cargo hold, William saw the truth of his manager's claim. Hatches that should have been locked were instead wide open. He continued down and thought about the ship's design: that a bloated creature that enjoyed resting on its belly. His glimpses of its form while he had watched it docking with the lunar base had shown him that it was a fat, round thing, immense and covered with metal blisters and warts, like a giant robotic toad.

Contrary to his hopes and in step with his expectations, the cramped stairwell ended well before he reached ground level. After navigating the maze of cargo crates, hoping he didn't lose his bearings, William at last came to the massive cargo loading doors. A brief attempt at operating one of the doors provided the first encouraging news since his landing: the manual controls there still worked. It made sense; the company would make sure that its ship's most important functions remained even when everything else failed.

William found it disconcerting that human comfort and safety were not the company's priorities.

As the cargo door released its seals and slid upward, he saw that the ground was still too far away for him to land there unharmed; however, a large pile of soil lay neatly near another door. If he took a running jump from that door, he could land on the odd little hill and descend in safety.

William executed his jump perfectly, but his landing was the biggest shock he had ever received. The moment his feet hit the pile, he knew from its softness—springiness, even—that it held more than soil. A moment later, when he stopped himself from tumbling down the hill, his hands dumbly felt what he waited to see, had to see, just to be sure, when the dust cleared.

He was atop a mound of corpses.

Running. That was his only thought. He didn't know where to run in that vast dirt plain; there were bodies everywhere. Many looked fresh when he sprinted by, like victims of a recent massacre. Except that nothing about them indicated violent death. There were no blood stains on their clothes. Face up, face down, no special order or system to their demise. The layout was too random to seem like an orchestration; the uniformity of the dead couldn't have been the work of a person.

These thoughts flowed through him in time with his frantic strides. Some distance from the ship, a pattern emerged: they became more concentrated along the path that William was taking. Slowing down, he stopped looking at the ground, and at last cast his eyes ahead. The structure he had seen from the ship was closer; the corpses led to it. While William still felt the same fear that had initiated his blind flight from the landing zone, he tried to calm himself and regain control. He realized that the dead people themselves did not frighten him; rather, it was the apparent senselessness of the situation: from the looks of it, everyone there had died unexpectedly.

As he slowed his pace to a walk, he noticed something very odd about several corpses. William stopped at one to get a closer look: the skin was worn, dry; the face, almost featureless; flesh was sagging or missing. This person was eroding. It was at that moment that William became aware that, in spite of all the carnage around him, there was no stench of decay. It was unlike decomposers to leave dead things alone with the elements.

He couldn't feel sick at what he saw: in some sense, he saw nothing wrong with it. And that was what sickened him.

Moving again toward the structure, William made a second observation: the clothes on the corpses were of many styles, some from recent years, and some from decades before. Several of the most worn bodies wore styles he didn't remember. How could they be so old, yet still untouched by the microbes that should have rotted them long ago?

He lost himself in these thoughts, eyes studying the ground, following the trail of dead people, until his feet fell under the shadow of the most bland building he had ever seen.

Had William not sensed danger all around, he would have been bored. Hours passed as he explored the structure that had towered over him, yet left so little an impression upon him that he hardly remembered entering.

There was only one way to go: down.

It was almost exactly the same in the building as it was on the surface; there were those same corpses, but those he saw inside all seemed more fresh. William thought it must have been the absence of the outside elements that kept everything as it was. There were also fewer bodies. William had to assume that the smarter people had been in the minority; the masses outside had obviously failed to survive.

With fewer casualties to try to ignore, he focused on the details of every dead person he found. Each had a face fixed in his mind, if not a name, and he started thinking of the men and women there as human beings. The first descent, like those that followed, was in the form of a long, straight ramp that led underground. His attention to human detail at last gave him a reward, there on the ramp: a woman in old-fashioned Planetary Exploration Agency garb still held a small viewing device to the floor, where her hand had fallen limply in death decades earlier. Technology had not experienced much change in the intervening years: William understood the basic operation of the device. To his pleasure, he found that it contained a recording, his first human contact, real or otherwise, in the ten hours since he had fallen asleep on the transport ship.

What he found left him terrified.

A video record of what must have been the first expedition to Equinox, thirty hours in length. The beginning: cheerful explorers leaving their ship. The comments, although thick with archaic words, made some sense to William. Small digits in the corners seemed to indicate life functions. He skipped forward in the video. The narrator, the dead woman who had held the recorder for centuries, described some place that must have been deeper in this same building. There were lights everywhere, illuminating polished metal surfaces that looked alien. He skipped all the way to the end of the recording. Five minutes before the video's termination, the narrator ascended the ramp. She expressed a normal desire to rest after such a long mission. Nothing was wrong. She reached the place where William stood, fell forward, stopped moving. The digits all displayed zero: the woman's organs had simultaneously ceased their functions. The recorder caught the deadman signal and turned off.

He looked at the body. Maybe there was something he didn't know; he had skipped far more than he had viewed. He wanted to believe that he was somehow less doomed than the woman on the ramp had been, that there had been complications leading to the demise of every person he had seen on the planet; however, he knew believing that it wouldn't happen to him was exactly what would lead to his death.

Continuing down the ramp, William tried to remember how long he had been on Equinox. If he wanted to be conservative, he could estimate perhaps five hours, but he didn't know how long he had spent running in panic when he had first made landfall. It could have been minutes, or it could have been hours. He began to walk more quickly. He was stuck on a barren planet with the strangest killer he had ever heard of. It left no mark on the bodies; it consumed nothing of them; it worked instantly and invisibly. Was it a disease? An alien life form? An undetectable source of radiation? William could not count on answering his own questions. He knew so little of the situation on Equinox that it was almost difficult to be afraid; the death all around him was sterile, without ugliness.

He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was fighting not only an unseen killer, but something that was worse than the killer: an event. A cycle. It was not only inevitable; it was perpetually inevitable.

Perpetual. Every thirty hours.

His enemy was Equinox. But how? Could the thirty hours be a coincidence? Deep within himself, William heard the answer: no. It was Equinox and its day that killed everything—down to the smallest microbe. Yet, it had not always been that way: he stood in an ancient alien structure. They had needed time to build. And they must have died, too. Long ago, Equinox had changed into a monster planet.

And Equinox Instruments Incorporated knew it. The corporation had sent hundreds or thousands of its employees to die. Employees. People. He glanced about himself—there were EII personnel among the dead; he recognized some of them. The company had killed people.

He had been assigned to the “Planetside Team” after his inquiry into the cargo security systems. His “team” was a pile of the dead.

While William thought, he wandered farther down into the building. He finally noticed the architecture that surrounded him and realized why it had taken him so long to do so: every curve, every line, and every surface was perfectly regular. Circles were everywhere, especially in the designs etched on the walls. It seemed a better use of his time to ignore them; having examined one, he felt that he had seen them all. He passed through many rooms, each one as regular as the last. They all had diffuse light inside that came from tiny holes in the ceiling.

The people who built this place were fatal perfectionists, he thought.

At last, he came to a room that caught his attention: one of its walls emitted a deep green light; it looked like a video screen. When he touched it, several shapes sprang from the wall, accompanied by very odd noises coming from no apparent source. In spite of this sudden animation, he felt far less startled than pleased to see a sign of life after so much time in the dead, motionless, silence. The shapes, as he quickly found, were intangible; they appeared to be holographic orbs. It took him several minutes to comprehend what they represented, but once he saw the largest orb take its place in the center of the others, while the smallest orbs circled around it, he knew that it was a miniature solar system. White lines traced the orbits of the planets: circles, ellipses, and a parabola depicting what must have been a comet's path.

The sounds seemed to correspond with the images; perhaps they were speech, but their unwavering meter sounded musical, except that there was no tonal variation.

One by one, planets glowed red and drifted away from the sun, disappearing from view, until only one planet, orbited by a small satellite, remained. Its orbit-line shrank and transformed from an ellipse into a circle. The line turned yellow. A tilted axis appeared on both the moon and the planet; each became perpendicular to the orbital plane and in turn became yellow. The display then showed the white line of the moon's orbit blinking. Both the sound and the movement stopped for a moment and began their performances anew.

It seemed that they would continue forever.

Artificial orbits, he reflected. I'll be damned.

William could guess at some of the meaning of the display: somehow, Equinox's solar system had changed from a normal configuration to its present layout. He had never known a solar system to jettison stable planets; judging from the design of the structure, it was the natives who had somehow altered everything. How could such a powerful race come to destroy itself?

He let the question bother him as he headed deeper underground. The natives had conceived of a straightforward, yet wasteful design for their structure. William had to assume that the lack of any practical facilities—no room had anything but walls, a ceiling, and a floor—indicated that he was inside a monument. To some extent, he knew he was right: the structure had already conveyed a message. Such a linear building, one hall leading straight through hundreds of rooms with nothing in them, seemed meaningless otherwise.

The flat music of the holographic schematic now accompanied the echoes of William's movements. He left the one unique room behind, but he could not understand the questions it raised.

Nothing could survive on the planet; even bacteria died. Yet there was nothing that appeared to cause physical harm—the explorer's video from the beginning of the endless passage showed no floods, no fire, no deadly chemicals. Death was sudden, not from a poison. It must have been a physical phenomenon, invisible and inexorable.

Paul would have understood.

William stopped mid-stride. Paul. Paul had come to the planet not long before William had. Was he in the monument, too? What did it matter? Paul must have died, the same as everyone else. Yet, the dead proved more useful to William than he ever would have imagined. In a short matter of time, they had become tools, sources of information.

More of the same uniformity battered William's mind into silence for the following hours. It was difficult to mark the passage of time since he had begun his descent, or if he had begun it at all. Memory became so shallow in the face of endless repetition that everything he saw and did passed out of his mind within moments. His life became a measured shuffle and a word—“down.” Gravity became the sole motivator; it replaced everything he thought, gave him the simple instruction.

From time to time, he encountered a human body, his mind registered its presence, and he had a fleeting thought: that's me. Before long, even this apparent break from routine became just another part of the pattern, and seemed as natural as Equinox's deadly pull. Step, see, continue.

Step, see, continue.

Because of his emptiness, William took minutes to understand that he had stopped walking. His mind had kept repeating itself in his body's stead. As soon as he recognized the physical fact, he felt the wave of fatigue that had crept into him. Twenty hours since he had landed, he realized. It took him twenty hours to grow tired in the thirty-hour day that he lived on the moon.

As he stood, staring down, he began to see past the redundancies. In front of him, sitting against the wall, was a corpse whose features seeped into William's memory. He filtered away the multitudes of faces he had seen on the dead, the combination of which had rendered every corpse faceless.

Red hair. Broad nose, dark skin, smooth cheeks now broken by a day-old beard. A thin frame that suggested agility, but never demonstrated it. Clothes that would have been fitting on a vagrant, worn out of total disregard for fashion.

William knelt to the dead man, placing his hand on a cold shoulder, wishing he could look into the man's closed eyes. His dry throat could hardly utter anything, but William managed the greeting that he had expected to deliver hours earlier.

“Hello, Paul.”

He stayed that way for a little while before whispering his friend a benediction and farewell; then, he searched Paul's body for something of use. Paul met William's expectations: his hands held lightly onto a small computer that turned on as soon as William touched it. The screen displayed several lines of text; the three that caught his eye were “View this immediately,”“To William,” and “To Angela.” He selected the first item. The screen blanked.

“If you have found this,” came Paul's voice, “and can understand this language, immediately begin walking back to the surface. I gave my life so that we can put an end to the cycle that killed me, and that will kill you. You must listen to what I say if you wish to help.”

William obeyed. He began the long walk back to the surface while he listened to the recording. At least he wouldn't be alone this time.

“I will not explain the whole situation; if you've made it this far, you already know much of what has happened; however, you might be asking yourself why it has happened.

“From what I have determined, the beings who once lived here were very intelligent and incredibly powerful. I'm a research scientist, and there are things in the depths of this building I never would have believed had I not seen them myself. These aliens had only one weakness: they could not ignore the day-to-day irregularities that we accept without thinking. This planet, called Equinox, and its solar system, are the ultimate result of their obsession.

“The used their mighty technology to alter the orbits of this planet and its satellite. Both orbits are perfect circles around their centers. It is this configuration that causes everything to die each planetary rotation.

“I don't have time to explain it all to you. Later explorers might find this recording when things are returned to normal; if so, my paper outlining the possible anomalies arising from this situation is available from the Galactic Archive, catalog number JBOCD1.”

William smiled. Paul was always trying to get others to read his work.

“To the person trapped on Equinox,” continued Paul, “I will give a brief description of what I think is happening.

“The cosmic forces involved in the alignment of Equinox, its sun, and its moon, cause a very brief but powerful distortion of space-time. As the system's gravity reaches its strongest point, when Equinox's moon lies between the planet and the sun, it causes an incalculably small jolt in the space and time encompassing Equinox.

“Normally, this would have effects only interesting in a theoretical sense. But the aliens built equipment at the bottom of this structure that keeps the orbits stable. The field generated by the gravity node causes interference every time the celestial bodies align; at a time when life is most vulnerable to such interference, it kills anything that happens to be on the planet.

“It killed me. It will kill you. I want you to think about this for a few minutes. Accept it, then open the file called 'Instructions.”'

It was a lot to understand; physics had never been William's strongest subject. But one thing, the most important thing, made sense: he was truly going to die. After he had witnessed the staggering carnage that Equinox inflicted on the living, it only seemed appropriate, inevitable, fitting. He would die as countless others had died, and that was the end of it. Why even keep walking to the surface? Why bother, when he was so very tired? Because Paul had said so. Without missing a step, William opened the file Paul had mentioned and kept walking at a tired but steady pace.

“I'm glad you chose to continue,” said Paul. “Otherwise you would have been useless, even if my plan is perfectly feasible.” William heard him add a smile to his words. “It means so much to me.

“Back to business. I did, in fact, make it all the way down to the bottom of this place, and, as I said, there were some real marvels down there. I even found a group of aliens, long dead, but without a sign of decay. Like all the old bodies here, they were dehydrated. It was still an incredible sight. I used this device to take photographs; feel free to view them when your task is done.

“Among the things I found there was the primary control to the node that keeps this damnable system running. If I had any knowledge of the language and computer systems of these aliens, I might be able to shut the node down gracefully. As things are, the only way is to destroy it manually, by brute force.

“Believe me when I say I tried. I had nothing hard enough to crack the casing around the circuitry. After I almost broke my hand in wild, vain efforts to succeed, the idea struck me to use the body parts of any people or aliens I could find. It was disgusting and futile work. After all that, I realized I only needed one thing: a simple hammer. The explorer who died at the top of this long ramp has something like that on her tool belt. I should have brought it with me. I was too far down to make it to the surface in time, not to mention going all the way back down so that I could destroy the machinery. From where I sit, I estimate that it will take six hours to reach the surface. You should still be able to get there, but you won't come back down. All I need you to do is to get the hammer, hold on to it, and make yourself conspicuous so that the next person to come here will notice you, listen to this recording, and end the cycle by taking the rock with her and destroying the node controls. You've made it this far, and I think it's a reasonable task. Good luck.”

The recording ended there.

He had referred to the next person as “her.” Could he mean Angela?

Still walking, William opened the last two files on the microcomputer, starting with “To William”

I only regret that we couldn't have this last adventure together. Know that you are about to end something that has taken more lives than anything we have ever known.

Paul.

The note to Angela was quite a bit longer:

Angela,

Paul.

He was always a sucker for Angela.

Through his numbness and the hopeless resolve that had let him come this far, William felt at peace with himself, and perhaps more importantly, at peace with Equinox.

His part in its long history would soon be over. He moved a little more quickly, and with a smile on his face.

The hours melted past. Before he was fully aware of it, William breathed the cool dawn air of Equinox. The sun had risen, and it was making its way toward its apex, where the moon would eclipse it, completing the killing cycle once more. The cargo ship in the distance was a small, gleaming spot on the wasteland.

How would Angela climb back on board once she had come out of the ground? The pile of bodies that had greeted him was tall enough only for jumping out, not for going back in.

He would not let Angela die on Equinox, especially not after all she would have to experience beforehand. To die of starvation or thirst was an insult in this place.

There was a way to go aboard; he knew it. He would think about it while he waited to die. The hammer had been on the explorer's tool belt, just as Paul had said. William had picked it up and now is eyes drank in the barren land. The stark beauty was a good last sight.

He turned the hammer in his hands. It was of dense metal, its matte surface dully reflecting the sunlight. He pictured himself many times his size, stomping over to the ship and cracking it open for Angela with the hammer.

Too bad there's a security system, he mused.

Something tingled in the back of his mind.

Security.

Security!

And with that thought, he turned the computer on, made sure it had enough battery power, and began the last program he would ever make.

The sun had dimmed by the time William had perfected the code. It wasn't a cloud that obstructed the sun, it was a whole moon. He had checked and double-checked his code to be sure it would work, and once he was satisfied, he opened the note Paul had written for Angela, adding his own text.

P.S.—If you want to board the cargo ship, get really close to it, preferably near one of the landing bays, and run the routine on this device named “Security.” It will send a radio signal to the ship that emulates those it expects from the non-existent loading vehicles. The ship will lower a platform and take you back to the cargo hold. From there, you're home free.

William

William smiled, turned the computer off, and tilted his head back. So, so tired. He took a look at the eclipsing sun, then went inside the building, to the beginning of the ramp that led all the way to the bottom of that place. After dropping down to the floor, he placed the computer on his lap. I never got to see the photos, he thought. I'm sure Angela will like them.

He held the hammer loosely in one hand, and with the other, he pointed down the ramp. Then he leaned forward in the encroaching darkness and slept forever.

© 2001–2008 Jonathan G. Irons—All Rights Reserved