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You know the story, right? Everyone does. At age eighteen she left home to busk on street corners and train platforms, just her and her acoustic guitar, singing to an indifferent crowd. Everyone liked to claim they’d been to one of those performances, these days—that they’d clapped, or tossed a coin, or at the very least had stopped to listen rather than simply going about their day the way so many others had. If that were true, it may not have taken an alien invasion to jumpstart her career. As it was, it wasn’t until she was about twenty that the name Neichel truly became known, and even then, it hadn’t been about her music. Not really.
You know the story, of course. That she’d barely had a penny to her name when she’d first arrived in the big city; that she’d worked three part-time jobs to cover rent; that she’d slept in parks the months she couldn’t make it. That she’d volunteered for a time at a local radio station, and it was there she’d recorded her earliest songs in exchange for the station’s right to play them, and it was because of that station that anyone had come to know her music at all.
Her songs were a dreamer’s songs, her biographers would later say (but of course you know this). Ethereal and timeless, almost otherworldly, yet with a certain innocence about them, too. They were songs that gave voice to childhood dreams, stirring and sweet. Yet there had been no question, in the minds of those early listeners, of their simply being dreams. Her lyrical style was too whimsical, the worlds she saw impossible. She sang of clockwork stars that granted broken wishes; of the wellsprings from which all dreams flowed; of gardeners whose flowers could grow to reach the heavens but never reach the one they loved. They were metaphors, allegories, fairytales, not to be taken seriously.
But then there came the incident in Redgar.
There’s nothing that brings a people together quite like a common enemy—nothing that awakens the patriotism in a people’s collective hearts quite like a shared victory. Something incomprehensible had descended into the wastes of a part of the world already scarred by disaster, but it had been contained, the monster soundly defeated, and the energy in the atmosphere afterwards was nothing so still or placid as relief. It was electric. Take that, the whole world sang. Take that.
In that atmosphere of hysterical celebration, someone at the radio station put together a rotation of songs about space—maybe trying to be edgy, maybe trying to be funny—and, as I’m sure you are aware, one of them was hers.
Like so many of her songs, it was a fable. It was the story of a star that fell, and broke, and scattered, and of those who cut their palms catching its pieces in bottles, that they might use its fragments to grant their wishes.
Perhaps, in another world, that could have been it. It could have simply been a song.
In this world—
Hey, someone somewhere said. ‘Red mountains’ is kind of specific, huh?
Hey, someone somewhere said. Why would a star have wings?
Hey, someone somewhere said. What year is this from again?
It takes time, to leave a planet. Even with newly-perfected warp technology, even with a destination already in mind, there are so many considerations to be made. There are paths to be charted, terraforming to be done, infrastructure to be established. It cannot happen all at once.
How many years does that take, then? Five? Ten? Thirty?
Plenty of time for a girl with a guitar to become a voice known around the world.
“Do you want me to go through the whole tour spiel?”
“That won’t be necessary,” the woman called Neichel laughed.
“Good,” her guide said with a smile. “I’m not sure I even remember it all. We wound up letting the AI do most of the talking towards the end. Still, I’ll do my best to answer any questions you have, so please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you.”
No pomp and circumstance accompanied her arrival, no cameras or members of the press. Perhaps her visit would have attracted more attention once, but with the Day of Departure fast approaching, there were few media outlets still active, and of those that were, few were interested in anything so mundane as celebrity gossip, even gossip about Neichel. She was greeted only by lab employees, and while they were initially as deferent as anyone might expect them to be, they soon became relaxed. It was like she was but an old friend come to visit, rather than the voice of the New World Project come for what was to be Lab Discovera’s final tour.
The lab had already closed its doors to the general public, but when it had been open, its museum had played host to a number of exhibits, all with the stated goal of promoting science communication and forging connections across the globe. Come to Lab Discovera and learn about the natural forces that shape our planet. Come to Lab Discovera and ponder how our society may yet evolve. Come to Lab Discovera and ask yourself: what kind of future do you want? Shall we discover it together?
Most of those exhibits were missing on the day of the final tour. The displays had long since been removed, the majority of objects and specimens either packed away or safely disposed of, leaving behind little of interest. But that was all right, Neichel had assured the employees when she had made her request. There was only one thing she wanted to see, anyway.
“This place used to feel friendlier, I promise,” her guide noted as she was led down a particularly industrial-looking hallway. “But maybe you know that? I was told you’ve been here before.”
“Only once, back when the museum first opened.”
“That long ago? Wow. You picked a good time for a second visit—we’re basically operating on a skeleton crew these days, so if you’d waited much longer, there may not have been anyone left to take you in.”
At this, Neichel only smiled, saying nothing.
“Admittedly, some of the spooky atmosphere is by design,” her guide continued, swiping a magnetic ID card to open yet another heavily-secured door. “Our younger visitors found the specimen scarier than anticipated, so our Director of Science Communications had the idea to lean into that by making seeing it feel more like a test of courage. You’re not easily frightened, are you?” she added, tone almost teasing.
Neichel shook her head. Still smiling, still saying nothing.
“That’s good. There really isn’t anything to be afraid of—we wouldn’t allow visitors if it weren’t perfectly safe.”
ID-F86’s containment chamber was, in many ways, a relic. ID-F86 itself had been inactive for decades, with the researchers in charge of its keeping seeing no reason to fear its coming out of dormancy. Still, no one wanted to risk moving it, and as a result, it had never left its original room, not even after Lab Discovera had opened its museum. The posters, signage, and seating that had once decorated the chamber had long since been removed, leaving it looking barren, yet Neichel’s guide smiled and bowed her in all the same, as though welcoming her into a theatre that had simply been awaiting its audience.
Perhaps it didn’t matter how stark the chamber was. After all, that would never be what someone entering it would notice first. One’s attention could only ever be dominated by ID-F86 itself.
It was ugly. Hideously so. It resembled a fetus that had somehow become malignant, its enormous head existing utterly out of proportion with its larva-like body and pink, wrinkled skin stretched so thin one could almost see through it to the foreign organs it contained. What’s more was that it was hideous in a way no animal native to █████ could be. Even the strangest and most grotesque creatures of the deepest seas and darkest jungles bore the mark of planetary kin, yet here was something wholly and utterly alien, something that repelled and fascinated in equal measure.
There was no barrier between her and the observation glass, yet Neichel only went halfway across the room before stopping.
“You can go closer, if you want,” her guide remarked. “Like I said, it’s perfectly safe.”
“I shouldn’t,” Neichel replied, and she stayed at a distance, gazing quietly up at the capsule, guide by her side with her hands folded neatly before her.
“Why does it look like this now?” Neichel asked abruptly.
“Without other specimens to observe, it’s been hard to say for sure, but there’s been speculation that this is simply how the species ages. It’s been here for a long time, after all.”
“Is that what you believe, too?”
A co-director of Lab Discovera’s Centre for Astrobiology would naturally have an opinion of her own, regardless of how long it had been since she had participated in direct research involving ID-F86.
What she said was: “That is the prevailing understanding, yes.”
“I see.”
The containment chamber was never truly silent. It was alive, always, with the thrumming of the energy needed to maintain ID-F86’s capsule. But silence crept its way into the space left by Neichel’s words regardless.
“The subspecimen,” she said a moment later. Her gaze was still fixed, unwavering, on the capsule. “Do you know what happened to it?”
“I’m afraid not. We never did manage to track it down, despite its tag. At least it doesn’t seem to have caused the same kind of ecological damage ID-F86 did—that would have been impossible not to notice.”
“What would you have done with it if you had been able to recapture it?”
“ID-F86 wound up giving us everything we needed for our spatial teleportation research, so if we’d had ID-F87 as well, we likely would have taken a fairly different direction with it. I know there had been interest in comparing their physiologies, so—"
“So it would have meant renewed experimentation?”
“Of course. Having a second specimen would have introduced all kinds of exciting new possibilities for xenobiological research.”
For a second time, Neichel said, “I see.”
The ever-presence of sound in the chamber was due to more than just the humming of electricity and whirring of instruments. It was also due to the ghosts of old voices that rocked and beat unsteadily against the room’s four walls. If ever there was silence found within, it was found entirely in the shape of the woman called Neichel and the words she did not speak.
It was a silence that broke for a final time when she asked, “Are you really going to just leave it here?”
“We have to,” the director answered simply. “We can’t justify the amount of energy it would take to bring it with us. Fortunately, we haven’t needed it for quite some time.”
Briefly, Neichel’s gaze flickered away from the capsule and towards the director. “It feels strange to simply abandon it.”
“I mean, we’re not bringing our nuclear waste with us, either. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? A total clean slate. And just in time, too.”
“Nuclear waste isn’t alive, though.”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Don’t be. It’s in stasis; it doesn’t care what happens to it.”
At last, Neichel turned fully towards her companion. Her eyes, the director would later say, were strangely bright.
“It’s not in stasis,” she said. “It’s awake.”
Had it been anyone but Neichel, the director might have laughed this off.
But this was the miracle girl, the soothsaying songstress, the woman with the voice who pulled dreams across time and space. The diva to whom everything was owed.
And so instead she said, “Well, for god’s sake, don’t tell anybody.”
In the end, Neichel gave no clear reason for her decision to stay behind. Perhaps no reason could have been fully understood. She was Neichel, after all. Her songs had been the banner under which the planet’s people had willingly marched aboard the spaceship New World. She could have had a place of honour on that ship had she been but willing to accept it, and those who loved her could only be heartbroken that she wouldn’t.
You won’t miss me, she’s reported to have said when asked why she would not be joining the planetary exodus, still smiling that ever-enigmatic smile of hers. You’ll have Neichel’s voice with you the entire time.
I’m sorry, she is not reported to have said. I know it wasn’t enough.
If there truly was a world somewhere like the one Neichel claimed to be able to see in her dreams, then her songs might have led one to believe it would be paradise. A world in which anyone might hope to belong, regardless of the weight of the darkness they carried with them; a world of fresh spring breezes and new beginnings.
Who wouldn’t long for such a world?
But in time, even the cities of a dreamland can become overgrown, its structures abandoned and its people forgotten. And in history, it shall be written: paradise burns like everything else.
But of course you know that.