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“I just don’t think I am cut out for this career, I hardly understood a thing in today’s lecture!” Ykvsm exclaimed in dismay.
Xey, along with xeir close friend, Kwrrh, were hovering along the Academy grounds, back to the small dormitory that they shared. It had been a long and brutally challenging lesson today, both mentally and physically, but that’s just what it took to become an astrochemist.
Kwrrh interlaced one of veir antennas with Ykvsm’s; a comforting gesture. “I know how smart and capable you are. Just give it some more time, you’ll get into the motion of things.”
Ykvsm’s tail flicked back and forth in annoyance. “I dunno…”
“Listen,” Kwrrh stopped to hover in front of Ykvsm. “You’ve spent the majority of your life working towards becoming an astrochemist. You knew it was going to be hard, you knew what you were getting into,” said Kwrrh.
“I know,” Ykvsm groaned. “But you’re better at this stuff than me, it’s easier for you to say that.”
“I’m not better at it than you, I just practice it more.”
“That means that you’re better.”
“Then come with me to the labs, I’ll show you some projects I’ve been working on!” Kwrrh suggested.
Ykvsm hummed in thought. “I dunno. I have a lot of studying to do before next lecture.”
“Books will only get you so far, you need actual experience in the lab to…” Kwrrh trailed off mid-sentence.
“What?” asked Ykvsm.
Kwrrh pointed one of veir tendrils behind Ykvsm, up into the sky. “What is that?”
Ykvsm turned to follow the line of pointing. Xeir hovering lowered a bit in confusion.
At some arbitrary point, high up in the atmosphere, a bright, deep red streak was beginning to form across the sky.
“Wait woah, what is that?” Xey asked, echoing Kwrrh.
Several others throughout the Academy grounds also began to turn their attention to the sky. The red streak was starkly contrasting to the usual pale green or sometimes blue clouds of the atmosphere. Murmurs of confusion spread amongst the crowd of pupils, as no one could seem to find an explanation for this anomaly.
The streak then began to grow, longer, redder, and brighter. Suddenly the interest of the anomaly turned into unease.
Almost unconsciously, Ykvsm floated closer to Kwrrh in fright. “What’s going on? Could that be an asteroid?”
“I don’t know,” Kwrrh could only flutter the ends of veir tendrils in confusion.
Long moments passed, and the streak did not fade. In fact, it grew even larger, and even brighter. Kwrrh and Ykvsm were forced to look away because of how blinding it had quickly become to their sensitive eyes.
“We should go inside,” suggested Kwrrh, and Ykvsm wasn’t going to argue for a second. The two took off down the courtyard, quickly flying over inside one of the buildings, where several other pupils began to follow suit.
“This is crazy!” someone cried out.
“It’s probably nothing,” another person tried.
“How can it be nothing?! The sky is on fire!”
Ykvsm retrieved xeir info-catalogue from xeir satchel, and put in the prompt: big red streak in the sky.
It came up with nothing. No information on this sort of thing at all. Xey shared a worried look with Kwrrh, who was currently stroking veir antennae in an attempt to keep calm. It was unnerving to say the least; Kwrrh always kept a very level head. That’s why vey were surely going to be an exceptional astrochemist. So seeing vem actually nervous about something was not helping Ykvsm’s fears.
The two of them stayed inside for a while, waiting for something to happen. For something to explode, for someone to notify that it was all over, for-
Clink.
A noise came from the roof. Kind of like hail, but more metallic.
Clink-clank.
Kwrrh, ever curious, peered out the door to the courtyard. Was something… falling from the sky? Just as vey thought that,
Plunk.
Something small and roundish hit the ground hard, right in front of the entrance. Vey peered down in utter confusion for a moment before the shape of the object began to make sense.
“Is that a chain?” Kwrrh asked. Vey gingerly poked at the chain with a tendril, finding it hot to the touch, but not terribly so. Vey picked it up, turning it over and over. Yep, that was a chain link all right; oval with a little notch to fit more links.
Vey looked up to the sky, to the chain, then back up to the sky, and back to the chain. “Did this just fall out of the sky?”
The small gathering inside the building hovered over curiously towards Kwrrh. “That wasn’t there before?” Ykvsm asked.
“Look! There’s another!” Someone pointed further out in the courtyard, and rushed to go retrieve it. Then they took it back to Kwrrh to compare.
Sure enough, the two chain links looked like they came from a common source. The shapes were identical, and they both had this weird tan and black blotchy pattern to it.
It turns out, the academy wasn’t the only location that experienced the strange chain-rain. In fact, in the following few days all along the western plains, people had been reporting that they too were finding these odd random single links of chain. Someone even became hospitalized because they had been struck with one.
No one could figure out why they were here, or what they meant, but there seemed to be an unexplainable conclusion that these came from outer space. After all, they had fallen from the sky.
After several days of searching, tens of thousands of them were turning up all over the place, possibly hundreds of thousands, strewn across the entire continent. In fact, for the kyxch (the playful creatures that they are) it quickly turned into a little game, known as Chain-Hunting.
People would go out around their respective cities, or the surrounding wilderness, and look for these links of chain. Once they found one, they’d upload the location onto their profile on Chattersnap, and tally up how many they’d found in total.
Some got really into it, and had dedicated loads of time into finding hundreds of these things. It became somewhat of a niche bragging right to display your link of chain across your clothing, or as decor inside your home.
That was cute and all, but Kwrrh was fearing that people were missing the bigger picture. These came from outer space after all (maybe?), so vey wanted to know why they were here, and what they were made of.
Being a future astrochemist, vey of course had laboratory equipment readily accessible. One of which was an element analyzer. All vey had to do was knock off a small chip of the chain, so vey could put it into the slot of the analyzer.
So with a chisel in tendril, vey got to work at knocking off a small chunk.
After several hits, the chisel snapped in two.
“Oh!” Kwrrh exclaimed in surprise. “Whoops.”
So this chain was tough. Luckily, the labs also had a diamond cutter tool for situations just like this. Well, not the situation of examining a chain that literally fell from the sky, but the general situation of needing to cut a very tough material.
Unluckily though, the diamond cutter tool had to be shared among thousands of other students at the Academy, so the waitlist was usually stupidly long. Kwrrh just had to go see for veirself.
…
The blessings were upon vem today! Only one other person was on the waitlist, and they had finished their work a quarter day ago. “Nice!” Kwrrh exclaimed, bringing the chain into the lab with the diamond cutter. The machine was very simple to use, and in fact vey had used it multiple times for some other personal experiments.
After a few minutes of cutting, a piece of the chain snapped off; a perfect size to fit in the element analyzer.
Once vey put it in, the analyzer hummed to life, and only moments later, it reported the element of-
“Xenon?” Kwrrh asked aloud in confusion. “Um… what?”
Vey re-ran the analyzer, four more times in fact, but it still came up with the same strange readings. Kwrrh stopped hovering completely, as suddenly all veir focus went into thinking about this chain. Now it only brought up more questions than it answered.
Vey knew about xenon of course, vey would be a pretty bad aspiring astrochemist if vey didn’t. But everything vey knew, scratch that, everything vey thought vey knew about the element did not line up with what was being observed.
For starters, xenon was a notoriously rare element, found on the order of something like 0.00003 parts per million. There was practically no way that someone could have harvested this much to create such an arbitrary object.
Secondly, xenon was a noble gas, one of the most un reactive elements ever discovered. It doesn’t naturally form bonds with anything, nothing naturally found in the atmosphere anyway. And how could a gas be incorporated into this solid form? How on Adrian could this have possibly been created?
Well…
That’s just it.
How on Adrian could it have been created? But what about from somewhere else?
Could these somehow be alien made?
Kwrrh jerks upright at the absurd thought. No, no way. That’s a stupid assumption, aliens weren’t real. For these chains to have come from aliens, there would have to be a ship or something literally in orbit right now around the planet, which couldn’t possibly be true. And why would aliens deliver chain of all things to Adrian? What, would they have just sprinkled them down into the atmosphere for no apparent reason?
It was originally thought to be remnants of one of the satellites in orbit, made from a component that was kept top secret from the general public. Although now, the mystery of the chains were getting to the point where the United Adrian Aerospace Exploration Foundation had to come out and put their two cents on it. Every single satellite, every space launch, every thing in space was made by them. And even they didn’t know what the chains were from.
As of right now, no one, absolutely no one had a reasonable explanation as to where these might have come from. And that was irritating to say the least.
Kwrrh took out veir contacter to call up Ykvsm on Chattersnap. After a couple moments, xey picked up.
"What’s up?” asked Ykvsm.
“I took one of the chain links to the Academy labs, and I discovered something really odd about them.”
“Odder than the fact that they fell from the sky?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” Kwrrh laughed. “They’re made out of xenon.”
A pause on the other line. “Huh?!”
“I know, right?”
“But that makes no sense? Xenon is one of the rarest elements on Adrian! Not to mention it’s a gas!” xey exclaimed in disbelief.
“I know!” Kwrrh repeated.
“Are you sure the equipment is calibrated right?”
“I am sure.”
Another pause. “You should tell someone about this.”
“I did, I told you,” Kwrrh said, matter-of-factly.
“Well no duh, but I mean publishing it so that others can confirm.”
“Ugh,” Kwrrh sagged in annoyance. “I’m so not in the mood to write up a paper about this.”
“Just post it on your profile. Or ask one of the profs tomorrow.”
“People might just say that it’s fake.”
“Yeah, maybe. Or, you could be credited towards a new massive discovery about these things.”
…
Fortunately for Kwrrh, it was the latter that became true. Initially, of course people believed it to be fake, until dozens of other analytical chemists around the continent made the discovery for their own. And it wasn’t just a fluke, every single chain was made of the exact same, unexplainable compound.
The question was now, what was everyone supposed to do with this information? Did it really matter? Or was every new discovery just blowing up in popularity, because of the Chain-Hunting fad?
Well for the material scientists of Adrian, yes it was very useful. If they could find a way to easily harvest or generate xenon, then perhaps they could create this strange compound as well. But that alone was also another clue into everyone truly arriving to the conclusion that the chain links could be made by people other than the kyxch. Because no one actually knew to replicate it. Not the United Adrian Aerospace Exploration Foundation, not any of the best material scientists in the world, not even the company which owned the majority of the xenon gas on the planet.
So then, the question became not what were they made of, but who made them?
If there was an answer to the ‘who’, it would be found up there, in space. After all, maybe they still were here.
The kyxch, with their unparalleled biological fuel, Astrophage, had space travel incorporated into their culture for hundreds of years. They knew their way around the Tau Ceti system well enough, so putting things in orbit around their own planet was terribly easy. A few hundred satellites, as well as three space stations were up there. They each had some form of radar and detection technology equipped, so there was a way for some of the satellites to scan around in space.
For the first several weeks, nothing was found. Adrian was a big planet, and trying to find anything out of the ordinary across an entire planet would be like trying to find a grain of sugar on a mountain of salt.
It was beginning to look like these chains were created out of literally thin air.
Until, something actually was found. Two objects were located in orbit, and it was immediately obvious that they were not from Adrian.
They were large and cylindrical in shape, with what looked to be holes melted into the side. The cylinders displayed symbols along the sides of both of them:
HAIL MARY TANK 3, and HAIL MARY TANK 6
What that could possibly mean, no one knew. It was unlike anything that any kyxch had ever seen before on Adrian.
Further analysis led to the discovery that they were made of aluminum. Adrian space tech was made out of titanium, carbon fibre, and aerogel; never aluminum. Then when the cylinders were brought down to the surface, the best minds in the planet all collaborated together to figure out what these were.
Taking apart the cylinders led to some bizarre and very foreign machinery, that trying to understand would be like trying to decipher what HAIL MARY TANK 3 meant. From their levels of understanding, the best that they could come up with was that it was some abandoned piece of a spaceship.
And that’s when the dots started to connect.
That’s what the red streak was that wrapped around the planet. It was the orbit path of a ship, an alien ship. The red flare, that was the burn from the engines, burning Astrophage for propulsion, just like they did!
Millions of the kyxch had looked up into the sky that day, and saw the engine flares of a real life alien. Freaking. Spaceship. And only weeks later did they actually come to that conclusion. They were too late.
Real, actual, legitimate aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to figure out how to bind xenonite to other elements. Aliens intelligent enough to create an interstellar spaceship, and fly here. But why here?! Why now? Did they know about the kyxch, and this was all an attempt at first contact? Had the kyxch just been utterly oblivious, and literally missed their chance to actually meet intelligent extra terrestrial life?! Where had they come from? Why did they leave? Where are they now?
So. Many. Questions.
Questions that the kyxch feared would never be answered. But questions that Kwrrh and Ykvsm knew they would be dedicating the rest of their lives to.
…
“Rocky?” Grace asked one night, about a month into their journey to Erid.
“Yes, Grace,” Rocky replied. It was well past his mandated bedtime for Grace, but Rocky knew that pestering him about going to sleep would only further annoy him. He’d complain about ‘not being able to sleep’, which of course made no sense to the Eridian.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“That is surprising.”
Grace sat half up-right with a look of mock offence. “Cool it with the snark.”
“Apology. What is it, question?”
The human laid back down onto his bed. “So, you and I come from a common ancestor right, an Astrophage-like ancestor?”
“I think so. Not certain, but is best explanation as to how we both have DNA and similar cells.”
“Right. So that primitive life form must have originated on Adrian.”
“Most likely, yes.”
“Do you think there was intelligent life on Adrian too?”
Rocky, currently fiddling with his laptop, freezes. He sets down a tool in thought, for some reason not having considered that yet. “I… I don’t know.” Rocky spent 46, almost 47 years in that system, and not once had he ever found any evidence of such.
Grace rolled onto his side to prop up his head. “I can’t stop thinking about it. Because if from that common ancestor, it could generate complex, multicellular life, and then eventually intelligent life, on two incredibly different planets, then surely it could do the same on it’s home world, right?”
“If there was intelligent life, they might not have known we were here at all. I don't think they ever tried to communicate to me."
“Maybe they did know we were here, and chose to not contact us.”
“Chose to not contact us, question? Why, question?”
“I don’t know, maybe they have a different world view of aliens than we do, and aliens are something to be feared.”
The two of them stay quiet for a moment, thinking of the possibility.
“Intelligent life is not obligated to form from complex life. Our planets had life for billions of years before the human or the Eridian evolved,” Rocky pointed out. Just because a planet had life, didn’t mean that a conscious species had to exist. Maybe Adrian was just full of animals, or plants that didn’t know how to talk and think like they did.
“Yeah. Still interesting though,” said Grace. If only the atmosphere of Adrian was thinner, then he’d be able to see the surface and possibly confirm it.
“Maybe I hope intelligent life didn’t evolve on Adrian.”
“What? Why’s that?”
“We destroyed a big part of their atmosphere.”
Ooh… yeah. The ionization from the Hail Mary’s engines was probably not the greatest thing to the plausible life down on Adrian. Who knows how many of the microbial species in the upper atmosphere they brutally cooked to death, probably on the order of billions, if not trillions. But there was literally no other work-around, so sacrificing the bacteria things was just what they had to do. Sorry, bacteria.
Grace shrugged. “Eh, I’m sure they were fine.”