This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions Issue #3
My grandmother used to tell me stories of how the sky used to be smooth. Beyond the clouds during daytime, the atmosphere was always an uninterrupted blue, silk-like veneer, hiding the mysteries of the cosmos beyond. This was before The Precipitation happened.
One day without warning, the sky’s azure tinges were replaced with a paler, yellow canvas. Smoothness became membranous; forming a continuous mosaic of yellow spheres along the lining of the sky.
When I was a kid, our kindergarten teacher made us paint pictures of the sky before The Precipitation. It was simple – take a brush, dip it in light blue paint, and swipe it across the canvas. We were then told to paint horizontal bubbles at the top of the canvas to mark the alien boundaries that sequestered us from outer space.
My friend, Sarah, cried when she was done with her painting. Upon asking her, she said that we were trapped in by the mean aliens. She was not entirely wrong. Our entire atmosphere was strangely bubble wrapped within an impermeable matrix.
Exploration of space was impeded by the mosaic of spheres. Named the BioMosaic, the bubbles prevented the exit of any new satellites or spacecraft into space. I remember our teacher telling us that a huge missile would be sent out that very day to destroy the bubbles and we would have blue skies once more. But the next day’s newspaper left us all disappointed. The mission was a failure.
Unscathed, untouchable, perpetually unaffected by the explosion from the nuclear missile, the force of the explosions raining upon the BioMosaic’s surface only made it jiggle and reverberate, rippling through the entire mosaic.
Life still went on uneventfully. People went to work. Corporations continued to squeeze people dry. Wildlife prospered and went extinct. Only the sky was different.
It was beginning to make humans claustrophobic.
The Precipitation wasn’t the only oddity that haunted us. From those bubbles, crystal showers began exuding onto the surface of Earth; tiny, pin-like white crystal fractals falling to the ground. Of course, the immediate thought, when they first began to fall, was that these crystals were dangerous; that it would prick and injure all the life below. But it was not like that at all. The Crystal Rain dropped as languidly as snowflakes, as solid as soot and stone.
The crystal powders served no purpose. It was more of a nuisance, having those white crystals clogging the engine of my father’s car. I remember reaching out for a fistful of crystal from the small pile on the ground outside my home once. They seeped out through the gaps of my small fingers, just like sand. Even as a kid, when everyone else was cursing at the BioMosaic for encasing us within an impenetrable tomb and showered upon our earth’s surface with useless crystal powders, I always thought that the aliens were trying to tell us something. It would come as a hum in my head. But just like you would know where the chirp of a bird comes from, it was just instinctive to me that the BioMosaic was humming into my mind.
The hum came not as sounds, but as pictures. The BioMosaics were trying to convey something. It was that fateful day when I found out, that I had been given a gift.
“Anouk, what are you doing sweetie?” my father asked.
I was standing on the lawn, white just after another rainy spell of crystals. Excited, I gathered the powder and began prodding it on the ground to form a hemispherical mound. Something odd happened then. The powder fused together. It became a whole, solid lump. I yelled for my father to come see what I did.
He stood there with a furrow in his eyebrows, unsure of what to make of the situation. When he asked me how it happened, I told him that the aliens showed me how.
“I’m going to build a castle next!” I announced, grabbing more of the extra-terrestrial granules. The hum in my head was getting stronger. “The aliens want a long pole stretching for the sky.”
For the first time in my childhood, father shouted at me to drop the crystals from my hand. He proceeded to lift the solid lump of amalgamated powders from our lawn, and threw it over our fence as one would a dirty dog. Without an explanation, I was brought into the house. After the incident, father insisted I be home-schooled. I was separated from the other kids, from the outside world and my abilities kept secret from the world. My parents became jailors. What was love was now replaced with the provision of basic necessities. They rarely spoke to me, choosing instead to keep me in the room.
All I had for company were the voices of the BioMosaics in my head. They kept humming out pictures for me to see in my mind’s eye. There was one of a crystal palace, another of a pyramid, but often, it would be one of a simple tower, stretching from the ground to the sky. Every time the Crystal Rain happened, their voices would grow stronger. My hands shook, eager to shape the tower they so desired, but I wasn’t let out for a very long time.
*
Twenty-six years had passed since I was that little girl on the lawn. Adulthood had a funny way of playing tricks on the way I viewed the world. What was once my blessing, to receive messages from the BioMosaics, I now looked at as a curse.
Humans were surprisingly communal when it came to abhorring the BioMosaics. They were united in their feelings of being trapped by the alien life forms. Crystal Rain piled the earth’s surface up, hilly mounds forming here, there, everywhere. We learnt to live with it.
I couldn’t keep the voices of the BioMosaics at bay. Just like the piles of crystal everywhere, I compartmentalized it somewhere deep within my mind. I went to work and stayed out of trouble. Mother had scared me into thinking that those who claimed they heard the voices of the Aliens would be locked up in a mental institution far, far away. Not a day went by when I yearned to take those fine granules and shape them into something tangible. But the fear of judgment prevented me from doing so.
It was then that I met Domlen. He came into my office on a quiet Wednesday morning. My eyes appraised his frayed straw hat, plaid shirt, faded jeans and shoes caked with dried mud and soil. He walked into my office, clearly a man out of place in the city. Still, he seemed comfortable being there.
Giving out a toothy smile, he adjusted his straw hat and said, “The name is Domlen, Miss.”
He had an unforgettable face; his voice easily overcame by the creak of the ceiling fan. It would have seemed that this slight man had never been angry about anything. He did not even seem too perturbed by anything.
“How may I help you, Domlen?” I offered him a seat, to which he declined.
The stranger stood in front of me, a serene smile plastered across his sun-beaten face.
“Miss, I am a farmer from upstate, about sixty miles from here.”
“In Shile?”
“That’s the one, Miss,” he adjusted his hat. The hands were empty, calloused, yet somehow comforting to see. “We grow them potatoes out there.”
“Why are you here today?” I asked him. The smell of the grass was strong in his odor. Earlier that week, there was a report of a huge inundation of Crystal Rain on the fields in Shile. It had impeded farm work considerably. The white veneer of crystal powder clogged the soils and farm equipment, making it hard for the harvest to continue.
He did not have to use his words. He reached for his pocket to grasp at a pile of those white crystals from the sky. Scattering the powder on my already messy table, I could not help but be annoyed by his actions.
Then, he did something amazing. In front of my very eyes, he brushed the powder to form a small mound on my table, as one would do when they were to build the base of a sandcastle. I watched the tiny fragmented lines between the crystal particles vanish. One by one, they began melding towards one another. He continued brushing them together, shaping the lump to form a more conical appendage protruding off my tabletop.
When he was done, the crystal fragments had solidified under his mysterious touch. A cone was laid on my table, solid and whole. He picked it up and handed it to me, smiling at the slight tremor of awe in my hands.
“You can shape the crystals too?”
He nodded.
It was then I realized that the others might be watching. “Put it away!” I hissed.
Domlen gave me a puzzled smile. I sighed. If anyone could see what we were doing, it would be the madhouse for the both of us. My hands touched the cone. Just as he could solidify the powders to become one big lump, I could reverse its reaction. Upon my touch and whim, the cone dissolved into its original shape, the powder falling onto the ground in front of us.
The excitement on his face was clear. He pointed a shaking finger to the BioMosaics in the sky through the window and said, “They, they have been telling me to come get you! I finally found you, Miss!”
My colleagues were staring. Fortunately, they did not see what had just transpired. But a disheveled farmer shaking his hands passionately at me was enough to warrant anybody’s attention.
“I have something to show you,” he insisted, pulling at my hand.
*
The newspaper reports on the fields of Shile were true. As we progressed towards Domlen’s farm, the sheet of crystals grew thicker. At the last mile, the powder was a thick veneer on the once green lands. I saw cows impotently shift the powder with their hooves in search of grass. White permeated everywhere around, yellow above us. The sleet of Crystal Rain was unyielding, focused upon Domlen’s farm.
Nothing prepared me for what was waiting at his farm. The farmer was pleased to see my mouth agape when we got out of my car. Standing in front of me was a white, crystalline tower stretching sixty feet above the ground.
“You built this?” I asked, tracing my hands along the smoothness of the building. Nothing of its texture now implied its former, brittle, powdery origins.
Domlen nodded. He scooped up a handful of the white crystal powder from the ground and pressed it against the outer wall of the tower. I watched, awestruck, as the building absorbed the powder, and grew just a little taller. My knees weakened.
“How… how did you learn how to do this?” I asked weakly.
“I heard voices, Miss. I did. I know it sounds to you as though I am addled, but I am not!”
“Voices? Whose? What kind of voices?”
“Beg pardon, Miss, I don’t want to sound crazy.”
“Be as honest as you can, Domlen,” I said firmly. “I’m not here to take you to the madhouses.”
“I… I heard the aliens, Miss,” he pointed to the BioMosaic spheres hanging above us. “I heard them call out from up above. Them things up there, they are trying to tell us something.”
The tower stood tall and majestic in front of me. Simple circular walls, tunnel-like and moving vertically to the top. Domlen did not know architecture, and never questioned the fact that the tower stayed in place, upright without a single modicum of foundation. It neither swayed in the wind nor reverberated when he knocked on its wall.
After years of repressing my purpose in life, the tower was a testament to the lie people had created for me. My parents, my teachers, society, all of them had methodically tried to efface the one ability I was given by the BioMosaics. My hands trembled, eager to unlearn all the untruths I had been fed all my life.
“Go on, Miss,” Domlen urged me.
I needed no second invitation. Two hands dug at the crystal powders on the ground. My heart thumped. The hums of the BioMosaics resonated strongly in my mind.
“Tower… tower…” the BioMosaics’ hummed. I could see what the Aliens wanted us to build.
Pressing my hands against the wall of the tower, I watched as the powder vanished into the crystalline structure. The walls pushed upwards, slowly heading towards the sky.
Alas, I have found my purpose.
*
Domlen and I got to work immediately. He was tasked to fashion the insides of the tower. I brought buckets of the crystal powder to the construction site and melded it against the walls. As it absorbed what I fed, the tower continued to grow. Domlen busied himself inside the crystal carapace, building spiral staircases and smoothing the walls. We rarely spoke. There was not much to be said between us. We were brought together by a singular purpose. When two people were connected in the most primal of ways, the mind, there was no need for talk, love, or even sex.
But trouble was on the horizon. As the tower stretched towards the BioMosaics, it began warranting public attention. The fear slowly proliferated throughout the state. People came from far and wide, trying to catch a glimpse of the Crystalline Tower.
Domlen and I remained rooted in our duties. I fed the tower, he shaped it. I fed it, he shaped it. The tower was almost done by now. It stretched so high into the sky, I could not see its tip. As the tower continued growing, so did the humming of the BioMosaics in my mind. The language was incomprehensible, but it urged us on to work harder, faster.
It was not long when the military decided to intervene. The soldiers cordoned off the area around our Crystalline Tower. The public lined the perimeter of the blockade with their picket signs and haranguing. Domlen and I were called “Alien Sympathizers,” “Anti-Humans,” among other things.
We did have our supporters. Passionate artists driven by sublime, out-of-this-world beauty of our crooked Crystalline Tower, endeared to the public to leave us alone. But they were the minority, of course. And no one listened when artists spoke with words. Thus, their move to repeal the protests ended unsuccessfully.
My hands moved without hesitation; scooping at the powder and pressing it against the wall. The BioMosaics’ hum continued to resonate within my mind.
I began to feel places outside the Solar System. Other star systems. Other galaxies. The explosion and swirls of the Demilenere Nebula twenty-five light years away filled my ears, music from the universe.
When I needed someone to talk to, Domlen was there, our minds linked through the fine, interspersing neurons of the Crystalline Tower.
*
The army remained there for five days, unsure of what to do with us. It was then that a woman by the name of Zera chose to begin contact with me. She introduced herself as the General of the Army. I merely nodded when she spoke, too ingrained with my duties, scooping more powder to be fed into the tower.
Her right hand was settled upon her gun holster, and she looked like she very much wanted to just kill me right then and there.
“This tower…, you are building it towards the BioMosaic in the sky?”
I nodded. “We’ve been doing it for two months now.”
“Don’t you feel hunger?” Zera asked. “Our informants say you haven’t left this place, not even for a second.”
“The tower gives us all we need. When we are hungry, it transfers its latent energy into our bodies. There is no need for me to eat or sleep.”
“We have orders to stop you from building this structure,” Zera said. She looked at the tower, her eyebrows crinkled in disgust. “I don’t want this thing completed.”
I was not surprised by her waspish order. Still, I kept calm. “We can’t let that happen. The BioMosaics need us to finish the tower. They are relying on us.”
“Listen here,” Zera said, grabbing my wrist with her muscular grip. “We don’t want to have anything to do with the aliens. For decades, we have been trapped in this cage, this matrix, and nothing can be done! And you want to build this tower just because those alien scums told you to?”
I remained silent. Her arguments meant nothing to me. My other hand touched the wall. I could feel the incontrovertible heartbeat of Domlen. He was somewhere thousands of meters above me, meticulously shaping the insides of the tower. The hum of the BioMosaics and his pulsating heart was the only thing that kept me strong.
“They want to help us, General. That’s what they are telling me.”
General Zera tightened the grip around my wrists. I winced in pain, but did not cry out. The music of the Universe soothed my soul.
“You claim about hearing voices from above? Are you sure it isn’t just voices in your head, Miss Sharma?”
I kept quiet. The BioMosaics told me all I needed to know about the world. Domlen and I weren’t the only people who could meld and shape the crystals. In Switzerland, a four-year old girl had a castle built out of those very crystals. It needed no foundation, steelwork frames or latticed metal beams. She built it from scratch, taking one lump and putting it atop the other, till three years later, it was completed – a shimmering crystal palace. None of the other men or women in town could do the things she did. Quickly, after the castle was built, she was committed to a mental rehabilitative institution, never to be heard of again. There were others who were gifted. A man in South India, a centenarian in Mongolia, a toddler in South Victoria, Australia. And two in South America. Instead of honoring the gifts that were given to these special men, women, and children, the government decided to do away with them. Most of them were locked away, just like the little girl. Two were killed because they defied the imposed dogma.
The barrel of a gun was planted to the side of my head. “Continue building it and I will blow your head off!” she ordered
The BioMosaics’ hums reverberated in my brain. They told me what to say.
“You wouldn’t dare shoot me in front of all these people,” I said hollowly. It was not a challenge, just a fact. I could feel her swallow the saliva formed at the back of her mouth. The shouts and chants from the people around us grew louder. Some called for my death. Others weren’t sure of what to feel.
“You and Domlen are found guilty of unnatural transgressions with the BioMosaics.”
“Unnatural transgressions? All you are interested in is control. You don’t care about the true nature of the BioMosaics and the communication they are trying to bridge between us.”
“Those creatures are vile, Miss Sharma!”
“And you are prejudiced. You, like everyone else, want to have someone or something to blame. And people like Domlen and the BioMosaics, they have to suffer for your inherent selfishness.”
“Idiot woman. The Aliens are merely keeping us caged. Look around you, Miss Sharma. This sentience, if they wanted us to travel the vacuum of space, they would have let us done so!”
I scooped up one pile of powder from the ground and kept it contained within my palm.
“No more, Miss Sharma. No more!” Zera seethed. I could hear the revolver click against my forehead.
“The tower is almost done, Domlen,” I said telepathically.
“Aye, Miss, it is, almost.”
He was thousands of feet above us all, standing at the top of the tower. I could not see him, but I felt him in every fiber of my soul. I smiled. Zera continued shouting into my ears, but it sounded like she was miles away. How could they have thought us mad? We were at peace, fueled by our inherent desire to complete something pure and innocent.
“Are you nervous?” I asked him.
Domlen shook his head. As the months had passed between us, he had grown quieter in words, yet fuller in presence. He was standing just below the BioMosaic. Through him, I could feel the wind roar, and the oxygen poor on such a level, but it did not matter. The tower gave him life and sustenance. For months, we had forgotten what it was to breathe, to sweat or sleep.
“Can you hear them?” Domlen asked happily. “Can you hear their excited hums?”
I heard them from aground. Eager sounds from the BioMosaics filled my mind. A smile rippled across my face.
“What’s going on?” Zera shouted. “Why are you smiling?”
“Domlen is about to complete the tower,” I answered honestly. “He needs, just a little more crystal powder.”
“Send it to me, Miss.”
I held the crystal powders in my hand. The tower was complete. This was the last feed it needed. Domlen would use it to shape the pole, completing the bridge between Earth and the BioMosaics.
“I warn you, Miss Sharma. Feed the building, and I will be forced to shoot you!” Zera said, the hand on her gun unwavering.
Domlen hummed a tune which filled my mind. It was as if he was right next to me. “Music, music. I can hear the music of the universe, Miss. The BioMosaics have been waiting to share them with us!”
I watched with disinterest as Zera ordered for the cruisers to head towards the top of the tower.
“Blow that idiot, Domlen, off the tower if you have to! Make sure he does not complete the structure!” she screamed.
“Domlen, they are going to kill us.”
The cruisers were still below him by a few hundred feet, the distance between them and him fast decreasing.
“It is fine, Miss. Them aliens knew that this was going to happen.”
The farmer, god bless him, was not moved by the time-induced pressure. With the patience of an expert potter, he fashioned the crystal latticework, the last few centimeters. Slowly but surely, the crystal was inching towards the BioMosaic.
A bit more.
“Not another move, Miss Sharma!” Zera repeated her warning.
“Miss, I need just a little more powder,” Domlen relayed the message.
Ah, the farmer. Always so polite and never overbearing. It was ironic to find a man incapable of rudeness build a structure that went against the rules of civilization. The crystal powder was in my hand. The crowds still continued with their hollering and haranguing. Domlen’s voice interspersed with the BioMosaics’ in my head. I knew what was at stake. The cruisers were already at Domlen’s level, missiles aimed at the farmer, ready to pulverize him into a million pieces.
I pushed the last of the powders into the Crystalline Tower. Instantaneously, Domlen received it at the top, thousands of meters above. He only had to pinch the last crystal and push it into the smooth surface of the BioMosaic. And it would be complete.
Everything was suddenly quiet.
“Goodbye, Domlen”
“Goodbye, Miss.”
The silence was immediately sequestered by the loud whooshing of missiles fired towards Domlen. From the side of my head, I heard the loud bang of a gun.
I never had time to know what happened. The explosion was too intense for my eyes to perceive. But I heard it, loud and clear in my mind. I heard the Universe. Even better, I could hear life in other planets, other systems.
*
They say that when you die, only the body goes. It is quite a hard notion to conceive. But, that didn’t happen to me when Zera pulled the trigger. I could still feel the presence of my arms and legs. In that bright light, I took a deep breath. The diaphragm constricted. My ribcage rose. I moved my fingers, touching my nose, lips and teeth.
I was not dead. It was not the explosion that blinded me. The completed Crystalline Tower had extended a pseudopodium to envelop me from the blast of Zera’s gun, encasing my entire body within a protective shell. The music of the Universe continued. I heard Language. Language that came from other planets, in sounds I never would have imagined existed.
“Domlen?”
“I’m here, Miss.”
Relief washed over me, knowing that he was unharmed by the missile blast.
“Do you…”
“I hear them too, Miss! I hear them too! This isn’t vague music anymore!”
I could feel his infectious, teary excitement. The sounds continued fleeting in and out of my mind.
I understood then that this tower we had built was no useless, arbitrary structure. This was a Communication Tower, to transmit our existence to the rest of the universe. The Cable was complete. The BioMosaic was fully connected to the nucleus that was the Earth.
The pseudopodium unraveled from my body. I felt the cool, familiar air of the Earth once again. General Zera stood there with a stunned look on her face, her hands shaking. She cocked the revolver once more, this time at my chest. Where the barrel aimed at, a small coating of white protected me.
“Shooting me will not solve anything, General Zera.”
“You… what have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” she shouted. Another shot was fired. The crowd behind us gasped, I was unharmed. The force of the bullet was absorbed by the white pseudopodium still wrapped around my chest, extending from within the tower. The metallic kernel of the bullet fell impotently to my feet.
“Look!” someone shouted. Gasps reverberated through the crowds.
The BioMosaic spheres began disappearing. One by one, they imploded, and vanished into nothingness. Only a collective few remained in the sky, floating languidly between our atmosphere and space. Yellow began to vanish. From beyond the now vanished BioMosaics, the blue sky began to peek through. The smooth cyan canvas interspersed with the bubbles of yellow. Never had anything looked so beautiful in my life.
“So, that’s what a blue sky actually looks like,” someone said.
“What… what’s happening?” General Zera asked. Many could not process what was happening.
The music of the Universe still radiated in my mind. I could hear the voices of other sentient life in distant galaxies – from Turtlenote 24-X, EcRemi, CiYer, and 45:Edderuplet. We were to carry this message to the leaders of the world. We were the carriers of the messages from the cables that were connected to these other life forms. And they wanted to make contact with us.
“Take us to your leaders, General Zera. We have a message for them,” I said to an astonished military woman.
“A little too corny there, Miss,” Domlen said at the top of the completed Tower.
I laughed the laugh of a person with a purpose fulfilled.
*
“And if you come over here…oh…watch your step over there, the ground here is slightly muddy.”
The tourists from many distant galaxies surrounded the Crystal Tower. The tour guide was happy to see the crowd of thirty or so life forms. Natives from Turtlenote 24-X, EcRemi, and even a family of CiYers hovered around the structure. Humans still made the bulk of the crowd of tourists. They looked up at the tower stretching miles into the yellow, mosaic sky.
Compared to the other Crystalline Towers that followed, this was crude, almost ugly to look at. Yet, there was something primitively beautiful about the crooked way it was built, compared to the other hundred or so towers on earth built thereafter. Two statues flanked the base of the tower, one of a long-haired woman, the other of a man in a straw hat.
“Now,” the tour guide smiled to the crowd. “Can anyone tell me what this tower is?”
A humanoid boy from Turtlenote 24-X put a hand up. The guide gestured for him to speak.
“It is the first communication tower built five hundred years ago!”
The tour guide gestured for everyone to clap at the boy’s correct answer.
“This was the first Galaxy-to-Galaxy communication tower built five hundred and twenty years ago. And as some of you might know, when this first tower was built, it allowed Earth to have trans-galaxy communications with other planets and galaxies easily. Information that would normally take billions of years is now cut short to practically just hours!”
“But why is this tower crooked compared to the rest? Didn’t they have good construction skills then?” a snooty CiYer asked through its Translato-bot.
The guide laughed. “Well, the funny thing is that humans were opposed to the BioMosaics at the time and did not want the tower to be completed. The two people who built this tower, Domlen Blerini and Anouk Sharma, they never had any architectural skills. If you look at the walls here, you can see how the crystals were haphazardly stacked upon one another. It would seem that these two were pressed for time.”
A collective buzz resounded amongst the members of the tour.
The guide pointed at the statues. This was always her favorite part to tell. Tourists always wanted to know what happened to Anouk and Domlen.
“Domlen Blerini was a simple farmer. The land we stand on today used to be his farmland. Anouk over there,” she pointed at the other statue, “… was an office worker. The story has been retold many times, so no one really knows how they met. Some say that they were lovers. Others disprove that. But what we know for sure was that the BioMosaics were the ones who brought them together.”
At this, most of the tourists extended their heads to look at the yellow spheres in the sky. Intermittent and porous, it made the sky look like a bubbly cheese wheel with pools of blue.
“It would be interesting to note that many people tried to stop them from completing this first tower. On the day the tower was completed, they were almost killed by the military who were under orders to destroy the structure.”
“Now, if you will follow me over there, we will see where Domlen was reputed to have lived as a simple farmer. And then later, if we have time, we may even go to the Preservato-Museum where some of Anouk’s possessions are on display, along with a story she left us about her experience. Five hundred and twenty years! Can you imagine?”
The sky was continuously yellow and languid, and with the protective shell of the BioMosaics, Earth was now on the map of the Universe.