Chasing Your Echo
by (Hidden)
Science Fiction Story: The paradise planet Agapion had been at peace for forty-two years since its colonization. On its forty-third year, disaster struck from the sky paving the way for humanity's extinction. In Aionara, two people pressed into military service spoke to each other from the relative safety of their bunkers. Never meeting, never touching, their love uttered only through the voice from their communicators. Only within their tiny private space, could they imagine a world without monsters and devastation.
Tags: Fiction Tear Jerker Science Fiction Aliens Post Apocalypse
The heavy sound of boots stepping hard on the metallic floor echoed in the darkness of the hallway. Sparks from the ceiling fell on the figures in the darkness, singing their hair, yet those who marched with heavy steps did not care. They had no room to care, no room to feel, no room to give a second thought.
How could they, when there was never a smell of victory?
A middle-aged man came out of the shadows of the long corridor as the soldiers approached. His cheeks sallow and eyes sunken from lacking nutrients. His arms were bony with skin sticking to his bones without an ounce of fat. His skin was pale from lacking sunlight and yellow from illness. He spoke out with a trembling voice asking, “What happened? Did we win?”
The soldier in the lead, a captain from his insignia merely looked at the floor and shook his head. The man behind him merely tapped the left shoulder of the middle-aged man, just a little, out of fear that the old man would crumble from anything harder. The rest simply looked down dejected, unwilling to look at the faces of the residents who now walked out of the shadows, hoping for good news.
When the dozens of soldiers left without saying anything, they each made their own conclusions. And their conclusions were all the same. What other outcome would there be? When was the last time that humanity won a battle? Any battle?
Ilias Verne gently laid down his helmet on the desk in his room. He sat on his bed without even taking off his battle suit, a black graphite-enhanced aramid body suit fully covering his neck all the way down to his toes. It was designed to be able to completely block infestation but offered no additional protection.
Ilias was a tech staff, 3rd-class Technical Officer to be exact. So he didn’t qualify to wear the battle plate armour that the combat groups wore. He had heard that in the early days of the war, all soldiers whether combat or technical wore the battle plate armour but nowadays, even the combat groups didn’t have enough. Now it had to be shared.
Not only the battle plate armour, many other things were in short supply. Weapons, clothing, even food were in short supply now. A lot of things were used until they were broken beyond repair simply because they could no longer manufacture them or the kits to repair them.
A ringing from the desk woke him from his reverie. He pressed a button to accept the call and another button to transfer it to his earpiece. As he took off the body suit, he thought there was no need to look at the caller. He knew there was only one person who would call him at this time.
Because it coincided with the end of her shift.
“Good evening, lazybones!” A pleasant, melodious voice came out from his comm speaker, bright and teasing, carrying a warmth that did not belong in a bunker carved from concrete and fear.
Despite his exhaustion, the corner of Ilias’s mouth twitched. He closed his eyes, before placing his palms on his eyes as if to shield his eyes from the soft glare of the ceiling lamp, or perhaps from the weight of the day.
“I can assure that there is certainly not a single lazy bone in my body today.” His voice was dry, but softer now, the tension in his shoulders easing just slightly.
“How did it go?” The playfulness in her tone faded, replaced by something cautious. She always asked gently, as though afraid of the answer.
“Do you want to hear the good news or bad news?” He let out a tired breath through his nose, echoing to the other side of the comm. He leaned back on his palms, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer a kinder version of events.
“There’s a good news?” The voice on the other side asked, clearly not expecting anything good.
A faint rustle on the other side suggested she had sat down somewhere, bracing herself for the coming news.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” He tried to make it sound light.
It came out thinner than intended.
“Obviously, so what’s the good news?”
“That I’m alive!”
“THAT is the good news?” Her voice rose sharply, half incredulous, half angry at the world that had reduced survival into a cause for celebration.
“What? You want me to drop dead out there?” He forced a weak chuckle, though his fingers tightened against the edge of the mattress.
“That’s not what I ... well let’s put that aside. How did it go?”
The brief flare of emotion dissolved into quiet worry. He could almost picture her pressing her lips together, choosing restraint over fear. Of course, he wouldn’t know what it would look like for sure. He had only ever seen her through the video calls.
Ilias took a deep breath. His chest expanded slowly beneath the fabric of his undershirt. He didn’t really know what to say. No, he knew the outcome of the battle. He knew what happened. He just didn’t know how to describe the complete failure of the operation.
“A disaster.” His words were short and precise, as he gave up on trying to find words to beautify the events of the day.
“What happened?” Her voice was low and steady now, as if she had switched into listening mode, the way medical staff did when preparing for bad news.
She was a singer though, not a medic.
“The plan was for us to go to Section 12’s truck depot, grab the trucks and go to Section 28 to grab the machines. I was dragged along to dismantle the machines for transport.” He rubbed at his temple as he spoke, replaying the sequence of events step by step.
“I assume it didn’t go well?”
“Nothing went well. Everything was wrong from the start. The moment we started the engine, we were swarmed by hollows. It’s like they were waiting for us. We barely escaped and had to detour, then arrived an hour late to the rendezvous point. You know, that delay probably saved my life.” His jaw tightened at the memory of claws against metal, of distorted shrieks echoing through the truck chassis.
“How come?” Her breathing sounded slow and uneven.
“Guess what we found there.” A bitter edge crept into his voice.
“Hundreds of hollows?” She tried to guess the worst.
“Worse, broodspire!” The word came out like a curse.
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end.
“No way! So close? So the quake last time, it was the broodspire falling here!” Shock stripped her voice of any form of composure.
“That’s right. The entire Group 2 and Group 3 were annihilated there. They didn’t see the broodspire hidden behind the Lion Bank tower. We only saw it because we took a detour.” He stared at the wall now, eyes unfocused. He could still see it in his mind, the towering mass that was pulsing with a dusty haze.
“Wait, You told me you only had three groups defending your bunker, right?” Her tone was careful and tinged with worry.
“That’s right, now there’s only one.” He said it without much emotion, as if reporting a number on a list.
“How ... will you manage?” The hesitation in her question was heavy, one she could barely continue.
“I honestly do not know. A lot of techs died there too. I’ll probably have to cover lots more hours from now on.” Fatigue bled into his voice. Not just physical exhaustion but also the kind that settled somewhere deeper, somewhere harder to mend or share... “Sucks to be you, though I guess our situation here isn’t any better either,” the voice on the other side said as she unleashed a torrent of recent news.
Ilias’s mouth opened wide in shock as he heard the news from her side. His grip tightened instinctively around the worn comm device as his knuckles paled. “General Carson died? He’s a war hero!”
There was a short pause before her voice came through, calm but edged with dark humor.
“I don’t think the skitters received that memo,” the voice on the other side replied.
Ilias let out a slow breath, running a hand through his disheveled hair as he leaned back against the cold concrete wall behind him. The comm rested loosely in his hand. A faint vibration hummed through the wall, likely from machinery running somewhere deep below. He tried to picture her shelter, tried to measure its condition against his own.
“So who leads your shelter now?” he asked, thinking that eventhough his shelter’s situation was bad, it probably wasn’t as bad as her shelter.
He attempted to keep his tone neutral, but a deep concern slipped through despite trying to be calm.
There was a brief pause on the other end, the kind that carried exhaustion rather than hesitation. He imagined her rubbing her temple, weighing how much to say. Or what not to say.
“Lieutenant Foerster,” the voice on the other side said dryly.
“Your roommate?” Ilias could imagine the woman on the other side nodding.
“Yeap, and you know what she said? According to the old Terran calendar, Valentine’s Day should be in three days.”
Lyra’s voice shifted, a strange mix of disbelief and reluctant amusement. Even through the static, he could hear the incredulity in her voice.
“What’s Valentine’s Day?”
He tried to recall if he had ever heard the word. The phrase sounded archaic, something from before the migration to Agapion. Likely something from Earth.
“She said it’s a day for lovers. Said she was going to hook up with Jonsahn from the Second Reactor on that day and asked me to help her choose a dress.”
In his mind, he tried to reconcile the image. One of an underground shelter teetering on collapse, ration shortages, skitter alarms and disagreements that led to fist fights. And yet somewhere in that chaos, someone was worrying about what dress to wear to a date.
“Wow, that’s so random.”
He let out a cough that might have been a laugh.
“Tell me about it! It’s like her mind is always somewhere else!”
There was exasperation in Lyra’s voice now, but underneath it he detected something softer. He thought it sounded like fondness, as if she was smiling when she said it. The kind of fondness and smile reserved for people who irritated you but kept you sane.
“How come she’s leading the shelter? Where is everyone above her?”
As soon as he asked, he felt the weight of that question. It was heavier than he had intended. In times like these, promotions rarely came from merit. The only way it came would be from being a survivor.
He waited, bracing himself for the answer. Though in his heart, he already knew the answer.
“Where else? Either dead or turned into hollows, what other fate is there?”
Her answer came without inflection or emotion, as if she was talking about the weather.
“Food poisoning?”
For a heartbeat there was silence, then a lilting laugh from the other end put a slight smile on Ilias’s face. The sound was light and bright, startling against the grim reality of their world. This was a rare smile when the world was at peace, it became even rarer once the world went to hell. To think it only took a single year for everything to devolve to this point. He wondered if humanity was really that weak.
The voice on the other side spoke again after she stopped laughing, her tone soft but threaded with something dangerously casual.
“Wouldn’t that be a great way to go? I’ll keep that option open for myself.”
It was as if she was already entertaining the thought.
“No, don’t do it,” Ilias said with a heart full of worry. His fingers curled into a fist, as if he could physically hold her there through sheer force.
He regretted not meeting her in Lunessa, having had to take over his coworker’s shift that day. If he had known that would be the last chance to go on a date with her, he would’ve refused his coworker’s request. Even if it would’ve raised resentment from his coworker, he wouldn’t care.
Besides, it was he who ended up feeling resentful. While he had to forgo his date, his coworker actually went on his own date! All that talk about his mother having to go to the hospital for a major surgery was all total bullshit!
“It’s certainly a better way to go. After all, skitters can’t infest the dead.”
Ilias swallowed. The room suddenly felt so much colder, despite him not touching the thermostat.
“Please, value yourself more,” Ilias pleaded.
His voice was low with a slight vibration, barely perceptible beneath the steady hum of the shelter’s ventilation system. If it was any other person, they wouldn’t have noticed, but the woman on the other side did. They had spoken every night for the past year after all. How could she not notice his tone?
“Fine, I’ll leave it at that. I’m tired, going to turn in early today. Good night, Ilias.”
“Good night, Lyra.”
The next day during morning duty, the stale fluorescent lights of the corridor flickering overhead, Ilias adjusted his headset as chatter crackled through the work comm. His coworker, Randy, spoke first, his tone animated in contrast to the usual monotony of duty shift.
“You know, I think the skitters are not an animal, but a bioweapon.”
Ilias rolled his shoulders, scanning the dim hallway while half-listening.
Another voice, which Ilias identified as Juno from the fifteenth floor, chimed in with open skepticism. “Yeah right, if it’s a weapon, that must mean someone is wielding those monsters. Who can control them?”
Randy huffed audibly through the comm, undeterred. Still trying to push his idea through, he said, “No, hear me out. What if it’s like a bomb-”
“Now it’s a bomb?” another voice interjected.”
“No, he has a point. They’re dropped from the sky, right? What if, like a bomb, it’s dropped and left to do its thing,” another voice that Ilias couldn’t recognize said.
A pause crackled through the channel before a raspy, older voice cut in.
“You’re all overthinking it,” the man said. “Weapons are made to be aimed at something. These things don’t aim, they spread.”
Someone scoffed. “So what, they just happened?”
“I’m saying they’re animals. Invasive ones,” the voice replied. “Same as the mold that eats insulation or the rats that chew cables. You don’t call those ‘weapons’ just because they ruin your day.”
“They fell from orbit,” Juno shot back, unwilling to consider that the very thing that drove humanity to extinction were just animals.
“Plenty of things fall from orbit these days,” the man said. “Debris. Spores. Frozen corpses. We’ve been lighting up the sky for forty years, maybe we woke something up. Maybe our ancestors’ colony ship passed through something that shouldn’t be approached and they followed us here. We know both skitters and hollows can survive in vacuum.”
Randy muttered, “Animals don’t turn people into factories.”
The voice went quiet for a second, then returned, softer.
“Neither do weapons,” he said. “Weapons kill. These things ... they live. That means they’re part of something. Some kind of ecosystem, not a trigger someone pulled.”
Static hummed between them.
“And if I’m wrong,” the man added, “then that means someone or something looked at Agapion and decided we were in the way. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to believe the universe is that deliberate.”
No one argued back.
The channel filled again with the distant sound of tools and breathing, the argument went unresolved, just like every problem they’ve suffered since the broodspires fell.
Lyra dragged her exhausted body back to the room that she shared with her roommate, now the de facto leader of the shelter. In truth, it wasn’t her body that was exhausted, it was her mind and her throat. She had to speak herself hoarse over the crowd of people who demanded action.
And also someone to blame.
And who else to blame other than the current leader of the shelter and the one telling them that everything was okay? Being the person who had convinced everyone that everything was okay, Lyra too suffered a splash of that anger. She didn’t hate them for their anger and desperation, but she hated that instead of trying to make themselves useful, they had blamed others for not doing things that benefitted them.
Lyra felt sick in her stomach. How could people, in the face of extinction, act like this? Instead of uniting to fight a common foe, they were reduced to picking on the carcass of authority and to beating up the people who tried to step up and make things better?
“Sometimes, I feel like maybe we should just let humanity die.” The words hung heavy in the air.
Lyra stared at the white wall in front of her, with posters and pictures of celebrities that Lieutenant Foerster had stuck. The fluorescent light above flickered faintly, casting a sterile glow over the six-meter-square room she had retreated into. Looking at the posters, she spied one of her own face, that she had actually signed with her own hands on the first day she moved into this room.
“What is this about?” Ilias’s voice came from the speaker.
Lyra swallowed her spit, the scene still fresh in her mind. Her grip tightened around the arms of the chair as the memory replayed in brutal clarity. How the tables were overturned as Yana spoke, all the shouting demanding things, the sound of fists and chairs hitting flesh. She remembered it in all its gruesome details.
“Yana, they ganged up on her.”
There was a pause from the other side.
“Who’s Yana again?”
For a split second, Lyra almost laughed at the absurdity. Of course he wouldn’t remember her by name. Ilias knew her by another identity.
“Lieutenant Foerster.”
Another beat of silence before Ilias’s voice rose in sudden alarm. “Wait, isn’t she the leader of your shelter? She’s a hollow now?”
Lyra shook her head then stopped as she felt stupid doing something that Ilias couldn’t see. “No, she wasn’t ganged up by the hollows. She was beaten up in the canteen by the residents.”
“What? Why?”
Her chest tightened as she recalled the argument that led to the riot.
“Everything! They complained about food, about electricity, about sunlight-” She could still hear the accusations. She could still feel the hands grabbing at her sleeves.
Ilias cut in, disbelief bleeding through the speaker. “Sunlight? Do they not realize that going out is the same as offering themselves to the skitters?”
Lyra let out a hollow sound that might once have been a laugh. “They don’t believe that. They think we’ve intentionally kept everyone down here to control them and turn them into slaves.”
She pressed her forehead against the cool wall. Even repeating it made her feel exhausted. All the conspiracy theories, the whispers, the hatred in their eyes. And all that malice was aimed at Yana and all those who stood with her.
“How ... how can they be so stupid? How ... didn’t they see all the news about people turning into hollows last year?”
Lyra’s vision blurred as she felt like her world had lost any semblance of logic or reason.
“They said those were all doctored, edited to ‘support the narrative’. It was all I could do to drag Yana to the infirmary. To be honest, I’m not sure she will make it.”
Her voice faltered at the end. Yana’s face was swollen, with blood leaking out at the corner of her mouth. And her body, oh her body, it was all battered with multiple fractures. A picture that she doubted would leave her mind.
“You ... are you okay?” The voice from the speaker was soft, gentle, as if holding a piece of glass that would shatter with just a bit more pressure.
Lyra glanced down at her arms. Dark bruises were already blooming beneath her sleeves. Her ribs ached when she breathed too deeply. She wasn’t sure if her ribs were broken or if it was just her being a baby.
“Just some bruises, a few scrapes, nothing bad. A good night’s rest and I can get back to work tomorrow.”
The lie came easily. It was easier than admitting how tired she was.
“Please take care of yourself, get some medicine if you need it.”
Something inside her snapped.
“Medicine?” Lyra’s voice rose, rapidly becoming hysterical. “We barely have any left. We don’t even have enough to treat Yana. How would I dare use any for myself!”
Her voice echoed off the white walls, too loud in the small room. The hysteria surprised even her, but once it started, she couldn’t stop it. And she went on a tirade of how sick she felt living in this doomed world, how everyday she felt like she was losing a bit more of her sanity, how she had even forgotten happier times. And how she had even forgotten the face of her mother, her father and her little sister.
Tears blurred her vision as she lost her breath, she breathed hard as a panic attack overwhelmed her, several times coughing out the spit stuck in her throat. Her knees buckled and she slid down the wall until she was sitting on the cold floor. The comm clattered on the floor for a moment before she caught it again, clutching it a bit too tightly as if it were the only solid thing left in the world.
She pressed her forehead against her knees, shoulders shaking.
On the other side, Ilias’s voice came softer than she had ever heard it. So soft that she couldn’t even hear what he had said. For a moment, only Lyra’s sobbed echoed in the room, a windowless white room no bigger than six meter square in size.
“I’m sorry, if only I could be there.”
That was the worst part.
The gentleness.
The helplessness.
The distance.
The ache in her chest turned sharp and unbearable. She lifted her head, tears streaking down her face, and screamed into the empty white room, as if Ilias was right there in front of her.
“BUT YOU’RE NOT HERE!”
Yet even she knew, the calming embrace she was waiting for would not come.
“I know. I - I don’t know what I can do for you. I feel helpless and powerless, knowing the woman I adore is suffering, the only thing I can do is listen.”
She sobbed, tears flowed like a river down her face, “You could’ve been here. If you had only come, we could’ve been here together.”
Lyra’s mind went back to that day. It was the middle of summer. The sun was scorching hot and she had waited in a long flowing summer dress at a cafe, with only a wide-brimmed hat and the cafe’s parasol to shield her from the sun.
She had arrived early, excited at the promise of meeting the man she had been talking to over the web for the past two years. Their first date didn’t work out, but Ilias had promised that he would make it this time. So she had arrived early, afraid that something would come up again and he would end up having to cut the date short.
However, plans didn’t survive reality. She suddenly received a message saying, “Sorry, some kind of explosion at the power plant, The guy who’s on duty hasn’t arrived yet, so I have to do overtime this time.”
Explosion at the power plant? He didn’t know that she was already exploding in anger inside. She had called him and hurled abuses at him through the wrist comm. And to his credit, he merely listened to the abuses and didn’t argue back, saying sorry over and over. After the bout of anger was released, she knew she had gone overboard, but her pride wouldn’t let her apologize.
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