The Shift

Earth’s axis shifted 1.5 degrees at the tail-end of the 22nd century plunging half the world into a hellscape, the other half into an ice age.

Cannibalism followed shortly after.

Emil Gêrat, Commandant of the Gens D’Armes Federation, sat across from me, sawing a ‘steak’ into small bites. He was a corpulent, pale man, with beady eyes and a gummy smile.

Attendants brought my portion to me, carrying the scent of carrion from the kitchen.

They set it in front of me with aplomb.

My stomach grumbled but my brain retched.

He took a bite and smiled at me, though it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet,” he said, chewing wetly.

He held aloft his two-tined fork, a strip of meat lolling to the side. He swirled it in the juices and gingerly placed it in his mouth.

“Are you not hungry?” he asked, the food sloshed in his mouth.

I swallowed hard and shook my head.

He shrugged and kept eating.

No one was surprised that we were capable of it. The Koreans and Japanese long had traditions of eating animals alive. The French had foie gras and Ortolan.

Cruelty existed in the culinary world before the world ended and cannibalism started.

Americans and the Middle East, the super religious, were the holdouts, and we were suffering because of it.

Finished, he raked a bright red tongue over scaly lips and through his mustache to gather the grease. Then he smiled, cheshire-like, causing the corner of his mouth to crack, a gash of crimson in his pale skin. His tongue darted out and dabbed at the wound like a feeding hummingbird.

His smile never faltered.

Attendants came and took the plates away.

We were left alone.

He peered at me silently, his hard, black eyes reflecting the glow of candles on the table between us as he held a napkin to the corner of his mouth.

“Have you considered my proposition?”

“I have.”

“And?”

“I’m not eager to add to the problem, no matter the benefit,”

“Even if it means a way out?”

“Even then.”

“You cannot reverse the damage you have already done, Professeur DeBeeck, but you can redeem yourself.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Nonesense,” he said, waving the blood-stained napkin around in the air with a flourish before setting it on the table in front of him. “You forget the world was ending before the Shift happened. Your invention gave humanity the one thing she needed—a way out.

He was right. It’s why I pushed to test it before it was fully vetted.

“Should you decide to resume your work, the full force of the G.D.F. will be at your disposal.”

He paused giving me time to respond.

I didn’t.

The chair screeched as he pushed away from the table and he rose. “We will have use of your brain, DeBeeck. One way or another.”

He left me to sit alone in the cold, dark dining room with nothing but my thoughts, the taste of stomach acid, and the memory of his smile.

I was a prisoner here, starving myself in solidarity with those in the world who had not abandoned their humanity.

It was all I could do after dooming them.

The DeBeeck Drive was supposed to launch humanity into the space-age. And it had, in a way, but it had also knocked the world off its axis.

Before that point, I was so optimistic. I had identified three exoplanets capable of supporting human life within range and had the funding to make it happen.

And it worked. It actually worked. But it also generated a magnetic shock wave that shifted the world, kick starting the apocolypse.

I put my head into my hands, and sobbed.

Gêrat was right.

Of course he was right, he was as brilliant as he was evil.

He had scraped together the remnant of France through inspiration and logic. He subverted their culinary history, alikening human flesh to a delicacy. And why not, if it meant survival.

It wasn’t that much of a leap from foie gras to humans.

By embracing cannibalism Gêrat and the G.D.F. thrived while the rest of the world whithered.

The ends justify the means when something is as delicious as human flesh, he famously said.

I rose slowly and made my way to the quarters they gave me in their compound, which also would serve as a laboratory in the event I caved.

They wanted to resume the mission, to escape Earth and start anew.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t seed the universe with Gêrat’s evil.

My only hope was to starve myself thus starving them of the only means to leave this hell. Or wear their patience so thin they served my brains as an appetizer.

I opened the door to find my long-time assistant Jeremy working on a model for the full-scale drive. It was in pieces when I had left. I had given him orders to not touch it until I returned.

Anger surged when I saw him installing the iridium encapsulated chamber that held the proto-neutrino chain reaction—the final step before testing.

He saw me and dropped the socket wrench he was holding, and quickly swept a tarp over the Drive.

“Did you agree?” he croaked, knowing full well I had caught him.

I seethed.

“Goddamit, Frank,” he pleaded. “It’s the only shot we have.”

“You know damn well it would make the Shift worse. Might not even survive the fallout to actually build the full-scale ships.”

He walked over to me and rested his hands on my shoulders. His eyes were soft but with a hint of desperation.

“Then we don’t test it. We put all our eggs in that basket and shoot for the stars.”

“And what… leave the rest of Earth to die faster?” I jerked free of his grip. “No. The only option is reversing the problem, not fleeing the scene of the crime.”

“It won’t work,” he said, referring to my inversion theory. “I ran the numbers while you were gone.”

“We haven’t tested it yet.”

He ignored me. “Frank… Listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. The Shift was a fluke. It never should have generated that much force. If anything it’s the answer!”

He looked practically manic. “Surely its enough to save a portion of humanity? At least give us a chance to colonize one of the exoplanets… to start again?”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m not sending Cannibals to space.”

“There’d be a small contingent sent. Only those necessary. We wouldn’t need to do it anymore… they… wouldn’t need to do it anymore.”

“You folded…” I said, knowing the answer.

He nodded. “I was just so hungry, Frank. I’m sorry.”

I was nearly blind with rage, but I didn’t know what I expected. It’s human nature to survive, no matter the cost.

I stalked to my quarters.

“Say you’ll think about it, Frank…” he called after me.

I got to the door and struggled to unlock it.

“I said I’m sorry Frank!”

I spun to face him. “You’ve made your choice. Let me make mine.”

I slammed the door shut and sat down on the bed, still breathing heavily.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew it was likely my last.

---

The next morning one of Gêrat’s flunky’s stormed into the room, waking me from a nightmare.

He grabbed me out of my bed and dragged me out of the room.

My heart thundered, pain rang through my chest.

Was I having a heart attack? It ran in my familly. I’m malnourished. I refused to be a cannibal but my body wouldn’t hesitate to cannibalize itself—maybe I had reached the breaking point?

But that was too easy of a way out. I knew my heart was ok, just my nervous system was on the fritz—too much stress, too little food, not enough sleep.

No, I’d be butchered for stew-meat before I died of natural causes. They’d use my body one way or another.

But then we entered a room. Gêrat waited there with four other men, all scientists by the look of them.

He stood at my arrival and motioned me forward.

“Look at this,” he said excitedly. The other scientists sat squabbling at a table, sheets of paper, read outs of some data source, scattered in front of them.

I took the piece of paper from him.

“This can’t be right,” I said.

“You have scanning equipment that can verify it, non?”

I nodded. I’ll be right back.

“We’re coming with you,” said one of the scientists, his voice high and whiny.

Back in my quarters, I booted up my research laptop and launched my gravitational wave telescope and analyzer software.

I plunked in the coordinates from the data Gêrat had given me, and an image flashed on the screen.

“What… the…” I said, shocked.

“What is it?” he asked, impatiently.

“I don’t know yet, the scans are still running, but it’s moving fast. And directly at us.”

“Is it a ship?” asked that same whiny scientist.

“Hold on…”

My scanner was efficient, but the modeling software I used to generate images wasn’t.

“It’ll give me a read-out in less than 2 minutes, settle-the-fuck down.”

Finally, an image appeared on the monitor.

Whatever it was, it was hexagonal, or rather the bulk of it was. It had flat arrays that extended back. They were generating a lot of heat.

“Are those engines there?” he asked.

“I think so,”

“So it’s a ship then?”

“Could be, I don’t know.”

“They made contact,” said another scientist, a swede by the look of him.

“Wait, what?”

“They sent a stream of data we’re still trying to interpret, it’s binary, and prelim analysis shows it may be coordinates or a map of sorts.”

I was still reeling from the fact a ship in outer space had made contact with us.

He forced the papers they were looking at into my hands.

He was right, this was a map of sorts. It also included an extraordinary average velocity and vectors showing trajectory and an origination point.

“We think it’s a stage-3 life-form.”

“Light-speed travel, yeah, for the bulk of it’s journey. But why did it slow?”

“We think it wanted to announce it’s arrival. It used morse code. Something lower frequency like that would arrive after they did if they kept at the speed of light.”

It made sense.

“But why?”

“Look here,” said the Swede, pointing to the bottom of the data set they handed me.

The transmission had ended with a time-stamp of sorts.

“That’s… wild.”

“We know, we just wanted to make sure we weren’t reading into it.”

I knew these coordinates well—it was an exoplanet just within the range of my scanners. It was a compact planet, 0.9 earth gravity, in a system with a dwarf sun. It was the top candidate for the mission before the Shift.

“They left 4 years after we tested the Drive,” I said, barely suppressing my excitement. Or was it fear?

The scientists nodded aggressively. Gêrat stood there looking back and forth at us.

“What?” he said impatiently. “What does that mean?”

“The exoplanet is 4 light years away. Which means that they left almost immediately after the magnetic signature of my fuck up would’ve reached their planet.”

“Why would they do that?”

“There are only two options - either they’ve come to help, or they know we are vulnerable and they’ve come to capitalize on it.”

“How do we know which one it is?”

“We can’t,” I said. “Or at least not until they land or open a direct line of communication that we have capabilities for. Have you sent out morse code in response?”

The scientists all nodded their heads, the Swede, presumably the head of the group, spoke next, “No response back.”

“So we wait, then.” I said, a chill going down my spine.

“When will they get here?” asked Gêrat.

“In two days,” I answered.

---

They elected me as the representative to meet the aliens. I took to calling them Proximian’s, since they came from Proxima Centauri.

“I think I should be armed,” I said, one last time.

“We detected no high-energy frequencies emitting from their craft,” said the Swede, whose name was Johannsen, I found out.

“Weapons systems can be dampened you know. And they’re likely internalized.”

“Still, it would look good to meet them with weapons.”

“You’re not the one meeting them…” I said under my breath.

The ship had entered our atmosphere and was visible to the naked eye.

It was massive, and had an oddly organic shape to it. The body of it wasn’t a hexagon like I first thought. It looked like a beehive.

I shivered. I was deathly allergic to bees.

“Can’t I at least have some armor or something?”

“We don’t know what they’re capable of—I doubt that a stage-3 species uses projectiles like we do. Plus, as I said, it’s best to appear harmless.”

Fuck.

“Ok, fine.”

Johannsen and the rest of the G.D.F. science crew moved back to a bunker where Gêrat waited.

Before long the vessel approached the coordinates we had sent out using morse code. It moved through the air like a bumble-bee, clearly designed to fly in their home world atmosphere and in space, not through Earth’s skies.

I tried not to think in terms of bees anymore.

It landed and nothing happened.

Static sounded in my ear.

Ksssshk - Go up to it - Ksssshk

The vessel stank of ozone, it had taken damage when it entered our atmosphere. Oodd that a stage-3 species didn’t have shield capabilities.

A soft buzzing filled my ears as I approached, growing louder with each step.

I paused, a lance of fear struck my gut.

Ksssshk - What are you waiting for? - Ksssshk

I shook my head violently—Shook the thought right out of my mind.

I continued forward, the buzzing steadily growing.

Ksssshk - what is it like up close? - Ksssshk

Sweat dripped down my face and into my eyes. The heat from the vessel was overwhelming and the fear slowly building in me didn’t help. My heart was beating a pace that wasn’t sustainable for much longer. I had a stress test right before the world ended, and it felt a lot like this.

I raised a hand to the talk button

Ksssshk - it’s fucking hot. And there’s this buzzing sound that keeps getting louder - Ksssshk

Silence.

I reached the fore of the vessel, a flat pyramidal shape that extended to the bulbous center of the ship.

This had to be the front, any entrance would be further back along the middle of the ship or more likely in the back.

WUMP—BZZZZZZZZZZ

I froze in place as a circle opened up above me.

Ksssshk - Holy… what is that? - Ksssshk

---

I came to in the middle of a dark room, the air was redolent with something spicy, like cinnamon or cloves. I sneezed and felt something hard and metalic clamp onto my face, covering my nose and mouth.

I tried to look around but my head was locked in place by the device.

I heard the buzzing again coming from my left. It grew louder and louder and louder.

Another metal device clamped onto my left ear and I heard a POP then nothing but a ring on that side.

I felt dizzy, my equilibirium messed up from whatever they had done to my eardrum.

I was on the verge of vomiting when the device over my mouth lifted and the buzzing subsided.

Silence filled the room.

A voice spoke in my head.

<<NAME>>

Some kind of neural implant must have been placed.

<<NAME>>

“DeBeeck… Frank DeBeeck,” I said to the darkness.

<<PLANET…NAME>>

“Uhh… sorry… Earth”

<<EARTH GOOD>>

Morality?

“Yes, Earth good. We… er… Humans good.”

<<GOOD>>

God, I hope I can expand their vocabulary or this will take forever.

I sat up and a soft red glow lit the table I had been laying on, but I couldn’t see anything past a foot out.

I heard buzzing again, but this time it came to my right.

“Data… you sent?” I asked, my voice sounding thick in my own head.

<<DATA…EARTH…YES>>

Ok, we were getting somewhere.

“Magnetic pulse, you detected, yes?”

<<PULSE…YES…COME>>

My heart leaped in my chest.

“Come to help?”

Silence.

“Err… Help is good. Earth good. Help Earth?”

The buzzing grew louder and a cloud of data burst in front of my face. It was a diagram of sorts.

I could make out a globe, hopefully earth. A large device, half the size of antarctica before it melted appeared on the north pole. A long, thin, rod-like structure passed completely through the center of the Earth and out the other side.

The globe tilted slightly back, almost to the place where Earth’s axis was supposed to be.

“You… you’ll fix the axis??” I yelled, unable to hold my excitement back.

<<YES…FIX…EARTH…GOOD>>

I nearly cried with relief. Gerat was technically correct when he said that anybody who spent incalculable resources would only travel to take advantage of something. But I was right. It was a rescue mission.

“Thank you,” I said, tears forming. “Thank you… I… We thank you.”

<<NO…THANK…EARTH… GOOD…USE…EARTH>>

I paused.

“Yes, we will help if we can… but we’re weak… we need to get stronger to help.”

<<YES…WEAK…WEAK…GOOD>>

The tears kept coming, hot and heavy, but they weren’t happy tears anymore.

“What?” I asked, choking on my words.

<<NEED…HOME…EARTH…GOOD>>

I looked closer at the diagram still in front of me. The core of the Earth was hollow now, and small dots traveled down the shaft to the center.

“No…” I slurred, my tongue feeling numb. “No…”

I was dragged back to the table by my arms.

“No!” I screamed

THUNK

A tube slammed down onto my mouth again, sealing around my lips, muffling my screams.

The buzzing started again.

I looked up and saw something pour into the tube and travel down to my mouth.

Whatever it was it was amorphous, liquid, and shifting.

I cried out and the tube vibrated with the sound.

The buzzing got louder, and louder.

The liquid got closer to my mouth and I began to feel extreme heat at the back of my throat.

“MWHYY” I managed to say.

<<NEED HELP…YOU HELP>>

The buzzing became deafening and the liquid hit my tongue.

I could taste it. Taste them. They tasted sweet, and spicy, like Chai, or Mexican Hot Chocolate. They went down my throat.

My vision went black. But not before I heard the buzzing vibrating in my head.

They said

<<THANK>>

---

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this and want to continue onto the next part, click the link below!

The Shift, Part Two

In editing this, I accidentally deleted the credit to Bradley Ramsey as the premise (post-apocalypse/aliens/hope) for this piece came from his epic First Indulgence writing prompt contest this past October.