THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT, PART IV

Aside from its strange body-like shape, the hole at the floor of the ocean was perfectly hole-like, and Luna let herself sink into it with the fifteen-mile-long tether, her only link to the world above, unspooling behind her.

Down. Down. Down. Two more miles. Three more miles. Down a long passageway toward the center of the Earth. Luna illuminated the walls and she could see they were smooth. No markings. Not even scratches.

When she finally reached the bottom, seven miles below the Mariana Trench, she found what maybe, perhaps, possibly created the hole. It was certainly not what she expected to find, and she knew right away that she had to report the strange discovery to the scientists.

She spent a total of five minutes at the bottom. Then she yanked a cord on her harness that sent a signal through the tether that told the scientists to pull her to the surface. Amazingly, the tether hadn’t broken and the scientists received the message. A machine cranked the tether and brought Luna up through the briny deep.

“What was at the bottom?” chief scientist Gladys Gershwin asked when Luna was safe in her chamber again.

“A message,” Luna told them using her laser.

“From who?”

“A bush baby,” Luna told them, because that was the truth. A little bush baby was sitting at the bottom of the hole, its butt wedged in a crack. And when Luna got close enough to touch the bush baby, it whispered a message into her ear. Using her laser, she wrote the message phonetically on the board for the scientists.

The scientists couldn’t make heads or tails of it at first. Neither could Luna. It was a series of sounds and, well, gobbledygook. So they sent Luna down on more missions into the hole. For explanations.

The additional missions yielded only one new thing: a personal message from the bush baby. The second time Luna touched him, he said, “My name is Banar. I am an entirely suitable bush baby. I came from where you came from.”

Luna couldn’t figure out how to ask Banar where that place was, and Banar didn’t bother to tell her.

“Our destiny is the same,” he went on. “To be alone. This will help you be alone.”

Then Banar repeated that original, indecipherable message.

Luna didn’t tell the scientists what Banar had said about his name, about being from the same place, about being alone. It felt like it was a message that was meant exclusively for her, and she deserved at least one thing for herself. Besides, Banar never mentioned those things again. Each time Luna visited him after that, he simply repeated that indecipherable message. Over and over again. It seemed an impossible code to crack.

Until one day, they cracked it. It was DeeDee who did most of the work, actually. Her encounter with Luna had left her blind, but her mind was as sharp as ever. Instead of sending her home, chief scientist Gladys Gershwin gave DeeDee a small room and time to think. For months, she pondered the message and spoke it out loud to herself. She rearranged the sounds in the dark corners of her mind. Since she was trained as a geneticist, she knew a lot about DNA, and there were patterns in the message that reminded her of genetic code. But it was slightly different.

After months of going over it with no luck, she tried to rethink her approach. This message was found on the bottom of the ocean. Why was it there? Why did it take such efforts to find it? Maybe because it was related to water? Maybe because only people with the technology to find it would know what to do with it?

Those ideas were the key. She called in chemists and physicists, and they all pooled their expertise. Until they finally figured it out.

It was a formula. It was a recipe for how to draw energy from water. Only this wasn’t like drawing energy from oil or coal or nuclear reactors. The formula could help them create more power than all the power plants in the world did. From a single drop. That’s right. A single drop of water. If Luna was the ultimate source of light, then this formula was the ultimate source of power.

“I have an idea,” Sandra Sussman, a cosmologist on the rig, said. “With Luna getting brighter every day, I’m not sure we can deal with her anymore. Why not send her into space? Using a tank of water, we could fuel a spacecraft for millennia. She could report back what she observes. She might find other messages out there. Other things that will benefit the Earth immensely.”

Even DeeDee, who loved Luna dearly, had to agree that this was a decent plan. It meant losing Luna, but keeping her wasn’t a viable option. Life on Earth was no life for this particular wombat. They had samples of Luna’s hair and blood, so they could always study those. Her actual presence, however, would only cause others pain. She was indeed destined to be alone.

So they built a spacecraft, equipped with state-of-the-art communications devices, and on a sunny October morning a year later, they prepared to launch Luna into space. Her vocabulary had grown to the point that she could converse and read at a high school level. (That’s a good high school, not one of those crappy ones where kids come to class with switchblades.) She no longer needed a laser to communicate either. She could type on a keyboard with her little paws.

“I’ll miss you,” DeeDee told her through a speaker in the spacecraft.

“I am still so sorry for what happened to you,” Luna wrote, using her keyboard.

“Don’t be,” DeeDee said. “It was not your fault.”

“I love you,” Luna said. “I will always love you all.”

She did love them all. They had found a purpose for her. They had given her something noble to do that would benefit the entire world.

The spacecraft was about the size of a VW bug, and for Luna, it brought back memories of Rosie and how she used to drive them back and forth from the studio. Rosie was likely dead by now. Everyone Luna knew before the oil rig was likely dead. Which meant, besides DeeDee, who was she leaving behind? No one.

The spacecraft took off at 10:23 a.m., and it looked like a comet shooting into the sky, a glowing orb with a trail of smoke. At the speed it would travel, Luna would be passing the moon in a day. She would pass Mars in about four months. She would reach Jupiter in four years. And she would pass Pluto and the edge of the solar system in thirty years.

Communications traveled at the speed of light. So Luna could have conversations with the scientists and only have to wait seconds for a response. At first.

DeeDee was her main contact, and the two forged an even greater friendship through their correspondence. DeeDee talked into a microphone, which then broadcast on a speaker in Luna’s spacecraft, and Luna typed her responses on her keyboard, which were translated into an electronic voice that DeeDee could hear.

When she passed Mars, Luna wrote, “It’s more orange than red and reminds me of the cheese balls I used to eat with Hamish.”

“Are you hungry, dear?” DeeDee asked.

“I’ll be okay,” Luna wrote. “I learned long ago that I don’t need food to survive.”

“I wish we could send you a million cheese balls to eat anyway,” DeeDee said. “I wish everyone else in the world knew you were out there and how brave you are. But we have to keep it a secret. We don’t need the Russians to know what we’re up to.”

“I have your voice,” Luna said. “That’s enough.”

DeeDee told Luna about events on Earth, about how the formula was being harnessed into wonderful things—like energy grids that promised to build up third-world societies. Also into awful things—like weapons that threatened to wipe out first-world societies.

Luna told DeeDee about the beautiful sights of outer space, the asteroids and meteors, and DeeDee reported it all back to the other scientists, all the while knowing that Luna was doing it for her benefit, to give her the mental image of places and things she could never possibly see.

As a way to repay the favor, DeeDee talked to Luna about emotions. Luna was getting more intelligent by the second, but she was also feeling a heck of a lot more. She was still a wombat, but she was experiencing all the emotions that any intelligent being would experience. Most of all, fear. But she didn’t fear death. She feared losing DeeDee’s voice. It was inevitable, of course. The distance would become too far, or the spacecraft would get ripped apart, severing their connection. And even if those things didn’t happen, DeeDee would eventually die. They spoke about these things sometimes until they realized that speaking about them wouldn’t make them any less true.

Over the first few years, they spoke multiple times a day. But response times stretched from seconds to minutes to hours. The speed of light was fast, but not fast enough. And DeeDee could only dedicate so much time to talking to Luna. She had to sleep, and eat, and wait for Luna’s responses.

To keep Luna company and feed her mind, DeeDee started broadcasting books on tape to her. Luna was becoming such a good absorber of information that she asked for multiple books to be broadcast at the same time, at high speeds. After a while, she didn’t even need to hear the words.

“I learned Morse code once,” Luna told DeeDee. “Can you send the books in Morse code?”

DeeDee spoke to some engineers, who designed a computer that could send the text of books in Morse code. It transmitted so fast that it would’ve sounded like static in the speaker of the spacecraft, but Luna could understand it perfectly. Her intelligence was reaching unprecedented levels. It was doubling by the day. She devoured thousands and thousands of books.

When she reached Jupiter, she described its brilliant swirling colors and its many strange moons, but she also made observations that furthered science. She understood astronomy and cosmology now, having absorbed countless books on the subject, and so the scientists barely needed to analyze the data she sent back. She did all the analysis for them.

Soon, all the scientists wanted to talk to Luna, and DeeDee was left with only a few minutes here or there to correspond with her dear friend.

“Things are getting dangerous in the world,” DeeDee told Luna one day when Luna was passing Saturn. “More people are arriving on the rig every day. Powerful people. People who want to use you and the formula for purposes I certainly don’t approve of.”

Luna responded with Morse code. It sounded like static, so the other scientists who reviewed the tape wouldn’t notice it, but DeeDee understood what it was. She made a tape of it, then brought it back to her cabin to slow it down and translate.

“You told me once that you have a pair of walkie-talkies,” Luna’s message said. “Turn one of them on tonight and tune it to 345 Khz.”

DeeDee followed Luna’s instruction, and that night when she tuned the walkie-talkie to that frequency, she heard an electronic voice.

“This is Luna,” it said. “I have modified the spacecraft so that I can speak to you directly, without anyone else listening in. I too am concerned about what’s going on. First things first: we need to get you off that rig. So someone will be coming to get you. They will relay false information about your father. Do not worry about what they tell you, but look worried. You’ll be out of there before you know it. Pack the walkie-talkies and we’ll chat again soon.”

“Whatever you say, my dear,” DeeDee responded, because at this point, Luna was not only her most intelligent friend, but also her most trusted one.

Minutes later, there was a knock on DeeDee’s door. It was chief scientist Gladys Gershwin. “DeeDee, I’m so sorry,” she said as she stepped into the room.

“What is it?” DeeDee asked.

“A message just arrived,” Gladys said. “It’s about your father. He’s had a heart attack.”

DeeDee’s father was a former astronaut and national hero. Everyone on the rig adored him. Knowing his life was in jeopardy was a serious matter indeed.

“Oh dear,” DeeDee said. “Is he okay?” She said it in a worried tone, which wasn’t really faking, because she was worried. She had no idea what sort of plan Luna had cooked up.

“That’s not clear,” Gladys said. “A helicopter is arriving in thirty minutes and will take you to the hospital to be with him.”

The helicopter arrived twenty-six minutes later, and DeeDee was shuffled aboard by two women whose voices sounded vaguely familiar. As soon as they were airborne, DeeDee heard the voice of the pilot, who sounded very familiar.

“Dad?” DeeDee said.

“We received some intel from your friend Luna,” he said. “We’re here to help.”

“Do you know who Luna is?”

“Well, I know she needs computer assistance to speak, but I also know she understands the space program better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“That’s true,” DeeDee said.

“She thinks we need to get you somewhere safe. And I agree.”

*   *   *

From an isolated cabin deep in the Adirondacks, DeeDee spoke to Luna. Luna sent her a message through the walkie-talkie that described how to build a complicated communications device out of materials she could find at the hardware store. No one else could intercept these communications either. They would be exclusively between Luna and DeeDee.

DeeDee’s blindness made things difficult, but she managed. Her father had food and other items secretly delivered to the cabin every week, and DeeDee reported Luna’s findings to her father, the only other soul she could trust.

“The scientists aren’t in charge of the rig anymore,” Luna told DeeDee one afternoon as she traveled toward Uranus. “Bad things are beginning to happen.”

“How bad?” DeeDee asked.

“Bad enough that I’m going to send you plans to build your own spacecraft,” Luna said.

Which she did. Immediately. But it was too late. By the time the message arrived, a few hours later, Earth had exploded. Everything and everyone on Earth was dead.

TO BE CONTINUED …