ep05 - the just in case soldier

A strange transmission from the mines on the moon. A tall, mysterious figure carrying severed heads, quantum physics and a faulty robot. Strange, indeed. 

And who is this Yehuda anyway?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hey there, this is Jaran. I'm the facility manager at the Deep Earth Anomaly Department located on the coastal strip in East Antarctica. I'm signing in for yet another cold shift. Now I went outside in the blizzard today to reposition the antenna on the roof. Jaran the duplicate took a photo of it during daytime, and you could clearly see that the antenna was bent all out of shape. It's it's not how an antenna should look at all. And it wasn't an easy task as the blizzard is quite belligerent these days and nights, like a swarm of angry wasps stinging away. But I was prepared for it, I took my time, I did nothing in the state of rush. You know what they say, fast is slow, and slow is a death blow. So after hours of battling the blizzard, I managed to reposition the antenna to its original state. My plan was to get in touch with the moon and have them reroute my message. It's a long shot, literally and figuratively speaking, but you know what choice do I have? So when I got back inside, I checked the radio for any incoming signals. None. Absolutely nothing. Which was a bit disappointing to begin with, but after an hour or so of practicing my ukulele, it is Wednesday after all. I suddenly heard static coming from the speaker. So I put my youke down and I flew over to the radio to see if there was anybody on the other line. I said, hello, is there anybody there? You know. But it was just static. Cold, hard static, like a digital blizzard. Blizzards all around. But I didn't give up, so I repeated the questions perhaps 20 times. When all of a sudden I heard what I thought was a voice, because it wasn't super easy to hear what was being said, but after lots of trial and error to find the right frequency, I suddenly heard the voice crystal clear. So obviously I made a recording out of it and just just have a listen to this.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

There was something in the mines from the walls. Aye, Dios mío. It left for Earth. Everyone will die.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

This ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of Hugo Rodriguez. He's one of the mining operators on the moon, and I I don't like how distressed he sounds. But again, he says that everybody is dead, and if that was the case, I mean, you know, how can he be talking? But still, it has me a bit worried, the message, and and I rarely uh worry. I mean, most of the time worrying has no real use in life. You you either fix a problem or you adapt. And if none of those options apply, the problem isn't yours, and there is no need to worry, you know. Anyways, I sent a message to the moon, so all I can do is wait for them to reply, which I hope they will. Because I haven't really spoken to Hugo in a very, very long time. And last time I spoke to Hugo, I asked him a very essential question. I asked him, Hugo, how are you handling the powdered milk up there? Then the signal died. Now, the first thing everybody should know about moon earth communication is that the moon have a tendency to dip below the horizon, to take a swim in the horizon, like my mother used to say. And when that happens, the earth gets in the way of the signal. And yes, the antenna is big and not crooked anymore, but it's it's not that big. And when the moon came back up for air, so to speak, my radar had croaked, so there were no way to receive any signal. But Hugo knows how to handle himself. We we we served in the army together. He got first he got put on the bomb squad as he had a knack for diffusing bombs. He had he had such a knack for diffusing bombs that the army couldn't use him. You see, the enemy they all knew about his out-of-this world bomb diffusing skills, so they never used bombs. I mean it would just be the enemy wasting military budgets on bombs that would get diffused anyway. Sorry, it's music again Ingrid Dance Slow down Just Ingrid uh doing a dance, I think. Where was uh yeah yeah, Hugo Hugo was what we called uh uh a jix or a just-in-case soldier. So we spent a lot of time together as there rarely were anybody else around. The rest were all scattered around the world trying to win a war, and we were back playing chess and talking about space. Hugo was a huge space nerd, he specialized in the primordial black holes, and he had a theory that was quite interesting, he had a theory that tiny primordial black holes flew among us here on Earth and that they were responsible for almost all ghost experiences that people had. He said it was more likely that things moved apparently by themselves because a teeny tiny black hole collided with it rather than a lost soul. That was until he came into the cafeteria one early morning. He was pale as the snow outside my window right now, so I asked, Wow, what had happened, Hugo? And he told me I've seen a ghost. A ghost? I asked. A ghost, he replied. So we went looking for the ghost, but we didn't find any. Perhaps it was a vivid dream, I said. Because Hugo also had a knack for being able to sleep wherever he wanted, but he he couldn't remember falling asleep. But that same night I I woke up to a strange sound in in the hall outside my barrack, so I got up and went out to check what it was. Which is when I saw it, I saw this tall figure, the size of a tree, bent over as not to hit his head in the ceiling, carrying a pair of legs in one hand, and a net filled with severed heads in the other. And behind him was Hugo following him as he was under a spell, because his eyes were wide open, his mouth wide open, he was butt naked. So I ran over to him, tried to wake him up, and the tall man or figure didn't notice me, but when we finally got Hugo back to consciousness, the figure turned around and pierced its eyes into my entire being, which made my blood freeze solid. And I had never been afraid before, but then I felt a terror unlike anything else. It it felt like I had ants in my veins. And and the figure stared at us for seconds maybe, but the seconds felt like lifetimes, and and the lifetimes felt like eternities. It it was awful. Then suddenly the figure just turned around and walked out into the night, seemingly unbothered by the whole thing. Very strange, very strange. And and Hugo, of course, he was never the same after this. He had a feeling that the tall figure would come back for him someday. He told me that he owed him, but when I asked why, he never replied. And a week later he enlisted in the Space Force and he shot for the moon, leaving only a note to me that said, To escape death, one must be surrounded by it. And an old watch with a crack in its glass, which had stopped the exact second the space rocket he was on crossed the Karmand line about 11.02 AM. And when I reserved when I received the first message he sent me, he sounded happier than I ever heard him, which was nice. He told me that working the mines on the moon brought upon him a calm he had never felt before. He said he had reduced his life to mining, eating, and sleeping. So his mind had finally room for a deep calm where Hugo could simply exist. And I think that was all he ever really wanted. So I hope he still does. You know, exist that is, and that whatever he found in the mines, it was a bomb. And I'm still not sure if the tall figure that we encountered was real or if it was just a dream. Perhaps primordial primordial black holes are portals from which we receive what we experience as dream, and that sometimes these experiences slip out from the black holes. You know, in which case Hugo would be both wrong and right at the same time. So food for thought. Anyways, tonight I've done most of my chores, so I have time to relax. I told Ingrid that tomorrow night I will have to log her off for a few hours while I rinse her circuits for rusts. She replied by telling me a joke, which I think is her way of saying, all is good. Cause there's something funny going on. My theory is that salt has come through the ventilation of the Deep Earth Anomaly department facility from the blizzard, and that the salt uh somehow have entered her mainframe. Which has happened before. But last time I didn't know anything was wrong with Ingrid until she started to spin uncontrollably and tried cutting her own wires with a scissor. You know. Luckily the scissors uh were as sharp as a marble and wouldn't even be able to cut corners. She eventually uh succumbed, which is when I took her apart piece by piece and discovered that her mainframe like a half-eaten cookie. So from that time on, anytime Ingrid starts acting a bit out of the ordinary, I take her apart piece by piece, I do a rinse, put her back together again, and she's good to go. Now Ingrid is, after all, one of my closest and dearest friends, and um as well as a highly sophisticated robot, but there is humanity within her. There really is. So I intend to keep her in the best of conditions because I think she deserves that. I've seen people go mad down here, so having a friend to talk to is very important for the both of us. Which makes me think about uh the my other friend, Alexander Voss from MS Swalbach. Now, I think I will have to wait until I dare venturing back out into the blizzard. But I'd really like to go see him soon. I'd like to hear his story or two from from him, you know. He's so many good stories. And of course there are no shortage of stories here, there are books everywhere, but over the course of sixteen years I think I must have read all of them at least three times, if not more. And my favorite books are the ones about uh space-time and uh quantum physics. I've also read all of the novels by Himare Takahashi. I even have a handwritten letter from him sent to me only a few days before his sudden disappearance at Mount Kailash. Oh, I had forgotten all about that. That was a strange letter. Anyways, I also read Jonas Jensen's, you know, the the researcher who disappeared. Uh I read his textbook and notebooks multiple times just to try and understand his research a little bit better. I I think I know more now than I did 16 years ago, which means that I know nothing. Instead of absolutely nothing, so it's progress. So now all the stuff I know are all the stuff that I don't know. Like for example, where the Concord is. I know very well that I don't know anything about that. And also, okay, let's let's look at quantum physics, which I I like to read a little bit about, and then superposition. I and I won't go into any technical details about it simply because I know no technical details about it, but in quantum physics there is something called superposition, which says that something can be two things at once. Just like uh Hugo is both right and wrong if my theory on Hugo's theory on primordial black holes are correct, you know. But still, I mean how the hello, my good man, can one thing be two things at once? You know, and and the irony is that this was Jonas Jensen's field of research, and he is currently in nowhere at once. Nah, quantum physics is it's a strange thing indeed. It it's like magic where wizards have no idea how the trick works, you know. All they know is that it does. It's so strange and and and also, what's up with particles behaving a certain way until we observe them? So cheeky. Because how do we know that they behave differently when we observe them than when we don't? I mean, how do we know what something we don't observe is up to? Isn't that very strange? And yet it's it's true, it's real. But how do they know it's true? You know, how can they say that? I I just don't get it, but uh I think that's really why I like it. You know, a world in which we understand everything is a world in which we are bored. I think we all need mysteries. I really believe that. Oh, which brings me back to my good pal Frederick, the mirror man, as Jan Duplicate uh calls him now. So I've I've been checking in on him every evening since our chat, in case he's suddenly up for another one. You see, I I have an itch only Frederick can scratch, and that itch is called the green basement door. I have to know what kind of wonders lurk behind it. I I I just got to know. However, as I went to check on him tonight, I found Frederick gone. Which means I didn't find him at all. And I checked all his favorite mirrors. Uh I checked the one in the telescope tower where where Howard Duke took his last breath. I I checked the mirror in the eastern wing where Ingrid likes to recharge, and I even checked the mirror in the toilet. But he was nowhere to be seen, he was in no mirror. I I I couldn't even see myself in the mirrors. Two of the mirrors, however, had Yehuda carved onto them, which last time I checked was not Frederick's name. Frederick's name is Frederick. So whatever is going on, it's something strange, and I'm curious to see how this unfolds, so me and Jaran are now checking in on the mirrors every day and every night on both shifts, just in case he shows up. Anyways, it's been a long night and and uh the moon is in for a deep dive, uh, so I think I'll log off for now and hopefully I'll have more information next time. So yeah, this is Jaran, signing off yet another cold shift.