Daryl’s arm was obliterated in the crash, necessitating a cybernetic replacement. He’d fared better then the woman he’d rammed into: the shards of glass severed her neck clean off her head. Her name was Debrah Ataturk. She’d been forty-three years old. She’d been on her way to pick up her kids from school.

Daryl met her family at the funeral. It reminded him of his earliest memory: his birth parents’ funeral. That was where he’d first met his adoptive father, Michael, who’d been Best Man at his parents’ wedding. The scene was similar: a bright and dry day, the grass yellowed with decay. It was even the same graveyard: Daryl’s birth parents were a few rows away the whole time.

The meeting with Debrah Ataturk’s family hadn’t been reassuring: her husband Jamal broke Daryl’s nose. Daryl was been sixteen, and he’d yet to receive his new arm- apparently he hadn’t filed the insurance for it properly and would have to start the process over. When he fell and Jamal started kicking him while the kids watched, he couldn’t push himself off the ground. Michael came and broke it up, saved him from Jamal and probably from himself as well.

Michael extended Daryl a hand and lifted him from the ground, put a hand on his shoulder.

“Thanks,” Daryl said.

“Of course,” Michael said.

“Think I’m going to jail?”

“Probably not. They’re more likely to offer you military service as recompense. You could even get into the science corps- I know you’ve wanted that for a while now.”

“I don’t deserve to get what I want.”

“It was an accident, Daryl,” Michael said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Was it your fault? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do now. Someone comes along and offers you a second chance, then you’re doing yourself a disservice, and you’re disrespecting those who’ve left you behind.”

Daryl didn’t know how to respond to that, and so he looked at the ground and said nothing. Eventually, Michael took his hand off Daryl’s shoulder.

“You want me to wait in the car?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Daryl said. “I, uh, I need a few more minutes.”

Michael nodded, and then fell away with the rest of the crowd.

***

There was a noise on the scanner, the blunt hammering of a heartbeat. The Tutankhamun sat in the dark, tracking the sound to the source. Daryl kept the sensors tuned, kept the whole crew listening. It grew closer every day.

Daryl Talbot was a scientist first and lieutenant second, with everything else tied for a distant third. His uniform, commissioned directly from the Osiris government, was unbuttoned and torn in places- about as far from regulation as he could get, unless he started stitching labels to it. That would’ve been a bit too much, even for Captain Carradine. She was lenient, but she had her limits. Daryl passed by her in the ship’s second-level hallway, nodded at her rather than slipping into a salute; she nodded back, smiled. She was a tall woman, and a taller Osirian, with short-cropped natural hair and a face that did not reveal the truth of her many years. Daryl kept going right away, heading to his station, moving closer to the heartbeat.

A heartbeat out in space was not something they were supposed to be able to pick up on. That was the precise reason Daryl had convinced the Captain to veer off course, go search for it. They’d been examining a former asteroid that had settled in to orbit around Isis. They’d have to come up for a name for it soon, so it could join its brothers and sisters amongst Isis’ many moons. The asteroid was suspected to have massive silicon deposits that the motherland could make use of, and indeed it did. They were in an upswing at that point: Osiris could make serious breakthroughs in computer technology, the area in which they’d been consistently lagging behind compared to the other human factions. Even the goddamned Alaunan’s had a leg in them in terms of information tech. Hopefully, though, with the resources at their disposal, they could make some progress, update their systems, maybe even renew the terraforming effort on Sekhmet that evaporated when the alliance with Quetzalcoatl fell apart twenty years prior.

They’d done their job faster than expected, which was when Daryl first picked up on the rhythm. It was coming from around Set, between it and the sun called Ra. Set was a gas giant orbiting a larger gas giant- it wasn’t somewhere anyone spent a lot of time. Set’s moons were uninhabitable as well due to the heat, and only Amaterasu’s technology was capable of circumventing that kind of heat and pressure. Well, that and Gray technology, but they weren’t exactly on speaking terms with the twiggy bastards at the moment- most of humanity wasn’t.

“What do you think it is?” the captain asked him during dinner.

“I honestly have no idea,” had been Daryl’s reply.

“And that’s why you wanna go check it out, I take it?”

“That’s correct, Captain.”

“God, you are so predictable, Daryl,” the Captain said with a smirk.

“We have enough fuel and air to make the trip, provided we don’t linger,” Daryl offered.

“Can we take the heat?”

“If Hawkins can fix the shields, which by all rights she should be able to.”

“I see,” the captain said, clasping her fingers together. She sat at the end of a steel table in her personal quarters, which in total added up to about the size of the mess hall: a cramped square box not meant to accommodate someone of her height. Daryl was a more averaged-sized Osirian, so it didn’t bother him as much, but he knew there had to be something disconcerting about your own room being so blatantly wrong for you. “So what do you think this is?”

“Ma’am? But you already asked me-”

“Lemme rephrase that,” the Captain said. “What do you hope it might be? Because that is not a part of the neighborhood anyone likes going to. There was talk of putting a prison station in orbit around Set, but the Council decided that would be inhumane.”

“Is that why they keep Kayzhourian prisoners there instead?” Daryl asked, half-joking.

“According to my husband, yes,” Captain Carradine said. Louis Carradine, understanding husband to Aliyaah, was secretary to a member of the Council, or an affiliate of the Council- one of those government jobs nobody was sure what the exact purpose was, not even the people working them (save for the unspoken assumption they were meant to give the more educated citizens a source of income); either way he knew things he probably wasn’t meant to and told them to his wife because of a distinct lack of patriotism Daryl noticed was common amongst bureaucrats.

“So what do you want to find?” the Captain said, still smiling.

“I dunno,” Daryl said. “I really don’t. I just know there’s something there and that maybe it needs our help.”

“How long is this mission projected to take?”

“No more than a day, Ma’am.”

“The others aren’t gonna like it. Especially not Hawkins. She’s been eager to get home this whole trip.

“Daniels won’t like it either.”

“Yes, but Daniels doesn’t like anything. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say a word that wasn’t a part of a complaint.”

Daryl laughed. “I think you’re right.”

“I’ll give it the greenlight- I’m being awarded a medal a week from now, I have some sway afforded to me at the moment.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Daryl said.

That had been twelve hours ago. They were closing in on the source. Daryl sat at his station on the bridge, examining the scanners. The ceiling of the ship was only a few feet above his head. He was an ordinary looking man for Osiris: dark skin, bushy black hair, and only a poke above five feet in height. In space, he felt smaller than usual, but he didn’t mind: it kept him humble.

The blank chrome of the ship’s bridge was broken up by the lights both inside the ship and from the sun called Ra. Daniels dimmed the windows without having to be told, to shut out the glare a bit more thoroughly. Daryl concentrated on his readings- the heartbeat was growing louder, but it maintained its slow and steady. The readings began to resemble more than just random data, however; they began to assume a shape, a silhouette.

They looked human.

Nobody had any clue what a human being would be doing in that particular spot. A Kayzhourian would have at least some sort of logical explanation to it, but a person? No.

A shriek cut through the bridge. Daryl looked up and saw Daniels screaming in front of the window. Jemesin had her hand on his shoulder, trying to calm him down, while Hawkins simply stood at her station and gaped.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Carradine asked as she stomped her way in.

“We’re not sure, Ma’am,” Hawkins said. “Daniels just started screaming.”

Daniels sucked in air like he was afraid his supply was about to be cut off. The Captain went up to him, put both her hands around his face.

“Daniels, please look me in the eye,” she said gently.

Daniels’ eyes were still closed.

In the harsh red light of Ra, Carradine repeated, “Daniels. Omar. Please. Open your eyes. That is all I ask of you. It is not an order, it is a request. From all of us.”

Daniels’ eyes peeled opened gradually, and his breathing normalized as well. Carradine lowered her hands, and Daniels’ posture straightened and he rangled his hands into a sloppy salute.

“At ease,” Carradine said evenly. “Please tell me what you saw.”

He spoke with great reluctance, but finally he said, “Eyes, Ma’am. Two of them.”

“Eyes. Like human eyes?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Where?”

Daniels pointed, and he adjusted the filter on the windows to present a clearer view of the outside. Daryl and Hawkins walked over to the others to get a better look, Daryl putting a companionable hand on Daniels’ shoulder.

There weren’t any eyes outside, or at least none that were opened. There was, however, a boy floating in orbit of their sun. He had no space suit, and he wasn’t awake, but he was completely intact. And according to the scanners, his heart was beating.

Daryl and the Captain attributed Daniels’ claim and reaction to a stress-induced hallucination. Not unreasonable: it wasn’t exactly a normal thing to look out your window and bear witness too.

Daryl volunteered to retrieve the boy while Jemesin messaged their superiors about what they’d found, fudging the details only so far as to claim they’d been answering a distress signal. After some head-scratching, the time came: Daryl climbed into his space suit and shot out the airlock. It was clunky and laborious and cold, and Daryl loved it the same way he loved free-climbing back on Osiris: he knew he shouldn’t, but there were few things he enjoyed more.

The boy was right outside the airlock. Daryl, tethered, went to grab him. He heard the heartbeat now. It had to be in his head- no sound in the vacuum, after all. He grabbed the boy by the arm, and there was a cold flash of white light. It felt like he was sticking his hand down a broken garbage disposal trying to de-clog it. The soggy wetness and the sensation of rot and decay and mush slithered all over his body.

Over where the boy floated, there was a pair of eyes. Two floating human eye balls with blue irises and a few noticeable blood vessels.

It was gone as soon as he noticed it. Daryl hadn’t fully processed what he was looking at until it’d vanished. He didn’t conclude, definitively, that the irises had been blue until he was back in the airlock, and he didn’t realize how noticeable the blood vessels were until the doors the of Tut slammed closed.

The artificial gravity kicked in, and the boy became heavier in Daryl’s arms. The Captain took him off Daryl’s hands as Daryl took off his spacesuit.

They set him down on a table in the med-bay. Daniels’ was their medic, but the lack of anything eventful on the trip previously hadn’t left him with much to do. The desire to tell Daniels’ he was right about the Eyes scurried through Daryl’s mind like a blind dog chasing a scent. He muzzled it. The mind can play all sorts of tricks on you, he reasoned. Stress and confusion, that’s all it is. This isn’t quite a normal situation. Unless this boy is an exceptionally powerful psychic there’s no way he could manifest that kind of illusion. Hell, probably not even then: there’s maybe a dozen human psychics alive that powerful, and to my knowledge they couldn’t do it while asleep.

A hallucination, that’s all. Power of suggestion. I’ll have Daniels check me out later, make sure I don’t have a brain worm or something. And then I’ll get him to check himself, too.

The Boy had what Born Earthers and Martians would call European features: pale skin, blonde hair, and wide blue eyes. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen years old, and he weighed barely a hundred pounds. He was clad in black pants and a black pullover, and in his pocket was a pair of white leather gloves. His heartbeat was steady, if a bit slow.

The whole crew was assembled in the medbay save for Jemesin, who was plotting their course back to Osiris. The Boy didn’t show any signs of waking up, and yet there was nothing wrong with him.

“No illness, no injuries, no nutrient deficiency, nothing,” Daniels explained to the others. “Not even dehydrated.”

“How is that possible?” Carradine asked.

“Drawing a blank on that one,” Daniels’ confessed. “I don’t know if I have enough equipment to really figure that out, frankly. At least not here. The best thing to do is to get him back to Osiris and run some tests on him at one of the university labs.”

“Alright then,” Carradine said, “Let’s do-”

The Boy made eye contact with Daryl first. He sat up at a ninety-degree angle on his cot, turned his head, looked at Daryl, and blinked.

“Thank you,” the Boy said to Daryl. “For saving me.”

A full ten seconds passed before a response cam. “Of course,” Daryl said. Both Daniels and Carradine were looking at him: Daniels’ face was confused while Carradine’s was grave. “It wasn’t just me, though. It was everyone on this ship. Including these two people here: this is Dr. Daniels and Captain Carradine.”

The boy turned his head and nodded at both of the others. “Thank you.”

Daryl continued, “My name is-”

“Daryl Sadavir Talbott,” the Boy said, pointing at him. “Age… Thirty-five.”

The silence returned. Daryl finally said, “Thirty-seven, actually.”

“Oh. Sorry. My mistake.”

“Don’t, uh, don’t worry about it,” Daryl said, cracking his knuckles. “How do you know my name exactly?”

The Boy put a hand to his chin. “I’m not sure. I guess you must’ve introduced yourself when you came and got me.”

“Because I touched you,” Daryl reasoned.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Daniels said. “I touched you as well when I had to examine you, to see how you were still alive. You didn’t know my name, did you?”

“I don’t know. I must not have been looking at you,” the boy said.

“But your eyes have been closed the entire time until now,” the doctor said.

“Daniels, maybe ease off,” Carradine said with a gentle reproach.

“No, I wanna know how this works.”

“Daniels,” Daryl cautioned.

“HEY! Back off. I need to know how it works.”

“Daniels, if this is about proving you’re not crazy-“

“I’m not crazy. I know that. I just need you to know that.”

“Daniels, I saw the Eyes as well. Out there, when I got him,” Daryl said slowly.

“Then you know we have a responsibility to investigate this!” His eyes were wide and wild- he’d had a very different reaction to the Eyes, to the Boy, then Daryl had.

“Omar-“

“Enough, Daryl. I’d like some answers as well,” the captain said.

Daniels gave a smug smirk, then put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “What’s my full name?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, looking away, pulling a hand over his lap.

“What’s my full name, come on,” Daniels said. He forced the boy’s face towards his direction. “Tell me my name-”

There was a brief image above the Boy, what Daryl came to know as the Eyes. He only saw one of them, due to the angle he stood at, and they weren’t aimed at him. He was, in a dirty and morbid manner, grateful for that.

Daniels fell to the floor in an instant. Blood leaked out his mouth and nose and ears.

Carradine put a hand to her mouth.

Daryl found himself screaming.

The boy looked at the corpse and began to sob.

***

They sealed off the med bay, put every lock on every door leading to it. They stuffed Daniels’ body in a pod and fired it into the sun called Ra. Standard protocol. Not that whoever wrote it had anything like this in mind.

“Do you think it’ll do anything?” Jemesin asked.

They all sat at the main dinner table in the mess hall. Formality appeared to have broken apart quite quickly. Everyone was out of uniform, everyone had forgotten to bathe, and everyone had gargantuan bags under their eyes.

“I certainly hope so,” was Carradine’s response.

They ate their rations in silence for a while.

“This is my fault, isn’t it,” Daryl said.

“It’s not your fault, Daryl,” the captain said.

“I think it’s a bit my fault,” Daryl said.

“I’m inclined to agree, honestly,” Jemesin said flatly.

“You’re out of order, Jemesin,” Carradine said. “I agreed to go check it out, you charted the course there, and Daniels decided it was okay to keep going even when he nearly went into hysterics. Daryl was the one who saw the kid and brought him in, but we all did a bit in getting to this point. Am I clear on that?”

Silence.

“But… I didn’t do anything,” Hawkins said finally.

Carradine laughed first, much to everyone else’s relief. The others joined in fairly quick.

“Alright, fair enough. You didn’t,” Carradine said.

“Just so we’re clear,” she said with a grin.

The silence returned after a moment. It was less dense, less overpowering, and was undercut by the sound of the crew chewing. It also left Daryl with a chance to embrace the fact this was well and truly his fault.

***

Things got worse when Hawkins’ screaming woke everyone up.

“Do we kill him?” Hawkins asked as they stared at the Boy.

“No,” Carradine responded.

“It might be worth considering.” Hawkins would suggest that: a rough and calloused woman in her fifties, she was a civilian contractor on a federal boat. She’d been stuck jobbing around for nearly three decades on whatever ship would take her on as their engineer. Nobody seemed to particularly like Hawkins, though nobody seemed to hate her either. Daryl suspected that was because she’d learned not to talk to anyone most of the time.

“You’re not killing a child, Hawkins,” Carradine said flatly. Daryl noted the use of ‘you’ over ‘we.’ Carradine wanted Hawkins to know she was the only one considering this.

They stood outside the med-bay, while the Boy slept on his cot inside the sterile chrome room. All of them were assembled there. They’d gathered after Hawkins cries of terror woke them all up: she’d been having a nightmare. She’d seen the Eyes in her dreams, and she’d woken up covered in her own sweat and piss.

A few minutes later, an alarm went off. It came from Jemesin’s quarters: the oxygen generator had somehow switched off, without warning, for about thirty seconds.

They got it fixed, got Jemesin out safe. And when she came to, she’d said that in her dreams she’d seen the Eyes as well.

They’d all known it was the Boy again, and when they arrived outside they saw him levitating above his bed while he slumbered.

Daryl kept quiet. He knew he needed to have an opinion on this. The Boy didn’t seem to have any control over what was happening: he’d cried for Daniels, and he’d been asleep when he almost killed Jemesin. The security footage confirmed it- the Boy was either a very good actor or, more likely, just a child who didn’t know his own strength. The exact how and why of that strength, however, proved a potent question.

The other factor was that, no matter what the Captain said, bringing the Boy aboard the ship, following the pulse in the first place- that’d been Daryl’s idea. He hadn’t intended for any of this, but still: the traces of blood he kept finding on his hands were difficult to ignore. Flecks under his nails and between his knuckles, the splotches of proverbial crimson on his palms.

“Actually Captain,” Jemesin said, “I think it might be worth considering.”

“That’s a child in there,” the Captain said. “A little boy. And any evidence that this is his fault is circumstantial at best.”

“Why don’t we let Talbott decide?” Hawkins said bitterly.

“Excuse me?” Daryl said.

“Don’t play dumb. You made this mess, you should be the one to decide how clean it up.”

Before he could answer, Jemesin screamed. She backed herself against the wall, and howled in fear and agony as she pointed at the Boy.

… No, no, not at the Boy. At right above the Boy.

Daryl didn’t see the Eyes, but he knew they were there. Watching. Observing. Reacting. Were they protecting the Boy? Was it some kind of mutation, an adaptation designed to keep him safe from threats he might not be consciously aware of?

Why do I feel like that’s what it’ll turn out to be if we’re all very, very lucky? Daryl asked himself.

The Captain held up both her palms and said, “Jemesin, please calm yours-”

Before Carradine could finish, Hawkins snuck up from behind and grabbed her. She was shorter than the Captain, but double her weight via muscle mass.

Daryl reached for his gun reflexively- how had he known he would need it when he was called down here?- but found himself pivoting at the sound of the med-bay door opening. Jemesin rushed inside, gun at the ready.

“Go!” the Captain shouted at Daryl.

Daryl turned and went for Jemesin, and Hawkins took that as permission: she snapped the Captain’s neck, and her body hit the floor in an instant.

Daryl forced himself not to react, forced himself to prioritize the Boy and the threat Jemesin posed. He raised his gun, aimed-

No need, though. The Eyes came into sight over the Boy, now lying on his back on his cot, and Jemesin dropped dead. Blood came in steady, sharp streams from every orifice of her body.

A round fired off, the bullet zooming past Daryl’s ear and heading towards the Boy. It stopped directly in front of him, then turned around and snapped back at the source. Hawkins’ blood and brain matter became paint on the silver wall behind her, and her corpse fell face-first to the floor.

Slowly, deliberately, Daryl turned his head back towards the Boy. Towards the Eyes. They held his focus: he looked directly at them, met their gaze. He put his gun on the ground, then stood up straight with his hands behind his head.

The Eyes did not waver and did not blink. They did not vanish as the Boy awakened.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice high and sleepy.

“There, uh, there’s been some conflict, aboard the ship,” Daryl said.

The Boy took in the sights around him, and he began to weep once more.

“I did all this, didn’t I?” the Boy asked.

Daryl wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that question. Gingerly, he reached out and took the Boy’s hand.

The Eyes widened.

And Daryl saw.

He saw the star, the sun, called Ra; he saw hands holding it, a body of something resembling a man wrapped around it. It wasn’t quite a man, however- it was a perversion of the very concept of a human being (or perhaps, the thought came to Daryl, unsure if his mind was the source, it’s the other way around). It was twice the size of the star itself, almost too large to comprehend. Daryl’s stomach was empty and began devouring itself as he looked at the creature, its many fingers and hands, its inhuman face that made Daryl want to scream. Half of Daryl’s body was coated in ice, the other half was set ablaze. His blood turned to worms and maggots crawling through his veins, desperate for escape.

Then Daryl saw the creature’s Eyes. Only two of them, in spite of the excess of everything else about it.

The creature began to shrink, and it was silent as it fell into the sun it evidently called home. From the sun emerged a flare, no more than a finger of burning gas. From the flare emerged the Boy.

The Boy knew not what he was or where he came from. The Boy knew not of the eyes that watched over him. The Boy knew not of the truth Daryl saw.

But the others saw it. Daniels, Hawkins, Jemesin, saw. And they all reacted in terror.

Daryl withdrew his hand. He looked up and saw that the Eyes had vanished.

“No,” Daryl said. “It’s not your fault. But it is your responsibility.”

“How do I fix it, then?”

“You can’t. But you can live with it. Let’s get back to Osiris, then take it from there.”

“Okay,” the Boy said.

Then the stars outside vanished, and the black sky burned blue. Outside was an open field of grass, a treeline nearby at the edge. Daryl walked over to the window and saw birds fly over the glass. Daryl said, “Computer, what’s our present location?”

The clean, electronic, feminine voice of the computer spoke: “Osiris. Twenty kilometers outside the city of New Cairo.”

“I did that too, didn’t I?” the Boy said from behind Daryl.

Daryl turned, looked at him and nodded slowly. He looked at the bodies on the floor, and decided that the hard part wasn’t over yet, that the hard part had yet to come. Or perhaps that the whole thing constituted ‘the hard part.’

Daryl took a deep breath. He decided to call the boy Michael.

End