Eridanus Supervoid

Synopsis: A zoo administrator is visited by an ancient, arcane, all-knowing, interdimensional being that seems to transcend all of time and space. But why? She isn't quite sure, and the more it attempts to make its purpose clear the more she believes she may be suffering from a brain tumor. As the entity sheds light on the fundamental nature of life and the universe, the zoo administrator loses all semblance of reason and rationality, finding that greater knowledge may not be all it's cracked up to be. 

ERIDANUS SUPERVOID

I.

The sun had just begun to peak over the horizon when Liza walked through the entrance gate to Tadani Zoo and headed to the Grey Wolf Lair. It wasn’t a real lair, but zoo-goers didn’t know that. Zoo-goers liked names but thought little of their meanings. They thought about names the way they thought about the animals they saw.

Liza unlocked a gate to the Lair and observed two zoo workers preparing for the wolves a meal of chicken parts. She walked through and continued toward the Cheetah fields, across the walkway. Several zoo workers cut the grass and cleared the field of excess foliage—a weekly task.  She watched them for a minute longer, shivering in the wet morning cold of the fall, then walked to a building directly between the Cheetah fields and the Grey Wolf Lair, the Zoo Administration building. Like every morning, she was the first one there. When she opened the doors she noticed the elevator in the hallway with its doors wide open. It was the elevator that took her to her office on the third floor. The indicator arrow for “up” was lit. How strange, she thought, that it should be waiting for her.

She flipped on the building’s lights and walked to the elevator. She peaked inside before stepping on, convinced that someone must be waiting inside. Finding no one inside, she walked in. Before she could hit the button for the third floor, the door close. Liza was overcome with an emptiness inside her the source of which she could not pinpoint. The feeling had been there before, but only in times of grief or profound change. A suicidal wind blew through her nerves. Like a small reel of film playing behind her eyes, she recalled in a split second the associated circumstances that had caused this feeling in the past. Why it came to her now she did not understand. She tried to shake these thoughts from her mind. Still, her attention fixated on thoughts of oblivion. Her brain tackled the concept of nothingness, of ceasing to exist entirely, a fervent horror that always resided within her. The sudden awareness of permanent unconsciousness swept over her.

Liza didn’t hit the button for the third floor. She stared into the doors before her and let her heart sink. A lump developed in her throat. Her chest was heavy. The dismal haunting of melancholy floated over her.  Then a voice.

“Hello, Liza.” It was a voice warm with congenial tone, mellow, and lacking sex.

Too mellowed by grief to be startled, Liza responded, “Hello. Who’s this?” She looked to the ceiling of the elevator, though the voice didn’t seem to be coming from any particular direction.

“I have no name,” said the voice. “But you may call me what makes you comfortable.”

“I don’t really care,” Liza said. “I feel lonely. Really lonely. Somehow.” She looked at the walls, the floor, back to the ceiling. “So suddenly.”

The elevator began moving. Liza realized it was moving down, not up. The floor indicator at the top of the doorway did not light up.

“I know,” said the voice. Its tone implied empathy, and that it understood. Unthreatening, it continued to speak. “The feeling will pass.” The hum of the elevator as it drifted downward seemed to fade away, until total silence surrounded Liza.

“There’s no basement in this building. Where am I going?” Her voice seemed distant to her in the presence of such silence. It was as though she were violating an empty, soundless space that made no accommodations for voices. As if there was nothing for her voice to bounce off of.  She looked at her phone. There was no signal. Unusual. The time read 5:58 AM. 

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “You are here,” said the voice.

Liza didn’t recognize the room the doors opened into. A glass floor and glass ceiling seemed to barely conceal a deep field of stars, and no walls were visible.

“It is safe,” said the voice. “You are safe.”

Liza put her hands against the inside of the doorway and walked forward a couple steps, just enough to peek outside. The temperature was cool. Despite the blackness of space, there seemed to be oxygen. She walked out of the elevator. The glass floor was barely visible as a white light reflected off it from an unseen source. The ceiling was the same. Still stricken by inexplicable grief and a strange sadness, Liza wasn’t interested in asking anymore questions. She walked across the floor toward the blackness that seemed infinitely far away. Spinning in slow circles, she observed her surroundings. Other than the elevator in the middle of this vast expanse of glass and space, her surroundings appeared to be uniform. The elevator’s doors stayed open.

Liza’s sadness prevented her from feeling fear. Inside her was room only for despondency and confusion. “Who are you?” she said.

“I told you I have no name,” the voice said. “Call me whatever you like.”

“What are you? You don’t sound human.”

“I am not. I am one who watches humanity.”

“Are you a robot?” Liza looked around the spacious expanse of glass and fields of stars. The voice didn’t seem to have a source. It was as if it resonated inside of her with familiar tone. It wasn’t imposing, nor did it feel unwelcome.

“No. I am a sentient being. I am not from any place known to you.”

“Why can’t I see you? Are you hiding?”

“I am not hiding.  I have not presented my physical self to you because I don’t resemble life as you would know it.”

“You’re an alien? What is this place?”

“This is a neutral plane. I am an alien to you. But not an alien as you would know it.”

“This is too much.” Liza’s mood was returning to normal and fear started its growth inside her. “I must be going insane. I want out of here.”

“Step onto the elevator and you will leave. But I hope you will return, soon.”

Liza walked back onto the elevator and hit the button for the third floor. As the doors closed, she heard the voice say goodbye.

The elevator opened to the third floor. Sounds of lightly rumbling air conditioning filled the hallway, and lights automatically turned on as Liza stepped out.

“An alien,” she whispered to herself, as she walked toward her office. “Yeah right. You must be hitting menopause. This must be what happens. Voices invade your head, tell you unbelievable things, and you end up like your mother.” She stopped at a door with the title Zoo Director plastered on the front. She walked in, set down her purse, and began making coffee.

By the time lunch rolled around, Liza had spoken to others in the Zoo Administration building about her strange experience on the elevator. Nelly from Human Resources said she’d never heard of anything  quite like it happening. Karen, the chief veterinarian, said there was no basement in the building. Only three floors. Alan, Deputy Zoo Director, suggested to Liza that she might be overworked and, in his non-medical-expert opinion, hallucinating  in response to stress. Kurt, the Zoo’s maintenance supervisor, told Liza there was absolutely no way that what happened to her was real. There was no location in the zoo with glass floors and glass ceilings, or ego-neutralizing views of outer space. Daniel from the Planning and Development Division explained to Liza that it sounded like a beautiful place, but that it surely was a dream she had while asleep at her desk. Officers of the Zoo Commission agreed with Alan that Liza must be stressed and therefore experiencing imagined events.

Instead of going to lunch, Liza chose to take the rest of the day off. She drove from the zoo to the Velvet Memorial Hospital where she spoke to a neurologist about investigating a possible brain tumor.

“I’d like a CAT scan as soon as possible,” she told the doctor. “There’s something wrong with my brain, and I’m convinced it’s a tumor.”

“Kind of a funny name, huh?” said the doctor, brushing his gray beard as if he were deep in thought. “We don’t scan cats. We scan humans. That’s the funny part.”

Liza smiled to pretend she found the joke amusing. “Good thing I’m a human. When can I get a CAT scan or an MRI?”

“Whenever you want. But first I’ll perform a neurological exam. Jumping right into a brain scan is expensive and a possibly unnecessary procedure. I’d like to check your vision, hearing, balance, your reflexes, and coordination. This will let me determine if any of these areas of the brain might be affected.”

“I already told you, I had a very intense episode of visual and aural hallucinations. And a brief feeling of depression out of nowhere. Isn’t that enough to go on?”

“It’s a start,” said the doctor.

That night, Liza sat in bed thinking about the feeling that had overcome her in the elevator. The gentle, haunting voice she had spoken to stayed in her mind. The results of her MRI would be available in a few days, the doctor had said. He’d said her examination looked fine. No indicators of strange goings on in her head were found. But until the MRI results were back, Liza would remain skeptical.

Sleep brought disconcerting visions to Liza’s mind. Unconsciousness came unbound, and Liza saw dozens of human shaped bodies standing from crouched positions, until standing straight, below one shining red light that drowned their features. They raised their arms to the glow and seemed to stretch as they did so, without pain, and with silence. The feeling of despondency returned. Liza felt a weight burden her, a weight that wouldn’t release her. A sudden sense of tremendous loss sank low inside her. She continued to watch the bodies as they stretched toward the glow. From the golden ground on which they stood grew spiraling branches and vines of thorns that at first teemed with chaos and erupted into disordered shapes and reached in every direction. A subtle but audible hum accompanied the growing chaos. It grew louder as Liza watched helplessly. Each branch and vine embraced the humanoid bodies that stretched toward the red glow, encircling them, relentlessly twisting around their outstretched limbs.

The hum’s pitch changed, in one brief instant jumping higher, and the red glow grew brighter. The sound of clicking became clear beneath the hum, and the chaos that described the vines and branches appeared to change, to approach something resembling order. The shapes taken by the growing mindless masses bent toward suggestions of structure and intentional purpose, and the clicking became louder. Liza fell short of breath, and her heart slowed. The sense of loss grew greater, and sadness deeper. Time slowed, and she watched the humanoids move with delicate precision toward the glowing light while the growing branches and vines took on ordered patterns and forms. The hum reverberated through the environment, joined by complementary pitches that allowed the facade of harmony to play in Liza’s ears. The weight upon her increased until she could  no longer breath, and the shapes below the blinding red light, both humanoid and plantlike, ordered growth, became drowned out and seemed to fade from her sight. A familiar, sexless voice said something faint in the distance, but Liza couldn’t hear what it was.

II.

The following morning, Liza stood again in front of the waiting elevator. Its doors were open, and the building was empty. She stepped onto the elevator after a few minutes of hesitation, and allowed the doors to close on their own. It began descending.

“Good morning, Liza,” said the voice. “You will be pleased to know you don’t have a brain tumor.”

“That sounds like something a brain tumor would say.”

“I know you don’t know who or what I am, but I am not a brain tumor. I would need to be a pretty large and sentient brain tumor to do the things you have seen. And the things you haven’t seen.”

“Whatever it is that you are, I don’t know that I care. I’m here because I want to know why you’re doing this.” Liza’s emotional state sank as the elevator descended, returning her to the mental dungeon she felt she’d experienced far too much of in the past 24 hours.

“What you’re feeling right now is beneficial,” said the voice. “Melancholy, depression, helplessness, and grief. You need these.”

Liza shook her head. “Why?”

“Think of the evolutionary purpose that depression might serve. Increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, improved connectivity to the rest of the brain. Enhanced focus, less distraction. Your fears are subdued, and instead you find yourself in the mental state to make better decisions in complex situations. You’ll find your cognitive skills greatly improved, your ability to piece together information accelerated and strengthened.”

The elevator stopped, and its doors opened to the vast expanse of space and glass. Liza walked out. As her shoes clunked against the glass beneath her, she looked through the ceiling, to the blackness that lied beyond. The emptiness within her became more savage, as if tearing at walls that separated one world from another.

“But I hate feeling this way,” she said. “It’s like there’s nothing… I have nothing… I don’t know how to say it. It’s an awful feeling.”

“Don’t fool yourself. On the surface this feeling is ugly and perhaps debilitating. It’s a response to something. But when it settles it becomes a gift. It has an underlying beauty to it that you can find. You want out at first, but then you realize there’s something to appreciate in that dark space. Devoid of anything inhibiting.”

“I don’t know about that. It’s paralyzing. I kind of just want to be sucked out into this universe.” Liza gestured toward the field of stars and the emptiness that filled the rest of space. She stood still and stared into the cosmos. “Never to be seen again,” she said in a whisper.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“I had a dream last night,” Liza said after a moment of quiet observing.

“I know,” said the voice. Its tone remained empathetic and understanding.

“Weird sounds and weird colors. It woke me up and I couldn’t sleep. That’s part of the reason I’m back. And because I think I must be dying. This brain tumor is playing tricks on me.”

“You do not have a brain tumor.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what’s going on? The last twenty four hours have been fucking with my head, and I don’t know what to make of any of it.”

“I have no name, I can take no shape you will find comforting, and I come from a place farther away than you will understand.”

“Where do you come from? Can you give me any real answers?”

“I don’t come from any star or planet or galaxy that can be seen from Earth.  My race comes from outside this universe. An entirely different plane of existence.”

The blackness of space beyond the glass ceiling and floor seemed to light up for a second, as rays of light reached out across the universe. Liza followed the rays with her gaze, but they disappeared almost instantly.

 “There are things about space and reality and the nature of the universe, or universes, that remain unknown to your planet. I am a messenger.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” Liza said, still staring into space. “You know who I am, right? I’m a zoo director. You know that, you have to. You, this, that fucking elevator… it came from the zoo.”

“I know who you are. What better person would there be to speak to on matters such as those I am about to share with you than one whose purpose is to manage artificial ecosystems and habitats? You may not know it, but the role you play, while superficial and not beneficial to most forms of life, is much like the work we do.”

“We? Who is we?”

“Beyond the universe your people know, there lie others. Manifesting themselves as constant forces tugging at, and stretching the universe you are in. The multiverse behaves this way and there is constant growth and pulling from every universe on every other. Like magnets, or electronically charged particles, these universes interact. We are extra-universal beings who have transcended senescence. We’ve achieved biological immortality. We come from beyond your cosmological horizon.”

“This is most certainly a brain tumor,” Liza said. “You’re extra-universal beings? You’re immortal? And you’re here on Earth. How did you get here from  your universe?”

 “Your astronomers and physicists observe the cosmic microwave background of the universe to learn about the conditions of the early universe. Something they’ve found puzzling is a great cold spot in this background, something known as a supervoid. It lies in the constellation Eridanus, and appears to be a many –parsecs wide void where nothing exists. Some speculation by theorists, though, is on the right track.”

“A supervoid?”

“The Eridanus supervoid. It’s a doorway to my universe. For us, a doorway to your universe.”

“And you travel through, how? With ships? What technology do you use?”

“Our race has existed for billions of years. We are one of the few to have evolved from the very origins of the multiverse. Your universe is young. Our universe is close to 600 billion years old, and more than a hundred times the size of your universe. My people’s primordial beginnings were 88 billion years ago. Evolution through the following billions of years brought us to an impasse, which we finally overcame after millions of years of strife. It propelled us to higher stages of evolution. We conquered the stars, then the galaxy. Then the metagalactic orb. Then we spread beyond. We are an amalgamation of various species from that universe. Beginning as one people on one planet, we grew until spaceflight allowed us to meet others. Inter-species breeding was possible with many of these new lifeforms, and the offspring of each generation was stronger, healthier, smarter than the generation before.

“As more races from around the galaxy developed space travel, we encountered them. In time, they bred with our peoples. Even those who were incompatible with the first races were able to engineer offspring that were capable of cross-species reproduction. This continued for millions of years, until traveling outside the galaxy became possible, and until all known space-faring races were interbreeding, often by some type of artificial process. After billions of years of this, the universe’s many intelligent races coalesced to create… us. We are descended from over 90 million unique, intelligent alien species. All of their strengths and advances are part of us. Many of these unique species still exist in their pure form, in their regions of their own galaxies. But ours is the result of billions of years of combined evolution of millions of races. Immortality was achieved by our hybrid species nineteen billion years ago. I was alive to witness the birth of your universe. We no longer utilize technology as you would know it. Our civilization has reached such a point that it is indistinguishable from nature. Our technology is part of us, we are part of it. Our technology undergoes morphogenesis in the way organic life does. It evolves without any input from us. It is always in us. The highest point of Meliorism that is attainable has been attained. The technology we have  works in concert with the forces that make us alive. It is technology that breathes as if it were alive, because it is.”

“That doesn’t even begin to answer my question.”

“I have not finished. We have the ability to travel to any point in space or time instantaneously. This includes universes which we are able to find a way into. After biological immortality, we developed devices that allowed us to move freely through space, and shortly thereafter, through time. The closest humans have come to conceptualizing something of this nature is the Tipler cylinder, though it is a troublesome and needlessly large theoretical device your race’s fancy minds have devised. Any place our devices touch or have ever touched, or have ever seen, or have been within influential distance from, we can go. And these devices became a part of us through our technological and biological evolution.”

 “You are a super-race? Is that right? What you’re saying is you’re the product of billions of years of millions of species evolving toward one point. Let me guess. You’ve come to collect humanity. You want us as part of your race.”

“Not at all,” said the voice. “Humanity has a long way to go. You’ve barely explored beyond your own atmosphere.”

“Ah. So you’re here to help push us to the next level.”

“No. I’m here as part of an investigation. An examination of Earth’s inhabitants. Nothing I do here will affect humanity. That is part of the plan. We observe and, on occasion, communicate. You’ve been chosen for communication.”

“Well, I don’t understand why,” Liza said. She continued to stare into the dark beyond the glass.

“I have told you already. The work you do has greater implications than you might know. The integration of technology with our biology was not a new idea for us. The races that came together to form ours had each achieved a high level of connectedness with the natural world before they explored the stars.”

“What we do isn’t really a connectedness with nature. Not what I do, anyway. Some of the workers might feel that way. My job is management. I don’t have any interaction with animals or their environments. As far as the work goes, it’s hardly any different than being a factory manager or a business woman. I deal with people more than I deal with the animals. I don’t even have a degree in biology or anything related to animals. My degree is in business management.”

“Your work affects the lives of those here.”

Liza laughed. “I suppose.  On some level, maybe.”

“Do you ever wonder why it is humanity hasn’t met any intelligent life from beyond the solar system?”

“Actually, I do. I think about that from time to time, and decided it was because there is no intelligent life out there. There’s just us. I thought it was a big, lonely universe.”

“It is lonely for humankind because no one has said “Hello.” Humanity sees the stars and watches cosmic activity from its safe and remote vantage point. But you won’t recognize intelligent life when you see it. So organized and indistinguishable from nature are their civilizations that they may not be noticed by human eyes for thousands more years. They generate no apparent waste, their worlds appear healthy and wholly untouched by the devastating hands of progress. They are invisible to your primitive eyes. But it does not mean they haven’t seen you. They watch you, and we watch them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you a peacekeeper, making sure they’re not going to destroy us.”

“No. We do not intervene. Especially not outside of our own universe. We simply watch them as they watch you. And we watch you.”

“Good to know,” Liza said under her breath. “You said your technology grows. Through morph-something.”

“Morphogenesis. It is how biological organisms grow, and how our synthetic organisms grow as well.”

“What is to stop them from taking over? Like robots who destroy their creators. Does your technology have its own mind and free will?”

“Our technology is weaved into who we are. Although it is a separate set of processes and its development is different than our own, it is seamlessly  integrated into our cells and our bodies, and our collective consciousness. It has no control over us. It is impossible for it to destroy us because it lacks the sentience required for independent behavior.”

“If you’re so advanced, why aren’t you able to show yourself to me? Even with a hologram, or something to hide who you are? I want to look at something. This disembodied voice isn’t working for me.”

“I can easily do that,” said the voice. A three dimensional, translucent, bluish body appeared on the glass in front of Liza. Its shape was that of a human, its face unclear. It looked like a male, about six feet in height. It bowed to Liza, then put its arms out as if to welcome a hug.

Liza raised an eyebrow and shook her head.

The hologram closed its arms, which seemed to melt into its torso, and its face shrunk until it was gone.

“But it is not me you are seeing,” said the voice. The hologram shattered into thousands  of tiny fragments that spread out as if exploding from the center, then re-assembled themselves. “This is just an image. I can make any image. What I cannot do is show myself to you in any way that you’ll find familiar or comfortable because I am not life as you know it. I’ve remained invisible to you so that you’ll be at ease. I’ve chosen this voice for the same purpose.”

“I was going to say something about your flawless English. Aliens in movies always seem to know English. I think that’s the stupidest thing in the world. How would an alien know English?”

“We know many languages, most of them far better than those who speak it natively. We learn, we absorb information. We spend millennia studying cultures and entire civilizations, entire galaxies. In billions of years of life, there is a lot one can learn.”

“I’d be interested in seeing what you look like. I could take this seriously if I saw who I was speaking to. Something you don’t seem to know about humans is our innate need for trust in those we’re working with, or listening to.”

The hologram disappeared.

“I know how what will happen,” said the voice. Then it was quiet.

Beyond the glass ceiling Liza watched a massive shape fade in from the darkness. It was a blur of blues and greens. Its features came into focus, undistorted by the glass. The size of the creature was comparable to that of a whale, Liza estimated, yet resembled nothing she had ever seen. Its sheer size was intimidating, overwhelmingly so, to the point of shock. Liza was paralyzed with awe.

What Liza identified as the face was larger than a car, and uncounted numbers of eyes seemed to swarm around it with a dim green glow, moving continuously, but each staring at her. The body of the creature was smooth, oblong, forty or more feet in length, and with eight appendages protruding from its sides that radiated a spectrum of color. Parts of the body seemed to flow with plasmas and bright energy in dazzling patterns, yet in uniform direction, toward the face.

Liza’s breathing had slowed. Even in the dismal trough of artificial gloom, her body reacted with terror at the being above her. She didn’t move. She didn’t say anything.

Yet, with its monstrous size and inconceivable shape, its goliath presence, its blatantly alien existence, there was something calming about the spectacle which floated above Liza. Its appendages moved slowly, and a soothing radiance appeared in its center. As it grew brighter, a roaring, bass-heavy boom shook the glass floor on which Liza stood. Her body vibrated with it. A dense hum overtook her, crashed through the area between ceiling and floor, and Liza trembled in somber admiration. The glow from the creature’s center became so bright Liza closed her eyes. Upon closing them, visions of odd worlds came to her, with beings floating in the air, no ground in sight. Beings as large as the one before her. Cities in the sky loomed in the distance, and thousands of creatures soared at harrowing speeds in every direction. Other worlds came into view, worlds of crystal and dark clouds, with silicon biology crawling and flying over rocks and canyons; glacial worlds of behemoth life-forms breaking ice to hunt; small, low gravity planets with towering trees and slender bipedal creatures reaching for high branches, with bright starlight illuminating their fields and streams; large, dense, high gravity planets with short, thick creatures battling for territory, heavy clouds blocking most of their sun; views of celestial beings residing in the vicinity of neutron stars and black holes, dark and shrouded from all but invisible spectrums of light, their perplexing forms dizzying Liza as she tried to fathom their existence.

Her eyes opened, and she fell to the ground. Without uttering a word, she stood to her feet and ran toward the open elevator. Her heart raced as she pressed the button for the ground floor. The hum continued, and she could see the hulking blue being above the glass, though she looked away. The elevator doors closed and the hum disappeared. The doors opened on the ground floor of the administration building. It was still empty. Liza fell to her hands and knees, crawled out to the hallway, and lied on her side as she waited for her heart to slow to a moderate pace. She closed her eyes.

When her eyes opened, administration personnel were standing over her, whispering to one another, touching her to get a response.

“Liza,” said Alan, the deputy zoo director, “what happened? Are you alright?”

Liza sat up, her face cold with sweat. “I’m going home.”

III.

In the space of Liza’s dreams that night, she saw a colossal network of lights and neural pathways fire with endless vigor, new connections being made each moment, others dying, and the sounds of life and death, ambiguous, though somehow recognized to her, filling the black space between neurons. A cloud of species descended on the apparently infinite network, each molecule of the gas representing a unique form of life. The cloud’s meaningless shape evolved into intentional shapes, shapes that seemed to symbolize natural phenomena, but in ways Liza could not have conveyed to anyone with analogies or words or any known communication. Chemical elements formed within the cloud, soaked into the neural bridges carrying light from node to node, and the pathways grew stronger. Liza did not feel her body. Her awareness was that of a quiet observer with no mobility. All movement and activity and thought was orchestrated by forces unseen, removing autonomy from the scene Liza already struggled to understand. The infinite network of firing synapses before her became less  dense, as neural pathways exploded, others went dark, and some became visibly separated from the nodes they connected. The cloud of species grew smaller, and a steady hum fell over the sound of biological activity.

Molecules of the species-cloud took the form of humankind, and as they grew in size, the network of neural activity seemed to lose stability. Again, Liza felt a nauseating sense of grief that slowed her senses. Echoes of bells could be heard in the distance, minimalistic notes that accompanied the subtle hum. The clicking sound from her previous dream returned, as neural pathways vanished before her.

Sounds Liza recognized from the animals at the zoo emerged from the muted notes, blended together into a drone that pierced her ears. But she could find no solace. She existed helplessly as her surroundings evolved without concern for her. Tears came to her eyes while the sounds and the visions around her amplified in intensity. A red glow started in each of the surviving neural nodes, and became brighter with each synaptic firing. A flat plane materialized below the scenery, glowing from a singular point, and folded into an hourglass shape, centered on the glow. The voice of the stranger appeared, but Liza could not understand its words. Time seemed to come to a stop. For a split second, Liza thought she could feel her body, and within that split of a second, thought she felt her heart stop and disappear.

The next day Liza stayed home. Awake before sunrise, she called the lead wolf caregiver, left a message on his phone, then made herself breakfast. The day was dark. Clouds obscured the sun, and rain poured on and off throughout the hours leading to night, at which point the rain fell without reprieve. The next morning, she called the lead wolf caregiver, left the same message on his phone, then made herself breakfast. She called her doctor to check on the results of her MRI. They were not ready.

On the third day, Liza went back to work. She stopped by the Grey Wolf Lair to speak to the lead caregiver. She then went to the administration building. The elevator stood open. She stared into it. It seemed to stare back. She stepped on.

Her shoes clanked against the glass floor as she walked underneath the still-floating giant blue being beyond the ceiling. “I know what you want from me,” Liza said.

“I don’t think you do,” said the voice. “All I want you to do is listen.”

“I had a dream the other night. Another one. This one was worse.”

“I know.”

“What did you say in my dream? You were in it.”

“I said this is the folding point in time. I tried to show it to you, to show you something you could make sense of. A point in which the direction of humankind and other life changes. It changes for the better.”

“I don’t understand the sounds. The humming, the clicking, the barrage of notes. I don’t think any of it makes sense.”

“It’s all communication. Everything communicates on some level. Plant life clicks. Think of the animals at your zoo. The various forms of communication they engage in. It all means something. They don’t communicate for nothing. And that is a standard human flaw, the belief in meaningless communication between these animals you see yourselves above.”

“We don’t think it’s meaningless. We study it to learn what it means. I know better that most. It’s my job to know, or at least to supervise those who do know. We employ experts, here. Do you think you know what it means?”

“We know what all of it means.”

“Then why don’t you fucking tell me? What’s the point of this?”

The voice was silent.

“Tell me,” Liza said.

“You’re going to do what you’re going to do. And I can’t stop you.”

Liza looked at the creature floating in the black of space, examined the stars that floated behind it, and let the sense of hopelessness cover her. She walked to the elevator and stepped inside. The doors closed.

Liza sat in her office, watching the time move forward. It was Saturday. Almost noon. The zoo would be at its greatest capacity at this time. When the clock struck twelve, she stood up and left the building.

“Leave,” she said to the wolf caretakers. “Everyone. Tell them to leave. You did as I asked?”

“We haven’t fed them in three days. As you asked.”

Liza nodded, and the workers left the area. Liza opened the gate to the inner sanctum of the grey wolves. She left it open, and opened the door to the outside, to the rest of the zoo.

She walked out of the Grey Wolf Lair and sat on a bench nearby. As the seconds ticked by, the wolves began to emerge from the lair. Guests of the zoo were beginning to flock by, in time for the 12:30 cheetah show, a show that starred the zoo’s family of cheetahs displaying their speed and agility to eager watchers.

Liza watched. The first wolf ran from the lair and into a crowd. Three  wolves followed. Screams from men, women, and children shrieked above the dull roar of the crowd, and soon, all the dozens of people in the vicinity were running for cover while others were mauled by hungry wolves loose from their prison.

Liza closed her eyes to visions of galaxies colliding, alien species embracing in harmony, and a distant Earth descended upon by curious beings. The bloodcurdling screams of terror and death flooded her head, but a smile crossed her face.

Her phone rang. Liza answered it, covering her free ear to block out the sounds of violence just meters away. “Hello?”

“Liza, hi, this is Dr. Fern at Velvet Memorial Hospital. The results of your MRI are in. If you want to come by the hospital this afternoon, or whenever is convenient for you, we could go over your scan.”

“That sounds lovely,” said Liza. “I’ll be right over.” She hung up and dropped her phone. She stood, put a smile back on her face, and ran toward the chaos of wolves. A dozen wolves by now were eating corpses, some victims still lying alive on the ground as they were devoured, and Liza jumped in the middle of the feast. “Unchained and free!” she shouted. Two wolves jumped on her, tearing quickly at her neck and her stomach. She didn’t put up a fight. Other wolves joined in to smear her blood and her organs around her body. 

The elevator in the administration building stood open. In the aftermath of the wolves, it stopped working, but stayed open. A low hum came from within, but neither the zoo staff nor the police investigating the wolf incident could place the source. It didn’t strike anyone as very important, anyway.