Something in the Air: New Story in Kaleidotrope Magazine

Thrilled to make my debut in the latest edition of Kaleidotrope Magazine, with a story called “Something in the Air.”

The story – and the whole magazine – is free to read online here. The magazine is well worth your time.

The story features an unfortunate linguist tasked with investigating the alien markings on a mysterious ancient slab retrieved from beneath the Antarctic. All other scientific tests having failed, the linguist tries to decipher what appears to be writing inscribed into the surface of the slab. But the message on the monolith contains a surprise that has a dramatic impact on the linguist, and through him the rest of the world.

There’s a story behind the story. It takes place at Porton Down, the UK’s chemical and biological research facility in south west England. Many years ago, I was lucky enough to visit Porton Down. Not because my work had anything to do with chemical or biological weapons (it did not!), but because I had met a senior official from Porton Down on a training course, and he organised the visit for a number of us. It was a memorable and fascinating day, including an outing to look at the UK’s stock of decommissioned chemical weapons (not as grand as it sounds – it was a cattle shed with pallets holding mainly rusty World War One gas shells that had been found over the years).

One thing that we didn’t see was an ancient artifact left by aliens who communicate perfectly among themselves as a group mind and understand what might happen if a species emerges that uses technology but struggles to understand others. I made that up

Here’s an extract:

The Slab was found by the Halley VI Antarctic research station, perched on the Brunt ice shelf. The station sat close to a large crack in the ice sheet and was due to be moved to a safer location, when heavy calving exposed the Slab. The discovery prompted a spasm of excitement across the world, which faded fast when it became clear that the Slab was all there was. No spaceship, no alien creatures, no sign of a settlement: just a rectangle of mystery metal, eight feet by three, and two feet deep. Once it became clear that this strange artefact wouldn’t explode, the British government shipped it home to Porton Down.

The Slab was ancient. When Julius Caesar landed in Kent and Jesus lugged his cross up Calvary Hill, the Slab had already been under the ice for centuries. But being old doesn’t keep you in the headlines forever. The public got bored, and the scientists were left trying to work out what on earth it was. Or what off earth it might have been.

Linguists weren’t on the original team, but we got our turn after the physicists, biologists and chemists had a go and learned little. Extensive scans revealed nothing about the interior of the block, but they showed that the featureless surface hid something interesting. The smooth exterior was a rigid skin over a pattern of markings beneath. The upper part of the Slab appeared to hold inscriptions, cut into the block like the words on a gravestone and filled in so that to the naked eye the surface was unmarked.

Carey Rogers did her best to decipher the marks from scan photos, but they were not clear enough. After a month of red tape, she got clearance to try to take out the shallow filling and expose the markings themselves. A bit like brass rubbing, but with a cobalt steel drill. The drill team had uncovered a couple of lines, no more than the upper nine inches of the Slab, when Carey suffered her accident. She had learned nothing about the meaning of the words on the Slab, if they were indeed words.

When I first saw the Slab, it was just as Carey left it, braced upright by wooden struts cemented to the floor. The panel that whacked Carey stuck out like the drawer in a roll-top desk left open by a hurried departure. A technician leaned close to the black surface, stroking it with the tip of a hand-held drill. When it touched the Slab, the drill bit screamed. Beneath the tough outer skin, the material filling the inscriptions was different, softer. When the technician broke through the surface in the right place, clouds of dark powder billowed up from the drill. He had been drilling for some time – the air in the Lab looked like the aftermath of a firework party. I was glad the airtight suit meant I didn’t have to breathe that stuff.

Drilling revealed fourteen rows of symbols, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but more abstract, with no recognizable pictures. Each row had twenty characters, evenly spaced, so the strict linguist in me said we might be dealing with twenty columns rather than fourteen rows. Some symbols occurred several times, but with less repetition than I wanted and more than 150 distinct characters in the 280. These guys either used some symbols for whole words, or they had a huge alphabet. I hadn’t a clue where to start deciphering this stuff. That first day, I remember wiping the dust from my visor with my wrist, thinking I had found a job to keep me busy the rest of my life…

Read the whole story here.