Day 4 Afternoon
I am snapped awake by the sound of Keeper's roar.
I can't decide whether to let go of the dragon's thumb to cover my ears or hold on and accept the decibels.
I get stuck somewhere in between both and get the worst of both worlds. I'm amazed I don't fall.
I open my eyes apprehensively. When did I fall asleep? More than 24 hours and I guess my body decided enough was enough. I don't feel well rested. Arms slink around keeper's thumb once again.
My eyes dart left then right then downwards. The view matches up with what I last remember, only difference being in the size of our destination. Thoughts of imminent danger recede. I was worried we might be in for a fight or something for a second there. The island is much closer than before.
We circle once over the island. It's smaller than the rest. I assume this is home sweet home. At the very top there are no trees, rather there is a suspiciously dragon sized cave opening and flat stones laid upon the grass.
With a roar like that you would expect whoever is inside to come out. Then again maybe keeper lives alone.
From where we land it is a bit of a walk up an incline. I rest my hand on a branch while stepping over a tree root. The skin of the tree is smooth, perhaps like the bamboo plant. Bit challenging to keep up with Keeper through here.
Emerging through the trees I get a clear view at the clearing. It is a modest place. Do dragons decorate their homes? I wonder if Keeper has any amenities. The dragon's tail flicks about. The draconic upside-down-smile-frown is out in full force. It's wings bounce up and down as if in a little dance.
We approach the cave looking thing and... and the dosimeter starts screaming....
I look down at the read out.
180 millisieverts... per hour...
Holy fuck.
I am not going in there!
No, I am back tracking in fact! Take me back to the trees. Perhaps I'll roll down the hill. The dragon would be wise to follow me too. Oh but the dragon is not following. I shout out to it trying to get its attention.
"Keeper do not go in there!"
Dawn Watcher is glad to be home. She rests her weight on familiar stones. It's been a bizarre four days but they've made it, her and George. Falling lights from the sky. A vandal on the mollis island. Mysterious washings ashore, and even a laying of the dead for one of George's own. A long four days. But now it is time to rest easy. She can't wait to introduce the human to Sky Catcher.
But what is this?
Why is the device on the human's side beeping again?
Why are they playing this silly little rock game again?
Why is George pulling on her tail again?
There aren’t even any rocks to practice pulling around and hunting with and hiding from.
Dawn Watcher ignores it all and walks up to the mouth of her home and pokes her head inside, full of joy.
She is ready to greet Sky Catcher. She is ready to see her son, whether in the egg or hatched, she is ready.
Oh…
Dawn Watcher is not ready to learn what the beeping means.
And she now knows what the beeping really means!
How could she be soo dumb!
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Danger.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Death.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Oh Mother God!
Aww fuck!
It is the most awful noise I’ve ever heard coming from the cave entrance. Much much louder than even the dosimeter's don't-you-ignore-this-or-you'll-die alarm.
Keeper doesn’t even bother with me, the dragon just flies off, letting their keening cries echo out over the island. Keeper disappears into Chara's afternoon glow. I take a moment to steady myself from the gusting winds of its departure.
Those are the wails of someone who just lost someone dear to them and I have a pretty good idea why.
But I need more than an idea.
I take out the tablet from Will Shen's escape pod and apologize to it but I need to know what is in there without coping a lethal dose of radiation.
Sorry tablet, but someone needs to take one for the team.
The hatchet makes short word of some branches. They become my makeshift pole. I wedge the tablet between three of them and it's in 550 cord we trust to hold it all together. The dosimeter is strapped on too, so I can see just how bad it is in there.
Flanking around to the side of the entrance, hugging the contour line of the banking I close in.
I tap the touch screen to start a recording and poke the tablet into the entrance while hidden behind the corner. The dosimeter is not happy with this.
I turn the tablet left and right, up and down, then pull it back out.
1.2 Sieverts per hour (Sieverts!), four such hours and you're a coin flip away from being a dead man in a months time.
As for the tablet, I play the recording and... Christ almighty.
I see, even though it is behind a masquerade of black dead pixels, I see it. Oh fuck I see it. There is a bundle of nuclear fuel rods sitting in there (not one or two rods, but a bundle of nine!). The heat coming off them makes the air waver in a mirage. The tablet captured a crackling noise, which was either the sensor being damaged by the radiation, or God help us, the sound of air ionizing in the fuel rod’s presence. As I watch my 'home movie video' I feel a pit in my stomach.
The rods sit between between two corpses.
A dead dragon and their dead dragonet.
I can put two and two together. Someone found a rock, got curious and brought it home home, God help them.
An awful scene. A scene that has happened before on Earth. More than once.
Someone gets curious and brings an orphan source home with them.
Out of morbid curiosity I type into the tablet LLM, asking when the last orphan source incident occurred according to its training data.
2050 — South Africa — A boy steals a Cobalt-60 source from a disused cancer treatment machine in an abandoned hospital. Over the following 7 days the boy, his brother, and mother all succumbed to acute radiation syndrome. If you believe you have found an orphan source, do not approach it. Do not video it. Keep your distance (inverse square law) as radiation falls off with distance. Contact your local authorities or contact the IAEA. Symptoms of acute radiation syndrome include: nausea, vomiting, and burns.
That’d be right. Just call the International Atomic Energy Agency. They’re only 2.6x10^14 kilometers away.
We can add to the symptoms list too. Black scales flaking from the body, exposing pinkish flesh beneath, burned red. Blood oozes from the radiation burns and pools on the stone floor. It's eyes, all four of them, are pinched shut. The face is frozen in an expression of pain, curling lips and taut lines, contorted scales. The dragon is much smaller than Keeper. Either an adolescent or the dragons have extreme variation between individuals.
And that poor whelp. Only half way out of the egg shell. Upper half splayed out, reaching for help that never came.
I peer back in using the tablet because I don't know what is good for me. I am torturing a tablet. But, yeah, it's the second option. I had to know. The tablet microphone is undamaged for now.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the fuel rods are glowing, but the light belongs to the air (and most of said light would be in UV too). They paint the chamber in a cool blueish light. It reflects of the dead dragon like sparkling glitter. I didn't see much else. I suppose either dragon's like it dark inside, or that fella has been deceased so long that the lights have gone out.
It is quiet now. The dosimeter and the dragon's cries. I have moved to a safe distance from the site of the disaster.
I fear that Keeper is gone.
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I get set for a dirt nap on the ground. I had assumed I would get the sleeping bag from Will Shen's escape pod on the return trip.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Make an ass of you and me.
If Keeper doesn't return then my options are going to become very limited.
I'm not looking forward to my imminent prospects of crafting a water raft. I don't think anyone would be, given what I've seen.
I don't bother with a night watch or anything. If the dragon thought this place was safe enough for a hatchling then it is safe enough for me. I'm asleep before my head hits the ground.
Day 5 Late Before Dawn
Dawn Watcher's heart is in her throat. She can't think clearly. Aimlessly she flies over the water in no direction in particular.
Part of her wants to go nose down and call it a night.
The awful sound echoes in her memory again and again.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
She can't even remember what Sky Catcher's last words were.
This human George clearly knows things that she does not. If only (if only damn it!), if only they could have communicated better, George could have warned her!
No. That’s not true, is it.
George did warn her, did the human not? She doesn't want to admit it but the truth of it is overbearing.
The tugging of her tail.
An ineffective attempt to drag her to safety.
Danger.
She misinterpreted.
Her heart hurts as though it bleeds. Bleeds like her dearest Sky Catcher.
Breaths so short her wings cry out for air.
One should never have to watch warmth drain from another in the strange light of their home. The home is meant to be a safe place.
Poor Sky Catcher.
Mercy Mother God.
Her poor son.
Gone before his story even began.
Mother God there must be a reason for this happening.
Dawn Watcher has not uttered a prayer in a long time. Not since the times when all homes were threatened.
She doesn't expect to hear a response. She has already chosen what she will do next.
Dawn Watcher knows she must do better.
She will not allow a mistake of communication again, it’s already cost her so much.
Yet a part of her is thankful.
Deep in the mess that is her mind, Dawn Watcher recognizes how it is. If they had never met, she would be side by side with Sky Catcher, dead on the floor. Dead with her son, unnamed.
By their meeting George has spared her life whether he knows it or not.
It’s a debt that weighs heavy on her.
To live well in this second life she has been given, that is what Dawn Watcher chooses, and that starts by learning to understand George, and Dawn Watcher means to really understand.
When Dawn Watcher returns home it is dark. Only in the strange light does the heat of the stones provide contrast by which she can see. At the mouth of her home she stands. She steels herself for what she must do now. She knows. She isn’t here to mourn the dead.
She runs past the evil stone that glows Mirluxa in the strange light, she remembers that the beeping stopped on the beach when there was no line of sight. So she runs past her dead Sky Catcher and her dead son, claws clicking on the stone, and dives around the corner.
She is here for one thing and one thing only:
The family cord.
The record of her lineage going back to time immemorial. She finds the cord where it always is. In the place past all of her most valuable material possessions. The deepest part of her home.
With grief filling her throat and seizing her wings she slings the cord around her neck then races back out.
Where has George gotten off to?
She follows her nose to the sleeping human. She notes the minimum safe (evil) rock distance the sleeping human has established, where the device no longer cries its warning signal.
Mother God why is George moved soo far away!?
Why does the human know about such an awful thing?
Day 10
I wake up enveloped in black scales. A membranous wing is draped overhead, blocking the morning light. The dragon has returned during the night and wrapped herself around me. As she has done every night now since that awful day. I lean up against them, feeling the warmth radiating onto me. It counts as a sleeping bag.
Yes, Keeper is a she. We got there by three steps. Egg. Ownership. Who owns egg?
And so the conversation went.
"Keeper, ??????? ????"
That’s her name in draconic.
I can’t make the sounds with my throat but I recognize her name now.
Keeper’s Resolve. That’s the newest pair of word we’ve established.
Her resolve is strong.
I was scared, yeah I admit it, scared that she wasn’t going to come back that first night. But she has resolved to learn. Resolved to live. What a strong mother she must be.
It’s like a snowball, this growing vocabulary of hers.
We’ve been rolling it bigger, waiting for this day. In fact we’ve done nothing else. Nothing to note in the logs other than blood sweat and tears spent in the forging of our tenuous understanding of each other. We still haven't found the words to explain the long rope looking thing she has draped over herself, like a chain of exotic beads.
The term “variable word” has been worth its weight in gold.
Every time there’s a word either of us need to establish to communicate some novel concept, that’s what we say.
She figured that out by the way.
Those big claws carved gashes in ground and she made the sounds that accompanied the draconic letters. Then it was a matter of my emulation in English and a few more questions to get the difference between the numbers we are oh-so-familiar-with and the new 'things'.
The words.
Clever girl.
It's how we chose the word 'dragon' to refer to her species.
But I don’t need to utter the magic word this morning.
I think she’s ready.
Ready to learn why her family died.
“Good morning Keeper.”
“George,” replies the dragon with a nod of the head.
My last FRH is used under the dawn light. But she has the words now to understand.
“Keeper George go escape pod today?”
“Yes, fly George escape pod later today”
"Good."
"Good."
A long time ago a professor told a class of hopefuls that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to others. I was hopeful once.
I’ve been in my fair share of lecture halls since then. Trying to explain quantum spin to laymen who nod and pretend. I’ve learned since that understanding is a two way street.
Learned that when keeper nods her head she is not pretending.
Technology aides the modern classroom and I’m going to leverage the tablet. We already know light comes from Chara and light comes from flame. Light from the tablet screen will not be much of a leap. I can always alter the brightness to punctuate the point.
After I clean up the ration pack for the last time I run my simple program. Writing code on a touch screen is a bitch but I got there.
The screen shows a simple Color spectrum with the numbers for key wavelengths placed strategically. Red at 700nm, yellow at 580, and 530 for green. Blue and violet being buddies on the other side, 470 and 400.
Once we can agree on that I will tell her of the smaller numbers, the light with single digit nanometer wavelengths.
Gamma rays and X-rays. I'll tell her of how they make us all sick when there’s too much. Sure I'm omitting alpha particles and beta decay, but baby steps alright?
That is the plan.
But no plan survives contact with the dragon.
"This is light," says the dragon, "where strange light? Variable?"
Yeah, I've got a plan for that. I strike a water proof match and place it to the left of the red.
"Infrared," I say.
"Yes, Keeper see warmth. Look."
The dragon points at the match and then to its black eyes.
"Warmth"
The black eyes close, the greyish blue ones remain open.
"No warmth."
"George see warmth? Variable?"
I point at the goggles.
"Goggles see infrared."
"Wow."
Indeed. Glad someone appreciates the PSQ's.
Keeper’s neck lights up. Sometimes that happens when we establish a particularly challenging concept (like ownership). She pulls what looks like a snail shell from the rope cord and gently places it to the right of the violet color on the tablet. It looks like a completely normal shell to me. Then again, I can't see in ultraviolet. I think I know where this is going.
"???§???!!" Keeper cries.
Mirluxa! George, you know the color of Mirluxa!
"Ultraviolet."
"Ultruhvieohlet! ???§???! Good! Good! Keeper call warmth and ultruhviohlet 'strange light'!"
Incredible really. I think, based on how she talks now, that 'strange light' must be very important to Keeper, maybe even all dragons. I'm working with a sample size of one here. I know now what she was going on about the day before. That the fuel rods looked incredible in the 'strange light'. Like a fly trap with its black light.
"George see ???§???? Vaahreble?"
I shake my head. Someone else will have the joy of figuring out what mechanism of natural selection and evolution has led to this planet's inhabitants having these black eyes, eyes that see past the parts of the spectrum that we can see. I have more important things to do.
I tap my finger down on the ground far to the right of ultraviolet.
"More light?"
"Yes. Much more light."
"seven hundred," I say, pointing at red on the tablet, "four hundred," again, pointing at violet, then I walk my fingers all the way across the floor. "More light at ten, one, and one divided by ten."
Keeper's eyes make this much easier than I thought it would be. She already knows about colors beyond the visible spectrum because those black eyes see in IR and UV. The idea of colors you can't see comes easy to her, after all, now she knows there are colors I can't see but she can, yet I'm aware of them nonetheless.
I imagine the concept of the electromagnetic spectrum would be a bit more apparent to the uninitiated if we stopped seeing reds, yellows and greens when we closed one eye but not the other.
I must look super weird to Keeper.
Dawn Watcher can see what George is trying to say. She imagines having another set of eyes, new eyes, to see this new light which hides past Mirluxa, and then the concept makes sense to her. If George has a tool that can see warmth, and George cannot see Mirluxa of course there can be other kinds of light that she and the human both cannot see!
"Is this light bad?" Keeper asks, tapping a claw around where I said ten (nanometers) was.
"Yes."
"How... mmmm variable word for hurt when close fire?"
"Burn?"
"Yes. Burn. Does new light do burn?"
Close enough.
"Yes. New light make very bad burns. New light kills. Stones in cave have many new light."
"Keeper understand..."
I don’t have the vocabulary to give condolences to Keeper. I don’t know if her mate was unusually small, or if all male dragons exhibit sexual dimorphism but I can tell already this is a tragedy.
A man made tragedy.
Our activities here, human exploration activities, have indirectly led to an orphan source and two deaths. I guess the UESC has a point with their zoo protocols. I'm making an exception though, teaching Keeper about the color spectrum, just this once. A grieving mother deserves to know.
Fuck man.
The best option is to leave them where they lay. I don’t have the equipment to clean up and I’m not taking a lethal dose of radiation for the sake of the dead. I think the dragon understands.
If anyone is reading this from the UESC, we have to make this right. It's not right that already we've done this damage by our coming here.
Keeper decides to call the low wavelengths 'danger light'. Danger light it is then. X-ray and Gamma ray can come later.
"Does George see danger light?"
"No, radiation dosimeter 'sees' danger light," I take the dosimeter off my belt and let the dragon take a close look at it, "dosimeter makes sound when there is danger light."
"See the numbers here?" I ask.
The dragon nods its head.
"Big number means many danger light."
"What create danger light?"
"Hard explain."
"Hard explain."
Ahh yes, the catch all for ‘we don’t have enough words yet’. Hard to explain.
Keeper twists her head, lights on the neck flashing briefly. Seems it is time for a change away from the morbid topic.
"Where is George from, variable?"
Dawn Watcher could wait no longer. The little creature simply looked up at the sky. So that’s it. Dawn Watcher’s suspicions are confirmed. George is from the heavens above. She had to ask three times just to be sure.
"Hard explain."
"What was falling lights?"
“Variable word.”
"Keeper knows high fly cause little air. Most dragon think fly higher higher higher then more air, then fly to stars. No dragon been high flying. Few loud dragons think no air, so no high flying."
"Does George know high flying? Variable?"
Well I don't want the dragon to think me deceptive. It already seems to know I came down with the Tongzhou wreckage. So now I am become death, destroyer of dragon superstitions.
"No air. Loud dragons are correct. Many many danger light during high flying." I tap the dosimeter for emphasis.
With the furrowed brow above the eyes, Keeper looks visibly disappointed.