Stragglers
A Selene City Collaborative short story
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Anyway, lets get into it…
“Come on, Taye, you already missed last week’s social. You can’t miss the biggest event of the year.” Laura said to Taye at the table over breakfast. Well, Taye’s breakfast, but Laura’s dinner. “You’ve gotta come out tomorrow. Literally everyone will be there. Grossman gave approval for everyone to take time off. Just do it, Taye.” Laura fidgeted with her frizzed out hair after a long day of work and shook her head in disappointment at her friend.
“I’m sorry, L, it’s really not up to me…” Taye replied, staring down at his food. The protein mush he opted for wasn’t the most appetizing, but at least it got him through the day. His day had just begun, and yet Taye was already exhausted. The bags under his eyes were collected after a year of nonstop research and sleepless nights of analysis. Something about the way the moon’s gravity made his hair fall had bothered him, so now instead of feeling for his once pin straight hair that rested around his ears, he was rubbing his bald head in stress.
“Of course it’s up to you! You choose when to schedule your experiments just like everyone else. No one is making you do this!”
“Not really. It isn’t that simple with animals. It’s up to the rats when this needs done.” Laura groaned,
“Okay, you know what? Fine.” She pushed her food away and shook her head, “But when Mrs. Serena gives her speech, you’ll be feeling like a real ass that you were in the red room with those stupid rodents instead of celebrating with all of us.”
“Give him a break, L.” Kim said, making his presence known next to Taye. He spoke quietly, but with a forceful voice. “It’s easier when we’re working on the celestial scale or observing rocks. He’s got the first colony of moon rats to take care of. That can’t be easy.”
“Thanks Kim.” Taye said with a nod to him. “I need to get this social data out before the new year strikes in eastern standard. The home team is waiting on my data so they can finish analysis. It's not just the rats, people back home are waiting on me too.”
“I get it.” Kim said. Laura shook her head,
“We’ve all done our jobs for the year. No one would blame you if you got it out a couple days late. You deserve a break. We all deserve a break. Hell, even your rats. Let them rest.”
“Hey, I’m on third shift, they’re on first shift. They sleep more than me at this point.” Taye said with a bitter laugh. “Social structures are difficult to analyze with the best equipment Earth has to offer. It’s even harder on the damn moon.” He leaned back in his chair. As he slumped down, his head drifted up until he was looking out of the dome. High above his head, the dome crisscrossed, revealing the vast space above their heads. In the distance, Taye saw a transport coming in to land. He wondered if that was the legendary daughter coming to see her lost father’s creation.
“I’m sorry, Taye.” Laura said with an exasperated sigh. “I just want you to get some rest. This isn’t your postdoc anymore. You can take as much time as you need. Just get a message out to your cohorts saying you need more time.”
“Maybe.” Taye replied. He was willing to say anything just to get Laura to leave him alone.
“Want me to leave anything outside the red room for you?” Kim asked. “I can leave you a plate from the celebration.”
“If it isn’t an inconvenience… yeah… sure. Thanks, Kim.” Taye replied. Just then, his watch vibrated on his wrist. “Damn, gotta run. Social records upload in ten.”
Laura and Kim gave halfhearted goodbyes as Taye jogged out of the dome and down the lab corridor. This time of year, the corridor was fairly empty. He was no stranger to being the only one working in a facility. Though Taye was American by birth, he spent most of his higher education in South Korea in a lab where holidays meant you still worked, you just worked faster to get home to your family. Of course, Taye didn’t have a family, so he worked at the same pace and savored the end of the day when no one was there at all. Now here he was at the start of third shift - 10pm EST - on the 30th of December, getting to work when everyone else was preparing for the 50th anniversary New Year’s celebration in 24 hours. Fifty years and he had only been there for one. There was something strange about that. Something weird about how insignificant his work was in the grand scheme. The fruits of his labor wouldn’t mean much until colonization went to the outer reaches of space, but Taye had this dream that one day people would discuss the importance of his research in establishing happy and flourishing colonies that were stable and self-sustaining.
For now, that meant working through holidays, beaming messages back and forth with Earth collaborators, and thinking about how rats’ social behaviors differ without their Earthly norms. It was a simple enough experimental design. The problem came with the testing the Earth group wanted to run. Clearly, they didn’t understand what was available on Luna. Even collaborators on other bases had nothing they could transport over - not without strings attached. They also didn’t realize there was only one scientist on the entire moon who specialized in prosocial behavior. On the other side of this project there were dozens of scientists with the best funding and education the Earth had to offer working day and night. Here on the moon, there was one Taye. One tired, busy, and ready to go home Taye.
But as he opened the blast doors to the red room, he realized this was his home. Not his living quarters, not any of the social spaces, not his long forgotten North American hometown. No. The red room was his home. Taye checked the cages lining the left wall. There were 15 cages of white rats. It took him a whole year to make this much progress. On Earth, this would’ve been easy, but low gravity meant birth defects he didn’t see coming and even more surprisingly, low breeding rates. It reminded him of how rodents seemed to breed less in the winter months. Maybe they were interpreting the strange abnormal conditions of the moon as winter. Taye always did think rodents could feel what it was like outside even if they were inside. Maybe this was just another sign.
Or maybe these damn rats just didn’t like him and wanted his experimental model to fail. They probably wanted him to fail. Unfortunately for them, he was Dr. Tayson Briggs PhD, and he didn’t get this far by giving in to some stupid rats. No. He would win - even if they didn’t know that he was fighting them to the end.
Taye grabbed his headphones off his workbench, synched them with the amplifier and turned on the room’s analysis computer on the desk in the far corner. When he received his PhD, he had to do all this behavioral tracking by hand. At least the Lunar base did have the modern built-in analysis software that tracked behavior in every cage then gave him results he could run the numbers on. A red screen activated and he looked through the results. It was interesting, based on what he saw, the red room did have different outcomes compared to that of the Earth data.
This was progress. This was good. But there was one more thing he needed to check. How were they communicating? This was where the limitations came into play. On Earth, each cage had a built-in microphone that a machine learning system analyzed. On the moon, they had Taye. And a microphone. He pulled out the microphone and slipped it into a cage. Each of the cages would be recorded for 20 minutes that would then be aligned with the number of rats in each cage and be compared with the live behavioral tracking. It wasn’t any different than he had done the last several weeks.
On paper it should take 5 hours. But once he included note taking, cleaning the microphone and restarting the program at the end of each analysis… he knew he’d probably be here well into first shift. Tomorrow would be more of the same, he guessed. He’d get the final behavioral analysis shipped out, then finish out the last of the microphone data to send out right on New Year's Day. He’d pass the hours upon hours listening to the rats talk and that frustrating whine he couldn’t get the amplifier to cut out. All the while, the entire base would be celebrating under the dome. For now he needed to focus.He turned the microphone on, slipped it into the first cage, and hit record.
The hours that passed bled together as Taye stared at the screen, his eyes vibrated as waves of frequencies squiggled across the screen. The whispers of rats’ secret conversations crossed his mind in silent hymns he couldn’t decipher without those stragglers that bled across the screen as the hours waned on.
Something he was never quite able to fix in the microphone was that annoying high-pitched whine that bled through the system and gave him a headache. Something about the whine made it hard to see. The headache was nothing compared to the way the red-tinted lights blurring together on the computer screen made it impossible to make sense of what he was doing.
Still, he continued on as if it wasn’t happening at all. Several days of work would be lost to him, yet the data would be there and so would his notes. He lost hours of sleep reading them just to catch up with what he had already done, setting him back even further. If he just had better equipment, more help, and that stupid whine out of his ears, this could be so much easier. There was something hiding in that whine though. Something he couldn’t quite place. It almost reminded him of a song, or maybe that was just the wishful dreams of someone coming down with some sort of sensory induced sickness. If it was a song, he didn’t like it.
And yet, as the whine of the mic came to a stop, the music stopped too. He blinked once. Twice. Something felt weird. Wrong. He looked down at his watch and had to restrain a gasp. The entire third and first shift had passed him by. It was second shift and he was only just wrapping up his recordings. How did he lose 16 hours? He took a deep breath and chalked it up to exhaustion. He repeated the mantra his mentor had always told him in grad school, When we’re tired, we make mistakes. It was supposed to convince Taye to take breaks. It never did.
Taye stood up on uneasy legs and shut down the computer. He removed his PPE and tossed them in the recycler by the door and left the room. As he opened the door, he felt a discomfort forming in his head. Like he still heard the whine of the mic. The song. But he couldn’t perceive it, he merely felt like he could. It was disorienting. Luckily, his attention was peeled away from it quickly. Sitting outside in the hallway was a sealed container with food - not his usual protein mush, but what looked to Taye like a blend of traditional meals. There was a note attached,
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Few of us got together last night and brought traditional holiday foods from our home countries. Tried to get you as much as I could. Take care of yourself. No one else can. We’re all waiting for you when you’re out of this. We all have our crunch times. Just don’t let it kill you.
See you on the other side, doc,
Kim
Tay smiled. Laura may give him a lot of grief, but he knew it was because she cared. Kim on the other hand was always so kind and encouraging, but Taye knew that was because he was worried. He was a kind and thoughtful man that made Taye feel a little less alone. He’d have to make sure to thank him, but for now he was going to take this food back to his quarters, eat, and go to bed.
Or maybe he would eat as he walked. Yeah, actually he needed to eat and walk. Honey baked ham, cheese-soaked potatoes, latkes, jollof rice, baked fish, mince pie, even a tofurkey all shoved in a plastic container. Any other day it would’ve probably grossed Taye out the way they all blended together in the too small container. Now, like a ravenous animal using the uncomfortably small metal fork, Taye rushed through the corridors of the base filling his mouth with food. The sounds around him faded away, replaced with only a pounding headache that refused to be soothed by food, and the feeling that the high-pitched whine that should’ve been gone by now was still assaulting his senses, making him feel slightly nauseous. Something in his mind told him, ‘if you just keep eating, it will go away.’ But it didn’t work.
By the time Taye made it to his quarters, the headache still throbbed on, and he was holding an empty container stained with the grease of food he wished he still had. Taye tried to take in his surroundings, but something about his quarters just didn’t make sense. All around him, the most gentle of noises made his head throb. Somewhere outside, a group of people were having a discussion about the soon to start celebration. His door skidded shut, scraping against the magnetized mat that identified it as his quarters. It all hurt. Everything hurt. And why wouldn’t that whispering from the walls stop? Wait… that didn’t seem right.
“Hello?” Taye whispered. His own words made his head pound even more. He put a hand to his head. He was burning up. He drug himself to his bed and sat down. But still, the whisper was calling to him, imploring him. In fact, it wasn’t a whisper. It was a song. “Is someone there?” Taye asked a little louder.
The world around him went silent. The room went dark. Everything stopped immediately and Taye couldn’t move. He sat on the bed and tried to make sense of everything, but instead all he could feel was relief. His head stopped hurting and he could think straight, but all he could think was, “What is that sound?” The music passed through him, consumed him, felt like part of him. Then… it called to him. He wanted more than anything to listen, he wanted it so bad, but he was too tired. Taye’s eyes rolled back and he fell back into bed.
His mind was alight with dreams he couldn’t make sense of. From the darkness, the biggest cage he’d ever seen. From the deepest crater of the moon, the rats poured forth, conquering the moon. Conquering all the bases. Becoming Luna. Becoming… And those who were left were left to the song. Left to the warning that they could’ve been lords of the cosmic beyond. And yet… Taye was trapped here. Taye looked out the window as the little creatures spread forth and conquered their new realm, a song bringing them together, a song turning the moon into their new empire. And where was Taye? Staring out an airlock like a fool.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP…
Taye startled awake in a cold sweat, fully clothed, and laying sideways on his bed. He hit the button and in a gravelly voice asked,
“Galileo, what’s the time?” He still hadn’t fully opened his eyes and the world around him was blurry.
“It is the first hour of the third shift.”
“In EST, please.”
“It is 11PM Eastern Standard Time.”
“ELEVEN?” Taye shouted. He had an hour to compile all the data he collected together and transmit it. He had no choice, it wasn’t going to be complete, but he had to do it. He had to.
He quickly changed, rinsed his face off, tried to clean up the best he could and ran out the door and into a celebration.
The hallways were alive with warring music, loud conversations, and children running up and down the halls. The New Years celebration was in full swing, and Taye was just late to collect his data. He pushed through the crowds, rushing for the research wing of the city. He pushed through the dome, grabbing something to eat as he ran past several groups of familiar faces. He overheard the Selene City Singers in the distance, and a few passing voices fawning over their beautiful performances. Taye chomped down on a piece of fried bread as he made his way through the dense crowd of revelers. He heard the crowd cheer as the artist in residence finished a speech that Taye didn’t hear, and he avoided getting swept up into a debate two cosmologists were having about hard science’s importance over the social sciences.
A group of teens who had clearly gotten ahold of alcohol were stumbling through the cafeteria loudly cackling. Taye rushed past them, and found his way to the research wing. He took in a deep breath as the silence washed over him. Then his heart leapt as he saw two figures standing outside the door to the red room. He took a deep breath, just breath just breath, it's fine.
He approached Laura and Kim. Kim gave him a halfhearted smile. Laura immediately started in on him,
“There you are! Where have you been, Taye?”
“Slept in.” Taye replied, lowering his head with discomfort and a tinge of shame.
“Taye! That’s not like you. You must be exhausted.” Laura said a little too loud.
“Hey, bring your voice down. My rats are right there.” Taye hissed out pointing towards the red room.
“Right right, sorry…” Laura shook her head, a bitter look on her face.
“Taye,” Kim began, “after third shift, you’ll have time to take a break right?”
“Well… after first shift probably, yes.” There was a long pause, then Laura asked the question on both her’s and Kim’s mind,
“Have you been working doubles, Taye?”
“Crunch time, L.” Was all he managed to get out. Kim shook his head. Laura bit the inside of her cheek. She was a rather small woman to begin with, but as she sucked her cheeks in, she looked like a skeleton.
“Taye…” Kim shook his head. He reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Something about his hand sent a chill up Taye’s spine. Maybe he just hadn’t had human contact in too long, or maybe it was just nice that someone cared about him. Either way, he felt lucky anyone worried about him this much.
“I’m fine.” Taye said with more venom than he meant to. He knew he was lying. He thought back to the headache, the voices in the walls… it was all wrong. He was all wrong. “I’m fine.” He repeated again, more softly. “I’m… fine.” This time more to himself than to them.
“Convincing.” Laura said, rolling her eyes.
“We’re just worried. Please, take some time off in the new year.” Kim implored. “Make time for the people who care about you. And more importantly, take time for yourself.”
“Sure. Yeah, I will, just… I need to get this done.”
“Need to?” Laura asked. “You don’t need to do anything, Taye. But you’re a human so you need to rest, and eat, and have relationships and do normal human things that don’t involve sitting in the red room going crazy. You should know that better than us.” Taye looked to Kim, but Kim only shook his head in agreement with Laura.
“Thank you for worrying about me.” Taye said in a robotic tone. “I’ll get some rest. Now, I’m sorry to cut this short, but I have to go get this data analyzed and transmitted. Plus, it's the last day of social recordings.”
“Great. We’ll see you more then?”
“That’s the plan. Ball’s in terra’s court after this.” Taye walked past Laura and Kim and into the red room. Before he shut the door, he forced himself to smile, “I’ll see you guys during second shift tomorrow.” As soon as the door sealed shut, the smile dropped away and he turned to look upon his kingdom. The red room was as it always was. Taye adorned himself in PPE and sat down at the desk. He picked his headphones up and synched it with the computer as it came to life. Streams of data began sprawling out in front of him on the screen.
Something was wrong. Behavior was erratic since he left. In the last eight hours, the rats became hypermobile and started huddling in corners, but also running from corner to corner in their cages as groups. Every single cage. Stranger still, Taye realized that he accidentally left the microphone on and recording on the desk. He could’ve sworn he turned it off. More out of curiosity than anything, he decided to look at what it recorded before transmitting out his data. Ideally, the analysis system for the USV system should’ve picked up some minor noises, but nothing extravagant. Instead, it was alight with data. It just didn’t make sense. What did it detect? But this wasn’t a right now problem. He needed to transmit the results before the clock struck midnight and he was running low on time.
Taye compiled all the data together and started transmitting. As he did, he activated the computer’s camera and began streaming a message in a quiet voice,
“Jamie, hey. Good news and bad news. Good news is we have all the social behavioral data collected and ready to ship out. Mostly. You’re getting everything we’ve got now. Bad news though… Look, I don’t know where to begin. Behavioral data for today is shot. Not sure what happened. And I’m running behind on the USV collection. Might be best to scrap the data for the 31st and just not have a full data set. The reviewers can get over themselves. 364 is still pretty good. Anyway, transmitting everything I’ve got your way now, then I’m going to check a couple things, and then… I think I’m going to take a week or two off. Sorry for not completing the last day. Behavior’s a mess and… I’m sorry, but I’m exhausted. I’ll be available through transmission to answer any questions, but otherwise… We’ll be in touch to discuss the analysis and divvying up the manuscript. Love to the kids, yeah?”
He turned the transmission off and sighed. Kim and Laura were right. He needed a break. He decided he was calling it a night and going back to bed. First, he wanted to see what the mic picked up. He opened the program and set it to playback. At first, all he heard was the whine he was all too familiar with. It quickly made his head swim and he felt dizzy. He decided to avoid the feeling and he jumped ahead a little. The sound was still there, but he heard something else. At first it sounded like the collective squeak squeak squeaking of the entire rat colony all whaling at once. A noise he’d never heard so clear before and rattled him to his core. All at once they were calling out in ultrasonics, screaming at a frequency he recognized according to the software. They were afraid. He checked the recording and saw this wasn’t even the peak of the noise. He skipped forward, and immediately felt himself rocking back in his chair. This sound was something else entirely. A faint song traveling through his headphones. It was so far away, yet so clear. As it began to play, the hairs on his arms raised and he felt a terror gripping him. It called to him.
But then an alert appeared on the screen. He read it quickly, trying to make sense of a notification he had never seen before. It was a warning from the shipboard AI, Galileo, to check his equipment:
“Current animal activity does not fall within typical ranges. Recalibrate equipment and reset experiment.”
At first he thought, “Why should I care? I’m not even running anything.” But then he heard it. He pulled one half of his headphone away from his ear and heard the scurrying of little legs. The pounding of little paws slamming against their habitats. In that dark red room, Taye turned and saw that all 15 cages were shaking. He could see their little white bodies smashing against the cages, trying to break free.
The warning flashed across his screen again, but Taye didn’t notice it. His head was beginning to pound, and he could hear something calling to him. He couldn’t tell if it was through the headphones or somewhere near him. He felt like he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to. Like there was something trying to tempt him with a secret he didn’t understand.
Then it broke him. Taye turned back to the computer and started a new recording on the microphone. Immediately his ears came to life with horrible chirping screams of terror from the rats. The thumping was faintly picked up by the microphone but not in a meaningful way. A pipe overhead squealed with pressure, and above all of that, a music that was somehow everywhere and yet not clear enough to understand assaulted his senses.
Taye stumbled from his chair and hit his back against the lab’s decontamination chamber. He fumbled his hands along the wall until he got a grip on the door handle and squeezed it until it opened enough for him to slip out. He sealed the door behind him and fell into the wall. He couldn’t get himself to take the headphones off, but he also couldn’t get away from the sound. They were still connected to the computer, and all the secret sounds of the red room still poured over him as he struggled to escape the terrors of it all.
Finally, with a strength he didn’t know he had, he grabbed ahold of the headphones and threw them down the hallway. The only problem was he still heard it. The rats, the walls, the music. He heard all of it. He heard too much. He felt his fists grabbing at his non existent hair, the strain of a migraine assaulting him as he came away empty handed.
“Stop. Stop. Stop!” He screamed as he rocked back and forth on the ground. And then it did. Everything stopped. The moon stopped. The rats stopped. The walls stopped.
The music stayed.
That’s when Taye realized the music wasn’t coming from here. Here was vague but that’s what made sense to Taye. He hadn’t wrapped the most reasonable parts of his mind around it yet, but something told him that it wasn’t from here. Where was it from? He looked first down the hall towards the dome. Towards the Selene City celebration. He realized it was strangely empty. No one milling around. No one was cheering even as they came closer and closer to midnight. That wasn’t where the music was coming from, he was certain. He turned the other way. This wing did have an airlock. He struggled up off the ground and lumbered towards it. The music became clearer and clearer as he stared at the airlock.
“No… no, that can’t be right.” He whispered.
But it was. And he knew it. The music called to him from the lunar beyond. Taye felt a hand involuntarily touch the airlock door. His other hand was busy doing something to his right, he wasn’t sure what, but the door cycled open. Taye took it as a sign and he walked into the airlock. He had never done a moonwalk before. He didn’t even know what equipment you needed to go out there. Certainly it wasn’t a pair of scrub bottoms and a sweater that stunk of rat musk. But there he stood anyway. Somewhere behind him he heard something - someone - banging on the glass. Taye leaned again the only thing between him and the surface of the moon and stared through the small window to get a better look at the space beyond.
It called to him. He didn’t know what it was, he just wanted it to stop. Stopping it meant going out there. Stopping it meant finding it. Somewhere… somewhere he could find it.
Just as his hand began to reach to the side again, his watch vibrated. He looked down in curiosity, unsure what had just snapped him from his delirious haze. His watch was blinking an alert. He brought it to his face to look a little more closely. All the while, there was that persistent, panicked banging behind him. He stared at the watch a little longer before he fully understood. If not for that damn music, he might’ve smiled. Instead he just stared.
Happy New Year! The message blinked over and over, virtual confetti falling infinitely into the perpetual darkness of the background.
“Huh…” Taye whispered. He looked back out at the moon and just stared for a little longer. His head hurt. There was an annoying bang coming from somewhere behind him. “How did I get here?” He whispered. “Where am I…” He turned around to see the terror-filled eyes of Kim staring at him through the glass of the airlock door. As the inner door began to cycle, Taye collapsed to the ground, the faint whisper of a song calling to him in a dream.
(Quick Disclaimer: The cover photo of this has no actual living animals in it, all those cages are empty and they’re actually mouse cages. Just wanted to clarify that. Very fitting imagery though.)
Please check out the other stories that are a part of this project (linked above)! I really do love doing collaborative projects with other writers on substack and just in general! It is such a fun way to build relationships and see different people’s takes on different concepts. I did 2 in 2023 and this is my only one for 2024, so maybe I need to make a bigger effort of doing it in 2025! We’ll see if anyone else does any! Also, the science side of this post is inspired by my most recent Sci-Fi today post linked here!
Anyway, thank you to everyone for such a successful year of writing. This year I posted several serials, several short stories, started the beloved Sci-Fi today series, got a short story published (coming February 2025 GASP), passed 200 subscribers, finished a solid third draft of my novel, started the sequel to that novel, started serializing a different novel on substack, and all this while working on my PhD. I couldn’t be more thankful. I’m in a privelaged position that I couldn’t have possible imagined myself being in even 5 years ago. So thank you. Thank you all so much.
Happy New Year. If we’re lucky, maybe it will be a good one.
Catch you on the other side!
Great piece, girl. Nice atmosphere, accurate and deep without too much detail. I like that.
This is SO GOOD, I love it! I love how you’ve used the real-life rat research and ultrasonic vocalizations, and the ramping tension and sense of panic Taye experiences is excellently done!