RUBY

(1)

It was one of those special mornings where the dim blue sun was rising at the beginning of the standard day. Even after nearly a decade of being stationed on the volcanic moon of Kuruvinda, Dr. Floras Sylvon still struggled to adjust to the discrepancy. The 24 hour day was still the standard across all human worlds, yet the day-night cycle here lasted for nearly thirty days since the moon was tidally-locked to its planet. Living quarters were designed to emulate this standard, but the artificial day-night systems weren’t enough to trick the fine tuning of circadian rhythm.

Perpetually groggy, Floras started her morning looking out the window to take in the blue sunrise. The large globe of the planet dominated the sky, a marble of green, blue, and white, with strings of yellow light dotted through the night side. She often wished she could retire from the hellish moon she was stationed on and spend the rest of her days down there in paradise. But, as long as there was money to be made here, she was going to be stuck stripping the moon down to its last stone.

Maybe the days wouldn’t feel so empty if she had a team of other humans working under her, rather than a bunch of unfeeling robots. They weren’t even particularly humanoid, and none of them were programmed to have any semblance of a personality. They were rugged, inhuman work machines designed with the sole purpose of smashing dull rocks to find shiny rocks. Sometimes, she would catch herself trying to humor her crew for her own sake, but the lack of responses only served to dampen her mood further.

Floras had tried in the past to get a few fellow humans to work with her on Kuruvinda, but the fully robotic crew was seen as a “cost saving measure”. After all, robot workers don’t need to be paid, as they were not considered to be “sentient beings”. The amount of capital flowing from this moon was already mind-boggling, even on an interplanetary scale, so this excuse seemed flimsy at best. At any rate, she had given up this pursuit a few years ago and came to accept her isolation.

Departing in her lunar rover, Floras began heading in the direction of a new platinum deposit. She had given her team the command to start the excavation without her, and had hoped that there would already be a good starting effort upon her arrival. That was one big perk of a robot team, she thought to herself, in that they didn’t require rest or sleep, and could simply carry on with their jobs at all hours without pause. It usually took some sort of emergency requiring human input to bring their clockwork grind to a standstill.

As Floras pulled into the work site, she noticed an uncharacteristic silence in the air and took a pause. Exiting the vehicle, she was met by one of the team lead robots, TA-04, which was more or less a large antennae with wheels and eyes to roam around relaying orders. Its choppy vocal synthesizer greeted her as it normally did, but abstained from giving her a report on their progress. Floras pressed it for information, and after an unusual loss for words, TA-04 simply said there was an issue that could not be described.

There was an immediate worry in Floras’ chest upon hearing this, as robots are never at a loss for words over even the most mundane tasks. TA-04 guided her towards the work site, where all of the other robots were also standing by, watching the two of them as they got closer to the recently unearthed deposit. Looking over a particular ridge was another team lead robot, SM-02, who warned the two of them to not go any closer to the site out of danger. Floras peered down into the supposed danger zone, but didn’t see any of the normal hazards associated with their jobs. In fact, the only sense of unease she was feeling came from the robots themselves.

As she slid her way down the rock face, she noticed a glossy red sheen amidst the volcanic rock and specks of platinum. To her surprise, it was a large reef of red corundum, glistening with hundreds of high-quality rubies. Surely that wasn’t enough to startle a bunch of robots, she thought to herself, but then her attention was caught by another gemstone nearby, one that she didn’t immediately recognize. Upon closer inspection, she found that it was unlike any other gem she had ever seen in her entire career.

Embedded in the rock itself, the gemstone had a very faint ruby gloss to it. However, she was able to identify an unusually geometric fracture pattern, very unlike the glassy fracture rubies are supposed to have. Along with that, the entire gem seemed to have a ghostly indigo sheen to it, especially when exposed to direct sunlight. The sheen had another optical effect to it as well, one that Floras couldn’t quite put into words. As she looked at it from different angles, it almost appeared to change geometry altogether, and it even appeared to become ethereal and intangible all at once.

Floras called back to TA-04 and SM-02, saying that an attempt to unearth this unusual ruby should be made. The robots simply remained still, glassy eyes peering into the distance, voice boxes silent. Floras repeated her command, and again the two leads sat inactive. Knowing that she could manually override them to give the work orders, she made an attempt to access TA-04’s control panel, but the robot began to move away from her. SM-02 as well started to retreat back to its own group of worker robots, and all of them had their lifeless eyes locked on her as she stood alone in shock.

Flustered, she ordered TA-04 to do a self-diagnostic test to see if there was a software issue preventing them from working. After a few moments, it reported back that everything was fine. She again told it to restart the mining operation, and once again it sat silently. Feeling unsure about what to do next, Floras asked TA-04 why it was refusing orders. All it could reply was that the site was too dangerous to continue. When pressed to elaborate, it finally capitulated and gave a rather chilling response.

“Director Sylvon, that unknown mineral makes me feel... afraid.”

(2)

Standing alone in her quarters, clearly disheveled from what had taken place earlier that morning, Floras nervously waited for her video calls to connect. On the left screen flickered the image of a geologist colleague of hers, Dr. Niren Crofton. On the right screen, the face of her chemist friend Dr. Seabor Emil came into focus. Having come to a complete standstill with her robot workers at the platinum deposit, she instructed them to wait until she could consult with other scientists she knew for further guidance on how to handle the mysterious ruby.

As she gave her best explanation to the two gentlemen as to what the ruby was, she could tell right away that they were highly skeptical of her descriptions. The geometric fracture patterns didn't seem quite right to Niren, and the soft indigo glow didn't really correlate to any physical process that Seabor could think of. The more fantastical aspects of the ruby didn't register to them at all. Floras tried her best to convince them that this ruby was possibly something completely out of the ordinary, but both of her colleagues eventually decided that there was no way to know for sure until it was properly extracted and studied.

Niren instructed her to try and force the robot team leads to get the ruby extracted again, but Floras hesitated before explaining what one of them said to her during her initial attempt to do so. Both men seemed taken aback by the robot's declaration of fear, and neither of them could recall a single instance of a working robot showing any kind of emotion at all. The robot simply should not even have such a phrase programmed into it, but they knew Floras was telling the truth. Everyone fell silent for a moment, then Dr. Emil offered up his own opinion on the matter.

Seabor was willing to concede to the possibility that the otherworldly qualities of the ruby were legitimate, and that there may be a connection between that strangeness and the unusual reaction from the robots. He insisted, however, that this seemingly paranormal event would eventually be explained away as a new discovery in the realm of science. The universe was a vast place, after all, and there were sure to be limitless relics hidden throughout it that would threaten to turn humanity’s entire understanding of the world upside down.

As the conversation came to a natural end, there was an agreement that Niren and Seabor would travel to Kuruvinda at once and meet with Floras in person. Since the mechanical work crew wasn't about to extract the ruby, they would be tasked with observing it until their arrival. Niren could fast track the paperwork to bring the job site to a pause with Floras' supervisors, so she wouldn't have to worry about it. With that, the deal was made: in three standard days, the three scientists would rendezvous at the platinum deposit and investigate the ruby together.

This had been the most stressful day of her career up to this point, and as her quarters began to simulate night, she readied herself for what would be a restless period of very little sleep. As she let her eyelids grow heavy, there was an ever-so-faint shimmer of light in her vision. The nerves of the day had taken their toll on her, and she jolted upright in bed. She let her mind slow down and reasoned it away as some hypnagogic stream of color, then laid her head back to rest once again. With her eyes shutting again, however, another shimmer of color filled the void of her vision.

Sitting up in bed, Floras was aware that the colorful shimmer was still present. It was extremely faint, but still noticeable, as light and glittering ribbons of indigo stars swirled around her. She tried rubbing her eyes and wishing it away, but the indigo shimmer remained. A feeling tugged at her chest, and she found her head naturally turning to face the deposit where that damned ruby was at rest. Without a conscious thought, Floras got back out of bed and prepared to wander back outside into the volcanic hellscape.

Driving her rover back to the work site, she found herself questioning what it was she was even doing at the moment. She knew that she needed to wait for Niren and Seabor to arrive to get a better picture of what the ruby was, but at the same time, how could she guarantee that the ruby would still be there in three days? What if her supervisors decided not to go along with the plan and took it for themselves? If it really was some sort of paradigm-shifting relic, should it really fall into the wrong hands before it can be properly researched?

These paranoid thoughts were not typical of Floras Sylvon, and she tried to push them away as she got closer to the work site. At the very least, she told herself, it would be more secure to have the ruby in her quarters rather than out in the elements with only a bunch of sleeping robots to protect it. Pulling her rover up to the site, she was immediately greeted by TA-04 and SM-02, who warned her that the site was to remain closed until the other two scientists arrived.

A slight indigo aura surrounded the two robots, and it beckoned to Floras. The words were almost not her own, and she was able to convince the two robots to give her access. As she left them behind, she noticed that the two robots fell dormant, almost like they had been completely powered down. She shuffled back down the ridge, and saw the ruby once again with its soft indigo glow. She pulled out her pick and began to chip away the rock around it, but to her surprise, the ruby seemed to phase through the rock itself and fell gently into her hands. The colorful shimmer that had guided her to this moment faded away, and she was left alone with her thoughts under the dim blue sun.

(3)

Floras rushed back to her quarters without attracting any further robotic attention, and quickly shut herself off from the outside world. Setting the ruby down at her desk, she was able to study it with a more critical eye than before. It filled the palm of her hand comfortably, rather large for a possible precious gemstone. Despite its size, she could have sworn the ruby was entirely weightless, and it registered as massless on her scale despite acting as if it had mass. Its jagged, broken appearance made it difficult to pin down a particular crystal system or fracture pattern, but overall it was mostly spherical, and its edges didn't feel sharp.

Although it was a ghostly indigo in the mineral reef, it now was a faint pink, not too different from a typical ruby. And despite the strange way it appeared to pass through solid rock earlier, it was a very solid mineral, and Floras wasn't able to scratch or chip away at it with anything she had, from diamond tools to a specially designed handheld laser drill. Feeling content that it was at least somewhere she could keep an eye on it until her colleagues arrived, she set it back down on her desk and prepared for bed. The heavy clunk it made against the faux wooden surface startled her, given its apparent weightless nature.

Crawling into bed, she found it much easier to drift off to sleep this time. However, the night was not restorative, as she was soon overtaken by strange nightmares unlike anything she had ever experienced before. There were images of unknown cities, each with their architecture ranging from modern space habitations to ancient steel and glass towers, to even more primitive structures made of mud or stone. The night skies in each image had different arrangements of moons and stars, and although they were all typical blue-green planets like the one that hangs in the skies above Kuruvinda, none of them were familiar to her.

Feelings of despair and dread washed over her as these flashes of other worlds filled her dreams. They all had a common thread weaving between them: cities were falling into ruin, hearts were losing their drive to innovate, and societies were falling prey to the elements around them. Although individual people had not appeared to her, there was a feeling of collective trauma, entire worlds suffering from a common source of malaise. As she tossed in bed, drenched in a cold sweat, the ruby began to glow a radiant indigo, its surface twisting in on itself in unusual ways.

She was able to jolt herself awake, but the visions still plagued her mind. She could see it all finally, entire worlds from throughout time being rendered lifeless by an unknowable cosmic force. The ruby's shimmer caught her attention, and as she turned to face it, she was transfixed by its cascading ethereal form. However, with an unintended blink of her eyes, the ruby was suddenly back to its dull pink self, lying lifeless on her desk. All of the visions and nightmares were gone from her mind, leaving her to grapple with the panic in the silence of her quarters.

As she collected her thoughts and reacquainted herself with what was real, she prepared to head back to sleep for the third time that night cycle. Checking the clock, however, revealed that the night cycle was over, and artificial morning would begin soon. The entire night had been consumed by those phantom delusions, and she would be expected to make an appearance at the work site to get the higher-ups off her back about the stalled operations. Preparing to meet the day ahead, she thought she saw the ruby's surface begin to crawl through her tired, watered eyes.

(4)

Floras nervously spent the next few hours at the work site with her supervisors, keeping her attention pointed towards the problematic deposit. Whereas the day before, her stubborn robots were a hindrance to the operation, today they proved crucial in keeping her supervisors from approaching the former site of the ruby. TA-04 and SM-02 in particular were back online but didn't seem to remember Floras coming by the previous night cycle. At long last, they agreed to suspend operations until Dr. Crofton and Dr. Emil arrived, and Floras was free to return home until then.

Returning to her quarters relieved, she planned on spending the rest of her down time undisturbed in her quarters with the ruby. Hoping to catch up on some lost sleep, she instead felt faint images of dying worlds fill her mind's eye every time she laid down to rest. With nothing else to occupy her time until her colleagues arrived in another day or so, she made it her mission to try and learn more about these mystery planets that had begun to consume her subconscious.

Scrolling through record after record in the interplanetary data archives, she began her search. Surprisingly, there were a fair number of blue-green planets that had suffered major ecological collapses, but most of them were known to be triggered by human actions. Within that pool of planets, all of them had been triggered in recent history, with the most common scenario being the arrival of humans on a planet with a very delicate global ecosystem. The accidental introduction of an outside lifeform was often enough to snowball into a planetary collapse.

Every world with a recorded instance of a planetary collapse was also a modern space colony, with modern architecture, so none of them could be the ones in her mind’s eye. Momentarily stumped, she decided to approach the search from a different perspective. Perhaps, if enough time has passed since a planetary collapse, the archives would no longer classify it as a blue-green world. Shuffling through the various biome types that the archives sorted by, she learned of an unfamiliar biome simply named “exhausted”.

An “exhausted planet” was one whose biome was considered irrelevant, as the planet itself could no longer serve any political or economic purpose within the interplanetary network of human worlds. Within this pool, she found several outlier planets with very little information on record other than when they were declared to be exhausted. These estimates ended up being helpful clues for her, as many of them were said to be several centuries in the past, some of them even predating mass planetary colonization. A particular sector of worlds seemed to have all been exhausted within a specific time frame, so she reframed her search to start gathering information about that era in history.

As she began her historical search, she saw a brief indigo glimmer within the ruby. Looking at her computer monitor, she saw a star map of human colonies, with a few images of said colonies in smaller windows in front of the map. It clearly was meant to represent the sum of all human worlds, but there were less than a dozen settlements across nine planets in six star systems. The colonies themselves were very primitive, resembling their very first designs. A digital calendar clock on the desk gave her a year from centuries prior, and she began to feel uneasy. As she nervously rubbed at her eyes, the calendar began to show the correct year again, and her monitor had reverted back to showing her archive search results.

Floras tried to shake off the unusual experience, but decided to try entering the year she thought she saw into the archive. Her search resulted in a collection of planets that had become exhausted in that timeframe, and when visualizing those planets as a star map, she found that it correlated exactly to the map in her vision. Much to her frustration, there was virtually no helpful information about these planets at all besides what she already knew. However, a pattern had emerged, and she was soon able to trace a semi-linear path from Kuruvinda all the way back to the human homeworld.

Although the human homeworld was not an exhausted world, there had been an unexplained catastrophe in its history that it had since recovered from. The true nature of this disaster was kept under wraps, but it was clear that every couple of years, another planet along this line would find itself “exhausted”, until the pattern ended here on Kuruvinda several decades ago. All that was available to her at this stage were the final satellite images taken of each world before abandoning them to their long sleep.

World after world, she had found green plains dulled to brown, and blue seas rendered a murky cyan. The scars of former cities were still visible, sprawling across the empty landscapes like graveyards for lost souls. Or perhaps, she found herself pondering, those souls were never lost. As she continued to scan the globes, her search became less for concrete answers and more to satiate her own curiosity. She soon found that at times, a vision would flash in her mind, connected to a physical location on these maps. They were like snapshots of those places in a different time, and all the while, the ruby was shimmering a faint indigo nearby.

The visions would soon become more than pictures, and Floras herself felt like she was now a participant in these memories rather than an observer. She wasn’t simply looking upon these forgotten worlds, she was living on them. As she was flung from one life into the next, she started to take in more of what was going on in those moments. The abstract quality of that nebulous fear was now very real in her heart as she began to live through a series of final moments on repeat. The line between her own memories and these remembered lives was starting to dissolve, and near her dissociated body, the ruby was coming to life.

Floras was no longer aware of what she was going through. She spent hours, sometimes days, living the lives of past humans, all of them grappling with the inescapable horror of their dying planets. None of them were able to escape to off-world colonies, as their worlds had become isolated in omnipresent states of malaise before decaying away. Although they had all been separate people across multiple planets separated by light-years, all of them had watched their planets wither away into lifelessness. Having been overcome by the souls of those long gone, Floras began to slump in her seat, eventually sliding off onto the floor in a near-trance state.

The ruby had begun to hover above the desk, and was now a blinding, radiant indigo. The glassy surface was no longer of matter, and was shifting into shapes and patterns that the human mind would not be able to even properly perceive. A dull ringing was coming from it, and it began to pulse in gentle rhythmics. With each pulse, Floras' body would shiver ever so slightly, and her out-of-body experiences started to overcome her true memories. At last, when it seemed to reach a terrifying climax, a knocking at the front door caused the ruby to fall dead to the desk, and Floras was forced back to the present with a jolt.

(5)

From outside, Floras could hear the voices of her colleagues, Niren and Seabor. It had been two entire days since Floras returned from the work site, and she was supposed to report back at least once each morning until their arrival. Caught in the ruby's influence, she had lost track of time completely. Frantically trying to get to her feet to answer the door, she suddenly felt like she couldn't remember who the two men at the door were. All she could remember was that her young daughter was choking back tears as her short life came to an end alongside that of her planet.

No, that wasn't right, she wasn't that girl's father, she was Floras Sylvon the planetary geologist. She knew that it was her sworn duty to patrol the shipyard and keep an eye out for stowaways... no, that wasn't right either. Floras was struggling to get her mind right, but had her thoughts interrupted again by a firm rapping at the door, followed by Niren's voice asking for permission to enter. Floras yelled back through the door at them, intending to ask for more time to get ready, but in reality shouting that the indigo eclipse in the sky would drive us all to insanity within hours.

Panicking, Floras had her quarters' security system initiate a lockdown, then rushed to her bed and pulled the covers over her head. Another rapping at the door, this time followed by Seabor's voice, went unacknowledged as Floras struggled to contain the myriad of memories swirling in her mind. She didn't hear anything again for a while until the security system disengaged from the outside. The two scientists had gotten assistance from a couple of specialist robots, and once they were inside, they were taken aback at the sight of a disheveled Floras lying in bed with the damned ruby sitting on her desk.

As Seabor made his way to examine the ruby, Niren realized that Floras had gone against her instructions and took it for herself. Niren attempted to admonish her for being impatient and not waiting for their assistance, but as he spoke, he felt as if his words weren't really being heard by her. She was looking at him and appeared to acknowledge that he was speaking, but at the same time, her eyes looked empty and distracted, and she kept glancing over at Seabor, who was holding the ruby in his own hands now.

Floras asked Seabor what he made of the shifting surface and the indigo radiance it was emitting, but he only returned a confused look. The two men saw a large ruby with a slight indigo luster, but it was otherwise only irregular due to its size and seemingly natural shape. Floras didn't understand, because the ruby was still manifesting itself in strange ways from her perspective. Gazing into its glow once again, she was suddenly someone else again, a game warden trapped within a forest wilting under an indigo rain from a cloudless sky.

As Floras began speaking to them as a male forester, then a concerned father, and once again a female patrol officer, Seabor set the ruby back down on the desk and began to back away from it. Niren stepped outside for a moment, coming up with some excuse to justify getting away from her. Seabor tried asking her if she had been alone with the ruby the entire time since their conversation, but she was locked into multiple conversations with herself and took no notice of him.

Niren re-entered the quarters with a few robots at his side, and the machines soon scooped up the ruby as he tried to reason with Floras to come with them and seek medical help. Sensing that the ruby would soon no longer be in her possession, she surprised him with a sucker punch to the gut, then leapt towards the robot holding the ruby. As Seabor tried to pull her off of it, she was able to tear its power cell loose, disabling it and giving her an opportunity to get the ruby back.

With a mad swing of her arms, Floras struck Seabor in the side of his head with the ruby, knocking him out cold. Pushing Niren aside, she was able to escape her quarters and hop into her lunar rover. She was no longer fully in control of her own body, and guided the rover in erratic patterns across the lunar surface. After thirty minutes of fleeing, she unintentionally drove into an old crag, the remains of an iridium vein her team had already depleted years ago.

Taking shelter from the hot daytime winds, she slid into a small alcove and held the ruby in her hands, close to her face. For the first time, she was in contact with the ruby as it began to come to life again, and the visions that filled her mind were the most realistic so far. She found that she was able to probe into the ruby's own "mind", and searched deep to unlock its mysterious origins. Within was a mystic archive of souls, collected from across the stars, but no hints as to where this ruby originally came from. One thing, however, did become quite clear to her.

This ruby had been on every single one of those exhausted planets at exactly the moment they had been exhausted. The indigo radiance of this gemstone was of the same shimmer as the horrors that plagued the last inhabitants of the dying worlds. Although it didn’t originate on the human homeworld, that’s where it first made itself known, and although the first humans were able to survive and recover, the sequence of worlds that came next were helpless against its eldritch power. She couldn’t see how it moved from planet to planet, but she eventually realized that it became stranded on Kuruvinda because the moon was already lifeless to start with.

Seeing her face within its impossible curvature, she finally realized what she was meant to do with the ruby. It had been waiting all this time for someone like her to find it, someone that could allow it to escape the volcanic wastes and travel across the universe again. Rather than remain behind and continue to live a mundane life on autopilot, she had the opportunity to create a living archive for all of mankind, an infinite number of lives for her to live through. The ruby would be her glorious purpose, and she its avatar on the material plane.

The visions and lives that had taken over her mind had finally subsided, and she was now firmly in control of the ruby and its collection of souls. No longer would she waste away on Kuruvinda, stripping the land of all its worth to appease her corporate handlers. Floras Sylvon was a one-of-a-kind living archive with a mission to experience the universe in a way no one else could. As Niren and Seabor arrived on the edge of the ridge in their own rover, they were able to see the ruby in its full glory for the first time.

Floating in front of Floras, its surface shifted and collapsed into itself in impossible ways as its indigo radiance blinded the men. As this cosmic heat washed over their minds, they found that their thoughts were now shared. A chorus of other voices began to crescendo over their own, and as they all struggled to be heard over one another, their panic began to dissolve into spiritual detachment, no longer able to comprehend their loss of sentience.

The glowing silhouette of one Floras Sylvon could be seen walking along a volcanic ridge on the moon of Kuruvinda as the indigo sun in the sky began to set once again.

-END-