Motes

A short sci fi Story

Motes

Arrival
They came silently and largely unnoticed. Ten million of them materialised just above our planet's surface to form the lattice: a network of equidistantly positioned, grain-of-salt-sized particles, perfectly contoured to the landscape. They hung suspended at a height of between two and five and a half feet, whether above ground or water.

It wasn't the sort of invasion we were accustomed to seeing in movies or on television. No mothership, or aerial dogfighting between F-16s and alien attack vessels. No little green men, just almost invisible, tiny, unmoving crystals occupying our space four and a half miles apart. I read somewhere that if you could collect them all together, they'd fit in a five-litre bucket.

June 3rd, 2027, was a big day for news, but no-one understood why. Four oil tankers had exploded at sea. Numerous cargo ships were lost, and cruise ships went down in the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. An airliner exploded during takeoff at Lahore airport, and a cargo plane met a similar fate attempting to land at Mombasa.
The number of road traffic accidents worldwide went up that day by two thousand percent, and hospitals were overrun with patients suffering a range of inexplicable injuries, from cuts and burns to severed limbs and acute internal injuries. Worse still, worldwide, tens of thousands of people died suddenly and unexpectedly while going about their everyday lives.

In the United States, Japan, France, and Russia, nuclear power stations suffered unaccountable failures resulting in meltdowns and radioactive pollution.

Politically there was pandemonium; initially superpowers suspected and blamed each other until they realised everyone was affected. Terrorism and organised crime were ruled out as having insufficient resources for such global sabotage.

As I remember, it went on for days before the government called the curfew. They had no idea why it was happening, but too many people were dying. The only common thread seemed to be that they were usually on the move, either walking or travelling. The media speculation was incredible, but perhaps not as incredible as the truth.

Investigation
The Chinese were first to launch a properly organised scientific investigation. They mapped known particles through plotting where the inexplicable events were occurring and were able to extrapolate the locations of undiscovered particles.

The science was shared internationally, and soon science institutions liberally funded by governments were setting up field laboratories around the particles, which, it was discovered, appeared completely inert yet had a devastating effect when in contact with other matter.

They put out public information videos on TV and streaming services, warning everyone about the dangers. “Remember you're never far from death” was one of the most dramatic slogans I recall.

Theories about the cause and purpose of the phenomenon were widespread and varied, especially on social media. An invasion by interdimensional beings being one of the most popular beliefs. It did seem like more than a horrible coincidence that the things were positioned at a height that would cause maximum destruction to people.

I was still at school at that time and remember clearly the first occasion I ever saw one. It was a Sunday.

“There’s one by the Roman road near Whittle’s farm!” Rowan was at our front door, excited, sweaty, and panting. His bike lay in our driveway behind him. “Come on! Let's go and see it for ourselves.”

Dave Haynes and three of his gang were already there when we arrived. They were all standing around a traffic cone in a field of sheep. One ewe, its fleece streaked with blood, lay in the grass several feet away.

“Come and have a look at this!” Dave called as we approached. He held a chocolate bar wrapper over the cone and moved it up and down. A crackling noise and the smell of burning paper. When he held the paper up to the sky, a dozen pinpricks of light passed through.

“Where is it though?” I said more nervously than I had intended.
“Just there,” he said, indicating a thigh-high spot above the cone with his index finger. I leaned forward, straining my eyes to see it. Just a static speck catching the sunlight a few millimetres from the end of his wobbling finger.

“Did it do that?” I said, pointing at the dead sheep. He nodded and pulled a plastic bottle of water from his pocket. “Watch,” he said. He poured water over the speck. It hissed and gave off a cloud of steam.

“Hey Figgy, go and fetch one of them blocks,” he ordered his tall friend, pointing to a pile of rubble by a nearby barn. Figgy brought back a heavy-looking breeze block. We all stood back a couple of paces as he raised it over his head and threw it into the speck. With a deafening cracking sound, the block shattered into pieces and violently exploded dust and debris all over us. “The harder you hit it, the harder it hits back,” said Dave through the ringing in my ears.

“So that explains how they can sink ships,” I said. “Because they're big and heavy, they must hit these things really hard?”

“Yeah, and these things don't give a fuck.” David laughed. “Whatever you throw at them, they just bounce it right back to you. They stop lorries because of the force of them barreling down the motorway. They burn through the metal and hit the diesel tanks, and—boom!”

“Police!” Figgy urgently pointed down the lane.

A police car and an army truck were coming down the disused farm track. Known to the police, David, Figgy, and the other two jumped on their electric bikes and scarpered, leaving Rowan and me with the dead sheep.

The police car screeched to a halt. “ “Don't move!” yelled the officer in a panic as soon as he'd opened the door. “For your own safety. Do not move!”

“It's alright,” shouted Rowan. “”We know where it is! It's here, over the cone.”

A dozen soldiers leapt from the truck carrying various bits of equipment. They made us sit in the police car while they encased the particle in a metal canister painted red, yellow, black, and white, supported on a heavy armature. Then they erected a high portable fence, the type you see around building sites, around it and fixed warning signs to it with cable ties.

When they'd finished their work, the location of the almost invisible speck was unmissable.

The policeman took us home, visiting both our parents to impress on them the dangers of going near the ‘motes,’ as he called them.

All that was fifteen years ago; I was sixteen, but I'll never forget it. I'm married now with kids, and I've seen hundreds of them since. I work for the UK Mote Surveillance and Response Service. It's my job to watch them.

Adaptation
David's assessment “The harder you hit it, the harder it hits back” turned out to be an oversimplification of their true nature. For weeks after the discovery physicists were frantically trying to rationalise the nature of the motes, but they defied all the laws of physics. Through field testing they determined that the motes were essentially immovable objects composed of what they called exotic matter. A substance so impermeable and inflexible that any normal material that came into contact with it immediately suffered a catastrophic destruction of its molecular bonds. No force on earth or in the known universe, for that matter, could affect or withstand them.

Of course the question remained. Why?

Acceptance
There was nothing we could do but accept their presence and continue living our lives around them. Over the next year they were meticulously mapped and isolated by use of the canisters. Their brightly contrasting warning colours became a familiar sight across the world. The motes at sea, which of course was most of them, were marked with buoys in the same dread-inducing colours.

Roads were rerouted, large ships had to be redesigned for manoeuvrability, rooms were sealed off, the dead were mourned, but life went on.

Eventually, after a few years, they became just another forbidden part of the landscape, like an electricity substation or a railway.

My responsibility is primarily for the observation and security of Exotic Matter Artefact DX18ZVH 51.77, -1.29, better known as the Port Meadow mote in Oxford. It was one of the earlier discoveries that had a lab built around it.

Mostly it's about keeping the boffins safe and the local louts out. There are two teams of three. I'm head of the B team. We work a week on, a week off. It's a good team; we take our job seriously, but we also get along really well and have become friends.

Iona, my partner, and I had rented a house just a mile north of the site. A very easy commute for me. The kids, Bran, who's six, and Cat, who's eight, grew up there. It was a happy home, but Iona and I had been digging at each other all week, and I was glad to get out of our house and back to the lab. The collection of buildings overlooking the meadow and the river would be home for another week. I was first on shift, relieving Marco Triani, head of team A.

“Alright, Marco? How's it been?
“Scintillating,” he said sarcastically.
“Anything to report?”
“Yeah. We've got mice in the dorm,” he said. “We've put traps down, but it would really help if people didn't eat in there.”

“Noted,” I said. “I'll tell Zane and Dol. You get yourself off, mate. I'll take it from here.
He was taking his jacket off the hook on the door when he suddenly remembered something: “Oh, there's a new professor—name's Iris Vaughan—working in the lab. Skinny woman in her forties, long curly black hair.”

“Oh, what's she doing?” I asked.

“I don't fucking know what any of 'em do. She's got clearance; that's all I care about,” he said as he left.

I settled back in my comfortable seat and surveyed the bank of monitors in front of me. There was nothing unusual. No alerts from the motion and heat detectors. I tapped the keyboard to bring up the lab cams. There was Iris Vaughan and Olly Shaw, one of the technicians, fiddling with the controls of a machine I hadn't seen before. It was right up tight to the mote. I flipped on the mic. “I hope you know what you're doing, Ollie. That looks like an expensive piece of kit to be so close to the doodah.”

Ollie chuckled, “Relax, Tom. We've been doing this all week. By the way, this is Professor Vaughan. Professor, that uncouth voice belongs to Tom Callaghan, head of security this week.”

“Hello, Tom, call me Iris,” she said in a gentle Aberdeen accent.

“Welcome, professor—Iris.” I said, “I'll leave Ollie alone now I know he's under adult supervision.”

“Thanks, Tom,” she said, smiling and sitting down to refocus on the machine's display panel.

She stood up so suddenly her chair skidded back three feet across the floor.

“Ollie! Come here a sec. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?”

Ollie peered at the screen. “Fuck no.”

Iris was on her phone in seconds. “This is Professor Vaughan; I need to speak to Johann. It's urgent. Extremely urgent. Yes, thank you.” She paced for a few seconds, biting her nails. “Johann? Oh my God, Johann, it's moving!”

I stopped breathing for a moment while it sank in. This couldn't be happening. I turned in the mic. “Professor, can you confirm that the mote is moving? If so, I'll have to inform my superiors.”

“Hang on, Tom, we need to be sure,” said Iris breathlessly. “Johann, did you know about this?” Her eyes widened in horror as she listened.

”Have Mote Response been told? Right, well, I'm confirming it. The damn thing is moving!”

She stared at the screen, nervously pulling at her hair while she listened. “Just under a mile in four hours, North,” she said.

She sat heavily back in her chair, shaking her head, and looked at Ollie. Apparently they're all moving together,” she said.

I stared at the mote, thinking, and this one's heading to my home.