Nick lurched in bed and immediately vomited.

  “Easy there, deep breaths,” his older brother, Simon, said as he grabbed him by the arm. Nick retched several more times, but nothing came out, just dry heaves that were painful to his abdomen.

  “There you go. You’re fine. Just take it slow, Nick.”

  Nick leaned back, his head resting on a pillow. He was in a bed. No, not just a bed. A med ward. There were wires attached to his wrists and a sensor on one finger. The world grew firmer around him, more real. The carefully chosen white of the station walls. His brother’s blue eyes, staring at him with obvious worry. The stars shining from the room’s lone window, as well as a tiny portion of the barren planet, Majus, around which Station 79 hovered in orbit.

  The smell of the vomit across his chest and lap.

  “Get this off me, will you?” Nick said, tugging at the blanket.

  “Of course.” Simon pulled it away, bundling it so the vomit was trapped in the center. Nick noticed he wasn’t wearing any sort of med gown. He must not have been here long.

  Nick pulled off his shirt, dropped it to the tile, and then shivered as he lay on the bed. No sign of a doctor. Just his brother.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Simon opened a nearby shelf and pulled out another folded blanket and tossed it to Nick. He caught it and gratefully wrapped it about himself.

  “Honestly, Nick, I was hoping you could tell me,” said Simon.

  Nick relaxed onto the pillow and closed his eyes. It felt like he had just emerged from a dream so deep it bordered on the absurd. His head felt light, and his heart heavy in his chest. All his limbs ached, too. What happened? Today had been special; he knew that in his gut. His brother’s clothes, they were nicer than normal, formal attire, crisp blue fabric with gold trim. His brother…his brother was doing something special, something with…

  The Artifact.

  Nick pushed back up to a sitting position.

  “What happened?” he asked. “The Artifact, what happened when you activated it?”

  Simon’s careful smile cracked.

  “What happened is that my little brother had a seizure the moment I put my hands on it. Don’t worry about the Artifact. Let’s worry about you. Did you notice any particular irregularities? Hear unusual noises, maybe experience sensations you cannot explain?”

  Nick felt memories hovering just outside his reach, refusing to come easily. The research station over Majus had originally been sent to Majus because of long-distance scans suggesting the possibility of life. Instead they had found a dead, barren planet. They continued their research, of course, collecting rocks and attempting to analyze the fate of the planet and discern why the scans had been so wrong…and that was when they found on the surface, seemingly waiting for them, the Artifact.

  It was an octahedron, its surface as smooth as obsidian, its height thrice that of a man, and its weight, somehow a shocking fifty tons if placed under universal standard gravity. The researchers on the station had eagerly brought it aboard for study—this was potentially the most important discovery in all of humanity’s long history. An actual piece of alien technology, the first ever found among the stars. Was it from a prior civilization, or the remnant of a spacecraft that had crashed? Whatever it was, the proof of life beyond humanity in the stars was exhilarating and frightening in equal measure. The scientists aboard the station did all they could to open it, speak with it, interface with it in any way. For a month, they accomplished nothing, but then the Artifact itself changed. Curved writing appeared upon the perfectly smooth surface, along with near-invisible grooves clearly meant to fit a pair of human hands.

  Simon, Nick’s older brother and the youngest station director of the Offworld Planetary Control organization, had been given the honor of tearing it open. There had been a grand ceremony earlier that day, with everyone on the station gathered in the curving observation deck overlooking the Artifact, as Simon spoke aloud the words that had been painstakingly translated.

  So far as everyone expected, Simon would be chosen for…whatever might happen. Simon, the charismatic director of Research Station 79, tall and handsome in his gold-trimmed blue OPC uniform, was the perfect person to make first contact with anything alien.

  Yet when his older brother spoke the words, Nick had felt strange, like sharp needles were stabbing deep into his temples, followed by queasiness, a sense of vertigo, and then…then what?

  Demons in the village.

  “I did experience something unusual,” he said. He swallowed. His tongue felt like sandpaper. “My head hurt, and then my stomach, too. After that, I think I passed out and went…somewhere.”

  Yensere.

  “Went somewhere?” Simon asked.

  Nick shook his head. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I awoke in an entirely new place. And I don’t mean, like, in a dream. It felt…real. Vivid. And very bizarre.”

  Simon grabbed a little rolling chair and slid it closer so he could sit. There was no hiding his excitement.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Nick, you have to understand, this was our first significant reaction from the Artifact. For the briefest moment, its core lit up with faint violet light. At the exact same time, you collapsed, hundreds of feet away in the observation deck. This isn’t a coincidence. If you had some sort of dream or encounter immediately after the Artifact’s activation, it might be your mind’s way of processing the information sent to you. More importantly, all my colleagues think the Artifact influenced you, and they’re demanding tests.” Simon twiddled his thumbs. “Lots of tests. I understand if you want to refuse, but it’s important that you—”

  “Refuse?” Nick sat up straighter in his bed. “Are you kidding? I want to help, Simon. Everyone’s considered me a freeloader for months now, so for me to have a chance to be useful, to actually accomplish something worth a damn?”

  “Language,” Simon said, and grinned.

  “Fuck you,” Nick said, and grinned right back. “I’m important now, aren’t I?”

  “To the detriment of all of us, yes, Nick, I think you are. But I’m glad you’re taking it well.”

  Nick sank back into his bed, already starting to feel better. It was frightening, of course, to be linked to the unknown Artifact in ways he did not understand, but he would overcome that fear. When their father passed away two years ago, Nick had been shuffled from caretaker to caretaker on their home planet of Taneth until Simon pulled enough strings to bring Nick aboard Station 79 upon Nick’s eighteenth birthday. Nick was technically a lab assistant, but he heard the whispers. Everyone considered him an unwanted helper, brought aboard through nepotism so Simon could keep an eye on his younger brother.

  “I’m going to do what I can, but first, you need to do something for me,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  Nick pointed past him to the med ward closet. “Grab me a shirt. It’s cold in here.”

  Simon’s mood immediately lightened as he walked to the thin med room closet and pulled out a clean shirt, tossing it to Nick. The shirt was basic white and short-sleeved, similar to a dozen in Nick’s room. He slid it on though it was a bit too big for him, then settled once more into the bed.

  “All right,” Simon said, and he brushed his thumb over his watch twice, activating a recording program. “So after the physical discomfort, you said you experienced a vivid dream. Could you repeat everything that happened? Anything at all, no matter how strange or insignificant.”

  Nick closed his eyes and tried to think. It was all a bit hazy, as dreams often are when one wakes suddenly, but a few images stood out in stark contrast. The first was of an old woman, cowering in fear as she recited a strange mantra. The other was of being frozen in the middle of a river due to…

  Well…due to magic.

  “Remember, I’m not making any of this up,” Nick said. “I exited a field of wheat into an extremely old-fashioned village, was chased by villagers wielding sickles and pitchforks calling me a demon, and died because a woman flung a ball of ice at my feet to freeze me in a river.” He shrugged. “Told you it was bizarre.”

  “Perhaps,” Simon muttered. He had no notes. Nick knew he would not write anything down, not yet. His older brother would transcribe everything by hand later while listening over the entire conversation. It helped him memorize things, puzzle through them at a pace that elevated him to a savant among his much older peers. “You say you died? How so?”

  “As in I was stabbed to death and bled out,” Nick said. “And it wasn’t like a normal dream, either. I didn’t wake up just beforehand. It…it hurt.”

  Simon tapped at his lower lip.

  “Strangely enough, I’m not surprised. Near the end of your period of unconsciousness, your heart rate rocketed to the 180s, and at times you were thrashing around like a wild animal. I almost bound your hands and feet to protect you. Whatever you experienced, it was traumatic, and your body reacted accordingly.”

  “But why am I encountering any of this at all?” Nick asked. “The people I saw were agrarian. They had no complex machinery, just pitchforks and sickles. I was wearing overalls, Simon. Overalls. It doesn’t make any sense. Whoever made the Artifact were more scientifically advanced than we can yet conceive. Nothing about what I saw implied those people were the ones who made it. And they looked human.” He squirmed uncomfortably. “Why would aliens look human?”

  Simon rose from his chair and tapped the watch to click off his recording software.

  “Remember, we don’t know what we are dealing with,” he said. “Perhaps you were shown what you could understand. Appearances might have been altered to be more acceptable. Perhaps you were introduced to a specific moment of the aliens’ history, like a sliver of time before their space-faring began. If the Artifact is meant to initiate first contact between civilizations, they can’t know what state of technological advancement the discoverers will be at unless the Artifact was purposefully positioned on uninhabitable worlds that required beyond light-speed travel to…”

  “Hey, hey,” Nick said, interrupting him. “You’re rambling conjecture again.”

  Simon paused, then resumed that cocky grin of his.

  “Right,” he said. “Well. I’ve got enough to form some theories. Prepare for a barrage of tests, blood vials, urine samples, all kinds of fun.”

  “Can’t wait,” Nick said, and stared at the ceiling.

  Simon left, and sure enough, the cavalcade began. Nick did as was asked of him, enduring the pricks of needles to draw seemingly dozens of vials of blood. Pupils were checked, pulse tracked. He recited the alphabet backward, twice, and proved his balance by hopping from foot to foot.

  By the end of it all, Nick demanded a return to his room. Dr. Haley, the woman in charge of the med ward, had initially refused, until Nick brought Simon in to argue on his behalf. This resulted in a compromise, with Nick allowed to sleep in his own room instead of the med ward, but only if his sleep could be monitored. By the time the machinery switched rooms and Nick relaxed into his own bed, the ceiling lights had dimmed to signal the end of the daytime cycle.

  “You here to observe my beauty sleep?” Nick asked the scientist sharing the room with him, a heavy-jowled man with a clean-shaven head and glasses so thick they seemed like an aesthetic choice. His name was Pagle, and Nick had never liked being around the dreadfully dull and serious man.

  “I will be monitoring your vitals, yes,” Pagle said, sliding an oxygen sensor onto one of Nick’s fingers. Much of the machinery was stacked on his bedside table. The photograph he kept there of his mother and father had been swept aside to make room, a fact that annoyed Nick greatly. “This time, we will be ready if you experience another episode, and be able to properly track any stress-induced tachycardia.”

  Nick closed his eyes as the room darkened further. His stomach clenched. Had he eaten anything since he awoke? He didn’t think so. What he’d give for a granola bar right now.

  “So,” he said, his eyes closed and his mind drifting. “You’re going to be staring at me while I sleep?”

  “Nothing so crass as that. And I will spend much of the time reviewing the results of your various tests, which are only now arriving on the shared server.”

  “Sounds great,” Nick muttered. His eyelids were so heavy. It felt like it hit him all at once, a sudden exhaustion that made speaking difficult. “Have…fun.”

  Pagle responded, but Nick couldn’t bother to spare the energy to make sense of his words. It felt so good to rest. His mind drifted further. Pagle’s voice faded into nothing. Just silence. Darkness, mixed with a bit of color floating across his eyes.

  And then.

  A ring of stones.