The Observer Effect - Part One
By Spencer Nitkey
Happy New Story Sunday! This week, we have a brilliantly baroque composition by the virtuosic Spencer Nitkey. This is a lovely one. - The Editor
The Observer Effect
By Spencer Nitkey
Even through his misery, Orpheus could hear the chords. F minors shifted into diminished Bs, in the rumbling sound of the rescue craft’s fusion engine. Black crowned his ship as it swam towards Eurydice’s last broadcast coordinates. No one on the generation ship had bothered to tell him they were sending the AI out to investigate the quantum deadzone.
No one told Orpheus much. His job was to make a music of the black void they sailed through, to keep everyone sane and singing. Most of the generation ship listened and cheered while he sang in the cafeteria at meals, and ignored him otherwise. Except for Eurydice. How could anyone have known that he talked to her everyday, practicing his melodies in his bedroom, her voice singular in his loudspeaker system? How could that know that she spent almost every night describing the shape of the universe to him? Gossiping about who was loving who under whose nose? How could they know that every song he performed was for her?
He pushed the small craft the captain had, begrudgingly, given him forward. He hadn’t given the captain much of a choice. After two months straight of dirges and morale reaching critically low levels, the captain had folded.
Now, sailing through space, tracing her path, his promise to himself rang clear in his head. He would find Eurydice, or he would die. He had resolved that the first day he found out she was missing. Orpheus was not, by habit, a brave man, but the two months of Eurydice’s absence had only strengthened this vow.
He did not know what he was looking for. The scientists and engineers knew more about space than he could ever learn. Most of his knowledge of space came from his talks with Eurydice.
When he arrived at her last broadcast coordinates his heart sank. There was nothing on any of his scans. No radiation, no objects, no nearby energy sources. Nothing that suggested anything living had passed through this empty void.
He pulled closer and closer to the coordinates, as despondency struck his heart in wailing minor keys. Was she lost forever?
The black in front of him slivered.
Orpheus decelerated as quickly as the ship allowed. As if from nothing, the space just miles from Orpheus split itself in a long, undulating line. His ship slowed, but moved forward. As it did, colors came kaleidoscoping out of the sliver, and fractals of impossible geometric shapes sequined the dark.
This strange radiation fled the sliver and barrelled towards Orpheus. It crashed, synesthetic, into Orpheus’s pod. Smells, tastes, sounds, colors, and sensations all smeared together on impact, passing from one into the other without pause or distinction. The chromatic spectrum of lights that fled the sliver, arrived at Orpheus as whispers and goosebumps, the smell of antiseptic wipes and the harmony of suspended 2nd chords. Orpheus could barely breathe through the chaos, yet he howled with joy. Somewhere, in the tangle of sensation, he felt the echo of Eurydice’s voice crawl across his skin.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. He was a 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction finalist, and is a Best Small Fictions, Rhysling Award, and two-time Pushcart nominee. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Fusion Fragment, and others. You can find more of his writing and learn more about him on his website, spencernitkey.com.
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