Depths of Dyriak Rift, an NFTstory by Parijat Mukherjee(Parijatverse)(Pilot story, flash fiction)

Year 2300: First Rift was sighted. Hysteria ensued among public, the social media and scientist communities. It was not supposed to be possible, but it was right there, at the far reaches of the solar system. Probes were sent right away to investigate it.

Year 2329:

Space rifts have been happening within solar system for last few decades now. Some of them have been explored by unmanned ships and probes. Most lead to a strange world, an alien ocean of immeasurable proportion, and unforeseen beauty. Callisto colony became the forerunner in the exploration of these rifts, being one of the pioneers of deep space exploration efforts. One of these were quite closer to the Callisto colony. Dyriak Rift, near Uranus. There were a lot of things different in this rift. Unmanned probes seemed to give different results each time.

Year 2330 8th August. Third Nevada, Callisto colony sector A6: Dr. Rylin's MindLog

I enlisted for the project Nebuchadnezzar 1, along with a few other candidates today. This project seeks to explore the Dyriak Rift by a manned probe in a few years. I personally think it is a terrible idea, but this seems to be the only way to keep things funded. Public would much rather have the money used to make earth rehabitable than this.

Sutton does not share my opinion. He is really hyped about this expedition. If possible he wanted to get into the manned mission himself. Sadly, he lacked in the physical fitness department to be qualified. He wore a loose, heavy glass spectacles, refused to get surgery, and had some pretty bizarre interests. If he was not one of the mavericks of solving weird maths, he would never been listed here. We did get along fairly well though. For a nerd with noodly arms, he played pool like a demon.

Year 2337. Location: Space Exploration Station Nebuchadnezzar 1. Time: 6 PM. 7th September. Dr. Rylin's Mindlog.

We waited holding our breath as Darius 1 entered the rift. Sutton was muttering something beside me. It felt like a chant. He was initially disheartened to know that he would not be part of the crew, though we had been talking about it for years, but of late he became really awkward about this whole thing. Not only he stopped nagging me to persuade the authorities to include him, he started to discourage others from the project. He could not say anything, other than that he had a really bad feeling about this. He was an empath, he said, and added he had similar feelings to anything dangerous. We all knew he had his moods and antics, so we all nodded and let him work on it. But evidently this was getting on people's nerves. One day Tala, one of the scheduled explorers for the mission went mad at his yammering about his bad feelings, and she complained directly to HR that this was bad for the morale of all explorers including her.

Since then, he was mostly quiet. I thought he was recovering, but now it seemed I was wrong.

At this moment, he was definitely chanting something. He seemed lost in the vision in the monitor. It seemed like a prayer to me, though I did not know what religion it was from. I was not into religions, so I could not tell one from another, and I had more important things to focus on. They were having some disturbance in the connections. The rift was changing its properties somehow. A huge magnetic flux increase....

Year 2337. Location: Space Exploration Station Nebuchadnezzar 1. Time: 8 PM. 7th September. Dr. Rylin's Mindlog.

The connections were lost. I do not know what to say anymore. I can still see the faces of those who went in the mission. Poor Jim and Tala... All our unmanned probes went and returned safely, and of all these decades of stability the rift had to be weird right this moment?

They are still working on it, but I am losing hope. People are giving Sutton eyes. We are all scientifically minded here, but it is true that deep down, we all are a bit superstitious at heart and what he spread was a really bad mojo,,talking about that rift in that ominous way. What am I thinking? I am not one of those. This is a bad thing to happen but it is pure coincidence. It has to be that way. All hope is not lost though.

Year 2337. Location: Space Exploration Station Nebuchadnezzar 1. Time: 11:33 PM. 7th September. Dr. Rylin's Mindlog. We resumed contact! They were excited. Everybody cheered up and yelled, hugging each other, or slapping each other's backs. I would give my team a treat tonight at the canteen. Real soda with real sugar! It will be wild. But it would have to wait till they return. There is not much for them to do now though, we mostly can collect more information with probes anyway, this was mostly because we needed to set a history and get the publicity for the funding to happen. I hope nobody leaks my Mindlogs.

Wait..grea

Year 2337. Location: Space Exploration Station Nebuchadnezzar 1. Time: 11:34 PM. 7th September. Dr. Rylin's Mindlog.

They had seen something new! Their voices were cracking up and making no sense, as the magnetic flux of enormous intensity was still flowing out of the rift. We already were being able to parse through it though, and with a bit of lag, the data was being cleaned, the picture they were streaming was coming up on the grand monitor. We were recording. Soon their stream would also be parsed.

Our rejoice was soon drowned by excited yelling and shouts from the team. They were talking together, not making any sense. Soon we understood.

We were sure that Dyriak Rift was just another of those space rifts that were opening up around the solar system...each time closer and closer to Earth. We sent probes through each of them before. Multiple probes for this rift in particular...before this flux happened. A few probes had malfunctioned, but others sent us images before. The alien world on the other side of the rifts were always barren...empty vistas of cosmic graveyard silence, even though some of those scenes were stunningly beautiful.

But this, we did not expect. Life! Uncanny life...Impossible life! Crawling everywhere, creatures that we never had seen the likeness before..things that should not exist were moving about. And the burst of colors! Oh, the colors! And the grand one! The, which called us, and soothed us..reminding us of the time we came from the darkness of the womb..it looked so wrong and yet so right! It was making us feel mesmerized.

Some sqealed, and we all felt the pull in our minds. The explorers were clamoring again about something... "Paradise! This was paradise!" They cried out. We also agreed. There was nothing to suggest it was not paradise, right? This was it. We also had to go there. I very slightly felt there was something wrong about it.But it must have been an unimportant thought. We needed to go there and this was the truth. It was an utmost cruelty against the nature of mankind to deprive anyone from experiencing this ecstasy!

I leaned forward, reaching out with my arms, towards the monitor. It was not going to get me to the rift? What was this thought? The great caller was beckoning to us right before us! It made no sense that it was a monitor, right? It made no sense at all. We would walk right through it!

I stumbled on something..an waste basket. It did not matter. We all congregated towards the screen, a massive throng of scientists and great minds, hard workers. Yes, we deserved this. We worked hard for this. We were the pioneers. And now we were going to get rewarded. The explorers were trying to open the ship. The AI was stopping them. Evil machine. I knew it. It might want to pose being friendly, but in the end it just wanted to stop us reaching paradise. They were trying to turn it off.

They wanted to get out from the ship. They were going to succeed eventually. I felt jealous. The first people who went to paradise. Are not more people supposed to be in paradise? I thought that was how it worked. Would my momma be there too?

Sutton fell beside me, stumbling upon the basket in his left foot. Such a clumsy fool. He was screaming now. Shaking me. But if Dyriak Rift was the paradise, then why there were no people to be seen? It was probably another unimportant question anyway. Some of us were thumping on the screen. Soon they would break the glass and walk into paradise. I will go too. The great caller and others would devour us and rip us into pieces, and eat our minds. It would be nice. I could hear it's voice now. It was calming and soothing. It had authority. It had everything you could want in a voice. It was not english. It was the language of the heart.

Sutton suddenly came upto me and yelled in my ear so hard in his shrill voice that it hurt me. It was very rude. Even more rude was that he tried to block my eyes. I suddenly realized that he did not want me to look into the screen. Doubts creeped back into my mind, doubts about the paradise...flooding my senses like dark sludge welling up from subconscious.

And then I got back into the senses. I looked at Sutton. He seemed to have lost his spectacles, effectively turning him half blind. The horrid scene was still unfolding on the monitor. I could not afford to look there. Sutton was safe. All he could see was large globs of color.

"What is that?"

"I have no idea, but we have to stop it!"

"How?"

"We have to shut down the monitor." He said.

"I do not know how to do that." I said."At least not without looking at it."

"I have an idea."He said, with a wrench in his hands.

I doubted if the fanatics would let him pass.

"I will have to try." He ran towards the screen with the wrench and plunged himself into a soft padding of Dr. Balkovnik's back. Sutton fell from his back like one of those great classic cartoons of the twenty first centuries. How most anticlimatic of the protagonist.

Balkovnik grunted and lowered himself to pick up the wrench. Sutton wiggled backwards, fear of being smashed eminent on his pallid face.

But Balkovnik looked at the wrench very closely and then cheered up.

"I will break the barrier for us all!" He declared, and rushed towards the screen.

Soon, he made way into the crowd, pushing everyone away like a bulldozer, and in the next moment, the screen was broken.

Year 2337. Location: Space Exploration Station Nebuchadnezzar 1. Time: 11:45 PM. 7th September. Dr. Rylin's Mindlog.

We had all gotten back into senses. We tried to warn the explorers, not to get out and turn their ship back immediately. We tried to turn off their monitors and camera so that they do not see whatever was up there. Some of them did have the screens before them turned off, and listened to us, trying to shut their eyes. Tala was one of them. She tried to stop others from destroying the ship and its navigation. But they were furious about this. They started a riot. The ship went offline again. We had not heard from them ever since.

We would try to make contact with them again. We hope if its successful whatever picks it up would be human. I have heard its voice.