Ten Day Window - Full Short Story

To Look is to Erase

Ten Day Window. Full short story below.

It took me a minute to find the clicker. The screen behind me was as big as a cinema, displaying my notes in massive letters. My next slide was important: a low-resolution video file of 2004 security footage. I needed time to explain this one step at a time.

“Ah, here it is,” I said, with one hand on the microphone and the other on the clicker.

On the screen, I could see myself walking down the street after a long day at the office, digging through my pockets just wanting to listen to some music. My fingers kept hitting different stuff: old receipts, a keychain, and a plastic wrapper. It felt like playing a claw game at an arcade, always dropping the prize right before getting it.

“Oye, espera!”

A voice in Spanish came from behind my left shoulder. It wasn’t a big shout, just a whisper, but it had some urgency.

I stopped. “If this is about the deployment log, we can look at that tomorrow.”

Behind me, nothing. Just an empty street where a colleague should have been. Nobody answered.

I turned back. A massive truck passed like a blade, centimeters away, blasting its horn at full volume.

Paralysis hit me. Breathing became completely impossible for a few seconds as a shock spiked through my system. My eyes shut and instinct took over, forcing two blind steps backward, away from the traffic.

“What the actual…” escaped into the quiet air, confusion mounting as my frantic mind ran through different scenarios. “That was it, and I skipped it.”

“It’s a day I always come back to whenever anxiety hits,” my voice echoed through the room speakers, the microphone giving a bit of feedback.

The big screen behind me flickered as the security footage ended. It was the only source of light, casting a cold blue glow over the silent rows of indistinguishable people sitting in front of me. I took a slow breath to keep my pulse steady.

“Pinpointing the exact cause of the voice you just heard remained difficult for a while. I spent the next ten years locked inside a lab studying the phenomenon. Which leads me to today.”

A Milky Way graphic appeared on the projection behind me. Facing the audience, the words “Mars Lander Personnel” were stamped in distinct blue letters across the carbon fiber of my podium.

“Enrico Fermi once asked, where is everyone?” Nods passed through the audience like a miniature fútbol wave, a silent gesture for a familiar question.

“It was a damn good question. There are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone. So, where is everyone?” I asked, extending both arms.

“Today, we have the answer.” I let the weight of the moment hang for a second or two.

“They have always been everywhere.” Each word dropped like a heavy stone into the silence of the room.

A few seconds passed before chaos broke loose as everyone shouted different questions at full volume. The silence instantly felt like a distant memory.

“One at a time, please. You, front row. Go.” I pointed toward the closest face.

“It’s simply not possible. We have looked at all frequencies, biosignatures, and megastructures. They are not there,” a silhouette in the front row said.

“How do you know that?” someone in the back asked.

“I don’t deal in a right or wrong binary, I deal in probabilities,” gesturing with my hands to wave the room back into their seats.

I waited for everyone to sit down and focus their attention again. The tension in the room was palpable. It was understandable, because these were all long-time scientists, and I was ripping their life’s script apart.

“So, let’s look at the board. Scenario A: We are completely alone in a hostile and sterile universe, making life on Earth the highest rarity in existence. There’s legendary, and then there’s Earth. Scenario B: Advanced civilizations exist, but they aren’t using telegrams transmitted by men on horses to communicate between towns. And right now, we’re staring at the sky looking for the horse tracks.”

“And Scenario C?” the silhouette in the front stood up, interrupting my flow. “Because unless those horses are invisible, Hubble didn’t see anything, nor did the Webb deep fields or any observable data.”

“Observable data. Interesting choice of words.” I looked at them, and took a moment. “And... Scenario C is the double-slit experiment.”

The projection behind me flickered for a moment as a new illustration appeared on the screen. “You all know the experiment. When we aren’t looking, matter behaves as a wave. But the moment we look, the wave function collapses into solid particles.”

I paused to let them connect the dots. I expected some confrontation, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this civil.

“What does this have to do with the Fermi Paradox?” someone shouted from the back of the room.

“Every time we pointed a telescope at the cosmos, our observation collapsed the wave function of the incoming light.”

I let the statement hang until the room fell completely silent.

“Simply put, we’ve been wiping their signatures from reality just by looking for them. Or, as the front row prefers to call it: observable data.”

“How do you measure something that changes the moment you see it?” someone in the corner asked.

Those ten years of isolation reduced to a single question. I tasted the recycled air, the reheated coffee, and the cold vending-machine sandwiches of that lab all at once.

“You don’t take a single snapshot. Instead, you take a billion out-of-focus, nanosecond exposures. A single data point tells you nothing, but when you compile those billions of exposures together, the noise resolves into a signal. And here it is,” I said, pointing at the projector.

A collective wave of whispers broke out across the room. Faces that had been locked onto me turned to one another, searching for answers.

“That is an incoming visitor ship.”

“And it will land on Martian soil in ten days.” My voice cut clean through the murmurs.

I didn’t expect another wave of questions. Every face in the room turned into the exact same expression. Paralysis hit, and instincts took over.

“Prior to this meeting you didn’t have security clearance, so this wasn’t a presentation. This was a security briefing, and you have all been officially briefed. I leave you with the data to process and report back to me. Good day.”

I gathered my badge and music player from the desk and walked out of the room.

A few members of my staff followed me out into the corridor as we made our way toward the main hub. All the planetary bases shared the same architectural layout: a massive kitchen and a round table dead center to encourage conversation through convergence. To get to any other section of the facility, you had to pass directly through this central circular space.

As we approached the area, Sullivan was waiting. Sully was a visitor I didn’t want to meet at the moment, especially since we both held the exact same title: Principal Director. We had very different views on how to interpret the data.

“You know we have to shut down all telescopes,” Sully said, opening the conversation in a sharp, cutting tone.

“If you mean stopping space exploration in general, then no,” trying to cut to the chase.

“Of course we have to. By your own discovery, every observation is causing irreparable damage out there.”

“Damage. That’s an interesting choice. What brings you to Mars, Sullivan? Other than the ambush?” I said.

“We are altering their state and collapsing their wave functions, making them vanish. I don’t know what else to tell you.” Sully stepped back, each word delivered like ammunition.

“I hear you. But how do you reconcile that view with leading the Europa mission?” I asked.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard my name coming from you in years, and it’s better for me to be close than far,” Sully said, looking back at me. “Así evito que te caigas.”

“Gracias. I have to go. Can we pick this up some other time?” I pivoted away from the heat to retreat into the safety of my schedule

“Sure. Tomorrow, or in ten days when they land?” Sully gathered some items from the table and turned away.

We had seen the world in very different ways. I didn’t think we would ever see a color and simply call it blue; it would always be cyan, navy blue, light blue, or everything in between. All things considered, Day 10 went better than I expected.

---

---

That “Oye, espera!” that saved my life has been in the back of my head all these years. The moment I turned, did they just vanish because I looked back? It was a question I might not want the answer to.

Day 9 started exactly as I expected, filled with the usual daily standups and synchronization meetings with different sections across the base. But as the hours progressed, something became very clear. Sully wasn’t alone. Followers were growing in number, and “stop looking” was quickly becoming their rallying cry.

I went to the nanodetector outpost on the far side of our facility to meet with staff. It had a direct line of sight to the Mars surface and the sky. Up here, the rust-colored dust stayed exactly where it was, indifferent to my existence. It was the only thing on this planet that didn’t change the moment I focused on it.

“Give me our latest transmission,” I said to the operator.

The operator kept looking at the console. “We’ve tried Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. They respond in whatever language we use.”

“Any alteration in their tone based on the language?”

“No, they seem calm. Polite, even. However…”

“However?” I cut in.

“However, the last message was incomprehensible, Director,” he said, looking quite confused.

“Kaposki, I presume?” I read the badge hanging on the uniform.

“Yes, Mars Lander Outpost Operator Kaposki, Director.” He straightened his posture on the wide seat, clearing his throat.

“Lovely titles. Go on.”

“The feed said, Power is not needed. It’s entirely disjointed from our pings about their trajectory and orbital calculations,” Kaposki reported.

“Well, there’s no reason to drop protocol before we even meet,” I replied. “The hard questions should happen here, face to face. Or face to... something..”

That was the last day I had any sense of control. Before closing my eyes for the night, I checked the array status one last time. The data was still compiling, billion after billion frames that would soon come into sharp focus. Any deviations in their trajectory would trigger new protocols.

A question lingered in my mind: if I had taken a traditional observation with the Hubble or Webb telescopes, would the incoming visitors have vanished from existence?

I wish I had been better prepared for what came next. I wish for many things: not to undo my mistakes, but simply to evade what followed.

---

Day 8 did not care about what I expected. From inside my chamber, I could hear the loud voices of a crowd gathering outside very early in the morning. It was not casual chatter; it was a full strike.

I gathered my things and walked outside. Arriving at the circular hub felt like crashing a private event where I was the main topic of conversation.

“It’s time to shut it down,” Sully said, appearing from the tumultuous crowd.

“Mutiny, Sullivan. Really?” The crowd behind Sully formed a direct line, a wall of support. “Nothing has ever come from burying our heads in the ground. If you are into the dark age thing, you do you,” I said, giving myself time to form a strategy.

“Destruction is not science,” Sully said.

“And mutiny is not liberty,” I replied.

“We tried the hard way and now we take the easy way,” Sully turned to address the crowd behind.

“Stop looking! Stop looking!”

The room detonated with the sound of a coordinated choir. The sudden surge of volume kept a persistent ring in my ears.

“And you call yourselves scientists?” I raised my voice to cut through the chants, but Sully didn’t give the crowd time to lose momentum, stepping directly into my personal space.

“We need all the data, not just the security clearance files. That includes your 2004 walking down the street footage. I’d say sorry, but it’s not something you can say for the damage you have caused,” before I could push back, Sully snatched the badge straight off my chest.

“They will be here in eight days. We have questions that need answers,” A desperate attempt at negotiation.

“No, they won’t.” Sully held up my badge for everyone to see. “The complete shutdown of all observations will start tomorrow. They can arrive, but nobody will be here to meet them.”

I looked at the wave of faces and couldn’t recognize anyone. It was as if they had turned their backs while still staring at me.

“If your solution is to stop looking, we’ve already ceased to exist,” I said.

“Has it ever occurred to you that we have wiped out civilizations?” Sully stepped too close, breathing a quiet whisper against my ear. “Lo siento.”

I expected them to take me to a chamber and lock me up. Instead, they cleared the room like a marching band. Sully did not just steal my badge but actually crawled inside my head, transforming a phrase into a knife.

The base was no longer under my command. I stood alone in the center of the circular hub, looking around at the gray and blue carbon fiber infrastructure. Its sterile and pristine condition felt more alien than anything I had ever encountered on Mars.

I imagined the next step would be an immediate evacuation protocol. That was probably the reason they didn’t lock me up. Where was I going to go?

I have never liked to sit during the workday. I prefer to stand to keep myself from falling asleep at the wheel. Today was different. I sat at the massive circular table to gather my thoughts and organize my next steps.

My first instinct was to gather a loyal following to fight fire with fire, but the likely scenario would be the total annihilation of the base. Either way, Sully’s mutiny achieves the goal. I could reach out to Earth, but what can they do?

Mars was currently at its farthest orbital point from Earth, 401 million kilometers away. It would take over twenty minutes for a signal to reach them, and even if they replied immediately, that was a forty-minute round-trip communication. There was the lag, and then there was this.

---

I was a visitor in my own base by Day 7. Every crew member I saw either refused to look at me or followed Sully’s command. Part of me nodded at the flawless execution of their plan. The rest of me saw the probability of this scenario and chose to ignore it.

One thing Sully did not foresee was why the visitors chose Mars as the contact point, and more importantly, how communication actually ran. The nanodetector outpost had to be my move.

I stood up. “It’s a two-star review for this resort,” I said to the empty room, “And the service is only getting worse.”

Getting inside the outpost was the easy part. It took me around ten minutes to navigate the maintenance vents and drop down into the abandoned post. The difficult part was enabling communication with our upcoming visitors.

Sully had already initiated the lockdown from the central hub, turning my credentials into useless plastic. I snapped off the main console panel, manually bridging the hardware boot.

It didn’t work. I needed central power reestablished to run both the console and the external array, and I refused to take this sitting down.

“Maybe if I create a jumper between the... No, that wouldn’t work,” I said out loud. It was an off putting habit picked up during my early years at the lab. “Think two steps ahead, but map your current coordinates first.”

“The power is centralized and we are locked in this outpost,” my words echoing back at me.

Forcing an emergency protocol was a choice, but it risked turning the mutineers into pallbearers dancing with my casket on the way out. Without power, there was no baseline way to send a message. I stood there in the dark, waiting for a better variable to present itself.

“We bypass the power entirely,” I whispered to the blank screen, my own reflection staring back at me. I closed my eyes for a second, letting the jumper wires slip from my fingers to drop like spaghetti against the floor.

I leaned over the cold, unpowered microphone and spoke straight into the dark. “Power is not needed.”

“Hello again, Director,” a voice said from behind my left shoulder

There was no acoustic reverb against the carbon fiber walls. It was a perfectly dry, flat sound, as if someone was standing close enough to feel threatened.

“I have so many questions, but I need to explain that your reservation has changed,” I said, settling back into the wide chair to gain composure. “The base no longer has the hospitality you require.”

“How, what, and when are just as similar,” they said. The voice felt like a small choir singing the words. “Every choice you have ahead leaves you in this room.”

I looked down at the unpowered console. The horizon of the Martian landscape through the glass of the outpost remained frozen as my wallpaper. I looked at that image once more, then turned around to face the darkness.

“Are you saying I have no free will?”

“You are free to do as you will. You are also responsible for your will,” they responded.

“I need you to explain that to me like I’m five,” I said into the dark. “Because these riddles aren’t working for me, Bilbo.”

I spoke to the faceless darkness as if talking to an old friend. They felt like someone I had met a lifetime ago, someone who used to catch every single one of my odd references.

“You already know. We already know.”

The outpost doors slid open with a heavy, penetrating hiss, and a wall of blinding hazel light flooded the room, instantly erasing the dark.

“Bilbo?” I asked, squinting into the glare.

“Are you going on an adventure?” a familiar voice said, cutting through the blinding light.

“Sully?”

Standing there in the hazel glare, I forced the pieces into a logical shape, trying to map all possible scenarios. One: the visitors were using Sully as a local transmitter. Two: the lockdown wasn’t Sully’s design at all. Or three, and it was my least favorite: I could not trust my senses any longer.

“It’s time to go. Evac in ten minutes,” Sully said, stepping into view and extending both arms as if to welcome me to my exile.

I dragged my feet toward the hazel light, watching as the silhouette became clearer. “They said we already knew, Sully.”

“The path ahead is for us to preserve, not to destroy,” Sully said quietly. “I know you would do the exact same thing if you could do it all over again,” escorting me out of the room and into the corridor.

“Was it you, Sully? I need to know. Is this an experiment?”

“Shutting it all down? Yeah,” Sully said.

We walked together through the lonely base. It seemed like we were the last two remaining. I still could not piece it together. I did not know whether to trust Sully or not, whether to keep the data hidden for later, or to release it to someone who would interpret it completely differently than I did.

For once, I needed that second view. “They said we already knew, Sully,” I repeated, which was not something I did often.

“We knew what?” Sully asked.

“Only that we knew already.”

“You have to give me a bit more for me to work on,” Sully said, turning to face me and halting my walk.

“Power is not needed. They said that before I entered the outpost. How did they know?” I asked, expecting Sully to dismiss it.

“Needed for what?” Sully asked, sounding more interested than I anticipated. That sudden curiosity triggered my suspicion.

“Needed to communicate. I sent and received messages completely in the dark.” I took a few steps back. “They said how, what, and when are all the same. We are free to do as we will, and we are also responsible for that will.”

I studied Sully’s expression as we walked in the corridor. “But if you believe I talked to them, why don’t we go back and see for yourself?” I suggested, trying to break free from the experiment.

I turned to look around to see if anyone was watching us. Nobody was there. I looked over my right shoulder to keep monitoring Sully.

Two sudden detonations shook me to the ground. A third followed soon after, violent enough to turn a hidden layer of dust on the ceiling into a choking red fog. I hadn’t even known those invisible particles were sleeping on the base infrastructure.

The facility turned back into the ancient dark cave it once was, leaving nothing but carbon fiber debris scattered around.

“Sully?” I called out. “Drop the act. Quit playing.”

A slow, mounting sound began at a distance. A crowd of people was moving toward me as I approached the circular hub. “Well, the pallbearer dancers are here to take me,” I said to myself.

“Director, here are the findings from the security clearance briefing. There’s an interesting relationship between photons and regular matter,” a man dressed in pristine white and blue said.

I did not remember his face from the meeting days ago.

“Is this part of the experiment, or are the evac procedures in place?” I asked, expecting some clarity.

“Evac? Is there an issue, Director?” the man asked.

“Can you point me towards Principal Director Sullivan?” I asked quietly.

“Director Sullivan is in position leading the mission in Europa, Director,” the man answered, and looked at me genuinely puzzled.

“Photons, you said?” I asked, leaning towards the device he was carrying.

“Yes, you see. The choice to observe a photon in the present retroactively dictates its behavior in the past,” the man said, pointing at some data curves on his tablet.

“Wait, what?”

“It seems, retrocausality, Direc….”I took several steps backward. I tried to rerun the events up to this point, but nothing made sense. It felt like watching a video playing at twenty times its normal speed.

“When are they landing?” I asked, looking frantically around the hub for any familiar faces.

“It’s today, Director. Ten minutes from now,” the man replied, studying me as if I should have known that. “Thank you. Good day,” I took the tablet right out of his hands, and walked away into the crowd.

I rushed into the corridor and into the outpost. My security badge on my chest, and the sliding doors opened immediately. There were no signs of breaking in and no cables on the ground. Kaposki and another operator stood up from their chairs to greet me.

I raised the stolen tablet, scanning the screen for deployment logs. The only graphic it displayed was a single photon moving backward through time, its entire trajectory rewritten by an observation made in its own future.

The countdown in my head was closing in on zero.

“How, what, and when are indistinguishable,” I said. “The arrow of time doesn’t flow the way we thought.” The operators looked at each other, then back at me, completely lost for words.

“Send a message to Europa, Kaposki.” I dropped the tablet onto their console so they could use the reverse data path outlined in the log. “Use the patterns shown here.” I pointed toward the screen.

“Write this down: I’m sorry, Sully, destruction is not science.” I turned around, the doors slid open, and I stormed out.

My footsteps echoed down the corridor as I rushed back toward the circular hub. The countdown in my head was passing through its final seconds. I knew the doors were opening.

A slow, mounting sound began at a distance. A crowd of people was moving toward me as I approached the circular hub. “Well, the pallbearers,” I repeated to myself. But the crowd wasn’t a marching band. And they weren’t looking at me.

“Director, they are here,” the man from the briefing room said. I blinked, looking at the pristine tablet in the man’s hands. The exact model I stole in a life that no longer existed.

“What’s the latest message from our visitors?”

The man looked down at the screen, his face twisting like he couldn’t read it.

“What is it?”

“It... it doesn’t make sense, Director,” the man said, the glowing hue of the tablet illuminating his face.

It read, “Oye, espera!”

Progress: 4,178 of 4,178 words

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