Trembling With Fear 3/5/2023

The Throne, by Isaac Gbadebo

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The Throne

From the womb of primordial darkness formed a voidbourne megastructure of terror and speculation. The Great Throne sits on the mathematical edge of the Sun’s gravity, three-quarters built by hands unknown to us, floating in the empty abyss. Dubbed “Object 212”, the megastructure has an approximate mean radius of 42,763.4 miles – roughly the same as Jupiter’s – and its seemingly proportionate gravity transcends the boundaries of the third dimension. After the RRS Starsurfer disaster of 2344, the Commonwealth of Man declared a no-fly zone within 80,000,000 miles of it in perpetuity. 

The discovery of the Great Throne occurred after the vanishing of the North Sentinelese Islanders in 2290. After five extensive censuses, it appeared that North Sentinel Island showed no more human activity. Two years later, the Commonwealth of Man had decided to investigate the island for the first time in 301 years. The inhabitants had mysteriously disappeared, leaving their huts, weapons, food, and even clothes. An altar sat at the geographical center of the island, surrounded with food and jars of fresh blood. A throne sat atop said altar and sitting on the throne were the bones of what at first appeared to be a young child. However, after further investigation, the remains shared identical DNA and skeletal structure to Denisovan remains previously discovered across Asia, an early hominid that existed during the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. The skeleton, upon several tests, appeared to have begun decomposition over two years ago. This of course baffled the scientific world and thus, for the first time since the prosperous unification of Earth, humankind was shaken to the core.  

The throne on North Sentinel Island stood at 8.8 feet tall and had a jagged top and an almost ‘melting’ texture. It held strange carvings of circles and lines etched in with a tool so thin that scientists and anthropologists remain unsure as to how these archaic peoples could ever possess the technology to create such inscriptions. Additionally, when unobserved, the carvings on the throne would change shape and position, as proven when a series of photos of the throne taken days after one another were compared. When the throne was recorded, no such changes occurred. The head researcher of the first investigation, Dr. Gregory Parr, stated the following:  

“The lines made a whistle as air passed through it. It reached these heavenly octaves I didn’t know humans could ever hear. Even our most powerful microphones couldn’t pick them up. Just our ears. It was like the whistles sounded in our heads, in our minds. And when you stared at the sacrilegious carvings for too long, the whistles whispered to you.” 

A series of petroglyphs and writings were carved into the base of the altar. Using other nearby Andaman dialects, The Commonwealth’s Indigenous Rights council successfully translated the markings on it. This was deemed difficult, as the North Sentinelese Islanders’ self-isolation had isolated their language from even their nearest neighbors. Upon translation, we found that the inscriptions held accurate heliocentric coordinates of what we would later find out to be Object 212 itself, located beyond 2018 AG37, the farthest known trans-Neptunian object from the sun until then. This new phenomenon split the artisan and conscientious minds of Earth as to what aspect of this discovery was more terrifying. The former would ponder where the Sentinelese even went, and the latter argued over the source of their knowledge.  

What we had later come to find out was that the Throne and Object 212 itself are made from the same material and are the only two places it exists in our solar system. Dr. Parr was the first human to come into physical contact with “metal 99”, after ignoring safety protocols during the second expedition on the island:   

“I kept dreaming of it. It whispered to me. I’ve studied the North Sentinelese for the better part of my life, and I got to finally study them up close. I just wanted to touch it. I removed my safety glove to feel the intricate carvings on the strange, moving metal and bathed in the euphoria, the hypnosis. What snapped me out of it was the smell of my burning fingers. The sound was like bacon on a frying pan, but the metal was freezing cold.” 

The altar was subsequently quarantined.  

Two weeks later, Dr. Parr, who studied Anthropology for over forty years, suddenly had insights into matters of aerospace engineering and quantum physics beyond every leading scientific community of that paradigm. Cited as the father of ionic propulsion, Dr. Parr’s innovations between 2292 and 2300 ushered in the second scientific golden age after the Third World War. In his own words, he “suddenly just realized how the universe worked.” Dr. Parr’s mental health deteriorated along the way, as seen when he claimed his 2298AD Nobel prize completely naked. Constantly in and out of mental institutions, Dr Parr always demanded a notepad and pen to scribe mathematical equations that further spurred human innovation. And if no pen or parchment were given to him, he would use his own feces. His dreams were of significance also: 

“These are no dreams. I am dragged to this place against my will every time I lose consciousness. It’s more real than here, now, this plane of existence is my dream. When I slumber, I spend eons in this limbo, building some great white monolith as the stars die above me. Something dwells there, beyond my five senses. Something ushers me to climb up the infinite stairs of starlit ivory, agonizing my poor old bones to drag identical cube blocks as white as light. I can only think, cry, and lament. I fear closing my eyes.” 

“There is another dream. I am running through infinite corridors with a ceiling shrouded in darkness. In this place, there is one other, that lurks behind every corner. The other searches for me, and I hear the malice in its footsteps. I hug the walls and cower in the shadows as it marches this place of disorientation in search of me. One of these days, one of these dreams, it will find me. In fact, it already has. It has found and devoured me an infinite number of times, my physical body just hasn’t caught up with the happenings beyond time-space. Soon, it will. Not just with me, but with all living things.”

Anesthesia and opioids were constantly administered to him by force as he would refuse to sleep. Despite his madness, Dr. Parr pushed the boundaries of humankind beyond the asteroid belt and in 2300, humans set foot on Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, for the first time. During the party held in honor of Dr. Parr that evening, he completely vanished, last seen entering his bathroom. The door remained locked from the inside and there was no sign of forced entry or exit. He would never be seen again until his remains were found on Object 212, during the Starsurfer disaster.

As more research concluded on the island, the human population spiraled into chaos. Some questioned the fabric of the Earth’s nation’s prosperous unification as the discovery of Object 212 rebirthed tribalism last seen before the Third World War. Cults sprang up in various fashions, worshipping the throne and condemning it. Humankind hung at the brink of decadent madness, sharing similar dreams of infinite oceans and endless corridors. Moreover, disappearances and unexplained happenings in seemingly remote parts of the world further turned the populace against itself. To reunite the world, in 2330, the high council of Earth voted to begin building spacecrafts to reach the heliocentric coordinates left to us by the North Sentinelese. What spurred them was the idea that if they could plant their foot on it, it would no longer hold such power over mankind.  A new space race occurred that successfully brought humankind together again, and on the 14th of January 2340, the RRS Starsurfer departed from Triton’s launch base towards the edges of the solar system, in search of a sick horror dwelling in a blackened ocean of nothingness. 

“Beneath the silent hum of empty space, I can hear the screams that follow the cosmic abominations interloping in our reality. We should have stayed on our little rock.” – The final message relayed by Admiral Arthur Lee from the RRS Starsurfer, (2344).