^{Original photo by @f3nix}

Once in a while, it's good to switch the roles and, from contest-maker, become a contest participant. Thank you @calluna for this opportunity through your contest to try my pen on such an enticing theme, "A Thermal Apocalypse".

The Sound from Outer Space

“Cum dederit dilectis suis somnum; ecce haereditas Domini, filii”

The crawler treads cut the icy white carpet, leaving behind a temporary wrinkle on the lunar face of the Antarctic. Through the window inlaid by the frozen wind, prof. Jules Birnes fleetingly observed the curious monolithic formations to his left, the last offshoots of the Transantarctic mountain range, before returning to focus on the snowcat’s command board and his inner demons.

In his conditions, he could not have said whether his ravings were just into his mind or they were saturating the vehicle’s cabin. After all, he did not care.

He would have dared that, at that moment, the sound of the diesel engine was producing a monotonous C major. No note could have clashed more with the airy andante of the “Nisi Dominus” psalm in G minor, by Vivaldi. He switched off the radio with an uncertain touch, searching mechanically for the rum flask on the passenger seat and carrying it to his mouth, tearing the cork with his teeth, avidly swallowing a long sip.

Soon he would return to the Italian-French Concordia research station, one of the most isolated outposts of mankind. Around the laboratories, what the European Space Agency liked to define “the white Mars”: more than 630 miles of snow, stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions, a no man's land with winds blowing at 200 mph and ice 15,000 feet thick.

After more than ten years and seven missions, that had become his real home. Away from the sterile academic world, from his exhausting divorce, from the damned expectations of everyone. Far away - this he hoped - from the profound and unfathomable horror that, for the last two months, had thrown the whole world into an abyss of desperation.

The sound had come from space that year, on the seventeenth of April, perceived for the first time in low orbit by the International Space Station. It had spread rapidly throughout the Earth's surface, like an immense aurora borealis, marvelous and at the same time disturbing.

In fact, the sound was so deep and poignantly beautiful that most of the human population did not care about what it represented and where it came from. As governments frantically questioned its source and built theories, whole masses had gathered in complete adoration, listening to that complex and hypnotic sound algorithm.

Then, as it had come, the sound faded and the horror began.

From that moment onward, there had been no beauty to contemplate, neither in his eyes nor in those of any other human being on the surface of a world raped by invisible claws. Everything was ending inexorably and the enchantment of the white Mars, as it flowed from the window in front of his crusty and tired eyes, was nothing but a sliver of permafrost making its way into his living flesh.

The professor clung desperately to the hope that the place, preserved by civilization, could somehow have escaped from that Armageddon. He thought of Benoit, Marco, Julie, Ricardo. His real family. Their last satellite communication dated back to the first of May, two weeks before the sound began to be heard everywhere. Even though the radio transmitter of the vehicle was refusing to collaborate, he was sure they had been waiting for him for a long time.

"In a little while, I'll see the hatch open, their faces cheerful, the laughter as they see me stumble drunk out of the snowcat". Unexpectedly, his eyes clouded with tears. "And after all, if it will have to happen ...". Prof. Birnes got frightened by his own thoughts, choking them back with terror. He wiped the two wet trails along his cheeks, already bleached by the cold, and with them he tried to clear his mind from the visions that infested it. Only the sight of the two familiar cylindrical constructions on the horizon finally succeeded in extinguishing his hushed sobbing.

The unconventional shape of the Concordia stood out against the windswept sky on top of the Dome C, a slight elevation on the ice cap. Under the balaclava, the professor's smile died quickly as his expert eyes noticed that the main door was wide open and banging abandoned to the violence of the frozen gusts. It was as if, inside his ribcage, heart, lungs, and diaphragm all collapsed together in a sudden implosion. He ran stumbling several times towards the door, an empty and dug out of darkness orbit.

Birnes climbed the sixteen metal steps of the ramp that led to the entrance, his heart pounding in his throat. His ears were buzzing as he threw himself into the corridor that led on the left and right towards the two silos. In total darkness and silence, his gaze could reach only a few meters in both directions thanks to the light of the Arctic twilight.
At first, his own heavy breathing and the whistling of his eardrums prevented him from hearing the sound, which, however, gradually found its way, bending docilely the professor's cerebral hemispheres to the alien modulations.

They called it "thermal apocalypse". People, apparently without any precise scheme, had begun to burn from within. The term "blossoming" was also coined, because of the process, harmless for those who assisted and... almost fascinating. Sooner or later everyone would have blossomed.

Birnes barely had time to look at a tall humanoid caricature from the hallway, approaching him with quick glitchy movements. As the light erupted from inside his body, his mind ran back to that music.

Cum dederit dilectis suis somnum;
ecce haereditas Domini, filii.

When he has given sleep to those he loves;
behold sons, here is the Lord's inheritance.

The hint of a smile. The flare. Nothingness.