Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth Read Online Free Page A

a real thing, allowing starlight to bend around bodies of significant-enough mass—and it was real, thank you—then shouldn’t it also be possible to somehow focus through a ‘web’ or ‘network’ or ‘crystalline arrangement’ of stellar bodies, such that you were looking down the ‘corridor’ of their combined gravity, a sweet spot maybe just a few centimeters wide but infinitely deep, where the combined, equalized ‘pull’ would essentially be opening up a hole in space, maybe even time? What could you see then?
    That was how he’d ended his proposal: What could we see then?
    The headlines would be along the lines of “Mankind Looks for God,” and have Billy’s picture under it somewhere, smiling just mischievously enough to usher in another age, where the scientists could again be celebrities.
    His project didn’t even make the first cut, though, and no new age dawned, or took him for its darling, its media child. As his director said, Billy’d made the cardinal mistake: proposed a project which required no labwork, allowed no empirical results. Instead, all he needed was a pencil, some paper, and a brain. The right brain, granted, but still—the board didn’t think their money would be best spent on a thought-experiment, one that could only ever be proven over the course of a million years, so, the next season, Billy and a colleague had a new, only slightly revolutionary proposal to submit, and he filed his Spatial Tunneling Debacle (as his director called it) into the bottom drawer, waited for the math to come.
    Instead of the math, though, what Billy got that balmy night in June was proof, the kind that can be written to a digital image file.
    And, because he was still in diagnostic mode, what he was seeing was beyond question, was untampered with, and, even better, whatever magical conduit of stars had lined up around his coordinates, to focus his series of lenses some exponential amount farther away than humans had ever even dreamed, they were each being recorded as well. So this would be a repeatable thing. If not physically, then at least in simulation. Let other people do the math, now; Billy Hanson already had the pictures .
    It was all so overpowering that he didn’t even bother to wipe the tear from his right cheek. He wasn’t aware of it, really. Like a child, he was just smiling with wonder, leaning in as if to touch the screen.
    On some as-yet unnamed planet an untold numbers of light-years away, a form of life wholly alien to him was sitting at what was probably a table, in what might be just another backyard.
    As near as Billy could tell, this ‘alien’ was just staring straight ahead. For all Billy knew, though, this—this whatever-it-was, it was telepathically communing with its species, or gestating a litter of young, or turning to stone like it did every third year when the solar flares came, or using some of its complicated neck apparatus to filter the methane from its air, or whatever it breathed, if it even breathed.
    It wasn’t quite bipedal either, Billy didn’t think, but did seem to be bilateral. From where Billy was looking, anyway.
    Which is the exact point, not counting that first fish flopping up into the dirty sunlight, when humanity started to wink out of existence.
    Billy Hanson’s fingers fell to the keyboard as they had a hundred other nights, to adjust the second lens, which needed regrinding, really, not just another gear pulling on it, and his gravity peephole focused down across the universe, tight enough that, for an instant, the skin or covering of his subject’s forelimb blurred, then snapped back in fine detail.
    Billy nodded, backed off a hair— had anybody ever done this, even? was he, in addition to testing the limits of physics, pioneering exobiology as well? —and when the image finally settled again he nodded to himself, content, and only stopped when the alien cocked its head over the slightest bit, in a way that made Billy feel suddenly