THE TICKET

Chapter 1

Morning light seeped through the heavy curtains in bright crimson streaks. Kane woke earlier than usual, a rare thing for him, and lay still, waiting for the alarm to sound, too drained of energy and will to glance at the clock on the shelf.

«Another day of the grind… another march to the gallows», he muttered inwardly, burying himself deeper into the warmth of his blanket.

Work gave him nothing – no joy, no hope for the future. In truth, there was no future in it at all. Still, these days even a job like his counted as a stroke of luck, and people clung to such scraps fiercely, enduring the exploitation, the meager pay, and the company of colleagues who barely knew which way was up.

Still, Kane knew he had to get up, weave his way through the endless stacks of boxes piled with books on the floor, and fire up his laptop. Lately, every spare moment went into scouring the news, searching for any scrap of information about recent events.

It had been about three months since the unthinkable finally happened – the very thing people had long speculated about, written stories on, and argued over in countless fields. For generations, it lingered as little more than a stubborn dream, yet now it was reality: an alien intelligence from another corner of the galaxy had reached out to humanity. The first official contact took place in the Gobi Desert, where the newly formed United Government of Earth styled, in the fashion of the age, as the Alliance, met with them, its delegates drawn from the world’s leading nations. The aliens turned out to be humanoid too, bearing a striking resemblance to humans, though far larger – over two meters tall, broad-shouldered, with luminous golden eyes and skin the shade of ivory. Their hair looked like dreadlocks, and both their hands and feet bore six fingers. They breathed oxygen, just like humans, but their diet was mostly plant-based.

They might have looked friendly enough, but could they really be trusted? Humanity had always feared the unknown, and now, faced with a more advanced and powerful race, many began to wonder if we stood to lose far more than we could ever gain. That, at least, was the prevailing sentiment across forums and chatrooms, where every scrap of news or rumor was seized upon like a swarm of bees drawn to spring blossoms.

Kane, however, who, according to friends and coworkers, suffered from an incurable strain of optimism and always believed in the best: in luck, in sudden windfalls, or in some fantastic breakthrough, was nothing short of delighted to discover that we were not alone in the universe. That «those very aliens» were real. And naturally, what troubled him most were their intentions.

Yet even though considerable time had passed since first contact – an eternity for people who had been expecting sweeping changes any day, nothing of note had really happened. Life continued in its usual steady rhythm, and the Alliance leaders remained silent, offering no official statements. People seemed more reflective now, less restless, and many began to stop putting off things they had long wanted to do but, for one reason or another, never managed before.

Chapter 2

It was golden autumn, the season Kane longed for each year and truly cherished. The vivid blaze of falling leaves, the crystalline turquoise of the sky, and that peculiar sadness belonging only to this time of year somehow filled him with both solemn joy and a quiet hope that everything would turn out well. Yet an inner voice, its steady rhythm constantly broken by uneasy thoughts, kept whispering: how could this happen, and by what kind of miracle?

«Maybe it was on days like these that old Dürer conceived his enigmatic Melancholia. Or perhaps someone had simply gotten on his nerves, and he grabbed a sheet of copper and a hammer on a whim.» Such musings circled in Kane’s mind as he finished yet another lap around the stadium after a workday that felt endless, a day he tried to banish from memory. He wasn’t especially close to the world of art, but from his university literature course he remembered that particular figure. who, as far as he recalled, had been more of a painter than anything else.

For someone just past thirty, he was in fairly good physical shape and looked much younger than his age. Lately, he had been running more for a change of activity and also to put his thoughts in order after workdays. He had long noticed that running cleared his mind – probably simply because, when you run, everything inside your head gets shaken up, and the heavy thoughts, constructed and raised to a certain degree, just fall apart into pieces. Those pieces are almost impossible to put back together properly without a good rest and sleep, which already changes a lot at its core.

With a light step, Kane walked out of the locker room. After workouts like these, he always felt much better and calmer than before, as if he had finally done something truly worthwhile that day. In the dimly lit corridor, a watchman sat at a small table. He was an old man of about seventy. His clear gray-blue eyes held a thoughtful yet mischievous look and seemed incapable of concealing a single dark thought. A kind smile rested on his clean-shaven, sunburned face. It was his shift today, and the whole corridor smelled of freshly brewed strong tea with ginger and cinnamon. Kane privately called him the «intellectual granddad.» His bald head, a walking two-legged exam, had long been a real scarecrow to the local athletes, which was no surprise. Talking with him was like taking a test of wit: the old man could as easily wield a mop in his narrow passageway as recite lines from literary classics, toss out quotes from films of different years, and season it all with heroic couplets from all sorts of chivalric poems. And why not? Were athletes not knights as well? Most of the athletes, however, ended up flustered and tongue-tied, hurrying past him with nothing more than a respectful «hello» and «goodbye.»

The old man sat on a worn, hard chair, wrapped in a checkered wool blanket, hunched over as he watched the news on a small television perched on a little stand by the wall.

«Pour yourself some tea, son», he said warmly, taking the key to the locker room and sliding a fairly large thermos and a clean glass toward him. Kane usually had a bar of milk chocolate or a pack of sweet biscuits with him for just such occasions. He always enjoyed these short post-workout chats, remembering his own grandfather, a great lover of chocolate, whose company and conversations he still missed dearly, even after many years.

The news spoke of mysterious alien activity in Antarctica and at the North Pole. Wasn’t it astonishing? In just a few short weeks, temperatures at both poles had dropped by ten degrees – almost like before the troubles with global warming, and the massive ozone holes in those regions had nearly vanished, which was nothing short of incredible.

«Well, maybe the aliens will finally set things in order», the old man said, taking a long sip of tea. «Since we either can’t or simply don’t want to do it ourselves.»

«If only we could understand what they really want, and who they actually are…» Kane murmured thoughtfully, taking a sip from his glass and breathing in the fragrant aroma of the drink. «Because if they can change the climate so easily… what else are they capable of? How far do their powers reach? What other wonders might they be able to perform?»

It was no surprise that the local military almost immediately stopped rattling their weapons and flying back and forth over the desert. Especially after someone in Earth’s military government decided to give the bewildered aliens a live demonstration of human technology. The aliens had arrived at their first meeting in the desert on a single small ship, only to be surrounded by three layers of armored vehicles on the ground and a swarm of planes and helicopters overhead. In response, they simply activated some kind of force field, lifted everything around them into the air, turned it upside down, and then carefully set it all back on the ground, including the countless aircraft. After that, even the most aggressive hardliners realized that we were no match for them, and that the aliens surpassed us as much as we surpass the people of the Stone Age.

«I wonder what we could possibly give them in return», the old man said, half-questioningly, as he took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. «Or rather – what is it that they themselves might want to take? Are we talking about so-called cooperation? Or friendship? Or will it all, sooner or later, come down to intervention and conquest?»

«Well, if they wanted to take everything over, they probably would have done it already», Kane replied, warming his hands on the hot glass and blowing on the tea the old man had just poured. «I don’t think things can get much worse», he added uncertainly. Like many others, Kane didn’t really understand what would come next. And although he truly was an optimist, and if not a pure believer in nothing but the good, then at least someone who hoped for it instinctively, he was often afraid to admit it even to himself, since reality had a way of putting everything in its place, regardless of hopes or dreams.

The old man, who had seen much in life, shook his head with a skeptical smile. «Poetry and optimism – that’s your lot, the young. For us, only dry and colorless facts remain», he said, scrunching up his nose so comically that his glasses jumped up onto his forehead.

Kane laughed. «I think you underestimate the grain of rationality on which the true essence of optimism mostly rests! Although, against the backdrop of our local ways, your so-called dry and colorless facts might themselves seem like sheer euphoria.»

He thanked the old man for his hospitality, who in turn was glad to spend an hour in conversation, then stepped outside and got into his car. The night was warm and almost windless, and Kane still felt the lingering heat from his run, mixed with the warmth of the hot ginger tea. He drove home along the lake, where the mirror-like surface reflected an unusually large yellow moon and a clear starry sky without a single cloud all the way to the horizon.

Suddenly the sky flared with a brilliant glow, and a giant pillar of light struck the lake at tremendous speed and with terrifying force. The powerful wave unleashed by that unknown energy easily overturned Kane’s car, rolling it several times in the torrent before lifting it dozens of meters into the air, hurling it onto the roadside, and then retreating back into the lake. Kane instinctively tried to unfasten his seatbelt and get out, but his legs were pinned so tightly he could not even move them. A sharp pain pierced his chest, his head spun violently, and then he lost consciousness.