by F P Adriani
There was a time when my successes on the Demeter used to be enough for me, but now, I found myself wanting to see how far I could push myself beyond the Demeter.
*
The next day’s “morning” lecture with Kostas was about the worksuits more than about anything else. I learned 1) how to medicate myself in an emergency (push the medical ridge on either shoulder and keep pushing till I felt a vibrational response in the correct part of my anatomy, then push again to confirm to medicate); 2) how to transport to different destinations (push the red button on either sleeve and push again to jump right into transporting away from where you are; or use the readout; or listen to the destination options and choose one, because these suits could talk if you wanted them to; the full workers—their suits could link with their minds); 3) how to use the suit’s communicator and link up with the Monument or even Rintu if necessary (by pushing certain combinations of the three buttons on the chest of the suit); 4) how to set up and turn on the comprehensive sleeve-readout….
The readout’s hologram-like screen was suspended above either sleeve; a readout had to be preprogrammed to the individual wearing the suit, but certain settings allowed you to coordinate with other worksuits and share your readout fields.
As soon as I started playing with my suit controls, I realized that understanding the readout was a very difficult thing to do: some of the data also contained symbols the Keepers used—I recognized the ones for temperature, velocity, omnivelocity, force, ship, and a few others. But, memorizing everything that I might need to know would indeed take time, and lots of it. The meanings of the readout data weren’t necessarily so obvious once you were even aware of what the symbols meant; some readout data just explained what the suits were doing as they were working, which the suit-wearer didn’t necessarily need to know, but I and some of the others in my crew—we didn’t like not having control over whether a mechanism we were using was working properly, especially if it was on our bodies….
“Looking at this is frustrating,” Steve said when we were still sitting inside the meeting room and he had made his readout publicly visible. All of us trainees had our readouts visible.
Devin was in the room with us today, and now he said to Steve, “Explain what you find frustrating.”
Steve glanced up at him. “Well, I’m assuming you’ve been doing this stuff a long time—how long?”
Devin’s dark cheeks seemed to flatten, and his eyes rose up as if he now had to access something in his mind from long ago. “I’m not sure of the exact number—but I’ve been here for decades. I came to Rintu about ten years after Kostas. Kostas trained me, and when she was quite new to this herself. She is the most expert of all of us workers.”
There was a slight smile on Kostas’ face—and maybe a little flush of pride, too—as Devin continued speaking: “I can’t say I ever felt ‘frustrated’ with Keeper mechanisms or Keeper science. But maybe that’s because I initially chose to do it. You have basically been seconded into this. Maybe it would help if you forgot your reason for being here and simply remembered that you are here now.”
“You people often say that,” Steve said, “but I’m finding using your mechanisms isn’t that intuitive—they don’t seem like they’re very compatible with human ones. Even the readout—it’s mostly in English for us, but the Keeper symbols seem to be randomly inserted every ten or so words—”
“Ah,” Devin said fast, “you are looking at the suit’s communication stream for its functions. That does contain extraneous ‘interruptions’ of Keeper signals—you will sometimes pick those up, depending on where you are. You need to remember to turn that setting off.”
Steve flushed. “Geez. What a dumb mistake….”
“No—there is no dumb here, and I admit that I did not always see that about you and the rest of the Demeter crew,” Devin said, his mouth ending on a hard slant. He glanced around the room at us. “On Rintu, I felt that you were being ignorant through stubbornness, but now I see that my ignorance of your feelings was the bigger problem.
“I’ve been spending time with Geena and the others in the kitchen, and their efforts to help the Keepers have been most satisfactory—today, many of them from the lounge have resumed working on the cube.”
“I’m glad to hear it!” I said now.
Beside me, Gary smiled at Devin. Geena, however, was with the other group of my crew; we’d been split into two groups this time, and now I felt sorry that Geena wasn’t here to hear Devin’s compliment.
“Does this mean we’ll be leaving the anomaly soon?” Gary asked Devin now. “I’m kind of anxious about, well, testing out using this ship. Will we see the bridge today?”
“Yes,” Kostas said, her eyes on Gary. “But, you’re not ready to touch much. We will go there so you can get a feel for the area. We can go now, if you all wish.”
“Actually,” Steve said, “I’d rather get another look at the engine area. We barely got to do that yesterday.”
“As you wish,” Kostas said, looking over at me now and waiting for my reply.
“Yeah—that’s fine with me,” I said finally. “We’ll split up. Who wants to go with me to the bridge?”
*
Most of my crew from both groups went off with Devin, and my usual bridge companions plus May wound up coming with me and Kostas.
Going on the overall direction we moved in now, the Monument’s long axis seemed to be perpendicular to the hangar containing the Demeter. But I couldn’t be sure of the Monument’s layout: first we walked along it in a mostly straight line; then we entered a tube-like, long car. The walls of the car were a dark, transparent material. There were rows of seats inside, and once I’d sat down and the car got going, I began feeling a little motion sickness; the car seemed to be whipping through the ship in various directions and repeatedly making quite-sharp turns.
“What’s going on?” Chen asked. “My stomach isn’t exactly liking this.”
“The bridge,” Kostas said, “is in a more protected area of the ship—”
“So that means moving through more fields and dimensional shifts,” I said.
And Kostas replied, “I didn’t have to explain this time, and that’s very good.”
*
Kostas might not have had to explain that traveling detail, but when we reached the bridge, I realized that if someone didn’t explain that, my crew and I would never understand it.
The enormous bridge area was more long than wide, and it was mostly composed of clear, room-like compartments stacked on top of each other all the way down the bridge’s sides; in many of the compartments, there was a lone Keeper working at the consoles.
Kostas said that there was a forward bridge area, way at the end of the stacks, and when we finally reached it, my eyes slowly roamed over the various table-sized devices, computers, and other mechanisms that banked both sides of the space. The side walls above the equipment were dark, and at the front end of the bridge, there was an enormous viewer screen, similar to the one on the Demeter’s bridge. Most of the Monument’s devices here were dark, with lots of bright lights and arc-ing Keeper symbols sprawling across the interfaces. I noticed small placards stuck onto some of the consoles on the left side of the bridge.
I pointed at one card. “That says ‘Auxiliary Disassociating Engine’—you need that sign?”
Kostas’ head purposefully whipped left, then right, then left again. “No. You do. The forward bridge is symmetrical: both sides can be used to do the same tasks. It is one of our many back-up systems.
“But during your training, you will only use the equipment on the left side. From on the right side, we will keep an eye on—and control when necessary—what you’re doing.”
Gary stepped forward from beside me, to get a closer look at one of the labeled consoles. “Kostas, don’t you think we would have been better off looking at one of those mini-bridges you’ve got up there—I’m assuming that’s what they are.”
Kostas now expl
ained that there was a lot of coordinating going on, of the spatial dimensions of the ship’s structure, of outside the ship, of signals to and from Rintu and other places where Keepers were….
Each mini-bridge usually had separate functions. “The Monument can be split into four ships if necessary,” Kostas said. “Though we’ve never had a need to do that. When we work on important tasks, each of the four ships usually represents a single task, as is the case now, with the cube.”
I ran a hand over the smooth, charcoal-gray, stone-like edge of a console on my left. “What is this stone material? I keep seeing it all over the ship. It was in the Rintu mountain, too.”
Kostas turned to me. “It’s a composite of stone and stellar material.”
“Shit,” I said, whipping my hand away.
There was a laugh behind me—Babs. “It hasn’t jolted you yet, Lydia, so what are the odds?”
“The odds are zero, actually,” Kostas said, her head briefly turning Babs’ way. “The raw, stellar material has been altered. It’s electromagnetically inert to our bodies, but it’s also very light and very strong.”
“What about that?” Gary asked, pointing at the frame of the front rectangular viewscreen. There were no images visible on it now, but the frame literally glowed red and silver, in tiny swirling patterns; they seemed to have been scratched into the brilliant surface.
Gary frowned now. “That looks familiar to me—” he snapped his fingers fast “—oh, I know: there was something on Dia—”
“Humans should not be interacting with anything to do with that species,” Kostas said. “Even the Keepers avoid them. They are much too powerful.”
Gary turned his frown onto Kostas. “Well, thanks for the info, but it’s a little too late because that place has already been settled by people. But if you’re so wary of those powerful beings, how do you have material from them?”
“They tend to abandon their latest inventions before they go into their lengthy hibernation periods. We only take what they’d never come looking for again. We store most of it in our archives, but their creations are very useful, so we make use of them in our buildings when we can.”
Gary nodded slowly, then began staring at something else. “So, where are the controls for thrusting, for landing, for—well, just about everything!” His brown eyes suddenly lit up into a storm of curiosity.
And now my crew and I spent even more time listening to and talking with Kostas. She encouraged us to use our hands then, to get a feel for how the levers and buttons on the bridge worked, but Kostas said they weren’t connected to any power at the moment. “We can’t afford to accidentally leave the area where the cube is.”
“How far away is it?” I asked fast. “Though I guess it’s not that far—it shook the ship that day.”
Kostas’ expression suddenly softened, and into a sad, deflated one, which made me feel sorry I’d mentioned that incident….
Quickly now, she moved to a small, triangular, green extension on a table on the right, her fingers finally punching very flat buttons there. I heard a wispy sliding sound, then saw the front viewscreen open to reveal an image of the cube, which looked much different now—as in, it was no longer a cube. It looked more like a long, pale candy-bar floating in the murky anomaly space.
“We have finished removing 86% of the cube,” Kostas said. “We should be done in less than two Earth-days.”
“And then what?” Shirley asked from behind me.
I glanced at her, but her wide eyes were on Kostas, who now replied: “And then you train for real.”
*
“Am I the only one who’s nervous about her ‘for real’?” Shirley asked as we walked beneath the last suspended bridge compartment and then completely out of the bridge area.
Before on the forward bridge, Kostas had to suddenly transport-leave, so she had turned on lit-up wall-markers to guide me and my crew back to the tube-car and then back to that same kitchen area we knew.
My eyes followed the red marker-arcs as we moved through the Monument’s hallways, some of which were quite dark; others of which looked more like rooms we had to walk across, empty rooms….The ship was really quite empty—or maybe it was simply empty-looking to us, when there was actually a lot there. But, to our human brains, that lack of decoration made the ship seem an eerie place. I wouldn’t want to be running around in it by myself….
I finally said to Shirley, “We’re all feeling a certain lack of confidence here.”
“I don’t feel that way when I’m around Kostas,” Babs said, and when I looked at her over my shoulder, she was smiling to herself.
Chen asked now, “How do you think the others are doing—with the engines? And where are they doing it?”
May was walking beside him, her head and gaze bobbing at the walls as we moved. “Didn’t Kostas say it was in an entirely different part of the ship than the bridge?”
“Yeah,” Gary said. “And I think I remember seeing the Keeper engine symbol on one of the layout maps.” He pulled off his workbook from two of his suit-tabs. The others had their workbooks attached to their suits too, but I had mine hanging off my captain’s belt….
My eyes began following the wall symbol-directions again, but then I whipped my eyes away when Gary suddenly said, “Here—look. That’s the symbol.”
He pointed at a curving line similar to an S on his workbook’s screen, but the curve had a horizontal T on the bottom; the symbol was centered on top of a large, vacant-looking area in the ship’s map-schematic. “Maybe we can figure out how to get there,” he said. “It looks like it’s not far from the bridge area in the horizontal direction, but it’s three levels up.”
I felt dubious. “Gary, we don’t know where the hell we’re going as it is.”
“But aren’t we essentially explorers now?” He lifted his workbook a little. “We’ve been reading our training material every free moment we get. I think we should try out what we learned in the classes and see if we can read the schematic ourselves. What could really happen? The workers are always up our asses anyway, taking care of us, a.k.a. controlling us.”
The rest of my crew couldn’t help laughing at that a little dryly. And neither could I.
*
A few minutes later, we all stepped off the path Kostas and her markers had laid out for us, and, as far as we could tell from our workbooks and our sleeve readouts, there was one of those tube-car thingies around a bend in the hall we were slowly moving through. The tube-car was supposed to provide vertical transportation, but I was still unsure…and I should have listened to my unsureness, because when we finally turned around the bend, we didn’t find ourselves in anything that looked like a tube-car.
We now stood on a vast plain; it would have seemed like an outdoor plain, had we been outdoors. But we were indoors. And yet, there didn’t seem to be any walls in any direction.
“O…kay,” I said. “Who expected this? I certainly didn’t.” I felt a movement in front of us—like a chilly wind, but it was moving slowly, floating around and between us, and finally making the back of my neck tingle.
“Uh, what’s that—what’s going on?” Shirley asked, and I could hear her feet shuffling, as if she were whirling around. But before I could turn to look at her, I heard another noise—a great lengthy squeeaaaal….
I shoved my palms against my ears, and that did nothing to quell the insane, mechanical squealing noise. My crew were doing the same ear-covering—and also shouting now. We tried running back into the hall, but though the squealing began dying, we didn’t wind up in that hall. We wound up in a stairwell.
We stood on the stairwell’s platform, staring at each other through wide eyes. There was nowhere else to go but up or down.
“Now what?” May asked, grabbing onto Chen’s arm, his not-normal arm actually, which made me remember that I wanted to ask him if his suit-sleeve and readout were working the same as the rest of ours….
This wasn’t the right moment. We were s
tuck on stairs, to who knew where.
I stared upward, but it was too dark to see what was above us—or below us, when I looked down now. Beside me, Gary’s hands were jerking at his workbook controls as he searched for some answers about our location. When I turned my head again, I noticed a pretty, circular symbol had been carved into the vertical rise of each step.
“Well,” I finally said on a frown, “we intended to go up for the engines, so I guess up it is. Put your workbook away, Gary. It’s clear that we don’t know where the fuck we are because we don’t know how to read the ship’s layout yet.”
Gary sighed hard as he attached his workbook back onto his suit.
I took the lead and the six of us climbed the stairs…and climbed and climbed. When would they end? I was feeling thankful that I had some crackers in my belt. I was feeling not thankful that my current predicament was reminding me of being stuck somewhere else….
An instant later, my crew and I were no longer stuck: the stairs ended, and we stepped into a long bright room with large white boxes sticking out of the side walls. I could see to the room’s other end, but it only seemed to lead to another room like this one.
“Okay,” I said, “we had something to prove, and we didn’t prove it. We still don’t know what we’re doing. Now we’re lost and that’s it. It’s time to transport out of here.”
I tried to push one of my red transporter buttons, but Shirley said in a confused voice, “Captain Lydia—you forgot that the workers haven’t activated our transporters yet.”
My face flushed. “Shit—you’re right. Well, then we’ll just contact the others.” I tried using my belt to reach my other crew—who now had Demeter communicator-buttons attached to their suits somewhere—but I had no luck contacting my crew. Then more no luck when the six of us in that odd bright room tried using our worksuit communicators to contact someone—anyone.