Ice Moon 1 The Enceladus Mission

by Brandon Q Morris

  “What happened?”

  “We lost the laser,” Francesca said.

  “What did you say?” Frantically, Martin looked around. “Everything looks normal. Neumaier to commander, come in.”

  The loudspeakers remained silent.

  The pilot explained, “I checked everything. Nothing is going out from here. But what is worse, nothing is coming in.”

  “But everything looks so ...” Martin said.

  “I just turned off the searchlights when you came in. So we are barely using any energy right now,” Francesca said in a low voice. He saw that she clenched her fist and put it in her pocket.

  “Maybe it’s just that the concentrator is out of alignment? Jiaying and Hayato are probably working on it already.”

  “Then we should at least be able to create a connection to them, because the signal is being fed in separately. Yet everything is dead…” Her last word was deliberately slow and harsh.

  Martin thought of Jiaying. How will she react to the fact that any contact with Valkyrie is lost?

  He asked, “Do you have an idea...”

  Francesca stood in front of Martin and placed her right hand on his shoulder.

  “Martin, you know I did not want to be here,” she said insistently. “I really hope this is not the end. I hope you can get us out of here. You know the technology of Valkyrie. I am just the pilot.”

  I would prefer to hear some comforting news, but she is right. Back then, when they voted, he had not been on her side. He wanted to continue the mission. If one of them was responsible for the situation they were in now, he was the one. Martin turned around and started working on the computer.

  “Okay, Francesca, I checked the signal transit time. We have about six kilometers of cable hanging from the stern. Three are missing.”

  “The cable must have some problem inside the ice layer. Maybe it’s a kink?”

  “That’s impossible,” Martin replied. “It’s frozen solid in the ice. It would take a quake to bend it. But there are no tectonic forces here.”

  Francesca sat down on her chair, placed her arms on the console, and put her head on them.

  “And now what?”

  Martin could not answer that question. At least not yet. First I have to check all options on the computer. “Really, Francesca, we’ll manage it, you’ll see.”

  She heard him, but she didn’t answer. Not a single muscle moved in her face. He had never seen the pilot act like this. He cast his eyes downward and looked at his display. I will find a way out. If not... he was feeling hot and cold at the same time. I have to.

  “We can forget about the direct way back. The battery would never be enough for drilling. But you know that better than I do.” Francesca now sat in front of her display, her hands in her lap. The light in the cockpit was dim. They were saving electrical energy whenever possible.

  “We just have to find a different way.” Martin tried to express confidence. But I don’t sound very convincing, he himself noticed.

  “Or we stay down here, explore the ocean as much as we can, and then we die. If we are frugal, we have eight or at most nine days before we run out of energy,” Francesca said grimly.

  “We should be able to do something with the battery. Can we somehow send signals?” he asked.

  “Maybe. If we find the end of the cable, we could use it to send signals. But even if we get our fingers on it, could we patch it?” Francesca looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  “A 5 MW cable? We could never fix it with on-board tools so that it would reach its full capacity, and we need that capacity. Unfortunately, it won’t be enough just to wrap duct tape around it.”

  “So is it even worth looking for the cable?” she asked.

  Martin shrugged his shoulders. “Good question. At least we could send a farewell message.”

  Then silence, Martin was thinking.

  Finally, he asked, “Approximately how long would it take us to reach the Tiger Stripes, Francesca?”

  “Probably two or three days.”

  “And if we go fast?”

  “Then we get there earlier, but also die faster. The battery...”

  Martin interrupted her, “Sure, we cannot outrun death.”

  He remembered a book written long ago. He had found this ‘utopian novel,’ as they used to call it, on his great-grandfather’s bookshelf, A Journey to the Center of the Earth.

  “Do you know Jules Verne?” he asked.

  “I am sorry, never heard of him. Who was he?”

  “A French author, from the 19th century.”

  “So he’s been dead a long time,” Francesca said. “How could he help us get out of here?”

  Martin explained, “In one of his books, a team of scientists enters a volcano. They discover a subterranean world, just like we did.”

  Francesca looked at Martin in exasperation.

  “Do you know how they finally leave the volcano?” he asked. “They go through a vent.” Martin answered his own question.

  “Really? That’s rather unrealistic,” the pilot said. “You should know that, after taking all those courses in geology.”

  “Yes, but we have a kind of cryovolcanism here. The Tiger Stripes connect the ocean with the surface. There must be a passage somewhere, otherwise ELF could not have discovered signs of life,” he said.

  “How do you know how wide the passage is?” Francesca’s expression brightened a bit, but she was still not convinced.

  “You’ve seen the root of one of the stripes. I don’t know anything more, although with smaller obstacles we could still use the drill jets. In the end, it could only be ice that’s in our way,” Martin said.

  “And what do we do once we are on the surface? The lander can’t pick us up. We were supposed to come out in its immediate vicinity.”

  “I guess then we have to walk,” he said.

  “Almost 55 kilometers across a terrain full of crevasses, craters, and canyons? How long do you think that would take?” Francesca shook her head in dismay.

  “I don’t think we can cover more than three kilometers per hour. The suits provide air for six hours, less in case of physical exertion. So we have to come up with an idea.”

  “Then get started on having ideas.” Francesca laughed anxiously. Martin did not dare to get his hopes up, but for the sake of the pilot he ventured a smile.

  Age of Questions, Square

  There is:

  The I.

  The not-I.

  The all.

  The thoughts.

  The dreams.

  The joy.

  There no longer is:

  The umbilical cord.

  The pains.

  There grows:

  The curiosity.

  A column in the Forest of Columns.

  A wave in the all.

  A thought in the ice.

  There will be:

  The...

  This...

  December 21, 2046, Valkyrie

  Martin woke up, but he knew he was dreaming. Somebody or something had taken him by the hand, invitingly, and Martin felt an irrepressible curiosity toward life. Am I dreaming of myself as a little kid? He did not recognize himself. When he looked in a mirror, he saw nothing, and there were many mirrors on the walls. He walked through a narrow corridor. The mirrors were facing each other so their images created an infinite sequence. The invisible thing that accompanied him stopped now. Martin felt this through his hand. He turned around. The mirror in front of him looked like an entrance. Just do it, he thought, and stepped through. He looked back, but there was nothing there. Everything lay in front of him. The invisible thing danced around him. How do I know this? He had no idea.

  They went on, because the invisible thing wanted to show him something. He stepped through one mirror after the other, and each time the world behind him dissolved. It seemed to him their path took eons and they never would reach its end. Suddenly he stood in the center, which he recognized by the fact t
hat there was a column here. What should I do with it? His question remained unanswered, since he was alone once more. Two words stuck in his mind, I and not-I.

  He awoke drenched in sweat. Martin pinched himself to make sure he was awake. They had wondered last night whether or not there was another way back, though the path through the Tiger Stripes seemed to be the only one—unsafe as it was. Afterward, Martin had a hard time falling asleep. The columns had kept him awake. It is impossible that they came into being naturally. He wondered, Who built them, and when? Was Enceladus ever visited by an unknown intelligence? The sample he had taken was an incredible 1.6 billion years old. I should have picked up material from the area closer to the where I entered, he regretfully concluded. The columns are definitely in various stages of the aging process. However, without knowing how they actually came into existence, one cannot estimate how far apart they were created, whether the outermost ones are quite recent—and that, just maybe, their builders are somewhere nearby.

  And what do the symbols mean? Martin could not remember the details, but there were the recordings taken by his helmet camera, and the resolution should be sufficient to digitalize the contents so Watson could analyze them. Learning and classifying things was the favorite activity of the AI. Creating a translation classifier for an unknown language should be a matter of hours using sufficiently capable hardware, Martin thought. Unfortunately, he had no access to the computer on the mothership. The on-board computers here were sufficient as a runtime environment for Watson and Siri, but they could not handle a learning mode. One step after the other, he thought. First, he had to let Watson analyze the video material.

  “Search camera recordings from yesterday’s EVA for exotic symbols,” Martin ordered.

  “Confirmed. Definitely identified symbols: 1,434,266. Symbols identified with less than 95% certainty: 340,778,” the AI reported.

  “Classify definitely identified symbols.”

  “Confirmed. Analysis will be finished in t plus 144 hours.”

  “Cancel.”

  That will take too long, Martin assumed. He had to set priorities, as a complete structural and semantic analysis would be impossible under these circumstances. And he needed additional computer capacity. He explained the problem to Francesca. At first, the pilot had given him a quizzical look, but he also needed her for solving the problem.

  “I understand,” she said, “but where are you going to get the additional hardware? I’m afraid Amazon does not make deliveries here—yet.”

  “We have a lot of computing power in this vehicle,” he said. “It’s just used for other purposes. If we can release it...”

  “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “There are the analyzers in the jets, the control modules, the measuring instruments. Even the light switches could help us. And then this here.” He pointed at her head.

  “Me?”

  “Your little gray cells—and mine.”

  “I’m not very good at mental arithmetic,” Francesca said.

  “That’s what you think. But there are the neural loops in our VR helmets. The technology might not be completely tested...”

  Francesca’s expression showed Martin that he spoke in riddles.

  “How do you steer in VR mode?” he asked.

  “I... think,” she replied.

  Martin explained. “This also works the other way around. The method is still new, particularly as there are ethical concerns—concerns which are understandable. Forcing a brain to do certain tasks by external means?”

  “And you don’t have those concerns?”

  “I do. But I don’t want to die here. Don’t you want to be able to tell the others what we’ve seen?” Martin didn’t mention that he also was thinking about Jiaying. It cannot be true that all these years were wasted, he thought.

  Francesca asked, “So... ‘might not be completely tested…’ What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It is not dangerous, that is obvious. The helmets are technically locked, so they only communicate in one direction, from your brain to the jets. I think I could change that through a firmware update. The helmets still run the old Kore OS, which has a known bug that gives me root access...”

  Francesca interrupted him and shook her head. “You cannot do that. The Ethics Council banned that for good reasons. If supercomputers received write access to human consciousness...”

  “And even if we—you and I—turn insane afterward, would that matter? Maybe only one of us goes crazy, and the other one will be saved? Isn’t that worth a try?”

  “No, Martin, I’m sorry, but I will not do it.”

  “Okay.” He clenched his fists and pressed his lips together. Then he took three deep breaths. Maybe I have gone too far. My fellow astronaut may be right. Some red lines should not be crossed. It still seems a waste not to use the gigantic computing capacity of the human brain.

  “We can use the computers in all those devices,” Francesca said. Martin nodded.

  “Watson, release access to all technical devices in Valkyrie except for life support,” Francesca directed.

  “Confirmed. Analysis will be finished in t plus 96 hours.”

  One third faster, but still too slow, he deduced. Should I try to hack the neuro helmet after all? Just for myself, without Francesca noticing?

  No. He had to rephrase the question. The complete analysis of all symbols could wait. If they managed to escape the ocean, they would once again have access to all the computing power on Earth. Right now, it’s not important to be able to read the entire library. We just need to find something that helps us get out of here. Martin thought about communication. If the beings that created the columns are still present, they might be able to help us. I have no idea how these beings will do it, or if they will actually want to. Yet, he clung to this straw.

  “Watson, how does the required time change, if we limit the analysis to ten predetermined semantic units?”

  “Analysis will be partially finished in t plus 3 hours.”

  Martin hit the armrest of his seat with his fist. Yes! That is something we can work with.

  “We think of a short message, let Watson translate it, and then build a column ourselves,” he explained to Francesca.

  “And you think that will be useful?” She seemed doubtful.

  “I hope so. If the purpose of the columns is to record information, and the symbols are more than decoration—which it looks to me like they are—then they must be legible to the beings that created them. I have no idea how, but that’s not important. Maybe they see in the X-ray spectrum, or have radar sensors in their head, whatever. If we place a new column with our message, we might establish a channel of communication.”

  “And what do you want to say to them?”

  “We visually show them how we are doing and what we are planning,” Martin said.

  “And then?”

  “No idea. If we are very lucky, they will notice our message. Imagine that an invisible alien would like to communicate with us, but it does not know how. Then the creature realizes it could paint a cross on your forehead. That would be an obvious sign, and you would pay attention. That is what I’m hoping for. If we’re even luckier, they will answer us somehow.”

  Francesca gave him a look of mixed disbelief and anger. “This is supposed to be your solution? You hope an alien will help us, although we don’t even know if it exists?”

  Martin shrugged. Yes, this is what I hope for, he thought, but did not say anything. I can understand that Francesca is outraged. However, she has not had the same dreams I have experienced.

  Three hours later, Watson had finished the message. Martin was already inside the suit at the SuitPort. He separated the suit and went to a storage compartment for an empty pressure tank. Then he used a special tool, a kind of can opener, to remove its top and bottom. This made the tank look like a miniature column. He wondered where he should place the column. Maybe in front of the other columns, at the edge of the f
orest? There it will be clearly visible, but it might also be ignored. Or, maybe between two columns in the first row?

  He placed the copy directly at the forefront of the forest, where two columns had a large gap between them. Then he started to scratch the symbols determined by Watson into the steel. They were not raised like the original ones, but they still had a three-dimensional structure. This work took some time. Now and then he compared the symbols with the ones shown on his arm display.

  He was almost done when Francesca spoke to him via helmet radio.

  “Ahem, Martin,” she said. “Take a look behind you. You notice something?”

  He turned around, but did not notice anything besides the column that had already been there earlier.

  “Below, look below.”

  The helmet had a limited field of view. He had to lower his head to look at the ground. Directly ahead of him, maybe twenty centimeters from his boots, a new column was growing.

  “It wasn’t there earlier, was it?” Martin started to sweat.

  “I compared the area with yesterday’s images,” Francesca said. “Back then, the ground was completely smooth.”

  He bent down and touched the stump that reached the height of his ankles. There were raised structures, so the same process seemed to be responsible for both the growth and the inscriptions of the column. Is this even possible through a natural process? What have we found here? He licked his lips.

  Francesca asked, “Could you take a sample when you are finished?”

  “Okay. I will be back inside in ten minutes. Neumaier, out.”

  Ten minutes were not enough, and getting out of the suit took additional time. Francesca waited for him, picked up the sample container via a separate mini-port, and started the analysis.

  “Take your time. I’ll have the results waiting for you.”

  Martin felt like a kid at Christmas waiting for his presents. He was so excited his bladder hurt. What would the monitor show them? How soon? He noticed Francesca’s cheeks were flushed.