Ocean of Storms

by Christopher Mari

  “All right,” Zell said after a few moments, “let’s get this show on the road.”

  They continued to climb, upward and upward. At last they reached what appeared to be the top of the structure. The ceiling rose above them, cathedral-like, its ebony surface mirroring the inky black of space. In front of the scientists was a door. Like the others they had come across, it was blank. The door was also completely sealed, with no apparent way to open it.

  “Looks like the end of the line,” said Zell.

  “Think we should knock?” Donovan muttered.

  Soong reached out and brushed her glove over the area’s surface, searching for a manual release. There was a glassy texture to the door, a pliability. As her hand touched the door itself, she felt a very slight but noticeable tremor. She jerked her hands back as the door began to glow with a peculiar blue-tinted light. Instantly the door slid open with ease.

  “Looks like we passed the test,” Zell said.

  Even with the dim illumination generated by their suit lights, they could tell they had entered a large, if not cavernous, room. The vaulted ceiling mirrored those they had seen throughout the ship, though much higher, stretching at least thirty feet overhead. Their flashlights bounced around, finding only the same blank obsidian walls. The sparse furnishings were comprised of comfortable-looking seats arranged in sections across the entire expanse. Most of them were facing what appeared to be large consoles or workstations. Each workstation, however, was just as blank and lifeless as every surface of the ship they had seen thus far. Donovan threw his flashlight’s beam across one of the stations and stared down, finding nothing but his own reflection. No matter what they did, their efforts were frustrated by the fact that this ship—or whatever it was—apparently had no controls, nothing that would enable them to unlock dormant secrets.

  “I’m guessing this is the bridge,” Donovan muttered.

  Zell approached him. “If it is, it certainly doesn’t have much in the way of equipment, just these oblong tables and chairs. It could be the damn mess hall, for all we know.”

  “No buttons, no switches, no computer terminals,” Soong muttered as she walked around, flashing her light on the array of stations before them. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  Zell sat in a chair before one of the oblong tables in the center of the room. In spite of his bulky backpack, he found the chair to be remarkably comfortable. He glanced at the blank surface before him curving upward into a half wall and slowly let his helmet’s light drift across it. A blank computer screen, Zell mused. The whole surface looks like an oddly shaped, blank computer screen. He sent his wrist lights out across the room and watched as they revealed more weirdly shaped tables and consoles, all blank. This whole ship is a blank—no controls, no buttons, nothing mechanical except for the airlock’s release. How were they able to control this ship?

  Zell stood up and walked to about the dead center of the room, shaking his head. “I’d like to get some goddamn lights on in here.”

  And suddenly the lights came on, blindingly so. Each of them winced as brightness hit their dark-adjusted pupils.

  “Elias!” Donovan called from where he was standing. “What the hell did you do?”

  “It’s not possible,” Soong said quietly.

  “Nothing,” Zell answered. “All I did was—” He clapped his hands together and roared with laughter. “Voice activation. It’s in sleep mode. The whole damn ship’s been in a power-save mode for millions of years!”

  Donovan looked around the bridge. For the first time since entering the vessel, he could make out colors. Far from the imposing black color they originally gave off, when illuminated the walls and other surfaces were a mottled bluish green, looking almost like the deep waters off the Caribbean. To Donovan, they seemed to ripple and move slightly, as if caught in a trade wind. They seemed powered, alive. Yet they still displayed nothing.

  The room was far larger than they had previously imagined—at least a hundred feet wide and seemingly perfectly round. The ceiling was completely vaulted, a giant half sphere that reminded Donovan of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, which he had once visited with his father and Thackeray Zell.

  “I don’t get it,” Donovan muttered as he scanned the vicinity for a control switch. “What’s been powering her all this time?”

  “It must have been a generator of some kind,” Soong said into her mike from across the room. “Something kept this ship functioning. Something triggered the signal—”

  “Dr. Soong,” Zell said from the far end of the bridge, “I think I found your survivor.”

  The body was sitting in a chair facing the wall. Donovan and Soong approached it with little apprehension. They had both seen their fair share of corpses in all states of decay. And yet this body’s condition bore little resemblance to any they had previously encountered. It appeared to be a man of above-average height dressed in a dark-purple coverall. The best way Donovan could describe its condition was mummified—with the exception that, unlike the dried mummies he had seen in Egypt, this one had retained a fair share of moisture.

  “He was probably frozen solid,” Soong surmised, “once the heat inside this ship dissipated after his death.”

  “He looks human,” Donovan said.

  “You sound surprised, Alan,” Zell replied as he flashed his wrist light closer to the corpse’s face. “Dark-red hair, from what I gather. An aquiline nose, strong jaw. I’m not sure if this was his actual coloring, but he seems to have had an olive complexion.”

  “Probably died at a fairly young age too. No more than twenty or twenty-five,” Soong noticed as she bent closer to the body. “Large cranium, suggesting considerable evolutionary development. Remarkable. Human beings from another world. Virtual duplicates of us right down to the bone structure.”

  “What are the chances, eh?” Zell asked with a grunt. “A billion to one? A trillion?”

  Donovan looked up from the body. “You sound as if you don’t believe it, Elias.”

  “Believe what?” Zell scoffed. “That this man and his crew came from another world? You’re both discounting what we’ve seen so far.”

  Donovan laughed. “Come on, Elias, you can’t mean—”

  “What we’ve seen so far is a technology far beyond our own,” Soong said. “This ship couldn’t have possibly come from Earth.”

  “All right, I’ll keep my theory to myself, then. But whatever the case is,” Zell said, “it’s clear they were expecting us. You mentioned an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Are you getting the same reading now? Is the air breathable here?”

  Donovan turned to Zell. “Why don’t you just ask the ship? It seems to like the sound of your voice.”

  Zell smirked at him. “I believe I might at that.” He glanced around the room and finally up at the ceiling. “Is there—er—a breathable atmosphere in here?”

  “THE SHIP’S ARTIFICIAL ATMOSPHERE IS FUNCTIONING WITHIN NORMAL PARAMETERS.”

  The ship’s voice made Donovan and Soong jump, not because it was overpowering, but because it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.

  And the voice was clearly human sounding, though its accent was unlike anything they had heard before.

  Soong looked at Zell with surprise. “How did you know it would speak?”

  “I didn’t,” Zell said. “I assumed it would give us a readout on one of these stations.”

  “Did it speak in an English accent?” Soong wondered.

  “My dear, I have an English accent,” Zell said proudly. “That’s an American accent if I ever heard one.”

  “No way,” Donovan said. “I’ve been all over the country, and I’ve never heard anyone ever speak like that. It’s like it almost has no accent, like a trained newscaster.”

  “No, not that either,” Soong said. “Dr. Zell, could it possibly be creating an accent by attempting a pronunciation after hearing us speak?”

  Zell strode across the deck, looking around at the array of screens.
“I doubt that. It’s likely that a machine—even as sophisticated as this one—would need to hear more words than the few we’ve spoken here.”

  “But it knows English,” Donovan said. “At least the designers of this ship did.”

  Zell cleared his throat. “Could you tell us how you learned to speak in English?”

  “I AM PROGRAMMED TO SPEAK ENGLISH IN RESPONSE TO ALL QUERIES MADE IN ENGLISH.”

  Donovan looked up at the ceiling, half wondering if this was what Moses had felt like on Mount Sinai. “Does that mean you’re able to speak other languages?”

  “I AM PROGRAMMED TO REPLY TO QUERIES IN ALL KNOWN LANGUAGES SPOKEN ON EARTH.”

  “All the known languages,” Soong said, looking at Donovan.

  Donovan turned to Zell. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “You’re right. But let’s be comfortable first. Can you raise the ship’s temperature above the freezing mark?”

  “YES. IT WILL TAKE ELEVEN MINUTES AND FORTY-THREE SECONDS TO RAISE THE TEMPERATURE TO ABOVE ZERO DEGREES CELSIUS. DO YOU WISH TO PROCEED?”

  “Yes, ah, computer. Please do so, taking care not to boil us alive.”

  Donovan stepped toward Zell and Soong. “Minutes, seconds. Zero degrees Celsius. This ship seems to know an awful lot about human civilization. Computer, how do you know the human terms minutes, seconds, and degrees Celsius?”

  “I WAS PROGRAMMED WITH AN UNDERSTANDING OF THESE TERMS.”

  “Donovan, it appears to be a tool, not an intelligence,” Soong surmised. “If it is unable to answer complex inquiries, asking it questions could take us all day.”

  “What do you suggest we do, then?” Donovan asked.

  “Ask it for the ship’s logs,” Soong said.

  “A brilliant idea, Doctor,” Zell said with a grin. “This way we can conserve the ship’s power while at the same time figuring out where the hell it came from.”

  “Computer,” Donovan again said to the ceiling. “Please play back the ship’s logs. Start with the last entry.”

  “ACCESSING . . .”

  Each of them expected to hear another voice coming from wherever the computer’s voice was emanating. None of them expected the consoles and walls to shift from their murky sea-green color to instrument panels and controls, or for the empty seats to fill with people. Not ghosts, not images, but solid-looking people studying displays and running their hands over controls that appeared to be embedded in console surfaces. Soong stifled a scream as a purple-suited crew member passed right by her and walked over to the body sitting in its chair. With a mingling of horror and excitement, they watched as the crew member spoke soundlessly to the corpse. Then a ghostly figure with red hair and olive skin rose from the body and solidified as he stood near them in the middle of the bridge. He was a good five inches taller than Donovan, who stood six feet even in his bare feet.

  Soong gripped Donovan’s arm as best she could through her gloves. He turned to her.

  “A hologram of some kind,” he said, and reached out his hand, expecting it to pass through the red-haired man’s shoulder. Donovan’s hand instead smacked against the man’s shoulder, but the man took no notice.

  He was odd looking, very large and powerful and handsome, but not in a traditional sort of way. Each of them tried to peg his ethnicity, but his features seemed to be a combination of all the best features from all the races on Earth. He looked human; that was for certain. But he wasn’t human in any way that they understood the term.

  The man paced the floor around them. Zell, Donovan, and Soong in turn backed out of his way.

  “What’s he doing?” Soong asked.

  “I think,” said Donovan, “he wants to tell us something.”

  Chapter 14

  Suddenly, violently, Donovan felt the room swim around him. Reality bent itself inward, twisting and curving into a Möbius strip of dementia. Donovan felt his thoughts turn to water as his mind rebelled against him.

  There is a world outside. This is a room, not a world. We’re on the Moon; we’re in a ship; we’re not here with what we’re seeing.

  Something was probing his mind, taking control. It was not a pleasant conjoining of thoughts. It was invasive, clinical. Donovan felt the floor drop beneath him and thought wildly of the time he rode the Rotor with Cynthia Evans at Playland, the centrifugal force pinning them to the walls as they spun round and round. Slowly, like a curtain being drawn back, he saw the fabric of infinite space unfold at his very feet.

  There are worlds inside of this room. A whole solar system full of worlds. It’s our solar system, isn’t it? There’s Jupiter and its innumerable moons. There’s Saturn and its rings. But that’s not our Saturn, not our Jupiter. They’re all changed somehow; they’re reshaped; the Moons have been transformed somehow into habitable worlds. People are walking around on Mars in shirtsleeves as water flows on its surface. And there are people—a hundred billion people populating those worlds, living under domes or in underground facilities or suspended in floating cities drifting with the currents on Europa’s now-iceless ocean. But they’re not people, not like us, men and women with flaws and imperfections and diseases and the fear of death clinging to their skins like cheap perfume. They’re people, yes. But not like us.

  These thoughts that were his and yet someone else’s whirled violently inside his animal brain. Donovan thought the sensation would drive him mad. He saw the future, events that had not yet happened unraveling gaily, rocketing through his consciousness at limitless speed. Whatever it was that was invading his mind was taking over, letting him see through its—his—eyes. As he clawed at the ragged ends of his sanity, Donovan suddenly had one clear thought—I am Joshua—before the horrible mental roller coaster ratcheted up again.

  No, I am not Joshua; I am Alan Donovan. I’m both and I’m neither. I’ve never—I don’t know. This world will die. Civilization will die, and I don’t understand how it came to be the way it is—no, damn it, the way it will be—

  Was it a minute ago or seven hundred years ago or more than two million years from now that Zell asked the computer to play the last mission log?

  The end began now. Here. In this time. In the twenty-first century. All we will become—all we have become—has already begun. And I must stop it. We must stop it.

  Too many images, too many sensations, too many feelings. I’ve got to think; I’ve got to remember the chain of events, not this loop of lives lived, of lives interrupted so long ago, of lives not yet lived. Think of Elias—remember Elias—

  Donovan screamed and covered his eyes, trying to block out the thoughts and experiences of generations not yet born. When he opened them again, he feared what he might see. But he was back on the bridge of the ship.

  As the man finished speaking, his image, along with those of the crew members who had appeared with him, disappeared instantly, almost as if an unseen hand had snapped off a television set. Instead of merely facing a blank screen, however, Donovan, Zell, and Soong watched as the entire bridge reverted to its previous seemingly inert sea-green color. Where instrument panels and controls had just been operated by the apparitions of men and women, only blank consoles and walls remained before empty chairs. Each of them stared at the vacant spot where the red-haired man had just stood. The words of the crewman, whose body now sat before them, had chilled them so deeply that they were unable to speak. The room reverberated in a profound silence.

  “Elias?” Donovan asked. There was a quiver in his voice. Whatever had just happened to him was still fresh in his mind. Looking at his comrades’ pale faces, he knew they must have experienced something similar.

  “Yes, Alan,” Zell answered. “I felt it too. Something . . . trying to probe our thoughts.”

  “We’re not alone in here,” Soong whispered, looking around.

  “Hello,” a voice boomed. All three of them jumped in spite of themselves. They turned and saw the same man from the mission log, looking considerably less harried. Although they knew he co
uldn’t see them—could he?—he appeared to be looking straight at them. The effect was unsettling. After a brief pause, he spoke.

  “You’ve no doubt traveled a long way to get here, and not just in terms of distance. If our calculations are correct, accounting for your technological restrictions, it’s sometime in the early twenty-first century. Don’t be alarmed. We planned it this way.” The red-haired man paused for a moment, walking toward them. The trio marveled at the click his footsteps made on the floor. “There’s time for that. Let’s start at the beginning. My name, the name I was born with, would sound strange to your ears. Our language is not quite like any of the ones of your time. Those of us chosen for this mission have learned many of them, but they are not regularly spoken, at least not in the way you do. We, and our vessel, were also given names so that you might better understand us. You can call me Joshua. You may want to get more comfortable.”

  Donovan, Zell, and Soong sat down as Joshua requested, never giving a moment’s thought to the fact that they were taking orders from a man who had been dead for millions of their years.

  “Your world, the world you know today, is in grave danger, although you do not know it yet. Even as you sit here, events are being put into motion that will unravel everything your race has sought to build for eons. Let me put it to you plainly. We, the crew of the Astraeus, left for your time more than seven hundred years from now. By that point, nearly all sentient life will be extinct.”