Diggers: The Sharp Edge of the Universe

by Shannon Heather

  “On it.” Reggie belted himself into the navigator chair and went to work.

  “ELAINA,” Finn yelled as he fell out of the maintenance closet he’d been slammed into. “Start focusing the view finder again.”

  “Do you always have to yell?” Mikayla gave him a dirty look. “ELAINA’s only a bot, but I, for one, am so tired of listening to you yell all the time.”

  Finn felt a rage like he’d never felt before. Furious, he rounded on Mikayla. “Well, I, for one, am sick and tired of you! I’ve had to watch your little love affair with my best friend for weeks. I’ve had to listen to you because of your background in science even though you hate the subject. I’ve had to listen to you complain about this entire trip, but no one asked you to come. We would’ve been fine without you. Better than fine. You’ve been a total waste of a person on this mission.”

  Mikayla looked like she might cry, but she didn’t. Instead, she went off on her own snotty, frustrated tirade. “I wish I hadn’t come, either. I’ve had to endure your, your…substandard science skills. You treat everyone around you like dirt. You never acknowledge when Reggie and I come up with good ideas. Instead, you just get mad and pretend like the idea was yours. I may not…like science, but I know better than you what makes a good Scientist, and you aren’t one. Pathetic! You never listen to other people’s ideas. You think you’re the only one who should discover anything. You…you’re just like my father! He’s the reason why I hate science.”

  Mikayla might as well have just punched Finn in the gut. Worse, Reggie quit his sensor reconfiguration to stand next to Mikayla and slip his arm around her. She’d succeeded in cutting him to the core. Finn had doubted himself since the moment they’d lost communication with Vortex, and Mikayla had just confirmed his doubts.

  Reggie gave a heavy sigh, then stepped between them and took the captain’s chair. “Both wrong.”

  Finn wanted to yell at him, but he still reeled from Mikayla’s words.

  “Both right.” Reggie refused to look at anything but the screen.

  Mikayla slumped in the chair next to Reggie and grabbed his hand. “I’m sorry, Reg. I shouldn’t have gotten mad.”

  “Wrong person,” Reggie said. “Apologize to each other.”

  Mikayla looked up at Finn and started to say something, but he turned away to stare at water blobs out the porthole. No way was he going to apologize to her, and he knew any apology she gave would be for Reggie, not him.

  “Whoa!” Reggie said, still holding Mikayla’s hand.

  Finn turned to see what Reggie was talking about.

  “Looks like…a table,” Reggie said.

  Chapter 18: Bearings

  “Oh. My. Gosh,” Mikayla yelled so loudly that Finn had to slap his hands over his ears. They all moved together toward the main screen. “ELAINA, stop right there.”

  Finn snorted. “Oh, yeah, and I’m the yeller.”

  She ignored him and searched the screen. “Look. That's definitely a chair.”

  “Trash can.” Reggie pointed next to the table. “It’s a room.”

  “ELAINA.” Finn forced calm into his voice. He wouldn’t give Mikayla the satisfaction of saying he mistreated ELAINA ever again, even if ELAINA was just a bot and had no feelings. “Can you widen the view but still keep the images this sharp?”

  “Yes, Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly,” ELAINA purred. “And thank you, Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly, for not yelling.”

  Mikayla fell into a fit of giggles.

  A long black counter top that featured oval-shaped sinks without faucets circled the room. The group of tables in the center of the room circled a massive set of shelves filled with books. Other black tables ran in rows up to the front of the room, and on each table were two…

  “Microscopes!” Finn and Mikayla yelled together.

  “Science Lab,” Reggie nodded.

  “No way.” Relief washed over Finn at the realization of this incredible discovery. “This is so cool.”

  “Wait a minute.” Mikayla the buzz-buster frowned. “How the heck did we get here?”

  “Uh, hello,” Finn said. “Were you not just with us for the past two weeks? While. We. Were. Cutting. Through. Glass?”

  “And exactly where did we come from? Hmm?” Mikayla said.

  “Stop it.” Reggie took them both by the arm and shoved them into the captain and navigator seats. “No more fighting.”

  The two stared at each other, daring the other to speak. After a few minutes of the silent treatment, Finn grew bored. He surveyed the screen for any clue as to where they’d broken into this colossal new world, having left the vast reaches of space to end up in a Science Lab. He quickly decided this didn't look like a classroom, but actually more of a discovery room because of all the unnamed samples at different stages of being cataloged.

  “ELAINA,” Finn made sure he didn’t have a hint of anger in his voice, “move the DUMP slowly around in a circle so we can see the entire room.”

  “Yes, Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly,” she purred.

  “Wowww…” Mikayla whispered as the DUMP rotated. The room looked much bigger than they first thought. The rows of tables seemed to go on forever, and the other end of the room couldn't be seen from their current vantage point.

  “What’s below us?” Finn asked. “ELAINA, show us the area below the DUMP.”

  The view shifted to a field of light gray.

  “Hmm. Maybe we’re too close.” Mikayla leaned over the screen on the captain's side to get a better look. “ELAINA, can you navigate the area now? Can you take us up without getting us stuck in a water droplet or bumped by anything?”

  “Yes, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne,” ELAINA said in her usual sweet voice.

  ELAINA lifted the DUMP higher, but they still hit something that jarred and rocked them nearly senseless. So many water droplets hindered their progress, their slow ascent felt like an bumper car ride.

  “Stop here,” Finn said. “Now slowly let us see the entire room.”

  They stopped in one upper corner of the room. Below them they could see a single black table with two humongous boxes full of something shiny. They were alone in the room, but Finn doubted they would be for long.

  “What kind of…being…would be found in a place like this?” Mikayla asked.

  “A Science being,” Finn exclaimed. “ELAINA, can you navigate us to some of the tables?”

  “Yes, Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly. Where would you like to start?”

  “Let’s just go down and see what’s on the table below us,” Mikayla said.

  “Good place to start,” Reggie agreed.

  Finn wasn’t surprised by Mikayla’s complete lack of adventure. But they had to start somewhere, and the boring boxes would be just as good a place as any.

  ELAINA dodged water droplets on the descent and finally hovered just above the table.

  “ELAINA,” Finn said, “modify the view so we can see everything on the table.”

  The items slowly moved in and out of focus until two boxes appeared, clearly made out of some kind of metal Finn didn’t recognize. The boxes were filled with microscope slides arranged neatly in rows. A microscope sat next to them with a slide still in it. Symbols on the boxes must have been words of some kind, but it was a language none of them had ever seen.

  “ELAINA,” Mikayla said. “Can you translate the markings on those boxes?”

  ELAINA fell silent for a moment, “I have no record of the language in my system, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne.”

  “Do you have anything in your data banks close to it?” Finn asked.

  “Old Earth Hebrew is not unlike the markings, Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly. The symbol language used on Vacuous Four is also similar,” ELAINA cooed. “I will need more reference material to make a full translation.”

  “Need a book,” Reggie said.

  “If we find a book, how in the heck are we supposed to turn the pages?” Mikayla said. “One wrong move and a piece of paper might squish us.”

  �
�Use the Grabber.” Reggie motioned to the auger head.

  “What’s a Grabber?” Mikayla asked.

  “It’s an extractor tool used to pull objects out of holes and caves,” Finn said, “and it just might work.”

  Reggie’s fingers flew over the navigational screen until a robotic arm unfolded from the bottom of the DUMP. The arm unhooked the auger connection and replaced it with a hook on another metal arm, just like a human arm, that bent at the elbow. The base of the arm was equipped with long metal fingers used to perform more delicate extractions.

  “ELAINA, navigate us over to the bookshelf by the table,” Finn said.

  Mikayla eyed Finn. “What are you going to do? We can’t exactly hold up one of those books. We’ll be crushed.”

  “Just trust me for once.” Finn moved closer to the view finder. Then he slid into the captain’s chair and took over the controls. “Get us as close as you can to one of the books.”

  ELAINA maneuvered the DUMP to within inches of a fat book Finn figured had to be some kind of textbook. He wasn’t as fast or as good as Reggie with the control screen, so it took him several tries and a couple of near collisions before he finally latched onto the top of the book.

  “Now, all back,” Finn yelled.

  The DUMP engine picked up speed but didn’t move. Suddenly, the DUMP went flying backwards, tossing Mikayla onto one of the rows of seats.

  “Geesh, you could warn a per—” The loudest boom any of them had ever heard filled the DUMP.

  “Did it.” Reggie removed his hands from his ears.

  Mikayla scrambled to the front and studied the screen. The book lay open on the floor. “Lucky shot.”

  Finn smiled. “No. That was pure skill. The floor is where you’ll find any boring textbook in my room.”

  Reggie nodded. “Yep.”

  Chapter 19: Lost in Translation

  They spent most of the morning waiting while ELAINA scanned each page of the colossal book, which proved to be no easy task. Reggie had to position the DUMP close enough to a page to allow the Grabber to get a good hold. Then ELAINA navigated the DUMP so the Grabber could drag the page along with them to the other side of the book.

  At one point, Mikayla actually mentioned how impressed she was by the strength of the DUMP. Reggie and Finn just smiled. If the DUMP could dig through an entire world, it could handle a book so colossal that it made them look like a piece of dust.

  Once they successfully turned a page without getting themselves caught between the pages, then they had to move far enough away to allow ELAINA to scan the entire page. The pages weren’t made of the type of paper used on Vortex—the nearly weightless, reflective polymer hologram projections, similar to old paper books from historic times. Those holographic paper pages could be turned just like the pages of the old books. But this world’s paper seemed heavy. ELAINA confirmed it by comparing the weight and size of the paper to their own paper holograms and found it to be at least one hundred times heavier.

  “What’s this paper made of?” Mikayla asked.

  “Ms. Mikayla Fishborne, the paper is a waterproof wax mixture most likely used because of its ability to resist moisture,” ELAINA explained.

  “Why?” Finn asked.

  “I think it’s because the air has a high water content,” Mikayla said. “Right, ELAINA?”

  “Correct, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne.”

  Finn thought for a moment. “I guess I didn’t realize all of these water droplets we passed through meant that the air here has a super high precipitation percentage. No wonder the paper is made out of wax.”

  “ELAINA,” Mikayla said. “How many more pages do you need to scan?

  “Estimates put full translation ability at twenty-five more pages, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne.”

  It took another three hours for ELAINA to scan enough of the book to be able to begin her translations.

  “We might as well take a look around the room while we wait,” Finn suggested.

  “I’d like to take a look at those sinks and try to figure out how the aliens who run this place pour water without using any faucets,” Mikayla said.

  The DUMP made its way over to the closest row of counter tops to hover above the place where the faucet should have been.

  They saw nothing but the basin. No sensors. No space behind the sink where a hidden faucet might emerge and recede as needed. They saw only a hole in the corner of the basin, but nothing in it blinked or sent out sensor light.

  “How in the heck do they get water? There aren’t any sensors,” Finn said.

  “Maybe it works by voice command,” Mikayla said. “Old-fashioned, but maybe these aliens aren’t very advanced.”

  Finn nodded. They might be enormous beings, but massive size didn’t mean they were an advanced species. Take the Gargantu Tribes on Megas Prime. They were sixteen feet tall, yet they still carried around clubs for weapons, the men had at least seven wives, and they all spoke mostly in grunts and chest beating.

  “Let’s fly around the sink and see if we can figure out how it works,” Finn said.

  “Not a good idea,” Reggie said.

  “Let’s just take a quick peek.” Finn was surprised that Mikayla agreed with him, for once.

  They took a couple of laps around the edge of the sink, but still saw nothing that resembled a faucet. The tiny hole on the side looked too small to be a faucet hole.

  “Let’s drop down inside it,” Finn said.

  “Not a good idea.” Reggie shook his head.

  “Come on, Reg,” Finn laughed. “It’s just a sink.”

  They descended slowly into the massive bowl.

  Whoosh!

  “What’s going on?” Mikayla screamed over the deafening roar of the massive waterfall.

  The DUMP surged into the sink along with the rush of water coming from all around them. Reggie grabbed the navigational controls and the DUMP shot out of the water moments before the sink emptied all the water.

  “Too close.” Finn shook so hard he could barely form words.

  “Told yuh.” Reggie's voice trembled.

  As the DUMP hovered over the sink, they watched the flow of water diminish, like some invisible washcloth had just been wrung out.

  “Where in the Milky Way does a sink just start pouring water out of thin air?” Finn asked, pressing closer to the screen.

  “Maybe it is taking the water out of the air,” Mikayla said, obviously impressed. “The air is water-dense. Maybe the aliens have some sort of method to extract water out of the air.”

  Reggie gave a low whistle.

  “Can you imagine what this kind of technology would do for our solar system?” Mikayla said. “We wouldn’t have to harvest water on Mars anymore.”

  Finn thought about all of the different planets that could benefit from this technology. “These humanoids must be really advanced. There’ve got to be sensors on the sink. If only we could get under it and figure out how they do it.”

  “Yeah.” Mikayla gazed at the viewing screen dreamily.

  Finn couldn’t hide his shock. “Wait a minute…you agreed with me twice, and…you like exploring? What. Do you like science now?”

  She looked at Finn’s shocked face and began to fidget with her zippers. “Well, I like this kind of science. This doesn’t feel like we’re tearing every good thing out of a world and leaving behind a dusty, useless mess. I just think we might have missed some cool discoveries along the way. I mean, if our Space Station actually explored, we’d be finding some pretty cool stuff. Like the animal at the top of the hole on the field trip. What if its poop could burn for a hundred days? But we’ll never know because my dad completely ignored that animal.”

  Mikayla was right. As a discovery station, Vortex didn’t spend much time learning about the billions of different species and getting to know their ways. But it wasn't like the way Mikayla made it sound. They didn't just drill a bunch of big holes in every world and then leave when it looked like Swiss cheese. They cleane
d up after themselves very well, to the point where no one could tell they'd ever been on the planet. But Vortex flat out ignored anything that wasn’t fuel or metal.

  “Yeah,” Finn said. “I guess it makes sense.”

  “Wow.” Reggie stared at both of them. “You agreed.”

  Finn and Mikayla smiled.

  “We might as well do some more exploring while we wait for ELAINA to finish translating,” Finn said.

  “I want to take a better look at their lighting because it seems to be coming from nowhere too,” Mikayla said.

  “Yeah, and I want to look at those microscopes,” Finn said.

  They navigated the DUMP over to the closest table and slowly circled the microscope. The instrument looked mostly normal, black with binocular-type viewing screens. The only major difference was the lighting. Similar to the water in the sink, the light seemed to flow out of the air. They found no light source or fluorescence of any kind to illuminate the specimen sitting on the viewing plate. The way the light just sort of formed under the specimen seemed like magic, which was completely ridiculous. The aliens harnessed light somehow, but the children had no way of knowing exactly how. They had no one to ask because the Science Lab remained empty.

  “I wish we could read the language.” Finn tried to study the lab slide from different angles, but couldn't determine much. “I wonder if we could see what they’re looking at if we take a look through the lenses.”

  “We probably could, but we’d need ELAINA, and between moving us around the room and translating, I think we need to keep her on task," Mikayla said.

  Finn shrugged off his frustration with Mikayla. One minute she seemed ready to dive into a sink and almost get flushed down the drain. The next minute she was worried about some insignificant detail and didn’t want to discover anything.

  “Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly.” ELAINA’s silky voice jarred Finn out of his thoughts. “I have successfully translated the language. Would you like me to project the translations on the screen?”