Noumenon

by Marina J. Lostetter

  A voice broke in over the comm system. “Sir? Matheson, head of Security.”

  “Yes?”

  “All areas secure. My staff and I are prepared for any crew member outbursts.”

  “Thank you, Matheson. I.C.C., is your consciousness full?”

  “My programming gives me free access to open consciousness when convoy activity has a standard deviation of more than 3.000231 from normal. I have been fully conscious for the last three weeks.”

  “And I’ll thank you to stay that way,” Straifer said. “All right, Matheson. I’m ready to go to the bridge.”

  “Six officers standing by to escort you.” If revolt could happen seemingly out of dead space once, it could certainly happen when the collective emotionality of the crew was at its highest. Every precaution had been put in place.

  “Thank you, Matheson. Signing off.”

  Time to view Reggie’s magnificent star.

  The six officers that made up Straifer’s escort were all Matheson clones.

  After the revolt it had become painfully obvious that the security details did not contain enough officers. Two possible solutions presented themselves to the board. Either they should relegate genes that had been brought on board for different purposes to law and order, or they should clone more security specialists. Seven of the top officers had been chosen for hypergrowth, but instead of receiving a numbered nomenclature, they were each named something new. The different names were used to help differentiate those who were serving their original purpose—who would move through the ranks as specified by the mission—and those the convoy had chosen for extra enforcement.

  All across the bridge officers hustled left and right, checking stations and preparing for the convoy-wide emergence into normal space. Straifer felt centered. When his nerves lit up he became more focused. His heart rate slowed, his breathing shallowed.

  This was it.

  “Fleet to all-stop in five, four, three, two . . .”

  The main screen danced as they switched phase. Stars swirled where there had once been blackness. Light pierced their bubble. Space as it should be came into focus.

  LQ Pyx hung before them, a magnificent burning ball. The glare was extreme.

  Straifer barked orders. “Focus and go to infrared and ultraviolet. True picture won’t help us here.” I need to see. I need to see it.

  False color imaging strained away the harshness of the star’s rays and left them with a glorious picture sharper than reality. It was so small, still six months out, but they could see what obscured the light.

  Not an embryonic dust cloud, not a stellar remnant. Not an asteroid sphere or slabs of dirty ice.

  The star’s casing was far too uniform for any of that.

  The bridge went silent.

  Is that . . . Is it . . . ?

  LQ Pyx didn’t look like a star at all. More like a brushed-steel ball dotted with points of intense light. No, that wasn’t right either. It took Straifer’s brain a moment to decipher what he was seeing.

  “It’s man-made,” someone blurted. “I mean . . .”

  Straifer walked toward the screen, his hand outstretched. “By the ships. It’s artificial.”

  The light wasn’t coming from on top of the ball, it was coming through the ball. He’d initially thought the sphere solid, but now he realized it was more like scaffolding—an incomplete structure filled with octagonal gaps that let LQ Pyx’s light shine through. It was as though thick metal netting enveloped the star.

  “My god,” someone else whispered. “It’s enormous.”

  A stunned pause followed. No one said a word.

  The suspended animation of intrigue was fine for other crew members, but Straifer had to take action. He shook himself. “Contact Holwarda and tell them I want an estimation of the structure’s mass ASAP. Alert Nakamura, and instruct her to meet me in the situation room in an hour. Have Lieutenant Pavon join us thirty minutes later. Radio—what’s coming in from Earth?”

  Every head on the bridge swiveled in one man’s direction. The communications operator stared back, wide-eyed. “N-n-nothing, sir.”

  “It doesn’t matter how trivial, Sawyer. Report.”

  Sawyer shrank in his seat. It was clear he wished for fewer eyeballs in the room, and though Straifer pitied him, he was as curious as everyone else. “There’s nothing to report, Captain,” Sawyer said. “I’m not getting anything. No data of any kind on any wavelength. Just dead air.”

  With a frustrated sigh, Straifer stomped over to Sawyer’s station. “That’s impossible. Something has to be coming from the planet. Let me have a listen.”

  Sawyer rose obligingly and handed over his headphones. Straifer indicated for him to work the buttons and dials.

  Silence.

  “Who calibrated this thing?” Straifer asked, roughly handing the headphones back to their owner. “I.C.C., has the communications station—?”

  The AI answered preemptively. It knew him too well. “All bridge stations are in full working order. Neither Petty Officer Sawyer nor his equipment are faulty.”

  “Sir?” asked Sawyer. “What does that mean?”

  The captain took in his crew, making eye contact with as many of them as possible. “That we’re alone out here.”

  Straifer rescinded his previous orders. He wanted to meet with Nakamura and Pavon at the same time.

  No one sat at the long table. Instead they took up comfortable positions around the room, whatever came naturally. Margarita Pavon leaned against a wall, next to the largest monitor, with her arms crossed over her chest. Dr. Nakamura paced near the door, ready to flee the first chance she got. Excitement and nervous energy radiated from her every pore.

  Though the engineers saw to ship maintenance and repair, they’d really only been brought along just in case. In case the convoy was met with something more baffling than planetary remnants or galactic amniotic fluid when they reached journey’s end. The engineers were like children appointed to take over the fort only under the unlikely circumstance that flying pigs attacked.

  Suddenly, pork was winging left and right.

  And the engineers were ready for action.

  Straifer sat in his chair, which he’d rolled into the far corner of the room. He crossed his right ankle over his left knee and twitched his foot rhythmically.

  The three of them had allowed themselves giddy handshakes and excited exclamations in place of normal stateliness. Neither woman had saluted, and it never crossed Straifer’s mind to make them. They’d each taken turns expressing some variation on, “Can you believe it? Intelligence. They’re out there. They’re out there!”

  But when Nakamura had said, “We’re not alone!” the mood shifted. She’d meant it in the Grand Scheme of the Cosmos sense. They now had definitive proof that humanity’s intelligence wasn’t just some isolated accident. But her statement reminded them of Earth’s silence.

  The three of them drifted apart, and now occupied their own personal corners of the room, each thrust into introspection.

  “Lieutenant, you look displeased,” Straifer said eventually.

  Pavon brought herself to attention. “Permission to speak freely?”

  “Always.” Why couldn’t the crew see? He wanted to get away from Mahler’s hyperformality and militaristic drilling. They might carry naval titles, but they weren’t military of any kind. Perhaps Mahler’s stringent adherence to order had caused his breakdown—had caused him unnecessary stress. Perhaps it had driven a wedge between him and Sailuk. Perhaps that was why she’d come running to Straifer when—

  “I should be at my station right now,” Pavon said. “Maybe Earth’s using bands that were ignored when we launched. I need to go over every possibility. Why couldn’t this wait for the board meeting?”

  “I asked for you two because the silence isn’t just worrisome. It’s a clue. Yes, we’re not getting anything from Earth, but we’re not getting anything from anyone else either.”

  Nakamura stopp
ed her pacing. “They’re not here, you mean. The aliens,” the word rolled awkwardly off her tongue. “The beings that built that thing out there.”

  Straifer nodded. “Either something is preventing signals from reaching us, or we’re totally alone out here.”

  Pavon crossed her arms again, her glare passing over the captain first, then the head engineer. “Are you saying . . . You think Earth’s not there? That it hasn’t been there for at least a hundred years?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it? No signals because there’s no one around to send them.”

  “There could be hundreds of reasons why we’re not getting a signal. Right now, let’s focus on what we can control.” Readjusting his position, Straifer leaned forward. “You were saying something about alternate bands?”

  “Our equipment isn’t calibrated for the entire EM spectrum. There are places we’re not looking because they aren’t traditionally used for communication. And maybe our math’s off, maybe we miscalculated the degree of signal degradation—”

  “So there’s a chance we’re just overlooking something?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “Then it could be the same with the builders,” Nakamura said. “They could be close.”

  Rocking against the wall, Pavon shrugged. “It’s a possibility. If they’ve got the technology to build something like a—a Dyson Sphere or whatever it is—they probably have communications capabilities we can’t even imagine.”

  “So you think it’s a Dyson Sphere?” Straifer asked.

  “Why else build a giant net around a star? I mean, look how much of LQ Pyx’s output it’s intercepting. Surely that thing is gathering energy.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Nakamura? Was Dyson spot-on?”

  She slid into a seat at the long table. “Could be. It’s likely. The three primary possibilities were discussed long ago, and any engineer aboard can recite them by heart. Number one: a Dyson Sphere. Such a structure would be designed to passively gather the majority of a star’s energy output, to effectively make useable what would otherwise be lost to space. A Dyson Sphere could be used as a multipurpose battery, or could be intended to power something specific, like a matrioshka brain—a very advanced AI.

  “The second theory,” she continued, “proposes such designs as increased surface area for physical habitation. The lack of signals anywhere in our vicinity would seem to rule this out, as well as the matrioshka brain idea. If there were billions—trillions—of lifeforms crawling around on the inside of that thing, I think we’d have some sort of indication right away.

  “The third theory is related to travel. Stellar engines. If a civilization wanted to move a system, they could build a structure around the parent star which would directionalize its radiant energy. For example, a Shkadov thruster relies on the pressure differential created by the ‘capping’ of a star on one end—with something like a giant mirror or solar-sail. The structure is stationary, creating a constant energy differential that generates thrust on one side of the star, effectively pushing it through space. Seeing as how our variable has a wobble, but isn’t exactly streaking across the sky, I don’t think it’s a stellar engine.

  “That leaves us once again with Dyson Sphere, but we can’t limit ourselves to one assumption. There are plenty of things it could be, could do. Now that we’ve seen it, can actually quantify its physical aspects and the nuances of its behavior, we need to brainstorm, come up with every possibility.” Smiling an amazed smile, she shook her head. “Who knows—maybe it’s a communications scrambler. Maybe that’s why we’re in a dead-pocket and it looks like Earth has vanished.”

  Straifer perked. “What purpose would that serve?”

  “Maybe there’s other stuff out here the aliens don’t want us to know about. Chatter they don’t want us to hear.”

  “Us?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Anyone,” she clarified. “The point is, we need to know more. We can throw out guesses left and right, but that’s all they are without data.”

  Six months later they had officially arrived. Observation shuttles were sent out to visually map the structure, and it had taken them weeks upon weeks. A three dimensional diagram now floated above the long table in the situation room, with the board gathered round. The model slowly turned, orbiting around the illustrated star.

  “As you can see,” said Carl Windstorm, head of Observations. “The structure is a lattice work, tied together by sort-of nodes and lathes.”

  Straifer raised his palm. “Sort of?”

  “That’s the best description I have at the moment,” Carl said, pushing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. Glasses weren’t a necessity—he could have easily had his sight corrected on Hippocrates. Straifer guessed Carl wore them for the same reason he wore his father’s onyx watch. Nostalgia. “What I’m calling ‘nodes’ appear to be devices of some sort, but we won’t know what they do until we crack one open—presuming we choose to go that route,” he continued, holding up a placating hand, halting the questions that lay ready just behind sealed lips. “Let me finish, please. The nodes come in four sizes—roughly shuttle-size to Mira-size—and are arranged in kind of ripple patterns, with the smallest nodes in the middle.

  “And, as you can see, here and here, two sections of this . . . web . . . are anomalous themselves. First we have the gap, which we have no doubt causes the strobing effect that lead to LQ Pyx’s designation as a variable star.”

  As if to illustrate the point for Straifer in particular, the large gap in the diagramed construct rotated into view. He’d seen the real gap from the bridge. The web’s orbit had brought the hole into direct opposition with the convoy, spewing the star’s full brilliance at the ships. The dazzling glare had prevented him from making out the gap’s borders, but the illustration defined them clearly. Three AUs tall and half an AU wide, relative to its curvature, it looked so small compared to the rest of the structure—though Straifer knew the distances to be daunting.

  Why was it so hard for the human mind to grasp things as large as stars and astronomical units? We were not built for such enormity, he realized. The imagination attempts to make the concepts manageable through the lens of distance. But the truth is we can only understand the vastness intellectually, we cannot comprehend it.

  “The gap is interesting,” Carl said. “We can’t tell yet if it is part of the design, or what purpose it might serve. But, of even more interest, is this structure here.”

  The 3-D display shifted to show only one device. It dwarfed all the others and broke the pattern. It hung opposite the gap, was approximately the width of Jupiter—one AU long—and stood vertically in the sights of the convoy ships. Its front, angled toward the star, was concave, its back equally convex. Each end tapered into a sharp point. It looked like a fine seed, a thin wheat grain.

  A shiver crawled its way up Straifer’s spine. The image hung in the air above the table like a piece of worked stone—heavy, inert, yet somehow organic. It bothered him, sent an uneasiness throughout his limbs, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. The “seed” was clearly the starting point of the structure, but felt separate from the web, like something caught in it.

  Or the creature that had spun it.

  “Okay,” Nakamura said, taking control of the meeting once Carl finished with his presentation, “what could it be?” She poised a stylus near a wall screen.

  Dyson Sphere received the most votes, and many members seemed at a loss for ideas after they’d blurted out the one. Nakamura’s suggestion of a signal-blocker went on the list of possibilities. Someone suggested the web was a dampener, meant to reduce the star’s output in order to protect something from its radiation. Since there was nothing of importance in the vicinity (two planetary bodies had been detected within the web’s grasp, but neither was suspected of being habitable), many found the idea unfounded.

  “Plus, Licpix is only G class. If it wa
s something like a neutron star, perhaps that might need encasing. But not Licpix,” Carl dismissed.

  Still, Nakamura wrote dampener on the screen.

  “A landmark?” suggested the education head. “The strobing is reminiscent of a lighthouse, isn’t it? Maybe it’s used for navigation—maybe even intergalactic navigation.”

  “It’s probably just a giant alien sculpture,” said Pavon. “We’re here scratching our heads over what it does when it doesn’t do anything.”

  A few members laughed, others rolled their eyes.

  “No, no,” Nakamura said. “That’s good. You might have meant it as a joke, but that’s good. Colossal space art.” She added it to the list. “Think big. Think outside the ships—outside what we know or would do.”

  “It could have religious significance,” said Carl. “As a sort of temple, or offering. Maybe a symbol.”

  “How about a border marker?” suggested Matheson. “Maybe it signals to other civilizations that they’re nearing the Galactic Empire and should keep the hell out.” More chuckles followed, as well as concerned murmurs.

  “Maybe it’s a weapon,” Straifer said bluntly. The chatter halted. “Maybe it absorbs energy from the star like a Sphere, then redirects it through that giant seed and blasts things out of space.”

  An uncomfortable pause followed as Nakamura wrote weapon of mass destruction on the list.

  “If it’s a weapon, wouldn’t someone have used it on the convoy?” asked Carl.

  “That’s awfully presumptuous,” said Straifer, leaning forward. “First, you’re assuming we’re significant enough to use massive force against. We’re not. If it’s a weapon, it’s meant for an invading fleet or something, not a small scouting party. Second, you’re assuming someone is still out there to use it. If the structure isn’t blocking signals, then there’s no one in range. It’s dead out there, remember? Lastly, you’re presuming the web is functional. Personally, I think that gap means the structure is incomplete.”