by Josi Russell
When she had clipped all the cables and wires back, she stood up, shaking the cramps out of her muscles. She looked at Ethan, standing against the wall a few feet away. “Ready to give it a try?”
“What’s the phrase?” he said. “Ready as I’ll ever be?”
She smiled. “I know you’re nervous. I am too. I’ll try to be very careful.” She crossed the floor and picked up the laser and its now-closed control box.
Ethan looked closer at the laser. There were several rings that made up the tapered end. Notches in the rings seemed to indicate intensity. Small ports and connections studded the topmost ring, and the very end of the point was an open, perfect circle. Kaia held it in the crook of her arm and moved back to the panel.
On the other side of the control box, wires extended out to an energy port beside the door. She had altered the hardwire and made it easy to connect to the port. Ethan was impressed with her skills.
She sat on the floor, bracing the laser against her shoulder and sighting down it like a rifle. “Here we go, Ethan,” she mumbled.
The beam shot out, and Ethan held his breath as she moved it slowly in a simple square. One of the bundles of cables drooped slightly into the path of the laser, but before he could warn her she’d already passed over them and they remained unhurt. She completed the square, and the section of titanium fell forward, clattering to the floor. She held the laser steady and switched it off, leaving the rest of the wall untouched.
Ethan breathed again as they both moved forward eagerly to peer into the hole. Wires and cables laced the hole on the other side and he felt a slight disappointment to see the back of another panel just past the cables.
“It’s okay,” Kaia said, reaching for her crack kit. “I expected that there might be more paneling. I’ll have it off in a second.” She slipped into the hole and slid her small hand up into the darkness on the other side of the wall she’d just cut. Ethan heard her prying at the panel and then heard it give way and pop open. She spread the wires and slipped through.
He was right behind her.
They emerged into a much smaller room than the one they’d left, but otherwise it looked very similar. The walls were lined with monitors, control panels, and readouts. The two looked at the wall they’d just come through. A star map monitor tracked the ship’s progress through space. A readout beside it gave coordinates. They moved around the room, looking carefully at the various monitors. All were identical to those in the secondary navigation room until they reached the wall opposite the one they’d come through. Here things changed dramatically. Keyboards on this side were infinitely more complex.
Ethan ran his fingers over the keys in wonder, centimeters above actually touching them. “It’s a Xardn keypad.”
“Xardn? Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s the only hardware one I’ve ever seen outside of a university. Almost every computer has one buried in its memory banks, but no one ever uses them.” His eyes moved up to the monitor. Several lines of numbers and single letters filled the screen. He stared at it for a long moment and then muttered, “Impossible.” Moving closer to the screen, he said, “that can’t be.”
Kaia looked at the jumble of characters on the screen. “What is it, Ethan? What are those?”
He turned slowly to her. “I’m not sure, but . . . I think they might be the parametric equations for Xardn symbols,” he said. “Computer, show the holoscreen.”
Nothing happened.
“Computer,” he barked, low on patience.
Still, there was no response.
Kaia said quietly, “Ethan, it can’t hear you. The computer can’t hear you here.”
He looked at her skeptically. “Kaia, the computer is omnipresent. It can hear you anywhere.”
She shook her head. “Call it again then.”
He tried several times, from various places in the room. “How can that be?”
“This room must be shielded from the computer for some reason. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t even know how you’d do it. It raises a thousand questions. What is this room for? Why is it hidden even from the computer? What are these machines controlling?”
Ethan turned back to the screen, slightly shaken by the absence of an entity he’d come to feel was everywhere. “I think we need to decipher these equations. Maybe then we can find some answers.”
The screen scrolled through a dizzying array of letters and numbers. It moved quickly, obviously never intended for people to watch.
x(Ɵ)=((135-315)cos(Ɵ)+(-98)cos(((135-315)/315)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(135-315)sin(Ɵ)-(98)sin(((135-315)/315)Ɵ)); x(Ɵ)=((78-117)cos(Ɵ)+(32)cos(((78-117)/117)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(78-117)sin(Ɵ)-(32)sin(((78-117)/117)Ɵ))); x(Ɵ)= (76-243)cos(Ɵ)+(115)cos(((76-243)/243)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(76-243)sin(Ɵ)-(-115)sin(((76-243)/243)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(53-124)cos(Ɵ)+(205)cos(((53-124)/124)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(53-124)sin(Ɵ)-(-205)sin(((53-124)/124)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(118-124)cos(Ɵ)+(205)cos(((118-124)/124)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(118-124)sin(Ɵ)-(-205)sin(((118-124)/124)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(111-222)cos(Ɵ)+(205)cos(((111-222)/222)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(111-222)sin(Ɵ)-(-205)sin(((111-222)/222)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(113-210)cos(Ɵ)+(150)cos(((113-210)/210)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(113-210)sin(Ɵ)-(150)sin(((113-210)/210)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(78-210)cos(Ɵ)+(151)cos(((78-210)/210)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(78-210)sin(Ɵ)-(151)sin(((78-210)/210)Ɵ)
Ethan stepped closer to the screen, mumbling under his breath. “One-thirty-five . . . cosine . . . theta . . . equals . . . that could be ‘yesterday’ no, I think more specific . . . but it’s a date of some kind. This one—” He traced the equations as they moved up the screen. “I’ve only seen that in verbs, but it seems surrounded by . . . no, that can’t be right . . .”Finally, he turned from the screen in frustration.
“I can’t keep up with it. Just when I get a handle on the part of speech, it’s moved to another equation. I can’t concentrate on one long enough to decipher it. And most of them I don’t know by heart anyway. I need a readout that I can freeze, and I need my glyphtol to plot the symbols. It’s impossible this way.” He headed for the hole in the wall.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going for my journal and my glyphtol. Maybe if I can record some of the equations I can decipher them.” He was down and gone through the hole before she could protest.
Ethan returned quickly, reaching through the hole and setting his instruments in the room ahead of him. He crawled through after them and then stood in front of the screen. Taking a laser pen and opening his journal, he began writing as fast as he could. The equations appeared on the surface of the paper, letter after letter, number after number. His eyes darted from the paper to the screen and back, capturing one line at a time. As he struggled to keep up, he realized with chagrin how easy this would be if the computer could record the readout and freeze it. He couldn’t dwell on the thought, however, because he had already missed several numbers and letters by letting himself get distracted
He had two pages of notes by the time his hand cramped up badly enough that he had to stop. He seemed to start breathing again and he looked up at Kaia.
“Did you get it?” She said carefully.
“As much as I could of it. I know I missed a lot. And it’s still scrolling. I don’t know how much good this bit will do us. But we’ll see.” He took out the glyphtol.
“Are you okay?” Kaia asked suddenly.
“Sure. Why?”
“You look a little pale . . . paler than usual, I mean.”
Ethan looked at her. “I’m a little dizzy,” he said. “I’ve never read anything so quickly.”
“Sit down.”
He followed her advice and then bent over his journal.
“I’m starved,” she said as he began to work. “I’m going to get some food to bring back here.”
He nodded, and she slipped out the hole in the wall.
Chapter 15
Ethan worked feverishly. He flipped from the page with his scrawlings to a blank page, where he carefully found his starting places and drew the figures. He didn’t bother stacking them, just drew them i
n straight lines, left to right, across the page. It was complex work, and as the symbols slowly appeared on the paper, he knew that there was a risk that he’d written a number wrong or forgotten a negative sign. Wherever he’d made such mistakes, the symbols would turn out wrong.
As the symbols appeared, Ethan tried to do a progressive translation. Many of them were new to him. He had to approximate their meanings based on other symbols he knew. By the time Kaia came back, he had translated most of the equations into symbols and many of the symbols into words. It was, seemingly, a list of parts and items on the ship. Chairs, assembly units, engine parts—the list ticked on from the top deck down. This bit was on the third deck, where the Caretaker’s hold was located.
Kaia looked over the list. “Hmmm. I guess it’s just the ship’s manifest.”
“Seems like it.”
“It’s odd, though.”
Ethan nodded. “It almost raises more questions than it answers: why is it hidden back here? Why is it streaming? And most importantly, why is it written in a language that only a handful of people in the world can read?”
“It is strange.”
“I think we need to see more of it.” He stood, turning toward the screen again. To his surprise, he staggered slightly. “I’ll jot down some more.”
Kaia was suddenly at his elbow. She put a hand on his arm. “First, I think you need a break. You’ve been in here for hours.”
Ethan raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“Really. It’s 2 AM. Come get some sleep.” She pulled him gently toward the exit.
“Actually, I am really tired.” He followed her without argument, bringing the journal and the wooden case carrying his writing instruments with him.
“I’ve turned off the day and night cycle.” Kaia said, as she helped him stagger to the the couch nearest the door on the observation deck. “Sleep as long as you can.” She was still standing quietly beside the couch as he fell asleep.
He slept a long time. The curves of the Xardn language ran through his dreams. He chased them as he slept, trying to capture their meaning and the reason for their existence on this ship. He slept through the next day and night. When he awakened, it was mid-morning and thirty-two hours had passed. He ate a huge breakfast, drank three glasses of orange juice, and took a hot shower.
“Computer,” he said, as he dried his hair. “Where is Kaia?”
“Passenger three six nine two is in the secondary navigation room.”
Ethan made his way there. Kaia was not in the room, but when he stuck his head through the hole in the wall, he found her inside the closet. “You fooled the computer,” he said as he wriggled through.
“What?”
“It thinks you’re in the secondary nav room.”
“Well, according to its schematics, I am.”
“It really doesn’t recognize that there’s a wall here and a whole lot of extra computer equipment?”
“Not from what I can gather. It still knows we’re here; it just thinks that this is part of the secondary nav room. I have decided we should call this the “Tertiary Navigation Room” between us so we can keep them straight.” Kaia turned back to the bank of computers. Ethan noticed for the first time that she was manipulating a slender glowing cable that was connected to an open panel in the bank of computers. His eyes followed it back to where it connected to a small computer terminal at her feet.
“Keeping yourself busy while I slept, I see?” He crouched down to get a closer look at the terminal. It was a small squarish box covered on the topside with knobs, switches, and buttons.
“This,” she said, tapping the cable, “is going to make your life easier. You should thank me.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said exaggeratedly. “What is it?”
“Oh, just your standard DR6320.”
“Of course . . .” Ethan waited.
“Okay, okay,” she laughed. “It’s a holographic storage module. Primative, as I scavenged the main bits from one of the AAUs.” She pointed to the screen with its scrolling data. “In a few more minutes, anything that has ever been on this screen, or the module that’s feeding it, will be in this little box. All you’ll have to do is plug this cable into the screen in the hold and you’ll have the data at your fingertips. You can pause it, go back, go forward, enlarge it, whatever you want. Of course, you can also feed it directly into the ship’s main computer and have the translation done in a matter of seconds.” Her eyes sparkled at him.
“Wow. Kaia, you’re an engineering marvel.”
“I knew that all those extra courses would pay off someday.”
“You took extra courses?”
“Three every semester. I didn’t want to miss anything. Of course, I probably learned more from taking apart every mechanical thing I could get my hands on. I’ve done that all my life. Way before coursework.” She checked the colored lights on the box. “When the purple one lights up, the copy is complete. Then you can take it back to the hold if you want.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“I have another mystery to solve,” she said, moving back to the open panel and pointing inside. “I’ve got to find out where this comm cable goes. It appears that this information is being communicated somewhere. That’s weird because the ship’s manifest should be a static document, available for access, but not of importance or interest to anyone other than the Caretaker. Unless there’s other info on this system, I can’t see why this cable is here. I’m going to track where it goes. If it’s linked into the other computer, that’s one thing, but this kind of cable is usually used to send information out to other systems outside the ship, which makes no sense.”
Ethan was only half-listening. He was itching to get the Xardn information into the ship’s computer. When he saw the purple light, he couldn’t help interrupting her. “Looks like it’s done.”
She double-checked and then reached up and unplugged it, coiling the cable, scooping up the terminal, and handing it to him in one fluid motion. “I’m off to track down this cable. I’ll check on you in a while.”
He was back to the hold in a heartbeat. He found the input port on the screen and plugged the box into it. A list of equations appeared. “Computer,” he said, “Please translate the information on the main hold screen.”
The computer was quiet, scanning. “Information not found.”
“What?”
“Information not found, Mr. Bryant.”
“Computer, the information is clearly visible on the main screen.”
“The screen is blank, Mr. Bryant.”
Ethan felt the old exasperation rising in him. It was impossible to argue with the computer. It would simply restate its position over and over. It obviously didn’t see the information which was so plain to him, and he didn’t want to leave the puzzle any longer.
“Computer, do you recognize the external module attached to the main hold screen’s input?”
“Yes, Mr. Bryant.”
“Please translate the information available on that module and make it available via the holoscreen.”
The computer was quiet. “Information not found.”
“The module is full of information!”
“The module is blank, Mr. Bryant, except for ghost images of the food prepared by Atomic Assembly Unit number six.”
“That will be all, computer.” Ethan realized that he’d have to get started on the information the old-fashioned way. Maybe Kaia could do something about the computer when she got back from her quest.
Ethan sighed and crossed to the shelf where he kept his glyphtol and his journal. He retrieved the instruments and began his work.
The screen read:
x(Ɵ)=(75-125)cos(Ɵ)+(44)cos(((75-125)/125)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(75-125)sin(Ɵ)-(-44)sin(((75-125)/125)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(39-120)cos(Ɵ)+(44)cos(((39-120)/120)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(39-120)sin(Ɵ)-(-44)sin(((39-120)/120)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(75-134)cos(Ɵ)+(98)cos(((75-134)/134)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(75-134)sin(Ɵ)-(-98)sin(((75-134)/134)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(50-201)cos(Ɵ)+
(100)cos(((50-201)/201)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(50-201)sin(Ɵ)-(100)sin(((50-201)/201)Ɵ); x(Ɵ)=(230-50)cos(Ɵ)+(50)cos(((230-50)/50)Ɵ), y(Ɵ)=(230-50)sin(Ɵ)-(-50)sin(((230-50)/50)Ɵ)
Ethan started with the first equation and worked out the symbols:
He jotted down the translations: “Navigational Coordinates,” then went on to the next equation, which yielded three symbols.
And the translation: “List of Items.”
“This must be a main menu.” He mumbled to himself as he worked out the next several symbols. They translated to “List of Human Cargo” and “Treaty Documents.” He paused as he looked at the “Treaty Documents” folder. It was different than the others, embedded later and by someone who knew little about the coding of this system, maybe an intern from the United Earth Government. He didn’t think the Treaty Documents would hold much interest because he’d read the whole history of the purchase of Minea and the many peace and trade treaties with various alien powers. No one had really been interested in Minea or its surrounding galaxy, deeming it too small or claiming the atmosphere was unsuited for their various physiological needs. Though humanoids found it charming, most of the rest of the universe found it quaint but useless.
Right now he was most interested in where the ship was going, so he decided to investigate the Navigational Coordinates folder first. It took him a few minutes to figure out how to use the dials and buttons on the computer terminal to navigate through the menu and choose what he wanted. Once he was into the folder, he spent several hours deciphering the equations into various dates and coordinates for the ship’s travel.
He was just finishing charting the ship’s trajectory when Kaia came into the hold, looking exhausted. But her eyes burned as he looked up at her. They both began to speak excitedly at the same time.
“Kaia, I just plotted—”
“Ethan, I followed—”