Endless Sky (An Island in the Universe Trilogy Book 1)

by Greg Remy

  Ah Zoe, he thought. Darious’ mind lifted to new heights around her and his memories of lowly hitchhiking, and before that, of laboring in the mines, faded into dust. He recalled his initial hesitation when first witnessing her ‘methods’ but her heart seemed to be in the right place. Something new had sprung up in him. He was beginning to trust her, to believe in her.

  Darious backed out of the program and navigated to other routines. He soon found one labeled ‘Ship Thermostat.’ As the program opened, a graphical user interface appeared, transposed across all screens around him with many options, command line cues, and charts. Off to his left, a virtual screen overlapping part of the cockpit window, read ‘Onboard Filtration Settings.’ In the command line, he typed ‘enter.’ The central screen instantly came back with text in red stating: ‘are you sure?’ He typed in ‘y.’ The left screen expanded and whipped across all other displays, presenting a plethora of options. Dazed, though optimistic from the progress made, he began reading through the list of options, using his finger to guide his sight through the many lines of text.

  He stopped at one which read ‘Internal Filtration C.O.D. Central.’ Darious entered it and suddenly a shrill yelp erupted from the washroom. “No!” he gasped and frantically searched the screens for an ‘end’ option before quickly abandoning it and ran to save Zoe from whatever he’d done. “Zoe!” he yelled through the door.

  “Damn that waters’ hot. Surprised myself. I turned the heat too high. Everything okay out there?”

  He opened his airways and panted. His face was pale, and his hands were shaking. “Yes,” he said, his voice strained. “All okay. No problems here.” Darious sighed and marched back to the cockpit, physically shaking off the certain doom he had faced. Sitting once more, he read over the subroutine and his heartbeat soon returned to normal. He carried on and navigated through more appealing options, spending time to read each thoroughly. He was slowly working his way down the list, being sure not to touch the keyboard until he was certain the right option had been found.

  Presently, he entered into an enticing subfolder which brought up 5 items, each one containing a command line prompt. There were no descriptions, just titles and a line to type in dialog. He twiddled his fingers for a moment, rationalizing the possible catastrophic consequences. Feeling confident, he typed ‘enter’ into the option labeled ‘Configure Central Air Purification.’ Suddenly, an alarm rang to life. The cleaving oscillatory siren made Darious leap into the air.

  This was it, the end for Zoe and himself. How could he have done this? How could he have been so careless? Sweat from every pour of his body beaded up and rained down his body, cleansing his smog-stained skin and replacing it with a newer unpleasant odor. The many screens emptied themselves of menus and command prompts and were replaced by a single red statement outlined by a bold rectangle: ‘Incoming Call.’ His mental convulsions ceased, and he sucked in precious breath.

  “Oh.”

  Darious was about to go to the washroom door to ask Zoe if he should answer, but as he turned she was already entering into the cockpit. Her hair was still wet from the shower, shining and adding to the radiance of her cleansed face. She was wearing a new set of clothes, similar to what she had on before, but the shirt contained a different graphic. Zoe looked at the screen and then at him, no doubt noticing his pallid, shaky composure.

  “Did, uh...” Her grin was nearly splitting her face in two. “...did you see a ghost?”

  Darious tried his best to compile himself. “You have a call,” he sheepishly responded and pointed a shaking finger to the screen.

  “I can see that.” She continued to smile, now kindly moving past him with shimmering elegance. Zoe typed in a command, turning off the alert and engaged the call. The two circular blue lights on the left and right of the console lit up as the stereoscopic microphones rose. “Hello. This is Zoe.” There was a low static on the other end. Zoe waited a moment. “Hello,” she repeated.

  A tinny and slightly distorted male voice came through. It spoke slowly, “Zoe... Zoe and the clone.” The voice ceased and only static was heard. Darious suddenly began to feel very uneasy.

  “Yes?” asked Zoe as she took her seat. Darious leaned in close behind her.

  “Sto...stop what you’re doing. They...” the voice paused. “They have marked you. You...you need to stop. And hide.”

  The voice was quivering worse than Darious had felt during his recent foray into the ship’s computer systems. From the few lines the individual had spoken, Darious picked up on his truly tremulous manner, as if he were shaking from heart to fingertip. However, Darious thought the statements had sounded constructed, though clumsily delivered. Had the individual practiced these words?

  “Interesting,” Zoe stated, “Care to elaborate?” She silently began to touch-type. The voice on the other line did not speak, but the channel remained open. Zoe cleared her throat. “Okay then, whom am I talking to?”

  Static crackled. “No one.” The voice fidgeted. “Pl... please Miss Zoe and co... company, please end your activities into this mat...matter.”

  Zoe continued typing and suddenly paused. “What the hell?”

  Darious looked down at her and whispered, “What is it?”

  She muted the line. “The call is coming in through an FTL Fubier interstellar wave algorithm.”

  Darious scanned out to the horizons of his mind. “I am not familiar with the term. What does it mean?”

  “It means he’s calling from a very long ways away.”

  Zoe resumed the call. “Sir. Who is this? I can see your Fubier algorithm intertwined within the communication signal.”

  The call abruptly ended, and the blue encircled microphones slid back into the console. Zoe was already typing away. “He was using a proxy line shrouded to look like a normal communication signal. We can assume in order to mask his location, but the depth of the attenuation means it was sent from a very far location.” Her fingers typed as an orchestra, harmonizing each keystroke into the next with a precision of steps that Darious thought could rival the great musicians of Earth-1. He knew they too had played instruments of keys and he had read their rhapsodies could produce such melodies that would stir the heart and even end wars. Zoe had that gift, though the melodies produced by her tapping of keys were not for the ear, but for something even more fundamental.

  Zoe ended the concerto with an arm raised high and brought down her pointer finger to the control panel, engaging the program. “Well, that was an interesting call. I’m running a trace on it now. We shall soon see where our new friend hails from. Go ahead and shift our coordinates. I don’t wanna be caught off guard.”

  Darious swallowed, producing an unintentional burp. His meandering cognizance suddenly snapped to attention. The events of the last hour all at once seized his mind, as if a Trojan horse had just opened and he was the lone fool staring up at a thousand men. He could feel his skin go cold and once more he became a washed-out version of his former self. Zoe looked over at him expectantly but her face eased.

  “Darious, how about a nice hot shower?”

  He nodded and made a strained smile. Zoe took his hand and led him to the washroom. She pointed to the left temperature control. “Careful with that one, it’s a bit touchy.”

  Chapter 12

  Some People Just Have Too Much Time on Their Hands

  Darious soon joined Zoe in the cockpit where she was pouring over the results of the call analysis. She was huffing continuously, having to read and reread entire strings of results. Without looking up she asked, “Did you find the clothes I put beside the door?”

  “Yes Zoe. Thank you very much.”

  She turned in her chair and looked him up and down. The brown pants seemed a near perfect fit. Darious had tucked them neatly into the black boots she had also scrounged up. Of the three shirts she had laid out, he had chosen the ashen one and wore over it a leather vest that had slightly-worn trimmings, giving him the appearance of a veteran semi p
ilot. Darious’ exposed, tanned arms revealed the coded tattoos on each ligament. His muscles were now apparent and larger than Zoe had first assumed. Seeing him cleaned up and in fresh clothes, she began to wonder about the ‘clone.’ The word was fluttering; he was a human being. Darious stood tall and proud, beaming at her. The statement continued to free-float like an autumn leaf in her mind. Human. Though she had never agreed with the way clones were treated, she had never had the chance to converse with one, and now to hear his story and his dreams, to share commonalities and to have his companionship was simply... Zoe searched for the word... nice.

  “You look… nice,” she said with an emphasis on the word and instantly realized how it must have sounded. She finished by saying, “they look nice on you. The clothes, they fit you well.” She turned back to the console, palming her face in her mind. “Okay, so I’ve completed my first round of analysis. I say first round because it turns out this call has done some fancy flying on its journey to us and it’s going to take more time to find this fella.”

  “What can I do, capt’n?” Darious asked. She turned and was met with a smirk.

  “I take it you feel better after your shower?”

  “Yes! And the clothes! Thank you, Zoe.”

  She bowed to him in her seat. “Come, check this out.” Zoe scrunched over and Darious took up the spot next to her. “So, this guy was probably pulling our transmitted responses from a precision antenna pointed toward us.” She then pointed to a segment of overlapping mesh of symbols and text. “However, his transmitted Fubier signal was curved around three—yes three—neutron stars! The resulting vector was through four bismuth rich planets en-route to us, in addition to many other objects, which I assume was all done purposely to further distort the source. I’m having a hell of a time untwisting and detangling his signal.”

  Darious bent forward, reading the results she was describing, but it was evident he was not absorbing everything. She herself was a bit lost. Zoe acquired her position on the screen again. “So, the main problem now is I can’t see the source of the signal before that last neutron star. On my current simulation, if we follow that curve, the signal leaves the galaxy. Though, if I bend it by any minor amount, it intersects any number of objects. Like a needle in a haystack.”

  Darious chortled at the phrase. “Maybe...” he started. Zoe typed a request for the computer to simulate. It came back momentarily.

  “Nope.” She threw up her hands. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, what if the signal did originate from outside the galaxy?” Darious asked.

  Rockets ignited within Zoe. “Genius!” She began fanatically typing. “Darious! Simply genius! That accounts for the stretched-out attenuation of the signal. Simulating now.” After a minute, the main screen dropped down new meshes of coding. “Ah-ha! Darious, you’re right. The fade amplitudes match perfectly! The signal was sent from beyond the galaxy. In fact, it was sent from our galaxy out to the Andromeda Galaxy and looped around its central black hole back to us!”

  “Yes indeed!” His expression lit up but began shifting downward as some perplexing contemplation edged in. “The signal was not even in the haystack. Though...”

  She continued his statement, engrossed in her own thoughts, “Though, this person would need quite a powerful antenna or an array of highly localized antennas. The specificities and harmonics are mind boggling. This man is a genius. Luckily for us, now that we know the signal’s general direction and distance, the algorithm he used becomes apparent. Each node you see here is just to compensate an anomaly in space—like a comet or planet.” She typed in several cues and continued working out loud, “With the major known ones gone, we can now see the general power curve,” she pointed to a flowing green graph at her right, “and where the point reaches ‘1’ is the signal’s source. Now to go from a general direction to the pinpointed location.” She typed for several more minutes and waited for the computer to simulate the response. “Phew! Over 3 million subjacent nodes edited out. Good thing we aren’t using a slide ruler, eh Euclid?” Zoe playfully jabbed Darious in the side with her elbow. “Okay, just a couple more tweaks and we should have it. Gotta get rid of all this noise.” She paused for a moment. “But can you consider all the work that would have gone into such a phone call?”

  Zoe began to think as the computer finished up cleaning the complex signal. For her to unravel this communication algorithm, it was basically straightforward; for the person who initially calculated it, it must have been a feat worthy of a Z-Prize. Zoe’s mind was juggling about a dozen compounding variables—just off the top of her head—necessary to attempt this sort of communication. And not just that, she thought, the resonating algorithm would be required to hit just the right nodes at just the right points along its entire winding journey of—her mind went into after-burner mode—of a million floating-parsecs. Just to attempt such a communication; Zoe now saw an ocean of variables. Her mind did another summersault. Oh, and the dimension of time! To take into account all that scalar skewing… it’s not like one could simply dial a destination across the cosmos to the precision of a human hair and press ‘Call.’ Calculating the path through the many many-body problems would take a long time to compute. And plus! Plus the fact that they were moving and everything else in the universe was moving, and influences from obstacles would constantly be coming and going in-between the signal’s starting point to its destination. Zoe’s thoughts were now free floating in space. Astounding.

  “Zoe?” asked Darious, bringing her back to the ground. “This genius, though irregular, did warn us to stop. One must assume he was referring to our current investigation. But why? Also, how did he know?”

  “Well” she inflected his tone, “how about we go find out?” With fleet fingertip movements, Zoe unbound the last of the transmission distortions and the computer homed in on signal’s originating location. She enlarged it. “The moon Iros, of the world Ios.” She brought up a fact sheet on it.

  Darious began reading segments out loud. “Uninhabited. Near zero atmosphere. Calcate rock...” he stopped reading. “It seems like an out of the way place for a genius to be living.”

  “To each his own I suppose.”

  “Shall we?” Darious asked with a glint in his eyes and the hint of a shy grin upon his lips.

  “Yes sir!” responded Zoe. She input the coordinates and the ship bound into high speed. “13 days to rendezvous.”

  Chapter 13

  The 13th Day

  Zoe switched off the bass-filled electronic music as they reached the periphery of the planetary system containing Ios and Iros. She engaged the ship’s midrange tracking hardware. Darious was in the central chamber studying. Zoe had given him reading material covering a range of topics including engineering, physics, history, and sociology.

  “Darious,” she called over her shoulder. He put the books away and joined her in the cockpit. “It would seem we have arrived. No unusual readings from the scanners yet. I’m willing to bet we won’t get any until we’re right on top of him.”

  “This man is showing typical behaviors of a recluse. Perhaps a posttraumatic stress disorder.” He waved his finger in the air. “No, perhaps a social anxiety disorder, or an avoidant personality disorder. Though I doubt the last, as he did reach out and send us a warning. In any case, I suggest extra caution as he may be...” Darious searched for the word with his finger, “...unstable.”

  Zoe smirked. It seemed someone had been reading a bit of psychology. Darious was soaking up all she could give him at a rapid pace; soon he’d be teaching her.

  “Agreed Darious. I will put us into orbit around the moon and continue scanning. I’m assuming we will also be looking out the window for signs of life.” Darious nodded in the affirmative. Zoe had further integrated his computing station into her ship’s infrastructure now that he had a bit of training of the ship’s systems. “Set up a 40% electro-static covering on the outer hull. ‘Caution’ is the word of the day.” Darious nodded o
nce more and entered the command into his computer terminal and then rejoined her, leaning on the arm of her chair.

  The display to Zoe’s right remained blank. Even as they entered in the orbit of Iros, there was still not a single ping to evidence any human activity, not any out of place signal on any channel nor any ectopic radiation emissions of any kind. According to the ship’s sensors, this entire solar system was completely uninhabited. But Zoe was sure of her calculations. She salivated at the questions she would ask this man once they had found him. The ship started a controlled descent to a low anti-synchronous orbit.

  “We will loop around all quadrants of the planet. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  “Eyes peeled?” ask Darious

  “Indeed,” she replied.

  About a half-hour later, a sheen on the horizon caught both of their attentions simultaneously. Zoe was quick on the control console and adjusted course to intercept. The bright spec grew into a structure as the ship neared it. Darious continued staring at the foreign object while Zoe attempted in vain to get a reading off of it.

  “Oh my,” Darious said.

  Zoe paused her digital probing and looked out. Three stout towers were now decipherable on the dusty, cratered moonscape. As the ship neared, Zoe could see their semicircle tops arching down to cylindrical bases and each connected to the next through tube-like corridors. Adjacently, a landing hangar was joined to the structure. The colors of the entire ziggurat matched the ancient soil around it, save for a slight metallic patina that lined its edges.