“Why are you out here?” Nadir asked with a blank expression on his face. “You volunteered for this mission. Why?”
“I—”
She had no answer, not one that would make any sense to him. Why had Jazz undertaken this journey? Jasmine imagined Jazz would have had a sense of adventure, a desire to explore the unknown, but she doubted her future-self had come with the intention of self-sacrifice, whether for the good of humanity or not.
“So you're willing to die out here exploring Bestla?” Jasmine asked. “To give your life, if need be?”
“If need be,” Nadir said, using her words in reply.
“Perhaps humanity is not so different from this alien species after all,” Jasmine said, thinking aloud.
“I don't understand,” Nadir replied. “What do you mean by that?”
“We're all prepared to live and die for something, only this thing has no noble intention, being willing to lay down its life for Satan, the bitter enemy of humanity.”
“But not Shiva,” Nadir countered. “Or Osiris, or Iblis, or Mephistopheles, or any of the other dark forces described by ten thousand different religions.”
“I don't understand how you can ignore the message,” Jasmine protested. “It is so specific.”
“Ah, yes it is,” Nadir replied, smiling. “And perhaps that is our problem. It is too specific, so much so we have no hesitation in believing it, but look at the content of the message semantically.
“I want to live and die for you, my glorious Satan. There are eleven words, nine of which are monosyllabic—nine of them! It sounds like a complex sentence with a clear meaning but it is not. There’s pauses, other sounds. It is a simple enough sentence, but it’s not really spoken words. Glorious Satan are the only two words with more than one syllable. Think about that. We normally speak in sentences with much more diversity than this.
“And the first phrase is not even a sentence—it’s a statement: Here's to my sweet Satan. It's out of context. There's no paragraph, no continuity, no explanation.
“No, Jazz. To use your US terminology, I don't buy it. We've interpreted this all wrong. Perhaps it's not meant to be interpreted at all.”
“What do you mean by that?” Jazz asked, intrigued by Nadir's thinking, realizing he had a unique perspective, looking at this problem from outside of Western culture.
“We are scientists, first and foremost. Before being astronauts, we are men and women of science, and yet we have abandoned rational thought. To me, that is a mistake.”
“You think there's some other way we should be interpreting this?” she asked.
“I think there are other possibilities we have overlooked. Consider the sound before and after the message. The wailing. It's chaotic, stochastic. It's not static, like you’d hear on a radio caught between stations. There's cohesion in the sound. There are relationships between the tones, even if we don't recognize them.
“You can read anything into a stochastic event. You can see any pattern you want to see—the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast, Elvis Presley in a knot of wood, Jesus on a pancake. Seeing these things doesn't mean they're real, it means they're realistic to us, but that doesn't mean they're part of reality.”
“So you think this could be an audible illusion?” Jasmine asked.
“Possibly,” Nadir replied, and she could see he was reasoning this through as he spoke to her. Nadir didn't have any answers, but he had a mind honed by science, a mind that thought rationally and logically. “I’m not saying this is an illusion, but it is a possibility we should explore.”
“Like an infinite number of monkeys sitting at a typewriter,” Jasmine mumbled in response, somewhat lost in thought.
“Yes, yes,” Nadir replied enthusiastically. “That's it. If you sit an infinite number of monkeys down in front of a bunch of typewriters, eventually you'll get the works of Shakespeare. Granted, it's not likely and you'll get an almost infinite number of failed attempts, but in principle it could happen. This message could very well be nothing more than the random confluence of variables that mean something to us but are meaningless to the aliens making this transmission. We're reading our own fears into this.”
“So if that's not the message,” Jazz continued. “Then what are they trying to say? They're saying something, that much is clear. They've deliberately transmitted this message to us. What are they trying to tell us?”
“I don't know.”
“And they’re deliberately transmitting to us,” Jasmine continued, expanding on her train of thought. “They know we’re here. We’re the noisy neighbor, blasting radio and television into space, not to mention airport radar and microwave transmissions. We woke them. They must have figured out the basics of our communication. They know we’re a space-faring, technological civilization. Why would they say something inflammatory?”
“I don’t know,” Nadir repeated.
The look on her face must have been one of alarm, she thought, as Nadir quickly qualified his statement.
“And that's not a bad thing. We may not know quite what this alien species is trying to say, but we know that it has attempted to communicate with a message it thinks we can understand. We need to move past this misunderstanding and look deeper.”
A voice spoke from behind them.
“I wish I could share your optimism,” Mike said.
Jasmine wasn't sure how much of the conversation Mike had heard, but he'd definitely caught the tail-end of their discussion. She hadn't seen Mike approach and wished she had. Jasmine wasn't comfortable around Mike, not as comfortable as she thought she should be.
“Can we talk?”
“Ah, yeah, sure,” Jasmine replied, her hand playing nervously with a ringlet of hair hanging down beside her face.
“Let’s get something to eat.”
Nadir smiled politely, turning back to his computer console.
“Thanks,” she said, calling out to him as she and Mike walked away.
Now that they were under constant acceleration, with the engines of the Copernicus fighting against the gravity of Saturn, carrying them millions of miles further from the gas giant, the dynamics of moving around the command deck had changed.
Whereas when Jasmine had first awoke, she felt as though she had drifted horizontally along a corridor into the command deck, now the acceleration of the Copernicus changed her perception. The acceleration mimicked gravity, anchoring them to a floor of sorts. The main corridor seemed like an empty elevator shaft rising up through the middle of the command deck. Before, she and Mike could have flown effortlessly across to the far side of the sphere in seconds. Now, they had to walk around the shaft.
In what felt like low gravity, stepping was akin to bouncing. There was a definite lag between stepping off the ground and feeling the deck rush back beneath her feet. She’d never really thought about it before, but now she understood walking was nothing more than controlled falling, tilting off balance, propelling herself forward and timing the next step perfectly. Only in point-six, there was no perfection. Jasmine found she had to keep her arms out to retain her balance, as she tended to overcompensate. Skipping would be easier, she decided, but skipping seemed too frivolous on an interplanetary spaceship, so she persisted with her crazy walk. Occasionally, she had to reach out and stabilize herself against a console. Jasmine couldn’t help but laugh at how absurd it was trying to walk in partial gravity.
Mike smiled, saying, “Like being a little kid again, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she replied. It was nice to see she wasn’t the only one that felt like she was learning to walk all over again.
They walked through the staggered consoles, from one curved platform to another as they climbed higher toward the galley on the far side of the deck.
Jasmine glanced back and Nadir gave a small, friendly wave from the opposite side of the command deck.
“Hey,” Mike said. “I just wanted to thank you for siding with me during that initial confrontation. I was feeli
ng pretty damn lonely at that point.”
“Huh?” Jasmine replied, not understanding what he was getting at.
“Back when Chuck and Nadir first wanted to continue the mission. I’m supporting Chuck, but only so long as he stays within the original mission guidelines.”
He winked, adding, “I have my suspicions.”
“Mike,” Jasmine said softly. “I’m worried about you.”
“About me?” Mike said, pointing at himself with a gesture of incredulity.
“Yes,” Jasmine replied almost in a whisper, in stark contrast to his boisterous tone.
“What do you mean, worried about me? It’s them you should be worried about. They’re deliberately going against the recommendation of Mission Control. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“I think you should know I'm undecided on all this,” Jasmine said. She was determined not to be railroaded into one position or another by anyone.
“But you're my wife,” Mike pleaded.
Most of the future had taken Jasmine off guard, but this was one point she'd been waiting for. Although she didn't feel in any way wedded to Mike, she'd heard the reference to their marriage. Neither of them were wearing wedding rings, but that was probably for practical reasons rather than a deliberate choice, and their last names were different, but that wasn’t so uncommon in the 21st century. There were three couples on the Copernicus. They had to be married to be stable during a long term mission, she thought. Perhaps for the old Jasmine, this would have been a difficult position to be in, but for nineteen year old Jasmine, this was easy.
“Don't assume anything, Mike. I'm quite capable of making my own decisions.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I think Nadir has some good points. You should talk to him. He's an intelligent, reasonable man.”
Jasmine could see the anger rising in Mike's face. His mouth tightened, leaving a slight, white outline around his lips. Jasmine felt bad. She felt forced into this position. She didn't want to be hostile toward Mike, but she didn't feel any obligation to fall in step behind him. If anything, their predicament seemed to call for depth of thinking, not blind obedience. This wasn't a difference of opinion over the wine selection at dinner—pinot or chardonnay. They were on the precipice of alien contact. From here, everything changed. Regardless of what lay on Bestla, humanity would never be the same again. She only hoped Nadir was right.
“Don’t be fooled, Jazz. Nothing is what it seems. When the smartest and brightest minds at NASA recommend an abort only to be overridden by a bunch of ill-informed politicians in Washington, you’ve got to question what’s really going on. Seriously, who do you trust? A team of scientists that have dedicated decades to the pursuit of reason and space exploration? Or a populist president concerned about ratings and pleasing lobby groups? Whose judgment are you going to trust?”
Science had always been optimistic and so her allegiance naturally fell toward hope, but she was shaken by the message. To live and die for Satan—there wasn't much that could be said for a positive perspective on that outlook, so she could understand NASA’s caution, but Nadir was a scientist too. Nadir wasn't content to accept defeat. She hoped Mike could be swayed by Nadir’s lateral thinking.
“Nadir made the point—”
“Don't fall for this, Jazz. Don't let this drive a wedge between us.”
Jasmine may not have been confident about being in space, but she was no wallflower. It may have taken her some time to come to grips with their predicament, but she wasn't going to lie down without a fight.
“You just about killed me back there!” she cried, pointing her finger at the center of his chest. Mike gestured for quiet with his hands, but she didn't care. “Don't you get that? You botched the revival process. Mei showed me the graphs. And you have the audacity to think I owe you something? I don't owe you anything!”
“Jazz, please,” Mike said, moving closer. “You don't understand. I tried to wake you so I could warn you, so you'd know what we are dealing with.”
“Well, you fucked that up,” she snapped, surprised by how much emotion welled up within her. Tears formed in her eyes. She could see Mike expected something more from her. Jasmine desperately wanted to be the Jazz of now, not the nineteen year old Jasmine sitting on a porch waiting for her boyfriend. She so wanted to be the woman he expected her to be, but she couldn’t. She had to be true to herself, and at that point all she had was her independence. Her sense of identity felt fractured, fragmented, torn between two realities, and so she had to hold fast to what little she knew.
“There's more at play here than you realize,” he continued, lowering his voice even though they'd walked to the far side of the deck, well away from Nadir.
“Then tell me,” Jasmine said, setting her hands firmly on her hips. To anyone watching, her act would have seemed defiant, but her hands were shaking and she was trying to hide the tremor. Her voice had a quiver. She felt as though everyone must know, they must be able to see through her, they must have figured there was something fundamentally wrong with her, and there was. She was displaced. She fought through a panic attack, adding, “Tell me what you won't tell them. Tell me why NASA woke you and not Chuck.”
Mike looked at his feet.
“This is going to sound crazy,” he said softly, with a distinct change in tone. “Ours isn't strictly a First Contact mission. We have another priority out here.”
His eyes met hers and she could see the weight he was carrying in his weary expression. Sad eyes, she thought. Tired.
“We’ve been caught up in something that's bigger than any of us, Jazz. Bigger than the mission. Chuck knew of another priority before launch. He's the only one that knew about the contingency measures that had been put in place. I had my suspicions, but I had no proof until now.”
She watched as Mike swallowed a lump in his throat. He took a deep breath, sitting up on the edge of a console.
“Have you ever thought about what happens if they're violent?”
He didn't have to say who “they” were. Jasmine knew he was talking about whoever or whatever had constructed Bestla.
“Before our launch, it was a concern, but not a priority, and yet if there's one thing NASA does it is plan for contingencies. Someone, somewhere thought something like this might happen. Maybe not the crazed rhetoric about Satan, but someone considered what would happen if these guys turned hostile, and they thought about what could be… what should be done.”
Jasmine felt a cold sweat break out on her forehead. Although she didn't know the specifics, she had a fairly good idea where Mike was leading her.
“We're a billion miles from Earth,” Mike continued. “There's a whole lot of nothing between us and all of humanity. Empty vacuum doesn't offer much of a defense.”
Jasmine spoke, almost involuntarily, as the reality of what Mike was describing struck her. “You think we're sitting on top of a bomb?”
Mike's lips tightened. He didn't respond. He didn't blink. He looked deep into her eyes and she could see the pain and anguish inside.
“Oh, Mike,” she said, reaching out and resting her hand gently in the middle of his chest. “Don’t do this. Don’t go down this road.”
His lips pursed. His jaw clenched, suppressing his anger.
“I can see what’s happening,” she said. “I understand what you’re going through, but you’ve got to talk to Chuck and Nadir. You’ve got to—”
“Chuck knows,” he snapped. As quickly as he raised his voice, he lowered it again, glancing at Nadir as he added, “Chuck is complicit.”
“Mike,” she pleaded, feeling as though she could see the contradiction in his heart. “You’re afraid. We all are. But don’t you see? We all have to deal with our fears in our own way.”
“I’m not crazy, Jazz.”
He took a deep breath before continuing, and she could see he was composing himself. Mike spoke softly, as though he were uttering a secret.
“I can prove it. It was
the power output graphs that gave it away, for me at least. We have enough plutonium on this rig to run the lights for ten thousand years. Having redundancy is one thing, but the fuel cost of spaceflight is ridiculous. I ran the numbers while we were in Camp Miami, and Jason confirmed the figures just a few minutes ago. Why kit us out with so much plutonium? And why are there tritium cylinders down in medical? I know it’s used in scans, but we couldn’t use a fraction of that stuff, and it has a half-life of just twelve years. The Copernicus is designed to be in service for decades. Most of the tritium would decay into helium! No, think about it, Jazz. We’re on a flying bomb. That’s the only answer that makes sense.
“We should be running lean. We have three refuel rendezvous with unmanned craft, one of them barely fifty million miles from here. Why carry excess mass when fuel is such a limitation?”
He rested his hands on her shoulders, and for the first time she felt he cared. Mike had never been one to show emotions outwardly, but the firm grip of his fingers, the warmth of his hands, the tragic look in his eyes, they told her more than words could convey.
“We're not carrying any excess, Jazz. The tritium only makes sense if we’re carrying a nuke. We're carrying precisely what we need—a thermonuclear warhead. One that's carefully disguised. One that is dual purpose, functioning as a power plant. That's the only explanation that makes sense.”
He was so confident, so sure of the details that she found herself being swept along with his conviction. Jasmine was adrift in a storm, looking for any port that would provide shelter, and she barely understood her own motives. She wanted to believe Mike, and yet even if he showed her the graphs, she wouldn't have had any idea what she was looking for. She had no reason to believe him, no reason other than the strength of his conviction. As convincing as Nadir’s logic had been, it was her emotional connection with Mike that won the day.
“Chuck is angling to get us closer, to put us in a position where we can strike first.”
“You really think he’d do that?” she asked.
“Why else would he go against the NASA recommendation? What other possible motive could he have?”
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