The Anomaly
Matthew was an astronaut (1st Class) and was highly trained for the rigours of space work. He was fit, experienced and smart. He had a Ph.D. in physics and another in existential philosophy. Decades of rigorous mental and physical training had put him at the peak of his performance, the best of the best in a competitive field. He should have been on one of the explorations around the sun, or manning one of the first hyperdrive flights.
He should have been testing something, winning something, leading something. He should have been doing something, anything, to justify all that training. The station’s crew consisted of Matt and a second astronaut, Chen, who was equally as qualified for working in space, and equally annoyed at their assignment.
“Does it ever worry you?” Matt asked Chen one day.
“Which bit? The Anomaly? The fact that this is station is Observer Three, but I have never heard of a One or a Two? The fact that I’m spending a year of my life babysitting a ruined and archaic space station in a forgotten corner of the solar system with a man who ate my whole week’s chocolate ration while I was asleep?” Chen said cheerfully.
Matt said nothing; he still felt a little guilty about the theft.
“It worries me,” said Chen, now serious.
Neither Matt nor Chen felt that they deserved to be stuck changing fuses in the half-abandoned shell of the universe’s worst space station, but that was exactly how they spent their days. As punishment for stealing Chen’s chocolate, Matt had agreed to change any fuse that broke for three full days. He hung in the air, shoulder deep in an air filtration unit. It was a particularly hard fuse to get to, and he groaned as he pulled himself deeper into the electronic heart of the machine. He pushed his arm behind a foam insulation pad and felt around for the fusebox.
“Found it,” he said to himself.
He pulled out the faulty fuse, threw it gently over his shoulder and replaced it with a fresh unit. Then he packed the insulation back in place and slid out backwards, curling up into a ball in the air and then stretching each of his limbs out as far as they would go. He swam awkwardly towards a wall, and then pushed off towards the corridor, scooping up the broken fuse as he did so.
“Fuses!” he cursed, wondering who on Earth still used them.
Whoever built Observer Station 3 must have owned shares in a fuse factory. They were in every life-support and sensor system, and seemingly always breaking. Matt replaced dozens a day, and cursed every time he opened a new box of the things.
Keeping the station running was a full time job, and there was always something to fix or replace.
Fuses! Insulation made from foam! Doors that were opened by pulling on heavy levers! Matt had never seen such things in nearly two decades of working in space. It seemed to him that the Observer Station had been built by neurotic amateurs from parts they had found in rubbish tips and garage sales. The switches were large, the screens small. He was used to space equipment being the best of the best, but everything on the station was old, cheap and faulty.
The station defied the normal economics of space travel: it was larger than it needed to be, and most of it was empty. Entire sections were without power, empty halls floating in space.
The archaic construction belied the importance of the station: its mission was to watch the first confirmed alien artefact found in the Sol. The sphere had arrived unexpectedly, and its origin remained unknown. Apart from shocking and terrifying Earth’s population by its mere existence, the artefact did little apart from orbiting Mars. The Observer Station 3 had been built to watch, and that was all its crew could do.
The work was important, but mindlessly repetitive.
“And boring, boring, boring!” Matt muttered.
Every thirty-two minutes the Anomaly would glow green for ten seconds, and then fade back to dull silver. While it was green, it sent out two identical bursts of electromagnetic energy that may or may not have been a message. If it was a message, it was wasted on a planet of people who could only listen in bewilderment. Communicating with the sphere had proved fruitless, although everything short of physical contact had been tried.
So the crew of Observer 3 watched, and waited, and spent their time fixing fuses.
“Anything new?” asked Matt as he floated into the control room.
Chen didn’t even acknowledge the question, but continued playing what appeared to be a word game on the computer console. He wasn’t talking to Matt.
“I fixed the filter,” said Matt, conversationally.
Chen looked up at the huge board of lights above his head. The damage control panel was another idiosyncratic feature of the station: an old fashioned mixture of labels interspersed with green and red L.E.Ds. The panel was connected directly to all systems in the station using physical wire connections. As Matt watched, the light for the filtration system changed from green back to red. The fuse he had just replaced must have broken again.
“Did you, now?” asked Chen unkindly as Matt’s face fell.
Watching the Anomaly wasn’t difficult work. Computers and sensors of every kind and size were pointed at the dull sphere. When Matt and Chen weren’t fixing things they had to trawl through reels of data for anything unusual. Highlights from the last year of recording included a passing asteroid and a solar flare. Nothing changed: there was nothing new or unusual. Boring.
Matt sent a routine message back to his superiors on Earth. The date changed, but the message remained the same.
Although Matt and Chen were the only astronauts on the station there were five crew rooms, each with two beds in them. Chen had taken one, Matt another. They used a third as a games room and the last two for storage. They had never been told why they were the only staff on a ten-person station, or why the station had been empty when they arrived. It wasn’t normal, and it made Matt uneasy from the first day.
Apart from the maintenance and data crunching there was remarkably little for them to do. They spent their spare time playing games and betting on the results. Matt had lost their most recent game, a cross between Risk and Zero-g darts, and owed Chen three hours maintenance duty and an hour of pretending to be a chicken. Their current game, battleship-chess, wasn’t going as well for Chen, and Matt was quietly confident of a win. When the games got boring, Chen practised his French while Matthew read his way through the works of Dickens.
The Anomaly did nothing unusual. It barely did anything at all.
They agreed that Observer 3 had been built by paranoid idiots. It was the only rational explanation. Everything important to the station’s functioning had been built in sets of five, from the life-support systems to the sensor pods and connecting corridors. In theory this meant that every system had a set of redundant fail safes, keeping the crew safe. In reality, only three of the systems were ever working properly at any time. Station protocol demanded that all five worked continuously, so Matt and Chen had to work endlessly to fulfil their impossible orders.
“We could just ignore protocol,” suggested Matt one night.
Chen threw a pair of magnetic dice at the wall where they stuck with a double bang.
“A six and a three, which means your battleship is in check,” he said, moving a few pieces on the board.
“I said we could-”
“-No,” said Chen.
They never discussed it again. Matt knew that Chen was probably right. The work had become an annoying routine, an endless ritual of replacing fuses and analysing data. It wasn’t long before they could change the fuses blindfolded. They made a game of it: Chen won six times out of ten in the life-support, Matt seven out of ten in the sensors room. The Anomaly never changed, and its thirteen second cycle became imbedded in their minds.
By the fifth month they had given up all hope of something happening. They passed the time as best they could. Sometimes they argued, but the lack of other company meant that they had to get on or go mad. Whoever had chosen them had done an admirable job, and they got on extremely well for the most part.
The latest data flashed on a screen overhead, unheeded. The astronauts continued with their little hobbies until something made Chen stop suddenly.
“Something odd just happened,” said Chen, glaring suspiciously at a dial.
He clicked a few buttons aimlessly, checking readout and wondering what it was that he had seen.
“What, the restaurant finally said yes?” joked Matt.
“No, really. Something is wrong, but I don’t know what!”
Chen grabbed a computer console and began trawling through it, but Matt knew what he was going to say even before the computers confirmed it. The anomaly was silver.
“It didn’t change colour,” whispered Chen.
“What-”
Matt was cut off by a stream of purple light that illuminated every corner of the room in painfully bright colour. Sparks ran across the control panels, and the room lights went dark. When Matt finally opened his eyes, all he could see were the red lights of the damage control panel. Chen groaned, holding his head as afterimages from the purple light played in front of his eyes.
Sirens beeped, lights flashed and then died.
A screen lit up on one of the control panels, flashing. Matt read its message, which said:
“Emergency protocols initiated: send message drone (7/9 remaining) Y/N?”
Matt punched the send key, a bad feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t ever used a message drone before. It surprised him that they were still being used: message drones were antiques, nothing more than a black box on a rocket. Matt wondered why a station would need nine, and what had happened to the other two drones. The Observer Station just got a little more terrifying in his mind.
Chen was already trying to contact Earth through more conventional means. He tried sending out a call using lasers and radios, but the systems weren’t responding.
“Not good,” said Chen calmly.
The station fell into darkness unexpectedly as the lights died in the control room. The station began to shake and spin. Chen moved over to the emergency stabilisation jets. The station was kept in orbit by a set of automatic altitude jets, but they had failed. Chen struggled with the controls, desperately trying to stabilise the orbit as the station was caught in unexpected tides of energy that pushed and pulled at it its walls.
Matt pulled out his emergency flashlight and caught Chen by the shoulder. He pointed at the red lights of the damaged panel, and Chen nodded. They had spent so long doing repairs that they instinctively knew which systems were the most important from all their repair works. Chen stuck to the controls while Matt rushed to the life-support. He reached an air filter and was surprised to find that the problem was nothing more serious than a broken fuse. He replaced it quickly, noting with concern that the insulation foam seemed burnt and twisted.
A series of explosions vibrated overhead. Matt counted seven explosions as he worked.
“Bet those were the message drones,” he complained as he worked.
Chen soon joined him in his repair work. The two men worked with efficiency born from long practice, quickly replacing burnt fuses and layers of insulation. Chen jumped on the comms panel and sent a new message off to Earth. The Anomaly’s light would have reached the Agency long before Chen’s message, so Earth would know something was up.
Matt worked desperately to get the station sensors to work while Chen reported all that they knew. The Anomaly flickered between colours and pumped out radiation in bursts. Matt and Chen could feel their adrenaline pumping through their bodies, both men ready to make a leap for their transport spaceship, which was docked on the side of the station opposite the Anomaly.
The Anomaly kept changing, defying everything they thought they knew about it. They were probably going to die, but this was what they had been waiting for their whole lives.
“Bet you a dollar that when we get promoted I’ll be your boss,” said Matt.
Chen laughed slightly, nervous but excited.
“If this goes badly, we will be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets,” he said.
“OK, but dibbs on still being the boss because-”
Matt’s reasoning was interrupted by a shriek of metal on metal as some part of the station ripped away and fell towards the Anomaly. The two astronauts waited, tensed and ready for action.
“That tearing sounds was… ?” asked Matt.
“Our ship being pulled from the station,” confirmed Chen tersely.
“Long walk home,” said Matt quietly.
The station vibrated around them and then fell silent. The lights flashed, went dark, flashed, held steady, fell dark again. The lights continued in this manner for a few seconds and then the station remained dark. Chen moved over to a signalling station. He pushed a few buttons and then hissed in annoyance. All their signalling systems were offline, even the most basic and reliable of them. There would be no contacting Earth for help, advice, or even just to say goodbye.
“I have a really big flashlight under my bunk,” offered Matt.
For once he wasn’t joking. The lights were playing out a single word in Morse code, over and over again. The Anomaly was trying to talk to them, and they wanted to talk back. Matt found his torch, and he and Chen searched the station for a window overlooking the Anomaly. One of the many oddities of the station was its surplus of windows, and one of them gave a magnificent view of the Anomaly with the planet in the background. Matt handed Chen the light and pulled out a notepad.
“Sending ‘contact’ back,” said Chen.
It was an obvious start. Deciding what came next wasn’t nearly as easy.
“G-r-e-e-t-i-n-g-s space o-n space b-e-h-a-l-f space o-f space e-a-r-t-h,” Matt wrote as Chen signalled.
It was the best they could do on such short notice. Earth had never decided on the best way to greet an alien intelligence, and the final protocol had been decided by committee. It was long, tedious and, since it required the sending of photos and music samples by radio, now unworkable.
“If I thought this might actually happen I would have spent more effort trying to get the protocols changed,” Chen said.
They waited for over an hour in the darkness. They didn’t talk. The station was running on its emergency supplies of oxygen, and they both knew they wouldn’t last forever.
The station lights flicked on and stayed on. The life-support systems flicked back on. This time the Anomaly’s contact was gentler, dimming the lights rather than killing the station’s power.
“G-r-e-e-t-i-n-g-s space t-o space E-a-r-t-h space s-i-g-n-a-l-l-i-n-g space p-e-a-c-e-f-u-l space i-n-t-e-n-t-i-o-n-s,” Chen spelled out aloud as they watched the lights.
The Anomaly wanted to talk to them, alone and without interference from Earth. They didn’t know why, but it was better than nothing. They signalled their peaceful intentions back and waited. It was another hour before the Anomaly signalled again.
“The Anomaly wants to talk,” said Chen with a smile.
It made all the fuse changing worthwhile, but left Matt wondering if this had happened before. If this was the reason for Observer 3’s existence, did the Anomaly’s damaging form of conversation explain the station’s odd design? The excess of redundant life-support systems, its absence of crew?
The thought gave Matt cold shivers. Chen didn’t seem worried about it, and Matt wasn’t sure if he was just being paranoid.
“Ask if it has made contact before, Chen,” he said at last, deciding it was better to look paranoid than be unprepared.
Chen called out the letters as Matt wrote them down in his notebook.
“An eye of Earth watched us, but to listen was to break. A second eye saw but did not understand. This third eye heard once but ignored, returning to the Earth-orb.”
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br /> Chen said, reading the Anomaly’s answer as Matt wrote it down.
“Two eyes might be Observers one and two, but I wonder if the last crew on this station ran back to Earth when the station started shaking around?”
Chen nodded in agreement.
“That would explain quite a lot, but not why EarthControl didn’t let us know what to expect.”
They took a moment to silently curse EarthControl.
“Permission to converse?” read Chen aloud from the flashing messages.
Matt wrote this down with the other of the Anomaly’s messages.
“I thought we were conversing,” muttered Chen, “so what happens next?”
They made a second copy of all the Anomaly’s messages and placed it in the storage sections of Chen’s cabin with an outline of their situation. Then they went to their own cabins and wrote out letters to their family and friends in paper torn from Chen’s notepad. Like all spaceship crew, they had in-case-of-death letters stored with EarthControl, so the letters were brief.
Chen was waiting for Matt by the window overlooking the Anomaly.
“It’s been a pleasure,” he said unexpectedly but sincerely.
“Everyone who knows me says that eventually,” joked Matt.
Chen glared at him for a second and then smiled broadly for the first time since Matt had known him.
“You’re an idiot. Let’s hope this thing doesn’t use you to judge humankind. Although if I am about to be utterly annihilated by conversing with a powerful space creature, I’m glad you are here with me. That way you can’t hit on my sister when I’m not around.”
“Cheers,” said Matt, grinning, and clapped Chen on the back.
They were silent for a moment, sincere. But they were men of action, so the moment of reflection was short indeed.
They signalled a short message to the Anomaly that they agreed to converse, and then they waited. The Anomaly started to change colour slowly, a rainbow palette spreading across its surface. It began to move towards the station, spraying with an impossibly broad spectrum of energy. It consumed the station and its crew quickly, drawing them out of the solar system of their birth and deep into an abyss of colours.
The Origami Dragon And Other Tales Page 7