A Spacetime Tale

by J. Benjamin

  “Easy to do when the volunteers all have criminal records on Earth, are seven hundred and fifty million miles away from home, and have few other career prospects,” Thomas interjected.

  “So, as I was saying, the first few batches were an abysmal failure. Some of the gammanauts came back completely brain-dead or died while hooked up to the machine. That all changed after the seventh batch.”

  “The seventh batch?” Thomas asked. He opened the manila folder and pulled out three pages, each showing a separate face. “If I am not mistaken, this is the one that included Edie Brenner, Alex Harper, and Simon Emmerson? Tell me more about that sequence from start to end.”

  “It was April 3, 2081. This was eight months before the first report arrived. Back then, we had no idea what the Aquarians were. We didn’t know nor care much about Kennedy because, like everybody else, we never imagined the Pelicans would have found what they found. Instead, we set our sights on Kalaw 13. That was the destination we set for the wormhole.”

  “Kalaw 13? That’s a strange choice,” Thomas said. “There’s nothing there. The only known planets are a couple of hot Jupiters.”

  “Ah, but you forget the Wow signal!” Dev replied.

  “The Wow signal? From 1977? You mean from more than a century ago?” asked the secretary-general.

  “Yes. Before Kennedy, before the Pelicans, before Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and before Alistair 937, it was the earliest clue that we might not be alone in the universe.”

  “I know what the Wow signal is. I don’t see where you are going with this,” Thomas said.

  “For several decades, nobody was able to track where it originated. NASA and the earliest space agencies all concluded that it came from the Sagittarius constellation, primarily the globular cluster Messier 55. Most of the research into it dead-ended. Unbeknownst to the GSF and to every space agency on Earth, before she died, my mother conducted a secret project to locate the origin of the Wow signal.

  “Now, it makes complete sense that no sane person would waste their time on Kalaw 13. Like you said, it has no known habitable planets. It is more than twenty thousand lightyears away and well out of reach of Pelican swarms. When the star was discovered in 2055, it got lost in a sea of data,” Dev explained.

  “I remember Kalaw 13,” Thomas replied. “I remember when Bituin Kalaw petitioned GSF to do further research into the star. We turned her down. Well, I didn’t, but my predecessors did. Felt it was a waste of resources. Didn’t think her case was strong enough.”

  “And she went straight to my mother after that, and mother took the project on herself.”

  “And what did she find?” Thomas asked.

  “That there was absolutely something strange happening with the star. The team discovered radio patterns that were consistent with the Wow signal. At first, my mother wondered if there had been a mistake. It made no sense. Her team ran several tests just to be sure that they hadn’t mistakenly come across a neutron star or any other source. Test after test ultimately concluded that Kalaw 13 was the source of the infamous Wow signal,” Dev said.

  “Okay. So, you sent your gammanauts in the direction of where the Wow signal originated. What does this have to do with the seventh batch?” Dev asked.

  “The first six attempts to get gammanauts to Kalaw 13 were failures. Then on the seventh attempt, something extraordinary happened. After ten hours inside the sequence, the gammanauts came back! Brenner, Harper, and Emmerson all came back alive,” Dev said.

  “Go on,” Thomas said, now with a look of intense curiosity.

  “During the journey to the other side of the bridge, the surviving gammanauts saw things that confounded all logic. Primarily, they spoke at great length about coming into contact with a species that was not of this world. It was an all-powerful species that was able to understand them, see inside their heads, and take them on journeys across the universe, or quite possibly a multi-verse. They spoke of wormholes and this all-powerful super-race that spanned the cosmos. At the time, we didn’t have a name for them, so we simply referred to them as the unknowns,” Dev explained.

  “So, what happened when you realized you initiated first contact?” Thomas asked.

  “We continued the experiments. Edie went on several jaunts with other team members. They all came back with grand stories about this species, their already-possessed knowledge of humans, the discovery of other intelligent alien races. It was all rather unbelievable at first. Until the fifteenth batch.”

  “The fifteenth group?” Thomas inquired.

  “On the fifteenth iteration, two of the explorers who went on previous jaunts went in with Simon Emmerson. Something strange happened. When the sequence ended, Simon came back alive, but the other two were brain-dead. It made no sense, especially since these were veteran gammanauts.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that the success of the previous sequences was short-lived?”

  “That is what I thought, at first. In the sixteenth sequence, Edie went in with two more gammanauts. Before this, Edie spoke in great detail about a prosperity zone. That’s where the Aquarians, as you’ve named them, routed her. It was this fantasy world, possibly in another universe, where the Aquarians had constructed a perfect paradise world for humans, complete with all the natural resources we would ever need. After the sixteenth sequence, I started to get suspicious that gammanauts were intentionally keeping their consciousnesses on the other side of the bridge and not coming back.”

  “Intentional? They were killing their human selves? Why would they do that?” Thomas asked.

  “Because they found out that they didn’t need their human bodies to live in the alien dream world. You said it yourself. They were mercenaries who had diminished prospects in this life. The end of the road for them was Mimas. If you were in their shoes and you were allowed to start fresh, wouldn’t you?”

  “Fair point,” Thomas said.

  “How the Aquarians knew so much about us, seemed a mystery at first. Cosmineral had our suspicions for a long time that the Aquarians intercepted the Golden Wave from one of the many swarms floating in space and learned about us early on. That or they had a presence within two-hundred lightyears of Earth and managed to get information that way. If there is one thing I know about Edie, though, it is that she is very detailed in her logs. She got into the specifics about how the aliens had built this world not just for humans, but for other surviving species as well. She wrote in detail about a plan to help more humans move to this new place. She also took extensive notes on Aquarian technology as it related to spacetime sequencing.

  “On this last part, we had worked on a project that, if brought into practical application, would have changed the course of human destiny like nothing in our history,” Dev explained.

  “What was this project?” Thomas demanded.

  “From Edie’s numerous contacts with the Aquarians, we were able to study their manipulation of spacetime and get an understanding of how they create wormholes. In time, we came to see that they operated a super-complex network of wormholes nodes. The information we extracted made your Kennedy reports look like fortune cookies compared to what we found. It was like a thousand Rosetta Stones!”

  “What you’re telling me is the Aquarians shared with you information regarding a wormhole network?”

  “Yes! According to Brenner, these included locations and keys to access those jump points. We are quite clueless as to where specifically those points led to, but we knew enough to tap into a wide array of them. The nano-drive we created would have helped us take spacetime sequencing to that next level. That was until we got closer to the Herschel incident,” Dev said.

  “Things started to unravel between you and Brenner, didn’t they?” Thomas asked.

  “After the sixteenth batch, the concurring sequences were all busts. All the gammanauts going in went brain-dead. I got suspicious that Brenner was organizing a mass exodus of mercenaries. Further evidence of this was her paranoia. Her demeanor had
changed. She started discussing the Aquarians in such a way that sounded fanatical and cultish. It scared the living hell out of me. It scared the hell out of all of us. Sook Nguyen, the current CEO of Cosmineral, didn’t want to be anywhere near her. It got to a point where things got intensely hostile. It also didn’t help that GSF was breathing down our necks,” Dev said.

  “Come again?” Thomas interrupted.

  “Oh, come on, Thomas. Don’t play dumb. You knew what we were up to on that station since early-2080,” Dev replied.

  “This is the first time I have ever heard any of this,” Thomas said.

  “Oh, boy,” Dev replied.

  “Don’t oh, boy me. What is it you are hiding from me?” Thomas demanded.

  “GSF knew about everything we were up to. Perhaps your predecessor Katelyn Lew was not as honest as she may have seemed. She was in on the entire thing. How else do you think GSF got their hands on our technology? We shared it with your Intelligence. She knew what we were up to. In fact, Lew actively supported it,”

  “Bullshit! She would have told me. I was her secretary of defense.”

  “Oh! She told someone, alright, but it wasn’t you. It was admiral and secretary-general for a Day, Isla Perez. We coordinated directly with the two of them and in return, bought their complicity. You don’t seriously think that our generous donations in fiscal year twenty-eighty were out of the goodness of our hearts, do you? No! They wanted to see how far down the rabbit hole we would take this and went along for the ride. We paid them indulgence to nod their heads and absolve us of our sins. They kept you out for plausible-deniability purposes.”

  “No… It can’t be true,” Thomas said, barely concealing his shock and absolute horror.

  “Ha! It’s true, and you know it’s true, given how you just reacted!”

  Thomas gripped his face. He took a deep breath and attempted to compose himself.

  “So how did they react when things started to head south with Brenner?” Thomas asked.

  “I personally communicated with Katelyn and Isla throughout the lifespan of the project. I even had Edie give top secret testimony from the Herschel. As we uncovered more information about the unknowns and their technology, Isla became fearful that our experiment had gone too far. She pleaded with Katelyn and me to immediately cease all gammanaut activity and to break the reactor at once,” Dev said.

  “What about Secretary-General Lew?” Thomas asked.

  “You knew Lew. Always the optimist. She wanted to take things much further. She was feeling the pressure from Perez, but she wavered. That was until all hell broke loose,” Dev said.

  “All hell broke loose? Care to elaborate?” Thomas requested.

  “We knew if Lew fell on the wrong side, that it wouldn’t be long before GSF cleaned up their tracks and raided the Herschel. When word arrived that Lew was wavering, I believe that was the straw that set in motion the events which led to the Herschel incident. Brenner teamed up with Simon Emmerson and Alex Harper to raid Herschel’s database. They wiped our servers clean of everything related to the sequences,” Dev said.

  “This was before they stole the skipper and presumably crashed into Saturn’s rings?” Thomas asked.

  “Correct. The three rogue gammanauts illegally activated the spacetime reactor and set the coordinates to an unknown destination. Upon further review, we realized the coordinates were not coordinates at all, but a code that was acquired from one of the previous encounters with the Aquarians. We had no idea why they stole the skipper minutes after turning on the reactor. It was after the supposed explosion that we finally realized what had transpired.”

  “And what was that? Dev,” Thomas asked.

  “The explosion in the rings wasn’t an explosion at all. We didn’t realize it at first. Then when we failed to locate debris, it made us suspicious. What we had all witnessed on the Herschel with our own eyes, was the first-ever interstellar jump sequence.”

  “You’re telling me that Edie Brenner, Alex Harper, and Simon Emmerson were the first humans to ever leave the solar system?”

  “We didn’t believe it either. Then we examined the footage of the incident itself. Energy signatures were off the charts. The logs even show that they sent a torrent of data through the bridge before the event. Lastly, moments before they disappeared, their skipper sent out a massive data dump that contained everything we needed to piece the nano-drive back together. We honestly don’t know if they did this to share the technology with fellow travelers, or if the data became inadvertently exposed once crossing the bridge. Nevertheless, that data could very likely help backtrack through your spacetime sequence and locate Dr. Lacroix and Admiral Ashford,” Dev explained.

  “Can we find that location where you said the Aquarians were diverting humans? Could Brenner be at this same location?” Thomas asked.

  “I have no idea where Edie and the other two went. I have no idea if they even survived the interstellar sequence,” Dev replied.

  Thomas stood up. He removed keys from his left pocket and proceeded to undo Dev’s handcuffs.

  “You’re letting me go?” A surprised Dev asked.

  “This is provisional. Mr. Ivanov,” Thomas said. “We have two gammanauts to save. Crazy as it sounds, the lie detector in my lens says you are not lying. You probably believe you are telling your version of the truth. However, I am not sure what to believe at this moment. You say you can save our gammanauts? If you cooperate, you will get that pardon.”

  “Adler! You have my word!”

  Thomas proceeded to the door. They both walked out of the room and into the hall.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the spacetime command center. You should know that Sook Nguyen has brought us up to speed, and she too is on her way. If what you’re telling me about the keys has any inkling of truth to it, we have to hurry!” Thomas whisked down the hallway, but Dev grabbed his arm.

  “What?” Thomas asked, annoyed.

  “There’s one more thing I forgot to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I sure hope for Kiara Lacroix and Matt Ashford’s sakes that they are not in the same location as Edie Brenner. She is a complete and total sociopath. A fanatic. She murdered six people on the Herschel. Her commitment to the Aquarians borderlines on cultish. We better pray to God that she and the other two died in their insane experiment. Because if they didn’t, and they are in fact alive, and if they have found your gammanauts, then Kiara and Matt’s lives are in grave danger. And make no mistake, Edie knows how to communicate with the Aquarians better than anyone alive. She wrote the book on it.”

  38

  Universal Crescent: Earth Zone

  Kiara couldn’t believe her eyes. It was the absolute last thing she expected to see when she crossed the bridge. That was a living, breathing, functioning, human colony! The sight of such familiarity filled her with joy and relief, especially considering that these humans were coexisting peacefully with the Aquarians. Yet, it was that very thought, which also made her equally circumspect, given everything she just learned about this alien intelligence.

  The human settlement sat wedged between the rainforest and the beach. It consisted of several treehouses connected by hanging walkways and ladders. Next to the treehouses sat a giant, five-story container that appeared to collect rainwater. At the center of this compact village sat an orbicular, open-air community center with a roof held up by wooden planks.

  “Gammanauts,” Edie introduced. “Welcome to Universal Crescent.” Kiara and Matt soon realized the true vastness of this new world. They were at least one to two miles from the flagship, or Minerva as they now called her. It was as if the Aquarians took a brush to a canvass and crafted an ecosystem made specifically for organisms from Earth.

  It wasn’t just humans. Kiara was blown away by the sheer biodiversity. Birds of every species soared above. Schools of fish flowed in the salt-water ocean that filled the horizon of the Earth zone. As they headed toward the village
, they came across forests and rivers teeming with more life from Earth.

  “Amazing,” Kiara said. “All of this from the records of the Golden Wave?”

  “A good chunk of it, yes. It contained millions of records on plant and animal life from documentaries and such,” Edie replied. “However, one of the villagers is also a botanist and is working directly with the creators… errr, Aquarians, to fill in some more of the gaps. They can map DNA down to the micro-particle level. Rebuilding that DNA into the complex biodiversity of our home planet was like putting together LEGO sets. We’re constantly getting better at upgrading this place with new species.”

  “So, it’s like a canvass?” Matt asked.

  “Precisely, and right now, it has about two dozen painters working together to make it more complete,” Edie said.

  “What about those things in the neighboring zone?” Kiara asked. “Those giant blimp creatures. Which space diner did they hitchhike from? They don’t look smart enough to develop Pelicans of their own.”

  “Very observant. From what we can tell, not every living organism in this world was crafted. Obviously, I am here. My two proteges are here. We came via the wormhole. Those creatures were brought here by the Aquarians from an excursion to a world that… let’s just say we would all die instantly on. They are a species that was targeted by hostile explorers before the Aquarians showed up and saved them,” Edie explained.

  “Fascinating,” Matt said.

  “Hey, down there!” A man shouted from one of the treehouses.

  “Hey, stranger!” Edie shouted back. The man hopped on his ladder and quickly came down to greet the newcomers.

  “Matt, Kiara, this is Adriano,” Edie said.

  “Pleasure to meet you both. Welcome to our little universe,” he said. The gammanauts shook his hand.