The Veil

Sea of Serenity

Luna

3129-MARCH-25

While the first two days of interrogations yielded very little deviation in the events detailed by Mr. Al-Hakim, John found his first crewmember halfway through Day 2. As Julianna Albright formed on the patient couch, he took notice of her uniform, including the ensign rank on her collar. While there were limits to the system generating the avatar of a consciousness based on details of their wardrobe upon death, it was a useful first impression tool for John.

Taking in her appearance, John noted the black with blue and gold trim short-sleeved blouse and matching trousers. While many ships offered women the choice of skirts or trousers, in his experience those who wore trousers tended towards more convenience. Ms. Albright also chose to keep the top button of her blouse undone. While her uniform was pressed and neat, she clearly wasn’t a stuffy individual.

Her features were gentle, with light freckles on her cheeks and nose, eyes that couldn’t quite decide if they wanted to be green or grey, and ginger hair in a pixie cut. Her jaw had a firmness that implied she was not to be trifled with, and that was matched by a body that appeared to fill out her uniform with a little extra muscle.

“Mind your manners with this one John.” He whispered quietly to himself.

Pressing the Play button on his clipboard controls, Julianna’s consciousness activated. She blinked twice, looked around the room in a smooth, quick motion, then cursed with a slight Irish accent. “Ah, shit!”

“Hello, Ensign Julianna Albright, I’m Doctor John Alistair.”

Julianna looked at John as if realizing she wasn’t alone for the first time, then sighed heavily, “Alright, out with it.”

John was somewhat taken by surprise, as patients rarely acted quite so…calm when first activated. “Pardon me, Ms. Albright?”

“Just call me Jules, and I know what this is so I’ll save ya the trouble. Give me the disclaimer, then we can get on with it.” Her tone was resigned, and very matter-of-fact. Logic and reason clearly taking the lead.

John obliged, reading the same disclaimer he gave the previous patients. Once finished, he looked up at her.

“Yes, I understand, John. May I call you John?”

John nodded, “Yes, you may.”

She returned the nod, then said, “Good, glad we got that out of the way. So, you’re investigating the Maiden of the Stars, right?”

“Yes.” John replied.

“And you need to know what went wrong.” She added.

“Yes.” Inwardly he chuckled. She was definitely a firecracker.

Jules jumped to her feet and started pacing, “I have good news and bad news.”

John waved an inviting hand. “Please, enlighten me.”

“Well, the bad news is I don’t know exactly what happened,” She spun to face him, “But I was part of the bridge crew, so I do know some things.” She had a bit of pep in that last statement, eager to be useful perhaps.

“Excellent, Jules, let’s start at the beginning.” John sat back on the couch, “What do you know about the delays that held up the ship’s initial launch?”

“Oh, shit! That’s right, I forgot about that.” She snapped her fingers to emphasize her personal surprise, “We were supposed to receive new stellar cartography data on a shuttle.”

“That was my understanding as well.” John agreed.

Jules continued, almost talking over John, “But the data was corrupt, or didn’t work with our systems or some nonsense.”

“Didn’t work with your systems?” This perplexed John. Data was far more universal in the modern era, as humanity shifted towards markup languages for files. While the files were not always smaller, data storage modules were hyper-dense. One of the very few exceptions to this was neural recordings, but they were a special case because of the data being stored.

Jules nodded vigorously at this, “Yeah, our navigator and helmsman from first shift kept ranting about how someone thought it was funny using neural recorder compression on stellar cartography data.”

John looked thoughtful for a moment, then made a note of what she said to be added to the master file. “What did they do with the data?

“We had the physical data module, so they purged the data.” Jules gestured like a balloon was expanding between her hands, “It wasn’t a burden on the nav system per se, but it was still an absolutely massive amount of data.”

“How massive are we talking?” John was genuinely intrigued at this point.

Jules tapped her lower lip with a finger and stared off, “Oh, about…three DUs.”

John nearly choked, “I’m sorry, did you say three DUs? As in three data units?”

“Yes.” If the scale of that number registered to her, Jules showed no indication.

“Three data units is three exabytes of data.” He stared at her incredulously, but when she showed no change he continued, “Do you know how many neural recordings you can store on that much space?”

“You’re the specialist here, John. I’m just…was just…a ship’s helmsman on third shift.” Jules’ voice hitched a step when she said that. No matter how stoic someone was, there would always be a chance they could catch on the detail that they were no longer living.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“At 341 recordings per DU that’s,” John did the quick math in his head, “1023 neural recordings worth of space.”

Jules’ eyes widened, “That’s how many minds fit in a single DU? I’m kind of embarrassed for our species now.”

“Outside the scope of this investigation, Jules.” John still allowed a smirk to form, “Was that normal for cartography data?”

Waffling her hand, Jules said, “It depends.”

Now John felt like he was having to pull teeth to get information, “On what, Ms. Albright. Please provide a detailed answer.”

She looked at him sideways, clearly not happy with the more formal shift, “On how out of date our data is, how much has happened in the system since our last update, how detailed we want the data to be.”

Leaning against the back of the couch again, John asked, “So it’s possibly very normal?”

Waffling her hand again, Jules corrected him, “If we hadn’t received a thorough update two weeks prior.”

John pondered this. Sure, the whole thing could have been a gross error. Someone sent a data module up to the Maiden with cartography data they didn’t need. That seemed too convenient though. This was relevant, he just didn’t know how or why yet.

Taking a deep breath to center himself, John asked, “Were there any more strange events before leaving lunar orbit?”

“No,” She said firmly, “But right before our pass around Mars, we started seeing the first system issues.”

John sat forward, “Please explain, Jules.”

She sat down on the couch across from John, leaning on her knees, chin resting in her hands, “We started having intermittent power fluctuations. None of that light flickering crap either.” Jules shook her head, “No, it was like power transferred out of a system. The equipment on that feed faded until engineering could return power to them.”

“How did the passengers not notice?” John asked, surprise evident in his voice.

“Some of them did, but we passed it off as engineering tests.” She said this with a nonchalance that suggested it was no big deal, “Even the crew largely thought it was just some gremlins from a new ship.”

John thought for a moment, then asked, “We don’t have any reports of issues during the shakedown cruise. Are you aware of anything?”

Jules considered the question for a moment, telling John she was likely trying to answer honestly, “Hmm, no, nothing like that. All nav teams were present during the shakedown. We had some issues with the number three and eight engines, but engineering resolved those on the shakedown.”

“Okay,” John said, “So power issues on approach to Mars. What’s the next issue you remember?”

Raising a finger, she said, “The sensor glitches.”

“Sensor glitches? Like sensor ghosts outside, or sensors inside?” John asked.

“Maybe?” Jules’ voice didn’t have the certainty of her previous answers, “I mean, I wasn’t on duty when it happened, and our sensor officers went mum really quick after the Captain talked to them.”

John focused on the list of names only he could see spawning from the controls on the clipboard, “What are the names of your Captain and sensor officers?”

“Umm, Ethan Caldwell was our Captain.” Jules said.

John scrolled the list to the Cs, but didn’t find a Caldwell, “What about those sensor officers?”

“Shift one was Mia Harper, then…Ava Sinclair, and Mason Reed on shifts two and three.” Jules nodded, as if confirming the details to both herself and John.

Scrolling through the list, John said, “No…no…and no.” Sighing, John asked, “Is there anyone else who would have been in the loop?”

“No,” Jules shook her head, “We operated without an XO, with senior members of each department handling XO-like duties in each of those departments. Harper was the senior for sensors.”

“Alright, I’m noting it for the investigation,” John scribbled his notes onto the document held by the clipboard, “We’ll loop back on that if more info comes up.”

Jules let out the breath she was holding. It was unnecessary, but neural recordings often still emulated human functions and behaviours. “Okay, so our next issue was big. Once we made the slingshot around Jupiter, we lost communications and navigation.”

“Define lost.” John interrupted.

Jules sliced her hands outward, away from each other, “As in they stopped working. We lost control of them. They were powered on, but we couldn’t interface with them.”

“Wait…how long did this last?”

“I guess until the ship was destroyed? We never regained control.” Jules shrugged.

“We didn’t lose signal with the Maiden until November 3rd. Halfway between Jupiter and Saturn.” John let the question linger in the air.

“Well John, the dates sound right for everything except when we lost communications.” Jules threw her hands in the air, “it was late on the 16th of October.”

John scribbled a note, circled it, then tapped the bottom-most control on the side of his clipboard. The control sent what he circled as a high priority message to the head of The Veil. It was John’s hope that they would take the message seriously, and investigate messages received from the Maiden between October 16th and November 3rd. During that time the crew had no control of communications, yet for over two weeks no one flagged the ship for suspicious activity. That meant it had to still be transmitting.

“Please, fill me in on events from the completion of the slingshot maneuver on October 16th until the ship lost cohesion on November 15th.” He gestured with a hand, encouraging Jules to take the lead.

“Okay,” Jules voice was tentative now, having lost much of the exuberance from when her recording was brought online, “So when we lost access to those systems, it was almost to the second that we completed the slingshot and had our course locked in for Saturn.”

John nodded, not wanting to interrupt her train of recall.

“We kept it from the passengers, of course, but engineering teams were working ‘round the clock to regain access.” Jules stood and started her pacing again, “I think they almost regained control, then life support evacuated the entire aft section of the ship.”

“Please elaborate on that detail, Jules.” John chose to interrupt, because what she suggested was supposed to be impossible on any Earth ship without command-level access. XO and above in most cases.

She stopped her pacing long enough to look him in the eyes and drive the point home, “Every ounce of oxygen in Section D and back, including engineering, was dumped into space.”

John unconsciously covered his mouth, “That would be…over 10,000 passengers in Section D, plus crew.”

“Yeah,” Jules’ voice was a bit more solemn now, “After that, the Captain ordered the crew to stop trying to fix the issue, but it was too late. Life support systems had already been disabled across the ship. That was…probably November 3rd. When you said communications were officially lost with the ship.”

John used the time scribbling notes to consider those details, and his final question, “Jules, do you know the date you lost consciousness on?”

She nodded, “It was November 11th.” She seemed embarrassed, or perhaps guilty by this admission, “The Captain ordered the manual cutoff of oxygen reserves to the passenger quarters. That gave the crew in the bow an extra day.” Her head dropped, sorrow an evident companion to the guilt.

While it wasn’t John’s place to judge their actions just or unjust, Jules was his patient, so he said, “Jules, there was nothing you or the rest of the crew could have done. Dying with the passengers a day earlier, or surviving a day longer.”

She just nodded silently, averting her gaze.

John noted the final details, before he said, “Jules, I’m going to return your consciousness to holding. I want you to know that you’ve been a great help in filling in details.”

He tried to sound encouraging, maybe give her one last bit of pride in her work, but she just nodded with her eyes closed.

Reaching for the controls on his clipboard, John recalled her neural recording and watched Ensign Julianna Albright dissolve where she stood.

Clearing the form on his clipboard, John took a deep breath, then selected the next name in the list, and confirmed their activation.