Keith entered the bridge and stepped into pandemonium. People were pointing, shouting, running around and typing frantically at consoles. Some were staring blankly into space as they worked on mindpal interfaces, others were staring blankly into space at nothing; at a loss and wondering what to do.
The chaos was understandable. One moment they were in the Sol system, heading out on a grand adventure to TOI 700. They would sweep through the system, make a simple turn back and head back to be hailed as heroic explorers. Instead, they now found themselves lost in space, with the aftereffects of the wormhole traversal echoing through their minds with waves of lives they never lived.
At the centre of the room, Keith recognised the captain, sitting still, observing. Like the eye at the centre of the storm, the chaos was only small ripples near him but became full on waves towards the outside of the room. Sometimes the captain would ask a question to one of his officers, sometimes he would note down something. But most of all, he sat still, thinking and observing, hands calmly held in his lap.
Keith gestured for Nick to follow him and started walking towards the captain when two black clad marines stepped out in front of him.
“Sir, “ one of them said, in a voice devoid of emotion. “Please step back”.
Keith looked at them as his hand went towards his pocket. The men tensed up, and he held a hand up in a gesture of calm before slowly reaching into his jacket pocket and bringing out his credentials. Still with calm and measured movements, he offered it to the men. The same man who had spoken picked it out of his hand and looked down at it and then back up at Keith. “Mr Garner, sir. What can I help you with?”
“I need to speak to the captain. It is regarding the current situation. He will want to hear this, “ Keith said in a calm voice.
“I see, “ the marine replied. “Come with me”.
The captain was already looking up and waiting for them when they arrived.
“Captain, these gentlemen say they have some information for you, “ the marine said, and the captain gave a nod to dismiss the marines.
“Sir, could we discuss in private?” Keith asked, handing over his credentials.
The captain considered this for a moment before getting to his feet. Turning to a woman sitting nearby, he said, “Sandra, you have the con. Please continue gathering information. Signal me if anything important comes up.”
A few moments later, the captain led them into a small briefing room next to the bridge. Turning to face them, Keith recognised barely contained anger. But there was something else in that look. The captain was inquisitive, thoughtful. Good, Keith thought.
“Mr Garner. Mr Aaron. Explain,” he said, looking at Nick and holding the stare. Nick looked like he more than anything wanted to sink through the floor to get away. “And I expect that explanation to cover at least three questions that I have: Where have you been for the past two hours, Nick? Why are we not at TOI 700 and where are we?”
Keeping it as close to the truth as possible, Keith recounted the explanation he had put together with the kids. He explained how the government had picked up an alien signal. After working on parsing and interpreting the signal for many weeks, they had a breakthrough, revealing that the signal hid a signal vector which led them to this location in space.
Moving fast, the government had put together a secret task force to leverage the Pegasus mission to intercept the signal.
“Leverage?” the captain muttered. “More like hijacked”.
Not arguing the point, Keith continued his explanation. They had arrived at Deimos station some days earlier, and when they learned that the mission was due to depart, they had approached Nick to seek his help. As the astrogation officer responsible for setting up the wormhole targeting computer, the team of agents had recruited Nick to their cause and more or less forced him to manipulate the targeting information. They had then used their government level credentials to override the targeting which the captain had authorised.
To give themselves time and cover for manipulating the targeting computer, the agents had created the disturbance and delay that had held The Pegasus back when they were preparing for departure.
Hearing this, the captain once again cast a long glance at Nick, which made the kid shrink back, and Keith noticed his arms twitching.
“The last part of the plan was for me to get onboard. I got here with no one noticing and hooked up with Nick to make sure everything was ready. We thought it would be best to get Nick off the bridge until I’d explained events”, Keith said.
“And what is the point of this?” the captain asked. “As far as we’ve been able to determine, we are in the middle of absolute nowhere”. Keith saw the captain was more relaxed now, the anger having dissipated leaving only curiosity.
“Now… It is time to execute the last part of the plan. Please, here are your new orders, “ Keith said, and shared a document with the captain.
Thanks to the authorisation keys that Goose had stolen from the other agents, Sae had created a set of fake formal orders to the captain, ordering him to extend the laser array and receive the signal.
“I see, “ the captain said after reading through the document. With a slight smile, he looked up at Keith. “Curiouser and curiouser. You really think there will be a mysterious alien signal out here?”
“Yes. And it will be the greatest discovery of the human species, “ Keith said simply.
“Sounds like fun, “ the captain said before turning to Nick. “As for you, Mr Aaron… I don’t know what to do with you. I understand you had little choice in these events, but I need to be able to trust my command staff. Mr Allen will stay in the astrogation seat.”
-
Two hours later, and Nick was struggling. The experience of the past hours had been traumatic, and even if everything now felt like it was back in its place, he kept having flashbacks. His arms and legs would jerk and twitch as his brain reached out to confirm that he could still control his limbs, and his body would shiver with cold or pour with sweat. He still felt unreasonable shame at having disappointed the captain, and more than anything he needed to be on his own to gather his thoughts. To gather himself. But this was bigger than his desire for peace and calm. Any minute now, they would know if…
It was almost anticlimactic when someone - the signals officer - spoke up.
“Sir, “ she looked up at the captain, “we are… receiving… something”.
She looked puzzled, scratching her head and looking around the bridge. No one else knew what they were looking for. The order to extend the laser array in the middle of empty space had been met by incredulity by the rest of the bridge crew, who were not even trying to hide the confused looks they had been sending the captain.
A few seconds later, the signals officer continued. “It looks like… discrete laser pulses. Somehow binary encoded, sir. The computer does not recognize the protocol or structure.”
“Just keep receiving, “ the captain responded “, and make sure that every bit is recorded and stored.”
The signals officer nodded distractedly, fingers already twitching as she confirmed the order.
In his mindpal, Nick received a message from Sae, who was monitoring the situation from her room:
I am seeing it. The signal. It’s encoded in the same way as Goose’s signal. Same protocol, and… yep. First segment is the same bootstrapper. Bingo!
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At the same time, Goose said,
It is time. We should see the signal. Please, what is the status?
We are receiving something. It looks like the signal… it is… a lot of data.
Nick thought he could feel the sensation of relief wash through him from Goose.
-
Two days later, Nick did not feel like himself. He was still not whole. He had his arms back. His fingers, his legs and his mouth. His body was his again. He could smell, taste, touch. But there was still something missing. He felt like he was controlling a strange human shaped vehicle as he manoeuvred himself down the central spine of The Pegasus.
He pushed and pulled himself from handhold to handhold, avoiding the glances of the people that he passed. At first, those glances had been accusing. He had sensed how they blamed him for what they thought was a navigation error. Eventually, rumours had spread about the government intervention, and now the glances were more curious, or even concerned.
Still, he avoided the looks. He had more than enough with rebuilding his relationship with... Himself. With his body, and his consciousness. He felt like something had been left behind on Deimos; something undefinably him. Something Goose had forgot to bring, when they left the station behind.
Rashi’s concern for him was overpowering. At first she tried to talk to him, to touch him, to hold him. He did not understand why, but her attention felt suffocating. But as he pulled away, she understood. She had given him the space he needed, and when he had looked at her in a moment of confusion she had understood him better than himself.
“Go, be alone, “ she had said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be here when you are ready.” And she had smiled at him, absolving him of a duty to take her wellbeing into consideration.
He made it back to his room, and strapped into the bed. The constant absence of gravity was not helping, reinforcing the strangeness of the situation - the otherness. He longed to feel the familiar pull, to get back a sense of up and down. But as long as they were stationed to receive the signal, they couldn’t move away.
It had been two days now, and the signal was still pouring in. He knew Sae was working constantly to ensure the laser array was calibrated for optimal reception, to shift data around so that they had enough storage capacity, and running constant error checks on the received data. She had recruited Goose to make sure it was all done correctly. In the beginning, Nick had listened in to their communication, but he had switched it off. He knew they were still talking, but every time he saw the messages from Goose, he felt…
Anger.
It was as simple as that. An all-consuming, combustial anger that filled him in an instant when he saw the messages. Like a fire starting in his chest, spreading to his limbs in seconds. Even thinking about it now made his heart race and his fists clench. He gently pushed the thought to the side. The anger was entirely unproductive, and it only unsettled what little equilibrium he had.
The sudden and uncontrollable twitching he had experienced in the first days was slowly getting better, but his mind was still feeling… sore. As if reeling from a massive double punch. First, his ejection from his body, his imprisonment. Shortly after, the wormhole transition which had pushed his consciousness into an alternate timeline. Even as details had faded, he could still remember how it had made him feel. The absence of a living life that had been his.
And then, from a full life, he was suddenly back in his isolated brain, floating in a void with no explanation. He remembered looking through his eyes, as Goose left the bridge to go to his cabin. Getting up from the bed as Sae stepped in, and then… A flash of black. And then… voices. Voices! The realisation that he was back.
He had cried then, as he cried now.
–
Nearly three days after they first found the signal; Nick, Sae, Rashi and Keith gathered in the small meeting room they had designated as Mission Control. They had taken to staying there most of the time, getting out of the common areas where their crewmates would constantly ask them for more information.
It had not taken long for the rumours about the strange signal to spread, and by now everyone knew The Pegasus was sitting in the middle of what was supposed to be nowhere, receiving some kind of message. The captain had vetoed any kind of analysis on the signal from the other crew, insisting that they simply record it in full. This had created an atmosphere onboard the ship of frustrated excitement. They were floating over 400 light years from the Sol system and going back 400 years, humanity had been far away from being able to use lasers to signal messages. The only conclusion was that the signal was not human, and everyone was buzzing.
They all looked at the same display, which had been showing the size of the data received from the signal. It had finally stopped increasing.
“It just seems so… small, “ Rashi ventured from the sofa. “Receiving Goose took several hours. This time it was just sixty-something.”
“Vastly different signal throughput, “ Sae said. “In the order of… I think nearly a thousand times more.”
After thinking for a moment, Rashi responded. “That’s still just… something like ten thousand times the size of Goose. Wouldn’t that be like just ten thousand humans out of all the billions?”
“No, “ Nick said, smiling at Rashi. “In the original dataset containing Goose… Imagine it as being split into three distinct areas: First you have the protocol and control information, checksums and stuff like that. Then you have the bootstrapper, containing the logic needed to run Goose. The last section is the largest, containing all the actual data. All the information. We think of Goose as an individual, but really he is just an interface to that data…”
“...and nothing in the new signal is an individual, “ Rashi finished for him, resting her head in her hand, thinking.
“It’s almost sad, “ she continued. “His… people. Is just one large brain. Or not even that… just one large repository of information. We must seem so strange to him. And… friendships must have been such an alien concept. What is friendship to a creature that has never known about separate consciousnesses? Just one unity. No need to build trust, to be vulnerable. You never doubt, you never get support from someone else. It must be so… lonely, to not even know what loneliness is.” She looked at Nick. “In some ways, it makes me understand why he did what he did. It must have been so frustrating for him to work together with us as individual beings. Not being in perfect agreement - he must have thought his plan was the obvious solution, and our resistance…”
Rashi’s voice trailed off, and Nick could see the others looking at her. In their eyes, Nick saw individuals with their own thoughts and desires and plans, and he thought he understood her.
“Anyway, let’s get down to business!” she said. Her expression turned back to the radiant smile Nick loved, and he felt himself smiling back.
“Alright, “ Sae said. “I’ve passed the data through the same filters and analysis process which we created for Goose, and it checks out at the same protocol structures. It has the same bootstrapper, database and data index. In theory, it’s a matter of… just booting it up.”
“But where?” Nick asked. “I’m not having an entire alien race bouncing around my head”
“No, you are most definitely not”, Keith responded drily. “I’ve been discussing this with Sae, and we have a plan.”
Sae picked up the thread. “We have several basic probes on the ship, with pretty good processing abilities. If we send one out, far away from The Pegasus, with just the simple bootstrapper, we can tightly control the communication”. She took a sip of water before continuing. “We can also keep the data index and database in a separate storage area, controlling when the bootstrapper can access the data, and what they can access.”
“It also helps that we are in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of light years from Earth, “ Keith added.
“What do I tell Goose?” Nick said. “He’s been pretty… insistent.”
Sae was about to speak when Rashi interjected. “Keep him in the loop, Nick.” Nick wanted to protest when she continued. “I know you are angry. I’m pretty furious at him myself. But…” she gulped. “Let’s face it. We are here, we have the signal. We’ve succeeded in the mission we set out on. Thanks to us, and thanks to him. His methods were… unforgivable”, Rashi said in a small voice, looking at Nick. “But to him, they were necessary. And… it worked.”
The anger inside Nick was rolling. He could feel his legs and arms twitching again, but he forced himself to calm down. To breathe. Rashi was his conscience, and he trusted her. He considered her words carefully.
“I…” he started. “I agree with you.” He looked at Sae. “Sae, can you loop Goose into a shared channel?”
A moment later, Nick sent a message.
Goose, we have the full signal. Here’s the plan…
–
Keith stood next to the captain at a corner of the room, his voice kept low. “Sir, thank you for your cooperation. I know this turn of events is making your job much more difficult”.
“It was not like I had a choice, was it?” Keith turned to look at the captain, but seeing the small smile playing across his face, he realised the captain wasn’t resentful. “I knew I was going to make history when I woke up this morning, but this?” The man’s smile grew larger. “This is something else.”
Keith had shared more of the story with the captain, more of what they expected to happen. Although initially nervous about unleashing an unpredictable alien this close to his ship, he had reviewed the safety protocols Sae had put together. Now he looked more eager than anyone else in the room. Keith and the captain stood, watching the bridge together. Three days ago it had been pandemonium - now it was the calm and determined concentration of a well trained crew on a mission.
“Probe in position!” the signals officer announced suddenly.
“Self-destruct, armed and ready.” another voice said. Keith had insisted on that.
“Ok, let’s do this, “ Keith muttered to himself and looked up at Sae. “Go.”
Sae’s eyes fogged over as she entered the commands into her mindpal.
A second later, words appeared in her mindpal.