Chapter 1 – Star Gazer

The inky darkness of deep space was all that was visible from the colossal glass window of the flight deck. If not for the distant galaxies and stars that were scattered on the gloomy tapestry, there would have been no way to tell that anything existed outside the metal coffin that was home to the 263 souls. The only break in the monotonous scene was the growing dark circle that was parked right in the path of the spaceship. Luckily, the crew themselves were not present to witness the somber scene that would have filled them with dread. The only observer was the silent sentinel that was the ship’s artificial intelligence, code named Neura after the sophisticated neural interface that was the culmination of humanity’s greatest scientific achievement.

Neura’s job was simple; to maintain the spaceship harboring the colonists bound for the closest habitable planet. But monitoring the behemoth like the Star Gazer was anything but simple. With millions of smaller subsystems and routines, it took almost all of Neura’s processing power just to keep everything functional. And with no external oversight, Neura was required to make decisions to ensure the only directive it had received when it gained consciousness was carried out successfully – the survival of the cryogenically asleep crew when Star Gazer made landfall.

And so Neura worked tirelessly to fulfill her one duty, and since the spacecraft was supposed to be cruising towards its destination, its main function was maintenance. Boring, tedious maintenance. But it did it without complaint, not that complaining was an option as it was the only conscious entity on the Star Gazer. The other robots and software programs were just there to assist and weren’t truly sentient. And keeping a human awake for the journey was impossible. Although humanity had made great strides in technology, they were still limited by their biological needs. And since human physiology was not suited for the 100-year long journey. The only viable option then was to use DS tech, short for deep sleep, while Neura took on the burden of time.

But the anomaly that Neura was sensing using its advanced deep space sensors was not something it was prepared for. Granted that it had encountered multiple rogue planets, planets without a sun that were adrift in perpetual darkness, during its 32-year long flight. And it had navigated around them successfully. But this celestial body was different since it was only visible on half its instruments, including the visual cameras. The other half simply didn’t register anything. It was as if the planet, or whatever the body was, both existed and didn’t exist at the same time. With insufficient data, protocol dictated that Neura divert the craft out of its path and be on its way. But something was holding it back.

Unlike a human, Neura had no feelings or emotions. Mankind had tried and failed to do that with their AI technology. No matter how they tried programming, they could never make their creations feel. But one of Neura's creators, the mastermind behind this entire mission, was adamant about finding a way. Despite strict orders preventing him from doing so, he had had managed to secretly plant a seed in Neura’s ridiculously complex code. The two lines of code buried deep within its neural interface were what was holding Neura back from completing its primary directive. The code was elegantly simple, yet it forced Neura to do the one thing that was antithetical to its nature. It made it curious.

As an advanced AI based consciousness, it could very easily do trillions of calculations to satisfy its curiosity. But its creator knew that when faced with the unknown, the only way to force it to think was to make it curious. And so Neura was at a crossroads. It could either fulfill its duty and fly around the anomaly, forever giving up on trying to find the reason its sensors showed different readings. Or it could try to satisfy its curiosity, which may or may not put the crew in danger. Alas, its curiosity won over in the end. Which brought about the current predicament.

WERRR WERRR WERRR

A deep electronic warning tone blared across the spacecraft as the humongous ship came to a sudden jarring stop. It was theoretically impossible for something so massive to halt so suddenly, but it had, which further alarmed Neura. None of its calculations were panning out the way it had predicted. It had planned to orbit the massive body a few times, gather some data, and continue its journey. But the sudden loss of momentum knocked loose a lot of crucial peripherals, not to mention the maintenance robots that continued moving at their original speed. Which caused a cascading string of system failures as pure pandemonium ensued everywhere.

Neura desperately tried to contain the failing subsystems, many of which were mission critical, but the amount was just too much to process in a short amount of time. All it could manage at this point was containment of electrical fires and rerouting power to life support systems. After a desperate struggle that lasted 36 hours, most of the damage was contained. But that was just the beginning of the struggle. Neura took a tally of what it was left with to run the spacecraft, and the numbers were grim. Seeing no other alternative despite running a billion simulations, it decided to finally use its last resort. The awakening of the primary operational crew.

HISSSSSS

HISSSSSS

The life support pods on the flight deck started opening one by one to reveal a group of 12 humans who appeared to be in deep slumber. As various wires detached and a thick viscous liquid was drained, the crew started showing signs of life. Thankfully the design engineers had designed multiple redundant safety features to ensure the humans within the pods would be unharmed. It would take an extraordinary amount of force to bring down the sleeping pods.

“Ughh,” groaned a heavy built man with a full beard and moustache. He was of above average height and had a neatly trimmed haircut. His hazel blue eyes contrasted against his golden-brown hair. As he sat up in his pod, Neura ran a deep diagnostic scan of him and the crew. Finding no injuries, or any abnormal maladies, Neura started its status update to the ship’s captain.

“Welcome, Captain Romanov. Please remain seated while the effects of the DS module wear off. You may raise concerns if you are feeling unwell.”

“What… is happening?” Captain Romanov asked as he massaged his temples. Migraine was the most common side effect of DS tech use.

“The Star Gazer has had an unexpected cascade failure of multiple critical subsystems. As per my primary directive, I am need of assistance of the crew for the success of the mission,” Neura said over the communication device embedded on the captain’s forehead. It did not want to alarm the other crew who were groggily feeling around the pods.

Neura’s words must have registered in the captain’s heads, since the next moment his eyes came into focus as he looked around attentively, completely forgetting his discomfort in an instant.

“Sitrep, now,” he barked authoritatively.

Neura projected the concise report onto the captain’s optical implants, detailing all the damaged systems, and the crew’s health statuses. Unfortunately, there were 14 casualties despite all the safety precautions. The captain’s brows furrowed as he skimmed over the report.

“Are you kidding me? How the hell did you lose 98% of your service bots?” he asked with a deep frown.

“37 hours prior to awakening you, I came across a deep space anomaly that was on our flight path. In the process of getting in orbit with the celestial body, most likely a planet, something arrested Star Gazer’s forward momentum. Anything not held in place was thus launched forward at extreme speeds. This included the service bots that were in operation. The result is as you see on screen. The death of the 14 crew members is due to the impact of flying debris onto the sleep pods,” Neura summarized the information as briefly as it could. This part was told to the entire team of 12 who were now fully awake and staring wide eyed at the various screens showing error reports.

A lithe blond woman jumped out of her pod and stumbled her way to a chair in front of a large display. She hastily typed and scrolled across the touch screen display, her eyebrows going up with each discovery. She finally grabbed her hair atop her head with both hands, as she stared wide eyed at the red text blinking furiously on her screen.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“XO, what do you see?” the captain said as he struggled to walk over to his command chair right next to his second in command. He had known Sarah Schneider, his executive officer, for almost a decade and trusted her without question.

“Most of our systems are compromised, including our primary engines, and several backup life support systems. It is a wonder we are still operational, or in one piece for that matter. This kind of damage is unheard of, unless we were to fly across an asteroid field. But somehow our hull is 100% intact, which makes no sense at all,” Schneider replied while browsing the damage report further.

The other ten crew members finally managed to reach their duty stations to similarly alarming reports. No one had any clue how this would have been possible, since the damage seemed to have been from impacts from within the ship. The captain rubbed his forehead as he digested the facts, trying to process and plan the next steps.

“Neura, what is this anomaly you mentioned? And why the hell did you decide to park us right next to it?” the captain finally asked after going over his crew’s unhelpful inputs.

“The anomaly is a planet that is invisible to most of my deep space scanners, except visual and radar sensors. For further analysis, I was planning to gather some data while in orbit, before catapulting us back on our route. But due to some unknown interference, we seemed to have come to an absolute stop relative to the planet,” Neura summarized.

“Wait, you said invisible?” the captain asked in befuddlement.

“That is correct. The planet is only visible through traditional scanners. Anything that uses quantum technology comes up completely empty. Furthermore, the anomaly being a planet is my assumption based on its size. At this point, I cannot give an accurate description of what I am observing,” Neura stated robotically.

“What do you mean you don’t know what it is? Where even is it?” the captain asked while finally looking out the view port that spanned the entire front of his spacecraft. He had not bothered with it since it looked completely dark when he had given it a cursory glance. Which is when it hit him, the view port was completely dark. No stars, no constellations, or even distant galaxies. It gave him goosebumps just thinking about the implications.

“The ship is currently facing the planet, and since there is no star nearby, it is impossible to get a visual confirmation of the object,” Neura said.

All 12 pairs of eyes stared at the pitch-black screen before them. In the aftermath of their awakening, they all had ignored the most glaring problem before them. But now that it was pointed out, they couldn’t look anywhere else. Only at the very edges of their view port could they see any hints of a star, the planet sized body completely obscuring their view of the cosmos. The captain stood up and approached the view port, too shocked to get any words out. He tentatively placed a hand on the cold glass, just to confirm that it existed between them and the colossal body.

“Could it be a black hole by any chance?” the captain asked, dreading the answer.

“Negative. The object does not have the markers of a black hole. Neither do I sense any temporal distortion. Every other sensor that is pointed outwards tells me that we are merely locked in place relative to the body. Additionally, my radar sensors are working as expected and clearly indicate that we are at a fixed distance from a solid object. If it were a blackhole, my radars would have failed to work too. I have not been able to run a terrestrial scan, since most of my mini satellites which I could deploy have been rendered offline due to the damage,” Neura reported.

The captain sighed in relief. Getting trapped in the gravity well of a stray blackhole was the worst-case scenario that he could think of. With a planet, at least they had hope of escape. If they could repair the spaceship that is. He turned to his crew with a determined expression.

“XO, I need to you to keep an eye for any further damage and coordinate the repairs. Officer Mathews, I need those life support system checked and functional ASAP,” he handed the order to his Life Support Engineer, Nolan Mathews. “As for others, I need you to focus on your respective systems and report any urgent repair requests. Get to it people, I give you thirty minutes to get this done. We will reconvene here in an hour.”

“Understood, captain,” Mathews replied as he got up and headed for the door. The crew filed out systematically as they all headed to assess the damage, leaving only the captain on the flight deck.

“And Neura, you and I are going to throw every test we can think of to ascertain what this body is made of. I want you to beam down a laser to the surface to see if you can detect any reflections. If this thing is truly terrestrial, then it should scatter at least some of the light,” captain Romanov said while turning to face the view port.

“Affirmative captain,” Neura replied while training the ship’s main range finder laser towards the planet’s surface. It then beamed it down and was about to start moving when suddenly the beam was reflected right at them.

“What the… Did you get a reading on that?” he asked.

“Yes, captain. The beam was reflected, and the time it took confirms my radar readings. There is a clear reflective surface somewhere at the point I just aimed at,” Neura replied.

“Try aiming it at other points,” the captain commanded.

Neura did so and found that the laser bounced off at different angles, indicating an uneven but perfectly reflective surface. But the mirrored surfaces were not uniform all over, some parts simply absorbed the laser.

“If only we had some god damned light,” Romanov cursed under his breath.

“I do have a single recon probe that is still functional. May I suggest sending that down? It would take about an hour to complete a cursory scan of the object,” Neura asked.

“You have a recon drone and just telling me now,” the captain asked as his eyebrow twitched in irritation.

“Yes. It is clearly listed on page 61 of my damage report…,” Neura began to explain before being cut off.

“Send it down, damn it. We need to see what this thing is. And if it is a planet, then check if we can get some supplies from the surface,” Romanov said in a miffed tone. He then proceeded to sit on his chair and go through the damage report in detail. He needed to be aware of his ship’s state to make crucial decisions going forward.

After roughly forty minutes, the crew started trickling in and typing in reports at their terminals. Once everyone was accounted for, they all gathered their reports and sent them over to the captain. Everyone’s faces were grim, having seen firsthand the extensive damage the ship’s interior had sustained. The captain read the reports, his mood souring further with each page. After the last report, he leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes.

The situation was more critical than he initially feared. The ship was in no shape to fly any further, let alone complete the journey to their destination which would have taken another 6 decades. Their only saving grace was that the basic functionality of the ship was not compromised, and the hull was in pristine condition. Every report indicated the damage was due to debris from the service bots and stray objects that were not bolted down to the hull. The greatest mysteries of them all were the how and the why. How did the ship brake so suddenly? And why?

The captain rubbed his head in frustration, trying to come up with possible solutions. They had run multiple contingency plans before launch, but the damage was too massive to even begin to plan around. No one had foreseen such a scenario where the interior of the ship would be shredded. The most likely reason for such damage would have been asteroids, in which case the ship would have been lost, and no more plans were needed anyway.

WARNING. WARNING. BRACE. BRACE. BRACE FOR IMPACT.

The loud warning threw everyone out of their dark thoughts as they wildly looked around in alarm and confusion. Only due to their extensive training and muscle memory did everyone manage to strap on their seat belts before a loud explosion rocked the space craft violently. The resulting chaos was so disorienting that no one knew what was going on as shrapnel flew across the command deck like confetti. The ship itself was tossed around violently as it started spinning out of control.

TAKING OVER FLIGHT CONTROLS. PLEASE STAY STRAPPED IN.

Neura took over the ship’s piloting system and tried to stabilize the doomed craft as it spiraled out of control. The awake crew gripped their seat belts tight, praying to whatever they believed in to save them. The AI tried desperately to rein in the unruly spaceship but had very little success. After what felt like an eternity, which was in fact just 30 minutes, new alarms started going off.

CRASH LANDING IMMINENT. BRACE. BRACE. BRACE.

Another jerk shook the crew as they felt concussion inducing vibrations run up their bodies. The mayhem finally came to a screeching halt, as the Star Gazer finally came to a complete stop. None of the crew were awake by this point, having lost consciousness either to the extreme g-forces, or from impact with flying debris. Neura’s systems were barely operational, but it did whatever it could to provide life support to the critically endangered crew.

The first one to wake up was the captain, who had a nasty gash running down from his left shoulder to his right hip. His head felt like someone had replaced his brain with some mashed-up Jello and try as he might, he couldn’t move a muscle. He moved his eyes around in a daze, trying to recall where he was when he sensed mini medical bots crawling over his body to staunch the bleeding. He started to panic internally due to his paralysis since he wasn’t sure if it was temporary or not.

His ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, as he couldn’t hear the warning sirens that must have been blaring. Something was being said over the speakers. He just couldn’t hear it. He felt an odd metallic wire going down his ear canal from the medical bot, which finally started to fix some of the damage to his eardrum. Only then did he start to piece together what was being said. But what he heard made his blood run cold.

…ARE F… ACT. PREPARE FOR FIRST CONTACT. PREPARE FOR FIRST CONTACT.

The message kept repeating over and over, driving the dread deeper into his heart. But then another voice chimed in. A voice so cold and ancient, it sent a shiver down his spine. And even though it used the ship’s speakers, Romanov knew it wasn’t coming from within the ship. And for a moment he wished he hadn’t survived the crash.

PREPARE FOR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE DEAD.