40
Now that she was back aboard, their old ship had a lived-in feel that had never quite manifested on the newer Columbus. “I missed the old girl,” Traci said as she reacquainted herself with the hab module. She ran a hand across the small dining table. Reaching for a drawer underneath, she found her old chess board still sitting inside, its magnetic pieces safely tied up in felt bags. “We had a lot of fun here.”
“Had a lot of arguments, too,” Jack said over the speaker. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Me too. I’ve had plenty of time to think about us since.”
“Me too.”
She hesitated, knowing what she wanted to say but afraid to say it. “It was such a relief to find out you were still alive. Everyone had given you up for dead, but I couldn’t let myself believe it. I had to get out here and find you,” she said. “I rehearsed so much in my mind on the way out, you know. Imagined what life would be like with you in it again. And you went and screwed it all up.”
“That’s kind of been my way with women. Finally get them to the point where they can tolerate me, then I do something irredeemably stupid.”
“To be fair, it was Daisy’s idea.”
“It’s always been the women in my life who keep me sane. And who drive me crazy at the same time.”
“Is that what I did?”
“Yes to both.” The speaker buzzed with his laughter.
She winced. “We’ve got to work on that, by the way. Do you know how much it sounds like nails on a chalkboard?” She turned serious. “I wish there was a way to unplug you. It would be nice to see you in person again.”
“Daisy doesn’t think it’s safe at this point. Not with what we have here. Maybe back on Earth we—”
He was interrupted by Daisy’s alert chime. “I have results from the first chromatograph analysis. You may find them intriguing.”
The aeroshell, as with every other closure aboard the Artifact, had opened easily once they applied the right technique. In this case, steady pressure along the seam had made the casing pop open like it was spring-loaded. Traci had removed one of the ice spheres at random and closed the shell back up to protect the rest. The lab’s gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer slowly vaporized its contents, its instruments sniffing the air for chemical and spectral signatures as it did so.
“The first sphere’s contents closely match the organic compounds Doctor Hoover isolated during your crew’s expedition,” Daisy said. “Base pairs of chiral molecules adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil were all detected.”
“Exactly the stuff Noelle found,” Jack said. “Everything you need to start weaving RNA strands.”
“The seeds of life,” she whispered in amazement, thinking back to her experience in the atrium. “Assuming the rest are the same . . .” She stared through a nearby porthole, back to where the Artifact would be. “Whatever else that ship is, it’s designed to carry these things. Maybe even produce them. If this is what they used to seed our solar system, then it could be millions of years old.”
“Makes you wonder what happened to the crew, then,” he said. “It’s like they all packed up and went home.”
“There is more,” Daisy said. “When you opened up the insulating shell, I detected indentations on its inner surface similar to the writing you observed.”
Traci did a double take. “That’s funny, I didn’t see anything.” She slipped on a mask and gloves and slid a hand along the shell’s seam, popping it open. “Still can’t see anything.”
“Continue holding it open, please. The script may be too faint for you to detect. I will record and enhance it for you to study.”
“Finally,” Jack said. “Something for me to do.”
Jack had spent his early adulthood intercepting and translating Russian communications for the Air Force, becoming adept at both interpreting obscure idioms and decrypting coded messages. He’d honed his skills by mastering three different languages that were as far removed from English as he could find, eventually adding Farsi and Mandarin to his repertoire. While he might have thought that was good preparation for an undertaking like this, the Artifact’s alien script was nothing like them.
He had been able to identify the most frequently used characters, but until he could positively compare them to a known language their meaning would remain elusive.
Yet something about them rang familiar, tickling at his memory . . .
He had taken advantage of his direct line into Daisy’s immense database to search through her historical archives. Meant for refining her synthetic intelligence, her memory held examples of every known earthly language.
And as he delved into ancient, dead tongues, he found what he’d been looking for.
Jack projected two images onto the monitor in the galley. One was of the holographic keyboard Traci had recorded. The other was from something much older. “It’s cuneiform.”
She nearly choked on her coffee. “Come again?”
“Okay, it’s not an exact match. More nuanced. But it still uses similar script. See these wedge strokes?” he pointed out. “Their basic form is almost identical to Akkadian or Sumerian.”
“Those are ancient,” she said. “I mean ancient, like—”
“5000 B.C.,” he said. “So yeah, really old. Almost prehistoric.”
“How, with a civilization this advanced? Why would their language not evolve?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. Obviously they made it work for them. On the other hand, scientists will tell you math is the true universal language, and we can see they were scary good at that. Maybe they figured this was all they needed.”
“That means what, exactly? That they seeded Earth with RNA precursors, let them do their thing, then came back a few million years later to check up on us?”
“Maybe they dropped a few hints along the way. Like, you know, written language.”
She began laughing raucously.
“This is funny? Here we thought the Middle East was the cradle of civilization, now we find it’s actually a whole different solar system. I assumed you’d have a problem with that.”
She wiped away a joyful tear, her doubts falling away with it. “Not at all. This system isn’t just where civilization sprang from—it’s where humanity sprang from. Everything on that ship is sized and shaped for us. Their writing shares the same roots as our first written languages. And it looks like our life grew from the compounds they deposited.” Her cheeks were flush, her eyes beaming. The questions she had struggled with for too long were being answered. “Don’t you see? They’re not alien. They’re us.”
Their discussions over what to do next had lasted for days, and they repeatedly arrived at the same conclusions. Magellan was nearing the end of its design life, was almost out of propellant, and had endured enough. Columbus, on the other hand, still held four years’ worth of nutrients and had enough left in the tanks to accelerate all the way to Earth. With the proven hydrogen scoops, it could possibly do more.
With Jack still dependent on Daisy’s network, that presented a difficult dilemma. Transferring his body to the newer equipment aboard Columbus was only the first step; unraveling his sensory inputs to then embed them within Bob’s would be like blindfolded brain surgery.
It was safer to partition his share of her network in Magellan’s hab module and mate it with Columbus. The loss would be partial and short-term for him, and negligible for Daisy. The ship would become fully hers, with no human input.
As Jack reawakened aboard Columbus, his vision registered a familiar face.
Traci beamed with relief. “Hello, friend.” She caressed the plexiglass shield encasing him. “I’d rather touch you in person, but I guess this will have to do.”
“I’d like that too,” he said. “One of these days.”
“One of these days,” she agreed. “For now, you can drive the beach ball drone all you want.”
“For now. You may decide you want it back.”
“You might be right. Looks like you had fun with it.”
“Don’t get me wrong. Flying one of these ships with just your brain is a feeling of near-godlike power. But it’s more fun to zip around inside at will. It’s the most human I’ve felt in a long time.”
She studied him intently. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this? It’ll be a long time in hibernation.”
“I’m used to it by now,” he said. “Truth is I don’t want to go back. Not yet. There’s too much left to see here.”
She nodded and looked away pensively. “Same.”
“So how about you? Are you ready to do this?”
“It worked out for you, didn’t it? I’m infinitely more well adjusted.” She drew her lips tight. “Home isn’t exactly home anymore. Too much has changed, and in too many ways that I don’t like.”
“Think the folks back home will understand?”
“They’ll have to. I’m not leaving you again.”
Traci pushed away and into an open hibernation pod. She connected its IV line to a fresh port she had injected in her forearm and took a deep breath. “Okay, Bob. I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
Light.
Cold and clear, slicing open her consciousness like a scalpel. The light washed over and through her, everywhere all at once.
Sound enveloped her, as if she could hear every hum and creak of the ship. Jack would have to teach her how to modulate that—
A familiar voice cut through the cacophony of her freshly awakened mind.
“Hello, friend.”
“Hi,” she said tentatively, testing out her new voice. “Can you see me? I can’t see you.”
“Been watching you the whole time. Not in a creepy way, I promise. Hang on, I’ll change your video source.”
Her vision flashed momentarily, the field of view changing. Suddenly she was looking down at Jack’s hibernating form. “There you are. I feel better now.”
“I’ll show you how to change sources later. It’s not hard.”
“Good morning.” Bob’s voice was comfortably familiar, soothing in a way she hadn’t known before, a steady hand guiding her through this new reality. “I have some news from Daisy if you wish to hear.”
Please. She wondered if he could hear her thoughts. “Yes, by all means.”
“Daisy reports she has executed the injection burn for a low-energy transfer through the wormhole. She will arrive at Earth in two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one days, by her local time reference of course. She sends her best and adds, ‘Happy birthday, Traci.’”
That drew a laugh, in that same scratchy hoot that had so annoyed her before. She’d have to work on hers as well. “That’s great news, Bob. Please send her my regards. How about us—are we ready to go?”
“I have calculated a 0.01 g profile, tracing the Artifact’s trajectory to the gas giant you named ‘Colossus.’ Our optimal departure window is in four hours and eight minutes. Transit time will be one hundred eighty-three days and—”
“Hold on there, speedy,” Jack cautioned. “You’ve got a lot of adjustments ahead. Don’t you want time to get used to your new self?”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” she said. “Let’s go.”