Battle Luna

by Travis S. Taylor

  David had overheard one of the engineers saying something like, “It appears to be able to print out things in large pieces, maybe even a full two meters cubed.”

  Which was really freaking big. But appearances could be deceiving also. As far as he was aware nobody had yet to get the thing to print anything.

  It wasn’t like the desk 3-D printer that he had in his apartment to print out small devices and tools that a person might need for everyday life on the Moon. In fact, if David had needed anything larger than a spatula printed out he’d have to either traipse off to the marketplace to buy it or have one printed and shipped to him from a local shop that had larger print capabilities. The Object on the other hand, well, if they ever figured it out, looked to be large enough to print out things the size of a motor for a LoonieCart or maybe even a full-sized environment suit in one printing.

  David sat in front of the main display of the Object with his IR goggles on. The false color images filled his field of view with strange alien-looking writing and characters. Looking at the images before him gave him the elation that he—and Carla, Sarah, and Jerry if you were going to get nitpicky—were deciphering a completely new language that mankind had never seen before. He tapped at one of the glyphs before him on the device’s input screen or monitor or, well, it wasn’t a monitor per se, like an old school computer or device that you might find in a modern day human dwelling or office and it didn’t have a direct-to-mind link like some of the other more modern technologies. But it was the data interface for the Object and “monitor” was as good a word for it as any. Maybe “interface” would suffice but it seemed too little or common a word to describe it as far as David was concerned.

  There was something else. It had a set of glyphs on the side and the glyphs seemed to morph as you needed them to, and the key was knowing which glyphs you wanted to morph. You didn’t actually touch it, it just knew that you were thinking about that particular set of glyphs. How it did that was beyond David. He just accepted it as technology that the engineers and scientists understood, or would understand, once he figured out the instruction manual. No, it was more like they would understand it once he’d figured out which language the instruction manual was written in, then he learned said language, and then he read the manual and explained it to everyone else.

  One of the physicists from Luna 8 had said something about quantum entanglement and the human brain functioning like a quantum computer and it got the entire team buzzing about the idea. David wasn’t so sure how any of that was actually helpful in translating the instructions which in turn would enable using the Object for its original intended purpose or at least some purpose useful to the Loonies reverse engineering it.

  In fact, if it weren’t for Carla and Sarah, the mathematician and the physicist, helping decipher the glyphs David would be completely lost on the nuances of atomic and molecular physics and chemistry and quantum information mathematics that were involved in the alien glyph language. The weird symbols used for those sciences were pretty much an alien language to David as well.

  And were it not for the mayor pressuring him and warning that the Ueys were coming and gonna take it away any day now, David would much rather just sit back, relax, and take his time on the project. He had always worked much better without pressure. But he’d seen the news. He and the rest of the Loonies working there knew that if the Moon was going to keep any autonomy in their lives then a stand was going to be made soon. And the Object might turn out to be a key component of that autonomy.

  “Hey, Luna, what time is it?”

  “It is seven fifty-five, David.”

  He looked up as he heard the buzz of the elevator door and Carla walked through the translucent opening that always appeared in the IR goggle view. He nodded to her and paused from looking at his work briefly. She was carrying something in her hand that looked like a two-meter-long metal pipe with holes and gadgets connected to it. The one end of the thing was very pointy. She was also fidgeting with her security badge, trying to get it back in her hip pocket.

  “Good morning,”

  “Good morning, David.” Carla smiled her very youthful grin at him and scanned the room. The purple streak through her shoulder-length ponytail just reminded David how young she was and how old he was. Rhetorically she asked, “Hasn’t Sarah gotten in yet?”

  “Um, we’re the first ones here. What you got there?”

  “Oh, this is just a surprise. If it works then I’ll tell you about it.” Carla raised an eyebrow and sounded a bit cagy to David, but what did he know.

  “Okay, then.” He shrugged but still watched her with interest as she placed the pipe upright into the floor and folded three legs down at one-hundred-twenty-degree increments about the pipe. Each of the legs had an L bracket that met flush with the floor. Carla depressed some pushpins and they held in place, allowing the thing to stand upright by itself. She stepped away to the tool bin and returned with a hammer drill and six long masonry screws.

  “Uh, Carla, you need a hand?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. Carla finished placing the rock screws in and tossed the drill motor to the side. She then pressed a button on top of the pipe. “Oh, yeah, fire in the hole!”

  The pointy end of the device glowed red hot and then there was a very loud BANG! David nearly ruined his pants.

  “What the HELL was that?”

  “Wow, that was louder than it was outside.” Carla shook her head and fingered at her ears. David noticed she had earplugs in them. She went back to work sliding the outer pipe up over what was apparently an inner pipe that had just been hammered into the floor and then she tossed it aside. The metal on rock clankity-clank was nowhere near as loud as the explosive had been. She tapped a few buttons on the device and a light started moving up and down the shaft of it. A very low bass tone sound started to oscillate in the room. “Well, that won’t be too annoying, I hope.”

  The elevator door buzzed again and Sarah and Jerry stepped through laughing about something. David was still trying to stop his ears from ringing and couldn’t make out what they were saying. He noticed that Carla was removing the earplugs from her ears when she looked back at him.

  “Oh, David, I’m sorry. I should have warned you. Are you okay?” Carla asked.

  “Yeah, but do you mind telling me what is going on?”

  “So you see, Mr. Mayor, you are not at all where you think you are.” Carla pulled up a projected map of the Moon and zoomed into the West Dome area a bit. “Sarah and I placed geophones—they detect seismic vibrations—along this path here where the red dots are on the map. We basically took the old gravel road path the kids used back when to go between Luna City and Aldrinville.”

  “When did you do that?” Mayor Hamilton asked.

  “When we were shut down to have the security doors installed,” Sarah said, waving a hand over her shoulder as if to point to the elevator door behind her. “We hated wasting all that time so we put it to good use.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “Well, then we placed this thumper here into the rock floor and turned it on,” Carla continued. “The geophones, after a lot of computer processing, managed to detect the thumping and we used the delays from all seventeen of them to triangulate the position of the thumper.”

  “Just like triangulating on a radio source, I get it,” Mayor Hamilton said.

  “Well, guess where we are?” Carla asked him. “No don’t, ’cause you won’t get it right. We are right here about three hundred kilometers west and a bit north of the West Dome and about two hundred meters beneath the surface of this crater here.”

  “Wha—?” The mayor was dumbfounded.

  “That’s exactly how I responded, Mr. Mayor.” David laughed. “But we’ve checked and double-checked with different techniques now and it’s true.”

  “But how?”

  “Well, first of all, we have to realize that the elevator isn’t an elevator,” Sarah explained. “It’s a transport of some
sort.”

  “It might even be a teleporter like in science fiction movies but we don’t know anything about it yet,” Carla continued. “For now, just knowing how to use it is good enough. We still have to figure out how the Object here works before moving on to the next crazy thing.”

  “I agree with that.” Mayor Hamilton still looked bewildered.

  “There’s more,” David added. “Well, a couple of things.”

  “More than this?”

  “The transport has more locations.”

  “There’s only the up and down button on the door?” Mayor Hamilton said perplexed.

  “Well, kinda,” Carla said. “There is an up hand and a down hand. And they are both the same hand.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them. Used them.”

  “Ah, so, do this,” Carla held her right hand upright out in front of her. “This is the up hand and if I hold it upside down it’s the down hand, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, first hold your hand upright then slowly turn it clockwise to the downward pointing position. There are all these points between upright and downward that are locations too. The hands aren’t buttons. They are starting and stopping points on a dial.” Carla smiled as she continued to move her hand slowly through the positions along the imaginary hand dial.

  “Oh my God,” Then after a brief pause he continued. “Have any of you tried this?”

  “Not yet. We wanted to tell you first,” David answered.

  “It could be dangerous, might not be. Who knows?” Sarah added.

  “This team is my A-team,” Mayor Hamilton said. “I don’t want anything happening to you. I’ll get some others to work on the elevator thing. We need to stay focused here on how to make this thing do whatever it does.”

  “Well, realizing how the door works gives a bit more insight on how the aliens built their instrument controls. Before we were thinking buttons. Now we need to think of three-dimensional spinners and dials,” Carla explained.

  “I see. Good.” The Mayor nodded in agreement. “What else?”

  “Well, as you’ll note, Jerry isn’t here today.” David motioned around the Object room. “We sent him out to the location above us to survey for a spot where we might build ourselves a back door.”

  “A back door? Yes, that is a very good idea. But it must be a secret back door and only we know about it. Tell him to do it but with a minimal crew. And I want to have your team moved into here with all the supplies and creature comforts of home. This is your new home for now. The room is big enough we can set up private quarters. I’ll have that started.”

  “Wait, what?” David, Sarah, and Carla said mostly in unison.

  “Listen, I know it is inconvenient for you. And you can come and go as you need to, but I’d prefer you stayed here for safety.” The mayor seemed to know something they didn’t. “I don’t trust the Ueys. And I think they have gotten wind of our project here.”

  “Oh my God! It’s terrible.” Jerry was almost in tears as much as he was fuming with anger. The big projector in the center common area they had created showed the Luna 8 dome collapsed on the southernmost side with plumes of dust floating about randomly from escaping air currents. There were four UNE transport ships sitting just outside the dome with dozens of Earther troops moving about. The team couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  “. . . as it stands the casualty rate is estimated to be in the forties to fifties with at least nine confirmed deaths so far. It is unclear what the point of the attack is and a spokesperson for the United Nations of Earth has yet to comment. The coalition of Lunar mayors and governors are meeting in a nondisclosed and confidential meeting this morning to determine how to respond . . .”

  “What were they trying to accomplish?” Carla asked. “I mean, why attack a mining colony like Luna Eight?”

  “They were looking for something,” David said sternly. He had been expecting something to happen before too long. The mayor had been warning them something was coming, but up until this point it hadn’t been real. “Something that might be very valuable. Not sure why Luna Eight, though.”

  “You mean they were looking for the Object?” Sarah asked.

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “I bet the mayor somehow led them to thinking it was down there to see what they would do,” Jerry added. David could see from the look on his face that he was ready to start punching the next Uey he saw. “And boy did they do something.”

  “I bet they don’t have two dozen firearms down there. They were all just sitting ducks.” David leaned back on the old couch that had been brought in for them and sighed. “We’d better figure this thing out before they figure out where it really is.”

  “The first thing I want it to do is to print out me an alien ray gun!” Jerry said angrily. “Then we’ll show those bastards.”

  “Where we gonna get the blueprint for an alien ray gun?” Carla asked.

  David stared at the images before him and there were several that would seem to change from one shape to another and then back to where it started. He was beginning to think that the first images you saw when interacting with the Object might be a ready prompt like on an old school computer.

  “Don’t ask me,” Carla shrugged. “It just knows what you’re thinking. I think. The really interesting part is it seems to interact with all of us at once. How do we keep too many chefs from spoiling the soup once we do figure this thing out?”

  “This is that brain-is-a-quantum-computer thing again, right?” Jerry, the construction crew foreman, had seemed to acclimate to the physicist’s language quicker than David had. His orange-striped coveralls looked monochrome in the IR goggles. “So, what if I change my mind in the middle of a print?”

  “No, uh, I don’t think it works like that, Jer,” Sarah responded. “Think of it more like you sent a file to the printer and you are waiting for it to print. I guess you could hit the cancel button somehow.”

  “More than that.” David looked a bit annoyed at their conversation. “I think there must be a very complex drawing package or blueprint package down to the atoms or molecules input into this thing somehow before a print can be done.”

  “That would make a lot of sense, David.” Carla sat down next to him, putting on her goggles. “Our systems all require detailed three-dimensional models and print material descriptions. But how do we think in those details without saving and editing along the way?”

  “First things first. Let’s just get the thing to print something even if it is just a blob of goop,” David suggested. “Then we fine-tune.”

  “Well, the printers have printer material spools. Where do we put the print materials into this thing?” Sarah walked around and around the Object waving her arms about. David guessed she’d done that a million times. “Where is the print button on this thing?”

  “I’m thinking here, just thinking, mind you.” Jerry sat down and pulled up an image on his tablet of an apple. “Man, I wish we could have apples here on the Moon anytime we wanted them. D’ya think we could just print an apple?”

  “That’d be nice, Jerry.” David started to laugh but then the alien device lit up even more than it had been across the infrared spectrum. There were spots in the middle that saturated the goggles so brightly that he had to shut his eyes.

  “What did you do, David?” Carla and Sarah both exclaimed while jumping backward, putting distance between them and the Object.

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Hey, look!” Jerry pointed at the flat tray on the right side of the device. “Something is printing!”

  “It looks like a page or a solid sheet.” David reached down as the lights on the printer subsided and the printing noises stopped completely. “Well, Jerry, I’ll be damned.”

  “What?”

  David held up a piece of material that felt almost like paper or maybe it was very thin plastic or sheet metal, but in the middle of it was a drawing of an apple in orang
e infrared false colors.

  “Hang on a minute,” Sarah said while lifting her goggles. “You all should look at it in the visible spectrum. Jerry, what type of apple were you thinking of?”

  “Pink Ladies. I used to love them with peanut butter as a kid. Haven’t had one since I moved to Aldrinville.” Jerry almost licked his lips as he described the fruit.

  “Well, here ya go! One Pink Lady apple.” David smiled. He handed the printout to him. “I doubt it will be as tasty as you had hoped.”

  “A picture of an apple? What good does that do us? I was thinking of this picture here.” Jerry held up his tablet and the image was almost identical to the printout from the Object.

  “Wait, Jerry, that’s it!” Sarah clapped her hands triumphantly and looked as if she were going to bounce off the floor in the light lunar gravity. “You were looking at a two-dimensional image and thinking of that image, not an actual apple.”

  “But why Jerry’s thoughts?” Carla shrugged. “We’ve all been imagining things, I’m sure. I mean, I’d kill for a cup of coffee with a triple-shot espresso about now.”

  “I don’t know, but maybe it just likes him.” David turned to Jerry and handed him a tablet pen. “Jerry, hold this in your hand and look at it and think about it and focus on it and wish for it just like you did the apple.”

  “Uh, okay, David.” Jerry took the pen.

  “Too many people know where it is already,” Tami agreed with the mayor. “All the crews that were down there excavating the dome. Some of them will talk to their friends and family on Earth.”

  “Yeah, but all they know is there’s a big crazy room under the surface.” Mayor Hamilton leaned back into the seat of the LoonieCart II as they zoomed down the old gravel Aldrinville-to-Luna City pass. The gray regolith was building up on the front bumper section on the cart thick enough to write your name in. He suspected his suit looked similar. “Only the research teams and us know about the Object. I certainly didn’t think that the Earthers would do a hostile takeover of Luna Eight when they thought it was down there either.”