by Justin Sloan
"I don't know how you can eat that stuff," Collins said.
Sanchez said, smiling. "It's just pork shoulder. Food of the gods, if you ask me. All I need is some eggs and rice."
Collins led the still shaken Hastings, and Sanchez down another hall that opened into a circular room. Endless control panels with yellow knobs and red buttons extruding out from small circuitry. Just above, windows were inset, and they could see the blast shields were closed over broken glass.
"Something tried to break in?" Sanchez asked.
Hastings remained quiet, scanning the deck.
"Or out," Collins said.
They found a large center red padded recliner encased in a silver alloy frame, amongst some other chairs. On its headrest, was a silver helmet with black wires that spidered out and twisted up to the ceiling. Collins was in awe of how similar it looked to the connection of a spinal cord and its vertebrae disks. He figured this was the Captain's chair but had never before seen a psyche link for a ship this large that one person could control.
“Well, fuck me Ready Player One.” Sanchez said aloud.
Collins and Hastings giggled.
“How do we get into to the logs?" Collins asked.
Hastings and Sanchez both looked at Collins with an unmistakable expression of wanting him to lead.
"You want me to go into it?" Collins said.
“Snipes—er—Collins, you pencil pushed all this shit at the academy.” Sanchez said.
"Yeah, but that was just theory. I ended up joining the resistance in the middle of it,” Collins retorted.
"Listen, Collins, I know you can do it. Now’s the time to showboat,” Hastings said.
She placed her hand over his shoulder and Collins felt the warmth from her touch. Like a warm blanket, he felt soothed and knew deep down he would do anything for her.
He looked at Sanchez with half eaten chunks of SPAM caught in his short dark beard. For the first time in a long while he felt like he had a family again. If this was all the Syndicate’s doing—if putting them here was—then he didn't want to go back. He recognized Hastings and Sanchez felt the same.
"Okay. I'll do it," Collins said, walking to the strange reclined chair.
Collins slipped in and sunk into the red padding that was softer than any cot he had felt in months. The back half of his body was enveloped and when Collins tried to move the cushion seemed to respond back as if intelligent—some kind of smart chair? Straps grew over each of his limbs, pulling him in snug. Collins laid his head back and the helmet-like device automatically lowered over him, covering his eyes.
Radiant blue lights pulsed in strobing patterns from the base of the helmet to ceiling, initiating the connection link between Collins and the ship. The reclined chair began to react to his body. The legs split apart and separated, along with the chair recliner arms. Collins felt his body glide as if in a set of trays as it formed upright into a standing position. He felt comfortable and chalked it up to being similar to a mech suit that he used to drive at the academy.
"Awesome," Sanchez said.
Collins raised his arm, now connected to the chair and began to flick his wrist in tiny movements. A large blue projection hologram began to stream from his chair, banded in light.
"There, now you can see what I see," Collins said.
The hologram booted into a central mainframe. The mainframe constructs painted the database in a six-sided box inset into another box, connected at the vertices. Collins recognized the absence of any familiar basic file structures from Earth.
"Where are the files and folders?" Hastings asked.
"It's just a box within a box," Sanchez said.
Collins walked forward, looking around the walls. Familiar command text was transcribed along the wireframe walls, wrapping around to the adjacent side, but seemed to disappear, starting another set of words in its place. None of the sentences seemed to match.
"None of the texts are lining up. There's got to be a cipher of some sort – like a key," Hastings said.
"You have to think like a Syndicate" Collins said.
"What do you mean?" Sanchez asked.
Collins raised his hand and followed the dialogue on the walls around, thinking to himself. He murmured ‘hypercube’ under his breath.
"If you were to travel the universe then you would need to think dimensionally."
"So, three-D?" Sanchez asked.
"No, to travel vast expanses in space, you have to think in higher dimensions," Collins continued.
Collins drew with his finger a square and another square, connected the corners. "This is the three dimensions we are familiar with—the cube."
Sanchez nodded.
"Now if you draw another cube and connect that cube's corner to this corner. You have a four-dimensional cube or hypercube. That's what I think this interface is."
"So, how do we interpret a higher dimension in a lower one? I mean, we live in three-dimensional space and you say the hypercube is four-D?" Hastings asked.
"Just like how a two dimensional being cannot see the third-dimension, we can't see the fourth," Collins added, "The hypercube is our best way to interpret a four-dimensional cube within a three dimensional space, so if we were to unwrap it then we maybe…"
Collins zoomed out of the tesseract, scaling the interface to about half his body length. He unattached the four corners of the outer box and motioned the four vertices down and over the box within. As he pulled the vertices down, two more vertices extended out and each adjoining face took on a box-shape itself.
The shape was recognizable now to the group. Like a three dimensional double lowercase 't'. It intersected like a cross and looked something like what a messiah figure might have hung from, if it were four-dimensional.
"Dali's cross," Sanchez said.
"Like Salvidor Dali?" Collins asked.
"Yeah, my mother would take me to museums to look at paintings when I was young. I remember the painting. Jesus was hanging from this shape in a new interpretation of his crucifixion."
Collins looked at the strange cross and peered closer at the words now connecting together to make coherent sentences. "Looks like we found the cipher."
Tang
TANG STOMPED his way down the hallway back to the armory. His long black hair was pulled tight in a bun now. How could these idiots be so blind? This ship was toying with them. He'd seen it before. The damn Syndicate was behind it and Tang bet the Yao Guai didn't know they had the baddest soldier on board.
The armory door opened to a sulfur gunpowder smell. Tang loved the smell of warfare despite the repercussions it had on him. His hillside village had been fodder for the Syndicate, taking everything he knew—the innocent. But there was one truth now—the good die young and the bad motherfuckers live forever. If it weren't for the commando legion he met up with, he might not have learned all that was needed to fight against the Syndicate.
Tang brushed his heavily calloused hand over round after round as walked toward the larger guns hanging in the back. He knew what war had done to him, but it wasn't just that. He wore the mask of killing—the mask to fit in. Growing up poor can leave you coming off as an asshole to some. Tang grabbed the large sonic rifle that looked too large for him to hold. He cocked the gun and peered through the sight hole. He never asked for any of this. How would you expect for a guy like him to act toward a haunted ship? These fucking Yao Guai.
The Yao Guai were the evil spirits his older brother used to warn him about. Not since his childhood had he thought about the demons. Tang remembered hearing of different kinds. Some were good, some were bad, but the ones on this ship - they had taken one of his squad which gave him full authority to unleash some serious ass-whopping.
He panned the sight hole over the various weaponry he could use to exterminate the demons that plagued this ship. His dark brown eyes were beady and motionless. Just as his sight passed over the last of the racks he saw a strange device. Tang lowered the gun as he walked closer
to the tubular apparatus that jutted out from under a black blanket.
"Nano-Mech Suit Battery," Tang read aloud slowly.
Tang knew he would need his nano-mech suit if he was going to do something drastic. It gave him power and strength—something no one could stop. The suits were meant to travel in space if need be with only the help of a rechargeable battery source.
He scanned the walls and noticed the array of proximity bombs with remote detonators to match. Proximity bombs were used for exploding when an enemy passed close by. Maybe they would pick up the Yao Guai and detonate. Either way he could use the remotes to blow the ship up in sections. They needed to be purged.
He remembered the stunners having an effect on the demons. What if he could purge them completely from the ship? Electromagnetic pulses would not hurt living things—only energized circuits—like this haunted vessel. Tang smiled slightly as he licked over the grit in his yellow teeth.
A Transport
COLLINS WAS FASCINATED by the layout of the computer interface of the ship. He spun around the double-cross shape, reading the various directories listed in blue font. Hastings and Sanchez stood by looking puzzled..
At the very bottom were the core reactor functions, followed by something labeled as ‘naturalization’. Collins remembered seeing something like that as they passed by the CAT scan-like devices earlier on. Just above this were the mess hall, armory, and barracks making up the intersecting cross, and finally the head of the ship.
"The ship is the same shape as the unfolded hypercube," Collins said, intrigued by the views he watched in the headset.
"Interesting," Hastings added. "Check for the logs."
Collins dove into the head portion of the ship, opening the various command controls sections. Just beneath another layer were the ship logs. Collins wondered how the Syndicate, or the species that had occupied this vessel—whoever they were—operated their logs. It could be another task to wrap his head around.
The database now mirrored an industrial-looking complex of skyscraper shapes and the thousands of records of the journeys these travelers had taken. Collins wiped the sweat off his lip as he navigated to the last building.
As Collins touched down, he watched the organic-like circuitry pulse under his feet and around the building. Was it channeling something from him? He reached out and touched the side.
WOOOSH!
The building’s sides collapsed in on themselves exposing a brilliant red core in the shape of two inverted cones, one upside down atop the other, and touching at their sharpest end. Collins looked at the waxy red surface, watching the light scatter on its exterior ever so lightly.
"Is that the record?" Sanchez asked in awe.
The surface began to change and a series of bumps percolated up from within. Collins thought it resembled Braille, for a moment, but was taken aback when each little bump grew more minuscule and projected a physical display.
"It's a recording," Collins said.
"Why the two cones?" Hasting asked.
"Just think, Hastings. If you were a higher dimensional being then recording would work both ways. This upper light cone represents the future and the lower cone represents the past."
"And where they 'pinch' in the middle is us?" Hastings asked.
"It could be any point in time, but yes," Collins confirmed.
Collins touched the pinched portion with his two fingers and the current time slot played revealing the dead ship. He pulled the pinch down and time began to reverse to the very first recording event.
He watched on the holographic projection the ship being boarded by a large crew dressed in taut uniforms adorned with high cut collars. Despite not having chairs or normal seats like most human ships, the crew lined up one by one below a sign that read 'Naturalization'. Collins recognized this as the room above the core reactor area he had seen on the interface.
“They look like a goddamn cult.” Sanchez said.
Collins eyed the procedure closely as the ship mate next in line entered the room and lay in the machine. With a burning light, Collins witnessed the machine rip the soul out of the crewman. The attending crewman then slumped the dead body on the floor.
"They’re killing themselves," Collins said.
"Why?" Hastings asked.
Like staring at the sun, it was hard to look away. The crewmen then collected a small orb from the machine. The texture was smooth and made of an alloy, reflecting off the harsh lights as the doctor carried it over to a slot. Collins could make out the wispy energy inside as the new resting soul.
“I think they’re… transferring their consciousness."
“This is some Twilight Zone shit, man.” Sanchez said.
The crewmen inserted the orb into the slot and dropped it.
"They're putting it into the ship?" Sanchez said, a disgusted expression blanketing his face as he watched the feed.
"In stasis for a long journey?" Hastings asked.
"I've never seen this kind of technology before. The advances for consciousness transfer is decades beyond what we know," Collins said.
"What are you saying?" Hastings asked plainly.
"This ship is from the future," Collins said.
“This could give us the advantage we need against the Syndicate,” Hastings added enthusiastically.
Collins spotted something out of the corner of his pale eye. Movement such as he had seen before. As he isolated their positions, he counted five rogue entities.
"What are those?"
"My guess would be a few conscious entities escaped somehow." Collins said.
"So, those are the things that are attacking us," Hastings said.
“It’s fucking Casper the Ghost up in here,” Sanchez said.
"Wait, you said you saw Piña," Hastings said.
"Right," Collins confirmed.
"So, what if the ghost of Piña was just trying to get back into his physical body?" Hastings asked.
Collins fell silent and looked back to the inverse cones. He grabbed the pinched point and moved it upward.
"What the hell are you doing now?" Sanchez asked.
"This is a light cone. If we can see the past light then we can see the future light."
A scrambling of fast-forwarded movement settled to an empty hull—just like the way it was when they had first arrived. Outside the ship, they could see a double binary star pulsating a brilliant blue. As it strobed, it flung its electromagnetic-radio-waves far into the reaches of space.
"A double-binary pulsar star. Incredible," Collins said.
“Looks like they aren’t stopping,” Sanchez said.
The three marines watched as the ship headed directly into the star's center. In a thunderous clash, the ship ignited and a pulse of energy was sent throughout the universe. Not far away, hundreds of pods could be seen being struck by the force.
Collins zoomed in closer to see that inside each of the small structures something strange and wonderful was happening – he could detect tiny bits of matter as they reassembled into human form, ready to be imprinted with the stored consciousness of the missing ship’s crew.
"Projected consciousness into nano printed bodies," Collins said to himself. "There has to be a thousand people on this ship."
"I don't get it. Why the star?" Hastings asked.
"The ship is a transport for future humans. They are collapsing their consciousness into the star to radiate outward. The pods are reviving the signal and printing the self-image of their bodies on demand."
"Self-preservation?” Hastings asked.
"But from what?"
SCREEECH RUUUUUUMP RUUUUUUMP!
An alarm rang throughout the ship. The sound was deafening. Collins exited the record logs, unhooking from the machine. He rolled out of the cushion chair and looked up at the display showing the lower portion of the ship now missing. A nano printed seal closed the hole exiting into space, and there stood Tang in his nano-mech suit, triggering explosions.
CONFRO
NTATION
Collins whipped down the long corridors with Hastings and Sanchez behind him. The pads of his feet were light on the steps and the adrenaline surged through his body. Despite his confidence of finally leading a team, his stomach felt like it was in his throat.
Collins rounded the corner with ease and descended down different floor levels. Tang was a bad seed from the start – deep down he knew he would have to face him. There was no one else to do the job, and now Tang was destroying a vessel carrying a thousand lives.
"We need to get to our mech suits if we are going to stop him!” Collins ordered.
"What about the batteries?" Sanchez called out.
"Figure it out," Collins called back.
Just past the core reactor, the air began to feel cooler, and as he ran Collins could now see his steamy breath as he exhaled. Hastings and Sanchez caught up with him just as he reached the Naturalization sector where they had abandoned their nano-mech suits earlier. Tang wore his yellow and red tattered mech-suit with pride, fully charged. He moved purposefully as he placed explosive charges on each of the doors.
"Tang!" Collins yelled out. "What the hell are you doing? You trying to kill us?"
"Fuck you, One Eye! This place is cursed and I'm gonna' purge these fucking demons."
Hastings yelled out. "Tang, they aren't demons. They’re humans just like you and me."
Tang kept placing charges on the doors, ignoring the team. On his side, Collins saw Tang's new battery pack powering his suit. He was no match against Tang without his own mech suit. He needed to pull that battery, or the remote detonator from his hand, whichever one he reached first.
Collins looked back at Hastings, who had gone very quiet. She read the hard look in his eyes and understood that there was only one thing to do. Nate shot a glance at the abandoned mech suits and nodded. Then he turned his head back and as he did so he caught Tang's beady black eyes looking like daggers.
Tang was smiling crazily."Whatcha' gonna do, One Eye? I'll blow this deck quicker than you can say Ghost Ship."
Hastings stepped past Collins. "Tang, that's enough. We looked at the ship's logs. The ship is a transport of consciousness itself."
