by Dave Walsh
“Where are you?” the first message read.
“Are you not coming then?” was the second one.
“Fine, don’t bother. The door is locked now, and I’m going to bed,” the last one read. He heard her voice in his head while he read them, imagining it being angry but still sweet-sounding, with that hint of sadness behind it. Even when she was happy, there was that hint of sadness and uncertainty in her voice. Her green eyes felt as cold as the vastness of space sometimes, making him question his own intentions and if what she felt for him was really love, like the love that he understood, or if it was just another way for her to hide from her problems.
“Sorry,” he typed back. “Fell asleep, had a long day. See you tonight?” He tilted the projection toward his face, the light illuminating his bunk, and stared at it for a while before hitting send. Someday his excuses would wear out. That would be the day where this whole charade ceased to be. The thought made him sigh.
Their relationship got so heavy so fast, and he still wasn’t quite sure why it did. Kara’s family had money -- that much had always been clear about her -- but she liked to make her own way without her father’s money and influence. She enlisted on her own, claiming it would give her more insight into what life on the ship really was like, as well as citing the opportunities for officers in different fields. It was true: Advancing in the military did have its own perks. The branch that Jonah was in oversaw the media on the fleet. It was called the Communications Ministry, but the reality was, it was closer to propaganda control. Kara was a journalist by trade, and it did feel like a natural fit for her, but it was rough at first.
There were different decks to the ship, and they reflected the unintentional caste system that had arisen aboard the ship over the span of the epic flight to a new world. She was from the elusive A-Deck, where the wealthy ruled over the rest of the ship. Her father was the Minister of Finance aboard the ship, the man who was ultimately in charge of how currency was regulated and ensured that the commerce system aboard the ship was handled in a professional manner. This put Kara and her family among the very elite, and her decision to work and live on the B-Deck proved to be one of rebellion. Her choice struck everyone as a temporary one, just to help find herself before she went home to the A-Deck and her family.
Jonah continued to get ready in silence, feeling guilty now for not responding to her sooner, knowing the argument they were about to have and how much he was not looking forward to it. Since they worked together, it meant that he was going to have to deal with her not speaking to him all day, which would make life uncomfortable not only for him but for everyone else around them. That was always a part of it, and it was always very obvious to everyone around them, too. Kara felt like their relationship was taboo and had to be kept a secret. Maybe she liked it better that way, but it always made Jonah feel uncomfortable, like she was ashamed to be with him and didn’t want to actually commit to him.
Upon walking through the glass doors to the office, listening to the whirr and clank while they shut behind him, he saw the usual bustling office: his coworkers sitting in their ergonomic chairs, their holoscanners displaying a deluge of streaming data, and the general sound of confusion in the air. Jonah sighed, knowing that it was going to yet again be one of those days that he regretted waking up in his own skin.
He had thought that the uniformity of a military position would mean less of the usual job-related stressors, but if anything, they were amplified a few times over. It didn’t help that a part of him took pride in what he did and how a switch flipped inside of him whenever he walked into that office. He could feel the change wash over him when he strode past the first few desks, knowing that people were watching him, waiting to see what he did. He simply kept a smirk on his face and slid into his desk, clicking his personal holoscanner into a stand before powering on his work holoscanner next to it.
“I’m not talking to you,” he heard. Kara looked over at him while she walked by, making sure not to make eye contact with him, even speaking quietly so that no one else would hear. He glanced up to watch her striding toward her desk, his eyes quickly fixed on how her dress hung around her hips and legs, everything accentuated by the heels that she wore. That was one thing that they did have in their relationship: He always found himself physically attracted to her, and she seemed to be attracted to the commanding personality that Jonah displayed at work on a daily basis. Everything else felt like he was wearing two left shoes.
“So Jonah,” a voice came from behind his shoulder while he continued to watch Kara on the way to her desk. Alexander came into his view, rapping his knuckles on the edge of his desk and leaning over onto his hands. “Jonah -- hey,” he said, finally getting Jonah’s attention.
“Oh, hey, Alexander.” Jonah leaned back in his chair, giving his undivided attention to him, trying to pretend like he was simply engrossed in work before.
“I have a special project that we need you on. It should be right up your alley as I know you care about all of that science stuff.” He laughed awkwardly and moved his hands around as if he were holding a plasma lamp where the “lightning” is attracted to your fingertips. “So there is this story from the Secretary of Security’s Office, something that has been pretty hush-hush, and they are trying to get ahead of it before more details leak out.”
“Oh?” Jonah’s ears perked up, and he leaned forward in his chair, genuinely curious as to what this assignment could be. Alexander was right, sadly, and that partially made Jonah feel like his boss knew him better than Jonah would like to admit.
“Ah-ha,” Alexander said, pointing at Jonah and chuckling. “I knew this would be right up your alley, Jonah. It’s apparently about a cluster of space junk that we passed by the other day, bringing some of it on board. You know how chatter works. There has been some people from the deck crew who scooped it up whom they think have been talking about it -- and of course, they're spreading stories about alien technology, doomsday devices and all of that.”
“Aliens?” Jonah furrowed his brow and laughed. “Seriously? I mean...”
“Yeah, I know,” Alexander said, coming around into Jonah’s desk area and pointing at his work holoscanner. “Pull up the message that I just sent to you a few minutes ago.”
Jonah turned back to his screen, being careful to spin slowly while Alexander’s right hand was on the back of his chair. He flicked at the projection with his fingers a few time, pulling up his new messages and scrolling through until he found one from Alexander. He pulled it open. His heart began to race a bit when he saw a photograph of the device that was in Professor Cox’s workshop the other day, the one that they were inspecting on his holoscanner and discussing. He did his best to stifle the look of familiarity and coughed while reading the message, which was forwarded from a high-level government messenger (none of the transmissions ever came from the actual person, always the messenger) and saw that they had it all wrong. Completely wrong.
“Looks kind of weird, doesn’t it?” Alexander nodded while he spoke. “Turns out it was just a part that fell off of one of the probes that we had sent out years before. Looks like it was designed by what was known as the 'Russian government' -- whatever that is -- and they did things a bit different than they did when the Ministry started.”
“So you are telling me this is pre-Ministry tech?” Jonah looked back at Alexander, trying to stifle his disbelief. There was no way that technology was older than this vessel, which was state of the art when it was launched, and all things considered, was still better than anything that human hands had ever built.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean just read the rest of the message. It says it all right there. From the factory it was developed in to the man who designed it and the probe it was installed on. So,” he said as he stepped back a bit and tapped the back of Jonah’s chair with his fist. “You’ve got this, right?”
“Oh absolutely,” Jonah replied as he turned to him, nodding. “Yeah, this is a cool assignment. I a
ppreciate you bringing it to me. When is it due out?”
“ASAP,” he spelled out letter-by-letter to try to instill a sense of urgency into Jonah, which would have made more sense if he wasn’t pulling his nice-guy routine that he did whenever he wanted Jonah to work harder.
“Got it,” Jonah said, gripping onto the armrests of his chair and feeling his palms sweating. “You want to proof it before it goes out?”
“Yeah, I gotta,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Needs a level-four clearance, and none of the supervisors have that, only I do, so I’ll be waiting. Just give me a call and zip it over when it’s ready.”
“Great, I’m on it,” Jonah turned back to his screen. “Oh, and Alexander, thanks man -- I appreciate you looking out.”
“Hey.” He pointed at Jonah again. “Anytime.”
Jonah could feel his skin crawl. Alexander’s eyes finally slid off of him as he sauntered back through the office, individually greeting everyone in the room before wandering over to the next set of desks and chatting with the supervisor in the corner. Undoubtedly he was telling her to keep an eye on Jonah. He never did anything without a good level of mistrust, and he very much believed in micromanagement, which drove Jonah nuts. Nothing was ever as anyone said it would be here -- instead it was all smoke and mirrors, and the message he was staring at was proof enough of that.
Jonah had done enough research on Earth's history and knew about the Russians well enough to know that their space program was integrated into NASA after years of working together and pooling their resources together in the pre-Ministry years. The agreement between NASA and the Russian space program pre-dated the Ministry by at least fifty years, and all of their missions were reclassified to NASA when that partnership happened. There were no secrets, and this most definitely did not look Russian at all. The man credited for the design, Piotr Samedov, had of course been dead for years, a quick search string told him. While he was involved in aeronautics, his work with the Russian space program didn’t jump out to him at all. He didn’t doubt that he worked with them, but not like this. He was not as brilliant as that device.
Professor Cox had to see this, Jonah convinced himself, knowing just how tight the restrictions were on information passed onto his department and how closely their communications and data transmission was monitored. Jonah knew the systems well enough to be able to work his way around most of them, but it usually involved forcing an error to be sent through the system to get a few seconds off of the record so that he could decrypt it, then re-encrypt it and send it through a private channel to his personal device. He had done this dozens of times before to get music onto his work holoscanner to help him through the workday, although it was prohibited to physically move anything onto a government-owned device. Everyone assumed that Jonah had simply found a government-approved way to listen as he worked (because that would be something that he’d do) and left him alone about it.
This, on the other hand, was highly classified information, and he knew that it would be considered treason to leak out an official government communication to the public. Luckily enough, there was some room to move because Professor Cox was technically a contractor with the government and operated in a strange gray area when it came to what he really did. Jonah sighed and quickly began tapping away, sending the signals while he decrypted, re-encrypted and bumped the data over to his personal holoscanner, storing it in one of his private folders, then putting on the show, knowing that they’d be watching him, and a glitch in his system would be suspicious.
“Oh c’mon, now?” Jonah shouted out, slamming his fist down on the desk.
“Uh Jonah,” Andrea, the blonde, sickeningly slim supervisor in the corner called over to him. “Is everything all right over there?”
“Yeah, just this fucking thing.” He let out a loud sigh, shaking his head. “Always when I need it to not act up.”
“Do we need Bryan to come in and look at it?” She strode over to his desk, leaning over the edge and resting her hand under her hair, on her neck. “I mean, if it’s acting up...”
“Nah, it’ll be fine,” he sighed again, all a part of the show. “It just always does this when I’m trying to rush something out.”
“Yeah, you need to focus, buddy,” she said and she ran her fingers through her hair, tucking the loose strands behind her ears. “This is an important job here; you can’t fuck this one up. All right?”
“Yep,” he said, forcing a fake smile. He made note of her tone, the implications that he had a proclivity for messing up shooting right through his veins. The smile quickly dissipated. “I got it.”
She rolled her eyes and stomped off. Jonah rolled his own eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. The day that Alexander decided to pair Jonah up with Andrea might have been the worst decision his boss had made, another in a long line of disasters since Jonah lost his father. In no world, not even the new one that they were heading to, could Jonah and Andrea see eye to eye, and everyone but Alexander seemed to realize that. Jonah shook her off as he continued crafting the piece of spin presented to him.
It was hard to choke it down, but this was his job and what he did on a daily basis. In his mind, he knew that there was no way that Piotr Samedov was the man behind the mysterious device that they found. This was just damage control and a way to get this topic out in the open and quickly dismiss it. That way, the ship could move on to discussing other hot topics from around the decks, including who some of the vid stars in the A-Deck were sleeping with currently, or what their next project would be. Jonah barely watched any series on his holoscanner. It always disgusted him when people fetishized how the wealthy and powerful lived. For him, it was the knowledge that he’d never be a part of that elite.
Sometimes it was the bitterness that kept him going, and it was difficult for him to embrace that something so negative could be a driving force in his life.
In just a few more strokes, it was done -- his latest masterpiece of propaganda, handcrafted to misinform the public and obfuscate the truth. That was his life, he sighed to himself as he clicked “send” before pulling up his contact list, scrolling to Alexander’s name and tapping on it. Within seconds, a new image popped up of Alexander sitting at his desk. He looked into the projection and smiled, giving a thumbs up.
“Great work, Jonah,” he said. “I’m just going to read over it a bit and will push the button, get this bad boy out there. Great work,” he nodded again while Jonah clicked off of the screen and ended the call. He slunk back into his chair and sighed to himself. It was all a part of his life, and he needed to accept it, but there was still more to go. He knew that when he got off, he could go run through this with Professor Cox and try to get to the bottom of the mystery at least. All Jonah had to do was get through the rest of the day. He quickly shot off a message to Professor Cox that simply read, “I have something you gotta see. I’ll be by after work. --J.”
* * *
The day had dragged on and was only half over before Jonah found himself with his holoscanner striding toward the observation room on the B-Deck that he always went to for his lunch break. Things were too bustling on the B-Deck for anyone to care about taking the time to look out the window and appreciate everything that they were doing.
The B-Deck was characterized in the same way that the 20th century’s upper-middle class would be: always working, always striving for more, yet they had more than they knew. History showed how that turned out for them, with the gap between them and the wealthy widening until it became out of control, the “middle class” no longer being in the middle but simply on the higher end of poverty. His reading had taught him that it was one of the causes for the Great Revolution, which was long and grueling, and ultimately lead to the formation of the Ministry when there was no end in sight for the revolution and the planet began to reach critical mass on supplies.
Quickly, in a panic, people were willing to toss aside their liberties and their freedom just for a hope of surviving. Jonah found
it ironic that the caste system aboard the Omega Destiny would so closely resemble one of humanity’s last great failures, which had led them to this mission in what many considered a vain hope to continue the bloodline. But he knew this was human nature.
The more he read and the more he learned, the more depressed he found himself when he analyzed how society was evolving on the Omega. It was a microcosm (on a much smaller scale but developing much quicker), taking only three generations to reach the place that it took humanity thousands of years of society to reach. All in all, the Omega was just like a snow globe: artificial and manufactured in every way to pretend like it was anything but a hunk of metal in space.
The observation room was empty as always, with the exception of Dr. Julian Cox. He was sitting on a bench, wearing a gray t-shirt with a short-sleeved white button-up on top of it, characteristically unbuttoned, with his feet pressed up against the glass, and his eyes fixed on the stars. Jonah breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the professor sitting there, hands in his pockets, oblivious to everything.
“You’re here.” Jonah smiled, the door whooshing shut behind him. He pressed the “privacy mode” button on the controls to lock the door behind him.
“I am,” he said. “Locked door, huh?” He laughed to himself. “What exactly was that message about earlier? I’ve been spinning in my chair all day, wondering to myself what young Jonah Freeman had discovered that would require my attention, especially at such a mind-numbing job like the one he holds.”
“Well, look...”
“Hold on.” Professor Cox wagged his finger in the air, shaking his head. “So I say to myself, 'I know where young Mister Freeman is, what he encounters.' And I say, ‘Julian, you should check the wire for news.’ Well, that is exactly what I did, and what do I find?” he asked, smacking his lips. He jumped up to his feet, buried his hands into his pockets and paced back and forth, slightly slumped over. “I find a new story on the wire, telling us all about the marvelous device -- the very device that was in my possession just yesterday -- that we found in space, and providing us with quite a fascinating piece of historical fiction to explain it.”
