by Dave Walsh
“Yeah,” Jonah said, sitting down on the bench facing the window as Professor Cox paced in front of him. “That was me.”
“Of course it was you!” he said, putting his hands on Jonah’s shoulder and gently shaking him. “Who else could it have been, young Jonah? I can tell your writing from the first sentence, even if it is utter garbage -- no offense.” He turned to Jonah and smiled. “I mean the topic, not the writer -- and it was utter garbage. Yes, I knew it was you.”
“Thanks,” Jonah said. He gulped and pulled out a bottle of water from his pack. He placed it down on the bench and then reached for his holoscanner and put it on his lap. “But you know that isn’t what I wanted you to see, right?”
“Oh?” He crooked his head and pursed his lips. “Really? You mean there's more? Because that was quite an intricate tale, as there was no way that Professor Samedov was working on technology like this. I mean, there is no way.”
“I know,” Jonah said as he peeled the lid off of his water and took a big gulp before replacing the lid and placing it down. He swiped his fingers over his holoscanner a few more times before holding it out toward the professor. “Look.”
“What? Oh.” He turned back to Jonah and tilted the projection toward him before straddling the bench and burying his face into it. “Oh,” he mumbled, scrolling back up and then down quickly through the story before pausing. “What? No, this isn’t right,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “This is just...”
“What?” Jonah turned to him.
“This is all wrong, Jonah,” he said, shaking his head but not moving his eyes away from the screen.
“I know it is,” Jonah said. “Tell me something that I don’t know.”
“They are rewriting history, Jonah.” He dropped the holoscanner onto the bench and sighed, pulling his glasses down and rubbing his eyes. “Anyone who analyzes this knows that this is well beyond any sort of human technology that we’ve ever seen. It was years advanced -- years. This... this is bad.”
“What's so bad about it?” Jonah asked. “I mean, we send out how many stories a day on the wire that are just plain and simple propaganda? How is this any different? I don’t get it.”
“If this were nothing, if this were really, truly just something from a Russian space probe and they wanted to keep it classified, as they would,” he said as he placed his glasses back on and let out an exasperated tsk. “Why the public spin? There are many things that they keep classified, and since when do they feel the need to explain anything like this to the public? This isn’t like them, Jonah. This isn’t like them at all.
“This device that they found,” he began, staring off into space and nodding absently. “They are afraid of it; they are very, very afraid of it and what it means. They know that they can’t ignore it, and they want to put it into all of our faces, explain it away and make it fade from memory. They don’t want a news report about this coming out in a few months. They don’t want public inquiries into this. They want this buried.”
“So what is it then?” Jonah could feel his pulse quickening and the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. “What is out there?”
“I don’t know,” Professor Cox replied. “I don’t know, and for the first time in my life, I think I truly understand what fear is, Jonah. This is what fear is: the unknown. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Science can’t explain this.”
Professor Cox stood up, straightened himself up and walked over to the panel on the door, releasing the lock. The door whirred open, and he began walking out before he stopped cold. “Jonah, please, come by my lab as soon as you can, all right? I need your help.”
“Yeah.” Jonah swallowed hard. “I’ll be there, Professor Cox. Don’t worry.”
There was a pit in his stomach as the door whizzed shut behind the professor. Not only did Jonah have to make it through the rest of the day distracted, but it felt like dark clouds had rolled in and that a storm was brewing -- one that no one aboard could be prepared for.
* * *
“So,” Jonah began, clearing his throat and doing his best to break the silence as Professor Cox slumped over at his desk, just staring at the projection in front of him with a model of the object spinning around. He had been like this since Jonah arrived, not uttering a word or even acknowledging Jonah’s presence. “What do we do?”
“What?” Professor Cox jumped a bit before slowly turning to Jonah. “Oh, hi, Jonah,” he said. “I, uh, what did you ask?”
“What do we do?” Jonah asked again, almost questioning his own question.
“Well,” he said as he slowly spun his chair around to face Jonah. “That's just it.” He threw his hands up before they landed on his lap with a slap. “I’m not sure that I know what to do. I’ve done as much analysis as I can on the scan that we took of the device, but I’m just a physicist --”
“And I’m just a bad journalist. So what?” Jonah interrupted. “You know people, I know some people, we can try to figure this thing out, I think.”
“Oh,” Professor Cox said as he let out a loud laugh. “Oh, I know people, all right. This is classified, classified well beyond my level, and I’m not sure that I can even get near it or get any information about it. Those deck hands, they took it to me to figure out what it was, but it never should have come to me. It never should have been in my possession -- and I think that they know it.” He gulped hard. “I didn’t think it would go this far. I’m afraid of what might happen to me. I’ve never seen or read of anything like this happening on this ship before, and I’m afraid of what they’ll do to keep this quiet.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jonah protested as he ran his hand over his chin. “You are Professor Julian Cox, the premier physicist aboard the Omega Destiny, also known as the last hope for humanity. They need you more than you need them at this point, and they know that. They won’t touch you, Professor Cox.”
“You don’t know that!” he shouted angrily, pulling his glasses off and tossing them onto the counter next to him. It was more animated than Jonah had ever seen the professor before. “You don’t know that,” he repeated. “Who is essential aboard this flight, really? That technology, Jonah, it was light years ahead of anything we have. I can’t make heads or tails of it, and I’m afraid that there could be more. As we move toward this new planet, what if we find more and more of this? What if we find a complete probe? Or worse yet, what if we find a ship -- a manned ship? Or whatever else. I don’t know.”
“C’mon.” Jonah said, picking up the professor’s glasses and handing them back to him. “You are beyond this -- you don’t believe in fucking aliens! We can figure this out, we can figure this out...”
“How? If we encounter more, don’t you think it’ll just be covered up just like this one was?” He snatched his glasses out of Jonah’s hands and clumsily pulled them back onto his face with one hand. “We’ll never find out about it. This was an anomaly! How do we know that this hasn’t happened before?! This is absurd. We are in the dark here and --”
“Wait, what did you just say?” Jonah felt the light bulb switch on in his head.
“This is an anomaly, Jonah,” he repeated as he turned around in his chair, only to have Jonah put his hands on his shoulders and stop him mid-spin.
“No, not that. After that.”
“That this has probably happened before?”
“Yes!” He could feel a surge of excitement swell within him. “What if this has happened before? What if we’ve found more objects like this, and there has been some sort of, you know, spin?”
“Sure, that could have happened,” he said. “It could have happened, but what are the odds of them having to do a panic move like this? What are the odds that someone leaked something like this out, and they had to spin a ridiculous story like this?”
“It’s worth looking into, isn’t it?” Jonah said. “I mean, do we have any other leads at all right now?”
“No,” the professor agreed. Jonah watched
the light returning to his eyes. “Well, you might be onto something. I can run a few searches from the wire over the span of -- what, the past seventy-nine years? Has it really been that long?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Not that I’ve been alive for even half of that.”
“Neither have I,” Professor Cox smiled at him. “And I’m a lot older than you. This might take a while,” he said as he rubbed his chin. “But this is worth a shot. Plus, you have access to more historical data because of your job. If I find anything, I can relay it to you, and you can search through the archives, right?”
“I can do that,” Jonah agreed as he began to feel the gears grinding inside of his head. “My overachieving ways might actually pay off for once, as my clearance is one of the highest of any non-com employee there. But...” Jonah paused, his mind racing through jumbled thoughts. “What am I looking for?”
“Cover-ups,” Professor Cox answered, raising his eyebrows. “Cover-ups that smell and taste like this one. Ones that don’t make any sense. Use your best judgment, Jonah -- I believe in you. I’m doing to do research from here in the lab, but I need you to be looking out as well, and I need you to perform reverse lookups of anything I find. Remember, your division existed before this mission, so there should be records dating back... well, dating back rather far.”
“There are,” Jonah said, looking off at the distance. “We should have access to everything we need.”
“Good.” The professor blinked, staring off at the window, his eyes blinking rapidly, which was surely a nervous twitch. “Good.”
* * *
Sleep would not find him on that night easily, just like the previous night. Kara had broke her silence with Jonah after a day of the cold shoulder, and the ensuing argument was exhausting for him. No part of Jonah could focus on his girlfriend’s problems, which at the time seemed so trivial, distant and trite. Her A-Deck sensibilities and mannerisms had always been somewhat endearing to Jonah, but when real problems like the device presented themselves, her daddy issues and her addiction to stimulants seemed less and less like they were a part of Jonah’s world.
“I don’t understand,” she said. She looked up at him from the couch, her bare feet resting on the corner of the cold metal table in the center of the room. Her room, unlike most Jonah had seen, was comfortable by the standards of the quarters in the B-Deck: She had two bedrooms, both fully furnished, and enough decor to make you forget you were in the B-Deck. It was what she brought with her from the A-Deck, like it was her idea of slumming it. “Sometimes you make no sense to me.”
“There’s just...” Jonah began. He hung his head low and shook it, grasping for the right words. “We’ve been over this before, and I don’t know how many more times I can explain myself,” he sighed.
This argument always seemed to happen. Jonah was damaged in many ways, but a part of him just wanted to find a place to rest his head and feel comfortable. Nothing was ever easy for him, and when he finally felt comfortable enough to open up and express it, the words seemed to lose their weight, and his comfort level was reduced considerably.
“You know that I can’t just stay here,” she said as she broke open a pill on the table, crushing it up with the butt end of her ceramic pipe before carefully collecting the dust into neat piles. She hovered over one and inhaled quickly, her finger over her other nostril. Kara kicked back into the chair and quivered for a few seconds before wiping her nose. “This place is killing me; it is sucking the life out of me.”
“No,” Jonah replied as he hung his head, refusing to look up at her and refusing to give credence to her self-destructive behavior. “This place isn’t killing you, Kara.” He looked up at her and motioned with his head toward the table. “You are killing yourself, and no matter how hard I try, I can't make you help yourself.”
“I’m not who you want me to be,” she pouted, turning a bit red. “Well, I didn’t think I was getting involved with... with...” She paused and looked back at Jonah before throwing her hands up. “This depressed, self-doubting person who's going nowhere. You are going nowhere.”
“What?” Jonah could feel his blood begin to boil as he watched her looking like a complete mess on her couch. “How can you even --”
“Because you are going nowhere!” She fell back onto the couch and put both of her feet back up on the table, arms crossed. “That job is a one-way trip to nowhere for both of us, and it’s not my fault that I want to get away from it and you don’t.”
“You just want to go back to the A-Deck and have your father get you a job,” he snapped back. “How is that any better? Daddy has to take care of all of your problems for you, but he’s never known what to do about your substance abuse problems, does he?”
“This has nothing to do with him!” she shouted as tears welled up in her eyes. “This is about you, Jonah. I thought I was getting involved with that confident guy that I met last year, the one who walked around like he was better than it all, like he was going somewhere. I looked up to you.”
“Well, that was your first problem.” He let out a sigh, trying to control his breathing and stay calm. “That person died a long time ago, Kara. I can’t be him anymore; I can’t be who you want me to be. I’m just me now.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” She stared up at him with glassy eyes. “This job is just killing me.”
“For how much longer?” Jonah exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “You think that I’m happy with it? I’m not, but how long until we reach this new planet? How long until we reach Omega? Something like a matter of months, Kara. Months, and then we can start our lives together on a new place. Start over, just you and me. I don’t understand why you want to throw all of this away now when we’ve come so far. We can be whatever we want together.”
“I’m just not sure that I can wait that long.” She pulled herself up and plodded across the cold metal floor into the kitchen and poured some water.
“But we’re so close.” Jonah felt as if he was pleading with her, and he was not sure how it got to that point. Kara had a way of making him feel like that, of turning the tables on him. It always seemed like she knew just how to pull the rug out from under him and scare him. “Don’t leave me now.”
“Fine,” she said, walking toward the bedroom. “I’m going to bed now.” She ran her fingers over the control panel on the wall. The shutters on the window slowly extended down, and the room grew darker and darker until the only light was the lamp next to the bed, which Kara promptly flipped off.
004. Control
Captain O’Neil
“Report,” the captain said as he strode onto the deck of the ship like he had every other morning since he took command at age 37. His uniform was immaculate as always, with the captain’s pin that adorned his lapel glinting from the lights blinking around the ship’s command center.
“On course, and on time, sir,” a stout man named Peterson barked out, his eyes fixed on his board as he monitored the ship’s status and position.
“Commander Dumas,” the captain called out, staring out of the forward window with his hands behind his back, clenched together tightly. They turned a dull shade of white as the blood flow was cut off.
“Yes, Captain,” Dumas replied as he approached the captain with his holoscanner in hand. He stood stiffly before him and raised his right hand up to his forehead to salute him. Ceremony was important on the deck for the officers; the captain had always made this clear.
“Have we gotten the situation under control yet, commander?” He let his right arm fall to his side as the knuckles on his left hand dug into the small of his back. It helped remind him to keep his posture rigid, something that his wife had pounded into his head for years; she didn’t want her captain to be seen as anything other than a commanding figure. He laughed to himself. She had gone to all of that trouble only to betray him.
“Yes, sir,” Dumas said, looking down at his scanner. “There has been a story released through the news as
per protocol, and most of the inquiries seemed to have stopped or at least turned their attention to the story that we released.”
“Good,” he said, staring out the window again and noting that it always felt like the ship was standing still, with the stars in the same place, even though they were moving almost at the speed of light. “How about Professor Cox?”
“Nothing to report, sir.” He scrolled through his scanner before looking back up at the captain.
“Nothing? Not a single new detail about him at all?” He said, shaking his head. Every little detail aboard this ship was logged, and this was the best that they could come up with? He walked back to his chair in the center of the deck and sat back. “We know nothing about him or whom he associates with? No one else visited his quarters after he found this device?”
“Well,” Dumas began before clearing his throat anxiously. “Um, there was one person -- a Jonah Freeman, sir.”
“Okay.” The captain nodded, pulling his personal scanner up from the compartment on the side of his chair and resting it on his lap. “Who is Jonah Freeman? Another physicist?”
“No, sir,” he said as he shook his head. “He appears to just be a personal acquaintance. We did not look too far into him as he seems to be of little consequence.”
The captain let out a deep breath and pulled up his manifest records database on his scanner. He typed in the name “Jonah Freeman” to pull up his profile. “In situations like this, commander, everyone is of consequence. We cannot risk anything disturbing the peace aboard this ship. We’ve come too far, and we're too close for that.”
“Agreed, sir,” Dumas said as he looked away with a pained expression on his face. “We’ll look into him.”
