Terminus Cycle

by Dave Walsh

  “Have you taken into account that there will probably be food sources on the planet, Minister Soren?”

  “Yes, yes, of course we have! We’ll need to analyze it, run tests and find out if it will provide the proper nutrition that we're all used to aboard this ship. We’ve been integrating more and more agricultural foods into the diets of everyone aboard, less synthetics, but I’m afraid that the C- and D-Decks are still on a mostly synthetic diet.”

  “I’m sure that it will be fine, Minister, but we’ll – ”

  “Excuse me, Captain, but the military is anxiously awaiting our orders,” the Minister of Defense interrupted. He sat across the table from O’Neil and was overweight and bald, with puffy red cheeks and a bulbous nose. He looked almost like a cartoon character, a five-star clown. “We continue to drill and work on strategy, but if our purpose on the surface is going to be law enforcement and assistance, I’m not sure that --”

  “Continue the preparations as planned, Minister Dickers. We're still not certain of the conditions on the surface yet and might need the full force of the military out there.”

  “But,” he began as he shook his head and threw his hands up in exasperation. “We’ve been preparing for years now, with no end in sight. We aren’t afraid of wildlife and will be prepared to handle any possible animals that we encounter out there. We should begin focusing on other things.”

  “You’ll continue to focus on defensive tactics as well as offensive strategies for the time being, Minister. Is that understood?” He looked up at Minister Dickers, glaring at him from across the table, and repeated, “Is that understood?”

  “I just don’t understand --”

  “I am giving you an order.”

  “I understand. I just thought that --”

  “Captain,” Commander Dumas said as he rushed into the room. “Excuse the interruption, sir, but you are needed on the bridge immediately.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “No, sir.” He shook his head. His face was sullen, and the color was gone from his face. “It cannot wait even another minute.”

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” O'Neil said as he picked himself up. He grabbed his holoscanner and strode toward the door. “This better be good, Jack. You know how much they hate it when I don’t listen to them.”

  “We’ve intercepted a signal, sir.”

  “A signal?” He stopped, examining the face of his first officer only to note that his color was still reminiscent of unbaked clay, his expression like that of a lost child. “What kind of signal?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “Report,” he said. He walked onto the bridge, which was abuzz, fluid in motion while an officer ran from one station to another, comparing notes and running scans. Never in his lifetime has that bridge ever been like it was at that moment. It had always been protocol, according to plan, standard even. That day was different. He slid into his chair, clicking his holoscanner into place. “Is someone going to explain to me what the hell is going on here?”

  “Sir,” his Communications Officer Hideo called out. Hideo rotated in his chair. The usually careful young man looking flustered and out of breath. Hideo shot an uneasy glance at Dumas, which O’Neil chose to ignore. Hideo and Dumas had been involved in a relationship for years, without it interfering in either of their duties, out of fear of repercussions. “Five minutes ago, we received a signal. It just came out of nowhere and -- well, we're analyzing it now. It appears to be numeric pulses, but we are still analyzing the pattern.”

  “What is the point of origin?”

  “It’s from Omega, sir. At least, that is what we have found so far.”

  “From Omega.” He took a labored breath and pulled up the readings on his scanner. “What is this pattern, exactly?”

  “Numbers, sir. I’m sending them to your scanner now. We believe that it might be coordinates of some sort...”

  “No,” he said, staring down at the numbers. No coordinates would look like that. “Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight,” he said and then paused. “This is the Fibonacci Sequence.”

  “That’s what Richardson said, sir, but we still need to analyze it. Even if it is that, how would that sequence be so far out here as a communication?”

  “We are running an analysis on all of the probes that we’ve sent out towards Omega, Captain,” Dumas said. “Nothing so far.”

  “Keep running it, but --” He paused briefly. “I don’t think that this is ours, Commander.”

  “Are you implying...”

  “That we’ve made first contact?” O’Neil stood up, adjusting the collar on his shirt. “Yes, I am.”

  “Do we reply?”

  “Officer Takagi,” he called to Hideo. His soft Asian features looked like they might crack under the pressure.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What is the last number in the sequence that they're transmitting?”

  “Thirty-four, sir.”

  “Open our communications channel and send back a series of pulses of our own.”

  “What exactly do we send?”

  “The number fifty-five, then stop. Do it after their current sequence, and repeat that until we get a reply.”

  “A reply, sir?”

  “Yes, you heard me. Now do it.”

  “Do you really think that we’ll get a reply, Pete?” Dumas sat back in a chair across from O’Neil’s desk, sipping on a glass of water.

  “Anything is possible, Jack,” O’Neil said. He leaned back in his chair, looking out the window at the slowly growing orb that was Omega.

  “We are two weeks out now, and we knew that something like this could happen, but it's only a handful of us who know. When do we let everyone else in on it?”

  “We hold off for as long as we can. That's what we do.”

  “But word of this transmission will spread. If someone puts two and two together with that converter that we found, we could have some serious questions on our hands. Do you really think that the Ministry will be happy to know how much information has been withheld from them?”

  “No. They are already getting suspicious -- Dickers in particular. And I can’t just come out and tell him that we have to prepare for the possibility of hostilities on the surface without causing alarm.”

  “What do you think it means, the numbers?”

  “I’m not really sure, to be honest.”

  “Golden Ratio, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The spiral, whatever you want to call it. It’s mathematical, part of the foundation of our own math and science.”

  “So what do you think that this means? It can’t be from a probe, can it?”

  “It could be from a probe, just not one of ours. This could just be confirming all of those theories that we’ve had about this planet, Jack. All of them.”

  “That we're returning home?” He gulped hard, placing the glass down on the desk.

  “This could be it. We could be heading to humanity’s true birthplace.” He paused, his mind running through all of the possible outcomes before he remembered the object -- the converter. “Speaking of that object, anything on Professor Cox or that Freeman kid?”

  “No, sir,” his first officer said, still looking distracted. “We’ve been monitoring both of them closely, and all we’ve been able to tell is that Freeman is in a relationship with Kara Levine.”

  “That sounds a lot like the last report, honestly.”

  “Well, we only suspected at that point, but we’ve been able to confirm that the two of them are indeed involved. The perceived threat...”

  “From being close to Levine? There is no threat, Jack. Levine is as out of the loop as one can be. We’ve had no financial crises aboard this ship in its history, and his job is ornamental at best. Even if Freeman were to get information out of one of them, it would be worthless. Jim Levine is no threat to anyone aboard this ship.”

  007. Ease of Use

  Jonah Freeman

  The next few days drag
ged like none other. Kara was upset with Jonah for blowing her off without warning yet again. When he explained to her that he was having panic attacks again, her response was curt, if not rude.

  “This shouldn’t be happening,” she said. “You have me now.”

  Those were the words she had spoken months earlier when he told her about his panic attacks. It was hard to make someone who had never experienced anxiety like that understand what it felt like to see the world caving in around you. It felt like you’d always read a heart attack felt like, just without the left arm numbing and the vomiting. Well, maybe vomiting, but Jonah had yet to go down that road and hoped that he never would.

  Kara projected an image of herself that was superior to those around her, maybe from what she was born into or the fact that she has always overachieved in everything that she did. It was her way of making up for her feeling of inadequacies, Jonah figured. He really wasn’t that familiar with feeling like that; he had come from humble beginnings and spent his whole life fighting to be something more -- and inevitably failing.

  There were times when Jonah had no choice but to blame everything and everyone else for his shortcomings: the Ministry, society, the ship, the mission, his parents or even Kara for making him feel this way.

  He had been through enough counseling as a child to be able to predict what someone would tell him about himself: He had “mommy issues” and was unable to have a healthy relationship because of that. His mother had made him feel like dirt, so he always sought out relationships where he was made to feel like dirt -- not because he wanted to, but because that was all that he knew and was subconsciously comfortable with. Jonah was comfortable being insignificant, being abused and not living up to his potential because of how other people had treated him.

  Deep down inside, he knew that staying with Kara was unhealthy, but he felt that burning in his stomach for her still. Life without her made him feel as anxious as the idea of her being upset with him. He was trapped, in more ways than one. He laughed at the irony of being trapped inside of a relationship while he felt trapped in every part of his life, from his job to his social caste to living on a ship hurtling through space on the brink of the speed of light.

  Every part of his search for answers was a dead end in every facet of his life right then. He had been calling into work “sick,” and he knew that his department would be upset with him. Every time he spoke with the supervisor on duty in the morning -- ironically, he was Andrea’s husband -- he felt like his eyes were looking right through him and knew that he was full of shit.

  Jonah had heard that Kara was still going through the motions at work, and in a way, it was upsetting that him being in a bad place didn’t seem to phase her. And as much as she said she was there for him, it was in her hollow words only.

  His other search was trying to find a clue, any clue, as to what was going on with the part that they had found. A part of him felt downright insane over the obsession with it, like he had fallen in with twenty-first-century conspiracy theorists who wove intricate tales of the Illuminati, government alien conspiracies and everything else in between.

  The truth was, though, that he felt like he and Professor Cox were on to something; he could feel it inside of his gut. He found himself walking through the gardens of the B-Deck on his way to a former Minister of Communications’ quarters feeling pangs of doubt, wondering if all of those people who were written off as “nutty conspiracy theorists” felt as steadfast in their beliefs as he did at that moment. This former Minister of Communications was dismissed with very little fanfare or logic; he was just ousted from his post one day after he had been doing some digging. His dismissal could be the lead that Jonah had been looking for or a giant waste of time.

  He sighed and continued walking forward, doing his best not to look like the lowly C-Decker that he was. Jonah fumbled around in his pocket for his official badge from work, attaching it to his shirt like it would make for a more believable story for him being up there. There were so many branches of the Earth Ministry that it was never clear which one did what and who worked behind a desk and who worked in the field.

  He happened upon the door, noting the two small garden patches lining either side of his door and how markedly different it looked from anything on the C-Deck. Sometimes he needed to remind himself of how wide of a gap there was between the B- and C-Decks.

  The B-Deck’s decorations and garden appearance in the residential area was proof enough of the gap between the decks. It almost felt like you were back on Earth, even with the ceiling of the Deck being two layers. The first layer was made of glass, and the top was a realistic simulation of Earth’s sky, which changed in accordance with the time of day. It was midday, and the simulated sun was high in the fake sky. The light was warming him up, but somehow Jonah knew that it was not how the real sun had felt on someone's skin back home. By “home,” he meant Earth, the planet that he has never set foot on and never would.

  Jonah took a deep breath and pushed the call button to the right of the door, straightening out his badge so that it was facing out and running his fingers through his hair, not that it would help tame his thick mane.

  “Yes?” The screen flickered on above the button. He could see an old man with white wisps of hair on either side of his head and a bulbous nose with a pair of glasses resting on them, looking mildly irritated.

  “Hi,” Jonah said. “Mr. McMahon?”

  “That's me,” the old man said, his voice sounding irritated and apprehensive. “Who is it?”

  “My name is Jonah Freeman, Mr. McMahon,” he said as he tugged at his badge and aimed it at the screen. “And I work for...”

  “I know who you are,” he sighed. The old man moved toward the screen so that only the top of his head was visible. The light above the door turned green, and the door swished open. “Come in,” he croaked out.

  Jonah did his best to compose himself and looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to him before walking through the door.

  He found himself in an entryway, decorated as if it were a home in New England in the twentieth century; it was painted an off-white color, with hardwood floors and a nicely polished wooden table adorned with a potted plant and framed photographs. The home was a stark contrast to his quarters, which were metallic and cold, the opposite of comfortable or inviting.

  “Are you going to come in, or are you going to keep gawking at my stuff?” The old man said, shuffling from a doorway off to the left of the hallway while wearing a pair of gray slippers, brown trousers and a green sweater.

  “Oh, I apologize,” Jonah said. “Just haven’t seen hardwood floors in person before.”

  “A marvel, aren’t they?” he said, his voice still sounding irritated. He walked back into the room that he had come out of and slumped over into his chair again. Jonah followed him into the room to see a room decorated in much the same way. He eyeballed a couch across from Mr. McMahon’s chair and motioned toward it.

  “Can I have a seat?”

  “What do I care?” The old man laughed. “You are going to do what you want, aren’t you? I don’t have any control over it.”

  “Thanks,” he replied, even though he felt less than welcome. There was a large holoscanner projection against the wall with one of the 24-hour news stations on. The volume was up rather high, and Jonah found himself raising his voice to try to beat out the television.

  “Mr. McMahon,” he started.

  “What?” the old man shouted. “I can’t hear you -- speak up.”

  “Mr. McMahon,” he said again, only to find himself drowned out again. Jonah hopped up to his feet, walked over to the projection and tapped the bottom right corner to mute it, which caused the old man to let out an agitated sigh.

  “Well, I guess that might help,” he said as he nodded. He picked up a box from the table next to his chair and set it down on his lap. He popped the lid open and pulled out a cigar with one hand; with his other hand, he pulled out a metallic
cigar cutter and clipped the end of it. He placed the cutter back into the box, pulled out a lighter and slapped the lid shut. He ceremoniously placed the cigar into his mouth and flicked the lighter on, circling it around the end of the cigar. The glowing red embers lit up his withered face. He held the smoke in for a moment before letting it out in a circle, holding the cigar in his left hand and staring at it. “So?”

  “Oh, right,” Jonah said nervously. “So I’m here because of...”

  “Oh, cut to the point already.” The old man coughed and wheezed before putting the cigar back into his mouth and going through the ritual of lighting it again. “We both know why you're here, Mr. Freeman.”

  “We do?” Jonah furrowed his brow and bit the side of his cheek. “Mr. McMahon, I’m really not even sure why I’m here, to be honest. I’m just following a hunch.”

  “A hunch about some object in space, I presume.” He laughed again, coughing through the smoke, which was starting to billow toward Jonah and make his eyes water a bit.

  “Well, sir,” he said as he fanned some of the smoke away with his hand. “I’m not sure that I know much about any objects in space, honestly, but...”

  “Cut the shit, kid,” he said. His cigar was still dangling from between his lips. He pulled it out of his mouth and pointed it at Jonah. “We both know that I resigned from my post well over forty years ago, and that it was bullshit -- hell, you were still a lusty thought in your pop’s trousers at that point, and you can smell the bullshit.”

  “Yes,” Jonah said, acknowledging that the reason he had come to see Dustin McMahon was because of his unceremonious dismissal from his post and how the official explanation was health issues. It stood to reason that if those health concerns were serious, he wouldn’t be sitting there in front of Jonah, smoking a cigar and looking fine (if not a bit old). “Mr. McMahon, I...”

  “Dusty,” he snorted, taking another puff from the cigar before taking it out, closing his eyes and exhaling. “Call me Dusty.”

  “Okay,” Jonah said, his eyes watering from the smoke. “Dusty, I -- well, I researched odd departures from the Ministry, and your name was the one that really stood out to me. It wasn’t like their usual stuff; there wasn’t a long list of your achievements or accolades or what your future most likely held. Instead, it was brief and only discussed some unnamed health problems -- and excuse me if I’m out of line, but I don’t see much being wrong with you, sir.”