by Dave Walsh
“I’ve got it!” The professor clapped his hands together, taking Jonah off guard.
“What?” Jonah looked over at him, his chest hurting and his head feeling like it weighed more than usual.
“Your girlfriend, Jonah!” He popped out of his seat and clamped his hands on Jonah’s shoulders, gently shaking him. “Your girlfriend... oh, Jonah, you don’t look so well. Here,” he said as he moved out of the way, guiding Jonah to his stool. Jonah just about fell onto the stool.
“What about Kara?” Jonah asked, trying to straighten himself out and weather the panic attack without freaking out too much.
“Her father, Jonah.” Professor Cox walked over to the sink in the corner and grabbed a glass off of the shelf. He held it up to the light and inspected it for a brief second to ensure that it was clean before he filled it up with water and placed it on the table next to Jonah. “Here, drink this.”
Jonah grabbed the glass and gulped it all down quickly, slamming the glass back down on the table and nodding.
The professor reminded him, “Jonah, he’s the Minister of Finance.”
“Oh, fuck.” It dawned on Jonah, and he could feel some of the life start to flow back into him; the ideas started to come on like a flood. “You're right. I didn’t even think about that.”
“We need a plan,” the professor said as he leaned in close toward Jonah. “We need a foolproof plan, Jonah.”
“I think I have one,” Jonah replied. He smiled, the color returning to his face.
008. Love and Politics
Captain O’Neil
“We intercepted a transmission today,” Captain O’Neil said as he leaned back in his chair, his uniform rubbing against the leather and making a muted squeak.
“A transmission?” Dr. Susan Brandis asked. She leaned against his command console, running her fingers through her hair.
“Indeed. A transmission.” He took a sip from his mug before resting it back in his lap. “Of unknown origins, out here deep in the Omega System, almost to our destination.”
“What do you think that means then? I mean, it’s not one of ours. We didn’t send any sort of probe out ahead of us, did we?”
“How could we? We're flying just under the speed of light; that's about as fast as we can go without rewriting the laws of physics or -- well, you’d know better than I would.”
She laughed, shaking her head as she sat down in front of his command console, looking up at the sea of projections, knobs and blinking lights like she was right at home. She reached over and grabbed her holoscanner, inputting a few commands and placing it in a jack on the command console. A holographic display came to life between them. She turned around to examine the data. “These numbers,” she said as she furrowed her brow.
“The Fibonacci Sequence,” he said as he glared down at his mug, swirling the tea around before lifting it up and taking another sip from it. “Or so I’m told.”
“Yes,” she confirmed, mouth agape. “It's exactly that, Pete. How far away is this transmission coming from? What's the origin?”
“We aren’t sure yet. We responded to it with the next few numbers in the sequence and are awaiting a reply.”
“A reply?” She let out a faint laugh. “Out here? I thought you just said that we didn’t have any probes out here that --”
“It’s not from one of our probes,” he interrupted. His words hung in the air for a brief moment as they both sat in silence, staring at the waveform hologram in between them.
“What?” Her voice slightly trembled.
“Sue,” he said, clearing his throat. “There are a lot of things about this mission that have been kept under the strictest of confidences over the past few generations.”
“I don’t...”
“Just listen -- although I know it might sound a bit far-fetched at first -- just stick with me here.”
“Okay.”
“So there is a chance -- and this communication just tends to confirm this -- that we are heading to a planet that contains intelligent life. In fact, there are theories that we might encounter humanity out here on Omega.”
“Impossible,” she said as she shook her head and blinked rapidly. “We’ve all heard those rumors; they’ve been around this ship and the mission from the very beginning. But you aren’t telling me that you believe this as well, are you?”
“There is a lot about this mission, Sue, that I’m not so sure about anymore.” He took a labored and careful sip from his mug before stopping and looking down at it. He pulled himself out of his chair, searching for the right words. “I’m going to make myself some more tea. Do you want some? It’s good, made from leaves in my garden.”
“What?” She looked up at him and shook her head quickly. “Tea? No. So wait, are you telling me that you actually believe this nonsense?”
“I’m not sure what to believe, really.” He picked himself up and walked over to the counter, making himself some tea.
He continued, “I have some documentation about the trip that's for myself and my advisers only, but I haven’t really given it much mind in years now. There was one curious part, though -- a talk of a rendezvous with a fleet from Earth.”
“A rendezvous?” She tried to hold back, but a laugh escaped her. “So now we are to believe that they sent an entire fleet out before us?”
“No,” he said. He shook his head, almost unable to believe it himself, and blew on his cup before taking a sheepish sip. “After.”
“We are the fastest ship that humanity has ever conceived, Pete. I’d know this. There is nothing -- just theories that we can travel faster than this. There is just no such thing as faster-than-light travel.”
“Apparently,” he replied. He took a bigger gulp of his tea, letting it slide down his throat before he continued. “They believe that by the time we finally reach Omega, they will not only have discovered faster-than-light travel but will send an entire fleet to meet up with us. I’m not sure about the specifics obviously, but do you think that it’s possible?”
“Everything that modern physics has told us has found it to be impossible, but maybe there's something that they weren’t telling us.”
“With this mission, I fear that there is a lot that they aren’t telling us.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Jeanette scares me,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders, staring out the window at the vastness of space. It still felt strange to be that open with someone about Jeanette. “Finally reaching Omega and completing my duty doesn’t scare me anymore. Whatever happens when we get there is out of my control, Sue. This is my only concern. I just have to get us there.”
“Are things that bad with Jeanette?”
“Well, she's cheating on me,” he joked, trying to keep the harsh topic as light as he could, knowing that he was failing. “I think I've told you that much before.”
“Yeah, you did,” she said. She walked up behind him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He jumped at first and resisted, but then he relaxed and let her reach her arm around him. It was something that he feared getting used to, but it made his heart jump, and he felt like a kid all over again. He wondered how she was feeling, what she felt toward him, or if it was just pity and how she acted around friends.
The stars in the distance felt like they were changing very slowly as they traveled, but it was just their position in the galaxy that was shifting. Peter tried to take comfort in her embrace. For years now, he had been yearning for it, but he could never allow himself to give in to it.
He let out a laugh at how foolish it all was, at the thought of what humanity was capable of and the implications of their mission. It seemed so silly to him just how far humanity had come, but how relationships were just as confusing and dysfunctional as ever.
“Did you ever find out whom she's cheating on you with?”
“No.” He was jolted out of his thoughts and pulled out of her embrace. “A part of me doesn’t want to know, if that makes any se
nse.”
“I’m not sure that I understand, no.”
“All of the power that I have,” he sighed. “Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be just like everyone else. This -- this is just that. She knows my position, she knows my power, yet she went and did it anyway. I think that she wanted me to figure it out, to find the guy and do something rash.”
“She doesn’t know you very well then, does she?”
“I’m the captain of this ship. Some say I'm one of most powerful men in human history.” He had never bought into it, but it was him living it, so it was hard to have much perspective. “But I’m not the man that my wife wants me to be, so she tries to make me into what she wants. I guess in a way it's poetic, right? I’m Captain Peter O’Neil, who will go down in the record books as the man who led the final leg of the Omega Mission to bring humanity to populate a new planet, but I can’t keep my own personal life in order.”
“The history books are fickle at best,” she said as she pulled him in closer before resting her head on his shoulder. “Nobody remembers Napoleon’s marital problems; they remember Napoleon.”
“Napoleon died in exile after being defeated in battle,” he stated dryly.
“Battle?” She tensed up and took a step back. “You're expecting a battle?”
“Like I said.” He turned and smiled at her as warmly as he could while knowing how unsure he was about the future himself. “We are going into the unknown here, but there are theories and official documents. They are serious about this -- in fact, that’s the reason for the rigidity of this whole thing,” he said as he motioned around the room. She understood his broader implications. “The sequence only seems like a confirmation to me.”
“Okay,” she said as she pulled back from him. She turn her back to him and looked at the projection of the sequence of numbers. “Back to that, yeah. This sequence. Was it possible that if -- and this is a huge if -- humanity was able to somehow travel faster than light, and there is a fleet waiting for us...”
She trailed off for a second, shaking her head. “That this message is from them somehow? Was there a sort of code or instructions for contact?”
“There was,” he said. He sunk into the chair in front of his wall of screens before pulling up a file. “There's a list of codes here that we’re set to exchange along with explicit instructions for how the contact will go.”
“Oh my god.” She stared at the files on the screen, mouth agape. “I don’t see anything about the sequence in here.”
“Right. There's nothing about the Fibonacci Sequence or the Golden Mean here. Nothing.”
“So this isn’t from us,” she stated. She held her breath for a few seconds before letting it all out. “Unless...”
“Unless?”
“Well, could there be some truth to that whole Russian satellite thing, you think?”
“Russian satellites?” he asked, shaking his head and turning the chair toward her. “We both know that we made that up. We’ve had a steady history of finding devices similar to this, you know.”
“Wait, we have?” Her eyes bugged out and she found herself feeling light-headed. She grasped for the chair next to her. “You mean this isn’t the first? I knew that we had some records of debris along the way, but I had always assumed it was from probes and just stuff that we had sent out before.”
“Some of it was,” he said, knowing that by choosing to disclose that information to her, she wouldn’t be able to turn back. “Some -- well, most of it -- wasn’t. In fact, most of it is so far advanced that it clearly didn’t come from us.”
“Peter,” she said as she looked back at him in disbelief. “I’m the Minister of Science. I’m in charge of this. Didn’t you ever think that it would be beneficial to tell me this?”
“The instructions were, and I quote, ‘Essential staff only, contain and suppress.’ This stuff was planned for. They knew that we’d find something along the way, but we’ve been urged to just lock it up in storage. Look.”
He turned and picked his holoscanner from the desk to pull up a file. He handed her the device.
She snatched it from his hand. She shook her head the entire time she was reading. “I don’t believe it. I mean...”
She looked up at him, seeming lost. “I don’t blame you for keeping this from me, but I would have liked to have known. I mean, this is just...”
“Unreal?”
“It’s something else, that’s for sure. I can only imagine how it’s been for you to keep these kinds of secrets.”
“Command has its perils,” he admitted. “In a way, I wonder if this is why everything else in my life has been so stilted -- because of the secrets that I live with on a daily basis.”
His voice wavered. “Sue, I have no clue what I’m leading these people into. It's possible that none of us will survive this; we might be heading into our doom.
“There’s a chance -- not a great one but still a very good one – that we'll have the same exact problems on this planet that we had on Earth. Think about that.”
He had been wondering why humanity would occupy two planets, fearing for the worst.
“Imagine that we travel all of this way, then we finally reach the planet, the planet that was believed to be our salvation this whole time, only to find that humanity was already there and already ruined the whole damned thing. Maybe we are supposed to die without a home, drifting through space. It’s some existential dilemma that we might deserve.
“Maybe we deserve to be homeless, to die out here.” He let the words hang in the air as she stared off at the projections.
She replied, “Maybe we do, but maybe we also deserve a second chance. This could be that, no matter what we find on Omega. They could just as easily be friendly.”
“We are floating alone in space, hurtling toward a planet that we know next to nothing about, and we are just mere days away from having a visual on the planet.” He stood up, turning toward the windows. “I sure hope that we’ll have some friends out here. I’m tired, Sue. I’m very tired and I just want to be able to retire knowing that I’ve done my duty. Then I can rest.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?” He found that it was easiest to ignore his own problems, instead focusing on everyone else.
“When do you get what you want?”
He searched for the words, taking a long, hard look out the window before replying. “Hopefully we get to figure that out soon.”
“We?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, damn.” His face began to turn red. “You know what I mean -- humanity. Us. I just hope to hell that Jeanette has nothing to do with that future. I want my exile to be a pleasant one.”
“I understand,” she stated, neither of them really sure what they believed.
He turned to her. “Do you ever have the sneaking suspicion that we're doing it all wrong, Sue?” He was trying to keep his expression from becoming grim but found it trying.
“How so?”
“Just --” He paused and motioned around the room. “The way that we run things. Our whole system. Why am I in charge? What did I ever do to deserve this?”
“Those are just doubts, Peter.”
“Maybe,” he said as he scratched behind his ear out of habit. “We just have a chance to start over is all. If we really do meet up with a fleet from back home, there is no chance of that at all.”
“I think that for now, we need to take things one step at a time.”
“I guess you're right.”
009. The Spy Who Loved Me
Jonah Freeman
The idea had come to Jonah as a stroke of brilliance, but the more he thought about executing it, the more nervous he got. It was going to take not showing his hand too early, and it was going to mean that he would have to be on his best behavior with Kara until everything could be worked out.
It also meant that he had to betray Kara’s trust, which was the last thought that came to his mind while formulating h
is plot.
For the past few days, Jonah had been splitting his time between work and Kara, but doing so in a manner where he seemed like he could care less about the time that he spent with Kara. It tore him up to see how well she responded to his neglect of her after he spent so many months trying to be genuinely good to her and show her how much he cared about her.
All of that was fading for him. As much as Jonah knew that being around her was toxic for him at that point in his life, he knew that he needed her for just a little while longer. A remote part of him still had hoped that it would all work out. He used to need her because he was afraid of being alone, but his motivations had changed, and while still based upon fear, it was now the fear of what they were hurtling toward. It was now about the greater good, not just him dying alone. He still loved her, and he was disgusted at himself for that and for his weakness toward her.
“What are we doing tonight?” Kara sank down into the couch with her pipe in her hand, lighter in the other, looking up at Jonah with her big green eyes through her bangs.
“I don’t know,” he said. He leaned against the wall and stared out the window at the blackness of space. It always struck him as odd that it looked like nothing was moving, even though he knew where they were headed and how fast they were getting there. He wished he could get out in front of the ship and stop it, but he knew that was impossible.
“Well, Jana and Paulie wanted to go to the Rusty Spoon for a few drinks.” She paused, the pipe hovering near her mouth. She held back for a few moments to finish her thought. “But I know you probably don’t want to...”
“Yeah, sure,” Jonah said, doing his best not to roll his eyes.
“What?” She looked up at him, taken aback. “I thought you hated Jana and Paulie?”
“Eh.” He said, walking around the square table and sitting down on the couch next to her before kicking his boots up onto the table and leaning back. “Whatever, you know?”
