Mark made his mind up to explain to Alan why he wasn't going to go after all. As he leant forward toward the door to break the news, Alan grabbed his arm and said "Come on, don't stand there in a dream." and pulled Mark inside.
Orbital
As Alan pulled Mark inside, the door slid silently closed behind him and he saw that the interior was lit. The light came from the ceiling which was glowing uniformly with a slightly yellow light. Alan released his grip on Mark’s arm and walked to a table projecting out of the wall opposite to where they entered. An odd shaped chair with a low back was by the side of the table. They both appeared to be made of the same pale grey stuff as the walls. Mark turned to run out again but there was just a blank pale grey wall where the door had been. Alan sat in the chair which he seemed to fit and was making hand gestures in the air above the table top. Mark thought he might be swatting flies away. His large backpack was stuck to the wall.
“Er, I was expecting something a bit bigger.” Said Mark, trying to stop his voice from trembling.
“This is my shuttle. Stand against the wall, put your feet inside those cuffs and hold onto those handles.” Alan said, pointing to the wall.
He looked at the wall and saw two loops made of the wall stuff at ankle height that he could slip his feet into. High up on the wall, were two more loops to put his wrists into. At least he could if he was as tall as Alan.
“Why do you want to manacle me to the wall?” Mark asked nervously.
“They are safety straps.” Replied Alan.
“We really don’t need them, you are perfectly safe from me.” Mark said, getting a bit panicky now.
“Good grief,” Alan said, sounding a bit exasperated. “The straps are to keep you safe while we go into orbit.”
Mark reluctantly walked to the wall and reached up for the straps. “I can’t reach the handles.”
“Reach up and slide them down to a comfortable height.”
As they were extruded from the wall, Mark thought that was a daft thing to try to do but shrugged his shoulders, and on tiptoe, reached up to a strap and pulled down on it. He almost let go in surprise as the strap slid easily down the wall. He pulled the other one down to the same height, slipped his feet into the cuffs and held on to the straps. They wouldn’t move now how ever hard he pulled at them. The cuffs pulled themselves tightly around Mark's ankles and fastened him firmly against the wall. “I really don’t like this.” Thought Mark. “Oh God, I hope he’s not a psychotic killer.”
“Uh, why I am I standing here holding on to these?” Asked Mark.
“We are about to leave and re-orient.” Explained Alan, who went back to making gestures.
“Oh, right.” Said Mark, as if he understood what Alan had meant. He got the leave bit, but re-orient? He hadn’t noticed that on any of the televised ESA and NASA launches.
Mark felt a slight tremble from the floor and then he was falling. At least, he would have been if he hadn’t had his feet in the cuffs and his hands on the straps. “Oh my god!” He thought. “We’re going to crash!”
Suddenly the shuttle was steady and there was just the slightest of vibrations, more like a hum, coming from the floor again.
“No, we’re not going to crash.” Said Alan, “We have re-oriented.”
“Did I say that out load?” Said Mark.
“Not so much said out loud, more like screamed out loud.”
“You might have warned me!” Mark said crossly, forgetting how frightened he was.
“I did. You obviously weren’t paying attention.”
“Yes, OK, you said that we going to re-orient, but you didn’t explain what it meant.”
“Never mind, you’ll know next time.”
“Oh god.” Mark thought, being careful not to say it out loud this time. “Is it going to be like this all the time? Still, I wanted something different.” He smiled at that thought. Then he felt sick and stopped smiling.
“What is re-orienting?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, OK. So, are the engines all firing now, blasting us up into space?” Mark asked, thinking he might distract Alan from any homicidal ideas.
“There are no engines firing. We are falling upwards towards my orbiter.”
“Falling upwards? You mean you are using anti-gravity!”
“Anti-gravity?” Alan made a short loud clicking noise, nodding his head vigorously and slapping his hands on his legs.
“Are you all right?” Asked Mark nervously, thinking this might be a prelude to being dissected alive, although if he were lucky it might be Alan having a stroke.
When Alan had finished he replied, “Perfectly all right thank you, that was how my people laugh.”
“Right. I never saw you do that back there, back home. On Earth.”
“There isn’t much to laugh about on your planet.”
“So what was so funny?”
“You have a lot to learn. I forgot how primitive your culture’s understanding of physics is. It was when you said anti-gravity.” Alan did the clicking, nodding, slapping thing again, but not so long this time.
“Do you know what gravity is?” Asked Alan.
“Yes, it’s the deformation of the space-time continuum by the presence of mass.”
“Very good.” Said Alan. “You’re not quite as dumb as you appear.”
Mark frowned.
“Where did you learn that?”
“I read a lot. The New Scientist. It’s one of the magazines they have in reception for visitors. I usually get to it before anyone else.”
“You steal it?”
“No, I borrow it. Permanently.”
“I see.” Alan said. “So, if gravity is the manifestation of the distortion of the space-time continuum, how would you make the opposite of gravity?”
“I don’t know. After all, I’m just a chimpanzee.”
“Still cross about that? That was a slip up from the cultural and contextual translation by my AI. I’ve fixed that now. Anyway, you can’t have anti-gravity, or anti-light or – anti lots of things.”
“So how are we falling upwards? And if we are falling why aren’t we weightless?”
“It’s complicated. When we reach my craft we will go into free fall temporarily, so you won’t notice the re-orientation before we dock.”
“That’s good. I was almost sick just now.”
“You’ll get used to it. Possibly.”
Mark thought that was a good sign. If Alan was expecting him to get used to the re-orienting, he clearly hadn’t planned to dissect or eat him for a while.
“How long will it take to get to your - craft?”
“We’re almost there.”
A few seconds later they went into free fall. It wasn’t as bad as the re-orienting earlier, but it still made Mark feel queasy. It didn’t last long and Mark soon felt the right way up and his normal weight again.
“Are we nearly there yet?”
“No, we’re not nearly there. We are there. You can let go of the restraints now.”
Mark let go of the wrist straps and the ankle cuffs relaxed so he could remove his feet from them. He felt better now he wasn’t strapped to the wall.
The opening in the wall had appeared again. Alan got up, pulled at his backpack which came free and walked through the opening. Mark followed him through into a brightly lit room with floor length grey outlines of doors on the left-hand wall and more grey outlines a bit less than a metre square lining the right-hand wall. He walked out through an opening opposite and found himself in a corridor stretching out to the left and right. The walls looked like they were made of the same pale grey stuff as the walls in the shuttle, with light coming from the ceiling which was uniformly bright and slightly yellow.
This was definitely bigger than the shuttle, much more in line with Mark's expectations.
There was another opening opposite, so he walked through into what appeared to be the control room. Alan was sitting at a console that had a la
rge screen with multiple active windows, built into the wall in front of it. There was no keyboard or controls on the console surface. Alan finished making gestures above the console and turned to Mark. “Take a seat.” He said, nodding towards another smaller console.
Mark moved over to the console and found that the seat was of normal human proportions and sat on it.
“So, is this the bridge?” Mark asked.
“It would be if this was a ship, but as it’s a craft, it’s not“
“So what is this place called?”
“It’s the place where we control the craft.”
“So the command centre.” Mark said.
“That sounds like a good description. You can call it the Command Centre.”
“But look, this is a space ship, isn’t it? So shouldn’t this be the bridge and the left-hand side called port and the right-hand side starboard?” Mark asked.
“Yes and a crusty old sea dog at the tiller. Do I look like Captain Birds Eye?”
“No, with that hat and coat and flying goggles - well, sunglasses, you look more like an old-fashioned aviator, like Amy Johnson.”
“Funny you should say that.”
“What! Don’t tell me that you’re really Amy Johnson!” Asked Mark, incredulously.
“I’m beginning to think that letting you come along may have been a bad idea. Have you ever seen a picture of Amy Johnson? I’m about a metre taller than she is. And she died in a flying accident ferrying a military aircraft in 1941. In case you hadn’t noticed, I am not dead.”
“How do you know all this stuff? I didn’t know that and I grew up on Earth. You know, being an Earthling and all that.”
“I am aware of your origins, and I pick up these things as part of my researches. But we seem to have gone off topic with that. When your species invented heavier than air flying machines they didn’t call them ships. They don’t have bridges on their aeroplanes, they have cockpits, which is admittedly a naval term for the place a yacht is steered from, but this is neither a ship or an aeroplane and what goes on in here is much more than just steering. The more I think about it the more the name Command Centre fits its function.”
“So what did you call it before it just became the Command Centre?”
“I didn’t call it anything. I didn’t need to, I knew what it was.”
“Er, OK.” Said Mark. He realised he was going nowhere with this. “You’ve mentioned translations a few times before. Do you have a translator with you?”
“Of course. I can’t speak your languages. I understand most of them but don’t have the physiology to make the right sounds.”
“But, your voice, it’s coming from your mouth. Where is the translator?”
“Implanted into my brain. It’s an Artificial Intelligence, or AI, which also acts as a context sensitive translator. It has direct connection to the speech centres in my brain. And of course my voice comes out of my mouth. It would look a bit odd if it came out of my backside. I need to get you fitted with your own AI.”
“Er, I’ll pass on that thanks.” Mark said. He really didn’t want Alan fiddling about installing bits of machinery inside his head. He didn’t trust him not to turn him into some kind of computer driven zombie. He had seen what the military had done with cockroaches so that they could fit them with sensors and remotely control them. “It works perfectly well with you translating, so I don’t need one.”
“It’s not optional. As an Archivist you will meet other species, few will have AI translators and those that do won’t be as good as mine. We’ll get it done later today.”
Mark went pale. “Having things stuck in my brain wasn’t part of the deal. I’m not having one!”
“Uh huh.” Said Alan, not looking round.
The thought of it was making Mark feel faint. He suddenly needed to go to the toilet.
“Where is the toilet?”
“Go out of here, turn left and keep going until you find an open door. That’s where your quarters are. You will find full facilities in there.”
Mark got up unsteadily and walked out into the corridor. He was still unhappy at being here. OK, he knew he had asked - well, pleaded to come along, but he had changed his mind. A man had a right to change his mind, didn’t he?
About 25 metres along the corridor he saw an opening in the wall on the left. He walked in and looked around and realised that the opening had closed, leaving behind just the faint outline of where it had been. That didn’t make him feel any better and in a slight panic, he stepped forward to push the door open. A soon as he got a metre from it, part of the wall slid open again. He stepped backwards and the door silently slid shut. He took a step forward and it slid open again. At least he could get into and out of his quarters when he wanted.
The walls of the room were the same pale grey he had seen throughout the spacecraft. There was a platform extruded from the wall on the left-hand side and a table with a seat on the right. There was also what looked like a padded sofa with a coffee table in front of it. The floor had a slight give to it, like a thick carpet. Everything was the same pale grey. The wall corners were slightly rounded as were the edges where the walls met the ceiling and floor, so there were no sharp lines in the room. As it was lit uniformly from the ceiling it lacked perspective and was a bit disorienting. The effect made Mark feel queasy as he looked at it, so he thought it better to try not to notice. There was the faint outline of a doorway opposite the entrance and even fainter outlines on all the walls except where the table and the platform were. Mark walked towards the door and it opened for him as he got close to it. He stepped into a spacious but ordinary looking bathroom with a hand basin, shower cubicle, toilet and bath. No soap, towels or toilet paper, but, he reasoned, you can’t have everything.
All around the walls were the faint outlines of doors. Mark walked up to one expecting it to open, but it stayed as just an outline. Mark tried shuffling up to it until he was almost touching it. Nothing happened. He stepped back and reached up to try to push it open and just before his hand touched it, the wall slid silently open and revealed a deep cupboard with shelves at about one-metre intervals. It was empty.
Mark tried the door next to the toilet and found the same type of cupboard, empty except for one shelf full of toilet rolls. Mark smiled. “Good old Alan.” He thought, as he reached out to grasp one. His smile rapidly faded when he examined the roll and found that it was made of the same type of paper used in the laser printers at work. “Alan is such a git.”
He tried the door to the left of the hand basin and found another empty cupboard. He had more luck with the one on the right, one shelf had four towels on it. They were a bit rougher than he would have preferred but they were serviceable. Still no soap though.
Then he remembered what he was there for.
Foreign Food
When Mark returned to the newly named Command Centre Alan looked round at him and said “Right, we’ve got a while, you probably have some questions and there are things you need to know. First – I am going to equip you with an AI…”
“I’ve already said, I’m not having one. You’re not poking around my brain and plugging bits of machinery in me.”
“Let’s not argue about that. I’ll just explain why you need one. It is superior to anything that anyone else has. It translates language into a cultural context so it will put what it is translating into a context you can understand and will translate idioms in alien languages, often using cultural references beyond your comprehension into idioms you do understand. This means that you can converse with anyone you meet in a relaxed manner and bond with them quickly and easily.”
“I’m not much into bonding with strangers…”
“You are likely to find yourself in situations when having a native friend will be very helpful. It may still seem alien and bizarre to you at times, but you will understand what they say and more importantly they will understand you. The AI is an artificial intelligence, or machine intelligence if you pref
er to call it, which will also act as your personal assistant. It will give advice on acceptable behaviour in an unfamiliar culture and it is also a communications channel between you, the craft we are in and me. You can, if you wish, set translation terms so you can specify translated names, or aliases, for individuals to help you remember them. This works both ways so you would hear the name you gave them and when you spoke that name they would hear their own name. You can also give yourself a description that could be helpful when introducing yourself or explaining who you are. For example, you could use Mark, keeper of records or Mark, puny timid geek from a primitive culture. The choice is yours.”
“Two things.” Said Mark. “First, I’m not having one implanted in me, second, I didn’t know you had a sense of humour and third, that wasn’t funny.”
“You said there were two things and just listed three.”
“Good, you can count.”
“Is that your idea of a sense of humour?” Asked Alan.
“It made me smile.” Replied Mark.
Mark was feeling more comfortable now. With all that Alan was telling him - even about the mad idea of having a computer stuck inside his head - and that just wasn’t going to happen - he didn’t seem to plan to eat him as a mid-flight snack.
“Alan Martin isn’t your real name is it.” Mark stated.
“No, I’ve had a few while I’ve been on Earth, I’ve had this one since nineteen fifty three.”
“So why did you give yourself the name Alan?”
“A little joke – it’s a bit like alien. Alan the alien. Do you get it?”
“Uh, yes. Hilarious. And the surname Martin – don’t tell me, it’s a bit like martian.”
“Yes! Great joke, eh?” Alan nodded and clicked, but refrained from slapping his legs.
“But you don’t come from Mars.”
Unwilling From Earth Page 6
