Unwilling From Earth

by Andrew Maclure

  Mark was tired and had a fairly full stomach. With nothing to read, no TV and no X-box he took his jumpsuit off, tossed it into the synthesiser and fell into bed.

  Meet Mother

  Mark woke up to the chimes again. Although he had slept well - he didn’t remember any dreams, he ached all over. He picked up his tablet to order a tea and stumbled over to the synthesiser to collect it. He felt really rough and wished that he had brought some painkillers with him. Taking his tea with him he went into the bathroom to wash and freshen up. He came out feeling more awake but still in a lot of pain. He pulled out a new jumpsuit from the synthesiser and slipped a fresh pair of shoes onto his feet. He limped to the door and down to the Command Centre.

  Alan was in there - as always, sitting at the console. “You do not look well.” He said as Mark sat heavily on his seat.

  “I ache all over.” Mark said. “I think it may have been something that I nearly ate.” He told Alan about the abortive attempt at ordering a pizza.

  “That’s possible.” Said Alan. “I’ll get you something for the pain.”

  “Hold on, I don’t think I can have the same drugs as you - we’re not the same!”

  “Of course not, I’ll ask the Medical AI to get something tailored to your body chemistry. It’s only the auxiliary Medical AI but it can do that perfectly well.

  What do you mean the auxiliary Medical AI? Is the main one broken?”

  Alan nodded, clicked and slapped his legs. “No, of course it’s not broken. You are funny sometimes Mark. The main AI isn’t here, this is just my orbiter. That’s why we are moving slowly. We’re nearly there now.”

  “Nearly there? Where?” Mark was a bit put out for being called ‘funny’ when as far as he was concerned he was constantly being kept in the dark and whenever he asked a question he got a convoluted answer that only ever seemed to give him partial information - and sometimes not even that. “Look, I’ve only got your word for it that we are anywhere. I haven't seen anything yet apart from the inside of this space ship which according to you isn't a ship, it's a craft. For all I know we could just be in some overgrown fun ride in Chessington World of Adventures and you’re just stringing me along in some kind of mad experiment"

  "You'd like to see outside?" Asked Alan. He made some gestures over the console and a large part of the wall turned into a screen. Mark gasped as he saw part of a planet with huge rings around it. At least, they looked huge from this close. They were looking down at the rings at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

  “Wow. That must be Saturn. So, are we going to land there?”

  “Back to the ‘wow’ again are we? It’s preferable to the alternative that you used. If you recall, Saturn is a gas giant, so we would have to go very deep to land on anything solid. That isn’t necessary. See that moon?” Alan said, pointing at small orange disc amongst the rings.

  “Ah, I see a yellowy dot.” Mark said, though he could just see that it was slowly, but visibly getting bigger.

  “That is Titan. It’s in orbit around that.”

  “What’s in orbit around it?”

  “Where we’re going.”

  Mark sighed. No straight answer from Alan again. He’d just wait and see when they got there. He sat and watched fascinated as they got closer and closer. Titan orbits outside the visible rings of Saturn, so there was no danger of being hit by the myriad of ice and rock particles that Mark could now see made up the rings, though as they got closer he could see that although the space around the moon was relatively clear there were still a number of what he could see were quite sizable chunks flying past them.

  “Er, Alan, how are we going to avoid all of those rocks flying around?” Mark asked.

  “The navigation system will do it’s best to avoid them and we have - other - protection to prevent collisions but no harm will come to us if we collide with them.”

  Mark wasn’t sure whether he was comforted by that or not.

  Alan went to the Command Centre synthesiser and pulled out a short cylindrical device. He took it over to Mark and said “This is a pain killer. It is not just suitable for human physiology, it is specifically tailored to your personal body chemistry. It is fast acting and has no side effects. I will administer it by pressing it to the carotid artery in your neck. There is no needle and you will feel nothing except the slight pressure of it as I hold it against your skin. I am telling you all of this as you are a - wimp, according to the translator and I do not want you to panic and soil yourself.”

  “How very thoughtful.” Mark said. He wasn’t sure whether Alan was just very blunt or simply very rude. He was a little bit confused because one of the things that was notable about Alan back on Earth - apart from the obvious - was that he was inordinately polite and his manners had been impeccable.

  Alan administered the painkiller, and he was right, all Mark felt was the slightly cool end of the device where it touched his neck. Within a few seconds, he felt the pain in his limbs ebb away.

  As they got closer to Titan, Alan said: “I have shielded it so that nobody notices it but I’ll just compensate for the shielding so that you can see it.”

  Mark didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but assumed ‘it’ was their destination.

  A small dark blob appeared close to Titan. The moon and the blob got bigger as they got closer until Mark could see that the blob was, in fact, a thick disc shaped object. “That’s quite big.” He said.

  “We are still some distance from it, we will be slowing our approach shortly.”

  “What do you call it?” Asked Mark

  “It doesn’t have a name.”

  “So how do you refer to it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But it’s got to have a name.”

  “Does it?” Alan sounded surprised.

  “Of course, it’s your mother ship, it has to have a name.”

  “’I’ve told you, it’s not a ship, but Mother, that’s a good name, we’ll call it Mother.”

  “You can’t call it Mother. That’s just not right.”

  “You are wrong, I think your suggestion is a very good one. Mother it is.”

  Mark sighed. “Not quite what I had in mind.”

  As they got closer it filled more and more of the screen and Mark started to get some idea of its size.

  “Wow. That’s really big. More than that, it’s huge!”

  “It’s adequate for my use.” Replied Alan

  “But you can’t possibly use all of it!”

  “Not all at once, no.”

  “How big is it?”

  “It has a diameter of just under one hundred kilometres.”

  “Look, I’m OK with millimetres, centimetres and metres, but kilometres don’t have much meaning for me. So, what is one hundred kilometres in miles?” Asked Mark.

  “You know what a metre is but don’t know how long a kilometre is, which is one thousand metres. You do know how long a mile is, which is one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards. Would you also like it in feet and inches? How about furlongs, chains and rods, or leagues?”

  “I believe that you are taking the piss now. Even though we use the metric system for nearly everything in Britain, distances are always measured in miles and all of our speed limits are in miles per hour, so kilometres don’t have any meaning to me, so just miles will do thanks.” Mark said, trying not to get annoyed with Alan, or at least, not to show it.

  “OK, it’s diameter is a fraction over sixty miles. That’s 520 furlongs.”

  “Bloody hell! Sixty miles! Are you sure? Sixty miles! But, sixty miles in diameter, that means the area of a single level would be – let me see radius squared, that’s thirty times thirty, er - nine hundred, times pi at three point one four two, that’s, er…”

  “Two thousand eight hundred and twenty eight.” Alan said.

  “Yes, I was just going to say that.” Mark lied. “Two thousand eight hundred and twenty eight square miles per level. Wow - I mean, no shit. How thic
k is it?”

  “You mean height, which is the correct terminology in the context that you are using. It is approximately eight miles or just under 13 kilometres. Would you like it in furlongs?”

  “Thanks for the information but the joke is wearing a bit thin. Did anyone ever tell you that you had a great sense of humour?”

  “No, no one ever has.”

  “I’m not surprised. So how many levels are there?”

  “A lot.”

  Mark wasn’t going to let Alan get away with his usual obscure answers. “Define ‘a lot’ for me.”

  “A lot is more than a few but less than many. On reflection, there are many of them.” Alan clarified.

  “OK, so define ‘many’ for me.”

  “More than a lot.”

  Mark was beginning to get a bit annoyed with Alan’s deliberate vagueness. “Sometimes, trying to get a straight answer out of you is like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. Can you give me a straight and accurate answer please?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It always is. However, you are very clever so I’m sure you can manage it eventually.”

  Alan explained. “There are very few levels that run the entire span of Mother. But if you are trying to work out the area of inhabitable space within Mother - that includes all areas with the potential for continuous life support, there are two million, two hundred and twenty four thousand and sixty four square miles or, if you prefer, five million seven hundred and seventy one thousand six hundred and ninety nine square kilometres.

  “Fuck me!” Said Mark.

  “On the whole, I think I preferred to ‘wow’ to that expression.”

  “That must be nearly as big as the surface area of Earth!”

  “Nowhere near. The approximate land surface area of Earth is fifty seven million, three hundred and nine square miles, about thirty seven percent is desert and twenty four percent is mountainous, so that leaves about twenty four million, six hundred and forty three thousand square miles of inhabitable land.”

  “So Mother is really quite small then.”

  “It is manageable, yes.”

  “Do you know what irony is?”

  “Yes, and I also know that you were using it just now. Artefacts of this size and much bigger are commonplace in the galaxy. At the human level of cultural and technological development, they are almost inconceivably large, but you’ll get used to it quite quickly. Are you familiar with the concept of a Dyson sphere?” Asked Alan.

  “I’ve read about them, but only in science fiction. Don’t tell me they really exist!”

  ”There aren’t many in the galaxy. Only a handful of civilisations have been so paranoid or shy that they thought it worthwhile the effort to construct one.”

  “So flying saucers do exist. Was this responsible for any of the sightings on Earth?”

  “It is not a flying saucer. It does not fly, at least not in the sense that you mean, and it is not saucer shaped. A saucer is a thin disc, concave one side and convex on the other. Mother is a thick disc with a diameter to height ratio of approximately one to eight and it is convex on both sides. Incidentally, the term flying saucers was first used in June 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that he estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour and told reporters that they looked like flying saucers.”

  Mark sighed. "I do not have the words to express how uninteresting that was”

  “I have noticed that you have a very limited vocabulary.” Said Alan. “You need to work on that.”

  Mark thought that the People may not age but there must be quite a few casualties when they got a few of them together. They would surely bore each other to death.

  Alan made a complex gesture over the console and sat back in his chair with his lower arms crossed over his stomach and his upper hands clasped behind his head.

  “Don’t you need to steer it in, open the cargo bay doors, batten down the hatches or something?”

  “No, the navigational AI can do a much better job than I can. We’ll be docked soon and can start some serious work. And you can get started in the gym.”

  “I was hoping that you had forgotten about that. I don’t know if it’s the lack of food or something but I’ve been feeling a bit weak ever since we’ve been on board so I’m not sure the gym is a good idea until I’m feeling better.”

  “That would probably be because I have stepped the gravity up to the equivalent of one and a half Earth gravities to start to acclimatise you.”

  “Oh, great. Thanks for the warning. I just thought that I had something seriously wrong with me. Nothing to bother about.”

  “I do like the human sense of irony.” Said Alan. “It’s almost as good as the song.”

  “Song, what song?” Asked Mark.

  “Human song. The sound of your speech. It’s very musical. It’s one of the reasons that Earth is such a popular tourist attraction.”

  “Tourist attraction? What do you mean.”

  “That’s not an ambiguous statement. Earth attracts a lot of tourists.”

  “But who… why… where… I mean… what - alien tourists?” Mark exclaimed.

  “Of course. I mean, there’s no reason that you should know. In fact, there’s every reason why you shouldn’t have known. But now you are a member of the galactic community it’s probably something that you ought to know.”

  Mark was a bit taken aback by this. Mankind had been actively looking for signs of alien life for decades and had spent billions of dollars on a fruitless search crawling around on Mars looking for microscopic remnants of life and now Alan was telling him that Earth was a popular alien tourist resort!

  “But how can it be? How can we not have noticed?”

  “Only humanoid body plan visitors go there, mostly mammalian. They disguise themselves as humans - that's all part of the fun - and blend in with the population.”

  “But - why haven’t any revealed themselves? Or have they? Was Einstein an alien? Did all of our scientific breakthroughs come from aliens? Do they run our governments?”

  “That’s a lot of questions. Briefly, no visitors have revealed themselves. All reported alien sightings are false, mostly invented by intellectually challenged or psychologically damaged humans and the few that aren’t are just simple misinterpretations of perfectly normal Earth-based phenomena.”

  “So flying saucers aren’t real?”

  “No.”

  “And the little grey men, or Greys, they aren’t real?”

  “No.”

  “And the pyramids weren’t built by aliens?”

  Alan clicked, nodded and slapped his legs at that. “No of course not. If an advanced civilisation had built the pyramids they would have made a much better job of them.”

  “So, are there laws about showing themselves or passing on technology?”

  “Not as such, but it just isn’t done. By the time a civilisation becomes integrated into the galactic community it will have learnt that some things just shouldn’t be done, and one of those things that just shouldn’t be done is interfering with a developing civilisation. I’ve never been sure about Leo Szilard though.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly. The fact that no-one has ever heard of him is very suspicious. If you knew what he had ‘invented’ you’d be suspicious too.”

  “Er, OK.”

  “Anyway, the Ants don’t like it and the People don’t approve.”

  “Ants? What have ants got to do with anything?”

  “Not the small insect colonies that you have on Earth. The Ants are something completely different, but that’s a subject for another time. We are about to berth with Mother. Would you take a seat for a moment?” Said Alan, gesturing towards Mark’s chair.

  Grey Matters

  Mark sat at his console and watched on the view screen as they approached Mother. As they drew nearer, the reality of t
he size of the enormous vessel that Alan had now christened Mother, became apparent to Mark. The side of the disc rapidly filled the screen, and all that Mark could see was a great black wall with a small winking dot in the centre of it. As they approached, the winking dot resolved into four slowly flashing white lights at the corners of a slightly blacker rectangle. This grew to fill the entire screen until eventually, the orbiter moved inside the rectangle.

  “We’re in now.” Said Alan “Make sure you’ve got your tablet and let's go inside.”

  Mark looked round thinking he should get all of his things together before leaving the orbiter and remembered that the few possessions he had brought with him had been recycled. He shrugged his shoulders, patted the pocket on his jumpsuit that he kept his tablet in, and having confirmed that the tablet was there, followed Alan.

  “Are we docked to Mother now?” Asked Mark. He hadn’t felt any kind of bump and heard nothing that sounds like a clamp or any sounds of connection, but didn’t really expect to.

  “We are in the dock, so if you count that as docked, then yes.”

  They crossed the corridor into the same room that they had entered the orbiter from the shuttle. As they approached the external door it slid open and Mark saw the orange and hazy cloud top of Titan through the open bay door.

  “Oh my god! You’ve left the door open - get back inside” Mark shouted and grasped Alan’s lower right arm and pulled him sharply back. Caught off balance Alan almost fell backwards on top of Mark.

  Alan recovered his balance and turned, clicking and nodding and giving his legs a couple of slaps with his lower arms to face Mark. “The door will close soon Mark, but don’t worry, the atmosphere is sealed in by an energy field. If you were to try to step through, it would prevent you from doing so unless you had instructed the bay door to allow you to.”

  “I don’t see why you’re laughing.” Mark said crossly. “You don’t warn me about any of these things in advance and then laugh at me when I am surprised. Do you enjoy making me look like a fool?”

  Alan suddenly stopped clicking and nodding. “I am sorry Mark. You are quite right that was very remiss of me. I apologise. As soon as we are settled in I will try to let you know what you need to know, both on board and a bit more about the wider galactic culture.”