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‘The what?’ I said out loud, and Pitr jumped. I gave him a lame grin and tapped my head.
‘The middle couch on the dais,’ the voice explained.
I strolled over to the dais, stepped up on to it, and walked to the chair in the middle. The bag slid off my shoulder with a fabric hiss and landed on the floor with a muffled thump. The couch was creamy white and all flowing curves. It felt warm to my fingers, and just very slightly rough. I looked back to check on Pitr. He was still gawping, but had moved farther into the room. I sat on the edge of the couch, testing it with my weight. The edges were firm, but inside it was soft and comfortable. I swung my body round and brought my legs up. As I started to lie back, I felt the material beneath me ease and shift to match my body shape. It felt so strange, but at the same time was so comfortable. My head sank down on to the headrest, and my body started to relax.
And something poured into my mind like water from a faucet.
It really was like water. I knew that something was there, but whatever it was it was transparent and didn’t get in the way of anything. It felt cool and fresh, and made me feel alert.
‘Again, Garret, welcome.’
There was no hissing in the background this time, and the voice seemed somehow more solid, and more real. It spoke very clearly, with a strange rhythm, but was very measured and calm. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman.
‘Hello?’
‘I understand this will all seem somewhat strange. Rest assured you are in no danger.’
‘But where am I?’
‘All in good time. First, who is this with you?’
‘Pitr. My friend. He came along to help.’
There was an infinitesimal pause. ‘Unexpected. Non-receptive. Permissible. You may call me ‘Noah’.’
‘I thought you said your identity was ‘Pal’-something.’
‘System Idents are installation dependent and may not be changed. Colloquial identification can be set as required by the station commander. The previous station commander set ‘Noah’ as the colloquial identification for this locale. You do not have sufficient authorisation to change it.’
My head felt even weirder. Most of the words meant nothing to me, but somehow I understood exactly what Noah meant. I looked up at Pitr to see what he made of it, and he hadn’t moved. I thought I knew why.
‘Noah, can Pitr hear you?’
‘Pitr does not have the appropriate resonating structures in his amygdala. He is not able to communicate directly with me. Now that you and I are in direct contact via the command couch, I am able to properly adjust the connection with you to maximise bandwidth and clarity.’
‘Can we make it so he can hear? Like out loud?’
‘Not efficiently.’
‘He needs to know.’
A large square on the wall flickered and faded from grey to black. Noah’s voice sounded in my head and through my ears, echoing slightly.
‘Pitr.’
He jumped out of his skin, then scanned around to find the source of the sound. Eventually, he looked at me. I just held my hands up and smiled.
‘Hello?’
‘Please watch the display behind you. I am about to give Garret some historical information. Whilst it is not possible to share all of the detail with you, the images and commentary may prove useful.’
Back in my head, Noah told me to settle back and relax, and a stream of information began to flow into my mind. With the information came understanding, except I didn’t understand how I understood it - if you get what I mean - and it wasn’t complete. I could feel I was missing stuff. It was like I was getting the surface layer, but missing stuff deeper down.
There was a sense of great emptiness, and of an enormous time in the past. I watched a small dot detach itself from the backdrop and grow into an irregular, oval pebble. It grew and grew until it became too big for me to get my mind around. Numbers jiggled around in my head telling me it was a carbonaceous chondritic asteroidal body 197 kilometres long by 48 kilometres wide, but as more and more details flooded into me they ran into each other and stopped meaning anything.
I drifted through the rock, seeing many chambers that were hollowed out inside the asteroid where about three thousand people lived. There was a huge open area where people went for recreation, full of things that were unfamiliar, but for which I got concepts like ‘grass’ and ‘tree’ and ‘plant’ and a curious notion that the place was somehow connected with breathing. Then I was shown there were ships that could travel through the darkness, many of which were parked in a sort of holding area, which used to come from many places to trade, and some just bringing visitors. Only a fraction of the rock was used for anything.
Concepts flickered in front of me: ‘gravity plating’ built into floors to stop people floating around, total conversion drives and power plants that broke any matter down into pure energy, and replicators that could make just about anything if you gave them the right raw materials. Those were just the things I managed to get some kind of understanding about. I felt dozens more slipping past me without really connecting. The images broke up and flickered, and Noah’s voice broke into my thoughts.
‘I apologise. I have been damaged, and some data has been irrevocably destroyed in both primary and secondary storage nodes. However, you should be able to surmise the missing information. I will continue with valid data.’
My mind cleared and rather than a flood of information, it seemed a story was unfolding. Lots and lots of people started to arrive from many places. They looked scared but determined, and they worked hard to hollow out more caverns in the asteroid. They used the rock and metal to feed the replicators that built thousands upon thousands of coffins where people could sleep for years without aging in something called DeepSleep. Over a hundred thousand people in all. The smaller ships were stored in the parking facilities. The larger ones were ripped apart; their engines were built in to the body of the asteroid, their protective devices clustered at the front, and anything else put where it could be most use. Almost as many animal species as people were saved as fertilised eggs held in stasis, and some animals were kept in bulk sleep pods for a ‘quick start’ to the food chain when they got to their new home. Tools and machinery were packed into other caverns.
When everything was as ready as they could make it, and when everybody except the command crew were sleeping, the pilots and the captain spoke with their minds to the computer controlling the asteroid and the massed engines spat energy. Slowly the great rock began to drift away from its home.
Sure that everything was going as it should, the crew began to go to their coffins. Last to sleep was the captain. The computer carried out a pre-set sequence of power saving actions, the last of which was to put itself into a standby mode. Lesser systems would wake it in microseconds if anything of note occurred.
When the computer was woken, microsecond reflexes were not enough. It had just enough time to register a problem in one of the total conversion reactors before the reactor became uncontrollably unstable. The computer quickly assessed the situation. They were almost at their destination. Automated systems had properly guided their flight and they were parked in a long period cometary orbit (that bit I didn’t get) waiting to make the final correction that would take them to their new home.
The computer realised that although it could limit the damage, the reactor failure would still dissolve all of the forward crew coffins into the subatomic soup that the reactor turned into pure energy. It would also destroy the ability of the computer to communicate with the rest of the asteroid, and the computer’s primary power supply. Wake-up commands were issued to three thousand DeepSleep coffins, which was the number of people the asteroid had been originally designed to support, and at the same time it reactivated all of the primary life support systems to full-normal status.
After leaving instructions for each revived group, the computer watched as more than half of the forward command complex turned into a brightly glowing ball of something, then switched itself off again to conserve its limited power. All it could do now was wait until it could somehow arrange for the engines to be fired again, so as to provide the transfer burn to shift them to a stable orbit around their new home.
Once per 97 year orbit, the computer wakes itself and searches for someone with enough of the right genes for it to be able to speak to their mind, which all of the officers were able to do. Occasionally, there is no such mind and no champion is summoned. The computer searches for one who it can send across the asteroid to the engineering command centre with instructions on how and when they should fire.
‘And now you are here,’ said Noah as the last image faded away.