“Ah, Houston we have a problem.”
“Say again Favelli. This is Main Mission. I did not understand what you said.”
“Sorry Main Mission. Listen, I found something and I think somebody needs to come see this.”
“Favelli, this is Commander Morrow, what are you talking about?”
“I was following a new fissure in the Moon’s crust – checking to see where it went, to make sure it didn’t go back into the base – and I got a funny energy read. So, I followed it. The fissure opened up to a point you could drop down inside. So I did. And that’s when I discovered the people.
“The people?!”
“Well, I guess it is just the one person now. A woman.”
If we would have still been in orbit around Earth when Gee uttered those words to the staff at Main Mission, it would have been one of the most pivotal moments in history…the proof of life on other planets. As it was, the effect was still pretty immediate: the whole base went nuts. Professor Bergman and Commander Koenig suited up and went to join Gee at his ‘crack’ in the Moon’s surface. When Koenig called back for a medical and a technical team everyone wanted to go. Dr. Russell headed up the medical team. Bob made everyone keep busy while we waited for her to get back and we continued inventorying all the medical supplies. Luke called me on my commlock about two hours after the Commander and the Professor left; Luke was to join the technical team.
“So for heaven’s sake you two…tell us! What is out there?”
“Easy, Isabel darling – I could do with a shower and some food. I’ve been in my suit all day and I must smell terrible."
“I don’t care what you smell like – who is this ‘woman’?”
“Yes guys, lets have a few details and then we’ll let you near a shower.”
“Never mind a shower, I’m just tired and I think my head is going to explode with all the planning work we’ve done today.”
“You guys don’t get off that easy. Dr. Russell didn’t say anything when she got back! Just went into a Command Conference with the Commander and Professor Bergman and the rest of Main Mission staff. The suspense is killing us – can you imagine trying to count bandages while your mind runs wild?”
Gee and Luke did get their showers, barely. Isabel went and brought back trays of food and we all ate in silence. Waiting. Gee told his story first. He had been out checking faults in the Moon’s crust that were nearer to the base. There had been a tremendous amount of stress on the Moon in the instant that we touched the Atherian planet. This lead the Commander to order a complete check of the base and the surrounding Moon’s surface to make sure there were no stress fractures that could open up and cause more damage. We were literally going over every inch of the base and the surrounding rock with a magnifying glass looking for anything that could cause trouble down the road. It was a big job in Medical and we were almost done.
“So, there I am, following this one fissure – which I am sure I’d never seen before – I’d walked that route a couple of times before and suddenly my radiation alarm goes off. Not a big measure, but enough to get my attention. So, instead of paying attention to the fissure I start following the radiation. It seemed to becoming from a particular point inside the fissure so I decided to jump down.”
“You just decided to ‘jump’?”
“Well, it wasn’t jumping so much as ‘wedging’…the fissure really isn’t that big but the room at the bottom of the wedge is big enough to stand in and hold about five people. When you see it, you just won’t believe it. There are two coffin – like structures that hold the bodies…the people…the person, and another structure that looks like a stone desk with a rectangular stone trunk beside it. That’s not really a good description but it is the best I can do. There is a stone chair of sorts between the two people – and something that I swear looks like a machine that escaped from an old Frankenstein film – you know the ones with the circular ends that the lightening come out of…and there is one attached to each side of the chair back so that if you sat down in it, your head would be between the two lightening rods.”
“Communication?”
“That seems to be everyone’s guess, Malcolm. I didn’t really want to move around too much - didn’t want to do any damage before somebody else got there so I just stood trying to take it all in. I literally have never seen anything like it before and I suppose nobody else has either. That’s when I called Main Mission. It seemed like hours before the Commander and Professor Bergman arrived. The Commander and I just mostly stood around while the Professor moved around the space and worked on a plan to explore it with some semblance of order. You know, he is amazing to watch. The Professor, I mean. In ten minutes he had things under control and the people he needed were starting to arrive.”
“Dear, the ‘woman’ that you keep mentioning – some details.”
“Oh, sorry. Well, one of the coffin-things had a skeleton in it. Whatever life-support was being used had failed and there were mostly bone-like things in the bottom of it with colored metal pieces thrown in for good measure. But the other coffin had a definitely female occupant that was at least still alive in some sense of the word. She has what I would call a shroud over her head and entire body but she looks like a really big pixie to me. She’s probably taller than me but weighs less than you Isabel. She has incredibly fine features and I think I imagined wings peeking out from behind her back but I think that may have been stress more than anything else.”
Gee just sort-of followed Professor Bergman and Commander Koenig around the room until he was told to go back to the base. By this time, Luke had been called because Professor Bergman could feel a hum of energy coming from everything but didn’t know how to track it back to the trunk object, which seemed the likeliest source for whatever kind of power was being used. Luke’s reputation was already preceding him and Gregor, the head of Technical Section, wanted his best man there when people started poking around. The Commander had already stated that he didn’t want another accidental death like that of the one Kaldorian - no more blindly stumbling around with alien technology, this was going to be done in a scientific and careful manner. This translated to things being done ‘slowly’ while those involved were almost beside themselves with excitement.
“So Luke, what do you think?”
“Well Professor, you are right. Just about every surface seems to be vibrating slightly. There is some kind of energy coming from somewhere and possibly going somewhere. Life-support if nothing else. The radiation readings that Gee picked up on in the first place aren’t strong but they are constant…even into the structure that the ah, corpse, is in. If we could figure out what the power source is, and get some vague idea as to how it works, we may be able to convince the system to work at full strength and then maybe we’d get some answers if we could wakeup…well, wakeup whoever that is in the other structure.”
“My thoughts exactly. I’m also betting that we would be much happier out of our spacesuits so, Gregor, let’s seal off this room so we can make a clean room of it. We’ll have to set up an antechamber for getting out of our space suits – probably have to tunnel that out a bit. It might take some time but it will be worth our effort. Make things easier in the long run.”
It took three days to tunnel out an antechamber and seal the room off so we Alphans could work in some comfort. Pictures had been taken of the room and sent around the base so everyone could see what Gee had found. Speculation on what it all meant occupied everyone’s thoughts and surprisingly enough, the speculation was reasonably scientific and high-minded. Despite having said that, the occasional tabloid-like rumor got started and I just rolled my eyes and kept on walking. When I went for my shift on the fourth day, I got a surprise.
“Malcolm?”
“Yes, Bob?”
“Dr. Russell wants to keep her focus on the female found in the room. She’s put me in charge of autopsying the other body when we find a way to access it. And I think that you should do it.”
“Me?”
“Sure, you’ve got a better background for this kind of thing. It will stretch your mind a little. Exo-biology forensics. Think of the paper that you could write if we were back on Earth.”
I took the job on with only a minor amount of trepidation and went out to the site for the first time the next day. Trying to concentrate on just one aspect of the room is really tricky at first because the whole thing just sort of overwhelms you. I mean, here were beings who had landed here on the Moon who knows when to do who knows what. I mean the possibilities are almost endless. Exploration or conquest? Would we ever know? I was just settling down to get a closer look at the body when I heard a shout of joy from Luke. He had opened the trunk object.
“Luke, what have you got?”
“Commander, the Professor was right. It is the main power source. There are wires all over the place – almost completely covering a ball-like structure. The wires are all different colors. They don’t seem to go anywhere but there sure are a mess of them!”
“Luke?”
“Yes,
Malcolm?”
“What color are the wires?”
Between Luke and I, we matched all the colors of the metal pieces in the coffin to wires in the trunk. There had to be a one-to-one correlation between the energy the wires accessed and the workings of the same colored metal pieces. It was a start. And so the entire technical team started looking for colored bits of anything in the room. I started with the coffin itself and came across a purple-type seam around the top of the coffin. Luke found the mate. The conversations following this find went on for what seemed like hours as more and more colored areas were found. Commander Koenig wanted to see if cutting the wire would disrupt the power flow and maybe open the coffin. Luke and Professor Bergman weren’t too sure but we had to start somewhere. Luke eventually made the cut – all the while hoping it wouldn’t blow us all up.
There was no explosion, just a gentle sigh as the coffin casing folded itself into the base of the dais. The corpse was exposed to our environment and nothing happened.
I worked on-site doing the autopsy on the corpse. This alien seemed to be generally taller than your average man but with way less weight than average. This, and what I calculated for bone density, suggested a lighter gravity than what we were used to on Earth and the Moon. The bone structure also suggested the skeleton was male. No wings, despite what Gee may have seen. A fairly large cranium with spaces for what we would think of as eyes and a nose. A very small space for what we thought of as a mouth. The skeleton had very long limbs – arms and hands maybe one and a half times as long as our own. The colored metal seemed to have been placed along the bones of the skeleton, maybe as an enhancement of some sort. They definitely weren’t natural.
What did this all mean? Well, the number one rule in exo-biology is: You are going to think in human terms, so just be aware of that when you draw a conclusion because what you are looking at isn’t human.
I wrote up my report and gave it to Bob. He passed it onto Dr. Russell and we sat around Medical making ‘informed’ guesses about the female alien. Meanwhile, Luke was making another discovery and he told us about it that evening.
“Finding out about the whole wire thing was great but all we knew how to do was disrupt the power, not to turn it up. So, I got to thinking about the desk object and figured that it had to be part of the power control. I found a green-like wire running in roughly a square just set off from the center of the desk. I started running my finger around it and staring at the stone surface. I think I was drifting and suddenly the area inside the stone lid slid back and I was looking at what seemed to me to be a screen – like a computer screen complete with files and folders and the whole shooting match! The whole desk seemed to vibrate that much more and for the first time we could actually really hear the energy field working. It was amazing!
“You’re kidding! You blanked out and the thing just came to life by itself?”
“No, I think that the ‘blanking out’ triggered the screen to appear.”
“Excuse me?”
“Isabel, I think Luke might be onto something. The human brain and body does radiate a certain kind and amount of energy. Maybe the desktop needed his body’s energy to trigger everything. Do you know what that means?”
“What?”
“That the trigger mechanism was keyed to human physiology.”
“So, Malcolm, are you saying we were suppose to find the room and get the energy flowing again. Wake up the aliens?”
“That would be my guess, Gee.”
We took our suspicions to Professor Bergman and he announced that he had come to the same conclusion. The room was set up to be human friendly and it was now our job to make the most of the situation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Dr. Russell came into Medical the next day, she went into her office and closed the door and stared at her computer screen for about three hours. She then got up and went out of the office and Medical without a word. Bob and I looked at each other and then went back to our work.
Two days later I was called to the site again. I was to monitor some equipment while Dr. Russell did an experiment. It seems that she had convinced Commander Koenig that someone needed to sit in the stone chair; that the chair could be a trigger for awaking the female alien. I could tell the Commander wasn’t really too keen on the idea but Professor Bergman was delighted. I was to monitor a brain wave machine that identified different patterns of wakefulness. Dr. Russell’s theory was that Luke’s ‘spacing out’ produced a certain brain wave pattern, and it was the pattern that was acting as the trigger. Bob put Dr. Russell into a light hypnotic trance and we all sat back and waited. The doctor was to stay in the trance for five minutes if there were no side-effects from the experiment.
As the Doctor stayed in trance, the shroud seemed to glow brighter. The ‘lightening rods’ began to glow slightly too. Dr. Russell seemed to be in no discomfort, so we waited.
As Bob pulled the doctor out of the trance the glow of the shroud and ‘lightening rods’ faded. She smiled up at the Commander.
“Helena, are you okay?”
“John, it was amazing. I was in contact with the female alien. Not her conscious mind, but her unconscious mind. She seems to be in a deep sleep, almost a stasis, but her mind is free to…wander… the universe it seems. We need to figure out how to improve power to her life support…to bring her to consciousness.”
“Helena, I don’t know if we can do that. We still don’t really know much about this room or why it is here or how things work.”
“John, this is important. We need to try.”
And so we went into ‘round-the-clock’ mode. Technicians went over the entire room looking for more colored lines and Sandra Benes sat at the ‘computer screen’ trying to enter the files that had appeared on the screen. Meanwhile Kano and Luke tried to figure out how the computer was connected to the power source and how we might be able to connect it to Alpha’s computer thinking that if the computers talked to one another we might get further ahead.
Luke was put in charge of color-coding all the wires that existed and mapping them to spaces in the room. It was tedious, but I volunteered to help just to keep him company. At the start Luke and I had trouble communicating because we didn’t have enough words for all the colors we kept finding and we ended up running back and forth between the found color and the trunk wires to make sure we had the right wire in the trunk connected to the right color-line in the room. It was a bit of a nightmare I must admit and I came home with a major headache the first day. The second day, while Professor Bergman was fussing around the room, I came across a color line by the door that had been broken up by either a stress fracture or from someone constructing the clean room.
“So, now we have to work backwards. Fix the broken color-line and maybe the energy from the unbroken wire can do its work. What do you think Malcolm?”
“Well, let’s go to Occam’s Razor – the simplest solution wins – why don’t we just rub the line like Luke did. It worked for him so maybe it will work for us?”
“Excellent. Luke come over here…I think we are going to need an extra pair of hands and another mind.”
We had hit upon a solution and it worked. A voice we had never heard before, one that was musical and light, spoke in our heads.
“Greetings beings of Earth. We have come from a distance place to tell you we exist and extend an invitation for you to experience our lives. Our…emissaries will guide you. Please join us in our lives.”
The voice faded away and we just stared at each other. No one knowing what to say. We stayed that way till Sandra’s computer started making funny noises and we all turned to look her way. The seemingly dead screen started opening files at random and the information was washing across the screen at high speeds. Sandra started touching the color-lines on the top of the desk to see if she could get the machine to slow down but the speed just got faster and faster till the screen went dark. Amazingly, the shroud on the female alien seemed to glow brighter and all the color-lines in the room stood out just that much brighter. It was a sign, but we didn’t know of what.
A Command Conference was called for the next day. It lasted seven hours and the faces of the Main Mission staff on the way out of the meeting were somber.
The next day Dr. Russell sat in the chair once more. I was monitoring her brain wave patterns again. Bob put her into an even deeper trance than before. Against the Commander’s wishes, Dr. Russell was allowed ten minutes this time. We held our collective breath during those ten long minutes and then Doctor Russell was with us again.
“John…Victor…she was actually able to communicate with me directly. The music of her voice…the feeling of warmth when we touched.”
“Touched?”
“It is impossible to describe. But we are running out of time.”
“Time?”
“Yes, Victor. Time. We took too long to find them. Their power supply is either running out or has been damaged by the Moon being moved out of Earth’s orbit…or by all that we have encountered…I’m not sure. And she will be only be able to communicate with us for a short while longer…maybe a week of our time – she isn’t too sure about how we measure time. She isn’t too sure how long she has been here, but she wants to share herself with us. It is what she has always wanted.”
“We must not waste this opportunity John. Think about what we can learn!”
“Helena, are you sure there are no side effects.”
“As sure as I can be.”
“Can we bring her out of her stasis? Into our world?”
“No, I don’t think so. She doesn’t project that as an option. But I can ask.”
“Does that mean you want to go back to communicating with her, Doctor?”
“Very much John. And her name seems to be ‘La’ – or at least that is how it translates to words – there is also musical component that I am not even going to try.”
Victor insisted that every Alphan who was interested would get a chance to ‘communicate’ with La. And nobody turned the experience down. Dr. Russell, Bob and I took turns hypnotizing people for thirty-minute sessions. Everyone left with a look of deep contemplation on his or her face and the entire base was somewhat subdued in the week following the start of the visits with La. The four of us talked about our experiences with La, but somehow you didn’t want to share too much for that seemed to diminish the experience. And there was much about the experience that was impossible to communicate verbally. The very musical nature of the communication added a level of awareness that was just about impossible to duplicate. Some of the more musical Alphans tried, but it never really seemed to work. There were snatches of melody that Isabel tried recreating on the piano, but it paled next to the memories. There were feelings and colours that washed over your experience giving nuance to the ideas; ideas that could never be expressed.
Victor insisted that we write down and submit to him everything that we could remember. He compiled a database of the information and looked for patterns, but none seemed to appear.
We were lucky and La’s personal strength and her unknown power source lasted for ten days. Victor and Helena’s teams spent the last days focused on trying to renew or increase the power source available to La…trying to get her to full consciousness.
“Gee, what are you doing down here?”
“Isabel made me bring you some food, Luke. She thinks you are wasting away down here. And she may be right. Malcolm, a bite to eat?”
“Thanks.”
“Any luck?”
“None what so ever. I think we are just going to watch her slip away. The shroud has something to do with the life support but when we ask about it – La doesn’t answer.”
“Gentlemen, I suspect that she doesn’t know herself. If she were our version of a diplomat, rather than an astronaut, she wouldn’t know the technical details of the room – only the details of the people she was to be meeting. I mean she has been communicating with people non-stop for almost a week and she seems to be okay with that. So, maybe that is her interest, the people, not the physics.”
“So Luke, what’s next?”
“I have an idea but it isn’t going to do us much good.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have been carefully moving the wires about and I think that the thing underneath all the wires in that trunk is a giant crystal. And that the ‘colored wires’ transmit the crystal’s energies to the colored lines – which may have crystal in them too. And the crystal is just running out of power… remember that TV show where the ship ran on crystals?”
“Uh, huh.”
“Well, what I think we have here is dying dilithium crystals.”
“Isn’t there some way to repower the crystal? I mean there should be, right?”
“Yes, there should be but where do we start? Nuclear explosion? Lightening? Who knows? The Professor has been working on it, saying all sorts of upbeat things, but the message is pretty clear. We are out of time.”
It was a ‘first contact’ mission gone wrong. No one’s fault, just circumstances. The whole conversation should have depressed the living daylights out of me but there was still a glow from communicating with La that refused the depression.
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Two days later, in the presence of Professor Bergman and Dr. Russell, the shroud disappeared and the crystal energy in the room ceased to flow. The lights we had set up in the clean room were the only source of power.
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Except for La’s container, all of the room’s equipment went to Professor Bergman’s labs. I imagine that everyone is quite busy going over everything – trying to figure out how things work now that they aren’t afraid of hurting La.
It was decided that La would stay in the room. She seemed to belong there and so there she would stay. There was a funeral service and that seemed to help, but the base was still a very subdued place.
About a week after La’s death there seemed to be a sudden outbreak of ‘longing for home’. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a crippling kind of longing but more of a wanting to “renew ties” with what made us individuals and part of the whole of humanity at the same time. What it meant to be someone from Earth. The sense of community on the base had never been so high and everyone seemed to have a new idea about how to make the old base seem more like “home”.
“What’s wrong darling?”
“This is just the last straw!”
“What?”
“Some idiot from Security has decided that he really just needs to start brewing beer. That it would be good to ‘have a cold one again’. What am I? A plant dispenser? Just push a button and out comes your favorite plant to do with as you see fit?”
“Isabel…”
“Oh, I guess I can rearrange the planting schedule for the umpteenth time and get some hops growing. But I’m not nursemaiding this beer idea. Maybe I can pawn this whole idea off on Shermeen Williams…she’s the only person with less seniority than me in this organization.”
January, 2004