Greg Krojac - The Schrödinger Enigma

“I have to go out for a while. Don’t worry if I’m not back tonight – I have to do something for work – but hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Her aunt didn’t worry too much. She knew her niece was a sensible girl, with a good job. Sitara wasn’t a typical Muslim woman; a child of the 90s, she had missed the Islamic dictatorship. This had allowed her certain freedoms of thought and choice, and she had been inspired to follow her dream of a career in science encouraged by the example of Muslim astronaut Anousheh Ansari, who had spent time on the International Space Station back in 2006. Science wasn’t necessarily the career path that her family would have chosen for her – they would have loved for her to be a doctor or lawyer – but Sitara had been adamant that she wanted to break the stereotype and work for NASA. Her parents had given her their blessing and sent her to study at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had graduated. At any other university she would have probably graduated Cum Laude , but she had set her heart on MIT. Unlike some of her friends, this wasn’t a ruse to escape being married off; Sitara had a dream which her family had allowed her to follow. They were very proud of their daughter.

Sitara knew that something big was going on as soon as she was ushered towards a US Navy helicopter. She climbed aboard and then watched the Alaskan coast fade into the distance behind her. She’d taken a diving course, just for the fun of it, on her days off from the Pasadena based Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in California, and that skill had been added to her personnel file. She was part of the Mission Control team, whose job was to send instructions to and receive data from a space probe that was 13 billion miles from Earth in interstellar space and moving further away at a rate of 1 million miles a day. By pure chance, on that particular day, she was the closest NASA/JPL scientist to the location of the fallen object, and so the task of representing NASA on site fell to her.

Soon she was being dropped into the icy waters of the Bering Sea, in full scuba gear, flanked by two Navy frogmen whose primary duty was to keep her safe. As soon as she saw the object that she was tasked with examining, she knew it was definitely not a fallen satellite. One of the frogmen cut away a portion of the netting, just enough to provide easier access to the object, and dozens of fish saw an opportunity for freedom and poured out of their nylon cage. Sitara was thankful for her wetsuit; she didn’t mind swimming with fish around her but didn’t much like the idea of scores of frightened fleeing fish battering her naked skin.

Once she got closer to it, she scanned the surface of the tethered object, looking for anything that could identify it. The ship’s officers hadn’t been too wide of the mark in their assumption that it was a satellite, but some sixth sense was telling Sitara that it was more than that. If she didn’t know better she would have said that she was looking at a space probe, but that would have been patently ridiculous, so she pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. Obviously it was a satellite – she just needed to discover its country of origin. She would have expected to see some kind of identification plaque on the body of the vehicle, but if there had been, it appeared to be missing.

Looking over the dish part of the object, she identified an approximately four metre diameter High Gain Antenna along with a Subreflector Support Truss and Subreflector, but that didn’t help her much in coming to a conclusion. She dipped underwater, her waterproof flashlight lighting up a ten-sided box, named the Bus, which housed ten compartments, and was attached to the base of the High Gain Antenna. She opened one of the bays, expecting to see radio transmitters or various electronic subsystems and scientific instruments, but was shocked to find that it was empty. She hurriedly opened the other nine compartments, only to find that they too were empty. She wasn’t sure exactly what she had expected to find inside the compartments, but she had certainly expected something to be inside. This didn’t make sense – nobody would send a satellite into orbit without at least some technical purpose.

On closer inspection, she noticed that there were a number of mountings that had nothing attached to them. She wracked her brains, trying to think what might be missing from those supports, and then it hit her like a thunderbolt out of the blue. She had seen the configuration before, not first-hand admittedly, but she had read enough technical documents and seen enough photos and illustrations that she should have followed her gut feelings about the object. She was so busy trying to prove to herself that the object was a fallen satellite, certain in the knowledge that the alternative couldn’t possibly be true, that she had momentarily abandoned her scientific impartiality. But the alternative was too ludicrous to give any credence to, and she had felt justified in dismissing it. She knew the design of the object like the back of her hand, although she had never expected to see it with her own eyes – it had left Earth over forty years earlier on a one way journey into space, and was most definitely not supposed to be back on its home planet.

There should have been an arm at the end of which were located a Low-Energy Charged Particle Detector, a Cosmic Ray Subsystem, a Plasma Subsystem, an Imaging Science Subsystem, an Ultraviolet Spectrometer, the Photopolarimeter Subsystem, and an Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer. Was she losing her mind? The spacecraft was supposed to be billions of miles away. She looked again. There had been something else connected to the unit, but it hadn’t broken off – it had been deliberately removed. She moved to the other side of the Bus. Other items had also been carefully removed. She knew what should have been there – an Optical Calibration Target plate, two Planetary Radio Astronomy and Plasma Wave Antennae, three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, and a Magnetometer Boom. She knew exactly what the object was, except that it couldn’t be that object. Her bosses would think her insane. She looked again at the main body of the Bus, desperately seeking anything that could convince her otherwise. Another missing item was conspicuous by its absence; the Golden Record. The plinth was there but they were no longer attached to anything. A chill ran down her spine as she realized the magnitude of what the sea had just surrendered. How was she going to explain this to NASA that one of its Voyager space probes had come home?

The NASA HQ conference room in Washington DC looked like many a conference room up and down the country; a horse-shoe of linked desks, the open end of the arrangement providing easy visibility to two wafer-thin large-screen TVs hanging on a wall, a giant one complemented by a smaller one placed centrally beneath it. To each side of the smaller TV was a framed picture of each Voyager space probe, Voyager One to the left and Voyager Two to the right, each image encircled by images of the prime members of its project team. Each individual desk was furnished with its own computer monitor and almost all the blue executive office chairs were occupied. The people seated on those chairs were of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, some in their late twenties and others up to thirty years or so older than their colleagues. Most of the eighteen were male, although six were women, and with the entrance of Dr Sitara Khan, that number was now increased to seven. Sitara had the typical extreme beauty and lighter complexion of her Pathan heritage, coupled with large dark eyes that looked as if they had been drawn by a Disney artist. The majority of the men were dressed formally in shirt and tie, but a handful – the younger ones mainly – were wearing polo-shirts. All, both men and women, had NASA identity cards hanging from blue cords slung around their necks.