Christian Oesterling: Blank Space: Into the Depths of the Universe

‘I shall try, one moment please.’ Leon had moved around the table to be on the side nearest to the floating mystery, adrift in the dark. He stood on a chair nearby to be above the hologram, looking down on it with an eagle-eye view.

‘What are you doing?’ Holden asked.

‘Just getting a different perspective on things. Sometimes it helps to go at things at a different angle to help creative juices to flow.’

‘What creativity do you need?’ Yuki enquired.

‘I need to decide what to do,’ Leon said simply.

‘I am unable to retrieve any data on any object in that space,’ Nightingale returned. Prissy frowned.

‘You can’t? What do you mean?’

‘My systems cannot detect any object in that quadrant.’ Prissy frowned, she was sure that she had read out the coordinates correctly.

‘It’s vanished,’ Holden said. The other six, who had turned their attention to Prissy and Leon in their various exchanges, looked back at the hologram. Sure enough, the item of interest was no longer there, and the only object still registered on the screen was the lonely Nightingale, drifting ever onwards in a barren emptiness of the universe.

‘Nightingale, rewind the recordings of the hologram for me,’ Oliver asked.

‘Certainly, Oliver, rewinding now.’ There was no discernible difference in what they were seeing, and sure enough, no blip reappeared.

‘Nightingale, you are rewinding this aren’t you?’ Yuki asked.

‘Yes Yuki, the image being seen is the image you saw one and a half minutes ago.’

‘Then we should be seeing it by now,’ Yuki said.

‘But we aren’t,’ Duma objected.

‘Play it forward from the time that Duma and Yuki entered the room please Nightingale,’ Leon commanded. The hologram shuddered slightly, as if there was interference with it, and then stopped. To their disbelief, only the Nightingale was shown upon the projection before them.

‘Are you sure you are showing what we saw when we entered the room Nightingale?’ Jenny questioned.

‘Yes Jenny, this is the image that you saw.’

‘But there is no object there.’

‘You are correct.’ Jenny frowned, her eyebrows knitting together in frustration. She thought that the ship was winding her up and then reminded herself that it had no consciousness, and therefore was incapable of such an act. Nobody spoke once more for a few seconds.

‘There’s got to be a glitch somewhere in the projection screen. Maybe it was a bug in the system,’ Holden suggested.

‘Nightingale is a brand new ship, state of the art. Suggesting that there’s a bug in the system that is virtually inconceivable,’ Yuki retorted.

‘Well, obviously something is out there. Apparently we just argued over the location of an object that never existed,’ Holden fired back. Leon looked around the room for inspiration. There was something not right about this, something out of the ordinary. He was sure that it was there, and so were the others. If it was a hallucination, it was a mass hallucination and a bizarre one at that. A glitch was an unlikely prospect, but not inconceivable. It had happened before, just think of that star liner years before, The Futan, that had hyper-launch problems coming out from past Karbinous Star, and bubbled away into nothingness. That had only been up and running three weeks, and still, nobody knew what had actually happened with its systems. There had to be some way to recall the information, other than what the hologram showed.

Suddenly Leon’s eyes saw a small light in the corner, and he had an idea.

‘Oliver, this place had cameras running, doesn’t it?’ Oliver looked around at him.

‘Yeah, sure. The whole place has cameras so someone if they wanted to, could see what everyone on the ship was doing at the same time.’

‘Which means,’ Prissy continued, ‘that if it actually was there, it should have been picked up by a camera in the room somewhere.’

‘All the cameras feed their links back to the observation room just down the hall,’ Duma pointed out. ‘Whole room with banks and banks of monitors. The ones in here and the captain’s room alternate randomly to make sure that nobody is caught trying to fuck up the ship in the case of mutiny or something.’ He looked down, slightly flushed, and caught Yuki’s eye out of the corner of his. She blinked and looked in another direction.

‘In which case, let’s get down there. Oliver, stay here and plot a course in the general direction of where that thing was, just in case there was something there,’ Leon ordered.

‘I’ll do that Captain, no problem.’ Oliver stepped over to his seat and began plugging away at the various screens.

‘Nightingale, take us out to V54, 88B, 490. Up the cruise speed by 5%.’

‘Yes Oliver, certainly.’ That soothing voice that once stilled Leon’s heart seemed to speed it up somewhat, by only a few beats, but enough to notice. He walked out of the cockpit without saying any more, and walked down the bridge, with the other five following him.

The observation room itself was not more than a large cupboard, barely big enough to fit all of them in there. All four walls, the ceiling, and floor, even the back of the door, were filled with screens. Leon looked around for some way of controlling them.

‘Nightingale, can you show us the footage of when Duma and Yuki walked into the cockpit under fifteen minutes ago?’ Leon was baffled by all of the images before him, this was more Oliver’s domain than his, he had only been in here once before, just to check where and what it was. He trusted his crew enough not to have someone in constant watch of the ship, although Prissy and Holden had come in here during their rounds whilst the others had slept.

‘I’m afraid not Leon.’

‘Why not Nightingale?’ Prissy asked.

‘This room displays only live feeds. To access past camera footage, you will need to go into the main database and extract it manually.’ Leon cursed.

‘The main database takes ages to get to. Damn it,’ Leon cursed.

‘Well we need to get there anyway, system maintenance comes up in a day or so,’ Duma pointed out.

‘That’s a good point actually Leon,’ Yuki said. Leon leaned against a wall of screens, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. This thing was stressful and unsettling at the same time; there was an irregularity about it that could not be ignored. Had something been noted and stayed there, a course been charted, a floating, dilapidated fortress of some ancient warrior race been found, declared empty, and they moved on, it would not have caused nearly as much confusion as what was happening now.

‘Ok. Here’s the plan,’ he began, pausing to consider just what needed to be done for a second longer.

‘Duma, hold station here and keep watch over everything from here, just in case something happens. Don’t know what, but we’ve just seen something which the ship is implying didn’t happen, we’ve no idea what could be next.’ Duma nodded his acceptance of the position.

‘Holden, go prepare some sort of test to check each of us individually, including yourself, to make sure there is no conceivable way we experienced some freak hallucination. I don’t care what abstract theory you have to test to disprove it, like phantom particles in the bloodstream or what, and in fact, pair up with Yuki on it. Both of you carry out tests to make sure that we’re not all delusional. I don’t know what just happened, but I would rather it turn out to be a massive warship with the ability to fuck with parts of the ship than us tripping out.’

‘We’ll get on it right away,’ Yuki said, and Holden acknowledged the same.

‘Jenny, go prepare a good amount of weaponry and hand out one handgun to everyone, full and primed. If that thing was intelligent and it just did something to us, it isn’t going to be friendly if it’s real and we meet it.’ Jenny smiled; an excuse to play guns again was one of her favorite things in the world.