John Moralee - Future Imperfect - A Collection of Science Fiction Stories

Alice shrugged. “It depends on the complexity of the code. A few hours. A few days. Maybe longer. It depends on what’s in the data.”

I was used to Alice having all of the answers. “So…you don’t know?”

“No. I don’t have a clue. This is a new thing for me too. I’ve always dreamt of meeting an alien—but I never really believed it could happen. The sat scans show nothing on the surface, so it must be buried under a layer of frozen methane and nitrogen.”

“I don’t want to waste any time,” I said. “For all we know, it’s a distress signal. An alien SOS. I’m leaving with my team as soon as the cat is fuelled and ready to go.”

“Fine—but I’m coming with you. You’re not encountering a potentially dangerous alien without me backing you up.”

I laughed. “Who do you think you are – some action hero in a horror film?”

“I don’t watch those sorts of films,” she said.

“You should. They’re really entertaining.”

Alice blinked rapidly in that odd way people do when they download a file directly into their neural implants. She was watching something in fast-time—fifty times normal speed. It wasn’t the best way of viewing a movie—but it was the most practical. She had watched a dozen films by the time I had finished my coffee. Her face was pale. “Oh. I wish I hadn’t seen those movies now. Now I’m really worried something horrible will happen. I hate horror movies. I’m not watching any more.”

The command module was a geodesic dome attached by a tunnel to what had once been our landing ship before it had transformed into a ground base. The cat— cat erpillar vehicle—sat in a bay inside a large hangar. It looked like a big black centipede with tracks on its underside. My team loaded equipment into the cat—high and low tech—making sure we had enough to deal with whatever was sending the signal. By the time I was inside the cab, my drone had arrived at the origin point. It hovered over the area, relaying images.

I studied its data feed. The drone was twenty metres over the surface, directly over the signal’s origin. Through its sensors, I could see the yellow surface of Eris, the second biggest dwarf planet in the solar system. The yellow was frozen methane. The sensors picked up something unusual—oxygen, nitrogen and a trace of water vapour, like the breathable atmosphere back on Earth. I made the drone descend slowly—scanning for the source. There were micro-cracks in the methane layer. The oxygen was leaking through the cracks. The area was slightly warmer than the frigid ground around it. A couple of degrees hotter. Something was venting gas.

“There’s definitely something down there and it’s leaking warm air.”

Alice nodded. She took her seat in the cabin, securing herself into her seat. “Breathable air? Doesn’t that seem amazingly coincidental?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m nervous.”

“Me, too.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

I drove the cat out of the base onto the dwarf planet’s surface of nitrogen ice. Eris was a little smaller than Pluto—but not by much. A long time ago, many astronomers had wanted to call it the tenth planet—but it had been classified a dwarf planet at the same time Pluto lost its planetary status. To me, living on it, I thought Eris was easily large enough to be considered a real planet. It wasn’t just an empty rock in space—not any more. Over a thousand humans and posthumans lived on it, mining, researching and building homes for future generations of space explorers. Our machines were all over the planet, drilling and digging, changing Eris into somewhere bio-engineered life could thrive.

My new home had a thin atmosphere and its own moon, called Dysnomia, visible in the sky over the base. A ring of communication satellites and space stations glittered around the moon like a halo, sending messages back and forth from the other worlds humans had colonised in the Great Expansion. Thousands of trans-Neptunian objects were bases and waystations, like Sedna, Makemake, and Orcus. Everything we were doing was being watched by billions of members of the Sol System Alliance. It was reassuring to know we were not alone as we travelled over the rocky ground to our destination. The cat crawled over the frozen nitrogen and methane coating our world, while we all prepared for the science mission.

After an hour, we stopped at a safe distance from the source. Alice and I dressed in our pressure suits and entered the airlock. When we stepped outside, our pressure suits shielded our bodies against the extreme cold and rarefied atmosphere. Through my visor, I saw the ice melting under my boots until they had cooled to the external temperature—minus 240 Celsius. I issued commands to a smaller vehicle, nicknamed a mouse, which detached from the cat and began moving towards the signal source. We stayed at the cat until the mouse had stopped five metres from the source and released a series of probes into the ground. The probes scanned the area under the surface using radar and sonic vibrations. They built up a detailed 3D map of what lay beneath the ice.

A dense object was ten metres down, shaped like a 750-metre-long arrowhead. The pointed end was facing downwards, like the arrowhead had been fired into Eris by a giant bow. The blunt end was close to the surface and hot in the middle where it was releasing hot air into the ground. A trace of that air was escaping through the cracked ice. A more detailed scan showed what looked like a hatch that appeared to be slightly open and leaking the hot air through the rock and ice.

“The next signal is due in two minutes,” Alice reminded me.

All of the probes were ready for it. The pulse sent the same data out as the last time—but this time we could isolate its exact origin under the ground. The hatch. It was coming from the hatch.

“Anyone cracked the message?” I said.

“Not yet.”

“Okay. We need to erect a dome around this thing so we can work here.”

The matter extruder on the cat looked like a giant silver spider. It was loaded with the designs for building a dome, then went to work, weaving the semi-transparent structure in under an hour. A breathable atmosphere was pumped in and the temperature raised, turning the nitrogen ice into a gas, that was vented outward, and exposing the solid rocky surface of Eris. Mechanised diggers removed the rock until the alien object was fully revealed. The surface was black and pitted by micro-meteorites. Scans proved the object had been buried for billions of years.

My drones investigated the hatch, checking for toxic chemicals and other dangers before I entered the dome through an airlock. I approached the hatch and opened it. There was a short tunnel leading to another inner hatch made of white stone. The tunnel’s walls looked like white marble with ridges like the handholds on a climbing wall. I climbed down to the second hatch. There were markings on the surface. An alien language? I recorded images and sent them to Alice.

“What do these markings mean?”

Alice answered from the cat. “We’re running it through language analysis. Got it. Translating now. It’s an instruction. Close outer hatch before opening inner hatch. ”

“That’s it? I was hoping for something more profound.”

“Are you going to do it? Close the hatch?”

I sighed. “I suppose I will have to.”

“Be careful,” Alice said.

In the low gravity it was easy climbing up the tunnel to the outer hatch. I pulled it shut and heard an ominous metallic clang. The noise made me nervous. I had locked myself into the alien ship voluntarily . What if I could not re-open the exit?

As soon as the hatch closed, the walls started to glow and ripple with a rainbow of shifting patterns. “Uh, something is happening. The walls are changing. Alice, are you seeing this?”