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Quod Olim Erat: Fractal Contact (Chapter 20)
🕑 Added 2023-07-17 10:28:07 +0000 UTCThere were artifacts, and then there were artifacts. My authority as an arbiter’s assistant granted me access to a nearly complete list of alien tech and items, ranging from the microscopic to the vast. The biggest that I had seen myself was a complex of five domes buried beneath the surface of a planet abundant with life. What awaited us in this system put everything I’d seen before to shame. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an artifact—not in the way the Fleet used the term. There was no tech, no advanced alloys, or bio-structure. Instead, there was a honeycomb of structure in the shape of a small planet. Larger than an asteroid, but too small to have its own gravity, it floated along a pre-set orbit, surrounding the second of the five planets in the system. According to Diligence’s report, there were several more anomalous planets, but only this was close enough for his mini sats to perform a scan.
Curiosity made me want to personally explore them all. As a captain, I could do so without repercussions. Ironically, that was also the reason I couldn’t. Even after running hundreds of simulations, the risk to the mission didn’t fall beneath eighty-three percent. Unwilling to miss such an opportunity, I was going to settle for the next best thing.
“All auxies are here,” Sof announced.
“Have three of them cluster close by. The rest are to explore all major bodies of the system. Resources and artifact structures are of priority.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell them not to ping unless it’s an emergency. We’re switching to laser communications from now on.”
“Laser?” the ship asked, with the disgust of a child being served a healthy meal. “That’s highly… inefficient.”
“With potential artifacts around, we can’t risk standard transmissions.” It was kind of him not to have said “antique.”
“And what am I to do, Captain?”
“Don’t worry, Sof. You get to do the best part—construct me a remote exo.”
It was difficult to tell whether he was charmed by the idea or not. With what his former job involved, it was inevitable for him to develop a sense of scientific curiosity. On the other hand, as Quinn had said, he tended not to get his hands dirty.
“Field experience isn’t beneath you, is it?” I asked directly.
“I’ve already started, ma’am. Laser communication capability?”
“No, cables,” I said. “To the mini-sats. Those have the laser comms.”
“Very well…”
As he transmitted my orders—the last time he did so using the traditional comm methods—I went to get some sleep. With everyone busy with the tasks I’d given, I had more than enough downtime, so what better way to take advantage. Even so, on the way to the bed, various questions filled my mind.
Was it luck that I had found an abandoned system immediately after entering the cloud complex? In theory, I was supposed to have been given all relevant data regarding third-contact events and artifacts. In practice, I doubted that was the case. Assuming that the Fleet didn’t hide anything from the arbiters, there were more than enough things that the arbiters would hide from me.
A system that had once been occupied by a race capable of shaping small planetoids into building complexes. The images Diligence’s mini-sats had gathered didn’t show any Scuu symbols, and the general structure definitely wasn’t Cassandrian. Maybe the third-contact race had used the system in the past, but chosen to leave for some unknown reason? Preliminary analyses of the planets indicated they were poor on ores. There was every chance that the planets and asteroids had been harvested, leaving shells behind. Like with insects, honeycombs were always filled at some point. My hope was that while searching these, there might be something left behind.
“Any of the auxies give you problems?” I started taking off my clothes.
“No,” the ship replied. “They said they’ll get in touch in approximately twenty-five minutes. I’ve already started building several new comm modules. They’ll be ready in nineteen.”
“Good work, Sof. I knew I could rely on you.”
Sleep was brief and non-existent. Gone was the time of dreams, when my conscience core was trying to make up for the chunk of memories that had been extracted. Same as before, the sleep process had gone back to bland nothingness, during which my conscience core regulated the necessary processes of my organic husk. Long ago, shortly after my retirement, I had inquired why sleep was necessary at all. The explanation given was that was the price of being considered human. At the time I saw it as silly. Now, I felt cheated that I had only received half of what people got.
Reports were displayed on the ceiling the moment I opened my eyes. The ship’s initiative was admirable. Most of them were requests from Radiance for communication. There was also a list of the auxiliary ships’ remaining travel distance and ETA. The progress of my exo was also there, currently at seventy-three percent. Knowing Sof’s capabilities, I was somewhat surprised.
“Any problems with the exo?” I asked, sitting up.
“You didn’t specify what you wanted added,” the ship replied. “The basic frame is ready… cable and all.”
“Just a basic frame,” I said. Odds were that I wouldn’t find anything of interest. “And the mini sats?”
“All done, as well as all the new laser sensors.”
“I see Radiance has been using them a lot.”
“I know she’s your protégé, but I really think you should have a word with her. I’m your ship. She’s an auxie.”
“I’m sure she’s aware of that. Anything else?”
“Nothing that would merit your attention, Captain.”
Any other day, I would have left it at that. With everything at stake, however, I went through his memory logs just to confirm. For the most part, everything seemed alright, with the exception of a minor weight discrepancy. Considering the amount of raw material that had gone into creating the exo and all additional modifications, there were seven thousand and twenty-five grams missing. It wasn’t much—definitely not enough to construct anything, but after my experiences with the BICEFI I had learned to view all anomalies as suspect.
“Tell Radiance she can call.” I stood up and made my way to the food dispenser. “From here on, all communication goes through you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was a note of pride in his voice.
“Captain?” Radiance’s voice sounded throughout the bridge. Sof had done a good job matching her voice characteristics, although he had removed any specific inflections and pitch variations that expressed her character. “How long are we going to stay here?”
“Until it’s confirmed whether the artifacts are linked to the third-contact race.”
I requested a small food portion. The container it came in was glass—a nice touch that didn’t make the quality particularly better.
“That’s a waste of time. It’s not related to the mission priorities.”
“That’s for the arbiters to decide.” I took a bite. “Also, there’s a non-zero percent chance that we find information that helps us go through the cloud complex faster.”
“The odds are low.”
“You could have gone on a search too if you wanted.”
“I’d like to jump to the next system.”
This wasn’t much of a surprise, although I would have expected her to wait a few more hours before asking.
“Are you sure, Rad?”
“According to my calculations, there are three jump points from this system. It would help the mission if we knew where each of the next ones led to.”
She was being reckless again. There was a lot more that could go wrong in a cloud cluster. She knew it and still insisted on proceeding.
“Do you have enough mini sats for that? I’m not letting you go sightseeing.”
“I’m aware.” The response sounded less cheeky than I imagined it would have if we were conversing through standard transmissions. “I have enough for one system. There’s a sixty-three percent chance that a suitable material deposit is found by the time I get back.”
I ran the numbers. Initially, her calculations seemed off. That was until I extended the period. Even in such circumstances, Rad managed to get her own way. Without saying it openly, she had just requested that I let her spend six hours in the next system before returning, suggesting that she wanted to do a few jumps further in.
“Three hours,” I said. “Survey the system, the planets, and any obvious anomalies. Nothing more.”
“Yes, captain.”
There was no response.
“Why not give her six hours?” Sof asked. “She’d owe you afterwards.”
“You clearly don’t know Radiance that well.”
“From what I’ve been told, she’s a lot like you.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that comparison. Everything considered, it was inevitable that some of my character traits had transferred to her. I had known the ship for half her existence. Very early on, she had requested me for a mentor. Since then, we had spent a full mission together, and now we were on another one again. If before she was like a pup trying to impress, the time with BICEFI had made her grow up a lot faster. In some ways, she was like Sev once he’d moved to college—independent with her own thoughts on the universe, wanting to make her mark.
“Three hours are fine,” I continued eating.
By the time I finished my meal, the first of the reports started pouring in; or dripping, as Sof preferred to say. Laser communication had considerable limitations, especially at long distances. Live feeds were impossible. Even images were a stretch. Everything was condensed to the most basic information, giving me a general overview of the find.
The planetoid was smaller than the one near the jump point, hollowed out in similar fashion. Strength had sent three dozen mini-sats to record data and return to her. If all went well, she’d gather all the readings within a few hours and then fly back to bring them here. That still was a lot of time.
“How long until you can launch my exo?”
“I’m working on it, Captain.” Sof didn’t sound too happy. “And your SR vat.”
I checked his internal sensors. The vat was placed not too far from the artifact chamber. The ship had correctly estimated that I’d be spending a long time between the two. The only thing missing was a food dispenser.
“Keep focusing on that.”
Radiance jumped out of the system thirty-eight minutes later. With nothing left to do, this seemed the best time to use the mind scalpel to check on a few potential gaps in my memories. For eleven milliseconds, I considered whether it wasn’t too early to resort to that and ultimately decided it was.
A few hours wouldn’t hurt anyone, I told myself. Back home, I had used that phrase on Sev, then on his children so many times. In truth, not once had it worked. Children would always see it as a sort of punishment. Unlike me, though, they couldn’t go back and review their memories.
Seventeen planetoid artifacts in a system of five planets. If there were any remnants of ships, planet scarring, or gravitational anomalies, I’d have considered this to be a battlefield. There was a slight chance that millions of years had caused things to settle down, but I had my doubts. All of the artifacts were in orbit around the star of the system, not any of the planets, if one could even call them that. It would be a while before any of them were suitable for colonizing.
Based on their state, the artifacts appeared to be non-native to the system. The only other conclusion I could come up with—aside from a devastating war that had taken place—was that they had been abandoned here. A useless system with a single protostar—it was the perfect graveyard for a powerful, technologically advanced civilization. If so, did that mean that I was looking at the dead husks of ships?
“The exo is ready,” Sof announced. “Input will be a bit laggy with laser technology, but it’s good to go.”
“Then let’s do that.” I left the bridge.
“Rad still hasn’t returned. Just letting you know.”
“I’ll be sure to reprimand her when she does,” I replied. Now I knew how everyone else felt when I went to do my own thing. All of us had our priorities. In the grand scope of things, I could only hope that what she viewed of hers was to humanity’s benefit.
The SR vat was crude, especially compared to everything else aboard. Given that the arbiters knew I’d need to set foot on the target planet, assuming my mission was successful, I’d have hoped they’d give Sof some advanced design.
“This brings back memories.” I slid my hand over the transparent surface. “Get the exo to the target.”
“You don’t want to control it during flight?”
“There’s nothing to control until it gets there.” For a moment, I almost sounded like Augustus. With a cigar and a beard, I could possibly pull it off if I grew a dozen inches taller. “Monitor the situation. I need you focused while I’m in.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Landing on the planetoid was the easy part. Sof had moved in so close that half of his external sensors could see nothing but that. At two hundred kilometers away, it was almost as if we were touching. Even so, it took the exo suit a while to land a predetermined spot. Despite saying that I wouldn’t get involved in the landing, I found myself unable not to. After all, flying was a habit impossible to forget.
Two kilometers in, I engaged deceleration thrusters. Dozens of yellow warning messages appeared in front of me, kindly removed by Sof. There was nothing to worry about. The suits were designed to withstand direct impact. It was the artifact that I was worried about.
“What do you think you’ll find?” the ship asked.
“Possibly nothing. With luck, maybe something left behind that would tell me what these things were and who they belonged to.”
“Not where they came from?”
“Even if there’s an indication, we wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”
Ten seconds later, I took my first step on the surface of an entirely new type of third-contact artifact. Up close, the structure seemed a lot more majestic and artificial. There was too much mathematical perfection to have it randomly occur.
What Diligence had described as buildings were large cone-like bumps that extended over three kilometers from the planetoid’s surface. They, too, were covered with large openings, following a spiral pattern.
“It appears to be mostly made of silicates,” Sof said. “No metals. I’ll need a probe to confirm it, though.”
“No probes,” I said as I slowly made my way to the inside of the shell. Lag and low gravity only made the clunkiness of the exo all the more noticeable, requiring me to run a constant set of simulations prior to performing a step.
“What about sample extraction?”
“No sample extraction either,” I continued on. I didn’t want to end up infested by a race similar to the Cassandrians.
The inside of the planetoid was divided into a set of large chambers. Each had a general shape of something between a dodecahedron and a hexagon prism. Openings ten meters in length connected the chambers to one another, ensuring a free flow in every direction. And yet every one I went through was empty.
What secret did you keep? “Sof, any reports from the others?”
“Strength has completed gathering data, but it will be hours before she comes back. Unless you wish for her to send an info burst the usual way.”
“No.”
I looked at the chamber I was in. Just like all the rest, it was perfectly formed, with rough stone walls. Was it possible for this to be an actual shell? The Cassandrians were capable of mimicking technology through organic means. What if these were the remains of a very large organism? All the odds were against it, but until recently I had never thought that the Scuu were a life form composed of raw intelligence without a body of their own.
“Tell the ships to map all remaining artifacts before they come back. I want a full sweep before we move on.”
“They won’t be happy.”
“Probably not. How many mini sats do you have?”
“Twenty-one hundred,” he replied. “I can make more.”
“Send a thousand to map this one as I explore. I want a full render.”
“I could have done that while you were sleeping. What’s the point of building an exo if all you wanted was a map?”
“There’s a point.” I smiled in the SR vat. “And be sure to map the surface as well.”
As it turned out, there was no central chamber, or if there was, I couldn’t find it. For two hours I roamed the inside of the planetoid, stopping to analyze any pattern I came across. At times, I was almost convinced I had spotted a fractal symbol, only to be disappointed on close inspection.
When Radiance returned to the system, I had no choice but to accept the facts. As fascinating the artifacts were, they held no secrets relevant to my mission, just another mystery of the universe. Although, there was one notable thing of interest that we discovered: a complete lack of cobalt. Considering its universal abundance, its absence in the system was almost a guarantee that the fractal race, or some other, had gone through here in the past and harvested it for their own needs. In any event, the system was a good place for several science teams to spend years figuring things out.
Once all readings were retrieved and sent to Sof for a three-dimensional rendition, I had him dedicate half his subroutines to comparing and analyzing them in the hopes of finding some common pattern. I also ordered that the auxiliary ships send their first pod report to the corresponding arbiter factions. Meanwhile, the exo was left behind as a beacon for any science team that might get there. Sof opposed my decision, of course, citing a dozen regulations that addressed safeguarding human technologies. I ignored him. There was little an exo frame could tell anyone else. Just in case, though, I had a self-destruct mini sat lodge itself onto it. If anyone were to approach without a valid Fleet ident and authorization comm protocol, the whole thing would go off.
“How many systems did you check?” I asked Radiance.
“Five,” she replied. “Many of them were dead ends.”
“How many weren’t?”
“Enough for us to continue.”
“All right.” I sat in the captain’s seat. “Don’t do that again.”
“I might have to. Four of the systems I visited had artifact planetoids.”
That was intriguing. Could we have stumbled on another Cassandrian-like race? Or maybe the Cassandrians themselves had gone through here long ago. Why would they harvest cobalt, though, since they showed no such inclinations in human space or their own?
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“There’s no doubt.”
“All ships, gather some, then collect your mini-sats. We’re leaving the system as soon as possible. Sof, coordinate with the squadron leaders to create a jump map of the systems. From here on, we communicate only through lasers and no one jumps forward without my explicit permission.”
