I DREAM OF TOMORROW
by Jeff Dosser
My eyes snap open and I gulp in a scene my groggy mind
struggles to comprehend. Klaxons howl while strobing
crimson lights sparkle along a frost-encrusted ceiling
only inches from my nose. For a long moment, it feels
like I'm inside a glass coffin and I’m filled with the
strangest sense of deja vu. Am I dead? My breath echoes
in my ears, so not dead. Slowly, a label fixes in my
mind, a word for this thing i’m in; cryo-bed.
I’m waking from cryo-sleep and… and something’s wrong. I
place a hand against the icy ceiling and push. With a
hiss, the lid swings up, the imprint of my palm sparking
a memory, a vision of ancient cave paintings, a man
forever trapped in time. I’ve seen this hand print
before but can’t place it. Maybe in a dream.
Cradling my head, I try
to shut out the clamor as waves of memory crash across
me. My name…my name is Lane Meeks, Captain Lane
Meeks, and this...this is the Space Union vessel, Pyxis.
I swing my legs to the
floor sniffing at the air. There’s a smell here, a hint
of what…smoke? Burnt electronics? Trying to rise, my
legs buckle and I sag to the floor. Across from me, I
see another glass top rise; another member of my crew
freed from their own glass cage. A name scrolls across
my thoughts and I mumble it more to assure myself than
for any other reason. “Commander … Fossey.”
Clutching at the cryo-bed
lid, I make another attempt to stand. My legs hold. I
stand in a cramped room with a row of chairs mounted
before a console. The console runs the length of the
wall. Opposite this, a bank of flashing lights and
flickering monitors display the trouble we’re in. The
Pyxis is a science vessel, I remember that now.
Stumbling forward, I drop into the center chair. Somehow
I know it’s mine. Memories thaw as I type across the
keyboard and screens spring to life. An image of the
ship appears like a three-dimensional jewel glinting in
the air above.
More memories flood in causing my heart to skip.
Carla, my wife, is aboard. And my daughter, Amanda. I
swipe a hand across the ship’s holo and zoom in on the
crew quarters. My shoulders sag with relief at seeing
their cryo-status in the green. A check of the remaining
eight crew and their families shows everyone in the
green.
Behind me, a rattle of stiff footsteps and suddenly
Fossey’ in the chair
beside me, her thick black hair a bird’s nest of unruly
curls.
“What’s the status,
Captain?” Her hands crawl across the keyboard and a
second 3-D ship image hovers next to mine.
“Darrell,” I shout to
the onboard AI, “kill the alarm,”
No response.
We exchange a concerned look.
“Darrell?” she says.
No response.
“Darrel, report status,” Fossey orders.
The klaxons blare on.
“The AI’s knocked out,”
I yell. I type in the commands to cut the alarms then
examine the screens more closely. The screeching sirens
go quiet and silence descends like a weight.
“Captain, these ship
updates are over twenty minutes old. I think Darrell
locked up.”
Fear grips me as I think
of Amanda and Carla, the possibility they may not be
okay.
In seconds, we’ve got
the live status restored. Like a cancer, crimson and
orange dots mar the ship’s holo. The entire lower deck,
the Alcubierre Drive, or Bierre Drive, as well as the
fission reactors, are a sea of red.
“We’ve lost three of the
crew,” Fossey says.
Dear God, not my
girls.
“Who’d we lose?” I ask.
I spot a breach in the cargo bay and a fire in the
secondary hull. I let Fossey do her job and dispatch
drones for repairs.
“Sparks, Gifford and
Brown,” she says.
A wave of relief washes
over me as well as feelings of guilt, guilt at the
relief someone else besides my wife and daughter are
among the dead.
“Do we know what
happened?”
There's a weighty
pause as she examines the screens.
“Looks like we
encountered a gravitational anomaly,” Fossey says. “When
the Bierre field collapsed, we were thrown into a debris
belt encircling it.”
With the immediate
threat to the ship under control, I type in the commands
for navigation. The ship's holo shrinks away and the
region above our heads explodes to reveal constellations
of stars. A green line tracks our trajectory from Earth
to the star system Eighteen-Scorpii. Three-quarters of
the way through the flight, our path halts, and a red
blip flashes in the dark. I zoom in.
“There’s your
gravitational anomaly.” I point to the red globe at the
center of the display. The green dot of our ship rides
dangerously close to the sphere's periphery.
“A black hole?” Fossey’s
brows pinch in disbelief. “How’d the scouts miss that?”
I poke at the keys,
reading the results as they flash across the screen. “No
wonder no one picked this thing up. Look at its speed.”
Fossey whistles in
appreciation. “Two million kph! Is that right?”
“Faster than a bat outta
hell," I say.
"A little bigger than a
bat, but I'll give ya the outta hell part."
I scan the screens, not liking what the sensors are
telling me. By my readings, we're locked into a terminal
orbit. We need Darrell back online…and fast.
On the display, more systems wink from red to green. At
least the repair drones are still functioning. Air
scrubbers hum softly eliminating any hint of smoke and
leaving me with the cold, sterile aroma of the ship and
the musky stink of my own unwashed hide.
“What’s the status of the AI?” I ask.
For the first time since
I’ve known her, a twinge of panic edges Fossey’s voice.
“It’s not looking good,
Captain. We’ve got micro-meteor impacts all across the
lower decks. Several penetrations through primary as
well as backup systems. Worse yet, It looks like that
deck fire took place right in the center of the AI’s
core.”
She glances up to meet my eye.
“To tell the truth,
Captain, I don’t know how we’re even alive.”
I turn by attention to
the computer as calculations explode on the screen in a
flurry of formulas and spinning 3-D graphics. As we
study the data, Fossey says aloud what I’ve already
guessed.
“We’re being pulled in aren’t we?” She pauses to examine
the figures, then sinks into her chair with a sigh. “How
long do we have?”
I push up from my seat after studing the shifting
displays. “Twenty-four hours. Maybe less.” I notice a
green spark among the forest of red lights. Despite
being on backup power, the Bierre Drive is still active.
“Take a look at that.” I point to the Bierre Drive
gauge. “It’s still online.”
Sweat beads Fossy’s brow
as she considers the screens. “You’re right, the dark
matter generator’s still functional.” She spins in her
chair and points to a slash of red on the ship's
display. “But the fission reactors are toast. There’s no
way primary power can be restored.”
“But there’s enough in
the batteries to activate the Bierre Drive,” I say. “We
could create a warp bubble in front of the ship.”
Fossie’s eyes narrow as
she considers the suggestion. Then slowly, she shakes
her head. “I don't see what good it would do. We can’t
enter the warp field, the ion drives are virtually dead.
Hell, we barely have enough power to maintain life
support.”
“If an escape pod were
outside the ship when we activate the field,“ I suggest,
“it might be thrown free. Every pod’s registered with a
quantum entangled beacon at Space Union Headquarters.
We’d be rescued in a few years.”
She studied the numbers,
her eyes darting from the screen to the ship’s holo. She
turned, pinned me beneath a look of stern disapproval.
“Captain, controls to
the Bierre drive are out. The only way to activate it is
through the bridge panel.
“Yeah, I noticed that. A
dead man’s switch.” I stared out the hatch window
and study the bright pinpricks beyond. “Which means
someone has to stay behind.”
“Captain Meeks,” she
begins. ”Lane.” She rose from her seat to stand beside
me. “I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t. You’ve
got a wife and daughter to consider”
I smile and take her
hand. “You’re going to be in that escape pod, Commander.
That’s not a request, it’s an order.” I look at her and
smile. “Besides, I’m not letting you steal my glory.
Heck, once we settle Eighteen-Scorpii, they’ll be naming
elementary schools and streets after me. Lane Meeks
Lane. Has a kind of ring to it don’t you think.”
Emotions
fill her eyes and she laughs. “No, that’s the worst.”
“Now come on,” I say. “Help me crunch the numbers, then
you can join the rest of the crew for a very long nap.”
***
Within an hour, Fossey
and I have the computations. We feed the coordinates
into the pod’s navigation and set the timer. As Fossey
climbs into her cryo-bed, she pauses and meets my eyes.
“I’ll make sure everyone
knows what you did.” A tear breaks free and drizzles
down her cheek. “I’ll make sure Amanda knows what kind
of man her daddy was.”
She lays back and the
lid hisses shut. In moments the remnants of humidly
crystallize like diamonds on the door of her pod
When I type in the
command to abandon ship, a soft clatter of gears lowers
Fossey’s cryo-bed into the deck. I watch as she slips
beneath the floor and slides down the ramp. In moments,
the distant rumble of movement announces all the cryo-beds
have been shuttled into the escape pod. A sudden
throbbing vibration and the escape pod is away.
From the window, I watch as the craft’s
cylindrical body drifts
into view. In moments, the ion engines ignite with a
flash of sapphire flame and the cylindrical ship
dwindles into the darkness.
“Okay, Meeks," I say to
myself. "Show time.”
A quick systems check
reveals battery power at eighteen percent, the ion
drives at five. After triple checking my calculations
and studying the screens as the escape pod maneuvers
into position, I bring the dark matter generator up to
full power and activate the Bierre Drive.
The familiar sensation
of static electricity surges through me as the drive is
activated and generates a warp field around the ship.
Then just as suddenly, the feeling’s gone. When I check
the reading on the entanglement detectors each crew
member wears; I'm relieved to see everyone’s life signs
at 100%. With a sigh of relief, I stand. It’ll be an
hour before I can confirm the pod’s location, and
another fourteen more before I make my own plunge into
the black hole. So I do what anyone in such a situation
would. I fix myself a sandwich and wait.
Readings on the pod's position come in slowly, the
process of discerning results complicated by the
electromagnetic soup surrounding the singularity. Yet
soon the disaster becomes clear. I clutch the console in
horror at the realization of what I’ve done. Somewhere
in my reckoning, I’ve made a mistake. The pod has been
thrown three million kilometers from the anomaly, but my
miscalculation placed them squarely in the black hole’s
path. My wife, my daughter, and what’s left of my crew
have less than two hours before they're sucked inside.
And there’s not a damn thing I can do.
I examine and
reexamine
the numbers, searching for my error. Then it hits me, I
never checked the Bierre field integrity. It takes a
while to override the damage to the sensors and check
the log. When I do, it's as plain as the nose on my
face. An eight-percent deviation in the Bierre field
geometry. With the vast pull of the black hole,
something as simple as a small deviation has translated
into a seventy-degree variation in the pod's flight.
I grip the chair in
frustration, my fingernails digging into the leather. My
carelessness has doomed everyone I love. If only I could
go back. If only I could tell myself to check the field
geometry before the jump.
My head snaps up at the
thought. Why couldn’t I go back? It was
possible...theoretically. I could send a message to
myself to check the Bierre field, save Carla and Amanda
and everyone else. I was, after all, sitting on the edge
of a black hole, the biggest rip in space-time there is.
I dig back in my memory
trying to recall the details of my thesis on the Kip
Thorne Inconsistency. Maybe, if I dive into the event
horizon and activate the Bierre Drive, then, feasibly, a
wormhole could be created. A wormhole back in time. Of
course, the Pyxis herself couldn’t make it through such
a hole, the odds of that were astronomical, but the ship
doesn’t need to make it through. All I need is a gap
large enough to send a signal to the other side, a
message in a bottle, a warning to myself.
My heart hammers as I plug in the numbers. On the
screen, I watch the black hole gobble up the distance to
the pod. Soon, concern for my family becomes too great
and I give up the work. I stare at the screens,
paralyzed by a morbid voyeurism as the pod races to its
destruction. With quivering fingers, I trace the cold,
flat surface of the screens, across the green indicators
telling me my family is alive. Then without fanfare,
without explosions, without a sign they’d existed at
all, their lights wink out replaced by a simple yet
cruel message:
SIGNAL LOST.
An icy depression seeps
into my limb and twines itself around my heart. Tears
come. I give way to the loss and weep, unable to believe
they're gone; reliving those last moments when I'd
tucked Amanda into the cryo-bed, her stuffed rabbit
cradled in her arms; the last warm caress of Carla's
lips against mine.
With angry intensity,
I return to my work. A message across time is the only
hope to save my girls, to save my crew. With the final
calculations made, I turn the Pyxis towards the ebony
nemesis that’s consumed my life and ignite the ion
engines. Damaged thrusters alone won't provide the
needed acceleration to enter the Bierre field. I know
that. But the gravitational assist the monster gives
should handle any acceleration the thrusters fail to
provide. In less than two hours, I’ll have more than
enough speed for the jump, almost too much.
All that’s left is to set the automated rescue beacon to
broadcast my warning … and wait.
***
It’s a strange thing preparing for one’s death, to quite
literally stare into the heart of darkness. It gives a
man an opportunity to review his past choices, both good
and ill. The screens flash with input as the Pyxis
reaches relativistic speeds, diving with abandon towards
an event horizon I cannot see. Doubt rises as my mind
gnaws at variations in the formulas, unknowns of mass,
speed, and angle injected into the equation. Then again,
I have no choice. At best, this gamble offers me a
chance at redemption. At worst, oblivion.
“Well, Meeks.” I tap the key and activate the drive.
“Here we go.”
****
My eyes snap open and I gulp in a scene my groggy mind
struggles to comprehend. Klaxons howl while strobing
crimson lights sparkle along a frost-encrusted ceiling
only inches from my nose. For a long moment, it feels
like I'm inside a glass coffin and I’m filled with the
strangest sense of deja vu.
The End