Chapter 1: Echoes from Space

  — 2272

  — Plato Orbit Station II

  “What are you looking at?” Clark asked curiously as he leaned towards a screen which Soren had been staring at for hours. He was on his way down the office towards a synthesizer vending machine when he saw Soren, whom he vaguely recalled staring at her console screen hours earlier, still sat there. The soft hum of electronics filled the room, and the faint blue glow from the screen cast shifting shadows across her face. As he approached and stopped by the pads, his hands pushing off one of the sparkling surfaces, her eyes were still glued to the faint light of the screen. “Hello?” Still she gave no response. “Soren…Soren Lee.”

  “Yes,” she let out a quick word without even a flinch on her face. “Shh, I think I might have discovered something, something extraordinary.” She put her ears close to the screen’s sound box, almost rubbing on it, as the gentle tap-tap of the synthesized water-drop sound resonated softly through the room.

  “Which is?” Clark kneeled down to the same level of Soren as he squinted his eyes. On the screen was a series of small digits, numbers packed closely to each other. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17… along with numbers came the sound of water dropping mixed with finger clicking from the sound box. “What is this? Binary?”

  “No, it is the frequency of electromagnetic waves, all in prime numbers.” She grabbed Clark by his ear and dragged his face to where her face was. “See for yourself.”

  “I don’t see what’s odd?”

  “Don’t you find it weird that something in the universe is emitting electromagnets at fully mathematical pattern?” She stood, voice tight with excitement, looking beyond the clear window into the starry sky. The space outside of the space station is dark, very dark, but because they are away from the sun’s direction, the stars are brighter than ever. Purple, orange, blue, silver, sparkling in the distance, as if they were gems planted carefully by a creator. “Don’t you find it wonderful?”

  “About what? Stars? They may be billions of lightyears away, perhaps turned to black holes by now.” He turned away and walked to the vending machine. Where it scanned his face and with a sound of buzz, printed out a bag of fully biological potato chips. “And perhaps the readings you recorded was simply the wrath of a dying star. Nothing is out there, just us, on that tiny, lonely blue dot being delusional.” He let out a sarcastic laugh as he approached the doorway towards the hall.

  “Do you think I should report it to the federal government?” She asked at last as he paused his footsteps. “This could very well mean something to them.”

  “But who are you gonna send it to? Send to the department of threadwork messages, then another 6 months to be examined at the astrophysics department, before they spent 5 years scrolling through the list to find you? It’s like last year’s tomato pricing, liberty always wins over efficiency.” He leaned against the doorway and winked at her before swinging his body into the hall behind the wall and disappear as the door closed behind him.

  “He’s right, who am I gonna send it to? And who's going to do anything?” She whispered to herself as she stared at the screen, or at her own reflection, The numbers kept running as synced signals streamed in, received by deep-space radar relayed through distant satellites beyond the solar system. She turned to look towards another direction, across the mining fields of astroid belt, through perhaps a dozen space debris left by old satellites, into a small blue dot in the distance.

  She rubbed her hand on her warm coffee cup, it has been five years since the last time she touched Earth’s wet soil, felt the breeze of wind, the smell of the grass after rain, or the seed of the future, children. Everything in this station is recycled, chemically speaking, with occasional physical supplies sent from cargo ships. Besides that, even the journey itself with the newly innovated antimatter-fusion-drive, it still took about three weeks. Not only the initial acceleration ruptured her pancreas, the weeks under zero-gravity had severely weakened her muscles.

  She hopped on her feet slightly, feeling the weak gravity generated by the rotation of the station. At least there’s something to step on.

  Earth…the home of humanity, there you stand like a lonely atom overshadowed by the brightness of the sun and darkness of the space, yet stood unhinged, nurturing life that for good or for ill, one day advances out of their mother’s womb. Venturing into the vast, unknown.

  Stars, how far you are, flickering in the dark abyss like fires that shine through the night. Like beacons on rough night seas, always guiding brave souls to reach for you. You are nothing but a glimmering hope, fragile in the face of the cold, yet strong in minds that turn to you.

  At night as she lay in her quarter, as she has been promoted to a tertiary engineer of the Pluto Station II, she was finally given her own quarter, her ears can finally rest from a dozen snoring roommates. But this night she felt restless. She had turned on the auto-record mode for the console and live streamed on federal lines. But no one is going to do anything about it, not the government at least, perhaps some individuals with great powers and technology controls.

  What could this pattern be coming from?

  Space, practically nothing except occasional flash of virtual particles and dark matter, yet it is a pathway everything, from the biggest star to the tiniest debris. What if, it was something intentional? But who in the universe could be using electromagnet to send mathematical waves for us to find? And for what reason?

  She rolled over to the other side of the bed, where there’s only a small screen mounted on the wall. She clicked on it as it lit up, she scrolled to the federal threadsite, again it was filled with news about regional leaders arguing with its people, it’s court, and the leaders of other regions regarding simply if they should accept humans who have replaced their entire body into cybernetics be considered robot, or the other way around. On the screen the recording of mass people shouting and signalling on the threadwork: It is my life, my right, my choice!

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  In the dimly lit room by the light of the flickering screen, she grabbed a handful of her long hair before her eyes. Some strands have already turned silver. Of course, a simple protein remodelling could fix the issue, but she is not going to.

  She rubbed the white strands gently. She is only 27, yet with strands of white hair, if without the use of technology, who knows how many years she has left. She recalls herself in university, staying up late at night with heavy doses of excitement radiation just to score a grade that no one cared on the moment of graduation. What was all this for again?

  Ever since the Third World War, the world had fractured into countless regions. Power checked power, endlessly. Decisions stalled. She knew better than to expect the federal government to act—but she also knew someone who might listen.

  Aric Cole.

  — Earth, San Francisco

  “So the Big Bang happened when massive positive and negative energies were trapped together inside a singular mirror dimension of zero-point,” Aric explained passionately, to…practically nothing except a blank yellow wall in his room. Occasional virtual particles drifted lazily through the sunlight, refracting faint rainbows across scattered papers and pens.

  Small droplets of sweat gathered and rolled down his neck as the bright summer sun blazed through the clear windows, casting a warm, golden radiance on the wooden floor that smelled faintly of polish and old books.

  “They weren’t colliding,” he continued. “They were balanced. Perfectly. Immense force, no motion. Until something slipped.”

  “When the equilibrium broke, the mirror dimension cracked. Its volume expanded exponentially, not as a clean explosion, but as fractures spreading within fractures, the mirror stretching but never truly breaking.”

  He swallowed, eyes fixed on the wall.

  “Antimatter wasn’t created intentionally. It was residue—leftover potential energy of some sort from the imbalance, born from the sheer energy density and particle chaos of the break.”

  “And from those cracks came the sub-dimensional threads. We now call them the threadwork space. Microscopic faults in the universe itself. The seams we now call threadwork.”

  “Mathematics predicted them. Quantum theory hinted at them. And now we use them every day— communication, observation, navigation, all built on scars that never healed.”

  Suddenly a small device on his table began ringing, in sound he could only hear in his brain. Not anyone else around though there is no one. He glanced at the table where the device is attached to, on top of mountains of rejection papers from universities and organizations, he immediately turned back and shrugged before carrying on with his speech.

  “I hypothesize a way to achieve faster-than-light travel…”

  The device rang again in his mind.

  “Alright, get it on,” he yelled as a beep sound was heard from within his mind, followed by a woman’s voice.

  “Hey, doctor Cole, I have a special gift, along with a special request for you.” The woman said.

  “Ah, Soren,” he chuckled as he walked out of the door, down the stairs. “What is it? A strange asteroid you found? Or disturbances in local quantum coherence?”

  “You know I’m not officially recognized,” he muttered, voice tighter as he glanced at the pile of rejection letters. “Officially, I’m just a guy with too many ideas and too few degrees. Can’t blame them but my request to present at Tokyo’s science theory fair was again denied just yesterday.”

  “Yeah I know, and I am sorry for that, but let's be real we like to call you that,” she let out a small laugh on the other side, the faint vibration of the connection humming through his neural link. “I am recently in charge with the most powerful radar on the Plato Space Station II…”

  Aric’s eyes widened as he leaned against the polished wooden banister, sunlight glinting off the lens of a telescope on the window sill. “The biggest one? And furthest one from Earth?” he suddenly cut her off in excitement.

  He then swung open the front door of his house. Outside is a clean field of green grass, he puts his hand before his forehead, creating a shade near his eyes and took a deep breath of the fresh air of summer. In the distance some children ran on the grass field as their drones followed them closely behind. “Let me guess, you must have found a new constellation, right?”

  “No, no, Aric,” she chuckled, the faint buzz of her console audible in the background. “I found…a strange frequency of electromagnetic emission.”

  He paused mid-step, feeling the slight warmth of the sun on his shoulder as he turned back into the empty house. “Strange?” He frowned, squinting at the scattered notes on the floor. “How strange?”

  “It is like…it has a unique pattern, if translated to codes it becomes all prime numbers, building on top of each other.”

  “Prime numbers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Entirely electromagnet, from deep space?” He circled his finger in the air as the pen on his table floated up, hovering with a faint metallic click before beginning to write down the notes, the scent of ink mingling with the warm sunlight hitting the desk.

  He turned around towards the window mounted on his front door, staring into the cloudless, blue sky. Hanging there is the moon, in broad day light he could see the silver cities built on it, and across it, is a bigger world, bigger and stranger than anything they have within the solar system. On their surface are layers of solar panels, harvesting sun’s full energy as they laser the energy back to Earth through a nearby receiver panel. “Are you suggesting it is purposely released by someone? Or something?”

  “That I can’t be sure of, but I do not think it is by natural causes.”

  “You know that math can be used to measure almost everything in the universe, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I am an elite engineer, of course I know. But this time the equation is simply 4 numbers instead of 4 boards.” She explained eagerly.

  “Did you send to the federal government alliance?” He asked slowly.

  “I did share a copy of the record with them, and a small description of my hypothesis generated by my robot.”

  “That’s good, they might take care of it.” He sat down on a chair. On the messy table is stacked with towers of old draft papers, of drawings of models and calculations which he spent years studying on.

  “No they are not going to, they can’t even reach a decision on the production of organic tomatoes last year. Let alone something big like this.” She argued. “And my status as a whole is still too small for this big world to listen to me.”

  “You are a top engineer, if you are too small for the world then what is I? A wild grass that grows everywhere and no one pay attention to at all?”

  “But you have ideas, ideas that those noticeable flowers can’t offer. I don’t trust those men in suits, but I trust you in your pyjamas.”

  Aric froze for a second and looked down at his shirt, okay, not a pyjama.

  “That was sweet,” he laughed slightly as the pen moved to document every sentence it finds meaningful in their conversation. “But there’s nothing I can do either, I have no power, influence, or the means to explore that signal.” He sighed. “Perhaps learn to trust them, that’s what separates modern human from aggressive cavemen, we learnt to trust each other.”

  “…”

  “Can you trace it?” He asked at last.

  “I can run a triangulation check, since over multiple satellites and our radar received the same readings but then it has to be within our explored range.” She muttered on the other side as the sound of finger typing also could be heard.

  He waited patiently.

  “No, it is not from within our range of explored regions, even ones just gone by satellites. However, the furthest one, an experimental deep-space relay launched from Neptune’s orbit and now nearing the Oort Cloud did pick up faint echoes that match the same sequence weeks before it reached my station. That puts it over a thousand astronomical units away, well beyond anything we’ve even just partially charted.”

  Aric paused and rubbed his sweaty forehead. “A thousand AU… that’s practically the edge of human reach,” he muttered, circling the floating notes with his pen. “If this signal is deliberate, someone, or something, sent it from well beyond our immediate grasp. Is it possible for you to activate the central threadwork radar in your sector to trace its origin more precisely?”

  He scrambled the towers of papers on the table, searched through random sketches and numbers, until he found a dusty printed star chart. His pen traced the orbits in and out of planets

  Soren’s voice came through the neural link, tense but excited. “That is out of my access, but I could attempt a multi-satellite correlation, but beyond the Oort Cloud, the signal’s spread might be distorted by cosmic interference. Still… it’s worth trying.”

  “It’s okay, I know someone who might be able to help us on this very problem.” He slowed down his words as he again searched through the piles of old papers, from under his desk, pages between books and all drawers, finally, from a dust-covered high school notebook millenniums ago, he took out a small lined paper, between two blue lines is an old address, and besides it written the name: Kael Baker.