Ghost in the Machine

Cycles Go ‘Round [ Chapter 11]

In our universe here, there are many, many things that could be considered unexplainable. Things that defy explanation and would take more than the lifespan of most sentient lifeforms to fully examine or even get close to understanding. That’s not even mentioning that some— if not most— of these anomalies are potentially hazardous, even malevolent by certain definitions of the word. The people out there daring to study such things are a lot smarter than me and certainly more brave. The claim I was issued to deal with had me headed to one such person.

The research station was free-floating, in distant orbit about the outer reaches of a young star. I had heard from Grep in dispatch that the area was known for the apparition of what might have been classified as a wormhole. I was assured that the chances of running across its path and getting entangled with its forces were low. Nevertheless, I made a beeline to the station the moment it came into sensor range.

The computerized voice of the automated docking system guided me into the bay, one obviously built for a supply craft, and not a one-seater. Apart from my little old self, the bay was empty, save for a few supply crates in the corner. When nobody appeared to greet me I went on my own, tablet in hand, to seek out anyone knowing about the nature of the insurance claim.

I knew that the automatically opening doors were just simple systems for the convenience of the station’s inhabitants, but I couldn’t help but feel as if I was being goaded into continuing deeper. From the space dock, I traversed a long, dim hallway, with several more sets of sealed doors, and finally into a larger room at the very end. I stood frozen as several sets of eyes turned my way, only to unhesitatingly focus back on their work as if I was the least interesting thing they had seen that cycle. The circular room had a domed glass ceiling to look out upon the cosmos, but everyone was glued to their screens and readouts and holographic displays.

I approached the least intimidating-seeming of the scientists, dressed in a white lab coat like the rest. The aged woman was pouring over a waveform of some sort of audio, scanning back and forth over certain segments. I paused for a moment to judge whether or not she would engage me first.

“Uh,” I finally spoke up, trying my best not to startle her. “Could you direct me to Dr. Caspian? Please?”

The woman jerked her head up and squinted at me like I was one of her objects of research. “The doctor? He’s quite busy with the discovery.”

“I see,” I said, bouncing on my heels disarmingly. “Well, he did make an appointment with me, so if you simply point me in the right direction, I can be on my way very quickly.”

She nudged her head in the direction of the back of the room. “Up the stairs, in the drone bay,” she directed, barely looking my way again.

“Drone bay,” I repeated, nodding and leaving the less-than-interested scientist behind. At the spot denoted by her vague head movement, I found the sole set of stairs and climbed, reaching the area foretold. The doors to the bay opened freely for me, leading me to the person who was likely the client.

The floor of the room had a set of wide, mechanical hatch doors that had been opened wide, revealing a lift supporting a spacecraft even smaller than the one issued to me by the company. A man of white, wild hair jerked up from behind the craft, making immediate eye contact with me.

“Who are you?” He said with a gruff, aged voice.

“I’m from—“

“Ah, Cycles Go ‘Round,” he finished.

I held myself high and rounded the craft, ready to offer my free hand out for a shake. “That’s correct. Dr. Caspian, I presume?”

He glanced at my hand but left me hanging. “Yes. I almost forgot I had called you out. Our… problem has… evolved. Of course, that hopefully won’t change our dealings with your company. It’s this drone here, you see.”

I pulled out my tablet and glanced at the screen, reciting the details I had already memorized. “Yes, right here; an autonomous remotely-controlled spacecraft working in a potentially hazardous environment. Can I assume it’s become inoperable?”

“If you mean, we, ourselves, can’t operate it, that’s correct.”

“Perfect. Err, for insurance purposes, of course. So, what I’ll need to do is make a record of the ways it has been damaged, how that came about, and finally take some images of the damage suffered. From there, we can—“

“Erm,” Caspian cleared his throat, interrupting me. “I’ll tell you now, it’ll take more than a few pictures and a report to explain to your employers what’s going on here.”

“I promise, I’m very thorough, sir.” I leaned into the customer service voice. “How about you tell me what happened and I’ll put the details down in my notes?”

Capsian sighed and rounded the drone, dragging his feet. “Have you ever heard the term, A Ghost in the Machine?”

I shrugged. “I suppose I’ve heard the phrase once or twice. So, is it like an electrical fault somewhere? Something like a manufacturing error?”

“Something like that. Uh, the first. If that’s enough to put on the claim form, go right ahead.”

I sighed. “I’m afraid I need a little more than that. Specifically in making sure that my employers are happy. I just need to confirm that it is inoperable, that’s company policy before we reimburse something of a value this high.”

Caspian sighed with an energy that rivaled my own. “Listen, kindly of course. There’s a lot to explain here that an… untrained observer wouldn’t be able to process. Would you really let a little policy get in the way of scientific progress?”

I forced myself to look into his eyes. “If there actually is something wrong getting in the way of that progress, you’re free to give me the details.”

“A ghost in the machine,” he repeated, squinting at me. “What if I told you, it was more than just a figure of speech? An actual ghost. What do you think when you hear that word, girl?”

I pulled my jaw up from its slack state and nodded as if thinking deeply. “Ghost? Well, scientifically, nobody anywhere has been able to find any evidence regarding a life after death, at least in this reality. Unless… this is your breakthrough?”

Caspian approached excitedly, wagging a finger my way. “I like your optimism. How did you end up as such a rule-following drone in an insurance company?”

“That’s also beyond scientific understanding.”

The old man paced, borderline ignoring me in favor of the sound of his own voice. “Here’s the thing about our ghost here, girl. There is certainly something that has come to inhabit our little drone here. And while the supernatural is not something we can fool ourselves into believing, I beg you to think about a being… a consciousness… that is simply too different for us to notice it with just eyes and ears, any of our senses.”

I nodded as if I was understanding his train of thought. “Even taste? No, forget I said that. Does this have to do with your wormhole? What… sort of… activity has this ghost demonstrated?”

“The wormhole, yes!” The scientist hummed, turning to the window of the bay. “Is it one, though? That’s what we are out here to find out. We’ve been able to foretell when it is to appear by fluctuations in the tachyon particles in this sector. During its last appearance, we sent this fellow through.”

I glanced down at the tachyon… whatever that meant… soaked machine laying bare on the lift before me. Stepping back, I responded. “And then?”

Caspian jerked about and mashed at a computer console, sending a picture to the screen. The view, I assumed, was from the drone itself, creeping forward to a dark orifice that seemed both flat and fluid at the same time, devoid of any of the stars of space. “At this moment,” the doctor explained, “is exactly where it crossed over.”

“Crossed over to where?” I began to ask when fuzz overtook the camera before the entirety of the feed went completely, solidly, white. “How convenient, that the camera would fail right at that moment, huh?”

“Aha, so it appears!” He exclaimed, leaning still on the control panel. “To the uneducated eye, it would seem so. But, in fact, the bitrate of the camera was maxed out at that moment, and in that blink of an eye, every single one and zero of the drone’s local memory was maxed out with video and audio data.”

“I assume that’s not intended.”

Caspian shrugged and turned back. “We couldn’t even fetch any sensor data from there on out. Miraculously, it was able to be turned right around and brought back on visual guidance alone. And while we were able to extract the memory modules, all the electronics refuse to respond, despite all the circuits being intact.”

I blinked at the machine. “And so here it sits.”

“Like a coffer of secrets! But ones that we are encroaching upon.”

I pressed my tablet to my chest, scratching the back of my head. “May I recommend that you reach out to us once more after these secrets are unfurled?”

I saw a glint in his eye, combined with a tugging on his twisty beard. “Are you so interested in these secrets?”

“I—“

He didn’t take any pause in beginning another explanation. “The video, we have yet to find an answer in it, but the audio, oh, the waves and ripples of sound!”

The computer screen changed to another readout, a waveform from a recording it seemed. “Such a high pitch, barely audible by the microphones. But slowed to a frequency able to be heard by our ears? I will let you have a listen.”

What I heard was somewhere between the digestion of a high-fiber meal and the din of a warp engine while you’re trying to sleep, all mashed into a vague rhyme. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“But no doubt there’s a noticeable cadence there, no?” He swooned, eyes mostly closed. “You meet many species out there, traveling and working across the galaxy?”

“Of course.”

“And you may hear many different languages, dialects. Even without knowing a word, you can hear the syllables, the rising and falling of intonation. Do you not hear the same thing?”

I nodded to appease him. “Sure. Have you tried translating it?”

Caspian planted his hands together and began striding about the bay. “It is unlike any language in any database.”

“If it is even a language.”

“Language or not, I believe it has meaning. The station’s computers and a couple of my colleagues are working to pick it apart.”

“To see if you… ghost is trying to communicate?”

“Precisely.”

I slumped my shoulders, holding my tablet like a shield to my chest. “This is some fine, proper science you’re performing, but I’m not quite seeing something that could be covered under your insurance policy.”

The doors behind us slid open with a gassy whoosh. “Doctor, I’m sorry to intrude, but I think you should see this.” It was the sour researcher from before, cowering against the door frame. I noticed the blinking of the ceiling lights outside.

Caspian strutted out past me in a hurry. I followed, not daring to be left with the machine and the so-called ghost inside of it. The rest of the researchers were stood up from their desks, glancing about at each other, view-screens and monitors all turned to white.

“What’s going on?” The doctor fussed, moving from workstation to workstation.

“It just started like this,” the woman returned.

The lights on the nearby controls lit up in a random fashion, flickering on and off, before slithering like a hungry serpent across to the neighboring panels. The researchers jumped back as the electrical anomaly crossed their paths. The ceiling lights flickered once more. A sudden alarm split my ears, and the room suddenly illuminated periodically by a strobing red light.

“What’s that alarm for, exactly?” I said, covering one ear with my free hand.

Caspian held his own ears, hidden behind the white tufts of hair. “That’s the decompression alarm! Don’t worry, it’s a false alarm. Because if it were truly going on this long, we wouldn’t be talking right now!”

“That’s comforting!” I shouted through the clamor. “But your ghost… looks like he’s invaded—“ My last word echoed loudly through the space as the siren suddenly cut off, followed by the mass extinguishing of the lights. “Your ghost has invaded the systems here too.”

Caspian tensed his neck and glanced about the dim space, wary of the siren returning. “Power? The power now!? Someone get to the emergency hatch, get out the air masks. What’s going on here?”

The sour woman held her forehead. “I don’t know, doctor. If I had to guess… in decoding the anomaly into something we could make sense of, it… made sense of us in return.”

The doctor stomped his foot. “If you had to guess? We are scientists! We do not guess!”

“I’m more than happy to guess, not being a scientist or anything” I spoke up, hand slightly raised. “And my guess is to try and figure out what this thing wants.”

“Doctor,” another researcher jumped up. “If it does what it did to the drone, we’ll likely only have a short amount of time before the vital systems shut down with nothing we can do.”

Just as my eyes had adjusted to the dark, the lights returned, brighter than ever. As the computer stations returned to life, their screens rained with a cascade of senseless errors and the accompanying minute clanging sounds. Some of the scientists dashed back to the room with air tanks and environ suits. I began to creep towards the door I had come through to get in.

“Where do you think you’re going!” Caspian shouted at me.

I froze in place. “I don’t know, just thinking of how I can make myself useful, I guess,” I lied poorly.

“Does none of this constitute something that you people cover? An anomaly from deep space, a wormhole, technological or not, must be covered!”

“I understand that, sir,” I loudly attempted to appease him, “but if neither you nor I are around, there will be no payout.”

“Doctor!” A younger woman called out, tugging a male researcher along with her to confront Caspian. “I believe this isn’t the anomaly you think it is.”

The doctor folded his arms expectantly. “Present me with your evidence.”

The young man stood himself up, his lab coat free from the woman’s grasp. “I perhaps have an explanation. I’ve… seen this before.”

“Where? Spit it out,” Caspian huffed, trying and failing to ignore the cacophony from the surrounding computers.

“It’s because his own personal computer was doing this same thing just the other day,” the woman explained, hands at her sides.

“That’s right, sir,” said the man, cradling the back of his head. “I, uh… downloaded something off the data stream. Something for my own… personal use. Perhaps one that was not from a reliable source.”

“Tell him what happened after that,” the woman shoved at his back.

“Uh, well,” he said, refusing to look the doctor in the eye. “Well, I disconnected the memory module from the computer and hid it away. Doctor, do you perhaps remember when the drone needed its own memory replaced?”

Caspian folded his arms. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me the one sitting in the drone now…”

“Is the infected one sir. And we hooked it all back up to the main server with all the data from the camera.”

The woman shoved him once again. “And now look what you’ve allowed to happen. Keeping your mouth shut like that.”

Caspian held his brow in his finger, shaking his head. “But the strange video and audio? We captured that from the wormhole, did we not?”

“I believe,” the woman began, “when the drone switched to its autonomous systems, the virus was able to gain control. Is spread from there, I guess.”

“Oh, I’ve heard about ones like that,” I spoke up proudly for once. “It just copies a bunch of junk data to fill space and jam up things.”

Caspian pursed his lips. “So… we have yet to see anything from the other side. I see. Let’s get things restarted in safe mode or something. You lot know better than me. Insurance lass!”

I straightened myself up as the others began to scramble back to the various computer stations. “Yes?”

The doctor’s eyes met mine. “I’ll… walk you out.”

I pondered what to say as I followed a few steps behind him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do much here, but I can recommend a good informational security company that may be able to handle things.”

Caspian opened the door to the bay for me, waving a hand forward. “Oh, thank you, but the people here are quite adept, if they’re thinking with the right head, that is.”

“So be it,” I wanted to conclude it there. I stopped, one last question entering my mind. “If this was the scientific breakthrough that it could have been, why not just reach out to the people funding you, rather than claim it on your insurance?”

Caspian clicked his tongue. “Because they’re stingy with grant money. You only get more money once you produce results. But in the case of insurance, you get money when things go the opposite way. We’ll just have to hope we don’t actually run across something actually devious in our future ventures.”

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