The ship’s avatar knelt down by the ocean. The roar of the waves rang throughout the seemingly infinite cavernous interior of the Nebula-Class Sleeper. The great interstellar starship nick-named ‘The Night Express’ a humorous attempt to offer small comforts on these life-spanning voyages. The tall slender humanoid with striking pale skin donning a loose black hooded robe extended a thin arm into the water and scooped something out from beneath the sand. It stood up and studied the object it had cupped in its palm. Flawless, it thought. The avatar turned to a young woman standing behind and extended the cupped hand.
“I think you’ll quite like this one.” The avatar’s soft calming voice nearly always made Taneesha’s baby kick her bulging belly.
She placed her hand over the top hemisphere of her baby bump, like palming a basketball.
“Oh,” she laughed, “there he goes again.” Her other hand plucked a beautiful shell from the avatar’s extended arm.
She was in awe. “Oh wow, it feels just like I remember.” Taneesha had only been to Earth once, as a child, now at twenty-seven this shell made by the ship’s avatar took her mind back to that pleasant place by the beach she holidayed at with her parents and her older brother. She could hardly wait to migrate to the beautiful blue planet.
The Night Express was a Sleeper, capable of carrying two and a half thousand passengers, one of the first, designed for ultra-long voyages through multiple galaxies. Remnants of The Thousand Year War still echo in parts across The Known making it too risky to galaxy-hop, with a potential sentient enemy ship waiting at every entry and exit point of the Euclidean Grid. The safest way, but longest, was for those seeking refuge to one of the twenty-six worlds protected by The Sovereign Alliance, to be put in Cryosleep so their bodies and minds were preserved for the nearly seventy year journey. This particular Sleeper was headed for Earth.
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The problem with the Cryosleep process was that every ten years the mind needs to refresh, and the best way was with one month of awake time. Conversing with other passengers, exercising, sexual activities, anything to reconnect oneself with the ‘real world.’ A one hundred year study found that an extended period of lucid dreaming caused rapid deterioration of the human brain. So, in precisely choreographed intervals, the ship’s Mind would wake the passengers in groups of fifty to one hundred and let them reconnect with reality, tend to their needs, then put them back to sleep in an unabating cycle until the destination had been reached.
The ship’s Mind would SwiftSync with a synthetic body, an avatar, to greet the guests when they wake in an unstartlingform. The avatar could also manipulate the large cavernous interior of the Night Express to create a humanly familiar landscape for its occupants. For this wake cycle it chose to fill the void with an ocean and a beautiful sandy beach, a premonition to their future home, Earth.
“Can I take this with me?” Taneesha asked with pure enthusiasm.
The avatar processed the question by giving the internal mechanics of the Cryosleep capsule a look over, in its mind, so that the young woman would not doubt herself. “Of course.”
Taneesha held the beautiful shell to her nose and took in a deep breath and smiled. “Well, I’ll see you next time.” She made her way back to the Cryosleep area of the ship with a spring in her step.
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With this wake cycle coming to an end, the avatar began planning the next landscape the passengers could enjoy. Maybe a beautiful mountain range with a green meadow at its base, it thought. It had time. The next wake cycle was not for another five years. Plenty of time for it to be alone with its thoughts.
***
In the past two years, since the last wake cycle, the avatar had manipulated the ships internal environment dramatically, draining the oceans and replacing them with picturesque mountain ranges. It was currently working on a meadow at the mountain’s base, but needed to access Earth’s database to create horses, as it did not know what a horse looked like but it knew they belonged on grassy fields. The human passengers would love to ride horses, a fun ancient Earth tradition.
The ship violently shuddered, sending the avatar straight to the ground falling onto its back. “Hmm. How peculiar.” It said out loud knowing no one was listening but merely to make sure its vocal projection module was still working. Being an extension of the ship’s Mind, the avatar only had to think, and it could instantly view the outside of the great starship. “Oh my.” It said out loud again for only the cavernous interior to harken.
A large wormhole appeared, only a few kilometres away, emitting a force which ensnared the Night Express stopping dead in its tracks. By pure thought the avatar attempted to deflect itself away, but it was no use, the gravitational anomaly was far too great. Stuck, it thought. At least the ship had enough thrust to be stationary. The Mind did a quick structural diagnostic to make sure the strain of the force would not rip the Night Express apart. It would hold for approximately five more hours. But before the Mind could say “Oh crap” a monolithic object snapped into view dwarfing the great starship. Then, just as fast, the wormhole blinked shut and vanished into the Black. The avatar gasped internally. The object appeared organic, unfathomably massive, in fact, the Night Express looked like a fly on an elephant in comparison.
“Curious.” It said out loud, noting a faint blue glow pulsing underneath the surface of this strange monolith. The ship’s avatar found his level of curiosity increasing rapidly in time with the pulse of lights. It almost looks….alive. It thought.
Is this a living creature? How did it form a wormhole without any apparent machinery? Was it a naturally occurring vortex? The avatar had many questions buzzing around its Mind but, first things first, protocol demanded a human representative of Earth’s Sovereign Alliance engage with an unidentified ship or being, so it scanned the passenger manifest for a suitable candidate.
There were only five acceptable candidates on board the ship’s Mind, the avatar, decided to wake the three that most suited just to be safe, less is better in situations like this. It greeted them one by one as they woke from Cryosleep, informing them of the current situation, then gathered them all onto the bridge of the giant interstellar star ship where they could view the mysterious monolith for themselves.
Captain HarokenReyneer of the Solar Navy was the first to speak. “Did you scan for possible life signs? Could be an organic ship? Stranger things have happened.” Even though he was in casual sleep attire he was still standing tall, straight and powerful. Legs lined up with with shoulders and hands behind his back.
Dr Tobias Shaw highly decorated astrophysicist, cosmologist and theoretical physicist interjected. “No. An organic ship? Come on, ah Captain is it?”
Captain Reyneer nodded.
“This cannot be a ship. It’s…” Dr Shaw held his hands up in line with his chest and began squeezing the air. “…it looks alive doesn’t it?”
The ship’s avatar gestured to a holographic rendering of the enormous craft that quickly started to zoom out so they could grasp the magnitude of its monolithic stature.
“This is certainly the largest ship I have ever encountered.” Kaylen Decker had been too in awe to speak but finally got to say her piece. “It does look alive. It looks kinda slimey, like its shimmering.” She was a starship engineer specializing in structural analysis. “May I?” She gestured towards the holographic interface.
The avatar nodded in approval. “Please.”
Kaylen began motioning her hands spinning the holographic projection of the monolith to get a 360 degree view. She zoomed in on an area on the side of the object. “See how these are all over the top half?” The top half of the object was made up of individual sheets on a strange shell type material. “This is just very poor starship design. There’s absolutely no need to use that many panels unless you want the middle of the ship to…. ”
Dr Shaw on edge, “To what?”
Kaylen fell into a chair a closed her eyes so tight that tears began squeezing out the corner of her eyes. She took a deep breath to compose her self. “…to bend.” She whispered.
The avatar lent down and put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it Kaylen?”
“It’s a Yon.”
Dr Shaw glanced out the view screen at the great monolith. “A what?”
Captain Reyneer joined Dr Shaw’s gaze. “An Astral Isopod.”
The ship’s avatar reached its own Mind and instantaneously looked up every recorded object in the Sovereign Alliances database of creatures. “Oh yes, you are correct.”
Dr Shaw was at this point jumping up and down like a child. “Can someone tell me what the hell that is!”
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