Graham Heights
MayFlower
Chapter 89
Earth?
Journal Entry March 23rd 2162Julia Scott
We are alone! I don’t mean the ship. I
mean the six of us. No one knows who we are or where we came from.
I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Mr. Monroe has wipe Earth
from the memories of the ship’s crew and passengers. They simply believe
that we have been wondering for hundreds of years on this ship. Looking
for a world to settle.
Tiffany is trying to get to the bottom of all this, but so far,
she has made no headway. She herself has been mostly shut down to the
past twenty years. She only wakes to ensure the stasis pods are operating
correctly, check her security systems and her link to the main computer and the
conditions of the compartment they are in. Then she would turn herself
back off or in standby. So, it was a complete surprise when the clocks
and calendars were changed. Then any record of Earth seemed to disappear from
the computers. She eventually woke us up. Well she woke me up.
We were schedule to sleep another sixteen years, even that was wrong, but
that was what the main computer was telling the crew. It may have had
something to do with the calendar change. The new calendar has fifteen,
thirty day, months in it. And each day only had twenty hours.
The first thing we had to do was get our bearings.
Where were we. How long were we actually out. Who is affect… Julia dropped her stylist
“Harold!” Julia
was in total panic.
Tiffany came into
the compartment, “Julia, are you okay.”
Julia looked at
her friend and asked, “Is Harold awake.”
Tiffany said
matter of fact, “You are the first that I awoke once I discovered the
discrepancies.”
“How long has this
been happening? I mean how..” She was at a loss for words.
“It’s okay.
You have only been awake for six hours. Your system is having a
hard time adjusting to consciousness.” Tiffany steadied Julia “It will
pass.” Tiffany picked Julia up and took her back to her bed. “You
need to stay here for a few more hours.” Tiffany put her down. “You and I
will go over the records that I have found. Both your husband and son are
still asleep. We need to see how extensive this...adjustment.
Fabrication. Alteration. That is what we can call it; The Alteration. We need to determine how extensive this alteration is and how
much of the crew is affected.”
Julia was
overwhelmed at the idea that people could go into the stasis pods as humans
from the planet Earth and come out as… Humanoids from an unknown origin.
How did he do this, why and…” Julia felt a sharp pain in her right arm.
She looked up at Tiffany as her sight dimmed.
“You need to sleep,
and this will help.” Tiffany said as she pulled the needle out of Julia’s arm.
The lights were
dim and the room quiet. Julia opened her eyes and asked the wall to
increase illumination twenty percent. The room complied. The lights
return. Julia sat up in bed. She remembered what Tiffany had done
and why she was awake. Her mental ability to take stock in her body and
remember what was going on was much better now. She really needed to let
her body have some normal sleep and get its bearings. Now she needed to
find Tiffany and start getting to the bottom of what was going on.
Tiffany walked
into the room, “I noticed you turned the lights on.” As she explained how
she knew Julia was awake.
“I need some
cloths.” Julia said as she got up from the bed. Her gown was hindering
her movement as it was not meant for normal sleep. It was nothing more
than a flat piece of fabric with sleeves. It had no back, and Julia could
feel the cold against her naked skin.
“They are in the
shower compartment. You need to clean yourself and try to have a bowel
movement. It will get your system back in order.” Tiffany did not
wait for a reply. “I will have some solid food for you when you get out.”
Julia did not hear a choice in Tiffany’s words so she turned and
went to the compartment that adjacent her sleeping quarters. There were
two and she picked the one on the right. Not know if it was correct.
“The other one.”
Tiffany corrected.
Julia altered
course and entered the bathroom. She took a shower and it invigorated her
skin. Her mind was fully taken over by the experience as it had been starved for
decades by the stasis pod. Once she was done she toweled off, got dressed
in the grey jumpsuit and joined Tiffany in the ready room. Upon entry
Tiffany handed her a cup of something warm.
“What’s this?”
Julia asked.
“Breakfast.
It will be the same for lunch and dinner. Your system needs to get
used to food again...slowly.” Tiffany said, again with no choice.
Julia complied.
Tiffany had been watching over them for almost fifty years now. Or
was it longer with the change of the calendar. Either way she has proven
herself to be indispensable to their survival. Julia tried very hard to
remember all the details in Tiffany’s rescue. When the security team took
her they just left her on the processing table, shut down. Who knows how
long they were going to leave her there. Julia remember telling Harold
that they were going to have to find another T model AI to put her in Tiffany’s
place. This way the crew wouldn’t miss her and come looking for her
again. It took them almost six months of sneaking around the ship to find
another T and get it out of storage, move it to the processing compartment and
then swap the two. Once that was done they had to put something else in
the storage box that the T model was in. Tiffany was the inspiration for
what was placed back in the box. They found a maintenance droid and half
took it apart to place it in the box. Then they put the box back.
Everything would look normal for the next five hundred years. This
thought brought her back to the presence. What is normal now?
I have the surveillance program up and running. Based on my
own calculations we.. you have been asleep for ninety-seven years, Earth time.
We are still one hundred and sixty-eight years from the halfway point and
we are traveling at point four, six light. The crew has been swapped out
twice and the current crew has been on for almost seven years. They are
dew for sleep in three.”
“Harold?” Julia
asked.
“He has not been
awake since you last saw him.” Tiffany informed her.
Julia put him out of her mind for the moment. They needed to
know what the crew doesn’t know. “How do you think we need to proceed?”
“We know the
calendar and time were altered. Earth is not mentioned in any file and
our destination is now known as the Gamma colony. Which indicates that
there may be others.”
“Others?” Julia
was surprised.
Again, a question
that cannot be answered now. Now they needed to know where they stood
with the crew. “What of the AIs. Why did they shut them all down?”
“According to
transmissions there was a security breach and all the AIs were shut down.”
Tiffany reported. “Upon re-animations they are to be reloaded with an
encrypted file. I could not access it, as we do not have a direct
connection to the main computer. So, we won’t know what it is until they
actually start processing AIs in another two hundred years or cycles as they
call them now.”
“So that’s no
help.” Julia said as she sipped her breakfast.
“How did you
discover that they don’t know where we came from?” Julia was curious.
“As a precaution I
have all transmissions both internal and external, monitored.” Tiffany
opened a file on the internal computers of the ship. “They show that
after the first crew was processed for stasis and the second crew had little to
know contact between them. Something about an error in the sleep matrix.
So they actually missed each other by two days. The new crew then
programmed the main disk to point at a different point in space. They
called it a correction. No further transmissions were received from
Earth.”
“Okay, so if Mr.
Monroe wanted to keep control of his ship, why did he cut the communication?”
Julia was perplexed.
Tiffany typed a
file name in and then said, “We have been receiving communications, but not from
Earth. The coordinates were from the places out here. In deep
space.”
“How?” Julia
looked at the transmissions. They had different coordinates each time.
“The crew does not
mention how. It seems normal to them and they don’t question it.” Tiffany
added another piece to the strange puzzle.
“You were right to
wake me.” Julia said as she took another sip. “This is going to take some
time to unravel and I don’t think we are going to like the answers.”
Julia turned her chair around and looked back through the bulkhead
door. She was studying the panel adjacent to the food locker. Behind
which was hid her journals and those of her great grandfathers. She could
not help but feel that these books would become the anchor point for truth.
And unlike a computer, they could not be erased. But they could be
destroyed. It would become her mission to keep them safe for as long as
it took…. As long as it took for man to ask where did we begin? And why
are we here? We will be the remnant of mankind that knows the truth.
“Found it.”
Tiffany said triumphantly.
“What?”
“It was a
transmission shortly after we left Earth, but after the first of the humans
entered stasis.” Tiffany said..
“What does a
transmission have to do with what is happening now?”
“Oh.” Tiffany
said as she continued to look at the transmission. “This line of code here.”
She pointed.
It was just ones,
zeros and dashes of two different types. All of which was lost on Julia.
“It’s the code
that woke the nanites.” Tiffany said with total understanding.
“What nanites?”
“Apparently there is
a group of nanites that were dormant in the stasis pods.” Tiffany pointed
to the code again, “This code woke them up. They were specifically
targeting neuron activity.”
“How do you know?”
Julia was interested but had no clue how to translate this code. If they
were going to survive, she was going to have to learn.
“The specific code
function is neural activity” Tiffany froze. Then in a mechanical voice
“They’re reprogramming humans.”
“Reprogramming?”
“It would be
possible to target axons and dendrites to erase memories.” Tiffany said in
complete fascination.
“But how would
they know which.” Julia asked.
“They would have
to provide some type of stimulus and monitor what neurons fired and the result
of all the adjacent activity. It would take decades.” Tiffany
stopped talking.
“Why weren’t we
affected?” Julia asked.
After a second Tiffany responded to Julia’s question, “For the
same reason that Captain Hansen put us here in the first place. We are
completely isolated from the ship’s communications system. Your stasis
pods never received the transmission.” Tiffany typed in some more code and
waited for the computer to respond. She read the code and then looked
back at the door. “We need to wake the others.”
“Why?” Julia ask
with a great deal of concern.
“I need to take
the stasis pods apart and remove the nanites so that you don’t get your
memories wiped out as well.” Tiffany’s voice was still very mechanical.
Her processors were working on too many things.
“You’re not
telling me something.” Julia said.
“Our inquiries may
have triggered the nanites. They are endanger of being discovered and or
having them memories altered.” Tiffany said.
With that they ran
down to the stasis chamber and hit the emergency revival buttons. There
was nothing quick about it, but that was the tradeoff of sleeping for a hundred
years and yet not aging but a few.
Julia looked at
the timer. It would be hours before they knew if they were waking up
friends or total strangers. Deep in the pit of Julia’s stomach came the
realization that the one man she had let into her soul was not going to wake up
to her. He was going to be a complete stranger and she could not go to
him or explain. He would not understand. He couldn't, because he
would have no memory of their relationship.
Mr. Monroe had won, again.
Pro-Log
As you know this blog contains two books of the Remnant Series. Graham Heights is book 3 of the series. Below is more.
Book 4: Obsidian Arrows
Book 1 is now available in paperback or kindle The Grey Abyss
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Thank-you
R. A. Legg
R. A. Legg
R.A. Legg © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
