Titans

The Stelliferous Era [239:09]

Location: The Hermes Starship

I’m doing an inventory of the ships supplies when I find them: the great big stack of paperwork – documents, letters, hand-written notes – all tucked away in one of two labs on-board the Hermes Starship, buried in a bottom drawer as if someone wanted to hide them.

When I take them out, placing the pile on a nearby workbench, my fingers tingle with discovery. It isn’t like finding tools and personal objects, medicine and food; it’s clear, direct evidence of whoever was on-board before us. It’s them, speaking to us from the past through hand-writing and black Courier typeface. It fills me with excitement.

At once, I forget about the inventory, setting to rest the notebook I was using to count and record the ships provisions. I pick up the first page of the stack. It’s a typed report on the bacterial presence found in a certain type of rock. I put it to the side and pick up the next.

I’m a quarter of the way into the stack, with nothing to show for my work, when Lilith walks past the doorway. A moment later, she backtracks, peering curiously into the room.

“What are you doing?” she asks in the blunt manner I have grown accustomed to.

“I found these while doing some inventory. They’re documents. I thought they might hold some clues as to our situation.”

“And do they?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t found anything.” I pick up the next page, discover it’s a letter regarding funding for further research into a certain plant-type, and add it to the growing pile of disappointing findings.

Her eyebrows drawn together, Lilith approaches and takes a seat at the bench opposite me. “Yet,” she says.

I look up to see her staring at me, pointedly meeting my eyes. “Yet,” I concede.

Without a word, she takes a handful of papers off the top of the stack and starts looking through them. After a brief moment – in which my emotions cycle through suspicion to curiosity to thankfulness – I return to what I was doing.

“So how are you doing?” she asks.

I glance up quickly. “As well as can be expected,” I reply, trying to keep the wariness from my voice. “How’s your head?”

“Fine. I thought the planet ripping apart was a neat development. It makes you wonder.”

“About what?”

“About this place. It doesn’t feel natural.”

“It isn’t natural.”

“Which is why I wonder.”

I sigh and put down the note I was reading. “While I don’t mind a good circulatory conversation, right now, I wish you’d get to the point.”

“What if it’s not real? What if this is some kind of – simulation?”

I send her a look that says, Are you serious? But in all fairness, the thought had occurred to me. A planet placed in sped-up primordial conditions? What a location to train astronauts in. That is, if we’re astronauts. At this point, who knows.

“It was just an idea,” Lilith says, and looks back down at the report in her hands. Although she does her best to hide it, I can see I’ve annoyed her.

“I thought the same, once,” I tell her. She looks up, her expression enigmatic. “But it doesn’t explain why we lost our memories. Why erase us and place us in here? I can’t see the point.”

She nods and the both of us continue flipping through the stack.

It’s not long after that we start finding things.

“Look at this.” Lilith thrusts a typed letter in my face. I read it. It seems mostly to address a mission into space and the lack of information the endeavour provided. However, a paragraph at the end captures my interest.

Mission POR3 proved that further research is not only possible, but necessary. After the failure of POR1 and POR2, I understand the hesitancy to continue the funding for this department. But we need to consider the benefits to humanity provided by further exploration, as well as the enormous leaps in the scientific field that could be made. This is not like researching planets or stars. This kind of research could lead to a completely new understanding of the universe and the forces that guide our existence. We’re talking about life-altering discoveries – things that could change everything we think we know. We owe it humanity, and to the universe, to keep searching.

“Sounds like they were onto something,” Lilith says. “Something big.”

Nerves tingle in my gut; a jittery sensation. I put the letter down beside the stack we’ve already looked through. The corners of Lilith’s lips tug with beginning of a smile. She can feel it too: the thrill of starting a new pile, one for discovery instead of disappointment.

Renewed, we continue.

A minute later, I find a report about the creation of a new starship, specifically designed to withstand high levels of radiation and gravitational force.

I show it to Lilith. “Withstand gravitational force?” she asks.

I feel the pieces of a puzzle starting to draw together in my mind. “Gravity. It’s talking about withstanding the pull of gravity with the aid of something stronger than engines and propulsion systems.”

“Do you think they’re talking about this ship?”

“I think it’s very likely.”

We find more documents like these: reports on ground-breaking missions, letters about the instruction of astronauts on the use of the newly constructed starship, letters about ongoing training for upcoming missions, articles about the effects of collapsing supernovae and the singularities caused by black holes, and sheets and sheets of calculations about flight paths and time-slippage.

We’re most of the way through the original stack when I find something truly astonishing. Every piece of information I’ve read realigns itself, suddenly making perfect sense.

“Oh my god,” I say, unable to help myself. “Oh my god.”

“What is it?” Lilith asks. “What have you found?”

It’s a letter to someone called E.L. Garen describing a recent finding in the scientific community. The writer calls it 'a massive topological change of unknown nature, originating from the collapse of a supernova’ and urges for the ability to conduct further research by way of manned missions. It’s signed by a Dr. Carrie Brown.

I look up. “We may have a way out of here.”