The Anomaly

Arrival

Staring out the lounge viewport at the emptiness of flat-space, her face made up with a dusting of cold starlight, Gina didn't bother to acknowledge The Capt'n coming up to stand beside her.

"Doesn't look very anomalous does it?" he observed.

"That's because the Anomaly is in hyperspace, you old gimp." Gina knew that he knew this. She was just feeling grumpy.

The Capt'n sighed. "So where's his nibs?"

Gina's gaze held for a moment, then faltered. Relenting, she answered. "On the bridge. He's plugged in."

"Really? You persuaded him then." He grinned. "Always knew you would."

Gina showed no pleasure in the compliment. "He agreed to look, that's all."

Time passed. Gina left the viewport and paced about the room. The Capt'n went to mix a drink, changed his mind when he saw the expression on her face.

More time passed. Ernest appeared.

Ernest knew it wouldn't be the same as being really out there. It would be like one of those virtual reality playbacks of a recorded scene – transforming you into a ghost, able to move about the scene at will, to view it from every possible angle, just not to influence the prerecorded events in any way.

This small technical quibble was all that separated the act from something he had vowed never to do again. Would the experience be like a vaccine, he wondered? An attenuated pathogen that would strengthen his resistance were he to encounter the real thing? Or would it have the opposite effect – a light beer to an alcoholic, the smallest taint of alcohol enough to reanimate that old addiction? Damn The Capt'n and his schemes.

Their first act on arrival had been to fire a series of probes into the Anomaly. Called skipping stones, these were little more than a transmitter atop a stripped-down drive, flitting in and out of flat space, sending back signals as they went. How long they lasted was pure random chance. Driven by automatics as they were, their inevitable fate was to end up smeared across the void when a turbulent patch of hyperspace caused the probe's constituent atoms to fall back into the real in a different order to which they left it. Of the ten stones they launched, the luckiest made it eight whole light-days before succumbing, requiring the ship to park up and wait for the eight days it took for this final silence to crawl back to its mothership at pedestrian light speed. With all the sensor logs now in, Ernest had been able to reconstruct a picture of the regions of hyperspace through which the probes had passed. That done, all that remained was to don his headset, enter the construct, and discover what it had to tell him.

He'd had to negotiate with his own anger to do this. To go back in after all this time was a risk, and therefore a concession. But he had to know the truth – that's how he'd put it to himself. The Capt'n was a phony, but the Anomaly might well be for real. His position would become so much easier, he'd reasoned, if he knew for sure that the whole thing was just another of The Capt'n's scams. Without the Anomaly it was game over. The only other motivation was plunder; he wasn't interested in that. He'd simply refuse to cooperate.

And if it's real? his anger had responded. To this he had no answer. Just an inward shrug. A case to be dealt with when and if it arose.

So in he dived.

The act of navigating a ship is an out-of-body experience. You expand into the space around you, become part of it all, the better to ride its bucks and bumps. Much the same was true of this simulated reconstruction. When Ernest engaged his neural implants, he left the physical realm behind him, plunged into that strange sea that was hyperspace, tested its waters and its weather.