Wait Calculation, Chapter 1 - A Sci-Fi Novel

A grin tugged at the corner of Matthew’s mouth. He had known exactly where to look. The Generation-class starship Genesis would arrive at the planet Proxima Centauri b exactly when the distance between it and Earth was shortest. Matthew slowly shook his head as he thought about the team who originally solved the equation 20,000 years ago. Their calculations were immaculate.

As the optical telescope operator, Matthew was the first to see the planet with his own eyes. It brought to mind the stories of sailors calling out “land ho!” as a foreign shore came into view on their spyglass. He had pointed his own spyglass in precisely the right spot, and the fuzzy dot before him was indeed land. Of this he was certain.

The crimson glow from the distant red dwarf was negligible, barely illuminating its largest satellite. In another few years he would be able to see it with the naked eye as a new star in the sky. And then a decade after that they would be finally be in orbit.

A wave of excitement rose inside him. The Genesis contained none of the crew that had boarded on Earth. Nor their children, or their grandchildren. Matthew was eight hundred generations down the tree from his closest Earth-born ancestor. Now he was virtually guaranteed to be one of the first humans to set foot on a planet besides Earth.

He glanced at the chronometer at his workstation as he pondered what he would write in his daily report. Settling on a subdued tone, he suppressed his excitement and annotated his observations in neutral scientific language, doing his best to avoid anything too pompous. Doubtless his report would end up on the history discs and be committed to heart by generations to come, so it was best to err on the side of restraint. He couldn't help but think of an ancient passage, now 10,000 years old but still taught to children:

Today we have executed The Turn and are firing all engines in retrothrust as we begin our deceleration. This is truly a momentous moment to behold. It was an honor to be the helmsman to execute this maneuver. Respectfully submitted, Alexander Helmsman-398.

Helmsman-398 had achieved two milestones that day – one navigational and one linguistic. Children for centuries afterward would compete to use his phrase “momentous moment to behold” in the most ironic manner possible. Matthew recalled the time he had described a particularly difficult bowel movement as such with a smirk. He would avoid providing any such fodder for mockery in his own historic report.

After he committed his update to the central server, he turned to his counterpart on the radio telescope.

“All set?” Matthew asked.

“Give me an hour,” Theodore replied. “I am trying to isolate a waveform.”

Matthew rolled his eyes and opened a different program at his workstation. He idly sorted colors and numbers in an ancient game while he waited on his friend. From their position at the top of the Spire, there was little else to occupy his time. The Genesis was a long cigar-shaped ship with two rings spinning around the body. The Spire was a mast rising several hundred meters out of the core of the ship and terminating at the module in which he was seated. It was about as remote as you could get on the ship of 800. No chance at idle conversation with a passerby here. The instruments required insulation, and most days this suited Matthew. But most days he didn’t make an observation worth talking about.

At last, Theodore was finished. He sat, brow furrowed, staring at the screen for several seconds. “I don’t know how to log this,” he said.

“Just use your old standby, ‘apparent noise.’” Matthew said.

“That’s the thing,” Theodore said. “It’s not noise.”

“Let me see,” Matthew said, swiveling in his chair to see the radioscope screen more clearly.

Theodore tapped on the keyboard a few times and the waveform zoomed out. “This is the past 11 hours,” he said, referring to the beginning of their shift.

A flicker of recognition passed over Matthew’s face. With little to do at his own station besides chart star positions, Matthew had become nearly as competent a radoscope tech as Theodore. It helped that in addition to being friends, they also shared a significant amount of DNA. The entire crew shared a baseline standardization, but he and Theodore had each been grown from the same egg. Being twins made them a rarity. Most children were born as triplets, quadruplets, or as part of even more efficient yields.

“That’s not noise,” Matthew said. “That’s repetition. How long has this been going on?”

“I went back a month,” Theodore said. “It’s there if you know where to look.”

“You don’t think-” Matthew started.

“That’s not for me to decide,” Theodore interrupted. “I could lose my job over a false alarm like that. I like working here too much to risk it.”

“So what are you going to write in your report?”

“I wrote ‘possible repetition’.”

Matthew thrust a finger at the screen. “But that’s clearly repetition.”

“It’s just a pattern as far as I’m concerned. Repetition implies intelligence. I’m not going to make that call. It could just as easily be a rotating radioactive body, and those things were scattered all over the Sun’s Kuiper Belt. We’re almost inside Proxima Centauri’s; I would almost be surprised if we didn’t see something like this.”

Matthew considered that for a moment. Theodore was right, he reasoned. Best not to take chances when your mistakes or overreactions would be committed to history. They often had long conversations as they laid in their dormitory about the merits and drawbacks of different choices in various statistical scenarios. Matthew frequently saw risk as acceptable. Theodore did not. They could both agree, however, that your reputation was never worth gambling.

Second shift arrived right on time. The two friends briefed their replacements on the exciting observations both had made that day. There was no reason to be restrained in person. The video recording systems on the Genesis were deactivated just a few years after leaving Earth. The first Admin had come to the realization that the servers would never have enough storage capacity to house even a fraction of what was taken and so the Captain had shut down every camera on board. With crime virtually non-existent, there was no reason to automatically record anything.

The four telescope operators quickly reached a consensus: Theodore had written the report properly, but there was almost certainly repetition. The incoming radioscope operator promised to monitor the waveform for her entire shift and come to get them if it changed.

Theodore and Matthew were relaxing in the cafeteria several hours later when the Captain himself walked in to the largest room on the ship, scanning the few dozen faces present. Once he spotted Theodore, he immediately headed in their direction.

The two looked up from their meal. “Captain,” said Theodore.

“Hello Radioscope-797, I’d like you to come with me,” the captain said.

“Is something wrong?” asked Theodore.

“The Staff has a few questions.”

The Staff was a group of senior officers that essentially completed the leadership of the starship. The captain’s power was nearly absolute, but the Staff did have the ability to veto him with a unanimous vote. Officially, the Judiciary had an equal say in the administration of the ship, but in practice they were rarely needed. Tradition reigned supreme aboard the Genesis, and conflicts were few and far between. A lifetime was too long to be at odds with your fellow crew mates, so most people kept things conciliatory.

Theodore glanced at Matthew nervously and followed the captain out of the room. Matthew’s knee began to bounce and he gazed at the door as it swung closed behind his friend. After gazing at his food for a few moments, he got up with a start and brought his still half-full tray over to the recycler. He walked briskly out of the cafeteria and headed back to his bunk.

A few hours later, the sound of the door latch releasing startled Matthew awake. He had been snoozing. The door swung open and Theodore walked in, looking drained. He dropped heavily into a seat at the small table and stared blankly at the wall.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?” asked Matthew, breaking the silence.

“The Judiciary was there. So was the Mathematician.”

“And? What did they want?”

Theodore paused. “They wanted to know why I thought I saw repetition on the scope today.”

Matthew’s voice rose in volume as he made a frustrated gesture toward the door. “Did you tell them it was because you saw repetition?”

Theodore paused again, longer this time. His voice was barely audible when he finally spoke. “They agreed.”

Matthew froze. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. So it was true. For all intents and purposes, the crew of the Genesis had detected a signal generated by some form of intelligence on the same day their destination had come into view. The implications were obvious. The Genesis was not the only lifeform in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri b.

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This is my entry into the First Chapter Contest being organized by @thewritersblock.

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@DollarsAndSense is a father, veteran, participant in the rat race, freelance writer, and volunteer EMT. Want to read more of my stories?

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Unless otherwise noted, all text and images in this post are my own and may not be reused without my permission.

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