Chapter 4

Atarah waited for the latest reply from mom. The Blue Ion folks were still working on the problem of shutting down the Drive. So far, it refused every conceivable option. So now they were working out of the box, way out. She just requested that if they tried something that might kill them, to please let her know first. The only piece of information they gave was a puzzle:

She told Jabin, “They said the physics of our drive isn’t quite right. Possibly why it isn’t controllable.”

He questioned her, “Physics not right? Hell, NOTHING here is quite right!”

She remembered the physics of the fusion reactor, the Lawson Criterion, was slightly different as well.

Her dad also added to the puzzle. Their ship had been in the wrong place for fractions of a second. They confirmed the ship appeared to have jumped several hundred kilometers in nanoseconds. That is ... beyond the speed of light. Then, poof, it was back in the right place. Don’t ask. We don’t know. By the way, if you are correct, his message continued, about that kilogram of whatever, the energy would have been a really, really big number and the ship and her and Jabin should be atoms, in fact, less than atoms, just ionized electrons and protons and neutrons blasting away into space. The antimatter creation alone...

She replied that they were still here.

Her mom replied several hours later. Atarah should have turned off the alert, as if a few more hours would make a difference, because the two of them had finally fallen asleep after another attempt at mating, only to be spoiled by their racing thoughts. Atarah was still groggy when she found more puzzles.

First, mom didn’t understand Atarah asking the question, ‘What’s with the hair?’ Her mom had responded with ‘What’s with the bald?’.

Anyway, she pushed that aside as the next information was that they had recorded spectral data for the region in the all-sky surveyor and luckily including the object. It appeared out of nowhere and apparently was traveling at least 99.999999% the speed of light, the limits of the accuracy for their spectral camera. So she assumed it was AT the speed of light. BUT, only for a few hundred kilometers, in well under a millisecond, slowing down, and was apparently a geometric point source, no larger than an electron, yet radiated the photonic energy of a hypernova! Again her mom asked if they were just atoms or not. ‘Do you feel ok?’ was the message from her mom. Atarah frowned. She did not feel ok.

The Blue Ion folks gave them more wonderful news; either cut the propellant feed lines to all 16 thrusters or cut the power links to all 16 thrusters. Cut as in saw through. There wasn’t a physical cutoff valve or a manual circuit breaker, but the good news was that there were the multiple redundant computer-controlled cutoff valves and circuit breakers that the computer already had cut. Whoops.

It was Pilot that offered an explanation, even if not a solution.

“It appears the drive controls have been overridden.”

Atarah nearly burst, “WHAT! Blue Ion?”

Pilot responded, “No, not Blue Ion, Atarah.”

Jabin and Atarah looked at each other.

She said to Jabin, “See! Pilot used my name again!”

Jabin ignored her but asked, “Pilot, who is controlling the drive?”

“Unknown.”

Jabin barked, “Pilot, shut off all remote access to yourself and Drive, immediate. Security lockdown, internal only.”

“Acknowledged. No remote access currently active.”

They went through the security protocols, including viral evals, with no results. Pilot showed nothing accessed the drives via remote or internal comms during the event all the way up to the point they had requested support from her dad and from Blue Ion. Yet they were being controlled. Pilot confirmed that the instructions to Drive were purposefully being ignored. Somebody wanted them to maintain this course and acceleration.

She felt a giggle in her mind.

Another message from her dad arrived. After viewing it, Atarah sent it to Jabin to see. He watched it several times.

“So, darling, I guess we did die,” she stated.

The message said that at 139.999 milliseconds, the fusion reactor lost containment. Gamma blast detected by Fermi IV all-sky gamma telescope. Visual flash detected on GASA all sky. He took so long responding because he had them revalidate the data three separate times. Estimates were about 48 kiloton explosion. Then a single nanosecond later, all was fine.

Tears formed in her eyes, “I don’t think I can take this much more. My physics is ruined! My brain hurts.”

He laughed.

Suddenly, she too started laughing, loudly, explosively, gut-wrenchingly. Happy! Happy! Happy!

“Atarah! WHAT are you doing? ATARAH!” he grabbed her, holding her tight.

She looked at him, puzzled. Her laughter stopped the instant he touched her. Her side ached.

“I need to take you down to Med,” he didn’t give her a choice.

The Auto-Doc found stressors and gave her fluids to counter dehydration. Everything else seemed fine.

Including the baby.

Jabin and Atarah looked at one another.

After several minutes of shock, where the Auto-Doc gave her a mild sedative, she spoke.

“Jabin ... not possible...”

Jabin was the first to recover. He ordered a full workup of Atarah; sonogram, blood chemistry, BCI diagnostics...

Jabin looked at the data. It lined up. She appears to have conceived on the day of the anomaly. She stared at the reports. Jabin requested Pilot run a diagnostic on Auto-Doc and then, when nothing was found, had Auto-Doc rerun the tests.

Atarah whimpered, “Shit, I’m Mary? Well, not immaculate!”

He had Auto-Doc run full tests on him, including sperm count. He was sterile. Vasectomy. He ran another test on her. She was sterile, except for the baby growing in her uterus. Tubal ligation.

She cried, “I don’t want to be Mary! I don’t want to be pregnant! I don’t want ANY of this anymore!”

Suddenly, she felt overwhelming joy, love, heat building inside her belly. She moaned. Her eyes went wide and then rolled up into her head. Her hands gripped the Auto-Doc table tight, and toes curled. Her mind explodes in cascades of orgasm as she climaxes hard multiple times. She screams in ecstasy as her body spasms and shakes on the exam table, her back arching. She gasps at the flood of sex endorphins in her brain.

Jabin grabs her, and immediately it is gone, she is freed from what happened. Sweat rolls down her face, and her cheeks glow. She looks at Jabin forlornly.

She whispers, “What’s happening to me?”

Jabin put Atarah to bed, blocking her BCI from any communication and created a message to her mom, attaching the data and hesitantly including the emotional events. He is anxious about her and just lets Blue Ion and her dad work on the Drive issue. He also sends a message to his mom, telling her about Atarah and, more importantly, the baby. She is a research biologist, maybe she can figure something out, but like everything else here, physical laws don’t seem to apply anymore.

He goes back to her side, falling asleep on the floor, not wanting to disturb her.

An alert comes in. His mom replying very quickly. She asks, ‘Have Auto-doc run a DNA test on the baby. And congratulations, I had expected it to be sooner.’ He puzzled over that. Why would she think they could have a baby? And ... He puzzled over the fact that HIS mother had hair, too!

She dreamed of warm places and of cold places. Joyfulness, Sadness, Fearful, Anger, Disgust, Trust. Feelings flowed over her like being caught in a downpour. Like being swept into a mountain stream. She fell over a waterfall of opposite emotions intermixed, intermingled. Finally, she quieted into a pool of softness.

She dreamed of stars, of beautiful beaches, purple water lapped at blue sand. The sky was aglow in stars and nebula. The scene shifted. She was walking barefoot on the surface of the Moon. Naked in the vacuum. Her body was warm on her front and cool on her back. She drew a little heart in the lunar dust with her toes.

The scene shifted again. She was floating in space above a planet alive with lights across its entire surface. She could see glowing nuclear fires streaming upwards, ships headed towards and away from the surface far below.

Again the scene shifted. She was standing on the inside of a great sphere, many hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. She could see seas and continents and mountain ranges. She could see cities rising tens of kilometers into the interior sky.

Another shift. She was above? beside? below? a black hole. Massive. She fell towards it. She was above? beside? below? a white hole. Stars were erupting out of it.