Chapter 5

John woke about four hours after he had lain down. He was filled with mixed emotions. He had enjoyed the fantasy, and it had worked out in the end, but ... When he had learned of the device, he had made the assumption that he would be aware that he was living a fantasy. Yet, on more than one occasion during the dream, he had felt in mortal danger. Now that he was awake, and conscious, he could think back on it with equanimity. But it had seemed so real. He sat with his legs over the edge of the bed for quite some time, before he could find motivation for motion.

John was hoping that today would be rather dull, considering all the activity of the previous three days. He shuffled his way to the personal waste disposal room. He didn’t even bother looking at himself in the mirror. The events of the previous evening were bothering him. Why was he feeling guilty over having sex with someone in his sleep? Maybe it was the strange sense of fondness he felt towards her at the end.

He shuffled his way to the mess.

‘This is not how the “morning after” is supposed to feel,’ he thought.

He ordered some breakfast and coffee. He sipped at his coffee, but was just pushing the food around on his plate. He was lost in thought. This was how Sam found him, a short time later. If the visuals weren’t enough, his other indicators were verifying that John was in a depression.

She approached him and asked, “John? Is there a problem?”

“Yes!” he answered immediately.

Then a thoughtful look crossed his face.

“No.”

After breathing a heavy sigh, he finally said, “Sam, I don’t know.”

As he said this last, he seemed to collapse in on himself.

“John, tell me what you are thinking about. Maybe we can make some sense of it, together.”

John surrendered to the inevitable, and started talking. He shared everything with the AI, holding back nothing. He started with his expectations of what he’d thought would happen, and ended with his unexplainable fondness for the fictional character he’d held in his arms. Although Sam had said nothing during his soliloquy, he felt better at its end. It was as though a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Sam told him she could adjust the program’s parameters, so that he would be aware that he was in a fantasy. John told her to wait, and give him some time to think about it.

He took his plate back to the replicator, and got a fresh one, with hot food.

Sam watched John go to the replicator. There wasn’t a logical explanation for the emotional response that John had experienced. She wondered if in John’s subconscious, he was aware that it was she running the program for him. She had to admit that she was receiving sensory inputs that could best be described as emotions. She shook herself out of her reverie as John approached the table.

John, now feeling less burdened (though still confused), ate heartily. As he finished and was sipping his coffee, the conversation took an interesting turn. After all, how often does a person get to discuss religion with an alien twist? Though the discussion did lead John and Sam to similar conclusions, they decided that perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad of an idea to make some kind of contact with the Rhylertians.

John had suggested sending a ship with an AI aboard, but Sam talked him out of it. She explained that a ship that showed up with an AI, and no one else, would become Rhylertian property again. In addition, they might or might not listen to any message sent.

They decided on building a shielded, cloaked probe. It would broadcast the Rhylertian friend-or-foe-signal. Sam was familiar with several such signals, but admitted that they were probably very old, and perhaps archaic. Still, she insisted there was a chance it wouldn’t be destroyed, if for no other reason than curiosity. They decided to include a video, covering much of their discussions and conjectures. John told Sam that he trusted her to design it. His only request was that there would be absolutely no way to ascertain its point of origin. After Sam looked at John quizzically, John explained.

“So far, no one knows where we are. However, there is no guarantee that Rhyler is still in Rhylertian control,” he continued. “Just sending a probe is taking a great risk. However, if the probe can be traced, it would lead whoever has control right back to us. If it can’t be traced to its origin, then we are safe, yet we have taken care of our obligation to Rhyler. Perhaps later we might open up the lines of communication. But for now, I want to concentrate on getting this sector secured and protected.”

Sam and John continued their conversation through several more cups of coffee. John mentioned he was going to need a work area with a monitor, a keyboard, and access to get on Earth’s internet. As soon as he had finished his request, a drone (similar to the construction drones, but smaller) came out of a cabinet in the mess. It headed out to the flight area.

Sam explained that since he had asked for several changes to the ship, she thought it would be wise to keep their own drone onboard. It would then be available, when needed. John suggested that all the new ships, and the old ones that would be joining them, should keep several on board. They would be handy in case emergency repairs were needed.

The United States government had built many underground facilities and bunkers. The only difference between this one, and the others, is that the government had no idea they had built it. The money had been milked from various cash cow projects and directed to its construction. When it was completed, everyone who had anything to do with it, and their families met with various tragic, but explainable accidents.

Lieutenant Jones (not his real name but one he had adopted after he left his other life behind) was looking at the large display screen that took up an entire wall. On it was a map of North America. It was covered with red dots. Each one stood for a reported landing or sighting. Each had been investigated in turn. Many by his predecessors and were either too old now to remember what happened, or were dead.

As he was pondering what his groups next move should be. Suddenly the screen shifted and a map of the world replaced the map of North America. The red were now displayed in denser groups and were suddenly joined by a handful of amber lights. The amber lights were flashing and made the lieutenant was curious as to what they meant. The system was initially intended to display incoming missiles.

He turned to the man at the console and said, “Smith?”

“Sir, we have multiple inbound. I’m tracking At least forty-eight independent objects traveling though the high atmosphere.”

“Are they missiles? Is the planet under attack?”

“I don’t think so sir, the objects are slowing down. My guess would be they are going to make a controlled landing.”

John asked about the probes, specifically the one in the United States. Sam told him it was one of the first deployed. She went on to inform him it had landed perhaps an hour earlier. John asked about the time there, and was informed that it was still an hour before daylight. He slapped his head, realizing he was missing a major opportunity.

John had Sam start making calls to the news agencies in the DC area. Each call varied in a few details. He wanted her to mention a streak of light across the sky, and watching the light make what appeared to be a controlled landing, next to the White House.

While she was busy with that, John headed directly to the flight console. A few minutes later, he had the ship headed towards Earth.

John had made certain he engaged the cloaking device, before lifting off from the moon. He knew there was a possibility that the government had already spotted the probe, and removed it. After all, the White House did have roving patrols. Someone had to spot it fairly quickly. John just hoped that in their infinite need to fulfill their protocols, they hadn’t removed the probe yet.

As John put the ship into a hover near the White House, he discovered he was very lucky. The army had personnel deployed all over the place, but the probe was still on the lawn. Sam started recording with her digital recorders. The army would have given anything for her night vision technology. The pictures she was taking were as clear as if taken in daylight, without the distortion or coloration problems of Earth-based night vision equipment. They stayed long enough to take digital film of the military bomb squad.

John and Sam watched in amusement as the squad approached the probe, and then jumped back when it opened up. They repeated this behavior several times.

John was nearly lying on the floor the fourth time it happened, he was laughing so hard. They eventually figured out that the probe wasn’t going to blow up. They loaded it onto one of the army trucks, and hauled it away.

Since they were this close to Earth, John had Sam make DVDs of the military removing the probe. He emailed it to every news agency he could come up with. John noticed that Sam had made certain that there were several close ups of the probes contents, when it opened.

Sam decided that since they were here, they could implement an idea she’d had, to make some investment money. As it turned out, she had been studying gambling on Earth. She thought she could manipulate the balls on the mega-million multi-state lottery game, so that a set of numbers on a ticket purchased by John would be drawn. Sam suggested that John buy ‘quick picks’, since they are random numbers and wouldn’t look suspicious. John figured why not, especially after he found out the jackpot was at one hundred eighty million dollars. It would be a good start to what he had planned for the future.

The two ended up taking care of several things while they were on Earth. John changed into some street clothes, and retrieved his pick-up truck from the farm. He stopped by an all-night gas station, and bought some lottery tickets. The town near his farm was so small, that there was no long-term parking available. Instead, he rented a large self-storage unit for six months, and parked his truck in it. When he finished locking everything up, Sam had the ship waiting to pick him up.

John was very glad to be back on the ship and underway. While he was on the surface, there had been an irritating buzz in the back of his mind. It reminded him of the static in between stations on the radio. It had stayed with him constantly, until he and Sam were well away from Earth.

The trip back to the moon was uneventful. John landed inside the base, though he didn’t intend to leave the ship just yet. He had Sam help him design a website that couldn’t be corrupted. On it, he placed the bomb squad video, some three-dimensional drawings of the probe, and the close-up pictures of the cover of the book. The pictures showed three languages, all saying ‘Galactic Standard’. He started posting the information on how to gain access to every site he could think of, which had anything to do with UFO’s. Then he expanded the list of links to include sci-fi based sites. After a few hours he rubbed his eyes, and pushed himself away from the monitor.

John asked Sam if she would replicate the site in all the Earth’s languages, and make links to any UFO-based sites, which were posted in each of those languages. He knew she was working on it, even though she accompanied him as he left the ship. As an after thought he suggested she post the video on YouTube. In the end it was the video posted on YouTube that was the most popular and the most watched. The video gained new popularity when someone added music to the scenes of the bomb squad approaching the probe and jumping away. It went viral.

John wanted to find out how the construction of the next ten thousand probes was coming. As John entered the room, he was surprised to see the two drones sitting, inactive, off to the right of the entrance. The only explanation for that, would be that they were finished with the probes. John was deep in thought as they left the room, though he did take the time to examine the progress on the new ship. He knew that it still had at least another day’s worth of work to be done on it, but it looked nearly finished.

“So,” John said thoughtfully, “what are you going to call your new ship?”

“Me?” Sam asked in a startled voice. “You want me to name the new ship?”

“It is going to be your new temporary home. So yes, I want you to name it.”

Sam looked thoughtful for a moment and then a smile came to her face.

“The Valkyrie,” Sam said with finality.

John realized just how appropriate the name was. The original description of the Valkyries, were of dark angels of death, who soared over battlefields like birds of prey. Later, it came to mean ‘shield maidens’ who came to the battle to smite the wicked. In this case, with this ship’s capabilities, both terms worked.

“It sounds as though you have been studying Earth’s mythology,” John said in a slightly amused voice.

“It’s quite amazing,” Sam answered excitedly. “In no other culture have I seen anything like it. I have studied Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology, and I have started on Egyptian, Mayan, and Celtic.”

“Well, since we are using mythology, then I will classify our ship designs with mythological designations. The small one-man fighters will be classified as the Wraith class. The two-man fighters will be the Griffin class. Finally, the two-man fighters that carry the four-man assault teams will be the Chimera class. I don’t know what to call the frigates, destroyers, or battleships, yet. We will figure that out when the time is right. The Valkyrie fits into the Chimera class category too, since it is simply a modified version. When the ship is done, we will christen it properly. Though that means that on our next trip to Earth, we should probably have you add a good selection of Champagne to the replicator’s menu.”

Sam smiled widely at him, glad that the name she picked out had pleased him. Sam followed John into the lounge, where he got a cup of Earl Gray from the replicator. He sat down in an armchair, and sipped on the tea contemplatively.

“Commander,” Sam started tentatively. “Is there a problem I should be aware of?”

John looked up at her as though he just noticed she was there.

“What makes you think there is a problem, Sam?”

“John, you normally drink coffee or soft drinks. Yet today, you chose tea. You normally acknowledge my presence. Just now, you were staring through me as though I wasn’t here (I did a systems diagnostic, to confirm that my projector was working properly).”

“I’m sorry, Sam. After our trip to Earth, today ... well, it got me to wondering if we are going to make it.”

“I’m not sure that I know what you mean, John.”

“The people on Earth,” he sighed. “I can’t help but wonder if they are going to survive.”

Sam considered trying to give an answer, based on her observations. Then realized that John was merely vocalizing what he had been thinking about a moment before, so she remained silent.

“When we were down on the planet surface, earlier, I came close to retching when I got off the ship,” John continued. “Yet when I moved from the city to the farm, the air smelled sweet. It made me realize just how poorly we are caring for the planet we live on. We pollute the air, and we destroy the ozone. Plus, the deforestation of the rain forests is at a critical level.”

John didn’t notice the tears that were streaming down his face, as he realized what was happening to the planet.

Out of respect, Sam gave John several minutes of silent contemplation before interrupting his thoughts.

“John,” she started softly, “if these things are bothering you, why not do something about them?”

John whirled on her, about to begin a tirade about being only one person, when he saw the serious expression on her face. Sam started to outline her ideas. By the end of her dissertation, John was laughing very hard.

“So ... let me get this straight,” John said, still trying to control his laughter. “We send cloaked drones down, with over-sized replicators. Each night after the lumber crews quit, the drones go in and not only replace the trees that were cut that day, but the trees that were cut the day before.”

Sam nodded, and John started laughing again. He could almost envision the expressions on the cutting crews faces when they came back the next day, and discovered that all those trees they had worked so hard to cut down the day before, had grown back over night.

It turned out that the ozone and pollution problems were nearly as easy to fix. A specially designed drones would go down and clean the pollutants out of the atmosphere.

The ozone was a slightly more difficult problem. Even though the ozone could be replaced by using a huge drone with a large replicator, there was the problem of how much ozone to replace. Sam and John decided that for the moment, they would just replace enough so that the entire planet had the same depth. John mused out loud that it was too bad that they didn’t have a sample of the ozone layer, from a time before man started destroying it.

“So why don’t we go get one,” offered Sam?

John who had been taking a drink of his tea ... choked, coughed, and sprayed tea out of his nose and mouth. Out of the wall came a small thing that looked like an enlarged wireless computer mouse. It passed over the sprayed tea, and the floor was left gleaming once again.

After regaining control of himself, John asked, “Do you want to explain the last remark?”

Instead of giving an explanation, Sam simply produced a projection of a huge white board filled with mathematical computations. It took him a few minutes to go through them all, but when he had done so, he looked at Sam in amazement.

“You mean that the Rhylertians perfected time travel?”

“Yes and no,” Sam answered cryptically. “The Rhylertians had the ability and the knowledge. However, due to the inherent danger, they used it on an extremely limited basis. I have been away for many years, but as of my last communications update, there had only been three voyages into the past. Since all you want to do is obtain atmospheric samples, the risk that anything would be altered, is minimal. This is not to mention that traveling through time is very hazardous.”

“How so?” John asked quizzically.

Sam was quiet for a moment before answering.

“First, you have to understand that during the period a ship passes through time, the ship is stationary. It is moving through time, not space. In addition, the shields will not function during that period. Let’s theorize for a moment, that at some point in the history of that particular area in space, which the ship is occupying as it travels through time, a meteor or asteroid or something passes through that area. Depending on the size of the object, it is likely that the ship will be destroyed.”

John was stunned, and sat down hard in a nearby chair. In the process, he spilled his remaining tea. The cleaning mouse came out of the wall again, and dealt with the mess. John had not considered time travel to be dangerous. Moments before, he was ready to build the temporal driver, and head off through time with Sam.

“Okay, so you and I won’t be going, any ideas?”

“Actually, Commander, I have come up with an idea. Of all of the assets we have now, the most expendable would be one of the AI’s the Hruth built.”

John had to admit that the idea had merit.

“Okay, so what we will do is go ahead with the plans for cleaning the pollutants and replacing some of the ozone. When one of the lobotomized AI’s gets here, we will fit the ship with a temporal shift unit, and send it into the past for samples. Have it perform the tasks we set for it, and then initiate the temporal drive and return. Preferably in the same location where it departed.”

John stood and returned his cup to the replicator. He watched it disappear. He ordered another cup of Earl Gray, and returned to the chair. He sat contemplating, for several moments.

“Commander, it appears that we haven’t discussed everything that is bothering you.”

John smiled and said, “For an AI, you are quite perceptive.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

John realized that a slight blush had come to her cheeks.

“There are actually three things that are still on my mind. The first being that I’m still finding myself thinking like an Earthling. The second is that I was wondering if the subcutaneous implant might have been picking up static from some source when I was on Earth. Finally, I was wondering if we could put satellites around Earth that couldn’t be detected by Earth’s technology.”

“Commander, firstly, it would be impossible for the implant to be the cause of any static that you may have heard.”

“Are you certain? I ask because the entire time I was there, I had this irritating static-type sound in the background of my mind.”

“I’m certain, Commander. There was a problem with the original miniaturized circuitry. After I installed it, it was unresponsive so I removed it. The new circuitry took longer to develop than I had originally thought it would. You do not have an implant, yet.”

“Oh,” was all John could manage, before he was lost in thought again.

“John, I may be able to offer some insight.”

Though John said nothing, he looked at her expectantly.

“Remember, on the first day, I mentioned that your race had the propensity of what you would call ‘psychic abilities’?”

John nodded his head, and hoped that Sam would continue.

“I would suggest that what you are experiencing is your mind’s’ attempt to pick up the thoughts of others.”

“Any ideas about what I can do to shut them out?”

“Nothing concrete, Commander. But if any of your fiction is to be believed, then you have to shield yourself. The stories I have read speak about imagining a shield around your mind, that locks out outside thoughts. The stories also speak of a time after creating a shield. It varies of course. Some speak of seeing the shield you have created and only opening a small channel when you want to read some specific persons thoughts. Others talk of a tendril extending from your mind, to the mind of the person you want to read. Considering the number of things about which your planet’s fiction is correct, I would say that those ideas are a pretty good place to start. As with many things, it will probably take some practice.”

John thought about this. He decided that when they dropped down to the planet, later that day, he would have to see if it would work.

“As for the satellites ... dependant on what you want the satellites to do, I believe we could build some that would easily avoid detection.”

“I would like to be able to monitor radio and television broadcasts, for now, to assure myself that we are undetected. Later, well, I also want to see what the reaction to the probes will be. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have some sort of spying capabilities, too. It would be nice if we could keep nuclear weapons from being launched, also.”

“I’ll get to work on a design, but I don’t think there will be a problem. Well, that last request, ‘stopping nuclear weapons from launching’, might be a problem. I will get back with you after I have done some research. Finally, John ... as for you still thinking like an Earthling ... you were born and raised there. This is, after all, only your fourth day of immersion in the Rhylertian technology.”

“Still, I think I can take some steps to start the change. First, I want you to suggest possible ways to help me complete the things I have planned more efficiently. Let’s start with the drones. How many drones do you think you could manage with your increased processing capacity?”

“I could easily handle fifty, and still take care of anything you require of me.”

John did a quick mental count, and came up with twenty-six, though not all of them were in use.

“Sam, have the two drones that have been building probes, start building twenty-four more construction drones. What is the optimum number of drones working on ships like our new one?”