Chapter 1: The Moon - 3749 C.E.

"So, remind me," requested the Interplanetary Union's Minister for External Affairs. "How have we managed to commit ourselves to the horrendous expense of this mission?"

"Do you mean the Alpha Project, sir?" asked Permanent Secretary Alfredo Miskiewicz from his office at Mare Cognitum on the Moon.

"Whatever it's called now..." said the Minister with a hint of brusque annoyance in his voice. "Just what is it about this mission that is so important that it justifies an expense equivalent to the gross national product of an entire space colony? Surely such expenditure could be better allocated to rather more pressing domestic concerns than a fool's errand to travel beyond the edge of the Solar System."

"The governments of many member states believe that this mission warrants the very highest priority, sir," said the Permanent Secretary. "They believe that the Anomaly might well be an alien presence of some kind and have persuaded the General Assembly to abide by the opinion that it would be more prudent to launch the mission than not to do so."

There were a few seconds between the time when the Minister uttered his words and the Permanent Secretary having received them that was an inevitable consequence of the physical distance between the Moon and the traditional headquarters of the Interplanetary Union on Earth, further exacerbated by the complex algorithms by which his words were encryption that was standard for all but the most mundane communication. In that time the Permanent Secretary had the leisure to evaluate the image of the elected representative while he waited for his words to arrive. His scepticism of any kind of fancy was evidence of the practical bias of his technocratic culture. That the Minister came from Triton was also evident from his overbearing height and the traditional satin and silk uniform he chose to wear. Although he was well over a hundred years old, he looked no older than any other representative of the Interplanetary Union, apart from the eccentric few who refused to artificially prolong their youth.

"What is the informed opinion of what this Anomaly might be?" the Minister asked. "What do respected scientists who are expert in this field believe it to be?"

"There's no agreement, sir. The nearest to a consensus opinion is the hypothesis that it might be a Dark Energy perturbation, despite the fact that it doesn't conform at all to the standard model. This is also the Interplanetary Union's officially stated view regarding the phenomenon."

"There must have been robotic probes sent to the Anomaly. I can't believe that something like this can have been known about for over two centuries and that no one has thought about examining it up close with something rather less expensive than a colossal space ship and a multinational army."

"Nearly a hundred probes have been sent there, principally by the Socialist Republics of Saturn but also by the various Martian nations and some from Earth orbit. The probes have most often failed to identify or transmit a coherent image, which fact has in turn generated some of the wilder conspiracy theories associated with this phenomenon. Those images that have been successfully received are at best inconclusive. They show very little more than can be seen through telescopes from the ecliptic plane."

"And what do they show?"

"As you know, sir, what they appear to show is a constantly shifting image that most nearly resembles a rip in space. There is no evidence at all of any energy being emitted from the Anomaly. The bizarre Apparitions that have been getting so much news coverage in the rest of the Solar System are significantly more densely packed around the Anomaly than they are anywhere else."

"You mean these fabled Apparitions like floating butterflies, anthropomorphic gargoyles and flying vegetables," remarked the sceptical Minister. "And these Apparitions are most often to be observed in the neighbourhood of the Anomaly?"

"It seems so, sir."

"These aliens must have a very odd sense of humour," the Minister said with a smirk. "What do our best scientists believe these Apparitions to be?"

"The best hypothesis currently is that they are a concentration of media images that have somehow consolidated in space and are now being bounced back at us, sir," said the Permanent Secretary. "It is believed that Dark Energy is acting as a kind of mirror to electromagnetic radiation and is reflecting back at us a random selection of our own emissions."

"Isn't it also claimed that these Apparitions have mass?"

"That could just be a result of interaction with Dark Energy, sir," said the Permanent Secretary. "There are some peculiar effects associated with the more exotic cosmological phenomena. Dark Matter is only one manifestation of it. This could very well be yet another."

"Well, I'm glad that not everyone has gone insane," said Minister Dhafer Kunde as he squeezed his flat nose between two huge black forefingers. "But do we really need to send an army, a multinational army at that, to observe a bunch of consolidated virtual images?"

"It is thought, sir, that if the space ship does meet an alien intelligence of some kind it would be advisable to be well prepared."

"Perhaps we should also send film producers and advertising executives?" sniffed the Minister. "This really is priceless! Do the Martians and the crazier Jovian colonies really believe that aliens would broadcast their presence by beaming images of flying horses, blue-finned fishes and funny yellow blobs? In any case, I'd have thought that our probes might have identified rather more concrete evidence of alien intelligence than a bizarre ten thousand kilometre rip in spacetime."

"There is also evidence that the Anomaly is growing ever larger at an alarming rate," remarked the Permanent Secretary. "When it was spotted in the early 36^th century, it was less than two or three hundred kilometres in length."

"But wasn't it just as large, if not larger, when it was first seen in the 21^st century?" remarked the Minister. "And that just fizzled out two centuries later. Who's to say the same thing won't happen again?"

"I must abide by the decisions of the General Assembly of the Interplanetary Union, Your Excellency," the Permanent Secretary reminded the Minister. "It has been agreed that the Anomaly is a matter of the utmost concern and should be addressed accordingly."