Chapter 136

Dear Willow and family,

The AI assures us that we should be able to send mail from inside this ancient construct. We are in an awesomely ancient (according to the Aer Lingus' AI) construct that was put here to capture the entire energy output of a type G star. We are actually in what seems to be a spaceship graveyard though. The area we're in seems to be maintained by some sort of AI that so far we haven't been able to communicate with. Luckily for us we had just fueled up by essentially cannibalizing a methane boulder so if we can't figure out how to communicate with the AI that is the curator of this place at least we won't suffocate, or starve to death unless we have a population explosion. Ensign O'Mally and I have both begged the AI to make sure that something of that nature doesn't take place. There is Holly's baby which is due in a while and a couple of the concubines that I was transferring are pregnant, but we don't want any more children to be born until we are sure we're going to get out of here.

If you believe in prayer it might be a good idea for you to pray that we are not being kept by an AI that has gone insane! Or if not insane that we will have to work for quite a while to establish a common language with. We've been broadcasting a simplified binary code on every band that the AI can imagine and so far have gotten no response. Still that wouldn't be too bad if we weren't being held in place by one or more, though we can't figure out how there can be any with the number of ships that are essentially being held here, tractor beams.

We've tried to move the ship a couple of times but cannot. Simply put, if we apply power in any direction there is resistance greater than our thrust. I suggested that we try applying micro-bursts of thrust in the direction of the airlock, which must be some sort of force-shield because it still appears to be open, in the same sort of pattern. Something that would either give the elemental table or primes. Something that wouldn't just happen randomly. Essentially, anything that might initiate an opening of communications.

The most wonderful thing for us though, is that we can hear and talk to Katy. We can't see her and aren't certain that she's in this particular Dyson's sphere, but we can talk to her. More to the point we can relay all of the information that her tug's computer gathered on her flight to wherever she is. She, according to her tug's computer is in a Dyson's sphere as well, and there is another ship's graveyard there as well.

Of course, considering the size of the parking area we're in you could lose something as small as Katy's tug a million times over! We're in a docking bay that has to be at least ten kilometers in every direction or a thousand cubic kilometers in volume! Although no point is particularly far from any other, that is still a lot of space and there are thousands of ships here at least. Since the area is so crowded we can only make an estimate, or rather the Aer Lingus' AI estimates that there are several hundred ships in the cubic kilometer that we've been parked in.

I suppose that the best thing that can be said about arriving here is that we've been able to contact Katy. When we first heard her for certain she had convinced her tug's computer to broadcast their emergency beacon as loudly or with as much power as the tug's radios could muster. That was enough to echo through the system of communications that the ancients used to connect their civilizations that had retreated inside the spheres and then apparently died of boredom. But outside of the spheres the signal had been so damped that we weren't certain we were hearing anything of any importance, and if we hadn't been using what amounted to the largest radio telescope that was ever created we wouldn't have heard her. We also would not have heard her if we hadn't been fairly close to one of the spheres. All that to explain why she was frantic and shouting until she heard us. Now the question will be whether or not she is in a sphere near Atlantis-at or somewhere halfway across the universe.