Sane ship Star Map Draftsman I: Federation War

The Dawn ship circled Neptune twice before letting its speed slow down.

Chang E flew the Dawn ship toward the Sane ship. In about three hours, the Dawn ship would ignite the reverse decelerator and slowly stop near the Sane ship, and according to the original boarding plan, Dawn Lucius would drive the engineering vehicle to approach the Sane ship. If he was lucky, Dawn Lucius hoped to enter the Sane ship and have a look.

Dawn Lucius counted the remaining food: two bottles of glucose, half a packet of jam, and half a packet of jelly made of oats. He threw aside the leaves that he had been going to mix in and eat; he could have a full meal today. There was still time; how about a bath? Dawn Lucius calculated how many calories a bath would use up. If it used up too many, that would be no good; he needed physical strength to carry him onto the Sane ship. Thinking of his experience of bathing on Earth, he would be very hungry after a bath. Dawn Lucius looked at the food on the floor and gave up the idea of a bath. “I smell a little special.” Dawn Lucius thought that if he met aliens, he could say this first when shaking hands with them, to avoid being told about his embarrassing body odor first.

Dawn Lucius sat down in the captain’s chair and turned to look at everything here. It all came from the same hand: cream walls with a slightly yellowish light, soft artificial leather chairs, yet it felt strange to him. Dawn Lucius saw the screen but didn’t hear Chang E speak, probably because the AI was tired, but he was concerned about the alert. It meant that the Sane ship was already within visual range of the electronic telescope. A wave of heat poured out from the back of his neck; he didn’t know whether he was happy or worried, but in any case, he moved to the front of the porthole. On the computer’s imaging chart, against the vast black backdrop, an object shaped like a moth rested silently; it looked like a moth that had folded its wings to rest.

“Chang E,” Dawn Lucius called out, half raising his head, but heard no answer, and he turned suspiciously to look at the empty room, where there was nothing.

“Chang E.” Dawn Lucius shouted, but Chang E still did not answer him. He turned and searched around the watchtower, staring at the computer for a long time with pleading eyes, but the computer did not tell him what was happening. This would not do. Dawn Lucius still needed Chang E to operate the engineering vehicle to fly to the Sane ship; although the engineering vehicle could be operated manually, its accuracy was far lower than with the artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can quickly collect and process information and come up with a more accurate plan.

“Chang E, why are you ignoring me?” Dawn Lucius asked himself; the logical mind of a scientist was no help at this moment. Dawn Lucius looked at the Sane ship outside the window, then turned to look at the empty watchtower, and decided that he would drive the engineering vehicle to the Sane ship himself. When Chang E’s humor parameters were set, its survival parameters had also been adjusted up by twenty percent, which, he thought, might improve the Dawn ship’s chances of survival.

After traveling four and a half billion kilometers to the Kuiper Belt, the sunlight had little brightness left. Dawn Lucius moved back to his chair and turned to the computer in the control room, intending to configure the data acquisition manually so that even if he was offline, the Dawn ship could capture the scan data from the Sane ship and transmit it back to the moon base. He also had a selfish wish to have the computer automatically fly back to the moon base in two days, or at least to bring Kenny Jr. Clooney back.

Dawn Lucius clicked on the super administrator interface. After setting up the data collection, he first checked the health of the Dawn ship’s engine. The nuclear reactor was intact, there was no damage to the compensation rods, and there was no risk of the shell melting, so there was nothing wrong for the return trip. He kept feeling that there was something he regretted not having done, like a dying man always full of regret in his memories. “What else?” “Yes, saying goodbye to my son.” Dawn Lucius sat up straight in his chair, intending to record a video. No, his appearance in the video would scare his son, so he would record his voice instead.

“Chang E,” shouted Dawn Lucius, but he didn’t hear “I’m here!”

Dawn Lucius clapped his palms gently, then raised his hands and clapped them over both ears. This time, he understood why Chang E was ignoring him: it turned out he was deaf.

Dawn Lucius smiled bitterly; he hadn’t even noticed such a simple thing. He shook his head, and with it, tears flowed down.

Dawn Lucius walked over to the food and started to eat, and finally poured the glucose into his mouth. After eating, he actually felt so full that he couldn’t even drink water; like a starving person overwhelmed by a sudden full meal, he half lay on a chair, his left hand propped against his forehead, in a daze. The sudden rise in blood sugar made him a little sleepy, but he could not sleep; the problem of landing had not been solved. In Chang E’s design, human-computer interaction is by voice, and only a small number of advanced functions can be operated manually on the screen. Operating the engineering car is not considered an advanced function, so there is no manual panel for it. Dawn Lucius needed to solve this problem.

Chang E is considered an advanced artificial intelligence, but it has no autonomous consciousness; at best it is an advanced query system. When humans speak to it, it splits out the key words in the dialogue and then looks up the task content in the database; when it executes a task, it does so in this order, and the result of the task is fed back to humans through dialogue. For example, “Chang E, please play music.” It then finds the music and automatically plays it; it does not have the ability to play music on its own. For humans, whether the task succeeded or not is reported through Chang E’s feedback. So Dawn Lucius now needed to receive feedback on the results, but his ears could not hear, so he could only rely on his eyes. And where could he see it? The answer: the screen.

“Chang E.”

Chang E answered.

“Please create a new engineering vehicle landing mission and show the results of our communication in the hologram.”

Chang E answered.

The new image lit up, as good as new, just as when it was first loaded onto the Dawn ship. Only one of the four engineering vehicles remained, and its diorama was displayed before Dawn Lucius’ eyes, with progress bars and pie charts in different colors showing the energy, communication system and auto-navigation system of the engineering vehicle, all unused and perfectly suited for landing operations within a hundred kilometers.

“Please calculate the execution plan.”

The hologram suddenly went out. Dawn Lucius did not know what it meant, and he was about to check manually whether the hologram was malfunctioning when a new video was shown. It was a video of the probes looking for the Sane ship’s landing port, and the picture in it was not what he expected. Those sphere-like probes had not succeeded in getting close to the Sane ship; they exploded within a certain distance. In the end, only one flew to the bottom of the Sane ship without exploding, which was enough to show that there was a force field around the Sane ship, or some kind of energy shielding it from anything approaching. In human history, everything with shields has been used for combat; did this also mean that the Sane ship was a warship?

Dawn Lucius was thinking about it when the Dawn ship suddenly pitched and flew downward, off its horizontal course. Dawn Lucius lost his footing and fell full length onto the floor by the hologram. He looked up to see what had happened. Multiple strings of numbers were flashing on the computer screen, and outside the porthole, the rival ship was accelerating toward the Sane ship. It was not hard to guess that they wanted to be the first human team to contact the Sane ship; that was easy to understand. But why had Chang E suddenly changed the direction of the Dawn ship?

Force field, crap.

Dawn Lucius’ heart tightened. The rivals did not know that the Sane ship had a force field ten kilometers thick; approaching the Sane ship so fast was undoubtedly like throwing an egg at a stone. Even more deadly, their ship’s explosion would hit the Dawn ship. There was no way to predict the effects of this impact, but in space, a risk is a risk; there is no difference between big and small, and all risks are deadly.

“Chang E, tell the other side about the force field. Hurry!”

The hologram showed what Dawn Lucius had just said; it was the AI prompting Dawn Lucius to complete the message to be conveyed. Dawn Lucius rearranged the message and said, “Captain, the alien ship has a ten-kilometer invisible force field, enough to destroy anything approaching it. Please be careful to keep your distance. Send!” The hologram showed that the message had been sent. The Dawn ship still had to keep changing its course. Gravitational waves can travel through the universe for ten thousand years, and since this place was empty, there was nothing to hinder the propagation of the force; if the other ship exploded, the Dawn ship could hardly be spared. The relationship was a bit like that of two adjacent farms. If there is an infestation, the best way to deal with it is to help the next farm eliminate the infestation; in the face of the same harm, the competitive relationship fades away.

“Chang E, please show the hazard measurements.” The hologram showed the prediction for the other ship’s reactor. The Dawn ship needed to start changing course now; only five hours away from the Sane ship would it be considered safe. After the blast shockwave, the Dawn ship would change course again to approach, but Dawn Lucius didn’t know if he could last till then; he didn’t have any food left to eat. He prayed that the other side would listen to the advice and not collide with the Sane ship. The worst-case scenario was that the other side would take the warning as a trick and ignore it, flying on toward the Sane ship, and then Dawn Lucius’ chance of completing the mission would be even lower.

“Chang E, please show a course prediction for the other side.” Nothing changed on the hologram. The other ship was like a bullet, flying straight toward its target, the Sane ship. “The Dawn ship stays away. Well, the Dawn ship stays outside the risk zone,” Dawn Lucius muttered as he returned to the captain’s chair and found a comfortable angle to lie back.

“Chang E, wake me up when we can land. You may use extreme means.”

Time escaped from the singularity and ran all the way across the Earth. Humans are highly skilled at taming livestock, but they cannot tame time. Everyone’s life is like a clock with an end, and when the last “tick” is over, they will be forgotten by time. He even suspected that he had died and that his soul had been lost in space. He opened his eyes, the flexible device flashed, and the engineering vehicle on the hologram was ready for him to land.

Around the Sane ship, there was nothing but darkness and debris from rival ships. Dawn Lucius opened the protective cover on the front window and checked the return settings and the automatic data collection settings again. Everything was ready. He stepped into the landing bay and got into the engineering vehicle. The flex device displayed a countdown, the containment door opened, and the engineering vehicle slowly drove into the containment bay. With his spacesuit intact and his oxygen tank holding enough to breathe for five hours, Dawn Lucius opened communications and reported the mission to the lunar base one last time.

“Command Center, this is Dawn. I will be arriving at the Sane alien ship in 19 minutes. Starting now, Dawn ship is automatically collecting data to transmit back to Earth ...... tell my son that I love him.”

Dawn Lucius flew away from the Dawn ship: one meter, two meters, one kilometer, ten kilometers ...... When he looked back, the Dawn ship looked as big as an eyebrow, while the Sane ship looked like a big mountain. Dawn Lucius thought of the data he had read before: the Sane ship was a thousand times the size of the Dawn ship, which meant that this warship could transport hundreds of thousands of elite soldiers. “They should really come here and take a look. This thing must be bigger than the data shows,” Dawn Lucius said to himself as he looked at the ship straddling the horizon. When the engineering vehicle flew to the edge of the Sane ship, Dawn Lucius’ heart filled with awe. He had already felt amazed when he designed the Dawn ship, but now, really in front of the Sane ship, humans seemed insignificant. Like a nimble bird, the engineering vehicle carried Dawn Lucius downward and finally stopped where he could enter the Sane ship.

Dawn Lucius turned on the searchlight, and instead of an entrance, it looked like an alien sewer. The measuring tool showed that the round hole was about ten meters in diameter, but its baffle was only half closed, as if it was malfunctioning and stuck. “Alien technology isn’t that great either.” Having said this, Dawn Lucius checked whether the several cameras on his body were working properly and the images were uploading normally. The engineering vehicle drove into the pipe and slowly floated upward. The probe data showed that the pipe was six kilometers long, and the further in he went, the more Dawn Lucius felt like he was walking into the mouth of a giant beast. “I hope this isn’t an alien toilet.” Infrared scanning mapped the structure of the place; outside the pipe the structure was complex, either a place for piling up debris or where all the ship’s mechanical equipment was located.

At the end of the pipe, there was a small square opening in the bare wall that looked only big enough for one person to climb through. Dawn Lucius told the engineering car what he was thinking, his words mixed with fear; he told the engineering car to stay put and wait for him here at the exit, and climbed inside, into an even smaller pipe. Climbing through pipes was routine for Dawn Lucius; he had crawled through most of the pipes on the Dawn ship, and there was nothing to fear. It took Dawn Lucius a few minutes to get to a table, which, judging by its height, was not for giants but for creatures the size of humans. Dawn Lucius played the searchlight all over the table and found nothing special, so he turned around and began to look for other exits.

The exit was not hard to find; there was no door at all, and he entered another room without any problem. There was more space here, with a round ceiling and seemingly no end. Dawn Lucius took out the illumination balls. This tool was as big as a pool ball, and when switched on it could be thrown into the distance; besides lighting things up, the illumination ball could also collect location data. Dawn Lucius threw an illumination ball in each of the four directions. Dawn Lucius scanned a floor in the middle of the room, or rather, a raised stage in the middle of the room, and walked over to it following the route on his wrist ring. The text on it had a left-center-right structure. At the top of the left structure was a horizontal rectangle, with a circle at the bottom center and a triangle supporting the bottom of the circle. The middle structure of the text was only a vertical rectangle, which was also the longest part of the text. The right structure of the text was even simpler, a square rotated forty-five degrees. Dawn Lucius walked along the stage and recorded a dozen texts, which as a whole seemed to be composed of simple geometric shapes, and behind these texts, a set of recognition rules must exist.

Dawn Lucius climbed onto the platform, and there was a diagonal seam running under his feet toward the center of the platform, which, he guessed, could be opened. And what would be there when it opened?

Dawn Lucius walked toward the middle of the stage. There was a disc on the floor about two meters in diameter, and the lines sunken into the middle of the disc formed a special shape. Dawn Lucius studied it for a while and found that the shape was a cut equilateral triangle: one corner of the triangle was cut off by another triangle, the other two corners were cut by a circle, and inside the triangle, beside the circle, there were two more rectangles that looked like two doors. Dawn Lucius could not see anything more, and he continued to search the stage.

The exploration was full of unknowns; time he had forgotten and hunger came at the same time. Dawn Lucius was now a little disappointed. There was only one hour of oxygen left, and the air inside the ship was mainly carbon monoxide, unbreathable. He had run out of things to eat. He summed up what the two rooms had in common: both were empty, and if he continued to explore other rooms, they would probably be empty too, so he would make this the last one. Dawn Lucius adjusted his breathing, took a searchlight and looked around; everything looked the same. Walk at random? No, he had only sixty minutes of life, so he would walk carefully. He walked along another seam, looking around as he went, until he had walked all the lines, and apart from the cold floor, there was nothing special.

Dawn Lucius felt soaked through, and he felt cold; it was the first time in a while that he had felt cold, and the soles of his feet felt as if he were stepping on ice and snow. Dawn Lucius threw all the illumination balls in his bag. The right arm of the spacesuit had an operating panel, and he set all the illumination balls to free collection; these little things were like dandelions blown apart, floating around the huge room. He was sleepy. If he was going to be used as a specimen by the aliens, or as a sacrifice, then he should find a conspicuous position. Dawn Lucius walked back to the center of the stage and sat down on the edge of the disc. When there were five minutes of oxygen left, his heart beat faster. Thinking back on what he had to be proud of in this life, on what had been worthwhile in this life, there was only Stacean Lucius. He began to be afraid. Inside that translucent glass helmet, Dawn Lucius cried out in pain; his rapid breathing drained his strength to hold himself up, and he fell heavily into the triangle.

Besides his own cries, Dawn Lucius seemed to sense other sounds in the room, the sound of metal rubbing and clashing. It turned out that there was a switch on that disc, and pressing it activated the devices in the room. At first, the lines of the triangle and of the disc lit up in turn, and after the pure white lights linked up, the light strips at the base of the room’s walls also turned on. The lights of the dome shone into his eyes; at this point, he was like an ant craning its head to look at a street lamp. Dawn Lucius also noticed that there was a brown thing beside the disc, the size of a fist and shaped like a short caterpillar, its body ringed with silver glowing lights that looked like an ornament. He heard the beep: he had run out of oxygen. Every breath he took inside his helmet was hard on his airways and lungs. He held his breath, ripped off his spacesuit, and looked at the smiling face on the flexible device on his wrist; he felt his eyelids grow heavy and collapsed to the floor.

When Dawn Lucius lit the lights, the Sane ship came to life. The lights along the hull’s outline all lit up, blue, yellow, green, and the Sane ship looked like an exquisite work of art. When the telescope of the moon base could clearly see the lights of the Sane ship, the people of the space agency were shocked and at the same time somewhat hopeful; they looked forward to the data from the Dawn ship. The air in the chamber recirculated. When Dawn Lucius woke up again, he felt clear-headed, but hunger had robbed him of his physical energy and made movement more difficult, and he felt pins and needles in his bones as he reluctantly crawled forward. Lucius picked up the caterpillar. It began to move, not wriggling, but turning into an open wrist guard that looked like a device to be worn on the hand. Dawn Lucius looked at it and put his right hand into it.

As the tentacles on the side of the gauntlet dug into his skin, the tingling feedback from his nerves instantly exploded in his brain, and he felt his life force being pulled out of his back by something. Dawn Lucius found his body being sucked dry by the gauntlet device, drying out at a rate visible to the naked eye. When he tried to take the gauntlet off, it was already deep in his flesh and blood. Meanwhile, the seams in the floor were drawing back outward, revealing a blue screen behind them, from which large swaths of stars floated out, large, small, bright, dull. The stars stopped when they touched the dome, and the sea of stars began to spin, the brightest part of which appeared to be on a disk, and in this spinning disk, purple nebulae rose and shrank like clouds. All this was reflected in Dawn Lucius’ eyes as they were about to close, and what he did not know was that this was a star map, the star map of the galaxy.

On the spacesuit Dawn Lucius had taken off, the data-collecting camera was still functioning, and the larger half of the star map was clearly filmed and transmitted to the Dawn ship’s server; these videos were compressed into a message queue and sent to the moon base every hour. Dawn Lucius’ body was gradually sucked dry, but strangely he did not lose consciousness. He was witnessing his own death, and probably because there was nothing he could do, there was not a trace of fear in his heart. The bracelet that was sucking the life force out of him began to work, and Dawn Lucius’ body was released from the gravitational pull; it was as if he were a product on an assembly line, fixed to a conveyor belt bound for another room that had just opened.

Dawn Lucius watched as he floated into the room with two medical chambers, the coffins Rodney Cruise had spoken of. Dawn Lucius was lowered to the floor, and he rolled his eyes to observe the room as completely as possible. The wall in front of him was like a window with four transparent containers set into it, and in the bottom two were two dark shadows, not unlike soaking corpses. There was a circle of purple light on the wall, and the purple was trembling slightly like liquid. He reluctantly crawled forward and climbed to the medical chamber on the left-hand side; the Dawn ship’s video had shown that someone had been lying in it. Dawn Lucius held on to the medical chamber and stood up, and he looked through the transparent medical chamber: lying inside was something ...... similar to a human.

Dawn Lucius noticed that there was a flashing circle of yellow light in the middle of the medical chamber, with triangles and rectangles moving around it regularly from left to right, which must be used to detect the vital signs of the creature in the medical chamber. Dawn Lucius pressed his hand on it, and the medical chamber opened. The transparent lid began to slide to the side, and Dawn Lucius did not have time to brace himself, so the lid caught him and he stumbled. Before falling to the floor, he grabbed the edge of the medical module, and a slight warmth came to his fingers, completely different from the warmth he felt on his skin outside the medical module. He wanted to see where the warmth came from. When he regained his footing, the thing in the medical chamber had sat up straight and was staring straight into his eyes, and so the two civilizations hurriedly met each other.

Dawn Lucius stared blankly at the other side: obviously a living human-like creature. Their civilization was much more advanced than the civilization of the solar system, and all in all, what happened next could only go a few ways. The creature might smack Dawn Lucius’s head, or grab his hair, bite off his ear and swallow it, or plunge a hand into his chest, pull out his heart and begin to eat it. Thinking about it, Dawn Lucius subconsciously looked at his chest; he had little strength left to panic. When he looked up at the creature again, this time it was staring at the caterpillar device on his arm.

“I’m from ...... Earth.”

He had thought that the thing would slap Dawn Lucius’s head, or bite off his ear, or pull out his heart and eat it ...... none of this happened; instead, the thing stared at Dawn Lucius’s arm. “I’m from ...... Earth.” Dawn Lucius opened his mouth to introduce himself, and the thing looked at his lips as if to identify his language. Dawn Lucius felt his arm being squeezed tighter, almost dried up, and his body seemed to turn into a dead branch. He began to be afraid, began to regret. Dawn Lucius panicked. “Please tell ...... my son that I ...... love him.” As he said this, Dawn Lucius took off the flexible device on his left wrist, its screen showing the smiling face of Stacean Lucius, and put the device on the thing’s leg, and the creature, after looking at Dawn Lucius, seemed to nod a little.

Just then, the light in the room turned purple, and waves of murmurs flashed through Dawn Lucius’ head that were not picked up by his eardrums, as if someone were whispering in his head, or as if someone were interrogating him. At the same time, he also noticed that the expression of the creature in the medical chamber was a little ...... complicated? It stared straight past Dawn Lucius. Dawn Lucius, leaning on the medical chamber for support, turned around: two things, shaped like people, but made entirely of light. The two things stepped closer, one of them raised its hand, and a beam of light shot into Dawn Lucius’s chest.

There was no pain. Dawn Lucius’s body was like a piece of paper, and where he was hit, it was like a white sheet of paper being burned from behind with a lighter; flesh and bone burned away together, and the burnt hole grew bigger and bigger. Dawn Lucius covered it with his hands, and his hands were like a candle lit in the middle of the night, his fingers like the wick at the center of the candle lighting up the surroundings. Lucius fell limp on the floor. He felt sleepiness, like a huge quilt, beginning to slide over him from his feet to his head. His breathing began to slow, his eyelids began to get heavy, and his head tilted unconsciously to the right. He remembered that a poet of Earth named Heine had said, “Death is the cool night.” Dawn Lucius felt no pain; instead, it was like beginning a date with a long-lost, familiar sleep.