The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (8 page)

“-but longer
waiting times.”

“Better
regulation of lobbyists-”

“-more time
spent with lobbyists than ever.”

Ti, like many
others, spent a weekend fact checking the fact checker. Her work
was meticulous. The game of politics began to change: the smarter
politicians resorted to telling the truth, which did not always
reflect well on them. However, it was worse for those who continued
trying to push the old half-truths and blatant lies. The journalist
was making a serious splash in politics, but Ti couldn’t work out
how she could be working so fast and carefully.

Finally, Ti
decided to call her. She answered the video call looking remarkably
relaxed for someone who should have been exhausted.

“How on earth
are you doing all this? It took me hours to find the stuff you
found in seconds,” he said to her.

“Ah, I did it
all with a little help from a few friends on the net. A person
called Al Ice developed a new app called the TruthSearch. Al is
brilliant, just brilliant. I have never met him or her, but she or
he got in contact with me after I covered a story about the new
A.I. legislation. Al wants to change the world by making the truth
more obvious. Most of the information is publicly available but
concealed behind a smokescreen of red tape. Some of it is a bit
more… private. The app is still in beta, but it will be out soon.
So, tell me a lie.”

“I am thirty
years old,” he said, wondering what she meant by private.

The journalist
appeared to look at her screen for a second, and then said:

“Not true. Your
Facebook says you are one hundred and twenty three, while your
birth record says you are twenty five.”

“Huh, OK. My
favourite colour is green,” said Ti.

“That’s true,
at least according to your ’book. You should really think about
changing your privacy settings, although I see you are single-”

The shadow
minster burst into Ti’s office, and Ti only just had time to turn
his screen off.

“I need you to
work this weekend,” said the shadow minster impatiently.

“I did last
weekend, and the one before. Can’t Jen do it?” suggested Ti,
knowing that it was a futile suggestion. Jen was the shadow
minster’s second aide, but also his favourite niece.

“It’s Jen’s
sister’s birthday, and she can’t miss it. I pay you more than Jen,
so I expect more from you!”

“But-”
protested Ti to the shadow minster’s back.

He turned his
screen back on, and was surprised to see the journalist still
there.

“Sorry,” said
Ti, but she waved his apology away and pointed at the bottom of the
screen.

Ti saw a window
labelled TruthSearch. He didn’t recognise it, but he knew what it
was. He read the sentences and number displayed in the window.

“Jen doesn’t
have a sister!” he said angrily.

“And she gets
paid more than you,” said the journalist.

Ti was furious,
but not completely surprised.

“So... any
plans for the weekend, then?” the journalist asked with a wink.

Matthew was an
astronaut (1st Class) and was highly trained for the rigours of
space work. He was fit, experienced and smart. He had a Ph.D. in
physics and another in existential philosophy. Decades of rigorous
mental and physical training had put him at the peak of his
performance, the best of the best in a competitive field. He should
have been on one of the explorations around the sun, or manning one
of the first hyperdrive flights.

He should have
been testing something, winning something, leading something. He
should have been doing something, anything, to justify all that
training. The station’s crew consisted of Matt and a second
astronaut, Chen, who was equally as qualified for working in space,
and equally annoyed at their assignment.

“Does it ever
worry you?” Matt asked Chen one day.

“Which bit? The
Anomaly? The fact that this is station is Observer Three, but I
have never heard of a One or a Two? The fact that I’m spending a
year of my life babysitting a ruined and archaic space station in a
forgotten corner of the solar system with a man who ate my whole
week’s chocolate ration while I was asleep?” Chen said
cheerfully.

Matt said
nothing; he still felt a little guilty about the theft.

“It worries
me,” said Chen, now serious.

Neither Matt
nor Chen felt that they deserved to be stuck changing fuses in the
half-abandoned shell of the universe’s worst space station, but
that was exactly how they spent their days. As punishment for
stealing Chen’s chocolate, Matt had agreed to change any fuse that
broke for three full days. He hung in the air, shoulder deep in an
air filtration unit. It was a particularly hard fuse to get to, and
he groaned as he pulled himself deeper into the electronic heart of
the machine. He pushed his arm behind a foam insulation pad and
felt around for the fusebox.

“Found it,” he
said to himself.

He pulled out
the faulty fuse, threw it gently over his shoulder and replaced it
with a fresh unit. Then he packed the insulation back in place and
slid out backwards, curling up into a ball in the air and then
stretching each of his limbs out as far as they would go. He swam
awkwardly towards a wall, and then pushed off towards the corridor,
scooping up the broken fuse as he did so.

“Fuses!” he
cursed, wondering who on Earth still used them.

Whoever built
Observer Station 3 must have owned shares in a fuse factory. They
were in every life-support and sensor system, and seemingly always
breaking. Matt replaced dozens a day, and cursed every time he
opened a new box of the things.

Keeping the
station running was a full time job, and there was always something
to fix or replace.

Fuses!
Insulation made from foam! Doors that were opened by pulling on
heavy levers! Matt had never seen such things in nearly two decades
of working in space. It seemed to him that the Observer Station had
been built by neurotic amateurs from parts they had found in
rubbish tips and garage sales. The switches were large, the screens
small. He was used to space equipment being the best of the best,
but everything on the station was old, cheap and faulty.

The station
defied the normal economics of space travel: it was larger than it
needed to be, and most of it was empty. Entire sections were
without power, empty halls floating in space.

The archaic
construction belied the importance of the station: its mission was
to watch the first confirmed alien artefact found in the Sol. The
sphere had arrived unexpectedly, and its origin remained unknown.
Apart from shocking and terrifying Earth’s population by its mere
existence, the artefact did little apart from orbiting Mars. The
Observer Station 3 had been built to watch, and that was all its
crew could do.

The work was
important, but mindlessly repetitive.

“And boring,
boring, boring!” Matt muttered.

Every
thirty-two minutes the Anomaly would glow green for ten seconds,
and then fade back to dull silver. While it was green, it sent out
two identical bursts of electromagnetic energy that may or may not
have been a message. If it was a message, it was wasted on a planet
of people who could only listen in bewilderment. Communicating with
the sphere had proved fruitless, although everything short of
physical contact had been tried.

So the crew of
Observer 3 watched, and waited, and spent their time fixing
fuses.

“Anything new?”
asked Matt as he floated into the control room.

Chen didn’t
even acknowledge the question, but continued playing what appeared
to be a word game on the computer console. He wasn’t talking to
Matt.

“I fixed the
filter,” said Matt, conversationally.

Chen looked up
at the huge board of lights above his head. The damage control
panel was another idiosyncratic feature of the station: an old
fashioned mixture of labels interspersed with green and red L.E.Ds.
The panel was connected directly to all systems in the station
using physical wire connections. As Matt watched, the light for the
filtration system changed from green back to red. The fuse he had
just replaced must have broken again.

“Did you, now?”
asked Chen unkindly as Matt’s face fell.

Watching the
Anomaly wasn’t difficult work. Computers and sensors of every kind
and size were pointed at the dull sphere. When Matt and Chen
weren’t fixing things they had to trawl through reels of data for
anything unusual. Highlights from the last year of recording
included a passing asteroid and a solar flare. Nothing changed:
there was nothing new or unusual. Boring.

Matt sent a
routine message back to his superiors on Earth. The date changed,
but the message remained the same.

Although Matt
and Chen were the only astronauts on the station there were five
crew rooms, each with two beds in them. Chen had taken one, Matt
another. They used a third as a games room and the last two for
storage. They had never been told why they were the only staff on a
ten-person station, or why the station had been empty when they
arrived. It wasn’t normal, and it made Matt uneasy from the first
day.

Apart from the
maintenance and data crunching there was remarkably little for them
to do. They spent their spare time playing games and betting on the
results. Matt had lost their most recent game, a cross between Risk
and Zero-g darts, and owed Chen three hours maintenance duty and an
hour of pretending to be a chicken. Their current game,
battleship-chess, wasn’t going as well for Chen, and Matt was
quietly confident of a win. When the games got boring, Chen
practised his French while Matthew read his way through the works
of Dickens.

The Anomaly did
nothing unusual. It barely did anything at all.

They agreed
that Observer 3 had been built by paranoid idiots. It was the only
rational explanation. Everything important to the station’s
functioning had been built in sets of five, from the life-support
systems to the sensor pods and connecting corridors. In theory this
meant that every system had a set of redundant fail safes, keeping
the crew safe. In reality, only three of the systems were ever
working properly at any time. Station protocol demanded that all
five worked continuously, so Matt and Chen had to work endlessly to
fulfil their impossible orders.

“We could just
ignore protocol,” suggested Matt one night.

Chen threw a
pair of magnetic dice at the wall where they stuck with a double
bang.

“A six and a
three, which means your battleship is in check,” he said, moving a
few pieces on the board.

“I said we
could-”

“-No,” said
Chen.

They never
discussed it again. Matt knew that Chen was probably right. The
work had become an annoying routine, an endless ritual of replacing
fuses and analysing data. It wasn’t long before they could change
the fuses blindfolded. They made a game of it: Chen won six times
out of ten in the life-support, Matt seven out of ten in the
sensors room. The Anomaly never changed, and its thirteen second
cycle became imbedded in their minds.

By the fifth
month they had given up all hope of something happening. They
passed the time as best they could. Sometimes they argued, but the
lack of other company meant that they had to get on or go mad.
Whoever had chosen them had done an admirable job, and they got on
extremely well for the most part.

The two
astronauts floated aimlessly in the control room. Matt worked on
his chicken hat while Chen tried to get EarthControl to send
hamburgers on the next supply run. Such silly things were the only
way to prevent the dull life on Observer 3 becoming
overwhelming.

The latest data
flashed on a screen overhead, unheeded. The astronauts continued
with their little hobbies until something made Chen stop
suddenly.

“Something odd
just happened,” said Chen, glaring suspiciously at a dial.

He clicked a
few buttons aimlessly, checking readout and wondering what it was
that he had seen.

“What, the
restaurant finally said yes?” joked Matt.

“No, really.
Something is wrong, but I don’t know what!”

Chen grabbed a
computer console and began trawling through it, but Matt knew what
he was going to say even before the computers confirmed it. The
anomaly was silver.

“It didn’t
change colour,” whispered Chen.

“What-”

Matt was cut
off by a stream of purple light that illuminated every corner of
the room in painfully bright colour. Sparks ran across the control
panels, and the room lights went dark. When Matt finally opened his
eyes, all he could see were the red lights of the damage control
panel. Chen groaned, holding his head as afterimages from the
purple light played in front of his eyes.

Sirens beeped,
lights flashed and then died.

A screen lit up
on one of the control panels, flashing. Matt read its message,
which said:

“Emergency
protocols initiated: send message drone (7/9 remaining) Y/N?”

Matt punched
the send key, a bad feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t ever used a
message drone before. It surprised him that they were still being
used: message drones were antiques, nothing more than a black box
on a rocket. Matt wondered why a station would need nine, and what
had happened to the other two drones. The Observer Station just got
a little more terrifying in his mind.

Chen was
already trying to contact Earth through more conventional means. He
tried sending out a call using lasers and radios, but the systems
weren’t responding.

“Not good,”
said Chen calmly.

The station
fell into darkness unexpectedly as the lights died in the control
room. The station began to shake and spin. Chen moved over to the
emergency stabilisation jets. The station was kept in orbit by a
set of automatic altitude jets, but they had failed. Chen struggled
with the controls, desperately trying to stabilise the orbit as the
station was caught in unexpected tides of energy that pushed and
pulled at it its walls.