I.S.S. Sagan - Approaching the Medusa Nebula

It was dark. The bridge was always dark when the crew first came across a new phenomenon. Captain Linda Preston insisted on it.

‘It allows you to see the details on the screen better when the lights are off. Plus, it adds to the air of mystery,’ she’d said to her young helmsman, Jack Simons.

Personally, Jack found that it made the atmosphere oppressive more than mysterious.

As he urged the ship forward towards their latest find, he spared a look around the bridge at the rest of the crew. The men and women of the Sagan looked unearthly as they alternated their gazes between their control consoles and the main screen, their faces aglow with the faint light of their stations. They stood out against the darkness of the bridge.

Jack shook his head and tried to focus on the job at hand. Ahead of them loomed a dark planet, its surface dimly lit by the shifting embers of a fading nebula caused by the slow death of a star before the first man walked on the surface of Mother Earth.

Jack checked his instrument readings, the ship was maintaining its heading. They were just now pulling into its holding orbit around this forgotten world.

‘Orbit is shaping up well captain,’ Jack said.

‘Good, what are our sensors showing?’

‘Confirming the initial reports from the Earhart,' said the crew member on the sensors, ‘a more in-depth analysis will take time. The science teams are already going over our readings.

Profesor Li is trying to make sense of it now.'

‘Keep me posted,’ said Captain Preston.

Jack looked at the display again, it’s focus on the planet. The surface seemed to shimmer in the light of the nebula, like gentle waves of water on a dark night, only visible by the light of the moon.

He heard footsteps stop next to him, ‘Another mystery out here in the dark. And we get to be the ones to crack it.’

Jack looked up at the shadowy form of the captain. ‘Yes Captain,’ he said.

Her voice sounded like it had a smile as she said, ‘Keep us steady Ensign Simmons. We don’t want to miss anything.’

Jack didn’t reply as his gaze went back to the screen. The Captain walked away.  ‘Captain, Profesor Li say's we're getting EM fields and low power radio waves,' reported the sensor officer.

‘Another mystery. They’re coming from the planet?’

‘He believes so.’

***

In the Mess Hall.

‘Jack, you can’t be serious, electromagnetic fields and radio waves?’

Jack was in the mess hall, his shift having ended a few hours ago. The ship orbited the dark world while they pelted the surface with all manner of sensors and imagers. His friend from engineering sat at his table, another young man from Earth like himself.

‘Hugh, I'm just telling you what I heard. Low-level radio waves, and it seems like they're steady.'

‘That shouldn’t be possible. The Earhart reported nothing like that on its initial survey.'

‘No, but they were just doing a fly by. They detected the higher than normal levels of exotic elements. That was the scientific carrot.'

‘Yeah, but the whole point of it was that those elements would have needed the death of a star to be present. A planet that old should be dead in every way.’

‘The impossible is why we’re out here isn’t it?’

Hugh nodded and gave a slight shrug, ‘I suppose. I'm more here in case the ship breaks. Plus it pays decently. It's so hard to get a job on Earth anymore.'

‘Yeah, sometimes I wonder if it was worth it come out here. I’m so far from my wife and kids, and I won’t be back for another year. It’s just, there was no work in the civilian sector. Not for a pilot,’ Jack reflected.

‘I know Jack. Things are messed up, either you know someone who can get you a job, you go on welfare, or you work for the government. And we can count ourselves lucky the government hired us.’

‘Luck, yeah. Whatever happened to ‘the stars will bring a new age of prosperity’?’ Jack said, quoting the slogan of the latest planetary president.

‘Prosperity is for other people. Best we can hope for is some stability.’

A group of scientists from the labs walked into the mess hall. Jack nodded his head towards them, ‘At least they want to be out here. They like this sort of thing.’

Hugh laughed, ‘Yeah, crazy. Who’d want to be out here when you could be home?’

The group of scientist sat down with trays of food at the table next to them.

Jack recognised one as Professor Li. She looked over to them, ‘Evening boys,' she said. ‘Evening. How goes the quest for answers?’ Jack asked.

‘Exciting as ever! That planet is full of more questions than we could have dreamed,’ she said, a smile forcing its way onto her face as she spoke, ‘I was just talking to my companions about some more interesting things it’s been doing.’

One of them spoke up, ‘Like that radio feedback yeah?’

‘Exactly! Every time we send a radio signal towards it, it gets sent back to us, except with a five-minute delay. The distance between us and the surface composition should mean it comes back to us a lot sooner.'

Jack frowned, ‘Any idea what’s causing it?’ ‘None at all!’ she said with a smile.

‘And that doesn’t concern you?’ Hugh asked.

Now it was her turn to frown, ‘Concern us? Why would it concern us? This is exactly what we wanted to find! Science is no fun if everything behaves as you thought it would.

Obviously, there's some kind of natural phenomenon we've never encountered before.'

‘Or unnatural,' one of the other scientists said.

‘Everything is a natural phenomenon. Just because we haven’t seen it before doesn’t make in unnatural,’ Li replied.

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

Jack’s eyes wandered back to his tray and his thoughts drifted back to his family. His youngest daughter was only one-year-old when he left. She’d be three now. He remembered playing with her, making faces at her, and her trying to copy them as best she could. Or her trying to mimic the noises he made.

Jack turned back to Professor Li, ‘So what did you mean by unnatural?’

‘More like artificial. Like its something designed to do that. Like a piece of technology.’

One researcher held up a hand, ‘We’ve yet to find any other evidence of intelligent life.’

‘Doesn’t mean it couldn’t be that, I mean look at how precisely the frequency is repeated and-’

Jack wasn't listening anymore. He couldn't get the image of his daughter out of his head, and the mimicry she used to do. He was aware of Hugh waving a hand in front of him and looked up.

‘Yeah?’ He said.

‘Did you hear that? Artificial! I think I might be starting to figure out why they want to be out here. That’s a huge find,’ Hugh said.

‘Artificial doesn’t seem like the accepted theory,’ Jack commented. ‘I guess we have to wait and see.’