cowlark.com

My Diary, 2002-11-10

The stars drift by slowly, endlessly, tediously. I got the length of a Temporal Unit wrong and we'll actually be arriving at Base tomorrow. In the meantime the only thing to divert me is eating paste, trying to avoid thinking about the bucket and arguing with the ship.

[break]

My memoirs, chapter one:

Once upon a time there was a man who got a call from an old friend. The old friend was suddenly called away from home and needed a house-sitter. (The old friend didn't want to leave the rather expensive house in north Wales empty.) The man needed a holiday and was all too happy to spend a couple of weeks in Wales walking in the mountains and living in what was, basically, a mansion.

Unfortunately, the man was a bit too curious for his own good. Discovering a walled garden with a locked door, he unscrewed the lock hasp and broke in. Inside was an odd-looking shed. He opened the door and went inside, at which point the door closed and the shed suddenly took off.

So, in two weeks Calvin will come back. He'll find the house empty, open and probably completely ransacked. If I know Calvin, he'll instantly panic and think of his deep, dark secret. He'll rush down to the walled garden and find the spaceship gone. At this point, he'll probably try to contact...

Oh, shit.

This ship is almost certainly Calvin's only means of dealing with whoever it is he's dealing with! I've stranded him on Earth! Which means he won't be able to come and rescue me!

Wait, wait... what are the chances he's the only person on Earth with a spaceship?

High. Damn.

So, my only chance of getting home is to hope there's somebody on Base I can talk to who'll give me a lift back. They are going to have to return Calvin's ship, they might well put me on it...

But now I'll know the Big Secret. Can they trust me not to tell anyone?

Perhaps... oh, god.

[break]

I've been thinking about it. I have decided that I've already compromised myself by sending these transmission to whoever it is they're going to, and I can't do any more harm. As ranting into this microphone, if it is a microphone, is the only thing that's keeping me sane, I'll continue.

If I can think of something to talk about. Pah.

[break]

Let me tell you, Dear Listener, about the way I'm talking to you.

That first day when the ship took off I was pretty panicked. After I worked out that I could talk to the ship, I demanded that it let me talk to someone who could help. It popped a hatch and this thing was inside it.

It's a little metal ball with a button on top and a shiny black strip around the middle. If I talk at it, what I say appears on the stripe. If I push the button the stripe goes blank, the word `sending' appears and flashes for a while, and it all resets. I suppose it's sending the words somewhere, but it could just be into memory or something.

It also responds to voice commands to let me edit what's in the buffer. I don't know how it can tell whether I'm saying something to record or a command.

The ship's good at that, too. Hmm.

Ship, are you listening?

I am listening.

Ship, are you listening?

God, that's creepy. Is it reading my mind?

[break]

I've been trying to explore the ship.

Given that the ship is a single empty room, this is an interesting trick. In fact, what I've been doing is tapping on all the closed hatches trying to work out what's behind them.

Some of them are hollow, some of them feel like solid metal. The three hatches I've seen open so far, the food hatch, the bucket hatch and the recorder hatch, all feel hollow. The outside door feels like solid metal. Slightly reassuring, given that it's all that stands between me and a horrible death in the vacuum of space.

Asking the ship about any of them is a total waste of time. All it says is, "You do not have clearance for that information." Bah.

I tried listening at the hatches. The bucket hatch hisses for a few minutes after I close it. I don't know what it's doing in there; the compartment is totally featureless, bare shiny metal. Certainly, when the bucket comes out, it's completely pristine.

Ventilation comes from a series of grilles by the floor and ceiling. There's not much airflow. If I wet my finger and hold it next to the ceiling grille ---- that's the air outflow ---- I can feel it get cold. I asked the ship how the air recycling worked. Guess what it said? Right.

I have been wondering how long its life support or power systems last. I'd hate to run out of fuel, or air, light-years from anywhere. However, I've been getting the impression that the ship thinks through its flight plans before setting out, so I reckon I'm safe. I tried asking it. Waste of time.

I have a theory about why the ship won't talk to me. Calvin isn't the most technologically literate man in the world. (Or any world, for that matter.) I reckon that he was assigned the ship by the Extraterrestrial Conspiracy, or stole it or whatever, but doesn't really know how to work it. This would explain the voice control and the total lack of anything resembling a control.

I think that he must have told the ship something like, "Natives of Earth are not permitted to know anything about the Extraterrestrial Conspiracy." So, whenever I ask it something about itself, it has to respond with that annoying clearance message, even if it makes no sense.

Yes! Of course! That explains why I can tell it to do things, but I can't ask it things! Direct commands aren't covered by that order.

Ship, what's behind this hatch?

You do not have clearance for that information.

Is the food dispenser behind this hatch?

Yes.

Q.E.D., I believe.

Hmm... ship, open the suit locker.

You do not have the necessary qualifications to operate a space suit.

Do you have a space suit on board?

You do not have clearance for that information.

Open the manual control system.

You do not have the necessary qualifications to operate my manual controls.

Yay!

[break]

I can not believe I have overlooked this.

This ship's got artificial gravity!

It feels perfectly normal ---- I stand on the floor, the floor pushes back at me. I jump up and down and everything seems to be working fine.

It appears to be gravity only, no inertial damping. The take-off was brisk enough to knock me off my feet, and I had to crawl up the floor to get into the pilot's chair. Which strikes me as odd, because with artificial gravity, inertial damping is easy ---- you just change the vector of the generated gravity.

Hmm. Unless there's a technical reason why they can't.

Anyway, this is such a huge breakthrough, such a massive step beyond our technology, that it raises such feelings of awe that my eyes water. Gravity control implies an understanding of the universe at a far more fundamental level that anything we know. Gravity control implies force fields, and reactionless drives, and stabilised wormholes, and even interstellar travel. I bet that gravity control is the key to their FTL drive, too.

Wow.

[break]

I had a scary moment there. It suddenly occurred to me that this ship may not have an FTL drive. It may have an STL drive and I've been travelling at relativistic speeds, and hundreds of years were going by at home.

Then I thought to ask the ship what the elapsed time on Earth was at this moment, and it matched the ship's on-board elapsed time. Phew.

Here's a tip, kids: do not mess around with FTL travel. It can be seriously bad for your health.

[break]

Okay. My watch tells me it's bedtime. Well, that was an exciting day; tedious as usual, but I found out all kinds of new things about the ship, and leapt to some quite astonishing conclusions about the Conspirators technology. Tomorrow we arrive at Base (no colloquial name). Things can only get better.

'Night-'night.

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