ARCTURUS INITIATIVE: The Photographic Companion

I was allowed to take photos, but, for security reasons, I could only partially photograph my fellow crew members and not divulge any technology. I was the worst photographer in the world, armed with the cheapest camera in the world. I think they knew they were safe.

Introduction

I’m telling you all that I can. If some of it seems glossed over, it’s because:
a) I had to leave some things out here and there
b) a lot of the science is way over my head, and I’m totally fine with that.
Thousands of us were chosen because of many different abilities. Mine are a bit less tangible and yet to be proven but deemed necessary. I could not be more grateful for that.
Some of us have been asked to report to the rest of the world. You have a right to know. I apologize for the security omissions that insulate the Arcturus Mission from people who don’t think you have a right to know.

Why do we seem to be blindly running off?

So much of that has to do with a feeling that has been gnawing at each and every one of us for all of our lives. A leap of faith? It’s a far more educated guess, considering what has been revealed to us.
There was a sudden clarity. An inner peace that resonated with an instinct we thought had long ago atrophied with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
I am very different than the person who wrote the earlier reports you are about to read, but it was a slow and gradual shift in the spectrum that brought me to this introduction. In what can be called a wonderful cycle of completion, this introduction is actually the last transmission I am sending and it is being prefixed by our people back at… well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
You may never hear from us again but I hope, after you read these journals, that you will never ever forget that each and every one of you is a child of the stars.

Greetings From UDL Percival...



What's Happening?
The simplest answer is the best. In the way that life imitates art imitates life imitates art ad infinitum, and to quote Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest, "It's all real."
I have been watched, approached and recruited by what I perceive to be an immense and totally unknown space program. This is nothing subversive. This is nothing aggressive. This is all about getting out 'there' and, apparently, a great deal of the heavy lifting has been in the works for several decades.
Unfathomable resources and incredible technology have been directing this mission for the sake of all humanity who no longer want to be mired down in never ending conflict. To cite the esteemed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, we have yet to achieve a planetary society, and therefore will not evolve to a systemic, interstellar or galactic society at this rate.
At least, not until now.

Why Am I allowed To Tell You All This?

Good question. I am one of many 'reporters' on this trip. I was selected, besides for having other skills for other purposes I will talk about later, for having a sizable readership already in place. There are things I can talk about, primarily for the mission's belief in disclosure and everybody's right to know.
For security reasons, however, I have been asked to refer to other crew members by first name only and, although I am allowed to take pictures, I have been asked that my fellow crew members, much of the technology and vehicles only be partially photographed.



Personally, I think I'm being allowed to tell you all this because, in the spirit of hiding in plain sight, no one's going to believe me anyway.

(Mission Date: 0105.51.L1.0E:h)
(Mission Clock: -hhE)


Back in the EVA/CRAB Module

Why me (and everybody else who is here)?

Let's take a step back, a really big step back.
Some people like to talk about Big Brother and/or The Illuminati. There's another legend out there that everybody in show business is watched by some 'mega agency' for their entire life.  
Well, in this case, let's call it Big Mother.
Long before being approached by a very personable British chap on my way back from Central America, dating back to (I'm guessing here) Junior High School in Astoria, Queens, I was on someone's radar for a long, long time. It seems like almost everybody I've met in the last week has been under the same very long term scrutiny. I guess whoever we ultimately have to thank for this job was not into rushing things.


I have a really good memory and I swear there was no camera taking my picture here.

In A Nutshell

In my case, it seems that my early (and consecutive) writing and art work about space travel and other life forms, my involvement in the early 70s with an experimental commune that taught ways of dealing with yourself and others with an 'out of the box' approach, my volunteer work on a telephone hot line for troubled people and my six years working in mental hospitals, where I accepted, communicated with and made progress with some very unorthodox people first put me on their watch list.
Add to that years of hard core travel and this year's being ordained a minister (and performing a marriage, no less) and the fix was in.
Looks like I've been attached to the Psych Department with the job of Assistant Xenopsychology Liaison and Deck Chaplain.
Go figure. If my High School Guidance Counselor could see me now.


I'm actually starting to learn how to read this thing

That's just me. It looks like there's several thousand stories here. I have to get back to training. I will start telling you more about some of the fantastic people I've met and some of the amazing stuff I've already seen .

(Mission Date: 0105.51.81.00:8)
(Mission Clock: -91E)

Cassie, Larry and THE CRAB...

There's no such thing as a free lunch and everybody wears at least two hats around here. I am not to rest on my lofty laurels of psychological and spiritual census taking.


Pulling a couple of Gs in the back seat while Larry and Cassie drive

It seems that EVERYBODY has to know how to drive a CRAB, in case of emergency or in case all the pilots had the fish for lunch. I was assigned to and buddied up with my two instructors, Larry and Cassie. I asked Cassie if that was short for Cassandra or Cassiopeia. She says it's just Cassie. Larry was easier. He freely admits to Lawrence.
It also seems that everybody, at least everybody at this facility, is either very recent ex-military or from some giant Margaritaville somewhere. Cassie and Larry are no exception. Cassie is around 5' 10, shortish dark brown hair and carries herself with a confidence that you want watching your back in a fight. She is also my immediate superior in the Xenopsych Department, so I'll be seeing a lot of her for both trainings.
Larry is pretty mellow and looks like he'd be a lot more at home in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. He also looks like B.J. Hunnicutt from M*A*S*H and Major Dad had a kid. His 'other jobs', believe it or not, are double (well, triple) duty between Physical Training and Cook. He fattens you up and then trims you down, I guess.
Okay, I'm not allowed to take any outside pics yet, but you are probably asking by now, "What the hell is an EVA/CRAB Module?"
It's pretty cool. That's what it is. It's a VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) and amphibious/submersible piece of hardware that has (when extended) eight 'legs'. Well, six legs and two arms in the front. The only thing it can't do is go suborbital.
Cassie and Larry can actually make it 'walk' on the six legs (and they make it a ride as smooth as a Caddy) and pick up stuff with the 'arms'. We haven't done any water stuff. I don't need to know how to walk or swim. I just need to know how to take off, hover and get out of there, in case 'there' is a bad neighborhood and I'm asked to take the wheel. I'm getting there.
EVA stands for Extra Vehicular Activity, like when the astronauts go out to tighten some bolts, y'know? I asked them why this is called EVA when we are still in a vehicle. They said there's only one ship that gets the designation 'vehicle'. I'll know it when I see it... and I'll know why.

Oh.

(Mission Date: 0102.21.22.00:E)
(Mission Clock: -8E2)

Don't Be A Fool, Stay In Space School...


Too late to turn back... they know I'm here :)

Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I’m exhausted from training, but one of the reasons I’m here is to write about it which, ultimately, will keep me here and exhaust me further.
I’m actually fascinated and very busy doing some incredibly stimulating tasks. I’ve mastered the ‘idiot box’ mode of the EVA/CRAB. Yes, I can hover and lean enough to propel it in pretty much any direction. It’s almost auto-pilot. A very smart on board computer does all the balancing of the pitch, yaw and roll. Otherwise, I’d be flipping over a zillion dollar omnicraft every day I’m here.
I’ve also begun Xenopsychology 101. I made up the 101 part. It’s more like an accelerated course that leads to more accelerated courses that then double back and do it all again with data from the first time. Huh? Yeah, me too.
XP’s come in two flavors. Linguistics and Deportment Science. I’m a DSci. Please to meet you. See? I’m already an ambassador to the Universe. The linguists are just like you might have seen or read about. They are bottomless pits of dialects and syntax and cryptology and mumbo jumbo. They are also very into math, which would make sense.
DSci is probably what I would call the opposite. It is not grounded in known databases. It’s more abstract and exploratory. Behavior, protocol and perception are subjective values that already run a gamut on one known world, and that’s just a flea in an ocean that's on a grain of sand of a beach that’s on another flea that’s on a dog that’s on another flea that’s on another dog. By the way, that last dog is also a flea on a giant dog that is really a flea somewhere else.
Ninety percent of DSci is fast observation. Spotting cause and effect can not only embellish a first contact, it can also keep you alive. I’ve already had a daymare about being the front man of my group and approaching an ETLF (Extra Terrestrial Life Form), only to be interpreted as a friendly gift of food.
I don’t know if this is in my ‘dossier’, but while I worked as a recreation director at a state institution I made quite the journey into my clients’ gestalt and macropsychodynamics. My caseload consisted of roughly sixty guys, ages ranging from their forties to their sixties, but they operated on the level of early to late adolescence. Many were dysphonic, not having the power of speech due to either a physical problem or euthenic neglect. They were all institutionalized, meaning they were primarily very adapted to the ebb and flow of the system that confined them and the culture they developed amongst themselves.
On more than one occasion, I would a observe a group of my guys having some kind of jovial round table. They would take turns telling some other guy some strange (to me) phrase and everybody would hoot and howl and slap each other on the back and catch their breath and rinse and repeat.
One time I went over to bring them a pot of coffee or something. They would always hush up when a staff member approached. I put down the pot and turned to go back. I then stopped, turned around and repeated the mystery phrase. Their jaws dropped at hearing an outsider speak that way.
A second later, they all hooted and howled and slapped me on the back and life was good. The fact that I was the only person that didn’t get the ‘joke’ didn’t matter. I reached out with a calculated guess, a very calculated guess, and was accepted.

The Island Of Lost Toys

Ninety five percent of my pre-Arcturus track record is a digital file. That alone makes me wonder whether I should be flattered or freaked out. I actually feel validated, and I also have a feeling that such a reaction is one of the reasons I’m here.
The aforementioned Cassie, my XP DSci Instructor, showed me a portfolio. It contained not only more photos of me over the years, but actual original hard copies of pieces I had written and drawn and thought lost forever.
Among them was a script I pitched many years ago. The story had a heavy XP lean. There, highlighted by someone other than me, was the part where I explained that the essence of Xenopsychology boiled down to ‘not getting pissed on by a giant briefcase or wasting an entire afternoon trying to communicate with the local equivalent of an ashtray’.
A good number of my sketches and doodles were also in the portfolio.


Wow, I was pretty out there. I guess somebody thought I was JUST enough out there.

(Mission Date: 1102.10.90.0055)
(Mission Clock: 0h2 Holding)

A Wrinkle In The Fold...



So, I'm in the Mess Hall with Cassie and two other XPs, John (another DSci) and Joyce (a Japanese gal from Linguistics with short black hair). I bring that up only because I'm starting to think that nobody here has hair below their collar. Some kind of rule I wasn't told? Was it a criteria in their recruiting? That was all about to change in a minute or so.
Cassie is in charge of the three of us. She seems to know more than the rest of us, that's for sure. So, as you can imagine, we are constantly badgering her about Arcturus and who is behind it and what's the plan etc etc etc.
A ruckus at the table behind me is slowly swelling and becomes impossible to ignore. Cassie, who is facing me and looking over my shoulder, rolls her eyes and leans in to whisper to us that it's one of the Physicists. One of the obnoxious ones.
I steal a glimpse at some guy who looks like Benjamin Franklin, if Benjamin Franklin was being played by Brent Spiner with long gray hair and granny glasses. He is in hog heaven, holding court at his table and expounding on all his theories of time and space. Then he starts on what appears to be his big baby, the concept of folding space as a means of faster than light (FTL) space travel.
I say to myself, "Man, if he pulls that 'two dots on a piece of paper and folding the paper together to connect the dots' thing, I'm gonna have a cow."
I should have called the Man Gives Birth To Cow Delivery Room and told them I was on my way. Sure enough, he starts with the paper and the pen.
"And by folding space we can place any two points right next to each other, even if they're light years apart and blah diddy blah blah doo dah."
I sigh and get up and go over to a rack of manuals or something that all look like phone books. I take one and bring it over to the 'Perfesser's' table and slap it down in front of him, opened about half way. He's a little startled and looks up a little miffed at me. I take his marker and make two dots, just like the two dots on his piece of paper. I then close the book and say to him, "Now connect the dots by folding that space."
He does some kind of 'Well I never... You don't know what you're talking about...' mumble grumble while he gets up and walks off. He doesn't even bus his own tray. Slob.
I sit back at my table and Cassie is giving me a raised eyebrow look, as if to ask, "And...?"
I tell her (and John and Joyce, who are speechless) how that parlor trick always ticks me off. You can't just 'fold' space with no regard for the surrounding space. Space is not a two dimensional piece of paper. Sure, there's dimensions beyond our familiar three through which we navigate, and extra-dimensional perception has insight similar to what we had over the (almost) two dimensional creatures in Phillip K. Dick's Dragon's Egg. But those two dimensional creatures couldn't just crunch their Universe between two imaginary extended hands any more than we can connect the dots on the center page of a closed phone book.
Then I asked her, "Am I gonna get in trouble for that?"
She has this thing, I noticed, that's kind of like an invisible smile. I'm still not sure if she uses it to laugh with me or at me. She started getting up, lifting her tray and said, "No. That's why you're here. That's why we're all here."
But then she stopped before turning to go to where the dirty dishes get dumped, "You don't get to be a chaplain until you're on the ship, but you are going to be the weirdest chaplain ever."

(Mission Date: 1105.10.01.00:91)
(Mission Clock: 0h2 Holding)

Learning How To Not Think...



My training, as you might guess, is divided into Phys Ed and XenoPsych. The physical training is rigorous but rewarding. It's either scheduled free time (where we can do weights, swim or whatever we want) or scheduled groups.
The supervised classes with Larry (remember Larry?) are group calisthenics and road work. I can dig the aerobics, but the jogging is abysmal. No treadmills, it's all real running over anything that isn't a nice flat track. Hills, dales and gullies. I think the goal here is to not break your neck or an ankle. Larry says it's all to make us survive take off and other (?) velocities with minor 'discomfort'. I guess 'broken neck' comes under 'discomfort'.
The XP stuff is a LOT more fun. I don't even feel like I'm working. Some of it is interactive discussion between the group and our supervisors. Some of it is dealing with computer generated scenarios that, according to Cassie, are totally made up by the computer. They are random, abstract and don't necessarily tell you if you're barking up the right tree or not.
During the computer simulations, we are paired up in 'pods', consisting of one DSci and one Linguist. Joyce has been my Linguistics counterpart. Sometimes we are side to side, trying to make sense out of a very realistic rendering of something never seen before or ever imagined by a human. Sometimes we are in two separate rooms on opposite ends of the compound, but we are dealing with the same scenario.
Sometimes we actually make some kind of connection and establish a very primal dialogue with a randomly constructed mind that probably thinks we're idiots. Sometimes we're just talking to rocks that just happen to make sounds. That's exactly what happened the other day. We spent an afternoon chatting with some kind of quartz that absorbs sound for arbitrary amounts of time and then 'echos' it back in a different order than we sent it. We really thought we were making contact.
We were yelling at a rock.
There's also all this deprogramming stuff that's designed to break us of life long habits of how we see things. These exercises are a blast! They'd make great party games. A lot of them are just too hard to describe, but here's one of the 'easier' ones. I say 'easier' the same way someone would say getting shot with an arrow is easier than with a sharpened telephone pole.
Okay, so they give you sixty seconds, right? You are presented a screen with the names of colors, but each name is NOT printed in the same color. You have to rattle off as many COLORS (not names) as you can, in order, column by column.
It really does fry your brain.
Or maybe, rather, un-fries it.

(Mission Date: 1102.10.81.0E:S1)
(Mission Clock: -0E2 Holding)

Acronyms And (Gastronomical) Contractions...


Take your protein pill and put your helmet on...

We're going out to eat and I haven't anything to wear. Not. We haven't left UDL Percival and dinner is right here.
And, today, I was introduced to the latest addition to my new wardrobe. I'm surprised it doesn't have a nickname. It really deserves one. Do you know that 'Jeep' is just the phonetic drawling of 'GP', as in General Purpose Vehicle?
My suit is called a Hydraulic Cocoon. I suggested HyCoo (y'know, like Haiku), but nobody bought it. It's basically a space suit, but it works differently. I think that's all I'm allowed to divulge right now, but I was told it will all be printable once we're a little further away.
Now, about the food. We've been eating very well, thank you. Considering all the calories we must be burning off, I'd say it's an even trade. That was, at least, until two days ago, when they started acclimating our systems to 'space food'. I don't have any here to snap a pic, but I'll get you some soon, okay? Some of it looks like Rice Krispie Treats and some of it looks like yellow kitchen sponges that have that dark blue scrubby side. I have not seen any toothpaste tubes with turkey dinner in it. Isn't that the Cadillac of space food? Not here, I guess.
They've also started us on ever-increasing daily amounts of something that makes the sponge seem like the turkey dinner in the toothpaste tube. Kind of like honey. Kind of like motor oil. It's pretty much tasteless, but your mind fills in the blanks. John says it tastes like roasting pan grease. Joyce says it tastes like chalk. I think it tastes like when the dentist is drilling in your mouth.
Then they take a small blood sample about ten minutes later to, I don't know, make sure it's not killing us or something. Everybody working on us is very cool and super nice. They really aren't mad scientists. But they have an invisible wink, similar to Cassie's invisible laugh. It's as if they just always seem to know something I don't, but it's just around the corner. I know the feeling. There's some things here that I can't tell you about just yet.
But I will.

(Mission Date: 11.10.S2.00:22)
(Mission Clock: -IS0 Holding)

Crash Course...


Cassie and The Twins

It's been about two weeks since my last post. Trust me, I would have. At least if I had the luxury to post reports, I'd...
Well, let me start from the beginning. About two weeks ago, my whole section of the living quarters (about twenty of us) get approached during breakfast in the Mess Hall. This includes John, Joyce and Cassie, who always sit with me when possible.
There's also several other XPs, a couple of astronomer types and a couple of nurses. I've worked two of the nurses, or rather I should say they've worked on me, as part of their training. This is usually during my post-motor oil blood lettings, where they take samples after each delicious intake of that viscous liquid 'food' I told you about.
There's several male nurses in my section, but I've only worked with Deirdre and Deborah, the Double Mint Twins. Don't tell them that to their face because (a) they are not twins, (b) they are not sisters and (c) they have sharp objects. But they are both blond mid-western types with the same first initial and (if they ever read this) very good nurses.
The guy approaching us all is Irwin, our sub-commander. No, no submarines involved. He's like our division boss. It's occurred to me that I'm getting pretty loopy and giddy while writing this report. I'll try to get to the point.
The point was, at that time, that we were going on a field trip, a surprise field trip. Imagine twenty some odd people looking at twenty some odd people at the same time with a WTF look and all looking back at Irwin within the blink of an eye. Irwin is kind of no nonsense. That's all he had for us. No regular training today. Get to the CRAB hangar asap. Field trip. Thank you. Pivot on ball of foot. Gone.
I looked across the table at Cassie, "Are you going?"
Again, with the patented invisible laugh while she started to get up from the table, "Nope."
And it was kind of a long N in the front and it all went up a note at the end. She did say she was driving us and dropping us off, though. Thanks, mom.


The aforementioned and promised pic of Space Food

Sure enough, we're scooted off to the hangar, each given a day pack and hustled onto three EVA/CRABS. It looks like the usual suspects on my flight. Joyce, John and The Twins. Thomas, another XP Linguist, rounds out our posse. That makes two XP DSci's, Two Linguists and two nurses. Good old Larry, my other CRAB flight instructor and gym instructor jumps in to fly us out with Cassie, so it's a real reunion of sorts.
I take a peek into my day pack, which is a light weight back pack with one of those crazy single straps that go over one shoulder and somehow come around the other side. Oh. Great. It's nothing but space food. The 'Rice Krispie Treats', the 'Blueberry Cheesecake Sponges' and, yes, the Motor Oil from Hell.


The Infamous last CRAB

We're followed by two other CRABS and we go off in a direction I never took during flight training. Kind of back behind UDL Percival, if there is such a direction. We traveled for quite a while, the furthest from Percival I'd been yet. Couldn't even see it behind us anymore. Deborah suddenly noticed the last CRAB in our little parade was gone. We all crawled back and somebody pointed it out. It was heading down for a landing, and we, with Number Two in tow, veered off a little to the left. A short while later, CRAB Number Two started a descent, and we veered off to the left once more.
Then it was our turn to kiss the deck. Cassie and Larry make it look so easy. Six legs extended and we squat down onto the ground like we weighed an ounce. Then they opened the hatch and Cassie twisted around and said, "Okay kids. See ya later. Don't go anywhere until you get further instructions."
And they took off. Just like that. It looked like, by our reckoning, that all three CRABS dropped off all three 'parties' to form a big triangle, with about five miles on each side. It was a sunny but rather chilly mid-morning. I think we might have traveled to a higher elevation. A high desert, from the looks of it.
The first hour went by. Nothing. The second hour. We kept losing ourselves in shop talk. There were still so many unanswered questions. Cassie and Larry weren't the only ones, believe me, who always had that 'Whoo boy, you ain't seen nothin' yet' look.


Finders Keepers: I get to wear the goggles

A sound. Engines. CRAB engines. We can make out in the glare a CRAB entering our 'triangle'. It's carrying in its six legs what appears to be one of those big cargo containers that they take off ships with cranes and drop right onto tractor trailers. It's about a half mile up and seems to know it's right in the middle.
And then it drops the cargo container.
The huge heavy rectangular box in a silent, very surreal and graceful spin, crashes into the Earth, raising a huge cloud of dust. Seconds later, we hear the crash, a low guttural bass and then nothing. We were so caught up in this ballet of gravity, we didn't even see the CRAB until we picked it out on the horizon. It was out of here.
We're sure the other two teams saw this. We're wondering what they're thinking. Seriously, we don't think they were thinking anything different than we were thinking.
"Nobody's coming to get us."

(Mission Date: 1102.20.60.20:E2) 
(Mission Clock: -IS0 Holding)

Crash Course, Part Two...


Spoiler Alert: I survived to write about it :)

So, that was that. The CRAB was gone and there we were in the midday sun with a cold breeze whipping and nothing more but dead silence.
We had some quick assessing of our situation to do. What's going on? Is this planned? Where the hell are we? Oh, there were other questions. I'll share them as we move along.
And move along we did. At this time of year, we were lucky if we had four hours of sunlight left and I didn't think it was going to get any warmer that night. Did I mention that none of us had outerwear? After all, we were giddy-upped right from the Mess Hall. I don't wear an overcoat and gloves to breakfast, do you?
Our first command decision was upon us. Do we stay put and await rescue or do we find better digs? We started making tracks for what was left of the crashed storage container. We were dropped off in a pretty bare spot and we all agreed that shelter was our first priority. Joyce and John took the point with me, while Thomas and the two nurses, Deirdre and Deborah, followed behind.
Okay, here's some more of our WTF questions we pondered during our chilly hike (at least we kept moving to stay warm and that was a win/win endeavour):
* We've all washed out of our training and this is how Arcturus takes out the trash.
* Something's gone wrong. Our field trip might have been real, but not the way it's turned out.
* Maybe UDL Percival has been discovered and compromised by outsiders or saboteurs.
* Maybe that last CRAB was supposed to deliver that container more gently, but (again) something's gone wrong.
* Everybody's dead and nobody knows were out here (a bit dramatic, but we were taking all ideas).
* We are doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, assessing a situation and making decisions.
It took just over three hours to get to the crash site. As we approached, we saw one of the other landing parties approaching from their angle. We all waved and yelled (nothing more than 'HEY' would carry in the wind) and pretty much concluded we were all meeting at the wreck.
It turned out to be six of the astronomers. Great, shipwrecked with six astronomers. Okay, to be fair, how useful will two Linguists (when everybody already speaks the same language) and two Deportment Science Officers (when we're all the same species) be?
Looks like Deborah and Deirdre suddenly went way up the ladder in regards to essential personnel.
And then there was the wrecked shipping container. Light was getting dim, but we needed to see what Manna dropped from Heaven before we were plunged in total darkness. We had two cameras between the twelve of us. Marcus, one of the astronomers, was also (like myself) one of the designated reporters. Our cameras had a setting to extend the flash. We all agreed to use it prudently and to keep the cameras off when not used solely for light, which is why there are so few pics of this interlude.
The container, as expected, split open like a giant pinata. It lay on the hard ground like some kind of big dead thing with a broken back. Some of the contents spilled out around it. We started sorting through the rubble, inside and out. It was junk. Crap. It seemed to had been at least half filled with leftovers from a yard sale. Boards and pipes and rags and paper and busted up metal things.
I volunteered the notion, "Maybe Percival WAS taking out the trash and they didn't even know we were in the vicinity."
It was, however, the trash versus treasure scenario. A lot of the junk was in big trash bags. Some was even wrapped up in thin vinyl tarps. Robinson Crusoe was smiling upon us. We spent the first half hour of our remaining light wrapping ourselves up in whatever we could wrap ourselves up in. Then we had to think about a fire.
I never got the knack of building a fire out of nothing, not for lack of trying over years. I just don't have a combustible thumb. However, Kathryn (one of the other astronomers) wasted no time.
She took to the junk like a cave woman and had one of those spindle things going in her hands in no time. As she diligently worked her MacGyver magic, she explained how she had been in love with stargazing since she was a little girl in the Colorado Rockies. Her father taught her at an early age how to stay warm during all night meteor showers stake outs. Son of a gun, within a half hour of what must have been blistering handwork, she actually had a little glow happening. She barked at us to find kindling. We obediently scoured the inside and outside of our dead metal dinosaur for twigs and dry grass. Rags and scrap wood were next and, just like in the movies, we suddenly had a healthy little campfire in our wretched little refuge.
Great, add one of the astronomers to the top of the heap in our pecking order. If this kept up, I was going to be the only bum in the bunch.

(Mission Date: 1102.20.02.9E:11)
(Mission Clock: -IS0 Holding)

Crash Course, Part Three...

With a blazing fire in a cleared out center of the shipping container and a foraged pile of firewood and broken furniture, we all settled in for a battened down night pretty well sheltered from the outside wind. 'Settled' may not have been the best term. Twelve recruits suddenly stranded in not only a physical wasteland, but a sudden situational vacuum as well.


Broken Home: Infrared pic of our campsite

Our day packs each contained four bottles of 'motor oil from hell' (about a liter each), eight 'Rice Krispie Treats' and eight scrubby sponges. The sun was down and we had not, according to everybody, touched our supplies. Time for a very late lunch.
Twelve men and women thrust into shipwreck mode, along with constantly looking around for the other shoe to drop (and perhaps finish us off), begat a full spectrum of conversations. I stuck mostly with Kathryn and Deirdre, as I needed their outdoors and medical savvy respectively. Joyce kind of latched onto us and helped with whatever we needed.
Firewood collection and dressing for warmth was the dance as the lyric was every possible combination of why we were there. Undershirts became head gear. Trash bags became togas. Rags became gloves. I found a ratty old pair of carpentry goggles and used that as a headband for my new 'hat'.
Deirdre and I decided that one whole bottle of motor oil and one Krispie would be a good first ration before we tried to go to sleep. It was a bit lavish, in regards to our total stash, but everybody was close to suffering from exposure and we would need a good kick start for the rest of whatever was going to happen. We also, almost simultaneously, brought up the need for each of us having an empty bottle.
"I've never done it, " she said, "have you?"
"Yeah. It's pretty gross but it will keep you alive."
In other words, I can't start a fire, but my colorful past has included research into drinking your own urine in regards to survival. A 100% pure intake is not advised by many experts, as it's way too salty and would actually do more harm than good. But a 50/50 cocktail, with some other liquid (hopefully water), would not only keep you fairly hydrated, but would also recycle your superfluous vitamins and minerals.
"Let's hope we find some water for making punch, " I told her.
"God, " she responded, "let's hope we find enough water to not have to do that. Yuck!"
We decided to tell everybody to keep an extra empty bottle on them for a 'canteen' in case we find potable water. Kathryn wasn't fooled. She gave a little, "Oh, is that what they're calling it now," as she brushed by us after the announcement. I figured she'd be up on all kinds of stuff like that. We were going to try to stretch what we had by doing a half Krispie and a gulp of motor oil for breakfast and a half scrubby sponge and a gulp for dinner.
Then there was the issue of posting a sentry or not. A big metal container, almost the size of a freight car, crashes to Earth and it had not grabbed anybody's attention yet. We were all finally getting warm and I think we all needed some rest. We compromised some of the more paranoid members by setting up some 'crap traps' around the perimeter. Interlopers were more than welcome to make crunchy and jingly noises if they snuck up to kill us in our sleep. Boxes and various shapes and sizes of junk piled up against the cracks in walls and everybody seemed as satisfied as they were going to get.
We curled up in two semi-circles around the fire, shoulder to shoulder to maximize warmth. There was no room for modesty or tactile defense. Tarps and rags below us and more tarps and rags bundled us all around. All we needed was a ghost story. The story at hand served pretty well, though.
Maybe it was because I was in the middle of what seemed to be the slightly 'higher' horseshoe, but I found myself serving as the conduit for the questions and theories. Above all, I was pretty impressed at the lack of panic amongst us. Maybe that's some innate trait that was part of our selection in the first place.
It was agreed much earlier that evening that wandering around in the cold dark would be highly counterproductive, let alone dangerous. What would we be looking for, anyway? A way back to Percival? A gas station to call a cab? A Western Union office to get a bus ticket wired and go home?
Something was going on and we had to assume the worst until proven otherwise. We were off the grid when we were at Percival and we weren't any closer now. We were well past our twelfth hour in limbo and we all noted that we never saw even the highest plane go by. Not to mention that there was still a third landing party out there.
Fact: We were all dropped off and told to wait for instructions.
Fact: A lone CRAB dropped a container full of junk.
That was about it for the facts. Speculators, start your engines. I was actually kind of touched at the way the forum going. It was, without self pity, a kind of, "We were so close and now this has happened."
"Look," I said, "maybe this is exactly what we're supposed to be doing. I know it's a leap of faith, but what's the option?"


El Fuego de la Kathryn

Oh, my little group had options. Nobody in power likes covert operations, even massive covert operations that look like, if they wanted to, run circles around any party poopers
"Part of the training" versus "We're under attack" were the two major mindsets.
"We're here, well not HERE, " I started, "because we want to represent the part of humanity that wants to leave this rock to see what the rest of the rock garden looks like. We've made some pretty big sacrifices already.
With the exception of the crazy reports we get to do, most of us have disappeared overnight. We've left careers and friends, maybe even families, for the big ride. For the chance to see what else, and maybe who else, is out there.
Maybe we've been busted and the cops are coming for us in the morning. I say we try to get some sleep and start thinking about finding the third landing party. Do what you can 'til you can do what you want."
I guess that did something. Some were good at falling asleep. Some people just get tired and have no choice.Some just stayed still with their eyes closed to not disturb the lucky snoozers, at least until cat naps came in dribs and drabs.
The arrangement seemed rather boy/girl/boy/girl around the fire. I was between Deirdre and Joyce. I tried to get Kathryn to flank me, but Joyce was hell bent on curling up next to me. She was keeping up a good front, but I think she was pretty freaked. I thought about, very jokingly, whispering to Deirdre that, if we don't get out of this, we'd have to propagate the species. I chose to wait to see if we survived the first night.
I always wake up not knowing, for just a few seconds, where I am and (even freakier) who I am. Just for a few seconds, then I always figure it out. I also always want to go back to sleep, no matter what. Whatever I was dreaming slowly segued into the wind outside. I could kind of sense the bluish gray beginnings of dawn on my eyelids. After still more resistance, I finally opened my eyes to give the crack of dawn, and the crack in the wall, a blank stare.
Wind. Ragged rubber sheets waving in the wind. The low light of the new day. And something else. Something blowing through the crack and occasionally landing on my face.
SNOW!
It was snowing! Snow is water!
"Hey, everybody! It's snowing. We have to grab this stuff before it melts into the ground.This is water!"
My wake up call was answered with a variety of grunts and startles. Sorry, no time to be cajoled. We started grabbing any kind of container that looked like it wouldn't give us tetanus. Then somebody had the great idea of lining said containers, most of them looked like metal desk drawers and filing cabinets, with some of the trash bags. Then, somebody else had the best idea. Just fill the trash bags with snow.
For twelve people shocked out of sleep, the train of logic kicked in pretty quick. Half a dozen trash bags of snow hung inside the shelter.We decided to nick the lower corner of one of them and start a drip to start filling the 'canteens'.
I wandered over to Deirdre and asked, "Do you always get your prayers answered?"
"Yeah, " she said, "why, do you want to put in a request?"
I bit my tongue the night before with the 'propagating the race' crack. But I've always had a whiny joke request that I always use when somebody is asking what else I'd like. It just blurted out and I immediately felt like I wasted a wish from a Genie.
"Can we get a pony?"

(Mission Date: 1102.20.L2.00:h2)
(Mission Clock: -IS0 Holding)

Crash Course, Part Four...

A decent supply of water and a brand new day. Too bad the brand new day was in the middle of nowhere and, when our day packs ran out, we'd seriously have to start looking at cute little wildlife as food.
The mission of the day was to scout out our third landing party. This brought up an interesting triangulation puzzle. Not only were we not sure where they were, we had to figure out as close to exactly where our two landing parties came from when we approached the wrecked shipping container that we perceived to be in the middle of all three landing zones.
The wind swept hard ground and patches of dry grass gave up no footprints dating back to our arrival. We had to break down into our two original groups and guesstimate our respective angles of approach from our view of the crash site as we approached. Done. Then we calculated the third point of the imaginary triangle (again, assuming that the CRAB dropped us all in three neat and equidistant packages) and the vector shooting out into the desert from that imaginary point. Done. Well, at least to the best of our combined squinting and hmmm-ing.


Kathryn, Keeper of the Flame

Kathryn wanted to go on the search party. I considered it, but her being our only skilled source of fire starting, I thought it best she stay and take charge of the camp.
"Sorry, Prometheus," I teased her, "How does it feel to have job security?"
"Hey, who died and made you Zeus?" she shot back.
"Uranus?"
"Cronus," she corrected, "Don't quit your day job, Zeus."

Thou Shalt Not Do Things You Shouldn't Do...

Thomas, an astronomer from the second group, not Thomas the Linguist, wanted to come along. Why not, I chuckled to myself, a shipwrecked astronomer was just about as expendable as a shipwrecked xenopsychologist.



Actually, to their credit, the astronomers could make a humble contribution. They knew where we were. The running joke (and an homage to Rod Serling, I guess) was that we were still on Earth. But, by looking at the night sky and checking sun shadows through sticks in the ground, along with looking at their watches for some reason, they pretty much figured we were one hundred, maybe two hundred miles Northwest of UDL Percival. So much for walking home from the prom.
I also thought a nurse would be important, as we didn't know what shape the other group was in. I asked Deborah to join our little posse. I asked Deborah, as opposed to Deirdre, for several reasons. First, she was just as qualified as Deirdre. Second, everybody knew who slept next to everybody the night before. People notice these things, whether you want to or not. I didn't want any weirdness or jealousy or whatever to start brewing for whatever stupid reason if I kept hanging out with Deirdre.
I always thought the Ten Commandments were (and are) a brilliant way to keep a tribe together, wherever you believe they came from. The first three basically tell you that the Boss wrote the rules and don't question the Boss and everything will be fine. The rest of them are just good sense for keeping a community together.
Maybe Moses was just worried about his tribe falling apart, went up a mountain and came down saying, "Hey! You'll never guess who I just spoke to."
Maybe not. Stranger things have happened. I'm in the middle of the desert after falling off the face of the Earth to join a secret space program. Are you listening, Horatio?
I was kind of surprised that Joyce didn't want to tag along. She was starting to follow me around and I was getting worried that she was getting too freaked out and not concentrating on the situation. Good for her. My ego could handle the fact that I was no longer her security blanket.
Thomas, Deborah and I each borrowed two extra empty 'motor oil' bottles from the others, filled all from our trash bag water dripper thing and took off in our calculated direction. The sun was already busting up the early morning snow clouds and it couldn't be a more lovely day to be wrapped up in rags and plastic and go in search of a lost tribe.
We kept scanning the horizon for friend, foe or none of the above. Our situation was still on high alert and one could not assume any less than the worst until events proved otherwise. Our conversation stayed lateral. Not too much speculation on whether we were being hunted down and/or were idiots to listen to our deepest instincts and join Arcturus. We started a fun 'invisible trivia' chat that began with bouncing around how UDL Percival got its name.
Other than being a randomly generated handle, I thought it might have to do with Percival Lowell, the famous astronomer. I was surprised Thomas didn't beat me to that guess. Actually, his thought was more obscure and even more romantic.
"Percival was one of the Knights of the Round Table," he said, "Although he joined against great odds. His mother sequestered him in the forest to protect him from, I dunno, everything. Arthur and the Knights came riding through that neck of the woods. Percival saw them and immediately knew it was his fate to join up and ride with them."
"Wow," said Deborah, "Kind of like us. I wonder if all the UDLs are cosmically named like that. Alice comes to mind."
And so we played the game as we walked.
"How about Neary?" I offered. That just got two blank stares.
"Aw, c'mon. Roy Neary, the central character in Close Encounters. Sheesh."

Nurse Livingstone, I Presume...

We made a list of potential UDL names and agreed to a nickel each if we ever got around to finding out the real names of our sister bases. We walked while trying to keep the same angle of our view of the campsite to our backs, to try to stay in a consistent direction. Something ahead piqued our curiosity. It was pretty much within our vector, so we made that our destination. It was an aberration of topography popping up ever so humbly from the surroundings.
I'm not up on my topographical aberration lingo, but I guess I'd have to call it a scrubby little grove of tough little trees. It quickly transformed into a scrubby little grove of tough little trees which, as we almost got there, grew a head down near the base of one of the trees that shouted out a friendly, "Hey!"



We found our third party camping out in some kind of tree lined hole in the ground. Again, I don't know if the technical term was sink hole, gully or grotto, but they had a sweet little setup. Bob, one of the two remaining nurses in my section and the guy who first greeted us from the pit, looked to be co-leading his little group along with Michael, the other nurse. Both these guys always seemed to have more of a field medic cut of their jibs, so I guess that kind of made sense. The rest of the group were our 'geeks', the four computer guys who filled out our roll call. I thought they were really going to be jonesing without all their toys, let alone electricity, but they all seemed pretty mellow and in good shape.
Considering they were all still in the clothes on their backs when they were left there, and the fact that the trees only partially formed any kind of roof, our newest lost sheep were keeping pretty warm in their giant sized foxhole. Staying out of the wind had a lot to do with it, I guess. Bob and Michael were both also gifted with fire starting. Between the reflecting walls of the crater and heating small boulders, along with aforementioned wind shielding, they were in good shape with lots of visible firewood in the general vicinity. They just weren't all that equipped for traveling or collecting and storing snow.
A meeting of the minds followed. We had two pretty interesting camps going on here. We named them Abbott and Costello, Abbott being the storage container camp. Considering the high alert paranoia that we operating under, albeit quite well, we came up we a peach of a plan.
a) Camp Abbott stuck out like a sore thumb on the desert, whereas Camp Costello blended in pretty darn nicely.
b) Camp Abbot had a nice supply of raw materials to use (tarps, trash bags, rags and random debris).
c) Let's get back to Abbott and organize a bug out/supply relocation and we all make snug like bugs at Camp Costello.
And so, our second day as castaways was planned. Deborah, Thomas and I headed back to our camp to tell everybody what was going on. The fact that Kathryn immediately liked the idea kind of helped motivate the rest of the gang. Nobody wanted to stay behind if their only maker of fire was moving out. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a Cro Magnon.
Thomas and Deirdre guided half the Abbot constituency back Costello. We figured water and 'clothing' for the new guys were a priority. That would also gear them up to come back to Abbot and help with the move. And so it went, increasingly larger groups back and forth, like ants to and fro. The rule was to keep one fire officer in each camp until the final move.
I also made a point that we shouldn't drag too much stuff. One of the big reasons we were moving was to conceal ourselves better until we had reason not to. I didn't think gouging the equivalent of the Nazca Lines into the desert floor, leading from Abbott to Costello, was a good idea. The wind and the hard ground was still doing a good job resisting our footprints. I just didn't want a big SECRET HIDEOUT sign pointing right at us.
Water bags placed on large areas of scrap wood and then placed on a large tarp, however, worked pretty well. The middle layer protected the water bags from rocks and other sharp underdraggings. The weight was distributed throughout the tarp and everything could be dragged without scratching any lines behind us.
By sunset, we had completed as much of the move as we think we could. A lot of material was strung through the trees, forming a nice tent atmosphere over three quarters of our roofless cave. To make matters easier, it seemed like most of the junk from Camp Abbott was one shade of dirt or another. It occurred to me that we were all slowly becoming one shade of dirt or another. At least our new hybrid camp was well camouflaged.
Eighteen in all, two Deportment Science Officers, two Linguists, four Nurses, four computer techies, six astronomers and not a partridge nor a pear tree anywhere in sight. I took in the surreal tableau around the fire, my mind swinging between the Last Supper and a somewhat swollen rank of Apostles in Gethsemane.
Sentries were easy now. Each one of us had to give up an hour of sleep and even having a pair of watchdogs at a time didn't put a dent in our rest cycles. It was late evening and we were settling in, discussing the situation and munching on that evening's ration of space food. It's said that when you're hungry enough anything tastes better. That still wasn't happening with our krispies, scrubby sponges and motor oil. This was pure nutrition and no taste. A pretty efficient way to avoid overeating.

Things That Go Bump In The Night...

Just before 11:00 pm, John suddenly came down from patrolling the perimeter and, if there could be such a sound, loudly whispered, "Guys, look at this!"
About two thirds of us made it up to the edge when I shouted back to whoever was nearest to the fire, "Kill the fire! Throw a blanket or something over it! Quick!"



Off in the distance, a massive array of ultra bright lights were beaming down at Camp Abbott. Every so often we could just make out the tiny washed out form of the shipping container as the startling white rays swung by her before moving on to scan the surrounding area. We couldn't even tell what was up there. That's how blinding, even at our distance, the lights were.
An hour of ghostly, silent piercing of the darkness around Abbott and then darkness. Total and udder darkness. Was whatever that was moving towards us? The starry night gave no silhouette against it. We watched. We waited. We were blind men in a dark room looking for a black cat that wasn't there.

(Mission Date:1102.E0.21.0E:L1)
(Mission Clock: -IS0 Holding)

Crash Course (Conclusion)...

A sleepless night. A long, cold, dark sleepless night with the eighteen of us spread out around the upper edge of our crater. Vigilant until daybreak, and the glow of the coming daylight just made us exhausted. We were all suffering from adrenaline crash after watching the night skies for anything that may be approaching.



We decided the constant wind would disperse our campfire smoke enough in daylight. It was either that or glow like a Jack O'Lantern every night. We opted for most of us sleeping and warming up during the day and blackout conditions at night, when most us would be ready for anything. Getting approached, attacked or just discovered would be far less disorienting if we weren't roused from sleep.
I didn't think it was necessary to pool all the Space Food together and dole it out in rations. Everybody had a day pack and we all started out with the same amount. Surprisingly, we weren't all that hungry. That couldn't have been solely because of our 'fight or flight' adrenaline levels, as we were now tired and cold and we should have been hungry.
Deirdre, Deborah, Bob and Michael had no answers. By their unanimous admission, none of them were nutritionists, let alone chemical engineers. Maybe it was the exclusive diet of space krispies, space scrubby sponges and motor oil. Nobody knew what was in that stuff. It went down, stayed down and, as far as we knew, came out. We were already exceeding anybody's track record of eating just Space Food, and breaking new records with each day. We did, however, start building traps for food.
Not that we really saw anything running around. No rabbits, no chipmunks, and I couldn't even find any beetles or scorpions.
"Okay, the first person who brings up the movie 'Alive' is the first person who gets eaten," I announced.
Joyce pointed out that I was the first person who mentioned the movie. This is why I suck at chess. One of the fire officers cranked up the fire and about fifteen of us, myself included, bundled up and cuddled up to get as much sleep as one could under the indirect sunlight and with the memory of some unknown airborne thing burned in our brains.

Expect The Worse, Sleep, Rinse, Repeat...

I wish I had something more exciting to tell you. Troubled slumber alternated with hearing nothing but the wind and seeing nothing in the darkness beyond Camp Costello. Not even a bird, I noticed, not even vultures. We had one more morning snow about four days into our exile. The canopy tarps worked great at not only catching a nice amount of snow, but also becoming a big funnel for a single drip hole as it melted.



Okay, I was having crazy dreams and I'm sure I was just one more choir boy in that respect. I'm walking a fine line writing here, as I don't know who gets to read this, but I guess it should be addressed. The boy/girl situation at Camp Costello was under control. I don't know who had a crush on who, but it was working out to be more of a platonic thing for the time being. Until we knew how long we had to live, I guess we all became big brothers and sisters. If you are expecting some kind of 'we're all about to die, let's do it' scenario, sorry. Add to the fact that eighteen of us were glommed on top of each other in a big hole in the ground, I guess that would put the kibosh on any action.
If I had my Desert Island druthers, I was torn between Deirdre and Kathryn. They were both pretty hot to begin with and they both had a confidence that made them even sexier. But we were all looking pretty worse for wear. Dirty and grimy and, despite the cooler clime, we were all starting to smell pretty ripe. Every now and then, though, I would catch a look from either Deirdre or Kathryn that kind of said, "If we ever get out of here..."
But, believe it or not, I was having dreams about Cassie. A lot of them were erotic. Discretion being the better part of valor, I will not extrapolate. However, a lot of the dreams were just about us talking or, rather, her talking to me. It always seemed like we were in some loud but tucked away place, like a cave behind a waterfall. I could hear her so very clearly, though. I couldn't remember what she was saying to me, but it always seemed to reach right down into me. I usually made myself go to sleep by thinking of her. I don't know if that initiated the Cassie dreams or whether she just became my auto-suggestion sleep mantra.
Something was gnawing at the back of my mind, but I kept pushing it back there and tried to concentrate on the situation. Then, around the end of the ninth day, while the majority of us stretched and got ready for another night standing watch, I realized that what was bugging me WAS the situation.
"WTF, people?"
That got a couple of looks from the few that knew I was designated to be a chaplain.
"Why are we so freakin' complacent?"
Most of us were still down in the hole, huddled around that day's just-extinguished fire to get some extra last heat from the surrounding stones. The desert night sky can be surprisingly luminous once you get used to it, or maybe we were all developing cat vision, but I could see every face clearly.
"We are stranded out here in who-knows-where-ville. We have an ever diminishing supply of horrible tasting food substitute and a tenuous supply of water and firewood. We have nothing but the clothes on our back and rags and rubber sheets. We have no idea if everybody back at Percival is alive or dead... and there's something out there that may or may not be looking for us. It may or may not capture us or may or may not kill us, and we're walking around in an absolute fog! What's wrong with this picture?"
"It's the space food," said Deirdre, not as an absolute, but as an offered theory, "Maybe it has some kind of sedative quality, like some form of anti-anxiety medication."
Michael countered, "So what does that mean? We stop eating altogether? We've managed to find ourselves in the one part of the world that apparently doesn't even have ants."
"Okay, good, keep the juices flowing here, people. Thank you, Medical. Anybody else?"
Thomas the Astronomer, as he was now regularly called to distinguish him from Thomas the Linguist, came forward. He rubbed his scraggly shipwreck beard and looked down. Then he looked up and said, "Maybe it's us."
We all gave him that kind of okay, you have our attention, don't leave us hanging look.
"We've all been, for lack of a better term, hand picked for this mission," He continued, "I don't know if there still is a mission, but you know what I mean. Each one of us has been watched for a very long time, which alone surprises me that we take that for granted, and I think that has something to do with what's going on."
"Like what," asked Deborah. I wondered if this was going to turn into an enhanced alliance or a debate between my two hard science departments. Xenopsych was way too out there to count right then and the computer techs, although handling everything as well as anybody else, had not chimed in.
"Look at us, " Thomas said, "We're from all over the world, we're from so many different former lives, but we have all been picked because, apparently, we display something that makes us all the same. We're astronauts. I don't mean known astronautics. We are the first deep space astronauts ever assembled, and I think we are predisposed, to some extent, to go with the flow of drudgery, to make do with little, to face emergencies with as much logic as possible and to not panic."
Then he added, "However, I think this might be pushing the envelope of the When In Rome Scenario."

Sleeping At Night... What A Concept...

"How do we know that thing with the searchlights isn't looking for us in order to rescue us?"
John was asking the group, but was mostly looking at me. That's the way it was going, actually. Some unwritten rule said that somebody had to look like they were asking me a question in order to ask the group a question. I was wondering if they were going to start facing the group when they wanted to specifically ask me a question. I quickly pictured Deirdre asking the whole group if they'd marry her, then I just as quickly dismissed it and grappled reality.



"Not too many rescue ships make one appearance in the middle of the night and never come back again," I finally answered, for the group, mind you.
We had been pondering the idea of signal fires and big Xs and HELP signs made from stones the afternoon before the searchlight incident. I was surprised nobody had named the mystery craft. Big Searchy? Big Lighty? I guess I wasn't surprised after all.
And so, again, the group took inventory of all facts and speculation.
FACT: We are stuck in the desert.
FACT: Something scanned Camp Abbott, we ALL saw it, and we have not seen or heard from anybody since.
FACT: We don't have much more space food supplies, as horrible as they are and as little of it that we eat.
FACT: Our only water supply is occasional snow and we can't count on that, either.
FACT: We are, to the best of our astronomers' calculations, somewhere between 100 and 200 miles from UDL Percival.
FAIRYTALE: UDL Percival has been overrun with hostiles, for whatever reason, and nobody knows we're out here.
FAIRYTALE: UDL Percival has been overrun with hostiles, for whatever reason, and they are coming after us, too.
FAIRYTALE: This is a test.
FAIRYTALE: This WAS a test and UDL Percival has been overrun with hostiles, for whatever reason, and they are coming after us, too.
We batted around the idea of just making a break for Percival. A possibly 200 mile 'break' across cold and windy high desert, with minimal outer gear and minimal supplies. After all, what was the alternative? Sticking around in that hole until the coyotes got us? I don't think there were any coyotes. We would have eaten them by now.
Okay, I thought, that was nice, relaxing bedtime story. It occurred to me earlier that I really didn't take a daytime or a previous nighttime sleep shift, for one reason or another.
"Let's kick this around again in the morning... evening... whatever the hell it is when I wake up later. Let me know any other ideas you come up with while I take my beauty sleep. Have your people call my people."

The Sky Didn't Fall, It Just Kind Of Landed...

I told you that I frequently wake up forgetting, just for a few seconds, where I am and who I am. I forgot to mention that I think I also go deaf when I sleep. That's how I can sleep in so many weird places. When I first wake up, it's like my dream ears haven't turned off yet and my awake ears haven't turned on yet. If you screamed and hollered like a maniac, I would eventually hear you, just like alarms clocks eventually worm their way into my head.
Dreamland. Cassie. We're behind that waterfall again and it's a little erotic, whatever we're doing, but it's mostly what she's telling me that's so important. Again, I can't really make out what she's telling me, it's in dreamese or something, but I'm holding on the her every word. I look closer and closer into her eyes and slowly move my face closer and closer to hers.
There is a sound, like a garden hose washing down a sidewalk combined with bees. It gets louder and louder as Cassie leans closer to me and then... silence... darkness.
The sudden chaos of Camp Costello in the earliest predawn light and someone is excitingly telling me something. I can't hear them. I don't know where I am. I don't know who I am, let alone who they are. A second later, it's all clear again. Kathryn is shaking me awake and telling me, "...you have to see this what the hell is going on!"
All that remained was that strange water/bee sound, although I don't really think I was 'hearing' it. It seemed to be in my head. Everybody was huddled around the perimeter again, peering upwards and trying to hide beneath a rubber tarp or a scrubby branch at the same time. My immediate impression was that it was still pitch black out, but the cobalt blue nether glow of the crack of dawn was all around in a 360 degree circle. That didn't make sense.
I always thought 'as big as a football field' was such a tired cliche. Maybe I just wasn't there when those people saw whatever they saw. Field? There was a freakin' STADIUM above us. It was just... there, hanging above us. It seemed to be pretty much an enormous rectangular solid that had all its edges beveled, like the facets of a jewel.
It was dark, like a dark brown or almost black, but I could make out tons of detail along the immense bottom edge. Thousands of girders and plates seemed to be the primary composition of this behemoth, with several thousand other curious substructures sprinkled across the expanse. It just HUNG there above us, with no visible means of propulsion. I could hear no VTOL engines whining, no roar of a hundred propellers, like some Jules Verne contraption. All I could hear was that water hose/beehive sound inside my head. It remained relatively motionless, although I could perceive just the slightest drift in one direction or another. Maybe it was compensating for the wind. I couldn't tell you how high it was as I couldn't get a grip on how large it was in order to judge relative distances. I did, after all, just wake up.



Kathryn and John flanked me while I peered up at the thing. John, who I earlier credited with the invention of the loud whisper, reprised his vocalization, "Is that the thing with the searchlights?"
Seriously, how was I to know? But there are times when you don't nitpick. There are times when someone is just doing as well as they can to not freak out and they just need a strong presence.
"Might be."
"Do they know we're down here?" asked Kathryn.
"C'mon, what are the odds..." I paused. Strong presence, "I think so."
I looked around at my little tribe. Did we survive ten days in the elements only to be done in like bugs? There was a beauty I could not put my finger on. They were all looking around, too. Not just back at me, but at each other, as if to catch one last glimpse of humanity, of togetherness, before the unknown.
Suddenly, the water bee buzz stopped. Dead silence. A really scary dead silence. I looked back at the tribe, "Klaatu verata nicto, babies," and I climbed up out of the pit.
The silence, after that constant eerie hum, was more ominous and unnerving than anything I could think of. Was it the calm before the blast of a Death Ray? It was like a cool, calculating, reptilian stare. They had us anywhere they wanted us. We could only have our dignity and a respect for the unknown. A respect shown by making an attempt at communication.
I stood tall and extended my arms slightly in front of me, palms facing up. I looked up to the massive form and spoke as loud as I could without screaming, "You have found us," I gently gestured to the others in the pit, "There are others here. We ask that you don't hurt us."
Silence from above. Then it seemed like a small aperture opened in the hull.
"Oh God, here comes the Death Ray. This is right out of the Gene Barry version of War Of The Worlds."
Strange last thoughts before being vaporized.
Instead, something dropped out of the hole and fell to Earth. It was microscopic in comparison and it spun and fluttered in the wind like no bomb I had ever seen. It seemed to be white and, judging from how it fell, very light in weight. It seemed to be so light that it actually dropped in a forty five degree angle and it hit the deck some sixty feet away from me without even a thud.
I looked back up at the sender. Nothing. I looked back over to the thing, now actually blowing and rolling away in the breeze. I looked back up. Nothing.
I trotted after what dropped. I actually had to hustle to catch it. It was so light that the wind was going to take it into the next area code. It was white with writing on it. It was rectangular. It was...
An empty milk carton.
I picked it up and turned it over. Somebody had taped a hastily photocopied mosaic of eighteen ID head shots. Me, Deirdre, Deborah, John, Joyce, the Thomases, Kathryn... the entire gang. Above the Rubic's Cube of pics was the word: MISSING.
"Son of a bitch," I muttered.

(Mission Date: 2102.h.1.00:9)
(Mission Clock: -9EE Counting)

The Clock Is Ticking...

Within an hour we were back at UDL Percival, minus the million years of culture shock and decompression.
The bee buzz/water splash sound had fired up again and the 'sky craft' descended by extending eight monstrous pylons, each about the size of an office building. A bottom door in the closest 'office building' opened and out popped Section Commander Irwin and CRAB pilot/Gym Instructor/Cook Larry.



My scraggly crew climbed aboard. Some were too tired to protest. Some were too tired to be happy. Some, including me, had that eye rolling attitude, like when you've had a prank played on you.
"Welcome aboard Centaur 5," Irwin gestured as we exited the elevator onto the main deck.
"There's five of these?"
"Actually, there's six, but we're all assigned to this baby. She's a beauty."
Centaurs, he explained, were basically humongous dirigibles with a big difference. The Goodyear Blimp can't go orbital.
"Why don't they explode in space?" I asked him. A good question to ask.
"Do you want the really complicated molecular chemistry answer or the easy answer?" he replied.
"Easy."
"Magic."
To the rear of the main flight deck was a hangar. In the hangar there were six EVA/CRABs, all parked facing external hatches. I was starting to notice a color scheme throughout the Arcturus experience. Everything was black, green, brown and a shade of brownish orange. Burnt sienna, I'd probably say if I was back in art school. It made for a very calming milieu, actually. Maybe it was some deep space psychological device at work.


Back at the ranch

There was one CRAB that we trained on that was taxi cab yellow. Of course, we called it the TAXI CRAB. It had a little bit of everything on it in regards to external equipment. That was for instructional purposes. I think it also had some extra padding inside and out, as newbies tended to bang her around a lot.
Up on the bridge, I watched the high desert glide beneath us and turned to Irwin, "How the hell are these things not seen and known about?"
He just gave me a prompting look, like I knew the answer.
"Yeah, yeah, " I answered myself, "Magic."

The Xenopsychology Deportment Science Officer/Chaplain Who Came In From The Cold...

Sure enough, five other gigantic Centaurs were parked around Percival as we came in for our final approach. It definitely gave the feeling that things were starting to rev up. I asked Larry where these monsters were hiding before our 'field trip'. He said they weren't here until last week and that they were at the other UDLs. I then asked him if every Centaur has six EVA (extra vehicular activity) CRABS in its hangar and he confirmed that. Then I asked if the Centaurs are the 'vehicles' that 'EVA' refers to and he just did an impression of Cassie.
"No, there's only one ship that's designated 'vehicle' and you'll know it when you see it."
My seventeen dirty and smelly brothers and sisters and I walked right from the 'office building landing pylon' elevator into the GMS (General Medical and Science) Complex. Other than the ride in the Centaur, it was our first time with a roof over our heads in way over a week. Cassie was waiting for us and she did one of her perfect walking U-Turns and merged right alongside me as we went to Medical.
"Welcome back, cowboy, I heard you took some time off to get back to nature," she said, looking forward but somehow still entertaining herself with one of her invisible smiles.
"Hey, I'm sorry you couldn't be there," I was wondering if she knew about my dreams about her. There was enough 'magic' around this place to be just a teensy weensy paranoid about such things.
"Oh, been there, done that," she said as she stopped to go down a different hallway, I guessed.
Along with her invisible smiles and laughter, she also seemed to have invisible hands that tugged at my clothes like a mother straightening out her kid's outfit before he went off to school.
She explained, "Pilots learn how to crash before they learn how to fly. By the way, nice job keeping your flock together, Chaplain."
"So this was two kinds of tests?" I asked her.
"Oh, it was many, many tests. Several tests for each participant. Get down to Medical, get checked out and take a shower. They're waiting for you in the Launch Clinic. The Launch Clock is running again."
She turned to go and then added, "And BRUSH YOUR TEETH. I heard what you were drinking out there."
"We didn't! We were going to if we had to..."
Forget it. She was gone.



In Go The Good 'Bots...

And so, dear reader, you are finally caught up. I've been in Launch Clinic for the last month writing to you about the previous month. I really thought we were going to be given a huge sit down dinner, like when the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo guys got plucked out of the ocean. Steak and eggs or something. Nope, Space Food, nothing but Space Food. All you can eat, though. Yuck.
We've also been infused with nanites over the past month. Millions of little robots, some the size of a molecule and some the size of a single cell, have been introduced to our systems. I knew about nanorobotics, but this, like so many things I'm encountering here, is off the scale.



It's funny, Deirdre, Deborah, Michael and Bob are helping and getting nanoed at the same time. They can't move around much more than the rest of us, though. It's a lot of sitting around connected to tubes The tubes are connected to machines, not IV pulls on wheels. And, if I may mention, I certainly haven't received any more of those 'when we get out of here' looks from Deirdre or Kathryn. I'm a little offended that millions of tiny machines being pumped into our bloodstreams have distracted them.
Harris, our doctor, says the nanites are going to make any repairs from radiation damage, along with upgrading any maladies we currently have. Cool.
"Yeah, it is cool," he added. Harris is a bear of a guy with shaggy blond hair and beard. Like Larry, he seems more plucked out of Malibu or Big Sur than a Space Medicine expert, but he seems to really know what he's doing. Then again, what do I know?
"Upgrading other maladies. Like what?" I asked him.
"Normal wear and tear, dude. Everybody has parts that wear out and you ain't the youngest astronaut in the world. Plus, the 'bots will plug any leaks from launch stress."
Cool.
I guess.
Next stop: Lagrange Facility and the 'vehicle'.

(Mission Date: 2102.S1.1.00:9)
(Mission Clock: -9S1 Counting)

I Hope You're Sitting Down...

It's been a week since my last report.
Part of it was trying to process the experience. The other part, the first part, was the experience. I've racked my brain trying to figure the right words to tell you this. I have to go with my gut feeling. Please excuse my choice of words, especially since I am designated to be a Chaplain.
I'm on the fuckin' Moon.
I don't know if I have the words or the bandwidth to convey everything that has happened, but I will try to fulfill my humble duties. Please keep in mind that I have been eating and drinking nothing but Space Food and I am now harboring a zillion nanobots in my bloodstream and I can already feel them poking around inside me.
I guess 'Lagrange Facility' was a bit of a red herring, even to me. Lagrange Points are several positions in space where something can orbit in a relatively motionless manner because of the corresponding bodies in the immediate neighborhood (like the Earth and the Sun). This has to do with tons (no pun) of gravity equations. I'm a DSci Xenopsychologist and soon to be a Chaplain. We move on.
I guess you can say I'm in the ultimate Lagrange Point, since I'm on the ultimate orbiting body other than the Earth and the Sun. I digress. I think I'm entitled. Did I mention that I'm on The Moon?
First things first. After a month in Launch Clinic, we were sent packing (literally) back to Centaur 5. Cassie or somebody once mentioned that non-materialism was one of the many flags that helped The Arcturus Initiative spot and recruit. We were all allowed one large gear bag. Since we were pretty much refitted in overalls, flight suits and general gear (G2s), we all brought favorite underwear, tools of our trade and maybe a couple of books.
Centaurs 1-5 were personnel carriers. Now I know why they were at other UDLs before our little 'field trip'. They were transporting the other populations from the other UDLs. I guess they saved the best for last. At least that's the story I'm sticking to.
Centaur 6 stayed behind. C-6 was called the Zookeeper. I was introduced to two other machines before I left Percival- The Termites and The Anteaters.


Entrance Hatch To Daedalus Prime

I don't think I ever described this to you, but most of UDL Percival is underground. The few above ground structures that tip the icebergs are basic trapezoidal or rhomboid structures of various sizes, but all colored to blend in with the terrain. If you paid less attention than I did in Mr. Dyson's geometry class, trapezoids and rhomboids are basically shaped like Chunky Bars.
I wonder if my attendance in Mr. Dyson's class had anything to do with hypothetical mega-structure designer Freeman Dyson. I seem to have brushed shoulders with a lot of people that I didn't know I was brushing shoulders with... yeah, yeah... I digress.
Yes, Virginia, There Really Are Metal Munching Moon Mice...
Jay Ward (Rocky and Bullwinkle) was a prophet. For all I know he was one of us. Termites are about the size of a tool box and they get around on wheels and little legs. They chew. That's all they do. They chew the external structures of UDL Percival and leave in their wake specific trails of plastic and metal granules. They are perfect recycling machines.
The Anteaters are the size of a house. Neither of these mechanical oddities are pretty, but Anteaters are big and ugly. As you may guess, they just snort up the granules left by the Termites. Concrete gets left behind to intermingle with the dirt. I didn't stay to see the whole process, but I heard everything that's above ground gets granulated and the Termites and the Anteaters jump onto Centaur 6 and follow us to the Moon.

Best Launch Ever... Well, Only Launch Ever...

Ninety percent of the launch was no different than the other ride in the Centaur, with the exception that we were climbing higher and higher. Whatever created the buoyancy worked harder and harder as the atmosphere got thinner and then...
The main engines kicked in.
I have to tell you, though, the G Force wasn't any worse than any intense amusement park ride. It just lasted a lot longer. I played pretending to work switches on the back of the seat in front of me, just to see if I could do it. Yep, but it's like being connected to a cable weight machine.
The roar of the main engines and then... silence. Well, silence immediately followed by the applause and cheers of hundreds of totally stoked brand spankin' new astronauts. It's funny, we never felt the transition, but suddenly we were in the next incredible phase.
Weightlessness...You know how, when you are sitting, your body makes a kind of 'S' shape and, when you stand up, it straightens out, right? Well, that's what our seats did. Ever so gently, while we were still strapped in, all the seats in the cabin simultaneously 'stood up' into a standing position.


Show and tell

None of us had that stereotypical training submerged in a pool of water. That's not what it feels like anyway. The air around you feels exactly the same. The only exceptions are (a) things don't fall, (b) there is no up or down and (c) anything can (and will) go off in any direction with the tiniest bit of encouragement. It's a bit unnerving at first when you realize your feet are unemployed as your prime movers.
I wanted to take a picture for you of some globules of water in mid air, but it seems they really frown upon that. I grabbed whatever was in my pocket and demonstrated for you (see photo).
A tow cable was installed in the main aisle. Row by row, we were dragged down to the hangar deck to get our fill of Zero G fun and games. I think there would have been a riot if we weren't allowed. We had several days to kill. This was before we even knew 'Lagrange Facility' was code for Daedalus Crater, dead center on the far side of The Moon

(Mission Date: 1102.S0.20.00:9)
(Mission Clock: -21E Counting)

Dancing On The Moon...



Greetings from 1/6 gravity. It's the freakiest thing (so far). It really does make you feel like a super mutant. This is much more like being underwater but, again, the air isn't any thicker and that tends to throw you off. A lot of things are Velcroed and magnetized, such as my laptop and the table in my quarters. I think that's to really limit accidents, since the closest store is around 240,000 miles away.
We are all issued Moon Boots, which are Velcro-like boots (kind of like Uggs) and 101% of Daedalus Base (it seems) is covered with the corresponding carpet.
My one allowed gear bag, which weighed over sixty pounds before we left, felt like a movie prop stuffed with crumpled paper when I got it back after we landed. Of course, the best part is feeling like I weigh as much as my gear bag weighed before we left UDL Percival.
A moment of silence for UDL Percival. Well, she's not really gone. She's just empty and all the above ground structures have been chomped into dust. The same with the other UDLs all over the world (as we now learn). There are six fairly sizable underground bases that are vacant and will probably never be found. If they are, they're cleaner than... well make up your own hyperbolic metaphor. They're pretty darn clean.
And they served us well.
Sorry, Deborah, none of the other UDLs were called Alice. It turned out they were all named after astronomers throughout history. Somebody said that might have been a way to be fair to all people everywhere and throughout time who looked up at the stars and yearned to be amongst them.
Hipparchus, Copernicus, Ptolemy, Zhang (Zhang Sui), Kidinnu and Percival- maybe I'm biased, but I think ours was the easiest to pronounce.

A Few More Unquestioned Answers...

How did we achieve Earth orbit without setting off every radar in the world?
What I do know is that we launched at night. All the Centaurs launched at night. They are practically silent (when they want to be) and just effortlessly float up to the stratosphere, where the big engines kick in. I guess they've been doing these maneuvers for years.
Centaurs and EVA/CRABs are both coated with this very thick brown skin that almost looks like rubber. I think that has something to do with radar absorption.

How many people are in the Arcturus Project?

There's about two thousand crew members for the actual vehicle, once we get going. To my awe and wonder (I can't believe I'm STILL getting awed) there was about that many more here at Daedalus Base when we disembarked and checked in.
Which leads us to...

How the hell did Daedalus Base get up here?

This is kind of tricky. I'm not allowed full disclosure at this point, but I will tell you what I can and tell you more later. Mind you, the Moon is getting pretty busy again. Several nations have orbiters and they (and several more) have more than a few Tonka Trucks rolling around the surface.
It's been here for quite a while. I can say no more right now, as we have a duty to prevent any more culture shock than we've already caused.

Are we taking Moonwalks?

No, and for several reasons. While Arcturus does, of course, have that technology, the Moon is indeed a harsh mistress (tip of the hat to Robert Heinlein). They've spent too much time and training to have us wander out there and get whacked by a micrometeorite (high odds, but all odds=possibility) or fall off the rim of a crater.
There's also the other little Tinker Toys that are wobbling around the Moon these days. Our privacy is ensured indoors. Outside, not so much. I'm sure there's something that can pick up a suit out for a walk from Earth orbit, let alone passing right above.

Wake Up And Smell... And See... And Hear...

Between the low gravity and the very detectable results of the nanobots renovating us from the inside, we're all feeling pretty damn good. We seem to be on a pretty tight schedule now and most our Lunar days are spent in a stepped up mode of training/examination/testing.
A good number of our tests involve sensory perception (no, not ESP, the regular kind). Maybe 'regular' is not the right term, either. Apparently our various acuities have benefited (see photo at top). We are also being trained 'in' something called Middle Earth. It's a really big sphere. We get inside. They shut the hatch. It spins. Centrifugal force hold us in place and we can walk around the whole inside of the sphere and perform tasks at different stations.
I am told this is actually called centripetal force. I saw some paperwork. It looks like horseshoes. I believe them.
Deirdre, Deborah, Michael and Bob are funny. They're nurses, but they're also as much recruits as the rest of us. It's funny to watch them administer tests and then have the same things done to them. They've named themselves The Instant Karma Gang.
I noticed early on that we all tend to name things a lot. We keep giving things, places and people nicknames and such. Cassie said it's part of the cut of our jib that we all have. It's in our macropsychodynamic. She said we've seen so many things we've never seen before in the last six months.
She also said that we're going to see things nobody has ever seen.

(Mission Date: 1102.S.L1.00:9)
(Mission Clock: -0h2 Counting)

The Big And Small Of It...



Ever have a dream where you dream you're asleep and you keep waking up and going back to sleep but it's all a dream?
I dreamed the other night that I kept waking up in a pool of smooth and shiny dark gray matter on my sheets. It was kind of like graphite, that powdery stuff you spray into locks. I discovered, in my dream, it was my nanites, oozing in and out of every pore of my body. There didn't seem to be anything wrong. They were just flowing in and out, as if they obeyed some micro-tide dictated by my circulatory system.
I've also been hearing, albeit very low, some kind of crazy music coming out of the ceiling (it seems). It's not distracting and it's not anything like tinnitus-type damage from my rock and roll days. It sounds like, for lack of a better description, the purring/cooing that those tribbles made in that episode of Star Trek. The trick is that it's coming out of EVERY ceiling, wherever I go in Daedalus Base. It turns out the two strange experiences are related.
My Daedalus training rotates around to checking in with Harris, our section's doctor, every couple of days. I didn't tell him about the dream but I HAD to tell him about the tribble music.
He was impressed.
"Only a few of you have mentioned this yet," he said, "that's a really good sign."
"Of what? That I'm hearing things?"
"Your nanites have adjusted your nervous system. You are receptive to more frequencies than before."
He put down whatever mumbo jumbo device he was messing with, as if he was going to need both his hands in case I went insane at what he was about to say.
"That's the ship you're hearing. You are now in tune with the beacon from The Arcturus."

X Marks The Spot... And O... And...

There's not a lot of symbolism or insignia throughout the Arcturus Initiative. Everybody knows who is in charge of what and everybody else has so much to learn that there is no need for ranks being worn on collars or sleeves.
I think it's also because, optimally, the few thousand of us will all be senior officers at some point along this curve.
"Do this."
"Why?"
"Because I've been on this mission for a hundred years and you've only been here for ninety five years."
"Oh."
We don't have mission patches sewn to our shoulders and there are no markings on any of the craft.
There is, however, one solitary glyph that pops up now and then. Lots of times it's just a screen saver or an icon that appears when a console is booted up. It's just eight intersecting lines in a rectangle, with a smaller circle at the center. Once in a blue moon (does that mean anything anymore?) I've seen it on a packing crate or elsewhere.
Let me explain.
We are not sure how long Daedalus has been here. It was initially discovered, in part, by one of the six Apollo landing missions. I am not going to tell you which one, as those two astronauts have worked in secrecy ever since on a mission in which they knew they would not take part. They, and many others, are the founding fathers and mothers of the Arcturus Mission.
Being on The Moon, to which I can attest, alters the way you've looked at just about anything. The Apollo astronauts were the first to experience these epiphanies.
Rather than turning over their astronomically iconoclastic findings, they knew they had to look at the big picture. Quite possibly, this was access for all those of Earth who longed to explore the stars. An access beyond any contemporary Terran means or manufacture. What followed was a long, slow and very careful process of sharing these findings in order to embellish the project and in order to not set off any panic in any capacity.
Scientists, sociologists, engineers, philosophers and philanthropists, some of the latter being phenomenally contributive, combined their efforts in a single minded project. That project was to return to the scene of the Apollo discovery and, hopefully, go on from there.
That initial discovery was not much bigger than the size of a man, but it changed everything. On the far side of a ridge on the Lunar surface, set just a few feet in from the rest of that ridge... a hatch.
In ways, it looked no different than a door in a vestibule. In other ways, it looked like it was forged in Asgard hundreds of thousands of years ago. Amazingly, the locking wheel turned with not much effort and ancient servos came to life and unsealed the hatch.
What they found beyond was a continuing system of airlocks, each reaching further down into a sublunary facility of indeterminable size. Add to that the fact that each airlock, when sealed, cycled and pressurized. The astronauts weren't sure what 'atmosphere' was pressurizing, but these hatches worked. They made it through three sets of airlocks before turning back.
A few minutes of dead air on the helmet radios always gave Houston JPL a mild heart attack, but it happened often enough to never raise suspicion. The astronauts actually went back the next day and tried it all again, just to make sure they hadn't contracted some kind of Moon fever. They kept all of this from NASA.
The immense clandestine industrial and scientific effort went underway. The mission: to return to that hatch, on the behalf of all and any citizens of Earth, and follow through where the astronauts left off. Their only common means of validating and confirming communication was the simple chicken scratch that represented that destination- The Hatch.
In the days of old school typewriters, it was possible to convert that symbol into an x, an o and a + for a rough interpretation.
With the advent of word processors, it became difficult to overlay the three characters, so x+o had to do.
The undertaking was technically insane, but feasible. However, insanity, like so many other schools of thought, can be incrementally exponential. The first phase of the Arcturus Mission (it really didn't have a name back then, other than the unspoken 'hatch' symbol) was a one way trip.

The Mission And The Elephant Graveyard...

The 'mission' took about ten years after it's inception to launch. Under the guise of ordinary satellite placement, three ingeniously jerry-rigged spacecraft and their crews were sent on their all or nothing Moon safari. You'd be surprised what a lot of money can do without anybody knowing what's really happening.
The late 70's were a political madhouse on a global scale. Between Cold War missiles threatening to launch and Skylab keeping its promise to crash, it was either tough or actually very easy to be a random glitch on anybody's radar.
Three Jumbo Jet cockpits and nose cones were rebuilt for vacuum and armored against the hazards of space. They were each then attached to the front of a respective fuselage, each of which resembled four freight cars strapped together 2x2. Each 'package' and cockpit was then placed atop a launch engine, just like any other space-bound cargo.
The 'freight cars' were equipped with steering and landing thrusters and loaded with some fuel and mostly survival supplies. The plan was to make as gentle a controlled crash landing on the Moon as possible, and as close to the hatch as possible. If that happened, they were to open the hatch and proceed as far as they could beyond the Apollo experience.. or die trying.
Sometimes I wonder, as part of my job as reporter and instrument of as much disclosure of the Arcturus Mission I can periodically dole out, how much havoc I might be causing if anybody is reading this. This is one of those times.
As you might guess by now, the mission was some kind of success.
As I will tell you, all twelve of the Second Wing (as they were called) safely hard landed. With suits, helmets and oxygen, they followed the footsteps of their predecessors and then beyond the third airlock.
I don't know what would have happened if the Apollo astronauts had gone further. Maybe they would have spent too much time and the biggest cat in human history would have been let out of the equally ginormous bag.
What is now known as Daedalus Base almost encompasses the entire Moon beneath its surface. Three Super Tunnels branch out from under Daedalus Crater and 'hug' The Moon, each ending in a smaller but still rather impressive sub-base. What the Apollo astronauts found was an access hatch to one of the three Super Tunnels.
A lot has been discovered in the last thirty years. Adapting to the incredible found treasure of Arcturus technology was easier than seemed right. It all fit like a glove, a long lost glove. It was like it was waiting to be occupied. Rather, RE-occupied. It all fired up into life and, yes, the second wing brought atmospheric analyzers. Whoever built Daedalus (or whatever they called it) breathed air.

(Mission Date: 1102.9.10.00:9)
(Mission Clock: -9E Counting)

Suiting Up... And Shipping Out...



I have never been so in awe and so disappointed in my life. I have also never been so looking forward to something and yet so sad at the same time. There is so much to tell you and I don't know in what order to put it. I'm just going to rant and you can work it out on your end.

Space travel isn't really traveling to something. It's more traveling to where something is going to be. Celestial bodies travel at amazing speeds and you can waste a lot of time and energy chasing them.
The Arcturus was scheduled/vectored to rendezvous with The Moon, or vice versa. At this point, anything was possible. The Arcturus had been in a wide orbit of its own, minding its own business until we got our acts together.
You never forget your first star ship.
The Centaurs were reloaded and we relaunched to meet her. We were told she was dark and more or less non-reflective, so she's been around a lot more than we knew. All I had was templates from science fiction and fantasy to speculate what she must look like.
An Enterprise? A Galactica? Maybe a little of both, with a little bit of Death Star thrown in for good measure. Whatever she is, she's real and she's going to be beautiful.
A great, big, beautiful...

rock.

As we swung around and were told we could see her, all I kept saying to myself was, "She must be hiding behind that asteroid. What a brilliant maneuver!"
The Arcturus is not made of pristine mega-titanium with a vast array of portholes, radar dishes and space cannons. The Arcturus is made out of rock. By all appearances, Fred Flintstone was an astronaut. My first impression of my first star ship was that it looked like a giant chocolate brownie.
However, once again, the ability to gauge distance and dimension in totality is still not one of my strengths. We approached. We continued to approach. We approached some more.
I've never been impressed with self important giant sized craft. I've worked on several of the, arguably, largest ships in the world. Yes, they are big, but they never made my jaw drop. I think this might have been another minor Arcturus mind set that somehow put me on the recruitment list.
I hope it's too late to fire me. Can you please hand me my jaw?
By now, you can conceive the dimensions of the average Centaur. To refresh, it's about the size of a midtown Manhattan city block and about forty stories high. Now, I want you to picture the biggest statue you've ever seen. Got it? Now, pretend The Arcturus is that statue... and one of the Centaurs is one of the baby toes.

Life In The Fast Lane...

Long story short, wormholes are real. They exist and at least one stable and functioning wormhole is not too far from Earth's orbit this time of year. Like I said, a large part of space travel is calculating how to be in the right place at the right time. We are about to enter, literally, another large part of space travel.
According to the physics guys (the ones I get along with, not the one I pissed off in the Mess Hall), wormholes are made of similar, but slightly 'special' particles. Within the wormhole, these particles actually get, ever so slightly, longer and longer. As a result, existence in the wormhole gets, ever so slightly, faster and faster as you keep up with longer and longer building blocks along the channel of the wormhole. Acceleration is off the scale, but it's relatively nil from particle to particle.
Redress and balance being a somewhat Universal truth, these particles get, ever so slightly, shorter and shorter again, until you reach the other end in the same kind of physical space as where you started. Hence, ever so slightly, you slow down and get in step with everybody else again.
There is a non-transversal nature to this phenomenon. You cannot 'see' a wormhole from the outside. In fact, you can travel right across one, like a tire across a gas station bell hose, and nothing would happen. Looking straight into the aperture is the only way, visually, to perceive even the slightest aberration. It looks no more than a slightly blurry patch in the starscape.
The wormhole guys have not yet come up with a name for these particles. Of course, everybody was trying to help. Stretchons was dumb. Accelerons was already taken. Somebody even put Wormholions in the suggestion box. I swear it wasn't me.
This also brings us back to another item I tried to name, the Hydraulic Cocoon. You may remember I tried to christen it the HyCoo. You may also notice that it is still not called that.
All throughout training, we would occasionally hear 'launch stress' as an end to whatever tortuous means we were enduring. We thought the G-Forces of leaving Earth's gravity well, let alone getting to The Moon, were the launch stresses that were now behind us.
Nope, and that's what the Hydraulic Cocoons are for.

Snug As A Bug...

Now let's reintroduce another old friend, the Motor Oil From Hell. No need for reintroduction on this end, actually. That, along with the krispies and the sponges, is all we've been eating since the Crash Course.
By the way, yes, I was told that the Crash Course not only served many psychological and physical survival training purposes, but it was also an homage to the Second Wave that made the all-out one way mission to discover Daedalus.
The anticipated 'stress' of ever-expanding subatomic particles has never been dealt with on any known human participants. The HC (I'm tired of the big name) will be our cushion. As its name implies, there's some 'fluid' involved. You guessed it.
Its actual name is Amnion something-or-other. It's not only a nutrional supplement. It is also oxygenated. This has been done before with a liquid called perfluorocarbon and other materials. These liquids have different physical properties from other fluids and are 'breathable'.
So, we are getting pumped full- lungs, GI tract and between the suit and skin- with Amnion and hoping for the best. Kind of makes bubble wrap look weak. At least we get a little bathing suit to make us feel sanitary about the whole thing.

Sad...

Throughout my Daedalus Base experience, I've been missing one person in particular. I thought everybody was just too busy and different people were running around in different circles.
I was getting packed and about to get into the Centaur for the trip to The Arcturus when, suddenly, Cassie was standing there.
I've told you she has an invisible smile. I've told you she has an invisible laugh. I've told you she has invisible hands that pull at my clothes like she's making me presentable.
This time she had invisible tears. But her real hands were tugging at my clothes to make me presentable. She kept looking down as she adjusted my pocket flaps and gear straps.
"My nanites didn't take hold," she said, "I can't go."
Before I could say something, anything, she put her finger to my mouth.
"I'm staying here to further study the Daedalus Facility," she reached into her pocket and thrust something into my hand, "Take this with you for me. It'll be like..."
And she looked almost frantically into my eyes. I wanted to look in my hand, but not at the cost of losing a moment of looking into her eyes. She gasped a deep breath and suddenly kissed me.
"Make me proud, cowboy," and she turned and disappeared around a corner.
And then I looked down to see what she gave me.

...

in suit in arcturus hard to type more later

(Mission Date: 1102.90.E1.0090)
(Mission Clock: -LE.00 Counting)

Is This Thing On?
I'm alive.
Everybody else is, too, unless this is all still some whacky fugue state and I'm still in the wormhole. This is the first transmission using the compressed data package which I am minimally sharing with thousands of other information bursts. They are being processed and relayed by our people back on Daedalus and, eventually, Earth.
This is the first journal from very far away.
I hope you are receiving it.
We are all very calm. You would think there would be a sudden 'OMG what did I DO!' freak out from at least somebody. Nope. We are very far away and we don't even know if this is a round trip yet. This is what we wanted to do.
Where do I start? What do you want to know?
Okay, I was pretty messed up by the Cassie thing. It happened so quickly and suddenly I was boarding the Centaur and seeing the Arcturus...
Let's pick it up from there.

Through The Looking Glass...

Other than our sparse personal effects, I only knew of two things we brought aboard The Arcturus from the world we were leaving behind. Cassie's dog tag and a old navigation jet nozzle cluster from the base of the Lunar Excursion Module that the Apollo astronauts left behind. I don't think anybody else, at the time, knew about Cassie's dog tag. The jet nozzle was our tribute to and inclusion of all those before us who made this mission possible.
The vast expanse inside Arcturus would have to be reckoned with some other time. Believe me, if we survived the wormhole, I don't think time would be an issue. Irwin and Larry were marshalling us to our section to get checked in to our respective quarters and then asap to the chamber where they were keeping our Hydraulic Cocoons.
I always kind of wondered if Cassie and Larry had something going on and how he was taking her not being here. I decided to file that under 'some other time' as well.
Things got a little kinky and personal with the final Hydraulic Cocoon fitting. No, not with Larry. I don't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that Deirdre was doing the honors. What I didn't tell you about the suit was that the little speedo you got to wear came equipped with a kind of enema nozzle that went up your butt and, in the other direction, out of the HC and connected to a drainage fixture.
The saving grace about that experience was that, to my delight, Deirdre borrowed a line from 'Aliens' as she looked me dead in the eye and said, "It doesn't mean we're engaged or anything."

You Can't Spell Relativity Without Reality...

This isn't a movie. There is no Artificial Gravity or Faster Than Light drive to make the story convenient. We are inside a big rock.
The Arcturus is a rectangular, albeit very well carved, dense stone monolith. It is roughly the size of Manhattan. I'm not sure of its exact composition, but I hear it is the most effective form of shielding against interplanetary debris (a grain of sand traveling at 200,000 mph is pretty destructive) and radiation.
Within The Arcturus, from stem to stern, run three enormous cylinders, side by side. Two larger ones flank a thinner one in the middle. The larger ones are actually each two cylinders, end to end. Just think of when you put a bunch of AA batteries into something. That's pretty much the picture.
The four larger cylinders are the environment chambers. As you might guess, they all rotate (in alternating directions) to provide a 'gravity' from the rotational force. Once again, I won't try to explain centrifugal/centripetal force. You're welcome.
The middle cylinder is the system's core.
At each end, a fairly large (but still relatively dwarfed) 
hemispherical dome is carved outwards from the rock hull. These can be considered the 'bridges'. There is no real front or back to the ship. It's a great big pushmi-pullyu.
On each of the port and starboard 'side' edges, or what we are temporarily calling 'side' edges, are two very big external engines. Each of these four (in total) engines are mounted on stubby 'legs' and can each swing in 360x180 degree pivotal range.
The 'top' and 'bottom' surfaces, the large and flat parts, are the most boring. They are basically miles and miles of rock, with an occasional antenna array or other structures that proportionately look no more significant than little weather stations on any Earth mountain.
I think it's time to stop using terms like 'top', 'bottom' 'front' and 'back', as well as 'huge', 'humongous', 'massive', 'giant' and 'gargantuan'. We actually entered the wormhole sideways (sorry) to minimize stress on the superstructure and any more enormous-type words is just like calling a dog a dog.
The Arcturus will not win any races. Even in Zero Gravity, it takes a lot of thrust a long time to get such a mass up to any kind of respectable speed. It was moving pretty fast when we boarded her and she was already pointing in the right direction to hit the wormhole. I don't know what incredible relative speeds we hit in the wormhole. Nobody does, so I am just as smart as the smartest guys for that one tiny bit.
We were traveling for what we believe to be seven days, EPT (Earth Perception Time). Okay I made up EPT, but it's not a bad reference tool.

Science By Association...

The reason we entered the wormhole side... errr... in the manner we did was as close to a precautionary measure as could be taken considering nobody really knew what was going to happen. Just in case, at this point, if you are confusing wormholes with black holes, let me say the following- let's not confuse wormholes with black holes.
There is a 99.99999999999999999999% probability that I would not be writing to you if we entered a black hole. A black hole produces gravity that is off the scale by normal standards. It pulls you in. Case closed. The closer you get, the faster it pulls you in. A black hole is the equal opportunity phenomenon in known space. It will eat anything. However, it does indeed split hairs.
Like I said, the closer you get, the faster you go. This gets ridiculous when your nose is traveling faster than the back of your head. What happens? You and everything gets stretched out into a stream of matter only one atom wide. Yuck.
Okay now, follow along with me. Big Bang. Expanding Universe. All caught up? Good.
When the Universe started (immediately) to expand, some of many, many new particles of existence did not want to play along nicely with everybody else. They didn't want to expand. They held their ground, but the Universe was bigger. The result, in the case of our one known wormhole and probably a million more, was a stretched out line of stretched out particles. Just like the old Silly Putty trick.
Rather than getting your nose sucked out of your face at 800,000,000 MPH while your sinuses are traveling a mere 799,999,999 MPH, you enter a wormhole and 'exist' in a faster and faster milieu by default. You are obeying the speed limit. The road isn't.
Try saying that next time you're stopped by the State Police. I guarantee it will bring on the sobriety test.

(Mission Clock: +Lh.9EE)

An Open Letter To A Planet Far, Far Away...

It occurs to me, as I write this second report from God knows how far away, how funny it is that I'm still using reading glasses.
I am packed pull of microscopic robotic workers, the nanites, and they've been scouring and rebuilding me from the inside out. Any more scoured and rebuilt and I'd be bionic. Yet, they haven't touched my eyes.
Harris says it was on purpose, but they have been in the neighborhood. My retinas, he says, were patrolled for clots, weak vessels and whatever maladies happen back there. But to be actively crunching and munching right in (and I do mean IN) my field of vision was thought to be too incapacitating and disturbing, however temporary.
Every diamond has its flaw.
I feel twenty years younger. I can hear parts of the sonic spectrum I never knew existed, including the aforementioned 'song/purr' of The Arcturus, but I can't read the fine print on AA batteries. I better not sign any contracts with the Galactic Phone Company.
Speaking of Galactic Phone Bills, we did indeed receive confirmation from Daedalus Base. At least for the time being, transmissions are can be sent back and forth through the wormhole. We have not perceived any time shift. It is often portrayed in many a space yarn that faster than light travel would return you long after everyone you knew passed away. Well, we technically did not travel FTL and I do believe you are alive and reading this.

Shine On, Harvest... Hey! What The?

The mind boggling trip to Daedalus Base opened parts of our brains that conceived almost anything happening next. To be honest, I thought for a while that we were going to be told that Daedalus Base was the bridge and that The Moon itself was The Arcturus.
That would have been quite the end of a 'secret' initiative, as you all watched your beloved Moon fire up her engines and disappear into a wormhole, not to mention the ensuing cataclysmic tidal disruption when Earth's big weather metronome skipped town.
Nope, didn't happen (obvious statement #12,546).
What I can tell you is that The Moon has water, a veritable frozen ocean permeating its core, and this is what powers Daedalus- electrolysis. I'm not talking about where ladies go to remove chin hair. I'm talking about the harvesting of hydrogen and oxygen from H2O. What, was I the only person awake in science class that day?
Daedalus, Arcturus, why The Moon is just the right distance to be exactly the same size as The Sun and therefore creates perfect eclipses- we have our hands full. We've been handed the keys to the Haunted Mansion. Somebody, a very long time ago, left the bread crumbs that has brought us to this point.

12welve...

I can't tell you exactly where we are because I can't find anybody who would have that answer. Kathryn and her small army of astronomers are in hog heaven. As you can imagine, they are going absolutely nuts studying this whole new view of The Universe- and loving every moment of it.
From what I hear, we can't even see you guys anymore without some heavy duty magnification. We are in the neighborhood of a star that is relatively similar to our Sun but, also from what I hear, a bit larger. It doesn't have a nice name yet. Right now it has one of those aLpHaBeTsOuP123456 names.
It has twelve planets! Are you ready for this? They are all nice and dirty and wet, to one degree or another. What this means is there are no gas giants (like Jupiter and those guys) and no barren little rocks that are not much more than overgrown driveway gravel.
Like I said, we all have the compulsive 'naming' gene. Cassie used to call it the Adam and Eve gene.Needless to say, we are all teething at the bit to name this system.
Dirty Dozen? Cute, but we all agree that this occasion calls for at least a tad more reverence and dignity. How would you like it if a big thing full of things suddenly popped into your sky and named you Booger Place?
The Twelve Apostles made the circuit, but that would logically lead to naming the star Jesus. We decided to keep things on the secular side until we knew more about this new (to us) corner of creation. We are guests, not conquistadors, and we don't want to barge in and start planting missionary flags all over the place.
What else came in a dozen? Donuts? Eggs?
It was not lost on us that twelve jurors were watching us and deciding our fate.
For all we know, these twelve planets and their sun already have names, if you know what I mean.

Our Work Is Carved Out For Us.


And so it begins.
Or maybe it began a long time ago.
I am a member of a group that is unfathomably and unprecedentedly distant from any other of its kind. This changes a dynamic, a balance, a flow. It was once believed that, upon the advent of the horseless carriage, a human could not survive speeds of 15 mph.
And now, we are planetary creatures out to survive without that planet.
As The Arcturus makes its way into this system, we have The Arcturus itself to explore. The vast cylindrical habitats gently spin and provide us a footing upon a landscape that wraps around and spans overhead. It's not that disorienting. Half the time you can't see the land above you as it looks, in turn, back down at you. Natural weather tends to condense in the center, and soft clouds mingle along the central axis.
The living quarters cylinders are a different animal altogether. Solid hives of hallways and decks, concentric and radiating from a hub.
I think I might pitch a tent in one of the habitats for a while. Who would have thought I would have to travel this far to spend a restful night in a lush green campsite.
We will be tested. Our skills that brought us here will come into play. Our faith in 'what it's all about' is going to get a tune up. But we've already succeeded in so many ways. All life came from stars, you know. Every living creature is made of precipitant building blocks of cooled down stardust.
And now we walk among them.
I'll go scouting for a campsite later his afternoon. Right now I have an appointment.
After all, I'm not just a Xenopsychology Deportment Science Officer and a really bad EVA/CRAB pilot. I am a chaplain. No denomination, no particular faith. On a good day, I'm barely agnostic. Some chaplain.
And we are halfway across an ocean of ideas and discoveries that will rattle anybody's cage. Gee, thanks.
I have to address my first 'assembly'. I guess that's what you'd call it. It sure as hell ain't gonna be a Mass. This is where I start to earn my keep as a morale builder, a sounding board, a lightning rod, a voice of... reason?
We're doomed :)
I'm about to walk through a door and address my tribe with...
I'll figure it out. It will come to me. It's a whole new day. The dinosaurs are watching us from heaven.
It's showtime.

(Mission Clock: +S0.1L9)

*****