Chapter 28

  Isaac

  Isaac punctuated the end of the group message with a re-posting of his chart:

  Isaac’s Chart (2 nd iteration)

  “Stars,” he told Charlie when the holographic greenish keyboard hovering in front of him flickered and vanished, “are just light plus time.” He swung the handheld multi-tool in the vague direction of where he imagined the ghosts congregating to watch him, emphasizing each word. “Light. Plus. Time.”

  An intricate holographic sphere churned silently above the polished black surface of a grand piano. This sphere of light was the size of an exercise ball, and its color, shape, and movement changed depending on what key he played in, and how fast, and which chords, and a million other factors. He called this sphere the ARKO Activation Program. He continued his educational lecture as he turned his attention out one of the dark viewing windows set into the wall of the lounge, helpless against the ever-present and entrancing pull of The Wondrous Cosmos just outside. “What we call stars are just an idea, right? Like money. Or numbers. They don’t exist as we conceive of them; it’s just the ideas are useful. It’s the ideas that we use. Those two stars,” he pointed out at a random two specks of light, one of them a caramel color and the other a minty green, “look close, right?” Charlie, now in the shape of a barn owl, surprised Isaac by hopping over to the window to have a look. The eyeless face peered out into the darkness. Isaac wondered what he saw. Isaac wondered whether he was actually educating Charlie.

  He located the two stars again, made room for the ghosts in case they wanted to have a look, and continued. “They look close, but maybe they’re farther away from each other than from us! And you know, Charlie, it took maybe hundreds of years for their light to reach Earth…they could have exploded hundreds of years ago, and we just wouldn’t know . We couldn’t know! Do you realize, Charlie, that the speed of light is a cap not only for the passage of matter and energy, but information itself? What does time even mean?”

  He paused, wondering where he had been going with this. “Stars are just ancient light,” he concluded, thinking that this was a bit of an anticlimax.

  The two stars he had chosen had already shifted in relation to each other. “Of course, everything I just said only applies back on Earth. Seems like the stars are restless here.”

  A small cluster of notes rang softly from the high end of the keyboard. He didn’t even turn to look. “What?” he asked the ghosts. “Just chill, okay? I’ll go to Skywater, meet up with everyone, then I’ll come back here and finish ARKO, then turn your dang communications relay on. Anyway, if you’ve got something to say, why not use those keys?” He pointed at the Phantasmal Conveyance Device?, which was a cookie sheet full of letter-keys that he’d removed from several keyboards. The ghosts had stirred the letters about and even made a few nonsense words, but had otherwise left his Ingenious Contraption alone. Maybe they couldn’t write? Or not in English? Yet they clearlu understand him when he spoke.

  Next to the PCD stood the Duality Revelator Apparatus?, a plastic box the size and shape of a large book. Isaac didn’t know what it was for, but one side of it was red and the other was green. He had told the ghosts to knock it over in answer to yes-or-no questions, red-side-up for “no” and green for “yes.” A few tests had shown (1) that they grasped this simple concept, and (2) that they were downright uncooperative. They only occasionally answered his questions, and sometimes they knocked the box over sideways in an act of defiance.

  Isaac swiveled on the bench to face the piano again. Sheets of paper on the stand displayed the results of his investigations thus far. He had found that programming ARKO was like music theory. That spherical thing hovering over the instrument was the last component necessary to activate ARKO, and it responded to his playing. It moved with the rhythm, turning and churning in fine-toothed gears and flurries of glowing threads to the melody like some inconceivably advanced MIDI software. The Circle of 5ths was important here somehow, but he hadn’t yet figured out quite how.

  It was some kind of code. A cipher. A puzzle, even. He had to figure it out, probably by playing a certain song, and then ARKO would activate. Isaac thought that somehow he had nearly got it, though he’d only been working on it for half a day. It felt natural. He knew the song already; he had just forgotten it. But man, it sure had a lot of modulations.

  Wait…what about modes? How did the sphere interpret modal melodies? He tested it out with a plain Dorian. It seemed to read that as a natural minor scale…or did it? He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell. He sighed and banged on some random keys. The sphere distorted into strange shapes.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said to Charlie. The bird looked at him with a cocked head as something hit the floor behind Isaac. It was the Duality Revelator Apparatus?, fallen over green-side-up.

  “Oh great, yeah. Real funny.” It was kind-of funny, actually, but he wasn’t about to give the ghosts any satisfaction. They’d been getting to be a nuisance. Sinister Presences indeed.

  Isaac readied himself for another spacewalk. Time for Skywater. It was a city, apparently. People, color, life, dirt, and many other things not to be found here on the aptly named Void Station. He loved it here, really, but he could go for a change.

  Before he left, he did everything he could to ensure that the automated defenses were functioning at full capacity. The ship which had invaded his airspace earlier had departed shortly, but not before being fired on by a brief burst of blue laser energy. No damage had been done as far as Isaac could tell. The Obviously Evil Spacecraft had simply turned and left, as though it had seen what it needed to see. Was it a scout? Checking to see whether the defenses were up? Isaac didn’t know, and because of this, he didn’t want to be gone for long.

  So he made a sandwich, vowing to get more creative with the food synthesizer (though it was a good sandwich, grilled ham and Swiss) when he returned. He facetiously left some milk and cookies out for the ghosts in case they got the munchies. He stood for a moment in the central lounge-area with the piano trying to think of things he might need. Money? He had no idea how that worked here. Possibly he had money, but if so, it was certainly all electronic. He’d figure that out when he got there. Besides that, given his ability to produce needed objects at will with the pendant, he thought he was pretty well set.

  He stepped into the black matte spacesuit, and then, with a shiver of anticipation, through the airlock and back out into space. His maneuvering skills had improved steadily on his other test-spacewalks. It was easy to locate and then arrive at the Skywater door. He kept a careful watch for the huge white bird, but he saw nothing.

  When he had landed on the slowly rotating asteroid and steadied himself on the silver arch of the doorframe, he took a moment to appreciate the view. The green planet rose in front of him, vast and beautiful and half in shadow.

  No sense putting it off! He removed the hexagonal pendant from its specially made pocket on his chest and touched it against the black pad mounted on the silver arch of the door. The door flickered to life. Light wavered in the middle of the arch. It condensed into a small bright point, which extended into a thin vertical line and then flashed out in the blink of an eye to reveal an overcast sky beyond, and strange rooftops rising up into the hazy distance.