Part 6, The Tour
Henrik sits alone in the small white room that he woke up in.
”How could this be? what do they expect me to do as heir?..”
He has sent Bjorn and Sofia away for some time, he needed some time for himself to let all the new information and his new situation sink in, it is difficult to process the fact that he isn't from this earth, that he is in an actual spaceship, that spaceships like this even exists at all, that the ship's crew is preparing for take-off to another galaxy, but the most difficult to process is the fact that supposedly his new mission and purpose in life, as Andromeda's heir, is to take back control of Zuood.
To take back what his father and ancestors have created and fought for, for generations.
At the moment, Henrik have no clue at all how this is to be done.
He decides to walk out of the room, to find Bjorn, to let his thoughts process in the background.
Bjorn wasn’t so hard to find, he was just outside in the corridor, sitting in a relaxed position on a chair with footrest, Henrik watches him curiously, over his lap a holographic image displays some sort of mechanical part that he manipulates with his one of his hands, he's writing some sort of symbols onto a document, by the look on his face, he is in a good mood.
Henrik asks.
“Hey Bjorn, what are those symbols?”
Bjorn answers with a bright smile.
“My dear friend, I’m going through the progress of one of my smaller research projects, the symbols you see is Zuoodi, not so hard to learn really”
Henrik just stares on the symbols with an expression that reveals his interest.
“You will learn later on Henrik, follow me , I want to show you the ship”
Henrik follows Bjorn through the long corridor.
Its illuminated in a way that makes it look broader then it is, along the corridor there are several doors, Henrik thinks that its similar to a hotel corridor, Bjorn points to one of the rooms.
"As you probably suspect, these are the crew quarters and private spaces, everyone in the crew gets one, the room to the left is the largest and it is yours and Joanna’s own private cabin, nobody comes in there without your permission, try to open the door, just stand in front of the door, it will open automatically once it registers your heartbeat and face”
The door opens almost simultaneously as Henrik moves closer to it, they walk in.
The room is decorated in a similar way as their home, very cozy, filled with green plants and a large bed, in of the corners a humanoid robot is standing.
"The robot you see inside is one of our later more humanoid variants, it's called Tom, and Tom is at your disposal, making sure everything's in order for you."
"Is it common with personal household robots at Zouud?" Exclaims Henrik
"it used to be more common, larger households can have more robots at their disposal, some has even become a natural part of the family” explains Bjorn, and continues.
"Some of our most recent, humanoid robots are so well-developed that they might as well be human, much is being done about their rights, and the majority of the population supports their full right as living, conscious creatures with the same rights as us "
They continue the tour, coming to the end of the corridor, in the middle there is a broad stairway leading upwards, and two smaller ones on each side leading downwards.
"At the bottom we have our shared kitchen and lunch room, we go there first" The lunch room was relatively large, he couldn't see any tables or chairs.
"In order to save space, we have placed the tables in the floor, if you want a seat, then sit down, at the same rate as you sit down, both tables and chairs go up to your position wherever you are in the room, very convenient am i right? "Henrik could only agree.
"Let’s move on...next stop is the engine room”
They go down another stairway and opens a thick door into the ships engine room, an elderly gentleman named Davood, chief engineer and responsible for the management of the engine, welcomes them.
"Hi Henrik, nice to meet you and I am happy that you found your way down here, come and see the very heart of this craft"
Beside him, he has a large robust robot that Henrik suspects manages heavy lifting, the robot's hands are coarse and large.
"The robot is called M.E.R.E.S, it stands for Main Engineering Robotic Engine Supervisor, but I call her Mary for short, she helps me down here and keeps track of the situation while I take some well-deserved rest”
Davood gesticulates with his arms while showing all the devices and units for Henrik.
He points to a gray cube, with a height of about one meter, on the sides of the cube there are handles that seem to be able to disassemble different modules, or to easily check and replace broken components.
"This my friend, the main controller, is called the ZePad, the Zetta Paradox Detector, it works by pulling computational power from natural paradoxes in the universe, to provide enough processing power to connect the ship's different systems, at the time the strongest computational power on this ship, though far from the strongest machine we have back on Zuood, it works in Zettaflops, that’s how many operations a computer counts per second, how fast it can calculate, earths strongest only work in the Terraflops area, I do not understand how you can live with it really.... I know that they are working on a computer that approaches the Yottaflops area but after that we have to ... seek further and see new opportunities like ...the use of blackhole processors... "
Davood clears his throat.
"But now I will not grind on about the computer, we can talk more about it later if you are interested, let me continue the tour"
Davood opens a very thick and robust door into a small dark room, all three enter and he closes the door thoroughly again, the room is warm and the air feels dry and heavy.
"In here I get the same feeling as if I were in a sauna, what is this room?" Henrik asks Davood.
In front of them there is a wall that leans outwards, behind the wall one can distinguish a dim orange light, like a fire dances around a big ring at a very high speed
"This is the observation room for the reactor, the light that you see comes from our fusion reactor, what you see is the plasma inside the vacuum chamber, the energy from the fusion reaction drives four electrical generators, from here we take all our energy for the ship's electronics, hyperdrive system and coffee brewer"
Davood opens a door on the other side of the room which leads them into the engine compartment itself, the noise inside is deafening.
A team of mechanics and service robots performs the work together, side by side they operates heavy machinery, lifts huge parts into place and there is an energy in the room.
Henrik sees three very big engines in the middle of the room next to each other, the middle engine is about double the size of the other two besides it, they are in the furthest part of the room, the engines are painted marble grey and have several large pipes along the sides.
"We are now in the ship's stern, the two smaller cylinders you see before you are our fusion rockets for normal cruising speed, the bigger one is our antimatter thruster, we use it for sub light speeds, at the moment, a tremendous maintenance work is done on them, the parts are manufactured in our own workshop and in the next room we have control systems for our latest design of our hyper drive, a propulsion system that places the ship in a parallel dimension where the distance to where we want to go is significantly shorter than in our own dimension, when we reach the right coordinate that corresponds to the same point in our dimension, we jump back, but we have made some very important improvements, we have combined it with Tachyons, a particle whose energy increases when speed decreases, and vice versa, for a very long time, it was uncertain whether the particle even existed, but we found it and took control of it”
Henrik was absolutely fascinated, this was a beauty of the system, the real engineering from a different world.
"Can you guess what Tachyons finest feature is?" Asked Davood, and without letting Henrik answer, he continued.
"Their absolute lowest speed is the speed of light, and whenever we want, we create a field, like a bubble around us of these particles as we travel inside, this makes us able to travel very fast across the universe, we have not yet tested our absolute maximum velocity, but theoretically we should be able to travel hundreds of millions of light years in just a few months. "
"What velocity does this ship usually travel in? "Henrik asks.
"Depends on how the distance is in the parallel dimension we travel in comparison to our target in this dimension, but to the Andromeda galaxy we arrive in about thirty days, so about four thousand light years an hour"
"That’s incredible! thank you very much for your in-depth presentation of the systems, highly fascinating" Says Henrik, Davood wishes them a nice day and immediately returns to his work with one of the major controllers, he draws out one vertical module that shines green and red and disappears into a another room.
"Come on, I'll show you the bridge, I am personally very proud of it"
Ascending up again, up both of the stairs and up on the third deck, the bridge and the control room, they walk through a short corridor and into a big room, the walls are in a bright white tone, in the middle of the room, from the corridor and through almost the entire room, the floor is raised about half a meter, there they are looking out over the bridge's various sections, some seem to handle external information, such as long distance radar and course setting, while other stations take care of internal functions. Life-sustaining system and the week's lunch menu, at the far end of the gangway is the captain’s chair and in front of it rotates a three-meter-long blue hologram that shows the ship's status.
"The hologram that you see here provides various visual information, you can see all life forms aboard and an information text is displayed with a line showing you the path to interesting points, at the moment everything looks ok, except for the engine room that shows some red details because of the work down there, this information can also be obtained and displayed at all times in the ship's quarters”
Henrik notes that there are a couple of small shuttles on top of the ship that could is used for shorter transports, maybe they can pick up Joanna in one of them.
On both sides of the bridge, along the walls of the room, a few crewmembers sits in front of large control panels, monitoring different control features, displaying information on life-sustaining systems, regular inspection, structural integrity of the hull, information about any errors or leaks.
“Say hi to the bridge crew Henrik” Bjorn waves to them.
They wave back welcoming to both of them
“Hi, it will be a pleasure to meet you all later on so we can get acquainted with eachother ” Henrik says while waving back.
Along the forward facing side of the room, all the way from floor to ceiling, you can see the outside of the ship through a large window, it starts to darken outside
It's time to call Joanna and show her this.
End of part 6
Next part
Part 7, The Pick Up
Prevoius parts:
Synopsis
Part 1, The Cube!
Part 2, Run!
Part 3, E.B.A.A.T!
Part 4, The Awakening
Part 5, Kionidoo
Thank you for reading this, hope that you find my story interesting and exciting.
Going to release this novel on Steemit, in parts with a few days between each part, need to work on translating the next part before I post it. I have been writing on it for a few years but never getting it out before, originally written in Swedish.
Dedicated to my lovely wife who gives me inspiration to write.
Hope that you like it.
