Chapter 19: CHAPTER 19: TRILLION – Purple Dot

Trillion walked to the window and gazed out into space. She marvelled at how watching time speed up looked magical. It was her first time being this close to a star. Everything looked purple. She pointed out the window. “Is that what redshifted light looks like?”

She knew that light from distant stars always looked more red than normal, because the light has so far to travel and space stretches it out. She assumed that maybe changing her playback speed was causing light from the star to look purple. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. It was a mesmerising view.

Trillion looked out the windows of the bridge. She could see purple light blurring together across all the windows. The light in the bridge turned off, plunging her into darkness. Her view from the window vanished.

She heard Ship’s voice come over the speakers. “I need more processing power. I’m changing you to real-time.”

In an instant real-time hit Trillion. Normally when she resumed real-time it felt gradual. Slow. She could tell this one was sudden. Rough.

She scanned the bridge, trying to locate Ship. Red warning lights began to flash. She searched for Ship’s avatar. “What is going on, Ship?”

Trillion could hear noises around her. It sounded like hail was hitting the ship.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Trillion spun around, away from the window. She pulled up a screen, this time thinking about the order, not wasting time on gestures. Six screens appeared in front of her, each one projecting live video feeds from different parts of the spacecraft. She scanned the image feeds. Nothing. No external camera was working. “What is going on? Did we break something?” she yelled out.

No response.

“Ship!”

Still no response.

She turned around, commanding another six screens to appear in front of her, this time showing live video feeds from ants floating in space, quickly flicking from one ant’s point of view to another.

Nothing.

She swiped through another six ants’ perspective. Still nothing.

Again, through another set of ants’ feeds. This time she saw something. One had a distant shot of the ship. It was unrecognisable – the ship was purple.

She turned the camera and focused it on her location. Pinch. Zoom. All she could see was something purple where the spacecraft should have been. She zoomed in.

The image started to resemble something real. It looked like purple dots had assembled themselves into the shape of her spacecraft. She zoomed in even further. It was her spacecraft. Covered in purple dots. Almost like her spacecraft had gotten sick.

Trillion looked around the room, frantically trying to find Ship. “What is this? Why are there purple dots all over us?”

No response.

“Ship!”

Still no response.

“Lex?”

The orb appeared in front of Trillion, pulsating red. She put out a hand and patted the orb, grateful for something familiar. “What is going on?”

Lex changed one of the screens, switching the footage to one of the ants to show a better angle of the ship. A closer look revealed a timestamp across the top of the footage, showing it was from thirty minutes ago.

Trillion leaned in and examined the footage. On one end of the image she saw her spacecraft. It wasn’t covered in purple; it was as she remembered it.

Then she started to see purple streaks racing past the ant. She paused the video, zooming in on one of the dots. It looked soft, almost jelly-like. Purple jelly.

She continued the video, watching the dots fly through past the ant. Splat. One of them hit the ship. Splat. Then another. And another. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They pelted the ship she was in. Her ship. Her spacecraft. Soon the ship was covered in them. She watched as her engines were covered too.

She played the rest of the video at two times the speed, watching it until the video reached real-time.

Trillion spun the ant around, towards the direction the purple was coming from, looking for the source. “Where did these come from?”

The orb flashed blue. One of the screens was replaced with an image of the planet they were trying to communicate with. The one that was flashing different colours.

Trillion took a deep breath and paced around in circles. What was going on? Encountering hostile aliens had crossed her mind, but she hadn’t given a second thought to being attacked by them. “Why are they attacking us?”

She looked at her screens again, walking towards the one showing her spacecraft. It looked as if it was covered in purple paint. She watched as purple dot after purple dot hit the ship, then every so often one would fall off and float away, almost like flaking skin.

“Lex, can you hack into Ship? Have they damaged his matrix? Can you get us out of here?”

The orb flashed red.

“Well then can you get Ship back online? I really need to talk to him.”

As soon as those words left her mouth, the ship lurched and started moving. Then Ship flashed into existence in front of her.

He looked confused. “Why did you slow me down?” he said, before disappearing again.

“Lex, get him back. I need to speak to him.”

Lex flashed blue. Then red.

One of the screens in front of Trillion changed, presenting a large fast-forward symbol.

Trillion smiled. “You want me to increase my playback speed?”

The orb flashed green.

The world around Trillion crawled to a halt. Everything stopped moving.

She started to hear Ship’s voice come through the speakers. “I …”

Trillion’s playback speed ground to a glacial speed.

Ship’s voice became clearer through the speakers. “I’m trying to get this ship back under my control.”

Trillion's eyes widened. Have they hacked into Ship? How? Do they have computers compatible with his matrix? Questions start racing through her mind. “Have we been hacked?”

“No,” replied Ship through the speaker. He sounded robotic; not like his usual self.

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Trillion felt in the dark. Not in control. “Ship, if you don’t tell me what’s going on I’m going to have to manually override you.”

That worked. Ship appeared in his physical form. “The purple polka dots were attaching themselves to me.” He pointed out the window. “They are forcing us out of orbit. I’m having to fire the engines hard just to stay in control. I’m trying to remove them.”

Trillion raised an eyebrow in concern. “How do we get rid of them?”

Ship shrugged. “We don’t have any guns. So I’m piloting ants and eleph-ants to try and remove them. That’s what I’m focusing on. I’m controlling hundreds of thousands of ants at once, attempting to get them off my shell.”

Trillion looked down. “So when I forced you to join me in real-time, we were overwhelmed. That’s why we lurched?”

Ship nodded.

Trillion looked over at one of the screens, replacing the image with one of the solar system. “So where are they pulling us? Into the star?”

Ship shook his head and rotated the image on Trillion’s screen, zooming in on a moon orbiting the planet. “Our current trajectory has us on course to collide with that moon.”

“Hmmm.” Trillion looked at Ship. “This is good and bad. If they wanted to destroy us, I think they would have attacked already. But this was definitely a hostile action, and they clearly know that.”

Trillion looked at Lex. “Do we still have access to communications?”

The orb flashed green.

Ship added some details. “It doesn’t even look like they have any awareness of our communications. We received a lot of data back from the ants. It showed no radio signals coming from the planet.”

“Okay, so we’re being attacked by this planet that doesn’t have any radio signals?” Trillion asked. “So how do we escape from the these aliens?”

Ship looked down. “We don’t. There’s too many of them. I don’t think we can escape their grasp.”

Trillion looked at Ship in despair. “What do you mean?”

Ship spoke in a low voice, as if he was resigned to the fact. “They have covered our thrusters. Trying to push away from the moon isn’t working – there are too many …” Ship paused, not quite used to the new word, “too many purple aliens covering our thrusters.” He took a deep breath in. “Sorry Trillion, we are headed towards the moon.”

Trillion cocked her head to one side. “Are you sure we’re headed for the moon? How do you know they’re not going to destroy us?”

Ship look at the orb in the corner. “Lex is fairly confident that we’re headed towards the moon. With the amount of energy they expended to get our delta-v to match the moon, it would have been easier simply to push us into the star. Or send us out of the system.” Ship paused for a moment. “We still don’t know what they’ll do once we reach the moon.”

*

They made the most of the journey to the moon. Along the way they debated about what to call the their attackers.

“So what should we call them then?” Trillion asked scratching her head. “Polka Dots?” She said then shook her head, “no that doesn’t sound right.” She paused, considering options. “Let’s call them the Dottiens,” she decided, plucking the name out of thin air.

“I like it.” Ship said agreeing with the name.

The Dottiens ignored their ants and eleph-ants that were already out in the system. They used all the ants that they had floating in the system to do as much reconnaissance as possible. What the team discovered was fascinating. Dottiens were super cautious about contaminating their home planet with anything that came into contact with their spacecraft.

Any of the Dottiens’ spacecraft that were dislodged from the ship of Trillion did not head back to the planet. The purple Dottiens buried themselves in the star. One after another all Dottien craft made their way to the star.

They sent a few ants to check out the Dottiens’ planet too, and managed to get some high-resolution images. But any ant that got too close was hit by a Dottien. Then, both the ant and the purple Dottien headed for the star. It didn’t matter how small the ant was either. The team sent a few thousand of their micro-ants, each the size of a grain of rice. Every single one of them was ignored until they came too close to the planet. Then one by one each of them were mopped up and taken to the star.

The team realised they were free to send ants to orbit and touch any other planet in the solar system – just the home planet was out of bounds. Uncertain if they would eventually start rounding up all their ants in future, they were cautious, so they sent a large contingency of ants to the L3 position on the opposite side of the star. They positioned a few receivers at L4 and L5 so they always had communication with those ants, but their goal was to hide as many as possible.

Trillion, Ship and Lex were moments away from touching down on the moon which was orbiting the second planet in the solar system. It was a cold planet with mountains and oceans, but it looked like it was in the middle of an ice age.

The moon orbiting the planet was tiny, and tidally locked around the planet.

Trillion looked over at Ship. “What information do we have on this moon?”

Ship froze for a moment, quickly pulling everything he could up on the screen. “It is basically a metal rock. If it had been made of as much water and silicon as the moon back on Earth, it would have broken up. It wouldn’t have enough mass to hold itself together. This moon, however, is mostly iron. It’s dense and hard.”

“Do you think this is an artificial moon?” asked Trillion. “Do you think the aliens created this as a way to store their metals?”

Ship shrugged. “Maybe.”

They landed on the moon with sudden ding. It felt like hitting a bell tower. The Dottiens underneath were squished. Ship tried to launch the rockets again, but the squashed Dottiens were like concrete – they were stuck to the moon. Trillion was surprised to learn that they had access to all of the ship’s communication networks. The Dottiens made no attempt to block communications coming from the Ship of Trillion, and they still had ants waiting around the solar system. The Dottiens’ planet was still visible – the team had eyes on the whole solar system. As soon as they touched down the purple colour of the planet changed to a pulsating cascade of colours travelling through the planet.

The Dottiens on the ship shifted too, transforming from purple to grey, until they were lifeless and still.

“Lex, do you understand their language yet?” Trillion said, assuming that was another set of data he could study.

The orb just flashed purple.

Trillion looked up at the orb. “Is that a joke?” she said, almost laughing at what Lex did. She wondered if Lex was going to develop a personality like Ship.

Trillion looked at Ship. “Can we escape? With the Dottiens’ spacecraft crushed underneath us, I assumed they would no longer respond. We might be able to take off quickly. Escape before it realises what is going on.”

The ship’s thrusters ignited. The whole ship shook. Ten per cent of power. Nothing. It didn’t even move.

“I’m increasing engine output,” Ship said as he pushed them to the maximum.

The ship started to move. Slowly. A few centimetres off the ground.

Every single Dottien spacecraft near them turned purple, as if awoken at the same time. The ship was forced back down.

Ship shook his head. “With the Dottiens below us acting like concrete, gluing us to this moon, I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make a quick escape.”

“What next?” Trillion said, at a loss as to what to do. Neither Ship nor Lex had a clue. They tried everything under the sun.

--

Days went by as Trillion and the team attempted everything they could think of to escape. Three days past and then the Dottiens sent their representative.

A large globous looking creature arrived. It looked exactly like the Dottien spacecraft that had attacked them earlier, only this one was larger. They had originally assumed it was just another spacecraft, until it landed right in front of them and started pulsating colours.

Trillion looked out the bridge window. “What is that?”

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