His voice lost all emotion. “The mission is dead, princess.”
Syn didn’t think. She didn’t breathe. On the word princess, she slammed her fist into his white hide, and he went sprawling through the air. “I’m not a princess!” Syn shouted, her fists balled up, screaming at him. “I’m not a princess.”
He turned and righted himself without effort and flew back at her. Syn jerked back in fear that he was going to charge her. Instead, he moved right up to her, nose-to-nose. “The. Mission. Is. Over.” Each word was uttered sharp and distinct. “Over.” He repeated the last word, drawing it out long and loud.
“No!” Syn shouted.
“Over. They’re dead. All of them. Even if you land on the planet, even if you make it there. In a few decades, maybe a century, you’re going to die. And then what? What’s it matter? We have a good life here on this ship. Let Olorun do whatever Olorun wants to do.”
Syn narrowed her eyes. Her head spun. Why was he talking about the ship like that? As if it was autonomous? It was automatic, but at best, the ship was still a dumb bot—a massive dumb bot, but a dumb bot still the same.
“What are you talking about?” She couldn’t believe it. Blip had always been the one to tell her of the plan of the ship and the ship builders. He had gone through the great vision and the goal for the ship. He had described the exit from Earth and the need to move humanity elsewhere. He had been the one to go one for hours describing the great interstellar initiative of the years before that led to the building and launching of Olorun. Syn couldn’t believe what she was now hearing. “It’s your mission!”
“It’s a dead mission. It was a dead mission from before you awoke. These numbers don’t matter.” With that, he signaled to the computer to shut the display off, and the blue floating images blinked out. They were left alone in the dark room, silhouetted against the star fields in the windows. “Let’s go back to the Disc. To the treehouse.” He turned and moved to the door.
“Blip,” Syn said. Her eyes staring out at the starfield in front of them.
He stopped and turned around. “Yes?”
“Why can’t I see the ramscoop?”
“Huh?”
Syn stepped closer to the primary display, the one that showed what was ahead. The star they were aimed at, Kapteyn’s Star, was barely a pinpoint of light from this angle. There was nothing but empty black space there. “Where’s the ramscoop?” Syn pointed ahead of them.
“This is an image of what’s ahead of the ship,” Blip said.
“I know that. Where are the cameras positioned?”
“I don’t know.”
Syn spoke into the air, “Olorun, where is this camera located?” She tapped the image ahead of her.
Before Olorun could respond, Syn caught the faintest wisp of blue light from Blip.
“Blip?”
“I want to go back down to the Disc,” he replied. And with that he was back to the door.
It was all quite clear at that moment to her. She whispered a question she had asked several times before, but this time, she knew there was a different answer than before. “What’s on the other side of the gate?” Her words were faint.
“I do not know.” There was something in the way he said it—maybe the flatness of the words. Perhaps they came out just a fraction of a second faster than they should have. She was certain. Blip had just lied to her.
“You’re scared of what’s on the other side of the gate.” Syn still looked out at the stars. “There’s something on the other side, and you know what it is. No—I take that back. You know who it is. There’s someone else on Olorun, and you know about it. And I think you’ve known about it for a long time.”
Syn walked toward him and tapped the top of his head, “And you know how to open the gate.” It was her turn to walk to the door. She pushed off and floated to the hatch before he could respond. Syn floated through the five-foot gap and then popped the hatch open below into the gate room.
There it was. The gate with its odd and conspicuous bubble. It looked like a zit and the more she stared, the more she was sure it was going to explode.
Blip’s shadow entered the cavern, and he came to hover beside her.
He started, “Syn—”
“Open it,” she said, not allowing him to get anything in. She didn’t want the excuses. She didn’t want the explanations.
“Syn—” he started again.
This time, louder, “Open it!”
“You don’t know what’s on the other side.”
“But you do.” She tapped her spear against his shell.
“Not exactly. I didn’t know there were people alive over there.”
“People? Alive? More than one?” Syn flung her arm out in gesture at the behemoth door before them. “There’s living people over there?”
“There must be. But I don’t know how.”
“Stop it with the thousands of cryptic sentences! What are you talking about? What’s on the other side? Where does that gate go to?”
He did not respond. Instead, they floated in the emptiness as the engines hummed behind them. There were no sounds beyond that.
Then he spoke three words which rattled her and took her breathe away. “There’s another Disc,” he said.
She shook her head. She rubbed at her temples. She staggered at the shock of his words. She struggled to catch her breath. She had heard him, but it was unbelievable. Another world? After several moments, she found the words and asked, “Another Disc?”
She wanted to be angry. He had just shared the most significant piece of information ever. She was furious. But she was also stunned, and her words coming out were nothing more than a single croak.
“When the Madness struck here, it struck there first. This was before you were even woken up.”
Syn knew the Madness had started before she was awoken. She had been activated after everything on the Disc went to Hell. Blip had always called the plague of killing and insanity The Madness. It made sense. Finding corpses torn apart, entire families slaughtered, and a perfect world devoid of humans felt like madness.
Blip continued, “From what I can tell from the scant files, it was the same: disease and killing—it was the identical story as on this side. But they went a step further. They burned their Disc. Someone or several people set fire to the residences. The bots couldn’t respond fast enough. Everything went up in flames.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s what Olorun told me. But everything was destroyed. The food stocks. The farms. The bots themselves. Gone. I did not say anything because there was nothing over there. An empty shell.”
“What about the knocking? The voice? You told me everyone on Olorun had died.”
“That’s the truth.” His voice was indignant. He wanted her to believe him. Syn wanted to believe him. “That’s what Olorun told me.”
Then a thought crept in. She had never had reason to doubt anything until this moment. Finding out that Blip had hidden facts made her question everything. “How can you be sure Olorun isn’t lying?”
Blip bobbed side-to-side as if shaking his head. “She is not like me…”
“Not a liar?”
“No! That is not what I meant. She is not a thinking machine—She is not independent. Just a dumb computer. One big giant dumb bot. That is all. Info in, info out. Tell it what to do, and it will do it. It cannot lie.”
Syn raised an eyebrow, but it went unnoticed by Blip in the darkness of the gate room. “Obviously, it did. You did. Someone is alive over there.”
“I know.”
“Blip, you don’t get it. There’s someone else on this ship. There’s someone else out here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know how lonely I’ve been. You know how much I wanted someone else.”