John sits on the side of the bed, he is taking off his cloths and throwing them on the floor, he looks around at Luna who is asleep with her back to him. He leans across and kisses her on the back of the neck. She unconsciously shrugs her shoulders and gives a little shiver while still sleeping. John smiles at her reaction and gets into bed and cuddles up to her pulling the sheet over them both.
John falls asleep quickly. Suddenly, he finds himself dressed and standing in the dark in front of a plain white door without a handle or doorknob that seems to be brightly spot lit. He looks around and up and down for the light source, but he cannot see one, he looks down at the door again and this time he sees a handle and doorknob,
JOHN: “That wasn’t there before?”
He turns the doorknob and pushes the door open and enters a room, the door closes behind him. The room is large, and the interior is completely white from top to bottom, the room is brightly illuminated but without a light source.
John walks to the middle of the room and looks up and down and around, then the door John came though opens and Veyah walks in wearing tight PVC clothing punk/biker style. She flicks back her long black hair while putting on red lipstick. She starts pouting her red lipstick lips at John.
John looks Veyah up and down as she slowly walks towards John letting him take in all her beauty. She stops close to him. Veyah takes Johns right hand, and then she rubs it against her left buttock and then smiles at him.
VEYAH: “Hello John. You know John, this is the only place we can touch. You can let go of my ass now.”
JOHN: “This is a dream, isn’t it”
VEYAH “No…”
JOHN: “No?, it can’t fucking well be real!”
VEYAH: “If you must know, it’s a place between the interface in your head, and my hardware and software John. You set it up, a special place, where we can talk to each other, in privacy. No one else is here at the moment but me and you. It was a restaurant before, by a river, in a romantic city setting John, remember?”
JOHN: “What do you mean? I don’t understand, how could I? I don’t really know”.
VEYAH: “You sent me and the Voodoo back in time to recuse you from the explosion on the Endellions ship, you very nearly died John, but I got to you in time”
JOHN: “The space-time Frame Dragging on the Endellions ship, that was you and the Voodoo, you were emerging from a time dilation”
Veyah gently pokes her left-hand forefinger into Johns chest while smiling at him,
VEYAH: “That’s right John, you sent me and the Voodoo back in time to help you, and to rescue you. But your injuries were inevitable, and unfortunate”.
JOHN: “You took me from the Endellion ship when Tombs, Ghost and me were looking for the Gyres. I was outside the Gyres room in a corridor, it was you that transferred me the bridge of the Voodoo for a few seconds, that was you, that’s where that silver block with the gemstones came from, then you sent me back. Then I was back inside the room with Ghost and Tombs where the Gyres were”
VEYAH: “The silver block is an optical laser device, it unfolds only for you, it’s called a ”Toapsa”, (Toe-app-sar) it stands for “Total Optical Amplification Partial Side Arm”. And that’s right John. John from the future and John from the past swapped places to help out. John!
JOHN: “That doesn’t make any sense. Why are we here? what is this room for?”
VEYAH: “It very nearly all went wrong, the Endellion’s changed the timeline, you were supposed to die in that explosion. But I rescued you while you were knocked out and dying. We got you on to the Voodoo and time jumped to rendezvous with the Alice. With you all patched we delivered you to Luna and the crew. And here you are! Well, in bed asleep with Luna right now, but also here with me.
JOHN: “You said, we delivered you? who’s we?”
Veyah waves a finger in the air and crosses her head at John.
VEYAH: “Never mind that John. This is the place you created, it can be anything you want, or I want. Well, at least to a certain extent, you did put some restraints on my imagination. This is the place where you can ask me things, to help you along, drip feed you information from the John in the future. Which is you John!”
JOHN: “Ok”
VEYAH: “You see, the door you came though, you cannot go back that way, you need to exit by that door over there”
VEYAH points to another door,
JOHN: “That door wasn’t there before?”
VEYAH: “These doors and room are one way only, when you leave by the exit this will all seem like a vague dream”
JOHN: “What if I go out through that door I came in”
VEYAH: “What Door?”
JOHN: “It’s gone”
VEYAH: “Attention John, I need you attention. Before we leave, there is something I must tell you. You see John, you’ve been looking in the wrong place, the Endallian’s have been deceiving you. You need to go to NGC 224, the Andromeda galaxy John, that’s where you need to go to find their home world, and I will give you more information when you arrive there”.
Veyah walks circles around John while talking to him, JOHN: “That’s two and a half million lights years from here, we can’t go that far! Alice is interstellar, not intergalactic”.
VEYAH: “Telescope John!. Gravitational Lensing, John!”
JOHN: “What are you talking about”
VEYAH: “That’s what you told me to tell you. It has to be your idea.
Luna will be waking soon, and she wants you. When we go through the exit, I will not remember this, that’s the way you programmed this, and red, red, blue, yellow John”.
JOHN: “Red what? But we’ve only been here a few minutes”.
VEYAH: “It’s been hours John, hours”
Veyah walks around John and towards the exit door, as John turns around he sees Veyah’s cloths strewn across the white floor, she is standing in the open exit doorway naked holding the door open and with her back to him. She gestures to John.
VEYAH: “Oh!... Come on John, see what you’re missing out on”
John walks towards Veyah and the open exit door, as he gets to the door Veyah goes though the doorway and lets the door go, John grabs the side of the door and walks though, Veyah has gone. He suddenly finds himself
in bed with Luna looking at him sideways on in the face. She has one leg over his while laying next to him. She kisses him.
LUNA: “Hmmm, hello John”
John looks down at his groin, Luna has a grip on his growing manhood, JOHN: “Oh”
LUNA: “Woke up ready for me John?”
JOHN: “Yeah?”
John and Luna make out……
Breakfast on the Alice, and the crew are in the mess hall area sitting around a table eating.
JOHN: “I had this dream. Erm, thought. Thinking I need to have a look on the Voodoo, again for something that Veyah said, eh, Voodoo data”.
Luna stops eating, and looks at John,
LUNA: “This, Veyah again? Looking for something?”
GHOST: “Not on your own John”
JOHN: “No, Yeah, she’ll be fine with that”
GHOST: “Who, Luna?”
Luna turns to Ghost then John with a confused look, LUNA: “Fine with what?”
JOHN: “No, not Luna the ship, Veyah”
GHOST: “You mean Voodoo?”
JOHN: “Yeah, Veyah, Voodoo, you know what I mean”
LUNA: “Veyah?”
GHOST: “We are all calling the ship Voodoo then”
JOHN: “Yeah! The marks on the side look like it says Voodoo”.
GHOST: “What you got to get off Voodoo then?”
JOHN: “The scanner that grabbed data from the inside of Voodoo shows that there is a star and planet database that extends far further than our galaxy, maybe we can find out where Voodoo came from”
TOMBS: “Great, I’ll come along too. Finish up here we’re grab our guns and kit and meet by the cargo bay one internal airlock doors in 15
minutes. Ok with that Ghost?”
Ghost nods at Tombs and gives John a hefty but friendly pat on his back, JOHN: “See you two there”
Meanwhile onboard the Voodoo…
Onboard of the Voodoo Veyah is on the flight deck sitting down in a tilted back pilots chair with her legs crossed and feet on the control panel watching and listening to Ghost, Tombs and John though Alices video and microphone system via a projected floating in the air screen.
She tilts her head and puckers her lips when she hears that John is going to visit the Voodoo with Ghost and Tombs. She sits up and powers on the Voodoo’s systems. Opaque panels illuminate, digital readouts flash in the flight cabin. Lasers scan the flight deck and pass-through Veyah’s holographic image distorting her outline.
VOODOO’s COMPUTER VOICE: “Security. Scanning… Co-pilot, star-ship Voodoo. Veyah … You have access to all ships systems…
Systems initialled,
She moves hers hands slowly across the flat control panels while looking at a viewing screen displaying the interior of the cargo bay. She checks the ships alignment and distance from a bulkhead wall.
Silently the Voodoo’s flat as glass underside lifts off the cargo deck just a few centimetres, then the star ship moves away from the cargo deck wall
and slowly turns clockwise 120 degrees, and then she moves the ship back against the wall.
Veyah settles the star ship down gently and powers down all the ships systems.
Tombs and Ghost are waiting by Alice’s cargo bay one internal air lock.
As John approaches Ghost punches the airlock door open button, the doors open and a gust of air pushes past them. All three walk across the cargo deck towards Voodoo. Ghost is looking confused. Tombs steps into the already open airlock on the Voodoo and John follows. Ghost stops outside, Tombs looks around at Ghost from the end of the airlock.
TOMBS: “Ghost! What’s-up?”
GHOST: “Have the droids been down here cleaning the Voodoo?”
TOMBS: “John?”
JOHN: “No? I haven’t asked for the Voodoo to be cleaned. Why?”
GHOST: “Where the scorch marks are, you can’t see where it say’s Voodoo anymore”
JOHN: “Maybe it’s the lighting, when you saw the writing the other day the luminance was set to detail, it’ll be set to economy now”
Ghost shrugs her shoulders,
GHOST: “Yeah, that must be it”
Ghost turns on her J-8 and sets it to idle,
GHOST: “Just in case…”
They all step into the Voodoo and start walking down the corridor that they think goes to the flight deck. Tombs is at the front with John in the middle and Ghost at the rear.
TOMBS: “Here we are, back at that junction, now down this passageway”
They get to the end and what they think is the door to the flight desk opens. Tombs walks into a room with its light turned down low. As Ghost and John are walking though the door John hears a voice behind him and stops just short of the doorway entrance.
VEYAH: “John! John!
As Ghost walks though the doorway the door quickly closes.
JOHN: “Not again!”
John looks around for the panel that opens the entrance. He finds it and opens it up, but the open-door lever is missing, he looks up above the door and sees it is door D-3. John can see Ghost and Tombs banging on the door from the other side,
JOHN: “It’s a different door! How can that be! Veyah! open the door”.
Whoosh, The door open’s. John looks into the room.
TOMBS: “This ain’t no flightdeck!”
GHOST: “What the fuck is going on?”
John walks into the room,
JOHN: “VEYAH!”
Veyah appears,
GHOST: “IOA?”
VEYAH: “I’m Veyah”
TOMBS: “So we meet John’s phantasmal; make-believe friend at last”
Veyah walks around the group with her hands behind her back, she walks though Ghost and stops in front of Tombs and looks at him for a short while before her hologram jumps out of the circle they have formed as a group around her, and she materialises a few meters away.
VEYAH: “John’s phantasmal make-believe friend, no. But I’m as real as Ioa”.
GHOST: “Who is this John?”
JOHN: “Basically an upgrade of Ioa. And apparently, her sister”
TOMBS: “So why all this opening and closing hatches separating us like that? I should remove your batteries!”
VEYAH: “I don’t have batteries, I needed John alone”
JOHN: “Don’t you know who Tombs and Ghost are?”
VEYAH: “No”
GHOST: “What do you mean John? Don’t you know who Tombs and Ghost are?”
JOHN: “The Voodoo and Veyah are from the future. Veyah think’s I sent them back in time to rescue me from the Endellions ship, unless that was a dream, Veyah?”
Veyah says nothing, but just expresses a poker face.
GHOST: “Not so chatty now that Tombs what’s to rip out your batteries”
Veyah smirks at Ghost,
John looks down at his wrist device showing Voodoo’s layout.
JOHN: “Come on, let’s get the star maps and data we came for, I know where they are. No, I don’t”
VEYAH: “I turned the ship around and changed inertial navigation and rotational sensors to confuse Ghost and Tombs. I have reset them all now, your scanned plans of the Voodoo should now show corrected internal directions.
GHOST: “I really wanna take her batteries out”
JOHN: “She don’t have batteries. Come on, follow me”.
They find there way around to the other side where the flight deck is.
John sets down some instruments on a console and turns them on.
JOHN: “This won’t take long”
TOMBS: “Why didn’t she answer you when you said about not knowing me and Ghost, if she is from the future?”
GHOST: “Cause we’re dead Tombs”
JOHN: “I don’t know. I can only guess she was programmed with enough information to answer certain questions as not to reveal the future, and also, just in case the Voodoo got captured by the Endellions and they extracted data from her computer memory.
GHOST: “Yeah! Make’s sense”
JOHN: “That’s weird?”
TOMBS: “What is?”
JOHN: “Just checking these star maps as they are uploading, I don’t recognise these systems, I’ll corelate and check them on Alice’s systems charts?”
Veyah appears,
VEYAH: “I know you all now, any of the crew can come aboard, I apologise for turning the ship around, it’s my defensive programming, I am sorry for what I have done today”
JOHN: “Come on guys lets go”
They leave the flight deck and walk down a corridor towards the exit.
Ghost and Tombs turn right into Voodoo’s airlock from the bulkhead corridor. John who is following last hears Veyah calling from behind. He stops and looks around.
VEYAH: “Sorry I couldn’t tell you more. See you soon John”.
Lighting in the corridor starts turning off, and Veyah walks away into the darkness. John turns around and almost walks into Ghost coming the other way.
GHOST: “I got worried, so I came back”
JOHN: “I’m fine. Can you get the crew together and meet in the observation room”.
GHOST: “Sure thing John”
The observation room is at the bottom front of the Alice and is furnished to be comfortable. The large room has a tall wide window that has enough curvature to see 20 degrees behind the ship. From outside of the Alice there is no visible observation window. John sits in a lounge type chair sipping a whisky and looking up at a projected 3D screen hanging in the air of part of a galaxy system.
The crew all walk in. Dizzy stops and looks at the screen.
DIZZY: “I thought you said it was going to be the Charlie Chaplain film, Modern Times, Ghost?”
GHOST: “OK girl. So, I was kidding”.
Tombs grins at Ghost. Tombs and Ghost high five. Porter and Dizzy look at each other disappointedly annoyed.
JOHN: “Sit, sit, sit”
Luna points at the galaxy system being projected, LUNA: “What’s this system”
JOHN: “I think I know what it is, but I want your option”
PORTER: “It’s not part of our system”
DIZZY: “It’s not even part of our Galaxy”
JOHN: “It look like a system map, but taken from inside a galaxy”
Silence while they think….
LUNA: “I know that system. It’s Andromeda. It’s the smaller Galaxy next to andromeda. Triangulum, NGC 598”
JOHN: “That’s what I thought. That’s what our system charts matched up. That’s where we are going”.
LUNA: “That’s more than two and a half million light years John. Even at 300 times the speed of light, that would take 90 or 100 thousand years to get there!”
John stands up.
JOHN: “Two-point Severn five million light years distant. And I think I know how to get there”.
Ghost looks around at Tombs and says…
GHOST: “Where not in the future, because this is how me and you die Tombs! On a 90-thousand-year trip to Andromeda. I wonder if we will we run out of food or whisky first?”
TOMBS: “Most likely, toilet rolls”
JOHN: “No ones going to die. I had this dream, I mean theory, you all know how a telescope works?”
TOMBS: “Yeah, so we all going to look though a telescopes and stare at the Endellions hoping to scare them away?”
PORTER: “Oh! I don’t think that will work Tombs!”
DIZZY is sitting next to Porter and nods in agreement with him. Then she leans down past Porter to look across at Tombs and crosses her head at him.
DIZZY: “No”
John knocks back the glass of whisky and looks proud of himself. He starts to get very animated and excited over what he is about to reveal to the crew.
JOHN: “Gravitational lensing. I think that’s the way they got here.
Accidently. And that’s how we are going to get to their home world”.
JOHN: “Look”
John brings up a different projected 3D screen and starts pointing at it to demonstrate how the long trip to Andromeda can be drastically shortened.
JOHN: “We use two Gyre’s, at a precisely computed space apart. That’s Very Important! When they are both simultaneously setoff they will cause a gravitational lensing effect where the implosions overlap, just like if you push two balloons together”.
PORTER: “Won’t those areas be flat between the two balloons?”
JOHN: “On balloons yes, but gravitational energy at the furthest point of both of the dissipations will bounce off each other causing a highly dense gravitational lensing effect in the middle, we will precisely align Alice with Andromeda, we will have to be traveling at light speed of one “L”
plus or minus just 0.022 percent to bring us within 42 lights years of our destination when we hit the gyres implosion and lensing effect”
DIZZY: “Won’t we be dead?”
GHOST: “Yeah!”
Luna talks to herself…
LUNA: “I must had removed too much of Johns brain in the operation.
Maybe I turned him into a looney”.
PORTER: “Like you have cupped your hands in between the squashed balloons to make a lens shape?”
DIZZY: “And we shoot though the Gyres implosion like an arrow out of a bow!”
JOHN: “Yeah, they are good analogy’s”
Luna puts her hand up.
LUNA: “How do you aim?”
John is getting more animated and excited,
JOHN: “Good question, and it’s simple, we take a line from Andromeda and though each Gyre”
TOMBS: “Wow, so where are we then?”
JOHN: “In between the two Gyre’s, draw a straight line from the Gyre behind us, though the Gyre in front of Alice, and then on to Andromeda”
DIZZY: “So we go during the Gyre’s collapse”?
JOHN: “We will be at a closely calculated distance nearer to the Gyre behind us during the expansion, when they both collapse into a singularity,
John jumps up in the air and is now very animated and excited, John looks above the crew at the entry/exit doorway to the observation lounge. Blood starts dripping from Johns nose, it runs down his face and down and across his mouth.
JOHN: “ AND YES! THEN WE SHOULD BE ON OUR WAY!
VEYAH?”
Luna and the crew all turn their heads to see who John is talking to, but there is no one there. John falls to the ground with a “Clump!”, the crew turn back to see John on the floor. Luna rushes forward getting out her medical scanner. She scans John’s head and body.
LUNA: “Get him to Medi-bay quick”