spaceships

lights and shadows danced solemnly across the fuselage of the giant.. pomfret. that was the only shape which came to mind when one looked at the 137. it was a source of tremendous personal pleasure to kranti that the russians who had designed it, the americans who had contracted it, the chinese who had actually won the outsourcing contract and had built most of it and the indians who had written the code(and painted the funky ethnic murals on the outside) could not agree on a common name for the greatest spaceship ever built, one that had ruined half the world's economy (of course the half of the worlds's economy belonged to the half which didn't sit in on economic summits, so it didn't matter anyway). anyway, the spaceship had been built in this last decade of the 21st century and had been sent onn a secret mission. so secret, in fact, that CNN gave it time on primetime news displacing the latest peccadilios of the chairman of the council of nations. (something to do with his secretary, an impossibly buxom lady of otherwise rather dubitable virtues, although the aforementioned chairman kept babbling about the coffee she made. aparently,, in this age, we still need ahem.. ladies, of, uh. impressive dimensions for making coffee..). where was I, ah,, yes, the mission. we had received a message, you see, on the Hydrogen line(1420.45 MHz). This message had come somewhat out of the blue one ordinary morning as an intense collimated beam aimed directly at earth. this beam had originated from somewhere in the vicinity of pluto. the message had, as per actual records caused one burnt egg(belonging to a grad student), a fantastic thesis(the same grad student) and a fatal heart attack(his advisor). it also caused the ship to be built, its rather controvorsial christening as the "137", its launch with the most highly trained crew of astronauts ever(not a single man amongst them) and now, four years and five billion kilometres later, here we were, loitering near the Lagrange point between pluto and his moon, the charon.

the preliminary exploration had gone well, so well, in fact that we had taken a short break just to sit back and let the bigwigs contemplate the magnitude of what we had achieved. the biggies did the sitting back, we scurried like so many ants across the ship and through the myriad service tunnels making sure that no AO unit gave out on us.


bridge:
"outlook 1 to bridge, outlook 1 to bridge, we found something". the watch cleared the hollywood breakup story she was immersed in as captains narya and mehak walked in. (detailed studies had shown that one male commander was 13.56 times more likely to do a harakiri with his ship than two female commanders, so.... incidentally, the results of tests with two male commanders were never made public.) "what is it, outlook?" mehak asked. amazing how she always managed to look like the uniform had been starched with her inside, the watch wondered as mehak slid quickly into the con seat. narya was viewing the tapes of the last half hour at 4X, a speed that made the wath slightly dizzy. "looks like a .. device ma'am". the screen filled with the image of the disc. "perfect". that was the thought that entered her head as she focussed on the pitograms. a man and a woman, side by side. and the man was .. perfect. ok, so was the woman. and those rulings by the side? what about them? mehak had fought long and hard for this job. and it finally looked like she had won.


earth:
"those numbers indicate the azimuthal angle, the perpendicular distance from the galactic plane and the radial distance from the perpendicular: in short the euclidean coordinates of planet earth, and those numbers indicate the same for what we think is the host planet. the numbers near the centre of the disc indicate a frequency, just slightly off the Hydrogen line and scheme of polarisation modulation, which we believe transmits data to the disc. Lights". the hall was illuminated with the harsh white fluoroscent lighting which universities seem to think promote learning as people came awake. the man from the council was almost aggressively awake:"so you are telling us that this .. disc is a .. communication device. a telephone?" Rafik, the astro man, typicaly in a coffee stained shirt and what looked like a secondhand jacket with crow goo n it looked up from his slides and said, "basically, yes. we can transmit voice data to the disc." the council man was not satisfied, "and how does the disc communicate with its home planet?" Rafik seemed embarassed at this point, "this we do not entirely know, but the experiments by Mahmud and Jogesh have proved the existance of Einstein Rosen bridges..."

Experiment, an out of order men's room in the basement of the Physics Dept. of a university which choses to remain anonymous:
the chairman, the deputy chairman of the council of nations(and their secretarys. these guys must love their coffee) and pretty much most of the inner chamber. also present were the scientific advisors to the council, a couple of grad students who came free with the electronics hijacked from EECS, fifteen religious leaders, seventy five politicians, five physicists and fifteen astro/phys grad students, two undrgrads who made out on wednesday nights in this room and had walked in hand in hand and had stayed to watch the fun and lastly, a pimply teenager of indeterminate gender who was hocking beer bottles and popcorn. finally, all the circuits had been checked for the seven thousand six hundred and fiftieth time, all the math had been checked by an underpaid, unshaven and unloved math grad who was just slightly less suicidal than his advisor and we were ready! a soft ping sounded as contact was made and the room waited in awed silence to hear the first sounds of life outside earth! a faint hiss sounded, followed by a loud warbling and then a deep resonant voice sounded. as i fell to my knees i thought "this is it, HIS voice!" "thank you for contacting Galactic Central. Congratulations, you are now a sentient civilisation. to continue registration, press 1. to speak to a customer care representative, press 2. this call may be monitered for quality and training purposes".