“I cannot find any damn anomaly,” he said, frustrated.
“Try harder bony lass. Penetrate it apart with your very consciousness,” the operator said, guffawing at his own joke. Behind that roaring bass like laughter, Saptarishi could hear a strain in his voice. There were very angry and important people breathing down their neck as to why the Starry-Eyed wasn’t working.
He was sweating copiously. No amount of advanced gadgetry was ever going to make this place habitable. After all, he was so close to the star.
He shrugged. He had to try it one more time.
He clinched the leather tube firmly between his jaws, feeling his tongue brushing past it, taking in that acrid taste. This was to arrest his scream, steel himself when the mind-meld took place with the super computer. He never ever enjoyed the feeling; it was like holding the last leaf of an almost uprooted tree, which itself is clinging precariously, in a giant thundering gale storm. The steely sub-consciousness of the supercomputer inundated his small puny brain. Had not proper safe-guards been built, the gargantuan mind would have scorched his brain with its excessively knowledgeable aura.
There was no denying that his was a painful job, to go out there in the scorching heat of the sun and try to fix some or the other equipment that was very necessary for the space-trotting, time-hunting human civilization to exist. Of course, he did not have that extensive knowledge or a degree in mechanical engineering necessary to fix this ship. He wasn’t supposed to do so.
All that he was ever supposed to do was to goad the supercomputer in the right direction, so that it self-heals itself and goes back into operation.
That apparently sounded simple but it wasn’t so. It was mired with enormous complexity, over ages people had gone crazy tampering with almost omniscient brains and so it was no surprise that there were few takers for that job. As a result there was windfall monetary gain.
That was what he had been trying to do, for the last hour or two. But the supercomputer was not responding. But that wasn’t something he was breaking sweat over.
It was entirely normal for a supercomputer not to respond to a query of a human being when it was overloaded with huge responsibilities. This computer alone handled all the operation of controlling all the near range floats few light-inches above boiling froth of the star, plus transmitting the energy in the form of micro-waves back to the nearest interstellar port for use.
But what wasn’t normal was for a computer, not to respond, when it has ceased all electricity-generating activities.
In no time soon, he had once again penetrated the boundary and entered the sacrosanct precinct.
Of course, as his mind melded, he winced sharply due to the sudden exposure to the super massive brain. But that was all in the back-ground. It was like a strong wind flowing, ready to sweep him off his feet if he showed the slightest weakness in his resolve. The dam was waiting to burst over……
It wasn’t responding to his nudge. Maybe the central-circuits had fried the computer during the solar storm. If that were the case, he wouldn’t be able to fix this.
He sighed. This was no good. He knew he had to call this off. He may have to face the music, tinged with remarkably original and copious amount of expletives as it neared the crescendo. But the operator won’t be able to do anything beyond that.
Just as he was preparing to break contact, he noticed something fishy…………..
He was slightly puzzled by it at first, but slowly and steadily, the puzzlement transmuted to horror. He was greatly experienced in his job, it did not take him long to find out what exactly was wrong with it.
He felt the urgent need to break contact. But of course that was not meant to be.
The operator was still on line, in contact with the Mind-melder. The numerous screens in front of him showed the different angles of the room on board Starry-Eyed, where the guy was hunched over, a fibrous cap over his head, in a deep glassy-eyed sleep, that was a result of contact with the super-computer. It was involuntary action (different for different melders), but this guy didn’t seem to close his eyes. It was a wee bit eerie, but anything to get the job done.
The operator noticed the change in the facial expression of the bloke.
Those raised eyebrows fostered a hope in the operator’s mind that the guy had finally found a solution to the problem.
But then, the face on the screen contorted to an expression of utter horror. The operator realized that they were in deep shit.
He anxiously waited for the melder to break contact. He did not.
He gave it five minutes, but the mind-melder did not emerge from his swoon.
Now the operator’s hands were shaking furiously. He checked the stat on the melder’s mind- no it wasn’t dead, though it showed remarkable brain activity, more than remarkable.
Before he could send panic signals to the head office, the man started having violent seizures.
The operator froze in his action, his eyes riveted to the screen with rising frission.
But it was far from over.
Absorbed as he was, another activity was taking place not quite far from the contact room onboard Starry-Eyed. With an indiscernible click, the Control center that was Starry-Eyed disengaged itself from the overhanging suspenders.
Unnoticed, the long defunct engines of the Starry-Eyed roared to life.
When he did come to his senses, the Operator knew that it was beyond his control, experience and pay-scale. He immediately sent the Help Signal.
But the ship had traversed a goodly distance in a short span of time. Within moments, it had reached a threshold limit, beyond which human habitation was hardly possible.
It would take time for help to reach. And of course, it wasn’t practicable for it to reach on time.
The operator tried frenetically to rouse the mind-melder from his sleep. Maybe he sent an unconscious signal to the supercomputer for the ship to start. It didn’t seem plausible, but he couldn’t think of any other alternative.
But the sleeping beauty never woke up. The operator watched with horror, as the skin of the melder begun to sing. Though the eye lids were closed, the flaps yielded as the eye balls bulged out of their sockets. His body was still suffering from violent seizures.
The operator knew that from this stage there was no going back.
Froth began to appear on the sides of his mouth and even that seemed to get evaporated. Surely enough, the water in his body must be boiling. Veins would burst out, brain would explode.
Inspite of the horridness, the Operator could not avert his eyes from the screen. And in the next five minutes, as the Mind-melder died, thousands of kilometers above the surface of the star, the ship slowly inching towards the all engulfing gravity of the massive fire-ball, the operator knew that a lifetime wasn’t enough to wipe this out of his memory…
Alienman 