Origin - Season Two Read Online Free PDF Page B

remains of the crew. Almost everything else on board was made of the same heavy alloy as the hull, a metal that appeared all but impervious to the second law of thermodynamics. There were six seats facing out and spread evenly around the perimeter of the bridge—the padding had long since gone the way of the crew—and one larger and slightly elevated one in the center. That one, presumably the captain or mission commander’s, had armrests that sported an elaborate interface of touch-sensitive buttons and switches.
    Mitch moved to the far side of the bridge and sat down in one of the seats. As soon as his hands touched the flat surface of the counter in front of him the station came to life with a low hum. Where there had been only cold gray metal, a key panel appeared, drawn in pale green neon lines. The screen itself was some kind of holographic projection with no apparent light source. Provided you didn’t turn your head too far in any direction, the screen remained directly in front of the user’s eyes, something it had taken a while for all of them to get used to.
    Naoko handed Mitch a battered notebook. Mitch opened it to a page filled with his own barely legible handwriting and began to carefully run through the login sequence. Every time he made an error or accidentally typed a command the system didn’t recognize the entire console blinked red for a fraction of a second. It took him almost five minutes to get it right despite several months of practice.
    To confuse things further, the system used two languages. Most of what appeared on the screen was written in the eight round characters of the programming language, which doubled as a kind of shorthand for the operator, while all the non-system information was written in the alphabet of the spoken language, thirty-nine symmetrical characters that looked a bit like digital Chinese. This is where Naoko came in. Occasionally the two would be mixed, making things even more complicated. In the time they had worked together, Mitch and Naoko had developed a kind of semi-telepathy built on a small vocabulary of essential words and gestures. The fact that the screen wasn’t static, but tuned constantly with the position of Mitch’s head, made it difficult for Naoko to read it unless Mitch sat entirely still, something he wasn’t particularly good at.
    “Same old shit,” Naoko said. “Location beacon not found. Reset or deactivate.”
    Mitch looked down at his notebook and typed something.
    “Override failed,” Naoko said. “Authorization required.”
    Mitch typed something again.
    “Confirm reset override,” Naoko said.
    “Okay,” Mitch said. “And when I do that we get the same damn riddle every time.”
    “Yep,” Naoko said. “Execution failed. Default configuration required. Current status is one.”
    Mitch closed the notebook in frustration. “It’s a good thing this stuff is indestructible. Default configuration? How the hell are we supposed to know what that is if we can’t access the system?”
    The woman who had spoken to them earlier appeared on the bridge. She approached the man standing in front of one of the other consoles next to a tripod with a digital video camera mounted on it.
    “Shift’s over, Justin,” she said.
    Justin reached for the console and the characters on the screen stopped moving. He handed her his notebook. “This job really sucks.”
    “Yep,” she said.
    When Justin was gone she put the remote down, walked over to Mitch and Naoko and sat down at the console next to them. “How’s it going?”
    “It’s not,” Mitch said. “At this rate we’ll be here a year from now doing the same damn thing.”
    “Try again?” Naoko said.
    “Why the hell not.”
    They ran through the sequence again. When they were done, Naoko said, “Same. Execution failed. Default configuration required. Current status is…”
    “One,” Mitch finished.
    “Two,” Naoko said. “It’s two now, not one.”
    “Great,” Mitch said.