Lunch Outside the Solar System

Two

Experiencing for the first time the Ark Travel left Ariel speechless and motionless right in front of the main window of the cockpit, being fascinated was the lesser of her feelings and emotions when she saw the paths of light appearing in front of her with all its colors jumping from one another, like a melted crayons pool.

Ariel stared with her green and curious eyes all the roads of light through the front window; she could see the reflection of her wavy reddish hair combined with the colors of the Cosmoway, she felt her freckled cheeks turning into glitter, and for a brief moment she could hear the soft and soothing sound of colors moving through space.

Being the first human traveling in the light and witnessing the Cosmoway, made her forget for a brief moment all about her duties and responsibilities within the spaceship, but then a noise that looked like a "blip" but sounded like a "blob" took Ariel's attention making her get back to work.

The spaceship for Ariel's mission named "The Lunar Equation" was programmed to do practically everything on its own, that was the way Dr. Adamar wanted the first Ark ship, so it could record all the information and data, leaving the pilot taking care of the basic functions of a conventional spaceship...whatever "conventional spaceship" means.

And so, Ariel employed a lot of space-time turning on and off some colorful buttons, (The Dr. had a tendency to color-code everything) and printing out various results and measurements. Once in a while, she would also check the levels of Ark Functionality within the corresponding vibration speed from the spectrum of light, always with a nice cup of coffee as her preferred companion.

She made it very clear when volunteering for the project, she wouldn't ask for any fancy provisions, but she insisted on having more than enough coffee to travel there and back. She could pretty much deal with any kind of food or provisions... but for her, black coffee was as essential as oxygen to survive in any space travel.

During her journey, Ariel spent some of the spare time reading about human history. She craved it. So she took advantage of the huge database the United Nations had loaded into the ship servers. The data had been provided just in case of encountering "something out there", that way Ariel would have the necessary resources to better explain any human event in case of a close encounter with an extraterrestrial sapient.

It didn't take long to realize that something was different from the data stored on the servers, there was some added and changed information not available to the public back on earth. Ariel stumbled with some interesting stuff regarding Conspiracy Theories such as hollow earth, hidden continents, assassination attempts, and even some strange blood drinking goat creatures from Mexico, all of them with the stuff to debunk them back.

After finding the extra data, Ariel understood why she signed so many Confidentiality Agreements when committing to the project. It had taken her hours just to go through all the small print, but ultimately led her to get some really classified information, so she decided to put it to good use and took time to read it all...very carefully.

After a couple of weeks of reading human history, she bumped into something that caught her attention. Among all the new facts, she started to notice a pattern in certain documents and photographs across the course of human history; she found a symbol, hidden in some hieroglyphics, runic inscriptions, pre-Hispanic codex, catholic writings, scientific treaties, and even in some prehistoric cave paintings, all of them widely separated between time periods, societies, and cultures.

The symbol somewhat runic in style was different to any kind of writing known to humanity; it appeared sometimes on an artifact and others as part of some text or some painting. What fascinated her most about the symbol was that she actually found some kind of pattern in history that no one else had figured it out, not even the wildest conspiracy theorists, and there it was, a symbol only for her to find.

The finding motivated her into starting a personal project of investigation, one that would help kill some of the spare time of traveling in an automated ship with no communication to Earth. Being that she was aboard the first ship to ride the Light, any form of communication was still on an experimental level. Complete solitude was one of the risks she accepted from the start, so instead, she took advantage of the situation focusing on her new project.

After a couple of months going through all the data, Ariel used a lot of cross-references with the updated version of human history, she found only two things. The first was, as she had already imagined, the symbol had nothing to do in any way with any of the written communication systems of human society at that time, it appeared as some repeated doodles throughout history in so many different cultures unconnected in any way.

Her second finding was that every time this symbol got referenced, it was in some format of mass media communication, accessible to people from the period in question, with the particularity that it could endure the struggle of time.

Her research stumbled a brick wall when she couldn't find any other reference or mention about the symbol. She had it all well documented and identified through the passing of time, but no apparent correlation between them whatsoever. So she decided to input an unusual new cross-referenced search using the "Six Degrees of Separation Theory"-stating that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart from anyone.

Basically if you made a quick research through all of your contacts and people you know, at one point or another you'll eventually found someone that knows someone, who knew another one, who had an interaction with somebody else related to the person of your choosing, this theory could be applied to literally anyone on Planet Earth, at the most no one could be more than 6 steps of human interaction with anyone.

Based on the Separation Theory, Ariel inputted an automated search algorithm to figure out if the symbols and interactions between people referencing the symbol across human history could be in some way related. The system told her that the results would take a while, probably when approaching her first checkpoint outside the Solar System, more than enough time to process all the recorded human history.

She decided to set everything in automatic inducing herself in a stasis sleep, setting up the system to wake her up before arriving at the next checkpoint.