Lunch Outside the Solar System

Three

A loud alarm noise and a sudden blow into her stomach wake her up from slumber, she pushed up the lid of the stasis bed dealing with a blurry sight and some nausea, she threw up right beside the bed cursing in between spits not knowing what was happening.

She focused a little bit more shouting the voice-command to shut down the alarm providing more concentration to handle herself, silencing the alarm didn't quite resolve the issue, all the little bulbs around the control panel kept tilting, she noticed on the data screens some decoding numbers and a pop-up window, she hated those.

With some trouble she reached the main panel to understand what was happening, apparently, some kind of disturbance call interfered with the traveling program overriding every system pulling her out of the Cosmoway into open space.

After shutting down all the alarms, notifications, and the annoying pop-up window, she calmed a little bit, made herself a coffee and started evaluating the situation, she found in the system log some type of transmission coming from Planet Earth, apparently too strong and very angry, enough to interfere with the Ark Travel systems. She tried to identify the calling; all she could found was a recorded voicemail from some angry teenager, the sound was too hormonally scrambled to understand anything.

It came to her senses that she was in outer space, outside the Cosmoway, and both radar and the Space Localization System couldn't figure out where she was, she was lost in space. The conflict of not knowing where you were in the Universe gave her a sensation of feeling really small. Imagine getting lost in a parking lot from a shopping mall, you don't find your car and you are late to your partner family dinner, it makes you feel veeeery anguished, now multiply it by some big Fibonacci number and that was the angst Ariel felt. She stayed sitting at the lunch table drinking some coffee, staring at the reinforced glass window looking at the stars and the blackness that lay before her eyes.

She couldn't remember how long she stayed just looking down the window until she wanted another sip of coffee; when she was adding two teaspoons of sugar she noticed there were not much more coffee left, she started crying profusely getting angry not knowing what she was going to do if she ran out of it, maybe she could find some green tea, but it was no coffee alright.

She screamed, toss around some stuff, hit the floor, screamed some more, finding herself sobbing, holding the mug looking again through the window not knowing anything, her mind just went blank until something came up on the radar, a nearby object big enough like an asteroid popped out emitting an unknown signal trying to make contact with the ship, a strange feeling like space butterflies crawled through her belly.

She left the mug on the side table next the main control panel trying to understand what was showing up on the monitor, there was some type of code appearing in the communications panel making no sense whatsoever.

She input again some coordinates and a translation algorithm with the object and signal as a reference; when the data came up, it finally showed a localization of her whereabouts, she was near a small cluster of stars situated way too far from Earth, the distance was measured in so many light years she stopped doing the math because it was too damn far. She couldn't understand what it meant, was she on the other side of the Universe? Or it was a misinterpretation of the system, or what else?

The object in the radar was still popping up and the strange code kept updating until the ship got hit by a sudden gravitational bump, so to speak, and then all the systems of the ship went crazy as hell. Lights everywhere started to show up; alarms sounded like crazy brides in a discount dress shop, all the screens showing data making her more anxious until silence broke out.

The ship stopped bouncing, the alarms went off, and in one monitor, a single green cursor over a black screen started typing "something" made of letters, symbols, and numbers, pure gibberish. Something resembling a sentence appeared with two options like % and # at the end. Ariel was shocked, she didn't know what to do, something or someone was trying to communicate with her, evidently the language was unknown for the Operating System of the ship, she understood the need to input an answer, by basic logic it was like a yes or no question, 'the first one should be the positive response' she thought, she pressed % on the keyboard trusting her logical guts.

Some time passed after pressing the key, she was filled with incertitude and weird expectations, she kept staring the monitor waiting for something to develop and then the cursor went down continuing typing a small set of... words? Ariel noticed a red bulb tilting at the top of the communication system indicating a request for an open channel, so she did the only option she could think of, she opened the COM System. Her level of anxiety rose to mountaintop levels; what was going to happen next? Am I going to listen to a human message? Non-human? She thought while exchanging sight between the red bulb and the flat screen.

A deep noise echoed through the whole ship and a set of guttural and whistling sounds created a voice, and for a moment she knew it was a non-human sound coming out of the speaker. If she had been able to pee on her pants she would have done it, but at that point, she was more focused on the sound than putting her attention on bodily fluids.

She stayed thinking if she was dreaming or if she was actually hearing an alien voice from the other side of the Universe, either way, it was crazy enough. She waited until she could hear something resembling a question or some kind of vocalization leading her to answer the call; then, another weird noise give her the cue to Turn-On her side of the communications channel, she pronounced the only words she was able to think of, "This is The Commander and International Mission Specialist Ariel Rubinak, Captain of the Lunar Equation."