Chapter No. 180. Saturn.

59 8 12
                                    

Part 19. The Age of Invictus.

Synopsis: Molly, Alexa and Jason discovered that they had never been humans, that their memories were fabricated by very sophisticated AI computer system that had been created by Invictus, a name that came from a famous poem by William Ernest Henley. Jason is dedicated to a mission to determine the truth about why they were created and by whom.

Chapter No. 180. Saturn.

I am the master of my fate.

Saturn hung like a gem in a canvas of pitch black emblazoned with millions of stars. Its rings tilted in defiance of our presence like thin blades of ice crystals. The scene was both uplifting as it was ominous. Saturn has 82 moons, but some of them are small and imbedded in Saturn's ring system.

As a location of a supercomputer system, Enceladus was too small, but its vast oceans under a shell of ice contained primitive life. Titan was large enough but was way too cold. In fact, all of Saturn's moons were too cold.

At first, it appeared that we were not going to find anything here, but something changed that.

"Something's wrong," Molly said. There's an object orbiting Saturn that's not supposed to be there."

"What sort of object?"

"It's black. In fact, it's so black as to be almost not visible."

I stared at the image on the main screen. "You were not kidding. What is that?"

"I would say it's what we came out here to find," she said with a subtle grin.

"Does it have any security systems?"

"I'm not detecting anything that would represent a threat."

"I can't seem to get an image of what's inside it," I told Alexa. "How about you?"

She shook her head. "Nope."

"I think there's a round hatch on it," Margaret said. "I used optical enhancement to find it."

Her enhanced image appeared on the main screen.

"I suppose we'll have to go over to it in a shuttle," I said. "Haven't had to do that in quite some time."

Molly, Alexa and I, along with Alice and Ben, launched a shuttle to travel over to the object, which appeared as a large spherical moonlet that was about five kilometers in diameter.  It reminded me of the Star Wars Death Star, but in this case, it had no outside markings and the circle was not recessed.

We approached the location of the round hatch slowly. Fortunately, the object didn't object. The round indentation didn't have anything that resembled a handle or latch, and there was no indication of how to open it.

We stared at it from the windows of our shuttle for several minutes before reacting.

"I think there's a data module right in the center," Alexa said. "Maybe it requires a passcode."

"That's possible, but even if it was, we don't know the passcode."

"I do," Alice said.

We turned to look at her.

"How would you know the passcode?"

"I'm unable to determine that at this time," she said without emotion.

Her reply was what you would expect from an intelligent computer, but I had no way to know if she was telling the truth. "We'll have to go out there to try her passcode."

Star FieldsWhere stories live. Discover now