e-Ghosts of Rogue Planet

Chapter 10

The robot stood at least ten feet tall and it was made from some sort of shiny metal. Its helmet head had a recessed visor over the area where the eyes should have been, and it had a diameter-descending series of discs for ears. The robot man wore metal mitten gloves, large boots and what looked like a metallic pair of shorts with a wide waistband.

When it walked towards us, its metal legs appeared to flex.

We backed up.

“Klaatu Barada Nikto,” I shouted.

The robot stopped.

 “What the hell does that mean?” James asked, his face twisted with confusion.

“That robot looks like Klaatu in the movie ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the original one. That was the words that Helen spoke to calm the robot after its owner got shot.”

“It must have worked,” Marie said.

“I don’t get it,” James said. “Why would some alien robot know about the plot to a human movie?”

I walked toward the robot.

“Be careful!” Marie yelled.

The robot vanished before I could touch it.

“What the hell?” James said.

“I believe that it was a projection,” I said. “They must be able to read our thoughts and memories.”

“Are you suggesting that they--whoever they are--are still here?” Alisha said.

“I don’t know, but I have a hunch that they are here in spirit, if there is such a thing for artificial life.”

“They’d call that an e-ghost,” James said in a joking manner.

“Let’s see if we can find the source of this e-ghost,” I said.

We proceeded into the city and walked along a wide metal avenue. Tall shiny metal and quartz spires rose a thousand meters into the sky. They were arranged in mostly octagon geometric patterns and they appeared to be untouched by weather or corrosion.

“The pavement, if you could call it that, is made out of a titanium with traces of vanadium, molybdenum, and aluminum,” Marie said after consulting her scanner.

“Titanium and its alloys form an oxide,” James said. “But, you don’t see that here because there’s almost no oxygen in the atmosphere.”

“They must like titanium,” I said. “It appears that everything is made out of it.”

“Except for the transparent material,” Marie said. “That’s made out of quartz, but it’s a very pure form of it.”

“Let’s look inside one of the buildings,” I said.

The tall pyramid-shaped building had no obvious means of entry, but when I approached it, a door retracted into the top of a pyramid-shaped opening.

“The power system still works,” I said with a smirk.

Marie gave the opening a wary look. “Hopefully, it allow us out of here.”

“You can’t discover truth without breaking into an alien door,” I said in a teasing manner.

“Smart ass!” Marie retorted.

James and I laughed.

The interior was unadorned. There was no place to sit, no art to look at and no signs of what the building’s purpose was. Marie and Alisha split off and went over to what looked like a pyramid-shaped structure in the middle of the floor. It stood thirty meters high and was about twenty meters wide. A door opened and they entered. The door closed behind them.

“What the hell?” James cried. “Why’d they go in there?”

“I’m not picking up their COM signals,” I said, looking at my helmet display.

“How are we going to get them out of there?” James asked, sounding panicked.

“We have to do something,” I said. “We each only have enough air for about three hours.”

James walked over to where the girls entered. “There’s no sign of a door here.”

I came over to him. A control panel appeared in the side of the chamber that the girls were stuck in.

“What’s this?” James said. “It looks like a number pad, but I don’t know what the symbols mean.”

I looked at them for a few minutes. “They appear to be hatch marks. I would assume they represent numbers that go up in value from left to right and top to bottom.”

“You’re assuming that the aliens that made this has a hand with five fingers.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“They must want us to enter the password, or in this case, a number?” James said.

“That’s not going to be easy to determine,” I said. “Who knows what aliens would use as a passcode.” I typed in a few four-digit numbers that I use as passcodes, but nothing happened.

Suddenly, the virtual keys of the number pad lit up in sequences. “Hmm, that looks like they’re trying to give us a hint.”

“I think it’s a numeric progression,” James said.

“Yeah, I think you’ve got it. It appears to be the progression X equals X plus two times X.” I entered one, pressed the bottom button, then three, then the bottom button, seven, twenty-one, sixty-three, and when I pressed the bottom button, the door to the chamber opened.

The girls rushed out just before the door closed again.

“How did you get the door to open?” Marie asked me.

“I entered a numeric progression into the number pad,” I said with a proud smile.

Marie looked over the chamber front. “What number pad?”

“It must be a virtual projection. It just popped up on the side of the chamber, and now it’s gone.”

“I think this was a test,” James said.

“Test of what?” Alisha asked.

“A test of our intelligence, I would think,” he replied.

“I think they scanned us while we were in there,” Marie said. “I picked up some electromagnetic signals that were high enough to penetrate our brain synapses.”

“If all this was created by an artificial intelligence, they would be interested in how smart we are,” James said.

“I think it wise that we get out of here,” I said. “We don’t want to be trapped here for any length of time. We only have an hour’s worth of air left.

The others didn’t need prodding. They followed me out of the building and back to the lander. We buckled in and I activated the shuttle for a return to the ship.