Jakob closed the door behind him as he entered his quarters. He was standing in a tiny bunk room tucked below the bridge - only about three feet wide and seven feet deep with a cubby in the wall for a bed. He presumed it was meant to be used by the captain when he needed to rest during extended periods on the bridge. However, based on the signs of boxes having been hastily dragged through the thick layers of dust on the floor, Jakob guessed that until very recently it had been used for storage.
A small round window was fixed to the wall across from the door. Of course, this was not a real window. If there was really a window which faced out of the ship, it would have been on the floor. No, this window was a holoscreen, which Jakob had learned about when he downloaded the ship’s specs during his journey. The window showed a three dimensional holographic stream of the ship's exterior.
Though he found the device rather pointless, Jakob could see how it would be beneficial for humans to have a way to look out at the stars. Living things had a curious aversion to spending prolonged periods of time in enclosed spaces, and even the illusion of a connection to the outside world offered some relief from the feeling of claustrophobia.
Once one knew the window was a fake, it was easy to pick out the wrinkles in the image - digital noise, blur from the screen resolution, and a slight blueish hue. Jakob was desperate to look at real stars with his own eyes again. The memory of seeing the boundless cosmos upon his awakening on the Argo IV was permanently burned into his mind - a memory he knew he would be replaying whenever he had the chance. The holoscreen did not do it justice.
Jakob tapped a button on the frame of the screen, and the feed switched to a blue sandy beach. A few sunbathers lounged in hammocks and there was someone riding a board along the wall of a massive twenty foot wave in the distance. He tapped the button again and the image changed to a warm sunset over orange desert mesas.
Gently, he put a hand against the glass. Tiny static shocks pricked the tips of his fingers as they moved over the screen. Focusing his attention on the device, he could sense millions of electric signals passing bits of binary information under his palm - data points being updated in a mad rush as the image on the screen changed. He pushed in further with his mind, following the path of each signal until he found the screen’s connection to a controller.
The controller acted as a bridge into the ship’s automation system, and Jakob was hit with a wave of information as his mind entered. He could sense hundreds of valves opening and closing, sensors reading pressures, temperatures, and velocities of gas and coolant, mechanical equipment being turned on and off, motor and fan speed adjustments.
The ship was like a living organism, sending signals from its brain out through its nervous system to regulate temperature and life support systems, and collecting energy by digesting fuel and absorbing sunlight. He saw humans were also a part of the organism. Within the system, it accounted for energy costs per soul on board, room occupation, work schedules, and intervals for human inputs such as refueling and maintenance. The crew was part of the ship’s immune system, fighting disease and repairing damaged cells, and they also formed the conscious mind of the machine. Though the humans were not within the digital world as he was, he could still see their shadows passing by as they interacted with the ship’s systems.
Jakob’s mind passed through a digital corridor from the automatic controls system and into the ship’s central server, from which he could access any system on board. He quickly scanned through the ship’s file storage, copying it and sorting it into his memory.
In milliseconds, he had absorbed trillions of bytes of information. He pulled a handful of files into his active memory as he queried the term “Andromech.” Curiously, he found nothing relating to his boarding the ship.
He looked into recent airlock and port records. The airlock antechamber depressurization history showed the time of his arrival, but nothing of a ship docking at the port nor any persons entering the airlock antechamber. He was surprised by the effort the humans had put into hiding him.
But he knew something they did not: they had made an error. Their plot to keep his presence a secret had failed before he had even set foot on the Hippogryph.
As he had exited the Argo IV, out of the corner of his eye Jakob had seen a man crouched behind a console in the observation room, spying on his entry. When Jakob was led out of the chamber, the man was tucked away in the shadows where no one else would notice. But Jakob had seen him.
When Jakob looked into the man’s eyes, he had not seen the same fear as in the others who had come to greet him. There was apprehension, yes, but Jakob had seen something else in that man’s expression as well: wonder and excitement.
That man was the first living creature Jakob had ever encountered, and it was reassuring to be greeted by something other than total fear and revulsion, which was what he had seen in the meeting afterwards.
Let me find you…
Jakob looked into other records from his port of entry - terminal activation, door sensors, security logs. A door to a connected data processing lab had opened minutes before he boarded. Security logs showed that the area had been cleared during an emergency shutdown, so nobody should have been in the lab. But it seemed they had not been thorough enough.
A single user had been active in the lab until just an hour before Jakob boarded, and the lab door had remained shut after the user logged off. Jakob checked the terminal activity, and he had his man: Odysseus Adamus - Thermo Engineer, Mechanical Technician, EVA Specialist.
This entire process had taken only moments, and before he had even consciously thought about it, Jakob had located a connection to Odysseus’ private server.
Unlike the ship’s main servers, this connection was strongly protected - likely by a custom encryption program. A key would be required to access the server.
Jakob went back to the main servers and located correspondences between Odysseus and the engineering board. He sorted through them until he found a terminal ID that did not match with any of the public terminals on the ship.
Thus, the way is opened.
Rather than return to Odysseus’ server, Jakob located the terminal in Odysseus’ quarters and connected to it directly, bypassing the need to break through the server encryption.
This terminal was connected to Odysseus’ private computer, giving Jakob access. As he sorted through the computer’s memory, something peculiar caught his attention. There were restricted files pulled pertaining to recent ship operations in engineering and navigation, and queries had been logged for the term “Archimedes.”
So, he has already uncovered the mission.
Suddenly, Jakob found himself back on the bridge to the ship’s central servers. In place of the connection to Odysseus’ terminal was a controller containing a program which simply returned “I see you.”
