You, Me, We Are All Mistakes

14. STARDATE 1, LANIAKEA

PART TWO
ANOTHER WORLD
STARDATE 1

There's a starman waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.
David Bowie

Whether you care about it or not, we live in an improbable cosmos. A barely imaginable group of one hundred million average stars is termed a galaxy. An inconceivably greater group of these galaxies is named a galaxy cluster. Further out, an impossibly vast chain of galaxy clusters is designated a supercluster.

To put this in some context for you and me, our very own supercluster home is called Laniakea, which is Hawaiian for immeasurable heaven. It contains one hundred thousand galaxies and would require a naïve Einstein at least five hundred million light-years to ride a beam across it. At the epicentre of this supercluster sits the shapeshifting Great Attractor governing space and time #5 plus the politically incompetent Republic of The Galactic Core.

A wretched migrant ship is streaming through Laniakea's Eastern edge.

_____
#5 Calendars and time zones remain tricky across a near infinite void.

***

CHAPTER 14
LANIAKEA

Schtip.

The elevator was white, hygienic and still worked.

It incorporated no unnecessary design features and all this simplicity agreed with its occupant. A harsh thin light glared down onto pale blue flesh and the stiffened grey uniform of a developed narcissist. Elsewhere it caught glass, titanium and carboplastene. Characteristic musky smells were subdued by a freshening detergent mist.

A hand raised to touch the privileged button pronounced above all others.

Schtop.

Both doors responded and slid to a close. A long ascent and the figure emerged into a spacious bridge with darkened recesses ascribed to faulty lighting. The whole domain was overshadowed by a vast augmented-reality screen depicting the Mayall II cluster and Andromeda galaxy, backed by infinite stars speckling their reach into an inky black universe.

"Jip jip. Wap wap."
"Jip jip. Wap wap."

The ship's alarm was talking. Sennai knew it was the ship's alarm and this grated on his nerves. Seating himself in a lavish, bloated chair, sharp orange eyes embedded in an oversized skull darted across the more senior members his crew.

Allowing time for his elbows to sink in the soft memory fabric of their seat arms, then each splayed fingertip, he reminisced of an era when alarms were incapable of speech. They had sounded with simple electronic tones: two bursts of high frequency followed by two at low frequency. Sennai flashed to a question, posed during his Cadet School, concerning the tone made by a ship's primary alarm.

He had answered:

"Two chords.... somewhat like Jip jip, wap wap."

Unable to commit to any form of revision, Sennai had relied solely on instinct and a fine memory to survive. His answer was deemed an accurate approximation and widely accepted. Those pioneering days were fondly regarded for their purity. Then came Duplicated Voice Synthesis, assuring perfectly orchestrated speech. The notorious Laniakea psychologist Hola Migola was paid a colossal consulting fee to develop a hypothesis that concluded: if a ship's primary alarm was consistently likened to Jip jip, wap wap then it must be far more logical and agreeable to have it simply say Jip jip, wap wap? This would prove more congenial, effectively reducing the on-board Assessed Anxiety Factor, and inducing a melodious wellbeing throughout the workplace, whenever the alarm need be deployed. To secure his completion bonus, Migola recommended upgrading the entire Galactic Fleet as a way to ensure every crewmember's mind was focused on dealing with any ensuing danger.