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Chapter 24

Chapter 24

December 11th, 2157

Logan. Mike, James, Nora, their escorts as well as a few others made their way to a shared workspace.  When they entered the room they were a little surprised to be greeted by Professor Fleming, the head of linguistics at New Congo Government University.  Suddenly their presence along with several others from their program began to make sense.

James was the first to greet their old professor.  "Professor Fleming, it's nice to see you again," he said as he reached out and shook hands.

"Ah, it's Tim now.  You are no longer my students."

He continued to shake hands with everyone who entered the room.  The room was large with several desks with terminals around its perimeters.  In the center was a large conference table.

"Please, take a seat," Tim said.

All of the linguists took seats around the table, which left the soldiers standing close to the door.  One of the solders that Logan didn't know took a step forward and politely said, "Professor Fleming, with your permission we will be about our training."

"Yes, yes, we don't want you getting soft on your babysitting job." Tim joked as he chuckled and politely waved the soldiers off.

As one the soldiers turned and left the room and the focus returned to Tim at the head of the table.  He wore a grey blue shirt with a black bow tie that matched his hair.  His eyes always seemed to be a little too small for his head.  His cheekbones were defined by the slight sinking look of his cheeks.  His trade make smile finished the look that all of his students knew well.

Tim continued to stand and simply smiled for a moment.  Then he began, "You may be wondering what a group of linguists are doing out in the deep dark.  Well, when a bacterium was discovered in Europa, we had proof of extra terrestrial life.  And now with new means of faster than light travel, we have high hopes to find more."

The whole room was silent.  Nobody moved as they waiting for more.  "Many believe that it is only a matter of time before we find intelligent life, and that is why the brightest are here before me today."

"How long is a matter of time," came a voice from behind Logan.

"Ah, well," began Tim.  "That is all guess work from what i understand.  If I understand it correctly, we could only open a tunnel to another place in our galaxy by line of sight.  Which is tricky by itself due to the constant moving of space.  They would have to calculate distance of our target, and figure out how space may have changed in the years that it takes for light to reach us from the target."

"Like I said, I don't know the details but it was a lengthy and not always accurate guess to get a probe to the general target area.  However, I was recently informed that we have new software that by some magic that I don't understand, can more accurately calculate the target area simply by entering in the coordinates as we see them in our present day in our current spot in space."

"This new software will also allow us to target areas of space that are beyond our computers sight.  But once again this enters a grey area, because we don't know what is at our targets at such a distance."  Tim paused for a moment, and then chuckled and shook his head from side to side.

"What is it?"  This time it was James who spoke.

"Nothing i hope," said Tim.  "He paused for another short moment and the smile faded from his face.  "I just had a really bad though about what would happen if the tunnel opened up inside a black hole. Huh, I wonder if we would even know what killed us?"