Engineered Magic

1 AL: Irene

The room stunk. Generations used this restroom and bleach could only do so much. Honestly all the public toilets smelled. After spending the last forty minutes in this one Irene thought that it was particularly ripe. She tightened the last pipe joint and leaned back on her haunches to check her work. Her back was braced against the stall door.

She returned the big wrench to the side pocket of her tool bucket. She took out her last dry towel and wiped each of the plumbing joints to ensure that they were clean and dry. With care she turned the water back on. She listened carefully as water pressurized the fixture. She studied each of the connections, watching for any leakage. The sound quieted as the pressure equalized. There was still no sign of a leak. She made it this far several times. With some trepidation she reached forward and flushed the toilet.

Water flushed through the bowl as the pressure was released. She checked all the joints, paying special attention to the connections around the handle where the first leak occurred. The flush valve closed and the toilet quieted. The joints were all still dry. Irene began to hope it was actually fixed this time. She tossed the rag into her bucket and picked up the used seal she replaced.

Theoretically the material in the seal could be reworked to make a new one. In actuality the Speedwell was nearing its end of life. Every seal, part and drip of water was precious. Which was why her first attempt was to disassemble the fixture, clean all the parts and put it back together, without replacing anything. Even with the best of their recycling technology there were always some losses. The vessel was designed to house the landing population for the first twenty years. Any growth in that population needed to be housed elsewhere.

Irene was so excited when she won the apprenticeship in engineering. With the landing imminent, her head was filled with visions of building modern cities and sustainable infrastructure. Plus she would get to work with her father. He was a key member of the engineering crew.

Instead of being proud of her, he seemed angry. As if a mere child getting a position in the department somehow invalidated the hard work of his life. Shortly after the landing he unexpectedly died. Well as unexpectedly as a man in his eighties could. Irene wondered if his anger wasn’t at her but rather at the small voice in the back of his head telling him his time was almost over. Irene’s mother was part of the medical team. She was away with one of the exploration teams when Irene’s father passed away.

All of Irene’s siblings were assigned to other teams. Her youngest brother was on the same exploration team as her mother. Irene suddenly found herself very much alone. The rest of the engineering group assumed she was granted the apprenticeship because of her father and that she did not actually win the position. Which just proved that none of them really understood her father, who would never endanger the ship by allowing someone unqualified to become an engineer.

She stifled a sigh as she heard someone enter the restroom. She figured it was one of her superiors checking up on her. As a lowly apprentice everyone was her senior. They all seemed to feel the need to explain to her the right way to do each job. Unfortunately none of them agreed on what the right way was. She stayed silent hoping that if whoever it was didn’t hear her they would go away. The stall she was in was about half way down the second row. She didn’t think anyone would search that far to find her.

There were only five members on the engineering team from the landing generation. Everyone else was from the last generation of flight crew and were in their eighties. The large spacing between generations meant a lighter load on the life support systems during flight. Since the high radiation levels in space made natural birth unviable, artificial wombs were used for all procreation. This meant the age of the parents was largely immaterial.

“Look at the proportions on the rooms, halls and doorways. They are a close match to our own. I think that indicates human origin,” a voice said. Irene didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of her coworkers.

“They are close but they don’t actually match. Everything is a bit taller than what we build,” a second voice responded. This restroom was on an upper level and mainly served ship officers. These two were likely part of the command team.

“Not what we build. What we have,” the first speaker clarified. “I have been listening to people complaining about how cramped this ship is all my life. How do we know our builders didn’t short us to save mass?”

“The records?” the second voice countered, “If anything they indicate they made our ceilings higher than the norm on Earth in an effort to avoid claustrophobia. Look I think they may have been something close to us but the chance that they were actually human seems extremely small.” Irene heard the screech of stall doors opening and closing and everything went quiet for a moment.

They were talking about the ruins. Irene felt like she was the only one of the landing generation that hadn’t seen them. She was hungry for any information she could get. When the senior members of the engineering team weren’t checking up on her, she could find them watching video feeds from the exploration teams. She would peek over their shoulders to get glimpses of darkened hallways of stone, soaring spaces of steel and glass and surprising islands of green where water and light rained down from the damaged structures above.

Irene heard a toilet flush. There was a screech from a stall door and footsteps crossed the main hall to the sinks. She heard the second toilet flush and the conversation started up again.

“Has there been any progress in translating the inscriptions?” the second voice asked.

“No,” his companion responded. “They are back to thinking they are just geometric patterns. Even the most complex of them never have more than seven symbols. Most of them only have three or four.”

“I thought there were more than seven if you considered orientation.”

“They gave up on orientation a while ago. After that they found a mosaic in multiple colors. They put a lot of time into that one, before deciding the tiles were colored in order to give a rainbow effect to the overall pattern that had nothing to do with the individual symbols.”

“Wouldn’t that have been obvious from the beginning?” the second voice asked.

“I simplified the description. It was a leftward spiral of color, or something like that. Most of the examples don’t have color at all. They are just engravings in the wall you can only see in oblique light.” There was a slight pause in the conversation before the first voice continued. “The current hypothesis is that they are just decor. Geometric designs as decoration were often dominant at different times in earth’s history.”

Irene heard the sinks shut off. She expected the two of them to leave.

“Have they considered that these symbols might depict properties,” the second voice commented, “or maybe the names of gods that could grant the quality.”

“Where are you going with that?” the first voice questioned.

“I guess I am thinking about Dr. Whitman’s ramblings about magic,” was the reply.

“Be careful,” the first voice countered. “Emmet has decided that she is senile. You don’t want him to decide that you are too.” Emmet could only be Emmet Black, the captain of the Speedwell. These two calling him Emmet confirmed that they were officers.

“I am not saying there is magic. It doesn’t have to be real for people to believe in it or write stories about it. In most magic systems you can infuse magic into an item. It just struck me that maybe the symbols might be the builders' idea of infusing properties. They could be some kind of enchantment.” Irene heard the outer door open and the shuffling of feet as the speakers moved.

“You might have something there. I think some of the geometric art movements on earth were driven by religion.” Those were the last words she could make out, before the door swung shut behind them.

Irene continued to brace herself against the stall door in shock. Those short words about Dr. Whitman being senile was the first she heard of her mother for months. Did that explain why she did not return to the Speedwell when Irene’s father died? Her mother was always very ambitious and a workaholic. Age wasn’t allowed to slow her down.

The first groups to explore the ruins found small animals they named rats. The animals were easy enough to scare off or kill individually. A group stumbled into what was a nest. In the resulting struggle several of the explorer’s weapons failed. While others produced wild shots. In the end several party members were too injured to be moved. Dr. Whitman volunteered to go out to treat them on site. As one of the few members of the older generation in the ruins, she rose to a leadership position quickly. Irene believed it was her mothers desire to secure that position that kept her from returning for her spouse’s funeral. Now she wondered if that was really the cause.

She was still holding the worn seal. She was spinning it absentmindedly in her fingers. She was turning it to the left, which was actually kind of hard to do with her right hand. A leftward spiral, she thought to herself. She dropped the seal into the recycle bag on the side of her tool bucket and rose to her feet. She rechecked all the joints and was happy to find that they were all dry.

It took some maneuvering to get both the tool bucket and herself out of the way of the door so she could open it. She didn’t remember it being so hard on the way in. As she passed the sinks she noticed that one of the visitors did not completely shut a faucet. She spent hours fixing a seal that dripped once a minute and someone just left a faucet running.

Annoyed, she reached out to crank it closed. The handle abnormally resisted her but she persisted. The thin stream of water cut off. A drip slowly formed on the rim of the spout and dropped down into the bowl. Irene tried more pressure but there was no more give.

Another drop formed. With a sigh she gave in to the inevitable and set the tool bucket down.

It was after the end of the shift when she made it back to the engineering center. This late it was mostly empty. She unloaded the tools from her bucket. After inspecting each one for damage she checked them back into the tool room. She picked up her recycle bag and headed to the recycle room. To get to it she crossed the main office. The lights were down in the power save mode. The desks were empty, their built-in screens were dark. Only a desk in the last row was occupied.

“You are running late tonight,” the older woman said to Irene as she passed.

“I ran into some difficulties with a drip,” Irene responded.

“It happens to us all,” the woman replied, before turning her attention back to her screen. Irene didn’t know the woman’s name since she was a member of the evening shift. The response was a lot friendlier from what she normally got from her own shift members.

When Irene came back out of the recycling room she had a clear view of the woman’s screen. It was a static image of one of the inscriptions in the ruins. It was engraved in stone. It was very simple having only two different symbols intermixed.

“I just overheard a conversation where they were discussing how there are not enough symbols for the inscriptions to be text. They must just be decorations,” Irene commented. The woman glanced back at her and gave her a welcoming smile.

“Just because they are decorations doesn’t mean that is all we can learn from them. There is a great deal of meaning in a lot of art,” she responded. “I am Agatha,” she introduced herself.

“Irene,” Irene responded, giving her own name.

“Have a seat,” Agatha invited, gesturing to a chair at a neighboring desk, “if you’re interested. I know it is late for you, I won’t be insulted if you want to head home.” Irene assured Agatha of her interest and pulled a chair over so she could see the screen.

“I think they are puzzles,” Agatha explained. “Have you ever played Sudoku?” she asked as she turned her full attention on Irene.

“No,” Irene responded.

“It’s a number game. The completed board is a nine by nine array of the numbers one through nine. At the start some of the values are blank. You use the rules of the game to figure out what value should go in the blank spaces.” Agatha turned back to the display of the simple inscription. “Now this is obviously not like Sudoku since there are no empty spaces but that game made me wonder if the symbols weren’t letters but numbers. What if their placement is as important as their value?”

“Those officers mentioned finding one with different colored symbols. They said the colors formed a rainbow in a leftwise spiral through the piece,” Irene offered.

“Really? I wonder where they found that one. It sounds fascinating,” Agatha responded. “I have pieced this one together from a couple dozen camera views. It is very close to the entry point our teams have been using. It is so simple that no one actually noticed it. I think my best bet of figuring out a method of analyzing them is to start with these simple ones.”

Irene studied the inscription for a moment. The symbols were packed tightly together to produce a pattern that was almost texture. Most of the piece was one symbol repeated over and over. It looked a lot like a hash mark. The second symbol resembled a cross. At first glance Irene thought it appeared once in every three. As she looked the inscription over she saw it was more complicated than that. In some sections the second symbol was only one in four or five. Their appearance staggered into different columns or rows from where they repeated before. Perhaps these change points could encode information? Irene wondered to herself.

“I have put together most of two others,” Agatha explained. She cycled the picture on the screen to show Irene the other two. They were similar to the first one. They shared the same primary symbol but the secondary symbol in both of the second two was different. Their edges were rough and showed sections of white where the data was missing. “I have bits and pieces of dozens of others. Our tracking systems aren’t working inside the ruins so I used dead reckoning to locate them. It gets hard to confirm if the images are of the same wall the farther from the entrance they were recorded.”

“Can I see them?” Irene asked.

“Sure,” Agatha said. She started cycling through another set of inscriptions, leaving them up on the screen for a moment or two for Irene to study them.

“Wait,” Irene said after the third one. “That one seems different.”

“Yeah,” Agatha said. “I have found four different styles. The style seems somewhat dependent on what it appears in. This one here was stamped into metal. But, of course, that relationship is not absolute.” She cycled through two more before coming to another one in that style. “This one here is engraved in stone just like the first one.”

“Why do you think it is a different style and not just new symbols?” Irene asked.

“See this symbol here?” Agatha asked as she pointed at the secondary symbol. It looked like an upward pointing triangle. She switched out the image for one of the earlier fragments. The secondary symbol on this one was an upside down y. “I think these two are the same symbol just in a different font. There are matches like that across all four styles.”

“I guess I can see that,” Irene responded.

“Plus I peaked at the real analysis team's data. It wasn’t until the exploration teams saw one with four symbols that someone started noticing them. They have never seen one with both the y and the triangle in it,” Agatha explained.

They went through the rest before returning to the image of the first large inscription.

“So what have you tried so far?” Irene asked. Agatha explained how she assigned values to each of the symbols, the triangle/y was given a value of three. Then she tried applying a huge variety of mathematical formulas to the resulting values.

“Hmm,” the sound slipped out.

“What?” Agatha questioned.

“Nothing,” Irene said, not wanting to accidentally insult the first person on the team who was nice to her.

“No, out with it. You are a fresh pair of eyes and I wouldn’t have asked you to take a look if I didn’t know I needed that,” Agatha countered. “I haven’t gotten any meaningful results from anything that I tried.”

“Well I think your math game may be leading you astray,” Irene explained. “I can’t imagine standing in front of a piece of art and having to do a lot of math equations to understand it.” She paused for a moment to gather her thoughts before continuing. “It’s visual art, so maybe it is just a different way of looking at it. I noticed earlier the pattern of how the second symbol appears is different here,” she said pointing at a section of the engraving near the center. “From how it looks here,” she moved her finger over closer to the edge.

Agatha studied the image. She split the screen in two and showed enlargements from each of the two area’s. Without the distraction of the rest of the piece it was easy to see that the patterns in these two sections were distinct.

“Earlier I was wondering if the transition between the two encoded some information but looking at it this way I wonder if it isn’t just subtle shading. Have you tried adding color to the different patterns?” Irene asked.

“No,” Agatha said, “but it should be easy enough.” She settled into the station and started working. She scanned across the inscription looking for additional patterns. She randomly picked colors. When she was done, she showed the entire image again, only this time it was garishly colored.

A series of horizontal lines were clearly visible in the image. Their ends curled off to the top and bottom. The center line remained straight to the end. After a break there was a drawing of what looked like a horizontal lightning bolt.

“Well,” Agatha commented. “That seemed too easy. I am feeling a little bit foolish.”

“You said these were the simplest ones,” Irene responded. “But what does it mean?”