The Drifting City was the most-creative name a bunch of international bureaucrats could allow the Bishop-Alcubierre Project Station to be called in the news. The stunted arcs linked together along nanosilk cabling and not a small amount of hope resembled a gaudy planetary pearl necklace more than a “city”. The stable orbit maintained by an astounding amount of precise engineering was not “drifting”. Considering that it was the result of global effort to scour the stars for a new world to colonize after the collapse of Earth’s oxygen ecosystem, people weren’t too picky about what they called it. And no one in charge of providing funding cared about accuracy of terminology and they all agreed that The Drifting City had a romance about it.
The reality of The Drifting City wasn’t particularly romantic. It had had many purposes over the last century— atmospheric rafts, failed Martian terraforming, space station construction— but it was presently occupied with the continued production and testing of Bishop-Alcubierre Drives. Engines to drive humanity’s salvation, was how they billed them. The hope was that faster-than-light travel would give humanity a chance to actually reach another habitable world within a generation or two. Dr. Penny Bishop herself supervised the work. Half the year, she lived on The City, the other half she had herself a little house in the Australian desert, in Boolardy, just outside the Square Kilometer Array. Some of the last and best wifi signal to be had was had at her place. If one was willing to tolerate the sheep.
As for the work, it went.
Work crews rotated monthly on three-month cycles and luminous matter grazed in minute, precarious portions. Of the half-dozen top-secret test flights all had been successes. Technically. The trouble came with the particulars. The B.A. Drive worked exactly as intended, folding space like a bedsheet. Except when you unfold it again, there might be a hole smack dab in the middle of it. Or you might bring things with you that you didn’t intend: from electrical interference taking out a shuttle’s everything to lonely pebbles hurtling through space at faster-than-light-speed that reduced them to flaming debris. Heaven help everybody if an actual asteroid got caught up in the mix.
The problem, surely, was one of coding. Accounting for more variables and more-precise logic, surely, would help the Drive’s tendency to fill itself with holes in spacetime or drag its pilots through solid matter.
That’s what Dr. Miller was there for.
Blessed with a short temper, shorter stature, and a truly alarming amount of hair, April Miller was what’s known colloquially as a genius. All that meant, really, was she had a Wikipedia page listing every language people reported she could speak fluently: all of them. Computer languages, too.
She didn’t meet Penny Bishop through work.
They met, as most people did, over the internet. They spent their nights arguing on SETI@home about patterns in the space noise generated by their respective SETI screensavers which were supposed to be helping the global effort to determine whether intelligent alien life was communicating with the universe. The argument ended with two of the world’s most-brilliant minds hopping red-eye flights to Florida in January and getting shitfaced in some backward bar called Guaranteed Wholesome.
When Penny asked her to take a look at the Alcubierre engine’s code there wasn’t any other answer she could give except, “I can fix this. When do we leave? Oh but, no, first, Penny, darlin’, I gotta introduce you to my friend Ursula.”
“She a computer whiz who can keep spacetime from blowing up my toys?” Penny was allowed to joke about the horrific string of tragedies. After all, she had begun papering her walls with designs and equations for bending reality itself when she was a freshman at Truman; calling it her life’s work wasn’t giving enough respect to the gravity of it.
April smiled, “Somethin’ like that.”
The City was always quiet in a way that couldn’t be ignored. The soft noises of HVAC were underlaid with silence that made everything jarring, even a heartbeat. So, during their downtime, Penny tuned in to the Square Kilometer Array, letting the hissing fill the silence.
At least, that’s what April thought it was at first.
They worked together almost two years before they’d traded tragic backstories. April told Penny about Jimmy Miller and the shape of his fists and that time her hairless cat Horatio ate the living room sofa. Penny told her about her bone-drifting foray into another world and the feeling of holding an entire universe beneath her breastbone. April was always a believer, her faith was a fundamental tenet of her existence, and when Penny sat in the Guaranteed Wholesome and cried for a daughter who didn’t even exist in their universe— April told her, “Zikhronah livrakha,” and held her hand, and cried with her. They’d spent the rest of that weekend drunk and trying to convince Horatio to eat more furniture with varying degrees of success.
Which is to say that April understood now why Penny listened to the SKA in every spare moment she had. April knew what it was like to be looking for something and she didn’t know why she didn’t see it sooner.
Ursula, unhelpfully, advised that she not worry about it.
April, generally, did a good job of not worrying about much of anything relating to the soul-longing feeling of having misplaced something terribly important that had plagued her all her life. Right up until the day Penny’s SKA livestream turned up words.
It wasn’t really speech permeating the endless feed of static… But at the same time it was.
The droning hiss was as constant as ever but April sat stock still in the break room because, as sudden as opening her eyes, she heard a pattern. Not the booming beat of a pulsar or the mournful whine of a supernova. It had enough irregularity that the steel trap of her mind could close around it— and it refused to open and let the thing loose.
Ursula watched as she blindly groped for a pen and napkin and began to sketch out the shape of the sounds. “You okay over there, doc?”
Penny shushed her.
April stared fixated at the wireless speaker in the middle of the table while her hand worked. Phonetic scribblings in ballpoint. Her eyes shifted in jittery fractions, reading sounds from the air to copy down. Hesitant at first, then faster, then frantic.
Whatever the words were— they were words, they had to be, she could feel them in the back of her mouth. Whatever they were, they weren’t on a short cycle and she was losing more of them the longer she sat there trying to fit their pieces into the languages she knew. She knew so many of them, she’d never kept count, but nothing humming out from the radio could be stitched onto them.
Finally the signal began to repeat again. She nearly tore the napkin, it jarred her focus so badly. She blinked. Flexed her hand to crack her knuckles. Then began pouring back over her work, making corrections, crafting new symbols for the intentions not accounted for in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Intentions that she could hear nonetheless.
Twenty minutes passed. April hunched close over the first napkin and more napkins she scavenged blindly for with groping hands– until Ursula put a hand on her wrist, feather-light and sounding choked. “Hey, you got it, you can stop.”
April looked at her. Blinked owlishly.
Penny stared too, “What d’you mean?”
She swallowed, watching April. “I mean, you got the whole thing as good as you’re gonna get it, now you just have to translate it.”
“Why do you know that?”
Ursula swallowed heavily. “… The answer to that depends on how much booze we have on this cheap-ass space necklace.”
The Illyrian Codices 