Estimated read time is: 5 minutes. (Word Count = 1092)
David flipped the switch for his headlamp as he walked into the opening of the mountainside. As he looked up, he realized he'd won the lottery twice.
The O2 meter on his feed shimmered as he looked around the dark cavern. He thought, no, he knew what he saw, and he had a hard time telling his hand what to do. It hovered above the switch, and David paused. Could he be wrong? No. he checked the O2 read again, then removed all filters from his view. Yes, he saw correctly. David saw the color coating the walls of his small mountain cave. He saw the color green.
David let his hand drop on the switch that it had been hovering above. Then he hit it two more times for good measure. The button left the superiors watching know that he had found something. Well, it let them know when his name and the timestamp-three time stamps - from when he pressed the button finally made it through the queue, the initial sweep of automatic vid review was completed, and the signal finally crossed their feeds. That gave him some time.
He took another long look at what was in front of him and kicked his chair back out of his cubicle.
"Hey Jeff!" he said to the man sitting next to him.
"Sup?" Jeff didn't look up from the feed on his own monitor.
"Where are you at again?"
"Same place as you, right? Trap-1-G"
"Yea, I'm there, but where are you on it?"
"Uhh." a pause. Some typing. "SP-Crater-three-oh-two."
"English, dumbass."
"Fine, fine. You remember the frowny face by the south pole?"
"Frank?"
"That's right! I forgot about Frank,” said Jeff. David looked at him expectantly. "I'm in Frank's left eye."
David glanced back at the O2 monitor dancing on his screen's feed. The visual feed hadn't changed. Red. Dark, illuminated only by the lights David had turned on. Red and green.
"You see anything funky on your monitor?"
"Nah," said Jeff. "The suits even locked me in biped mode because I was wheeling around the crater too quick and they thought all the nothing I was seeing might actually be something."
"Nothing at all on your meters?"
"No. Why?" Jeff asked, scooting his chair out of his cube and turning away from his screen for the first time to look at David.
"Well," started David. He paused, then slid his chair back towards his desk and quickly tapped a few keystrokes on his desk. The headlamp flipped off and all of his meters sat alone on the dark screen, floating at the permitter. "I hope not. Just look for a second, though, will you?"
He pushed his chair to the side slightly and Jeff craned his neck past the cube wall and looked in. Two-thirds of the meters on the screen were absolutely still, their numbers solid as always, and the rest pulsed with what felt like a rhythm, but this too was normal, absolutely. But one meter wasn't.
"What's up with your O2 readout?" said Jeff.
"Looks weird right?"
"Course it does, it’s not nil. Did you bump your sensors into something?"
"I doubt it. I saw the readout from the local zone map."
"Really?"
"Yea, let me check on your setup."
Jeff looked at David, mouth agape slightly. He quoted the line from the superiors. "We don't touch other people's setups."
"Yea, I know," said David, raising his hands slightly, placating. "I'm sorry, that was me trying to ask if we could double check on your setup."
Jeff looked at the ceiling. They all assumed there were eyes in the sky to keep watch on everyone.
"Sure, I guess," he said, rolling into his cube. David followed.
"You can drive if you want," he said. "just pull up the CZM."
Jeff punched in a few hotkeys and the pair watched as the view changed from Jeff's bipod's camera to a 3d topographical approximation of the planet G, orbiting Trappist-1. It was centered on a yellow arrow, while blue and red arrows moved about the surface on the periphery of the rendering. Looking now, from the visualization, it was as if the red and blue arrows avoided each other.
"Alright," continued David," now pull up LZM average meters." Jeff punched a key and a text overlay with faint highlighted circles around the blue arrows popped up. "Yup, nothing in your zone."
"Your meters went wonky at this scale?" asked Jeff.
"Wonky is a stretch, but yea, they looked different. Can you pull up NEP-Mountain-04?"
A few clicks and the virtual globe on the screen spun around, building a new rendering. This zone stuck out further on the 3d drawing with a mountain range splicing the expanse of the planet.
"See, there it is!" said David. He jumped forward and pointed at the line of text that could not settle on ending with a "0.63" or "0.64" and was bouncing between the two.
"That’s just an ambient temp," said Jeff
"No, it’s not, it’s hotter than ambient," said David. he pushed Jeff aside and began hitting his board. The map followed his orders and zoomed in on a singular point atop a mountain peak. The flickering number stopped.
Jeff should have cried out as David touched his setup, but he just watched.
"See it settle?” David asked, pointing at the number on the screen. His finger smudged oil on the glass slightly as he moved.
"Sure," said Jeff, with a minor pause before he committed to the word, dragging out the s.
David clicked the board a few times , zooming onto another mountain peak. The temperature's value dropped a thousandth of a single digit.
"Holy shit," said Jeff. "You found a shadow." he leaned back in his chair, smirk settled nicely on his lips.
"Nope. But do you want to see what I found instead?"
Jeff's smirk remained, but he nodded and they both rolled over to David's cubicle. His monitor remained a black screen with numbers bordering the darkness. David hit a key, and the numbers turned off, leaving the screen a vacant void.
"Ready?' he asked.
Jeff nodded.
David hit a key, flipping on his headlamps. Jeff saw it all. Neither of them spoke as green algae atop red stone filled David's screen.
Life.
The bell rang first before the door at the end of the hall opened up.
"They're going to steal this from you," said Jeff. He rolled his chair to the edge of the cubicle but didn't look out. His eyes flipped from David to the green on the monitor.
David knew the image in the hallway: rows of cubicles, heads staring out, down the hallway, as the suits marched down towards him, steps in unison as their true-leather shoes clacked against the concrete floor.
Jeff hit him. "David!"
David smiled as he looked at his screen. "This is bigger than all of that."
The suits stopped at the opening to his cube. One pulled Jeff out of his chair and out of their way. David’s smile grew, and he gestured towards his screen.
"We found it," he said.
The End.
(July 22, 2021)
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Max
Cover photo courtesy of RDNE Stock project via pexels.