Free The Echo by James Smythe Page A

running. We have scanners on here, deep-range systems that will be able to search further than anyone has ever searched. It’s a grab bag, a huge potluck of whether you get anything useful or not. When the software is running, Wallace shows myself and Lennox how it works, even though I already know. I helped design it. There is a room dedicated to my work: the lab, I called it in the early days of development. A room off the corridor, opposite the changing rooms and the airlock, and small, but enough space for the screens that I will need. Above all it is somewhere quiet for me to work. When the software is running, both Wallace and Lennox go to get some sleep. I stay here alone and attach myself to the bench in front of the console. I bring up the screens: 3D visualizations of the results from the pings being sent out, a map of the area of space we’re charting being drawn and constructed in real-time, and I’m able to zoom and pan and focus and highlight it as much as I like. I see the outline of the anomaly starting to be drawn: a patch of nothingness amongst the stars in the distance, surrounded by space. I spin the scene with my fingers, look at it from every angle, and I call Tomas.
    ‘This is incredible,’ I say to him.
    ‘I know,’ he says. He has an exact replica of my screens on Earth, showing him real-time – or as close to real-time as the lag will allow – what I am looking at.
    ‘Did you know about Tobi?’ I ask.
    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t important, I didn’t think. It was a long time ago. We certainly didn’t expect it again.’
    ‘I would have thought it enough to not let her up here.’ I can trace each ping from here, and watch them: little orange dotted lines, pushing out like digital ticker-tape. They disappear, and another part of the anomaly is confirmed: an area of space that we cannot see, that barely exists. ‘But you made the call.’
    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She was the best person for the job. I don’t mind there being something wrong with you if you’re the best person for that particular job. I honestly never thought that it would be a problem, Mira.’ He is silent. I imagine him leaning over his computer, bent towards the screen, examining the visualization of this. Watching the pings that I watched fifteen seconds before, as the data reaches him. ‘You’ll have to deal with it.’
    ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Is there anything else I need to know about any of the others?’
    ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Would it matter if there was?’
    ‘What if she had died?’ I ask. An orange line flies past the anomaly and carries on into the distance: traced away, so small that I will never see it. The result of what it finds will return to us when it does: eventually it will stop. Maybe it will stop so far away that we will no longer even be receiving data when it sends itself back. That we, humanity, will no longer even be alive.
    ‘Well, she didn’t,’ Tomas says. ‘She is fine. Bruised and embarrassed, but she’s fine.’
    ‘Okay,’ I say. I spin the anomaly again. We have no way of knowing how deep it is, because we have to imagine that it is a wall, and there is no way of seeing what’s behind it. ‘Does it scare you?’ I ask. ‘This anomaly? Whatever it is.’ I wait for a reply, but one doesn’t come. ‘Are you there?’ I ask, but nobody answers, not even Simpson; which means that Tomas is still sitting at his desk, still at the computer, but he’s simply choosing to stay quiet.
    I stay and watch the lines. This is such a process: like tracing the outline of a planet with the ends of strings of thread. Tomas and I wrote an algorithm to plot the pinging of this thing. The intention was, it would find likely areas and match them, following lines and trying to extrapolate the size of it that much faster. There is a game you play when you are children, Battleship: you pick a place that your opponent might have placed their ship, a number on a grid that you