The Lost Jupiter (Maura's Gate Book 3) Read online

  * * *

  After Devin and Thurman sat down in their seats and buckled up—not a lap belt but a five-point harness—the outside had notably changed. White and gray mist fleeted past the windows. At first, they could still catch a glimpse of the mountain-like clouds perching in the distance every now and then, but with time passing by, the world became hazier and darker. The ship flapped its wings rapidly like a bird floundering in a storm. It could have been worse, though. Devin had to remind himself that they were entering through the center of the Great Red Spot where the flow was considered minimal.

  After being tossed and turned for half an hour, the turbulence tapered off and Devin knew they had passed the cloud layer. The two men left their seats and stopped at the front window. Through the liquid droplets that were meandering on the window, all they could see was uneven darkness. But Devin could feel the motion, the flowing of energy, the endless shivering and transforming of molecules.

  “Now we’ll be flying north for a while,” said Mina as she joined them from behind. “I’m missing the rollercoaster ride. This is hell.”

  Devin agreed. When lightning bolts flared in the distance, the cloud top appeared above them like a concrete ceiling extending to the horizon in all directions. Nothing was visible below them, but he knew if they fell, they wouldn’t have the luck to dive into the ocean of metallic hydrogen. They’d be either burnt into ashes or crushed into atoms long before they touched the sea surface.

  Devin turned around and saw the others staring at him, as if asking, “Now what?” He smiled bitterly. What a stupid plan he had made! “Looks like we—”

  “What’s that?” Mina stepped forward to the window after another flash of lightning.

  Devin and Thurman traced her fingers but only saw darkness outside. They waited, and when a minute later the world was struck again, Devin could make out a long cylinder standing vertically in the distance. Its top poked into the cloud layer while the bottom kept descending until it was no longer discernible in the misty abyss below. The three exchanged looks. They didn’t know what it was yet, but one thing was for sure—it could not have formed naturally.

  * * *

  “I’m glad this ship has magnetic shielding,” Mina said as she maneuvered the ship toward the cylinder. “Five thousand times stronger than Jupiter’s magnetic field. What’s going on in this area?”

  They stopped a hundred yards away from the cylinder and cast a slowly-moving searchlight on its surface. Measuring fifteen feet in diameter, the cylinder was made of a solid glossy material, but not metal. Who built this thing? The one who had been sending the signal? Devin could hear similar questions resonating in his friends’ heads.

  “What’s that pattern down there?” Thurman asked and pointed downward at a spot on the cylinder.

  The ship descended a few dozen yards until they were at eye level with the engraved symbol— a horizontal disc encircling a diamond, like a ring system orbiting a planet. At the center of the diamond stood a Latin cross, with an exotic bird perching on its upper right side.

  “The manufacture that made the cylinder?” Thurman suggested.

  “Dummyhead,” said Mina.

  Devin smiled. The design was too royal for a corporation. It was more likely an emblem, which represented a country or something even superior to that.

  “I wonder if it’s hollow.”

  This time, Thurman did not make a dummy suggestion. As Devin tried to imagine what could be contained inside, his breathing picked up. “Don’t get too close, in case it … it leaks.”

  The other two turned to look at him.

  “You guys heard about superfluity?”

  Mina and Thurman shook heads.

  “In the presence of a magnetic field, it’s believed that liquid metallic hydrogen could exhibit various phase transitions from superconductor to superfluid. A superfluid inside a tube will self-expel against gravity.”

  Seeing the bewilderment on his audience’s faces, Devin realized he had to use layman’s language. “Basically, a superfluid likes climbing surfaces. If the tube goes all the way down to the ocean, the liquid hydrogen would rush up inside the tube. Since gravity decreases with height, the fluid will accelerate as it climbs up. With a temperature of ten thousand K and a pressure of two hundred gigapascal, the hydrogen shooting out of the tube can be devastating to a ship like ours.”

  The other two glanced at each other and gasped.

  “Let’s find its top,” said Devin.

  “But you just said we should stay away from it.”

  “Keep some distance as we go up, but I doubt it’s spraying all the time. Something should be there to control it.”

  Mina and Thurman went on to set up the navigation. Devin walked to the back of the bridge where the water dispenser was located. While he was filling a cup, the ship reentered the cloud layer. Then he suddenly had a sense that they were being watched. He pressed his face against the window and put his hands around the eyes to block the room light. There was a faint but steady light source ahead, a greenish light. It was blurred after passing through layers of clouds, but Devin could tell the source was quite focused.

  Let’s get out of here—he wanted to tell his friends, half-resenting himself for being a coward. It was his idea to come inside Jupiter, to look for intelligence, to resume the conversation. Now they had found an artificial structure, and likely someone behind that light source, yet instinct was telling him to run away as quickly as possible.

  He left the back window quietly as if trying not to alert whoever out there. “I think I saw something,” he said to Mina and Thurman, but they remained at a side window like two stone statues.

  He stopped behind them and peered outside. At first, he only saw mist wafting in and out of the beam created by the searchlight. Then gradually a massive silhouette revealed itself in the distance. The solid surface facing them was made of dark stone or metal. As the ship moved in parallel, Devin could tell there were substructures on the surface indicated by patches of lights and shadows. The bottom seemed to be flat. At least for the part they were examining, nothing supported it from below except that, every once in a while, a cylinder similar to what they had seen earlier was found to be connected to the bottom.

  “Don’t tell me the whole thing is floating in the air!” Mina said.

  “That … actually wouldn’t be too hard to realize,” Devin said, “with magnetic levitation.”

  The liquid metallic hydrogen was believed to be a superconductor. Based on their earlier detection of the strong magnetic field, the castle in front of them most likely contained a large magnet. Electric current caused by the magnetic field must be flowing on the surface of the metallic ocean down below—a property of superconductivity—which would further create an opposite magnetic field that acted to repel the castle.

  Before Devin had time to explain it, he saw a bright but soothing beam coming out from one of the shadows on the surface toward their ship. Meanwhile, something invisible whiffed through the intact window, like a warm breeze, but more mechanical and less dynamic. As all the machines inside the bridge stopped humming one after another, the senses of his body faded away, followed by the waning of his consciousness.

  There might be a hundred ways of dying inside Jupiter—the thought lingered in his mind before he fell backward to the ground—but he had never imagined it happening like this.

  Chapter 3 The City

  Before Devin opened his eyes, he heard the chirping of a bird overhead. Moist wind blew from the left. A lake somewhere? Where was he? The back of his head ached periodically. He must have hurt himself when he fell in the ship …

  The ship! Devin was fully awake. He looked around and found himself sitting on a stone bench, with clusters of pink azaleas blooming around. Outside the garden, a pebble road wound up a hill through closely-packed brick cottages. Where was this place? Hadn’t he been traveling inside Jupiter? What happened to Mina and Thurman? His fingers glided on the rough surface of
the bench. It felt too real for a dream.

  A squeaking sound came from one of the houses—a sound made by a door or a window being pushed open. Then he heard crispy footsteps drawing near. Why not find somebody and ask? He rose from the bench and waited. Soon a college-aged girl wearing a printed dress appeared in his view. Her left hand was holding a cane, which touched the road surface frequently. Was she blind? The pair of big gray eyes showed no gaze movements.

  But she seemed to know exactly where he was located. “Devin?” she stopped in front of him and said tentatively.

  “Yes, and you are …”

  “Melissa.” She smiled but kept looking straight ahead.

  Devin’s mind raced. If she knew his name, she must have known more.

  “Could you tell me where my colleagues are?”

  She moved to his side and sat on the bench. “They are here, but in a different part of the city.”

  Devin thought for a few seconds and also sat down. Now he saw the lake down the hill with sailboats chasing one another. Maybe he shouldn’t, but he enjoyed the scene. The place reminded him of his hometown, a once quiet and folksy village before it was turned into a holiday resort crammed with fancy restaurants and hotels.

  “Dad is right,” Melissa said after a while. “You’re special. Most of your fellow humans would’ve bombarded me with questions.”

  She was not human, then, Devin reflected. “My career has exposed me to situations people wouldn’t normally experience.”

  Besides, if something’s inevitable, it will come at a predetermined pace. Why rush through life? We’ll lose it soon enough.

  “I see, but I still don’t believe you can answer my questions.”

  “Your questions?” Devin smiled helplessly. “Now it’s the other way around.”

  “It’s a fun test. If you win, you’ll be brought to a person who may answer all the questions you don’t even dare ask.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “My dad.”

  * * *

  They left the bench and strolled down the road. Before Devin had time to survey the neighborhood, the first question came.

  “Where are we, Devin?”

  He knew this couldn’t be Earth, however authentic it felt, but he’d like to confirm it. An idea emerged in his mind as he looked around and saw a pot of white Jasmine placed on the porch of a house. He walked over to the flower, bent down, and took a deep breath.

  “We are inside Jupiter,” he said after he rejoined Melissa. “This is some kind of simulated world.”

  “How did you know?”

  “That flower smells wrong.”

  “Really?” She chuckled. “Well, our Pinocchios don’t have human’s olfactory systems. But what made your suspicious in the first place?”

  “I wasn’t sure, I just thought … If one tries to simulate a physical world, it’s not hard to take pictures or record sounds, but it would be impractical to analyze the chemical compositions for all individual plants.”

  “I see.”

  “You mentioned something called Pinocchio. What is it?”

  “That’s how we travel in the physical world outside the Kernel, which is the floating structure you saw earlier. Say, if any of us wants to visit Earth, we’ll just go inside a Pinocchio—you can think of it as a carrier, or a robot. Of course we only have a limited number of them, so we can’t go out in large numbers.”

  Then Melissa was just a soul—a program, Devin reckoned. Can’t a program get her “eyes” fixed easily? He tried not to continue on the thought.

  “Were some of them inside that ship before we approached the … uh, Kernel?” He remembered the mysterious light.

  “What ship?” She turned her head in his direction. “We haven’t dispatched a ship for a long time.”

  Then who was in there? Devin frowned.

  “Okay, our next question,” she said. “I can tell you our gas planet didn’t belong to this solar system initially. We used to live in Tau Ceti’s system.”

  Devin came to a stop. The Tau Cetil? He quickly summoned his knowledge about the closet star to our solar system. This relatively stable star, a solitary G-class, had four decent-sized planets, as well as two remote and tiny planets that were recently discovered by NASA’s mining team. Because the inner planets were surrounded by a large group of comets and asteroids, nobody had expected to uncover life there. But if Jupiter had once been a member …

  “Here’s my question.” She didn’t give him time to dwell on the big news. “Can you take a guess on the approximate time we arrived here?”

  Devin looked up at the familiar sky and remembered the moon. Not Jupiter’s moons, but the second moon on the cave paintings discovered by Roland.

  “About twenty thousand years ago. Earth years.”

  Melissa gasped. “How did you know that?”

  “A friend told me.”

  Now Devin realized Roland must have figured out the truth since the very beginning. Maybe some prehistoric event has made our world a better place … With its massive body, Jupiter had been acting like a cosmic vacuum cleaner. Before it joined our system, even though we didn’t have as many celestial bombs as Tau Ceti did, we would still get a major hit every several hundred or thousand years, which had hindered the progress of evolution.

  That said, when Jupiter first entered our solar system, it must have made several adjustments before it was settled on the current orbit. And every time it approached Earth, it would have caused powerful earthquakes on the small territorial planet.

  “Looks like we underestimated your race.” She held his arm with a hand. Considering the fact that she was blind, Devin complied.

  The road turned sharply at the edge of the cliff overseeing the lake. Now with no architecture blocking his view, Devin noticed a different world above the horizon. Under the murky sky stood forests of skyscrapers. The dingy steel and glass had little light coming out. Some of the buildings appeared to be completely abandoned.

  “We left Tau Ceti twenty-two thousand years ago. The interstellar trip took more than four thousand years. A dark and lonely trip, I heard, with no stars to warm us up. Just a rogue planet with a bunch of moons and souls. Dad kept telling people, we’ll find a new home soon, but nobody believed him.”

  The last sentence made no sense, but before Devin said anything, she pointed her cane at the distant city. “That’s downtown, which represents most of the cities in our world.” She knew what he was looking at. “Here we are trying to protect our last Arcadia from being polluted.”

  They walked up the hill on a street sandwiched by gift stores and cafeterias. Devin was still puzzled about Melissa’s father, but the moment of clarification was gone. Well, he’d meet the guy soon. A vertical light board with the word CASINO caught his attention. Those Jupiter people were simulating everything they had learned from Earth: physical forms, languages, names of stars, and even games?

  “One last question,” he heard her saying. “There used to be another planet sitting on Jupiter’s orbit. Do you know where it is now?”

  Once again Devin looked up at the sky. The bright azure receded in his mind, uncovering a dark universe with numerous stars and, above all, the largest moon in the Jovian empire.

  “Ganymede,” he said.

  “Unbelievable!” Melissa cried. “Did you hijack my mind?”

  As a fan of Jupiter, Devin had been troubled by that moon since he became a teenager. Ganymede was larger than Mercury and Pluto, second to Mars. It would’ve been classified as a planet if it were orbiting the sun. And the only satellite in the solar system that had a magnetosphere. Were these all coincidences? It even got a thin layer of oxygen.

  Devin’s hands trembled a little bit. Now it all made sense! Ganymede was the true fifth planet of the solar system. Maybe it used to have a lot more oxygen, which was stripped off by Jupiter during the capture …

  His mind played with the new finding until they stopped in front of the casino.

  �
�Now you are going to meet my father. My advice is: stay cool no matter what he says or shows to you.” She held his arm tighter. “I don’t want him to laugh at my boyfriend this time.”

  “My daughters are your age.” Devin broke free from her grip. “Now bring me to your old man.”

  * * *

  “Hey boss!” A voice came from far away. “Wake up. You alright?”

  Mina straightened in her chair and looked around. She was sitting at a filthy dinner table with Thurman in the chair nearby. A pendant light bulb hung above their heads, tingeing everything in the room with a sleepy yellow color. Apart from the table, only two pieces of furniture occupied the room: a wooden bookshelf overburdened with books, file folders, and dining ware, and a large rocking chair that barely held its shape.

  “Where are we?” she asked, looking through a window at the gloomy sky outside.

  “No idea. I just went out to the yard.” Thurman gazed at the door. “Looks like a military base adjacent to a city.”

  Mina frowned, but before she said anything, they heard footsteps sounding outside. The door swung open and in came an officer, wearing a pair of brown uniform pants and a gray shirt that might have been white some five or ten years ago.

  “Can’t believe I’m meeting authentic humans!” The man spread out his arms as he walked to the table. To Mina, the brown eyes were ten times brighter than the light overhead, and his mustache would suffice as a shoe brush. But something about him belied his career. He should have been a police officer or a facility manager, but not a soldier.

  “Abnor Rindeston.” He extended his right hand.

  “Mina Cheung.” “Thurman Cooper.” They shook hands.

  “You know, our ancestors came when you guys were making stone tools. We’ve been watching you all those times!”

  Abnor’s eyes glittered, and Mina could tell the passion in his voice was sincere.

  “By two thousand BC, the majority of our people had transformed into humans. I mean, virtually. Although there’s always been a group who refuse changes, even today. They speak Gemealish, drink ciliant and eat naweedroots, doing everything to preserve our culture. But, forgive my frankness, do they really know what culture we used to have? And what’s the point? It’s been a hundred eighty centuries and we still can’t call this place home?”