The ape looked at the strange black rock, and then the bone, then at the rock again. The ape tossed the bleached bone high into the air...
... A white spaceship sailed calmly and silently through space, heading towards the Moon. Known as an "Eagle," it soon passed by a large, double-wheeled space station which was slowly rotating to provide its own artificial gravity.
The Eagle had its more complex way of providing artificial gravity, evident by the way the single passenger's cup of coffee remained well-behaved. John Koenig sat quietly, perhaps thinking about the reasons he was going to the Moon.
Just barely on the far side of the Moon, with Earth only a few degrees below the horizon, astronauts did the slow dance of walking under lunar gravity, waving devices around and taking readings from the metal cones that were scattered in this area. A sign proclaimed this area as "Nuclear Waste Disposal Area One."
Nearby, in a small installation called Clavius Base, a man and a woman were watching the activity on monitors. They looked at each other and shrugged, apparently not finding what they hoped for, and then prepared to leave this small outpost.
Above a much larger place, bathed under the glow of earthlight, the Eagle ship gracefully slide out of the sky, lightly touching its hard feet to the cold surface of a orange cross, the top of a landing pad, itself on top of the almost uniformly grey rocks of the pitted lunar surface.
A naked arm of metal protruded from the side and touched the spaceship, and the descendent of apes crossed from the realm of ship to the realm of outpost and then briefly exchanged words with another hairless, clothed ape that was headed in the opposite direction.
It was Moonbase Alpha, September 11, 1999.
It had been a few hours after Koenig had arrived on Alpha to replace Gorski that two people returned to the big moonbase from the much smaller and incomplete Clavius base. He met with these two people on their arrival: a female doctor and an older male scientist returned from Clavius, and Koenig met to talk with them. He was told they had been to Area One, and there was no radiation leakage.
They took the commander to another place within the base, walking through the expansive, brightly light corridors that were clean and pristine-the model of working efficiency. The legs of their simple, mostly grey, efficiently-designed clothing made an ever-so-slight whisper of sound as they entered a room which was totally filled with the sights and sounds of technology at work - technology that was trying to repair broken lives. But these people were dying, and the man looked at shock at the men whom neither human nor machine could save.
Not much later, he was in another room full of technology, one that also bound by either strong walls or by clear windows that looked out on the Moon and the inky, mysterious space beyond. It looked like a decision- making place, and in a moment, it sounded like one as Koenig declared, "Emergency Condition Alpha One."
Another Eagle ship soon left Earth, headed towards through space towards the Moon.
At Tycho, just on the near side of the moon, in a second area filled with many times more metal cones than the first, a few of the people and machines from Clavius Base were digging. A new storage pipe was needed for more nuclear waste. Suddenly, the digger hit something hard, the sound traveling through the digging apparatus to be felt by the person.
A few hours later, they had dug out something unusual.
A slim ship silently sailed space. A man named Heywood Floyd was looking at some papers and jotting a few notes, then drifting off to sleep. His pen slipped free and floated around the cabin. A woman entered and began walking, slowly and deliberately making sure her slippered feet gripped the carpeted floor-the two materials binding together to provide artificial attachment. She retrieved the pen and put it in the man's pocket.
The ship slowly started to rotate along its long axis, to match the spin of the double-wheeled station floating in space.
With the aid of computer screens and other implements, they docked, allowing Floyd to move from ship to station.
He met with other people. "I'm glad Clavius contacted us directly. Too much going on at Alpha right now. Simmonds is heading there right now. I am heading to Clavius."
Another person in the room spoke: "As you all know, Clavius is being constructed to more closely deal with the nuclear waste, as Alpha is becoming a premier research
facility. Now, with Clavius only partially built-the only completed parts are a landing pad and the heavily- shielded, multi-room solar-flare shelter-Alpha still has the bulk of the nuclear responsibilities."
"I was in contact with Simmonds," Floyd said. "He is certain the astronauts on Alpha are suffering from an infection that Alpha's doctor has failed to isolate. Koenig has declared ECA1. We will declare a similar situation at Clavius, so we can isolate what has been found at Tycho."
"Speaking of that, the people at Clavius have found something else interesting," a third man said, handing Floyd some paper, before resuming, "these were a series of magnetic scans. They only finished processing the raw data now. There is a huge magnetic anomaly that built up. It centers at Tycho, so it is being called Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One, or TMA-1."
"Area Two is very near that," Floyd asked.
"Yes, but the anomaly is so strong that much of the surrounding area on the Moon is affected, including the one of the three other nuclear dumps."
"Could it have any affect on the dumps, or be caused by the dumps?"
"No, there is no way one can have an affect on the other. Besides, the TMA centers perfectly on what we found there, on the edge of Area Two. It's like a giant magnetic spring has been wound up."
"How did it go unnoticed so long?"
"A magnetic mapping satellite had been proposed, but it was shelved by Simmonds early last year. He said the development of the nuclear waste dumps took precedence."
The meeting didn't go on for much longer, and Floyd now prepared to leave for the Moon.
A squat, short ship-perhaps the ancestor of the Eagle ship that had just finished carrying Simmonds to Alpha headed to the Moon-but not to Alpha. This one was carrying Floyd on the next leg of his journey, this time to Clavius Base. Not unlike the Eagle that carried Koenig before, this little ship fell from the sky, also in a controlled fashion, the pilots using monitors to line itself up with one of the few things at Clavius that were complete: a landing pad.
Soon, Floyd transferred aboard an even smaller ship, which glided away from Clavius and over the lunar surface, passing over craters, mountains, and valleys. The commander of Clavius base, along with most of the Clavius personnel, were on a rare foray to one of
the nuclear areas-a journey they knew they would have to get used to-for it would become frequent once Clavius Base was complete. But the nuclear dump was not the true destination this time.
Several had been left behind on Clavius. Two of the base personnel who had struck and dug out something interesting had now fallen gravely ill. The doctor, one Ben Vincent, stayed behind, puzzling over their symptoms and hoping they could be taken to the better facilities at Moonbase Alpha. Also staying behind was a security officer named Tony Verdeschi, who had been temporarily posted to Clavius as a second in command but multi-purpose officer for the base. He sat, tapping his fingers, apparently frustrated by the radio silences and quarantines that were blanketing everything on the Moon. It was stifling, and he had the feeling an ominous countdown was proceeding.
The little shuttle, carrying the other Clavians and Floyd, reached the center of the magnetic anomaly. The cones of the huge Area Two nuclear waste storage facility were scattered about to the north, still hidden in the shadow of a sun that was only minutes from rising.
In spacesuits, they climbed out of their shuttle, and slowly bounce- walked to the edge of a now-huge, sloping pit that had been dug out.
They saw...
... Eagles suddenly lit up by the slowly rising sun, catching everyone's attention abruptly. They were all to the north, and too far away for the people on the ground to see what the ships were doing. Floyd was about to break radio silence to contact them to find out... but his eyes strayed to the bottom of the pit they had reached, and his and the others' curiosity about the Eagles evaporated at the sight there...
A slab of the most jet-black material any of them had ever seen. Sitting at the bottom of a ten-meter pit that had only just now been dug, it drove home the fact that it could not have been of human construction. They slowly, shyly touched it. It was like a solid monolith of rock, perfectly smooth and perfectly black. It sat there, as if it had a purpose; but it's unmoving, solid, unbroken perfection of stillness betrayed no sign of its function.
Abruptly, an Eagle ship sailed overhead; carrying what looked like a nuclear waste canister. The people on the ground all looked up, startled at this nonsensical sight. What were the Alphans doing? They clambered out of the pit and looked again at all the Eagle activity to the north. Now it seemed apparent they were all carrying nuclear waste canisters away from the dumps. Had they all gone insane?
The commander of Clavius base broke radio silence, trying to contact the Eagles. Before he even made contact, they all-almost as one-started flying towards the east, drawing Floyd's eyes to the now-risen sun. He glanced back at the pit, and saw the sun had started creeping down into it.
Voices were in his ear-Alphans and Clavians finally talking to each other, frantically. But he ignored them, watching as sunlight crept further down into the pit.
What artificial lights didn't affect, sunlight awakened. The monolith had sat, blocked from the light of the sun, for perhaps thousands or even millions of years. Now, under the light of this system's star, it came to life-but not in any visible way...
A piercing shriek sounded through everyone's helmets. They gripped their helmets, trying futilely to block the noise. It sounded like a radio signal, but was actually the radio circuits within their helmets blowing themselves out.
Unknown by any of the humans, the Monolith was abruptly releasing all of the magnetic energy it had built up-but the results were going awry.
The TMA's long-standing presence had-despite the humans' ignorance- been destabilizing two of the four nuclear dumps almost as soon as they had been built, building up over time until their disruptive interaction had started sickening, maddening, and then killing anyone who had been spending a degree of time flying near or walking within the dumps-and then causing temperature and magnetic variations that had caused the Alphans to attempt redistributing the nuclear waste across a wider area.
Now, the magnetic spring that the monolith had built up of uncounted years was being released within seconds-a tremendous disturbance indeed. Something besides the humans' radios were affected.
A sudden flash of light to the north drew everyone's attention.
A ravening fireball grew out of multiple explosions, and in a moment of fury against the sudden magnetic disturbance of the Monolith releasing its magnetic energy so abruptly, it turned the whole area the purest white as container after container exploded tremendously, adding to sheer energy.
One Eagle was instantly destroyed, and the blast consumed another within moments. Floyd and the others scarcely even a moment to contemplate anything before the blast hit them. As it did, Floyd closed his eyes, and cool blackness enveloped him.
Not far away, on Clavius, Verdeschi watched the monitors. They flashed for only the briefest of moments before being burnt out by the excessive light. He had a moment to mutter a single expletive before the whole structure started bucking wildly. Vincent, in another room in the heavily-shielded solar flare shelter, didn't even have that luxury.
The people on Alpha watched in horror as everything went terribly wrong, and then reeled as the shock waves hit them.
Pilot Alan Carter, in an Eagle high above, struggled to keep up as the whole moon suddenly started moving, accelerating-breaking free of Earth.
Floyd opened his eyes, and found himself standing with the others, still at the top of the pit, in gently lit-up area of the Moon that was otherwise covered with a dome of utter blackness. But the monolith itself was no longer black. It was still the same size and shape, but had an appearance he would never be able to describe.
He had no sensation of time, but something seemed to whisper into his mind that he had to leave. There was no voice, no sensation of presence; but he just suddenly knew. Floyd turned away from the Monolith, and realized everyone else was doing so as well. They saw the shuttle they had came here in. Without looking again at the indescribable slab of... whatever it was... they walked to their shuttle, boarded it, and skipping the usual safety checks- weren't they dead anyway?-fired it up and launched. For a length of time Floyd couldn't measure, they were in blackness. Then, in a blink, they were out in star-lit space. He took another breath, and realized he had been breathing all along. For some incomprehensible reason, the Monolith, whatever it was, had saved their lives. He had a feeling this wasn't the last time he'd see one of those monoliths.
For now, there were no words as they stared at a Moon that was flying away from them at incredible speeds.
It would seem strange for the explosion alone to push the Moon at as high of a speed as it left orbit: as powerful as it was, it shouldn't have made the Moon move as much as it actually was. Perhaps the monolith had magnified everything.
Over the millennia, it had built up a store magnetic energy around itself. Maybe it had intended to use it to direct a radio signal at another target, to attract the attention of whatever intelligence might have arrived from the blue world, and point them at a new target. But perhaps the Monolith (or whatever creators it might have had) didn't expect intelligence to build up excessively concentrated piles of nuclear waste so nearby. Instead of directing a radio signal burst in a certain direction, it instead directed the entire Moon that way. The explosion pushed one way, but the Monolith redirected it a little, keeping the Moon on the plane in which the planets revolved around their Sun.
The G-force of acceleration lasted for a few minutes, and then started calming enough for Alpha's artificial gravity to compensate.
The people on that base watched as they picked up a transmission from Mars, showing the Moon heading away from the Earth at a high speed. Computers could not provide a helpful answer to their dilemma, but the human commander of Moonbase Alpha decided that they would stay, reasoning a better chance of surviving on the Moon then dying scattered in space trying to return.
"Maybe Meta, maybe there," the commander said as they listened to strange sounds coming over the speakers.
Clavius Base was left badly-perhaps fatally-damaged by the explosion that was much nearer to Clavius than Alpha. Fortunately, it still held a still temporarily livable shelter. The two already-ill Clavians died, but the badly injured Verdeschi and Vincent survived along with one of the two construction engineers who had also stayed behind when all the others had left for Tycho. Verdeschi could only shake his head weakly, wondering what had happened, and hoping they could be rescued by someone. Even if they did, it would be a slow recovery, he realized as he slid from consciousness.
The Alphans watched the big screen as they sped towards Jupiter. The giant planet expanded on their view screen, and a woman reported they were going to pass very close to its large moon Io.
Minutes later, they saw something. A shadowy presence that had apparently gone unnoticed during the last mission to Jupiter, a year before. It wasn't hard to realize why: the object was way too hard to find on its own, even in orbit of Io. The only reason the Alphans were now seeing it was because the Moon was seemingly aimed directly at it.
A giant, flat, jet-black object expanded on the screen. It was truly monolithic, and edges whose lengths were in the proportion of 1:4:9, the squares of the first three whole numbers.
Just when everyone braced for impact with the miles-wide object, strange sights burst out around them. Someone cried "My God, it's full of stars!" Then colors appeared and slide by. It was as if the Moon was sliding through a tunnel many millions or billions of kilometers long.
Whatever the full purpose of this was, didn't seem destined for the Moon, for less than a minute later, it dropped out of the eerie, sliding tube of dancing lights.
They would soon find out that this strange trip had not merely been millions of kilometers, but hundreds of light-years-and even that merely the beginning of what would be a magnificent and terrifying odyssey.
Touched by strange forces, the Moon would never be the same again. Though it would never see one of these Monoliths or its related gates again, the Moon and its surviving inhabitants would end up jumping between star systems, sometimes slipping through another kind of space warp, but mostly just traveling through space-without benefits of an obvious "warp", but amazingly, faster than even light. It would slow down while approaching star systems, then build up speed again as it left-like some sort of gravity
equation gone mad, reversed and magnified. Even the Eagle ships would share in this, allowing travel proportional to whatever the Moon was doing. They would visit planets within star systems, or meet up with alien ships able to ply space at speeds that were also faster than light.
For now, they could only shake loose their shock and dress their wounds.
While there had been some quakes and tsunamis on Earth, the damage was miraculously much less than might have been expected. The people of Earth could only puzzle at the events-what they knew of them.
The ones who knew more - including the presence of the apparently alien "Monolith" - still didn't know much. Even Floyd and the others who had been with him at the Monolith now found it impossible to remember how they went from seeing the approaching blast to being in the shuttle, safely in space.
The mystery of what happened to the Moon plagued everyone. It had been blasted from Earth, had skittered across the solar system towards Jupiter, and had vanished there. Io's orbit had been somewhat affected, but not in the way expected of a flyby of a similarly-sized object. It had not crashed into Jupiter either. It was as if the Moon had simply disappeared right at the point of closest approach to Io. One moment, it was there in the telescopes; the next moment, it blinked out of existence.
Two years later, to find out what had happened to the Moon, and why it had flown so directly to the Jovian system-as if intentionally shot there-a huge ship called the Discovery was on its way to Jupiter. Even though he had pushed its development, Floyd was not going-he was instead the mission director. The ship was helmed by Astronauts Poole and Bowman, plus three sleepers who were the few who knew of the Monolith that had been discovered on the Moon before its Breakaway, as well as the humanity's most advanced computer system, the HAL-9000...
And so, two great odysseys began out of one shocking incident.
With apologies to Stanley Kubrick, Gerry Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, George Bellak, anyone else involved with the of the actual "Space: 1999" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" productions, and probably just about everyone else too :-) -especially considering how full of holes this hack is.