Chapter One

Book One: The New Adventure.

Today was a very exciting day. At least for Andrew Richards. Is it every day that you get a distress call? What about from another planet? This was just putting it in very mild terms, though. The reality was much scarier.

It all happened one day when Andrew was doing some launch reports. Everything was supposed to be well, everything was supposed to run smoothly.

But it just didn’t.

His computer, all of a sudden went blank. Everything shut off. What had happened? Andrew didn’t know. He was just mystified.

Before he knew it; his display came back on again. The lights flickered and blinked. Andrew just shrugged his shoulders and went back to work. But it didn’t seem like his program at all. No launch reports were on his screen.

There was just a message.

It looked like a distress call. But could it really be?

Andrew thought mistakes could never happen in a place like NASA. It was 2048. Technology was increasing from day to day. It was the leap of the century. The new world order. So why was this happening? Why was he getting this?

To have something as mixed up as this, was like accidentally falling down the triple towers, and surviving.

And the triple towers prevented things like that from happening, after all, it was the three biggest towers in the whole North America.

Andrew was the technological developer. Messages and help requests weren’t in his league. He shouldn’t be getting some sort of distress call. If everything was well and smooth, he really should have nothing to do with this.

He just stood there, flabbergasted, but he couldn’t just stay frozen like that. He had work to do.

So what now? First thing was first, he had to do something about this.

But what?

At a time like this, Andrew wasn’t really sure what to do. Should he call the police or his boss? He had been working at NASA for 25 years. For all his years of creating, and messing with technology, he had never got distress calls. Ever.

It made perfect sense. Why would he? Who even sent distress calls to NASA? If somebody wanted help, they would contact the nearest police or army. So what did NASA have to do with this?

Yes, it was true that every once in a while, NASA needed to help with some things. Like helping one of their fellow workers on some type of mix up with the building of a spaceship, or helping to fix a space base, that got hit by an asteroid in the middle of Mars. But those times were rare.

Andrew remembered those times. It was scary, yes, but it was kind of funny to look back at the times when those types of mistakes happened. It just went to show that nothing was invincible.

As Andrew was trying to contemplate on all these thoughts. Nothing seemed to come out of it. His mind was so full from the shock, it had hardly any room left for an explanation.

Why would somebody want his help anyway? He wasn’t NASA’s only technological expert. There were hundreds of them. All over NASA and the world. Why would somebody ask a nothing like Andrew Richards for help?

He was high ranking. That was true. The right-hand man of his boss. But if somebody would send distress calls, or maybe even hacks, why would they call him?

The only person who would ask Andrew for help was his boss. But he would only do it if he wanted him to fix a certain part in a spaceship, or a piece of technology. Yet, other than that, nobody else really begged him for help. At least not that he could remember anyway.

Come to think of it, it was sort of amusing for Andrew. Most likely this was just a big misunderstanding.

Maybe somebody had been slacking off when they were sending that message? In that case, that would mean it was meant for somebody else. Still, this never happened to other people either.

Then Andrew just took the more logical approach. It was rare, but everybody was able to make mistakes.

Andrew made a point to tell his boss after this episode was finished with. He didn’t understand why anybody would care to do this though, but then here it was, staring at him straight in the face.

The facts were true. There was no point in trying to come to conclusions; he should face the issue head on.

He checked the screen to see what it said. He never checked it out yet. All this time, he was just assuming.

Andrew continued on that train of thought. He started to think of possible suspects. Who would want to send this message?

The first thing that came to Andrew’s head was one word. Teenagers

Teenagers were always doing this type of thing. Technology became more and more powerful as the days went on, but it also had a lot of weak spots and opportunity for hackers. Mainly, people that were bored out of their minds, and wanted to have some “fun.”

They could hack almost anything. Technically, anybody could nowadays. But if they did that, of course, somebody would figure out that something was fishy, and stop them. Still, they always did it. Each time with a new trick up their sleeve.

It was quite clever how they did it. Andrew just really wished and hoped they would use their brains for good things. It could be very useful, especially if somebody like that worked at NASA.

That was the thing. People at NASA were also really smart. Developing computers to withstand all the hackers new schemes was their specialty.

But still, even hacking a NASA computer wasn’t so unrealistic. Hackers came up with new ideas every day.

Andrew remembered back in 2020 when some terrorists hacked them, and sent a message to one of the NASA computers, saying that they would bomb NASA. Of course, nobody believed them, and it never happened. But these type of things could still be possible.

It is amazing to see what some people can do.

But then, of course, this was just wasting his time. Andrew could be using his time wisely. He could be doing things like testing launch reports. Well, it wasn’t the most enjoyable thing to do, but it was better than looking at prank messages.

Let’s just see what they came up with, Andrew thought. All these messages were wasting his time. But it would be interesting to see what nonsense they had to say for themselves.

As he peered closer, suddenly, the screen went blank. Andrew could hear the fan in the computer go off. All the beeping, and lights at his touch keyboard seemed to flicker, and lose power.

His computer had shut down. Again.

So now what? He thought. This had never happened to him. The whole processing system at NASA made it so that this should not happen. The backups were supposed to go on automatically. But they didn’t.

Keep it calm Andrew. Wait a few seconds. Andrew did. Three seconds later it still did not go on. He waited ten more seconds. Still nothing. It’s not going to go on, thought Andrew.

So now, he tried turning it on with his fingerprint scanner. He knew it was useless though.

And he was correct.

It was like he was just touching a piece of plastic, all it was basically made out of.

So now that he tried everything, only one thought was going through Andrews head: My boss is going to kill me.

He had two things on his mind now. The first thing was that supposed “distress call.” The second, was his computer crashing on him.

Were the two things connected? If it was hackers … then who knows? They may have just sent a virus in.

But if it really was a real distress call, then what did this have to do with his computer shutting down?

Andrew was just about to sigh in frustration. But he still had some hope; the screen turned blue, and then came some beeps from his keyboard. Andrew gasped. That meant something, the computer was going back on again. Just one question. Why?

If this had happened a few minutes ago, Andrew would have thought those were the backups coming to life. But too long had passed for that. This was something else.

But what?

Was this related to the hackers? Could they really be this powerful? Andrew shuddered. If hackers this powerful were attacking NASA, they could probably take the whole building down, without breaking a sweat.

But then if this had to do with hackers, he should probably see the message, or distress call, or whatever they sent immediately. Then after this, he’ll just tell his boss about everything.

Then he stopped short. As he was examining the message, he found that it was not just any message. It was in a different language. Usually, it was supposed to be translated before the computer even showed the message. The fact that it couldn’t translate it meant that it was not even a language spoken on Earth.

Interesting. Andrew checked to see if there were any patterns in the language. This would show if the language was just made up. Or not.

A blue light shone around the border of the screen.

533 PATTERNS DETECTED

Interesting. This seemed to be like a real language. He should tell his boss about this right away. Something was up.

But then Andrew got a little tingling feeling. There was one more thing in his power that he could still do. He knew he shouldn’t though, but something made him suspicious … he checked the location.

How he regretted that.

This is what got him into this whole mess. Was it a good one or a bad one?

Whatever it was, it was getting dangerous. He had to help them, though. There was a world in peril, and he could not do a thing about it.

Instead, he was here in a hospital, with nothing else to do but hope everybody on that planet was okay. Today was an exciting day for Andrew Richards, perhaps too exciting.

— — — — — — — — — — -

Buy the Galaxy Survivors book. Carry Andrew and Luther’s adventures around wherever you go!