Aurelius Ascends

Aurelius Ascends had spent the best part of fifteen years shifting from a single figment of a dream to a glossy digital image on a one-hundred-inch computer screen, eventually realized by SpaceCorp's head designer, Lisa Scanlon, and put on the drawing board.

The leap from a high-resolution vision to a workable spacecraft was something nobody ever thought would be feasible. Humankind had dreamed and theorized this event for hundreds of years, but because world-wide funds were obliterated from Space-Corp's budget, each year passed with no results forthcoming.

Until the day came that heralded the downfall of what had always been widely known as money. Earth's own history had suddenly turned full circle from the undeveloped days of bartering for goods to the times when half-pence coins and one-pound paper notes were all the rage across the western world. But it wasn't long before digital currency took over the monetary staus quo, with the rise of mass unemployment as human printers were no longer needed.

Then, sure enough, the technological era got too big for its own good, as artificial intelligence became the new household name. Tech companies around the world competed to design and build the first truly 'home & work' synthetic android, followed by rapid, escalating, widespread job loss at every level as each synthetic came online. Humanity was seen as obsolete and too slow, as humans versus synthetics were pitted against each other to assess speed, quality, and quantity.

Money soon dwindled to a memory in people's dreams, since there was no use in employing human labor when that typically meant paying everyone fairly. Unfairness ran deep in the cruel nature of greed that had developed, as synthetic humanoids did not require the rewards that money offered, which humans craved.

So the world that once began to barter for goods soon returned, as it fulfilled that circle.

Who won overall was already a dead certainty and a foregone conclusion.

What do you think?

Who really won?

What really did happen to money?

But most importantly, did 'Aurelius Ascends' ever make it off the drawing board?

Drifting Past The Point Of Return

For many years, the question of surviving a technological world without physical money had merely been an academic one, a thought experiment tossed between economists, bunker‑builders, and the last remaining political analysts who questioned: "What happens when civilization abolishes money before it abolishes conflict?"

The answer was as brutal as it was predictable.

When currency died, governments around the world lost the final stabilizing force that had kept them from sinking. Nations that once negotiated through trade had all too quickly now discovered they could arbitrate through threat. Nuclear treaties, long upheld by mutual economic interest alone, dissolved rapidly overnight. Stockpiles of lethal weaponry that had slept for decades were quietly reactivated.

Borders bristled. Satellites suddenly tracked missile silos with renewed urgency. Every world leader spoke of peace while, ironically, preparing for the kind of war that ends history rather than shapes its future.

In that rising tension, that global, silent countdown, SpaceCorp made its final pivot. 'Aurelius Ascends' was no longer a scientific milestone. It was a political evacuation route. A symbol of hope repurposed into a pressure valve for a world on the brink.

And so the question that closed earlier, ‘Did Aurelius Ascends ever make it off the drawing board?’ was answered not by triumph, but by a raidly growing necessity.

Thousands of miles of fibre‑optic cabling had been laid efficiently within the most advanced titanium hull plating and reinforced with quad bulkheads, designed to protect in-flight management for at least 35,000 hours before any maintenance would ever be required. An entire deck of electrogel-infused nanotechnology backed it, operating like clockwork. By then, 'Aurelius Ascends' had flown admirably on autopilot, and Earth had shrunk to a solitary blue coin that the onboard crew had watched grow smaller as the weeks passed.

The crew gathered at the aft external viewport, which housed the exit ramps and sat at one of the craft's four evac points, and keyed in the unlock codes to disengage the safety overrides that kept the vacuum of space securely outside their plasma-powered spacecraft. Once the ramps had fully opened, the full complement of crew found themselves drifting in space, their newly designed protective spacesuits tethered by thin lines that looked too fragile to hold seven human lives.

Behind them, a planet teetered on the edge of nuclear self‑annihilation. Ahead of them, only the cold, unclaimed dark and the faint hope that humanity's future might survive somewhere its politics could not reach.

The Silence Before The Last Transmission

For thirty‑seven days after the crew returned to within the confines of artificial air, experimental gravity plating, and the constant glare of the LED lights, Aurelius Ascends drifted through the velvet dark with the quiet confidence of a vessel built for a purpose larger than its makers. The crew had settled into their routines, maintenance checks, navigation updates, and the slow psychological adjustment to a world without an up or down, left or right.

Earth had become a memory behind them, a fading blue coin swallowed by distance, and the crew felt an ever-present dread of what lived outside and around Aurelius Ascend's bulkheads. Their artificial environment and the constant hum of the craft's plasma drive were enough to trigger a sense of cabin fever that nobody before them had ever experienced.

But on Day Thirty‑Eight, the silence changed.

It wasn't a particular sound or even a vibration. It was purely a gut feeling among the crew, more like a subtle tightening in the air around them, as though the ship itself were holding its breath, expecting something to come.

Ellie Quinn, the youngest of the crew, at just twenty-five and the one most attuned to the ship's comms, noticed it first.

"Signal noise is rising," she said, frowning at her console. "It's definitely not interference caused by background radiation levels. Something just… patterned out of nowhere."

Commander Georgia Halberg lightly breezed across to her. "Patterned how, so?"

Ellie hesitated. "Like… someone trying to speak through static… possibly just interstellar noise, though?"

The others exchanged glances.

No one spoke the obvious: nothing and nobody out here to speak, other than the seven crew members inside Aurelia's protective shell, for billions of light-years around them, and this noise was coming from outside the craft itself.

The distortion began as a low harmonic pulse, a single tone that resonated through the hull like a tuning fork struck in the dark.

Keo Vale looked up sharply. "Did anyone hear that?"

Jacqui Rourke muttered, "Hear it? I actually felt that, too."

The tone rose, split, and folded back into itself, forming a strange, layered sound that was neither mechanical nor natural.

Ellie's console flickered, indicating more incoming. "Receiving… something," she whispered, focusing again on her screen and what she could hear filtering through her headset. "It's not Earth. It's not any known beacon either. We never managed to send anything out this far until we got here."

Jacqui steadied herself. "Recording everything in our onboard database."

The tone shifted again, but this time it seemed to be forming a rhythm. Reminiscent of a heartbeat, almost. It was slow. Deliberate. And it seemed ancient at its origin.

Keon Vale pressed a hand to his chest. "It feels like it's suddenly now inside me."

Commander Georgia Halberg floated closer, her voice low. "This isn't interference. This is intentional, but how? There's nothing out this far. No human has yet managed to get this far out to Mars."

The crew gathered around the console as the tone deepened into a structure, a sequence of pulses, pauses, and rising harmonics. It was a message… But not one meant for human ears.

Ellie activated the long‑range transmitter, doubting her message would even reach Earth, despite the crew having launched their newest extensive-range signal array only eight days earlier. "Earth, this is Aurelius Ascends. We're receiving an unidentified signal. Attempting to decode."

Static answered her; Ellie held her breath, still distrustful of the repeater's capabilities.

Then, faintly: “Aurelius… repeat… signal unstable…”

Ellie, now shocked that it actually worked, leaned in closer to her console. "Earth, we copy. We are transmitting the pattern now," and routed the harmonic sequence through the comms.

The ship vibrated as the tone passed through its systems, resonating in the bulkheads, the wiring, even the crew's bones. For a moment, the static cleared. "Aurelius… what is… that?"

Then the line fractured. The harmonic tone surged, much louder, deeper, more complex. The lights flickered. The air recyclers stuttered.

Jacqui grabbed a handrail. "It's overloading our comm systems!"

"Shut it down," Georgia ordered.

"I can't," Jacqui replied, panic overtaking her. "It's not coming from us anymore."

The tone now echoed through the ship itself, as if the vessel were repeating it. As if answering, by expanding the origin of the unknown transmission.

Back on Earth, in a bunker, securely nestled three hundred feet beneath what had once been the Geneva Monetary Authority, a lone technician monitored the deep‑space array. He had been half‑asleep when the signal arrived. First came the harmonic pulse, low, resonant, impossible to classify. Then came the voice.

Ella's voice. “… receiving unidentified signal… repeating pattern… crew experiencing … ”

Static swallowed the rest. Then the harmonic tone surged through the speakers, rattling the technician's teeth. The lights flickered. The consoles dimmed. And then, through the distortion, a final fragment of human speech: "Earth, do you hear… It's not…"

A metallic shriek cut the transmission. Then silence. The technician stared at the dead console. He replayed the final seconds again and again. But every moment he replayed the signal that had been relayed from Aurelius Ascends, the technician could make out something strange, new, and unknown that never matched any known signal Earth had so far recorded, and, disguised within its garbled signal, heard as an indistinct variable pattern. A heartbeat. But not human.

Back aboard Aurelius Ascends, the harmonic tone reached a crescendo. The spacecraft shuddered. The internal lights died. The stars outside warped, bending like reflections on disturbed water.

Ben's voice came across the comms, sounding metallic as it echoed eerily across the main deck: "Navigation's gone! The plasma drive just went completely offline. "We're drifting- no, err, something is pulling us out of the onboard navigational trajectory."

The commander's voice cracked. "By what?"

No one answered. Because the answer was unthinkable. The tone immediately stopped. The ship stopped. It was almost as if the universe held its breath… Then Aurelius Ascends vanished from every sensor, every telescope, every listening post on Earth.

There was no explosion. No debris. No trace. Just a sudden and complete absence. A silence so complete it felt deliberate.

The technician back on Earth filed his data, and the report was buried. Governments across the planet, already teetering on the edge of nuclear conflict, coldly dismissed the event as a malfunction… ship and human crew lost.

But the deep‑space array kept listening.

And sometimes, late at night, when the world above was quiet… the array detected a faint harmonic pulse. A heartbeat. The same slow, deliberate, and unexplainably ancient. As if something was waiting.

Decades later, after the long-assumed-lost Aurelius Ascends' new sister-ship, Astraeus-2, mission finally launched, its fresh-faced crew would hear the same hum. The same resonance. That very same presence. But they would not know its origin. They would not know that humanity's first exodus had been intercepted. But what they would not know was that the Martian substrate had already met Aurelius Ascends once… And remembered.

So, that's it until the next installment of this, one of my latest science-fiction stories, which will visit the fiction community soon; dreamed up and written by yours truly... a real human...

Jonathan Townend.