Chapter 8 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Coordinates Without Name

The data calibration station was located right next to storage drive row number eleven, a small desk attached to the wall with a curved screen and a mechanical keyboard with worn-out letter keys — where maintenance engineers were allowed access to compare the technical parameters of each storage drive with the central system, a legal and necessary part of the second day's work during the maintenance.

Khe Lam sat down, typed his employee code and secondary certification into the login box, the screen lit up with the familiar interface of the internal technical inspection system. This was something she had done dozens of times before at other stations in the Root Layer — no difference, except that this station connected directly to historical data storage drives instead of plumbing or electricity.

Vu Khac Dang went downstairs ten minutes ago and was called to assist team two in dealing with a small problem in the cooling module. The supervisor is at the other end of the cylinder, checking on group one's progress. Ha Dinh Khiem worked in the hallway quite far away, the sound of him muttering to himself as he took notes echoed very softly. In this moment, Khe Lam was almost alone.

She started the real work: entering storage drive code number eleven, calling up the technical index board to complete the unfinished reconciliation from yesterday. The screen displayed a series of familiar parameters, and at the bottom of the page, the "Historical access log" section still had the same padlock icon as before — but this time, right below, another section she had never noticed before appeared: "Raw data — unclassified — permission level two or higher."

Her heart beat faster. This was not a locked access log, but another item — raw data, which had not been reclassified by anyone according to new security standards, probably overlooked through many system upgrades, and most importantly: second-level permissions, exactly the same as the certificate she had in hand.

She pressed it, almost holding her breath.

The screen loaded slowly for a moment — old system, heavy data processing — then displayed a long list of log files, arranged chronologically, starting with the first years of the voyage. Most are routine technical reports: sensor calibration, navigation software bug fixes, star map updates. Khe Lam scanned quickly, her eyes searching for anything unusual, until she stopped at a file marked with the date of the forty-first year of the journey.

File name: "Destination coordinate comparison — Internal report — Classification: Restricted (automatic classification expired after 200 years)."

She clicked, and the text appeared full screen.

It was a technical report, with dry language, full of technical jargon about fuel reserves, component wear rates, and self-repair capabilities of key systems - things Khe Lam had to read slowly and reread a few times to grasp the full meaning. But there was one paragraph, nestled among the numbers and charts, that made her read it three times to make sure she didn't misunderstand.

"Based on recalculation of the wear rate of the Protoplasmic Core and the Rotating Ring gravity system, the probability of maintaining a journey to the Lam Chu star system on the original route is estimated to be less than forty percent, due to a shortage of spare parts for early components that cannot be rebuilt with the technology currently on board. Proposal: redirect to a closer alternative star system, provisionally named Tinh Vong, based on telemetry data indicating the possibility of habitable conditions Yes, although the reliability of this data is still low due to the monitoring distance."

Khe Lam sat motionless, her hands frozen on the keyboard, her eyes glued to the screen, reading and re-reading that paragraph until each word seemed to melt and coalesce into a different shape in her head.

Lam Chu. Not Tinh Vong. The original destination, the destination her ancestors were aiming for when leaving Earth, was not the name she had been taught in her first class, not the name she had just chanted under the altar last week, not the name that Chuong Khac Dinh had just solemnly announced in front of two thousand people that "is waiting for us".

She scrolled down, looking for more information, but the rest of the file cut off abruptly — a blank, textless blank space, accompanied by a small system message: "The remainder of the document has been moved to level four restricted storage pursuant to decision number 041-H, dated [deleted]." There was no signer's name, no specific reason, just that number — 041-H — like a door slamming shut right in front of her.

Her hand trembled as she pulled her personal recording device out of her pocket, quickly connecting it to the station's secondary data port — an operation that was outside the scope of her assigned work, she knew it as soon as she did it, but didn't have enough sense to stop. She copied the entire readable text, took a screenshot twice to be sure, her hands were still shaking so much that the first shot was blurry, so she had to take a second shot.

Footsteps echoed from the spiral staircase.

She pulled the device out of the data port in an almost reflexive movement, stuffed it into the inside pocket of her work jacket, closed the text window on the station screen, and returned to the normal technical index checking interface exactly one second before Ha Dinh Khiem appeared at the beginning of the hallway.

"Miss Khe Lam, Mr. Dang sent a message over the radio to prepare for a fifteen-minute break." He said, not noticing anything unusual on her face. "Are you okay? Your face is so pale."

"I'm fine, just a little tired from bending for so long." Khe Lam replied, trying to force her voice to sound normal, standing up and leaving the calibration station with her legs not completely steady.

During the fifteen-minute break, she sat quietly in a corner, pretending to drink water, pretending to rest, while her mind reeled with a series of unanswered questions. If the original destination was Lam Chu, and it was changed to Tinh Vong from the forty-first year of the journey — more than two hundred years ago — then who made that decision? Why did every teaching, every ritual, every sutra for the next two centuries speak as if Tinh Vong was always the only destination, without any change? And most importantly — Tinh Vong, the name "proposed" based on "low reliability" monitoring data — is it really a habitable place for humans, or is it just another promise, made in panic, never fully tested?

She thought of the letters "L.C." On the handwritten sticker yesterday, it now means: Lam Chu. She thought about the question her father had asked Vu Khac Dang eight years ago — if she discovered something that could cause panic on the ship, but it was true, should she say it — and wondered if he would find exactly what she had just found, in this exact place, at this exact calibration station, eight years ago.

When the shift ended, Khe Lam left Core Origin with the team, her footsteps heavier than usual even though no one else noticed anything unusual. The personal note-taking device in her pocket felt heavy, as if it contained not just a few paragraphs of copied text but a whole load of responsibility she was not ready to shoulder.

You can report. She could take this device to the Central Technical Department, or even ask to meet the supervisor directly, and explain what she found. That's what an honest citizen of Origin should do — report any unusual findings immediately, without arbitrarily intervening, in accordance with the safety regulations repeated before entering the core area.

But she thought of her father, who might have been faced with the same choice eight years ago, and who died three weeks later in a "sudden hyperbaric incident". She thought of Bui Dac Sinh's vague warning, of her grandmother's downcast eyes during the ceremony, of the level four door with the silent flashing red light at the end of the hallway.

And when he stepped out of the final control gate, back into the familiar light of the Root Layer, Khe Lam made a decision. She won't tell anyone. Not now. She needed to better understand what she was holding in her hands, before it could cause her to disappear from this life the way her mother had disappeared, the way her father had left, leaving only a name on a file and a never-used bowl on the dinner table every night.

That night, she hid her personal note-taking device at the bottom of an old toolbox that was no longer in use, tucked deep under a layer of greasy rags in a corner of the closet, where even her grandmother, who occasionally cleaned her room, rarely touched it. She lay awake for a long time, listening to the sound of the regenerative water pump echoing steadily through the wall, and for the first time in her life, wondered if the ship that was still breathing like that was really carrying all of them to a real place, or just carrying them away, far away, amidst a promise that no one could remember its original shape.