The Journey of 1000 Light Years Ends With A Single Step
Awake. But not suddenly. Rather gradually, first an awareness of his own fingers and toes, his heartbeat, his shallow breath. Something hard and strange in his throat. Fluid moving over his skin. A sympathetic nervous system reaction floods him, something like panic, but its volume seems low. He cannot yet move.
The fluid begins to grow warmer. He can feel the warmth moving through him, penetrating him. He can begin to move his limbs inside the fluid. The fluid starts draining away below him, and is replaced by a warm flood of air from above. A plastic tube withdraws itself from his throat just as he realizes that’s what the hard strangeness was, and he gulps as deep a breath as he can muster.
He realizes he does not know his own name. He knows he was born on Earth, but not specifically where, doesn’t know his parents’ names, doesn’t know if he’s married or has children. He has the concepts but not the specific information about himself. This sends another surge of panic across him, but at the same remove, as if he’s in a bubble watching the surface shimmer with his own emotions.
The man has not realized until this moment how small his quarters are, or how dark, but now a lid lifts off him, opening up an indeterminate space above and shooting light down into his eyes, and he realizes he’s been laying in some sort of coffin.
He sits up. The greater scene swims into focus. He is in a long room, long enough that his still-adjusting eyes cannot see either end. Running down the room are two equally long, opposed lines of the coffin-type boxes, in one of which he himself is sitting. Mechanical arms tipped with suction cups and pincers, ceiling-mounted on tracks that allow them to move anywhere in the room, are busy lifting lids off coffins. Other people are sitting up, blinking and looking just as confused as he now realizes he must look to them.
“Where am I?” He doesn’t actually get the words out because his voice fails him and they die as a throaty, low-pitched squeal, but that’s what he at least intended to say. And yet someone answers anyway, a pleasant female voice that fills the room from speakers he can’t see.
“You are aboard the Starship Allestria,” the voice intones. “You are currently waking from a cryo-sleep that has lasted, from your perspective, one hundred twenty-four earth years. Do not be afraid that you cannot remember details from your life. This is a normal side-effect of cryo-sleep, and your memories will return within a few hours.”
*****
Matthew Barnabas, is his name. He’s from Brixton, U.K., in South London. He is twenty-six years old, or one hundred forty years old, depending on how one looks at it. Never married, no children. He’d been training as a wilderness guide for two years, after a horrible stint in the army, when the call went out for volunteers on the Starship Allestria, and he’d jumped at the chance for a real adventure instead of just guiding rich Britons to where the lions were feeding on the bait they’d been offered.
He can remember all of this now, but it still feels like it was somebody else. A surge of disgust and alienation go through him, and he longs for the remove of the bubble because this surge goes right down his middle, right into his heart, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from vomiting.
They had left the cryo-pod bay and are now in a recovery room, which looks like a college lecture hall with comfortable bench seats, and a screen at the front. All the seats are filled with fellow pioneers, in various states of distress. Some are crying. Some are vomiting. Small robots scurry through the rows, cleaning up where necessary and offering soft towels for eye-wiping. There are no human attendants, and so the pioneers are left to endure this transition basically on their own.
“Do not worry about the negative emotions you are currently experiencing,” comes the voice again, which he now recognizes as the voice of the ship’s A.I. “They will pass in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. We will land on Lisk-2 in ninety-six hours, so you will have time to adjust and prepare yourself.
The screen at the front of the recovery room flickers to life, and displays a rotating planet, familiar in its green and blue color but with alien landmasses that look nothing like the continents he is used to. A single snaky continent with islands along its length dominates the northern hemisphere, and the southern has multiple blocky continents with vast interiors.
Matthew remembers this, suddenly, this image, this planet, and the facts return to his mind as the A.I. voice speaks them.
“This is Lisk-2. It is the most inhabitable non-Earth planet in the galaxy, with a similarity correlation score of point nine eight, meaning it is ninety-eight percent similar to earth. Atmospheric content is more suitable for human habitation than earth. It is in stable orbit at one hundred four percent of earth distance from its sun. Best instrument extrapolation indicates a developed biosphere with species variety comparable to pre-human earth, and massive photosynthesis occurring from the copious plant life.”
“Oh my God,” croaks Matthew, his voice finally finding purchase in his throat and coming out audibly for the first time since he exited cryo-sleep. “Oh my God, we made it.”
“Ship systems are one hundred percent stable. Supplies and equipment are one hundred percent functional and ready for use in settling the planet. Three thousand nine hundred and fifty six of the four thousand pioneers have survived their cryo-sleep and are ready to make landfall. Thus far, this expedition has been an unqualified success.”
*****
He stalks low, below the canopy leaves of some giant fern that does not yet have a name. There is something moving in the brush up ahead, something animal and large and as unknown as the fern. It is dark and he is outside the wire, on the hunt, his rifle loaded with tranquilizer darts that he prays work on the local fauna, tasked with bringing back a specimen for DNA examination by the expedition’s scientists.
The shape ahead stops moving, and Matthew stops with it. He averts his eyes slightly, because who knows what kind of senses this beast has and what it might be able to detect. He thumbs the safety off on his rifle, and takes one slow, cautious step towards his target.
The attack comes from the side. From both sides actually. He doesn’t even see the shape of the attacker, just feels the kinetic energy burst out of the bushes beside him and crash into him, sending him ass over teakettle and loosing the rifle from his nerveless fingers so it skitters off into the bush.
Matthew lays on his back, gasping for breath. He can feel blood flowing from somewhere on his torso, but he’s not sure where. He reaches for his sidearm but his arm is broken and won’t cooperate with orders. The creatures are standing around him now, reluctant to approach the unfamiliar but not running off either, waiting for him to make a move or die of his wounds. He can see scaly skin in the darkness, stretched over large feet with three toes tipped with razor claws as long as his middle fingers. Oh God, what are these? Some apex predator they accidentally landed near?
A grunting leap, and one of the creatures lands on his chest, crushing him under its weight, snapping multiple ribs and sending the broken pieces into his vital organs and—
—Matthew wakes up in an unfamiliar room on a padded bench. He is still aboard the Allestria.
“Twenty-nine hours until landfall,” comes the implacable A.I. voice. “All team members will meet with their team leaders in the next three hours to finalize plans. The first forty-eight hours after landfall will be crucial, so let’s all pull together and make them great.”
Matthew sits up on the bench, smiling. He feels at his chest, not expecting the wounds to be real but almost hoping they would be, just to make the whole thing already be happening. He hates waiting. He wishes he had a cigarette. He was never much of a smoker, but right that moment it sounds good, and he’d light up right here in his quarters if he had one, regulations be damned.
After all, what were they gonna do send him home? Not bloody likely. There was no going home from this, and it made his smile deepen even more. No bait, no fatass business moguls out to kill something in the vain hope it’d make their dick get as hard as it used to. This is about to be the real deal, and Matthew is more than ready.
*****
“It is now twenty-one hours until we will make landfall on Lisk-2,” says Matthew’s team leader, Etraz, a grizzled fifty-year-old with a surgically repaired cleft palate and grey shocks of hair on both temples. “In sixty minutes we will begin our deceleration from one point five six percent light speed. The computer has informed me that thirteen hours after that, at T-minus seven hours, we will be moving slow enough and will be close enough to establish instrument contact with Lisk-2 and get detailed pictures of the planet’s surface. That’s when our work begins.”
Matthew has a lot of confidence in Etraz. They’d trained together for fourteen months on earth before Starship liftoff, learning to work in scouting teams, learning to use their equipment or to operate without it, drilling advanced maneuvers in a whole variety of world-gamed environments that the eggheads thought they would find all the way out here on the fingers of the longest arm of the Milky Way.
“These three sites—“ Etraz points to the screen at the front of their briefing room and all two dozen members of the Scout Team shift their focus as one, as the now-familiar rotating picture of Lisk-2 appears. Three locations are marked, all on the snaky northern hemisphere continent. “—represent the most likely locations for initial settlement, based on our best understanding of climate, proximity to fresh water, and topography. Of course, when we get instrument contact, we’ll have a much more detailed picture of the sites, and it’s entirely possible that the big bosses will choose someplace different.”
Etraz sweeps a glare out over his team, and cracks a smile at them.
“Whatever they pick is no never mind to us. Our mission is the same. While the bulk of the pioneers will be assembling shelter, off-loading components, and setting up a perimeter fence, we will operate outside that perimeter. If an alien farts within ten klicks of that fence, we will know about it before the computers do. If there is anything resembling a trap within spitting range of base camp, whether natural or artificial, we will find and disarm it before it can hurt any of our people. If the bosses are suddenly possessed by the urge to walk to the nearest river and piss in it, we will know the best way to get there. Is anyone confused about what we’re going to do when we touch down?
“No, Sir!” Matthew finds himself shouting it along with his fellow scouts, as one, all their voices finally whole again, recovered after the long sleep. His heart is pounding out of his chest. Besides being a serious and dangerous guy, Etraz knows how to give a hell of a pump-up speech.
“Get your rest,” Etraz finishes. “You are mandated to spend twelve out of the next fourteen hours in your racks, whether you sleep or not. Once we land, it’ll be seventy-two hours before any of you sleep, and that’s if it goes well. We’ll meet back here at T-minus ten hours, after the ship reestablishes instrument contact, for a final briefing and a detailed look at the actual site. At that time, I’ll assign sectors and routes based on the local terrain. Dismissed.”
*****
Matthew doesn’t sleep any more, not after that briefing, not after the nightmare, not after the endless journey across deep space to find the meaning of his life. He sits in the dark and waits for the A.I. to announce instrument contact so he can get a look at his new home. He thinks of earth, of all he left behind there which amounted to a few friends who thought he was crazy and a family that didn’t think much of him at all. Precious little to keep a man tied to a planet, and in his case the tether had failed.
But he realizes now that he never thought it would really work. Even when he got chosen, even when he got interviewed, even when they started building Allestria in the atmospheric space over Britain, so large in the sky that he could look up and see it blotting out start as it orbited. Even after all that, he didn’t think it would work out. They’d cancel the mission, or they’d screw up construction, or he’d die somewhere out among the endless blackness or some instrument failure or some piece of space dust thrown at them by the same fate that wanted to keep his life on earth so boring and predictable.
Only it hadn’t happened. They’d finished the ship and he’d gone up to meet its orbit and laid down in the cryo-couch and they’d covered him in supercooled liquid that stopped his heart, and when he’d woken here he was farther than any man had ever been from his home planet, about to descend into the unknown.
The anxiety of it ripples his jaw and makes him yawn, stretching his arms over his head until his shoulders hurt just to relieve the tension.
“Deceleration sixty-six percent complete,” comes the A.I.’s voice, as calmly as if it was asking him to pass a basket of dinner rolls. “Establishing instrument contact with the surface of Lisk-2. Stand by for live imagery in ten, nine, eight…”
Matthew’s breath catches in his throat, and his lungs refuse to draw any more air in. He gasps a few shallow inhalations as he tries to slow it and get his rhythm back. He stares so hard at the small screen inset in the wall of his room that his eyes start to tear up.
“…seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… contact established. Scanning… scanning…”
A new image of Lisk-2 springs to life on the screen. It’s the same blue and green, the same shapes, the same snaky continent in the north and blocky ones in the south. But. But…
Matthew sits forward, inspecting the screen, unable to believe what he is seeing. Surely…
But no. He sees what he sees. Black dots scatter the topography, more on the snaky northern continent but also some sizable ones on the southern continents, even in the interior. And not exactly black dots, but grey and twinkling and very decidedly not naturally forming.
Matthew gets up from his bunk and goes to inspect the screen more closely. The walls of his cabin are soundproof, but in his imagination he can hear the buzzing of puzzled voices all throughout the ship, the rising tide of panic and shock crashing into the wave of anticipation they had all been feeling just moments before.
The image zooms in on the grey dots, as one of the big bosses no doubt shouts for clarification of all the same questions racing up Matthew’s throat at that very moment. Closer now and he can see the varied grey of a city. Closer and he can see movement, vehicles of some sort racing around gridded streets, around buildings.
This is, obviously, impossible.
*****
“Obviously, this is a bit awkward,” says the man calling himself Admiral Aggaroth, of Indian extraction but speaking in a clipped, British accent that jars Matthew’s soul through the video screen by reminding him of home in this alien place. “We’ve known approximately when you would arrive, and we have tried by many ways to send you a message, to prepare you for what you would find here, but the veil of relativistic speeds is strong and we had no way to crack it, no matter what we tried.
Matthew’s butt hits the padded bench, as almost four thousand butts are doing in other cabins on the ship. His heart is pounding again, but so so different than before, now not from anticipation but from a strange mix of disappointment and shame.
“Starship Allestria can move at nearly one and a half percent of light speed. Now that is a big number, it’s a number your crew can and should be proud of.” The Admiral sounds like he is talking to a slow child about why it isn’t so bad to flunk the maths exam and spend life digging ditches. “But, because of the effects of relativity, during your hundred or so years in relativistic flight, several times that much time elapsed from the perspective of earth. And during those centuries, humankind was able to improve quite a bit on the starship drive technology. The upshot of which is, well, we were able to go a lot faster. Nearly five percent of light speed, to be exact.”
Matthew begins to weep. He’s no scientist, but he knows now what he’s about to hear, and he feels like a fool.
“Given that Lisk-2 remained for those centuries the very best possible non-earth planet for potential habitation, and given that the drive breakthrough meant that we could arrive quite a bit faster than Allestria would do, the decision was taken to send a second ship. My ship.”
The tears flow freely down Matthew’s face. He weeps for the life he lost, for the sense of adventure ground under the bootheel of relativistic time. Those small, sad people he left behind on earth to come here and find his fate seem so much more important now, like so much more to lose.
“After we arrived and were out of relativistic speeds, of course, time moved quite a bit more quickly for us here on Lisk-2 than it did on Allestria. Reckoned in earth years for clarity, we have been on this planet for nearly two hundred years at this point. As your instruments are picking up, that’s been quite time enough to get pretty well up to speed, get our breeding programs into full swing, that sort of thing.”
Matthew weeps for himself, and for the crew around him. They had all risked everything, had beaten the odds, had summoned their human spirits and answered the greatest call to adventure that had ever been blown, and it was for nothing. Less than nothing. They are a footnote in someone else’s history. They are the rich Britons who set out to kill lions and do their best to ignore the bait that a better man put there to draw them in.
“Of course, you are welcome to join our society and find your place among us. We have a total population of over sixty million as of this morning, and there is plenty of room for growth in every corner of the planet. There is land for any who want it, work in the cities for those who don’t want to farm. We have a thriving holo-film production studio in it’s fiftieth year of existence. You can learn about the local wildlife in our zoos, or the marine life in our aquariums. It is amazing to see the ways in which evolutionary pressure on similar planets can produce either the same results or radically different ones. They have wombats here, and they are almost identical to the ones found on earth. Just as adorable, I assure you.”
Matthew turns the screen off, and the Admiral disappears. A sob escapes his lips, much as he tries to fight it. For just one moment, a few shining hours, the chance for true adventure had hovered and shimmered before him, but before he could pluck it, it had turned to ash and blown away on the breeze of time.
END
Thanks for reading! As always, if you enjoyed this story, you can really help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing with friends. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun!
When Matthew first saw the city, I thought it was aliens. I wasn’t expecting that twist. It was a very good twist, but poor Matthew! I feel so bad for him!
“You can’t run away from yourself”. That is advice that’s given when people want to escape their lives. But Matthew wasn’t just trying to get away from an unsatisfying life, he was trying to run toward a goal. Real adventure. Real purpose. But technology surpassed him. He could always make a new life for himself on Lisk-2, but it won’t be the same.
A new twist on time travel, and I loved it. I can see this story must have taken a lot of research…and math!