Hello! Welcome to the 8th story in the OGWiseman’s Stories project. I love multi-plot stories that skip around and tell things from different characters’ points of view. So today I wanted to try something like that (as much as a short story can anyway!), as a form for a really fun sci fi idea that I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while. I hope you like the results! :)
The Moment of Truth
By Owen Wiseman
“Passing eleven point two percent light speed.”
A cheer went up on the bridge, a massive swelling of fourteen hundred years of pent-up energy. They could all feel the generations that had lived and died aboard the Starmancer sitting on their shoulders, cheering them on, willing the CivPod to have done its work well, so that they didn’t all die in a six months after they arrived.
*
“This is a CivPod,” said the man in the historical holo. The watching schoolchildren giggled at the silly outfit he wore. Their teacher frowned but hoped that they were absorbing the lesson anyway.
“This tiny thing is the key to colonizing space.” He held up a little, white ball, just about the size of a fist. “Inside this ball is an entire civilization—food and water production, terraforming, shelter creation. It will take a planet all the way up to pre-robotic levels of technology in less than a millennium with zero human input except deciding which planet to point it at.”
In the holo, crowds of people surrounding the man stared at the pod with wondrous awe.
“I need the bathroom,” said one of the children, wiggling her butt back and forth in case her words didn’t clearly express her situation.
The teacher’s robotic aide escorted the little girl to the nearest facility. The teacher frowned again, as the rest wandered off to explore the rest of the museum. Normally, she’d have chased them down and gotten them organized again, but now she let them go.
Instead she stared herself at the CivPod in the holo, losing herself in the wondering. All her life, she’d known this day was coming, and no matter what the news was that came, nothing would ever be the same.
*
“Let us pray. Heavenly Father, as we have traveled across the infinite blackness between the stars, as far removed from the planet our ancestors came from as they were from the Garden of Eden, we have been moved still by Your presence, by Your light, and by Your wisdom. The truths of Christ are a stalwart pillar for us, anywhere we are in the universe You created.
“We know that when word comes from the CivPod, that it will be a good word, for Your works are mighty Lord, and our works done in Your light are mighty with Your power. Whatever we might find when at last we make landing on that promised New World, we will confront it with Your power and in the light of Your love, and armed with these things, we cannot be defeated.”
*
“Passing Eleven Point One Percent light speed.” The computer voice didn’t change at all, still the same pleasant lilt that every soul aboard Starmancer had heard since the day they were born. Yet instead of cheering, now it got strangely quiet in the room. Everyone’s shoulders were hunched with the tension. Their grandparents’ grandparents had this date marked on the calendar, and now it was here. The low, even voice continued.
“In three more tenth’s of deceleration, at ten point eight percent light speed, we will reach communication-enabled speed with the CivPod on Kepler C and receive information about its success level, and thus about what level of technology and habitability will exist when we arrive.”
No one said a word, but everyone in the room thought “yeah, we get it” at exactly the same moment.
*
“God, honestly, who even cares? I’m so sick of hearing about this stupid CivPod.” Three teenagers were hiding in an airlock, smoking. There wasn’t supposed to be any tobacco aboard the ship, but some blessedly enterprising soul had brought enough on fourteen hundred years before to allow for cultivation and made themselves a legend. A long series of the ship’s early Captains had tried to stamp out the scourge, but repeated failures and general discontent with the idea had eventually convinced them to stop.
“Even once we find out the stupid CivPod worked, it’ll still be literally twenty years before we even get there. Just, like, relax everybody.”
“Oh my God, we’ll be, ugh, old by then.
“Don’t remind me, all they ever talk about is how we’ll have to be in charge.
“Ready to face whatever comes!” She did a spot-on impression of their civics teacher as she said it, and the other two giggled and coughed at the harshness of their smokes.
*
“The Wave far out to sea thinks shore a dream. It does not remember beginning, and will find no end. There is only—“
“Would you knock that off? I’m too nervous, it’s overstimulating to hear you read.”
“Well it makes me feel better. I like to imagine—“
“I get it, you read the poetry written by the deep space generations and it makes you feel special.”
“Special? I never said that.”
“What’d you say then?”
“It makes me feel grateful. We’re living in the most amazing moment, it’s a privilege!”
“Unless the CivPod didn’t work.”
“And when I read this stuff, it makes me feel like it’s a privilege even if it didn’t work. Even if we’re just going there to die, we’re the ones who get to know for sure.”
“Lucky us.”
“If you don’t like it, go back to your room.”
“I’ll miss it!”
“Then shut up and let me read! Okay, where was I?”
“The stupid wave can’t imagine the shore, because it’s a wave and thus does not possess a brain.”
“Did I mention you can leave?”
“Fine, fine, read on.”
“I will! A-hem— It does not remember beginning and will find no end. There is only the wave in front and behind, the whole ocean in two parts, unmoving and unchanging swells of energy, predestined and yet without agency, savage and yet without force, undying and yet without hope.”
*
“Passing eleven percent light speed.” On the Bridge the Captain wanted to bite his fingernails. He hadn’t done so since he was a child, and had worked very hard indeed with the Thera-bot over the course of many years to eliminate the habit from his mind.
He looked around at the clenched jaws of his crew and tried to drink it in. This was it. It was happening. He was already growing old and might never see the surface, and even if he did he wouldn’t be there long, so in some ways, getting this information was the culmination of his life.
*
“In order for humankind to survive and continue our existence in this universe, we must become not just a multi-planetary species, but a multi-stellar species, and one day a multi-galactic species.”
A janitor lay in his bunk, listening to President Rodriguez’s send-off speech for the millionth time. He wished he could have been there. He imagined those first pilgrims, looking up in the sky at their vast vessel, the Starmancer, waiting in the skies for their leader to finish his speech so that they could begin their journey, knowing they would die only a very small part of the way along their intended route.
“We have solved the climate crisis through the miracle of carbon conversion and ocean de-acidification, among many others, but even our greatest science cannot reverse the aging of our star. It cannot hold back the magma within the earth, which will spill forth long before the sun swallows us to blacken the skies and threaten humanity’s very existence. These are not pleasant realities, but they are our solemn responsibility to address with the courage and determination that Americans have always shown.
“It is ancient Greek wisdom that says ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit’. Well, I say to you today that never have men and women planted such a tree, whose shade shall not be cast for fourteen centuries, far beyond the horizon of those who planted it, beyond all their knowledge, beyond their possible experience, yet connected, unbreakably and forever, by the supple cords of the human spirit, which know no boundaries in time nor space.
“It is we who love our kind enough to see this through. It is we who have the courage of our convictions, and the convictions of defiant gods. It is we who will live forever as legends in the soil of other worlds, our names ringing through skies we have never seen, until the last star twinkles and is gone.
*
“We pray for those left behind, Lord, those still on the home planet, whose earthly fates we shall never know. We pray that they know a world at peace, and that the inevitable destruction that random chance guarantees has not yet come to them. We hold faith in the resurrection, which shall ring throughout the universe and touch us just as surely as those still on Earth, when we shall be reunited with all those we have lost upon this long journey.
He felt himself slipping into thoughts about the CivPod, losing his grip on his belief in the provision of the Lord alone. He bore down on himself, knowing that the announcement would come and knowing that his congregation needed him to get them through.
“We pray most of all, Lord, for the chance to do our part, in spreading Your message not just on the earth but on all the earths that are, for that is our mission, to make of Your name a truly universal appeal, that all beings might come to know You. We know that You will make this possible in our lives, Lord. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
*
“Passing ten point nine percent light speed.” The Captain could not decide whether one tenth of one percent of light speed was a large or small amount of deceleration. He turned the question over in his mind, doing the math. 186,282 miles per second, one percent rounded was 1862 miles per second, a tenth was 186.2. a decrease in pace of one hundred eighty six point two miles per second is what they needed to enable CivPod communication. The amount of the decrease itself represented more speed than had ever been experienced by easily 99.999% of the humans who ever lived.
He started trying to refine that human percentile calculation, but couldn’t figure what assumptions about total all-time human population seemed reasonable, and didn’t feel like it was the right time to try to look it up.
Then he noticed his finger was in his mouth, and half a ragged nail was between his teeth, already hacked off and unsalvageable. He jerked his hand out of his mouth and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Luckily, they were all too nervous.
*
“Do it, do it, come on! I can’t take it anymore!” She wrapped the tourniquet around his arm and started looking for a vein. She hadn’t intended to get him off, but he’d been going crazy all morning, yelling about the CivPod and predicting disaster, to the point that he’d really started annoying her and she just wanted him to shut up, which the needle tended to accomplish nicely.
Tobacco was a bit of contraband that wasn’t exactly fine but also wasn’t a total disaster, and most of the relevant cancers were quite curable by the ships medical bots. What really concerned the Captains was the exotic stuff that people figured out how to manufacture from onboard supplies. The 3-D printers wouldn’t just make drugs, of course, but people figured out how to print precursors and trick the AIs into thinking the requests were legitimate, then combining with other elements obtained on the ship’s thriving black market.
The crew had been selected with a preference for familial lines without strong history of addiction, but the specific genes for addicts were still not totally understood, and the infinite interstellar blackness—just the idea of it, really—made addicts even of Puritans if they weren’t careful.
The addicts on the ship traded recipes and either used the results or sold them for commissary or other consideration. What they were shooting today wasn’t heroin, but it was pretty close.
“I don’t wanna hear what’s coming! Don’t want it! Shoot me up, hurry god damn it!”
“Enough from you! I’m going as fast as I can!”
She pulled the tourniquet tight and fussed with the needle, testing it a little longer than maybe she needed to just to show him she could while he writhed on the table and tried not to yell at her, lest she decide not to help him get off and make him get his own dose at great expense of energy and suffering.
She tapped his vein, jabbed it, and pushed the hammer down, filling him with it. He sighed instantly, and seemed to vacate his body. She would have been insulted if she didn’t know exactly what he was feeling, and agree without question that it was better than any person.
She started filling her own needle with a similar dose. She thought it was totally unfair that she always had to shoot herself up, but she had to admit she was much better at it.
She never got to shoot up, however. She moved slow, with stiff fingers already touched by the edge of dope-sickness, and so she hadn’t gotten off when the announcement came in, even though she didn’t want to know any more than he had. But it did make him the only person who was asleep or otherwise preoccupied aboard the Starmancer that morning when the connection with Kepler C came online.
*
“In a way, it’s going to be easier if the CivPod didn’t work and we’re just screwed,” he said to his son, without affect or irony. “We spend the next twenty years dealing with that fact, but that’s all we have to do. Everything else is taken care of. It’s if it works that we’re deep in it.”
His son wanted to smile a patient smile, but didn’t. He was fifteen, already strong from the endless workouts in the high-grav tank and his family’s excellent genetics. In the long journey, some of the families had changed their castes, as natural genetic variation within the strict anti-inbreeding protocol pushed them away from their genetic heritage. Not this family. They’d started as leader-caste, and now they were poised to fulfill that destiny and lead the people onto Kepler C itself.
“Even with the CivPod, there’s far more to be done than’s already been done. It will take real leadership, and by then, even if I’m there to help I’ll be less man than I am now. What I wouldn’t give to be your age! To fight and lead alongside you! But seeing you do it, seeing the man you’ll become, that will be enough for me. I’ll make it enough.
“We stand on the shoulders of giants, Son. Or fly through space on their shoulders, I guess. And one day, we’ll be the shoulders they stand on to reach for another star, and another after that, until the galaxy fills with our kind. We have a destiny, and a destiny is the very best thing to have.”
*
“Passing ten point eight percent light speed,” the voice intoned, as every single person’s heart inside the bridge leapt into their chest. “Deceleration is now complete, and we will continue at this speed until we are within three hundred million miles of Kepler C.”
It paused for a moment. Or maybe it didn’t, and everyone just felt like it did, like looking at the hand of a ticking clock and getting the illusion that it stopped momentarily. The Captain sat forward in his chair, fighting the urge to scream at the machine just like everyone else was.
“Establishing link to Kepler C. Please stand by.”
The Captain wanted to make a joke. Wanted to say “We’ve been standing by for fourteen hundred years” and cut the tension, but he couldn’t get the words out, or any words for that matter.
The entire ship held its breath. Even the smoking teenagers in the airlock were silent, their precious tobacco wasting away in trails up towards the ceiling as their cigarettes burned unsmoked.
It had long ago been decided that only the bridge would hear the outcome at first. Total broadcast could stir a panic if the outcome was bad. But everyone knew the exact day and time it would come. You couldn’t not know. And so they held their breaths, and waited.
“Link established.”
On the bridge, hands crept into hands and squeezed hard as the crew waited for what would come.
“We have successful CivPod deployment approximately four hundred Earth years ago, two hundred four local years.”
In that infinite blackness of space, a silence even deeper opened inside them. The next sentence seemed to take a year to emerge from the Bridge’s hidden speakers.
“Planet Habitability well within expected conditions. Water present in large quantity. Mineral deposits present in large quantity. CivPod has brought atmospherics…
The Captain lost the sound of the computer voice then. It did not cut off, but cheers drowned it out, as fourteen hundred years of waiting erupted into exult.
Images came onto the Bridge’s screens: Their main base, nestled next to a placid lake, gleaming and empty, waiting for their arrival. The tilling and fertilizing robots working in what will be their fields, planting and mixing and composting just so to bring the dirt to perfect nutritional balance in exactly twenty years. Animals familiar only from historical holos spun up once again from DNA carried through the endless vacuum of space.
“Send these everywhere!” the Captain shouted, as long-established protocol demanded in the event of good news. “Every screen in the ship!”
“Yes, Captain,” the computer intoned quickly before resuming its litany. “Animal stocks are self-reproducing after generations of careful management. Functioning ecosystems cover forty percent of the landmass, while another thirty percent are in early developmental stages.”
On and on it went, as images of their future home flashed before every eye aboard the Starmancer. And from that proud ship, that single, proud wave, wending its way through the universe’s boundless, depthless sea, there arose a great cheer for for the soaring hope that human boldness can summon.
END
Thanks so much for reading! If you liked this story, please like, comment, and share widely with friends or on social media. Thanks and have a great week!
You illustrate that, even hundreds of years into the future, human-ness is pretty much unchanged.
An eye-opener ⚓️👉🏿🌖