She wasn’t in the mood for pomp and circumstance, and the honor guard’s music made her eye twitch, so she gunned it and left them to their celebratory nonsense somewhere near Saturn’s orbit. A mission of prime importance awaited her on the third rock from the sun, a mission of love and betrayal and a whole lot of money.
Lights and a second cluster of Jun’Tar ships guided her to a docking port where even more wasteful nonsense awaited her. The Chamber wasn’t perfect, even if they never admitted that anything they did was a mistake or failed. Projects ceased, changed direction seemingly at random, received entirely different staffs, mission statements, names and locations, but nothing was ever called a mistake by the Chamber. Everyone else could call many of their projects’ mistakes. If the Chamber knew or cared what people thought—and Electra suspected they didn’t—they never made it known. The basic premise of rebuilding a planet that humanity had destroyed long before they had other viable options… That wasn’t something worth doing in the first place, especially since it was all just a scam to get the galactic economy chugging. The con artist in Electra did have to admit it was a pretty good grift. The mistake they probably didn’t know they had made—but would find out soon—was assuming Electra would take the fame, fortune to clear her debt and luxury she’d always claimed she wanted and leave behind the lover who could make it all worthwhile.
Electra landed, steeled herself and made her way to the gangplank that was bracketed by two rows of Jun’Tar security guards in their funny orange helmets. Appdurpin and Jun’Tar workers cheered from behind barricades all around the docking bay. Letterman’s shell, containing Ivy’s mobile module and the party favor, followed closely behind her. The fact that Electra was once again in debt—only twelve thousand in the red, to be specific—shouldn’t require the services of a debt enforcement bot. Perhaps they assumed Letterman was attending as her associate and friend. Regardless, the fact that she was escorted by the looming, omnipresent bot didn’t seem to register with anyone.
The primary docking bay—the one that would receive the most traffic for the foreseeable future—bore her name in large, strangely glittering letters on the wall above the entryway to the rest of the space station. Below the sign, a ten-foot-tall statue of her stood, her hands on her hips, her chest thrust out grandly and her eyes boldly fixed skyward. Dr. Baarqua and Cog 2 waited her arrival at the base of the platform holding the giant Electra statue.
“My dear Captain Rex,” Cog 2 said, “what do you think of your docking bay?”
“It’s…super shiny,” Electra said. And it was. Between the glittering lights used to spell out her name and the statue, which appeared to be made entirely of highly polished chrome, the whole bay kind of twinkled.
“And the statue? We made it based on the exacting specifications of Trish ‘Treasure’ Miller, the mother of the new world,” Cog 2 said.
“Did you?” Electra examined the statue more closely. Knowing it had come from Treasure’s imagination made it far more interesting. “She definitely remembered me fondly.” From a purely objective point of view, the statue was gorgeous, not only because it was constructed of shiny chrome and crafted to perfection, but because it depicted a stunning, heroic woman of almost otherworldly beauty who Electra didn’t remotely recognize.
“Empirically speaking, she did not,” Dr. Baarqua said, clearing his throat. “The dimensions of your form were taken directly from scans when you first entered the station to deliver the Bort Pod. Treasure provided information regarding your behavior.”
Electra’s neck suddenly felt very warm. “Ah, I’ve never seen myself from this angle, I guess,” Electra said. It was true. Why would she know what she looked like when depicted in ten feet of chrome and put on a pedestal? All in all, she liked the statue more than the artist’s rendition of her on the magazine cover, even though both artists had attempted to capture a bold nature that Electra didn’t feel she embodied anymore, if she ever truly had.
“Would you like the tour of the grand spectacle you helped create?” Cog 2 asked.
“That’s what I’m here for.”
Cog 2 led Electra through the halls, followed closely by Dr. Baarqua and the Letterman shell. A handful of VIPs were already inside the museum sections, although none had made their way to the ‘Earth of the Future’ wing yet. Some stopped to gawk and whisper at Electra’s attendance, although none approached her—a much more subdued fan base than the throng on Station 111.
The older exhibits were little more than dusty rocks shaped like bones. Cog 2 assured her that they were fossils of giant beasts that once roamed the Earth. Over hundreds of millions of years, they’d evolved into birds, whatever those were. Electra only half paid attention. She wanted to see Treasure. She wanted to get her plan started. She didn’t care that ancient Chinese people ate with sticks or that Australian aboriginals played a tube-like instrument that sounded like an FTL engine cooling tube about to fail.
Elk antlers, feta cheese recipes, stone tools, Craftsman brand tools, the Three Stooges, a portrait of Wu Zetian, two-and-a-half sperm whale ribs… It was all a slapdash pile of junk. Electra began to understand why her contributions were valued so highly in comparison to what other people had brought. Two living, breathing humans compared to a scorched, bulging tin of Jiffy Pop and a square of orange shag carpet someone claimed came from the Playboy Mansion.
“This was the game of baseball,” Cog 2 said, at long last standing before a display that was actually kind of interesting.
A mannequin in a weird, white jumpsuit stood with a light wooden club, awaiting… Electra couldn’t even guess what he planned to hit with the club based on his peculiar stance. There were pads that looked like uncomfortable pillows, unwieldy leather gloves to turn fingers into a semi-rigid scoop and a lot of ‘innings’ that contained smaller numbers of ‘outings’. Most importantly, there was a vendor setting up to sell replica baseballs, baseball mitts, baseball caps and baseball bats.
“I don’t suppose I could get a cap and bat,” Electra said. “Maybe wear them through the visitor center.”
“Yes, yes, absolutely!” Cog 2 procured one of each and practically threw them at Electra.
Electra slid the cap on and held the bat in the same strange manner the mannequin from the display did. “How do I look?”
“Perfectly Earthling,” Dr. Baarqua said. “What was that delightfully bawdy phrase Bort graciously shared with us in regard to successful baseball execution?”
“Sock some dingers,” Cog 2 said.
“Yes, that is the one,” Dr. Baarqua said. “You appear perfectly equipped and arranged to ‘sock some dingers’.”
“If you say so,” Electra said. “They had baseball on Mars?”
“A variation of it,” Cog 2 said. “There is less than half the gravity of Earth on Mars, as you may know—perfect conditions for socking dingers, according to Bort. He really is the most charming man—his initial post-thawing outburst notwithstanding.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Electra said through a forced smile. Bort better not be working his charms on Treasure.
The tour continued—sombreros, Alpine skiing, sloth skulls, Spiderman bed sheets, 2004 MTV Movie Award winner for the category ‘Best Kiss’…Carmen Electra.
That stopped Electra dead in her tracks. A cardboard standee of a brunette woman in a red bathing suit was displayed behind glass. A screen beside the life-sized picture ran a loop of an ancient video reel of the same woman accepting an award of a black cup filled with small gold rocks fused together. The woman looked familiar—reflection-in-the-mirror familiar.
“My wondrous stars,” Dr. Baarqua said, taking a step back to bring both Carmen Electra and Electra Rex into view at the same time. “You’re something of a doppelganger for this highly decorated individual. A younger, more ordinary sister, perhaps.”
“The scientists knew about her, the ones who helped me transition,” Electra said. “I saw a picture on a screen once before a surgery. I was so woozy
from anesthesia that I thought I’d dreamed it. I think I’m named after her and…modeled, maybe?”
“So it would seem. I’m sorry to say we can’t tell you much more than what you’ve already seen,” Cog 2 said. “She’s something of a mystery since she came after the Encyclopedia Britannica fourteenth edition was published. We’ve learned she was a Baywatch slow-motion runner who excelled at kissing.”
“Who brought these items in?” Electra asked.
“The Glott and his team,” Cog 2 said. “What was his name, Doctor?”
“Admiral Sempa,” Dr. Baarqua said. “I believe he and Miss Rex are well-acquainted.”
“Admiral, huh?” Electra scoffed.
“Yes, he insisted we call him that after learning you were being referred to as Captain,” Dr. Baarqua said, and they both rolled their eyes.
“Regardless… I can tell you it took some doing to pry the large portrait of her from his grasp,” Cog 2 said. “It wasn’t on the list, although it was obviously an Earthling artifact, so we had to negotiate vigorously. He wasn’t overly eager to part with it until we brought out the proverbial mountain of units.”
“Were she not a decorated award winner for the quintessentially Earthling activity of kissing, I daresay we would not have been so determined to acquire these items,” Dr. Baarqua said.
“Speaking of kissing, should we show her the birds?”
“Oh my, let’s!”
Dr. Baarqua and Cog 2 rushed Electra past several other displays to show her a cage with two small creatures inside—red and green with some sort of soft plumage and hard beaks. They quirked their weird little heads around then hopped to one another to meet beaks in something of a kiss.
“Those are birds?” Electra asked, only vaguely recognizing them from her skim of the Bi-MARP documents. For some reason, she’d assumed they would be huge—starship-sized or larger.
“Yes, well, animatronic versions, and they’re kissing!” Cog 2 exclaimed.
“The big rock skulls from way back there… They turned into those?” Electra asked.
“Over tens of millions of years, yes!” Cog 2 nodded.
“What the fuck was going on with Earth?” Electra mused.
“We haven’t the foggiest!” Dr. Baarqua said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.” Being human was something Electra had only given a lot of thought to lately. After her Embarker flotilla had died off, she’d actively worked not to think about her species in terms of what it meant for her identity. Humans hadn’t been Earthlings, not in her mind, not for thousands of years. Humans were mostly Embarkers, and that she understood, full stop, no further need for consideration. She hadn’t enjoyed being an Embarker and never wanted to follow the lifestyle, but she’d understood it. Even while collecting for Bi-MARP, she’d worked not to think about the planet and long-dead civilizations that were the genesis of her species. The more she did learn of the humans who had inhabited Earth, the less she felt a connection to them. Real Earthlings were as alien to her as any species she’d ever met.
They passed through another archway into a new hall, a bleak corridor—the fall of humanity and the extinction of all life on Earth. These records came directly from the Chamber, no treasure hunters required. Electra could see the beginnings of the second purpose of Bi-MARP beyond economic stimulus. The cautionary tale was a harsh and powerful one.
Centuries of industrialization had led to a scarcity of drinkable water. Profiteers had stolen, hoarded, commoditized water, and wars had been fought over the life-giving resource. Temperatures on the planet had skyrocketed when human activity thickened the atmosphere, and sea levels had risen accordingly when the polar caps had melted. Life in the oceans had gone extinct from pollution and deoxygenating of the water shortly after. Breathable air had become scarce. Famines had followed droughts everywhere, resulting in starvation and violence. Brutal storms had decimated coastal cities. Wildfires had burned unchecked for years. Wealthier countries had fled the planet to set up colonies on the moon, then Mars, then orbiting Venus, eventually even the livable moons of Jupiter. They’d taken the last of the water and mineral resources when they’d left. Twenty billion people had remained on a dead rock with no food, no water, no way to escape. Without oceans covering most of the planet’s surface to cool, calm and press down against tectonic activities, fissures had grown across every fault line. The largest was eventually three times the size of California, right in the middle of the dried-up Pacific Ocean. That had been the killer, the final, merciful blow to a dying world. Sulfur in a thousand different chemical forms had exploded from beneath the Earth’s crust and the air itself had become an acid so corrosive that nothing could survive even minimal contact.
The full accounting of Earth’s demise left only one clear conclusion. Humans had destroyed it all. Electra circled the hall, reading everything she could find, wildly scanning every chart, graph and historical recreation with desperate eyes. She couldn’t find a single explanation for why the Earthlings had done it. The when, the how, the what, the where were all present, but nothing offered even a vague hypothesis as to why.
“They need to see this, Dr. Baarqua,” Electra whispered, tears welling up. This was the other goal of Bi-MARP, the warning sent to the inhabitants of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Don’t fuck up like the humans did. Don’t destroy your world. We won’t rebuild it, we won’t save you and we’ll tell everyone what you’ve done. Earth was the Chamber’s cautionary tale to all other species, and the Jun’Tar incompetence in repairing what humanity had destroyed was the hammer to drive the point home.
“The colony on Europa? Yes, I quite agree, however…”
“The Chamber doesn’t want them to.”
“They do not.”
Sadly, it made sense in the way many Chamber projects did. They couldn’t tell the humans of the colony because they wanted to see if they’d do it again. The Chamber wanted to know if humans were actually a redeemable species, if humanity held value to the spacefaring society beyond what the Appdurpins had given them.
“Do you know why? Not why the Chamber is being obtuse—I think I’ve figured that part out—but why Earthlings destroyed themselves?”
“Appdurpins have many theories,” Dr. Baarqua said. “The simple truth is we do not know. To ask me, personally, and not the entirety of my people, I would say the reasons were too numerous to make a proper accounting of them. All these reasons had one kernel of truth at the heart. Humans cannot conceive of large-scale concerns. Too much time, too much space, numbers too large, too many variables… Humans tend to shut down and return to focus only on the tiny details before them. These catastrophic events spanned generations across an entire planet. Grasping the enormity of the problem was something only a few could manage. When these special few attempted to share their hard-won insight, supported by decades of data, most humans couldn’t understand or didn’t want to believe and thus refused to see the truth.”
“You’re basically saying humans destroyed the planet because we’re fundamentally selfish, stupid and stubborn?” Electra asked.
“Essentially, although I padded that explanation to fill a few hundred pages in my dissertation,” Dr. Baarqua said.
“I can’t say I like the implications.”
“Nor did I, especially when I was invited to help establish the Europa Wildlife Preserve,” Dr. Baarqua said. “Thousands of years ago, my people failed to help yours and a rare, special planet died. When Bi-MARP began, it seemed that both humans and Appdurpins were given another chance, but, as you’ve obviously figured out, that was not the case—at least, not on Earth.”
“How do you think we’ll do on Europa?” Electra asked.
“It is my hope that neither you nor I will live long enough to know,” Dr. Baarqua said. “Such is the work we’ve begun.”
“This is a depressing-ass museum we built, Doc,” Electra said, forcing a chuckle.
“For Appdurpins and humans,
at any rate.”
At long last they came to the live mammals display. Unlike the room outlining the fall of humanity and all life on Earth, which was thorough, organized and complete, the living animals portion of the visitor center had a lot of empty space to grow into if anyone could find more critters to fill the slots. Two humans and a handful of baby green elephants comprised the entire exhibit.
Electra stopped first at the elephants, trying her best to be nonchalant. “You read the Encyclopedia entry,” she said. “You know those aren’t right.”
Cog 2 grumbled, “You were the one to sell us the sample, and you made no mention of the errors it contained while you were getting paid.”
“You know, now that I look at them, they’re really, really close,” Electra said, suddenly realizing her legal culpability if the display was pulled for inaccuracies.
“I think we can all agree that they’re more elephant than anything else in the galaxy,” Cog 2 said.
“Absolutely,” Electra concurred.
“Perfectly stated,” Dr. Baarqua concluded.
The tiny green elephants trumpeted at one another and bonked their heads against the walls.
At last they came to the crowning achievement, the seventy-billion-unit display—Trish Miller and Bort Thompson, a perfectly healthy mating pair of genuine humans, neither of whom was from Earth.
The habitat they occupied looked much like one of the lounges on Electra’s ship. The décor of the kitchen and living room appeared to be from the early 1960s, heavy on the linoleum, brass and bright wallpaper. Treasure wore a green house dress, belted high on the waist and short at the sleeves. Bort was clad in khakis, a sweater vest and loafers, his dark brown hair shellacked firmly to his head. They both looked miserable. Bort sat at the Formica dining room table, reading a long out-of-date newspaper, while Treasure leaned back against the checkerboard tile kitchen counter and whipped silverware at the ceiling, trying to get the forks and knives to stick. She was as beautiful as ever and Electra couldn’t help but press her hand to the glass and smile.
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