by Ava Paris
Contents
Title
Prologe
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Choosing Cleo
Ava Paris
Copyright © 2021 Ava Paris
All rights reserved.
Prologe
My home would is an amazing place. We have so much to be proud of in the place we are lucky enough to still live. A big part of what I am proud of though is the work done by our people. We have done so much work to get where we are, and it shows. Not all of that work was easy, and not all of that work was done really knowing exactly what would come of it. Sometimes my people worked towards outcomes they didn’t even know existed, or that they didn’t expect. Not fully, when things began. When the work really began, we were just moving towards progress. Just taking one step in front of another to make things happen.
It is easy when you are in the middle of something, when you are too close to it, to forget the bigger picture. To lose sight of what is really going on inside and all around you.
On home world, it is believed that all technological societies eventually cause their own downfall. We have discovered this through our own near extinction, then through the research done by teams like my own into other highly technological and intelligent species that often are the cause of their own downfall. Sometimes though like what happened to us, other societies experience a near miss. A time when things could have fallen apart but didn’t. Often because of action taken by that society at the eleventh hour to avoid disaster.
Although the work I do is understandably difficult when one considers we are studying the downfall of civilizations, it is also work that I am so close to that I almost don’t recognize its significance until I take a step back and look at my findings. Often it is only when I am discussing my findings with other scientists at big conferences that I appreciate the magnitude of my work.
My team is far from home, researching one particular species who are vulnerable to this sort of auto-extinction. We are one of many teams who are conducting similar studies. The species we are studying are a species whose advancement is often not sustainable for their population size and environmental impact. They keep the same attitudes that made them colonize every land mass on their planet - that resources are limitless and everywhere, ripe for the taking - instead of developing newer and more sustainable attitudes in line with their current understanding of their impacts on their planet. New attitudes in line with their current realities are often nowhere to be seen, as they subscribe to older ways of thinking that make so little sense to me that it hurts my brain to think of it.
Due to a variety of factors though, even though it boggles my mind that they think this way, it makes perfect sense that they do when we examine their physiology and societal arrangements.
When I am being kind and understanding to this species - which sometimes doesn’t happen as often as it should - I also recognize how this mistake is also one that can be understood by anyone who has ever made an error in judgment. This mistake or error in judgment though sometimes has dire and tragic consequences for not just the species we are here to study, but every species currently living on this planet, or that could ever live on this planet.
As a scientist who works in this field, I know that there are as many ways for a species to wipe themselves out as there are intelligent, technologically advanced enough species to be wiped out.
That being said though, the species I am studying has really caught my heart in a way that I would never have expected them to. This one species who hold a serious special interest. I think in part at least because their story is so like our own. They feel like a distant cousin sometimes.
Currently, my species is learning about how to keep living in a sustainable manner after we almost wiped out our planet and killed ourselves. We put plenty of work into discovering more and more sustainable ways to live all the time.
I guess this ongoing advancement of my own species feels similar in some ways to this species taking its first steps into a sustainable future.
This species is of particular interest because they are on the precipice of creating a world that is sustainable. They are starting to make great choices, and starting to move in the right direction. Watching them is like watching my own species decisions, but through the eyes of someone who already knows many of the outcomes, something that humans do not yet know. This species is too close to things to understand the outcomes just yet.
I for one have been quite obsessed with these humans. I think though this goes beyond what is real and reasonable and logical, although I would never tell anyone that. I would talk about all the logical reasons I have said so far. I wouldn’t talk about how humans have so much diversity in their many cultures and societal structures. They are all the same but for the different ways they dress and behave. The differences in appearance are minor and are literally skin deep - there is little genetic difference between humans whose ancestors are from different continents on their world - that holds a special beauty to me. That they are the same yet can look quite different. There is so much beauty in all of the human experiences that I almost cannot fathom what humans would be like if they didn’t have this different-yet-the-sameness about them.
I am an avid collector of human artifacts, only taking those which have been discarded by the species. I also take many photographs of individual humans while we go about our studies. Although other members of my team are most interested in those with power - captains of industry, politicians - I am more interested in those humans who should have more of a say in the running of humans societies but don’t - members of tribes who have learned to live in harmony with nature, scientists, mothers - my team sometimes find my view of this species and obsession with them a little strange. No-one ever says anything though. They just smile and tell me to calm down when I am getting too excited over an old record I recovered or the particularly colorful clothes of hill tribes in Asia or desert tribes in Africa.
It seems only suiting that someone who is as obsessed with humans as I am managed to be on the mission where we wound up stranded on earth.
The day the solar flare knocked out most of our systems was one like any other. I had been in my lab reviewing some reports filed by my assistant the day before. I was getting ready for a trip down to earth where we would sit in on a conference human scientists were having on some new green energy. Green energy was a big deal because of the problems humans were creating on earth.
The planet humans lived on - a planet they called earth, but which we referred to by a much less attractive name in our data sets - had been through an extended period of climate stability which the humans had used to their benefit. Humans had used the stable climate and predictable seasons to farm the land and raise animals to eat. Humans were an amazing generalist who could live anywhere on the planet where there was land and in things they called boats and ships on their ocean. They knew how to farm and that was what made their populations stable. Then, over the course of a few hundred years they went through a technological revolution which they called th
e industrial revolution. This was where their populations shifted from country side with farms to cities with infrastructure. They bought the food in and learned to mass produce everything they needed.
Although this was something to be proud of, their actions had unintended consequences when they upset the delicate balance of greenhouse gasses in their atmosphere. These gases meant the planets formerly stable climate had been disturbed and the planet was heating up at a rate which would mean the whole thing would be uninhabitable within my own lifetime.
Humans were aware of what was going on, and scientists were working to find solutions to the problems, however, for a variety of reasons, the changes humans needed to make were being implemented far too slowly.
When we started studying humans thirty of forty earth years ago, they were just beginning to notice this and discuss it. To their credit, they woke up to their impacts on their planet faster than many other species - including my own - and were taking measures to mitigate the damage.
I was quietly proud of them. I was also quietly cheering them on, every time I came back to their planet and could see their progress from the last time we were here.
Although I did really appreciate humans for being such a wonderful species, mostly I liked them for reasons that didn’t have much to do with our research. I liked them for who they were, not for what they were doing. What they were doing - and the impact this moving forward was having, as slow as it felt sometimes - meant I was allowed to be happy with them. I was allowed to make a big deal about how great they were.
On the morning of the solar flare, I had been looking forward to the trip into the field where I would get to pick up some earth music to listen to on the long trip back to the home world with our data. Of course, the field trip had been to collect data on the humans, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t collect cultural artifacts too. I reminded myself that I was there for work and not to seem too excited, even as I was. Of course that data would be data we would of course share with our own scientific community in conferences and papers. Of course I was here for science, and not for love.
The best laid plans though never quite work out I discovered as the power started to flicker, then I felt everything shift. I don’t remember how we fell out of orbit as I must have hit my head when we lost gravity and lost consciousness, but the skill and hard work of our pilot meant that we landed on earth safely. All of our crew survived, although there were plenty of injuries.
We survived, but we didn’t have much of a ship anymore. While assessing the damage, we discovered that we would never be able to leave the atmosphere, we had no communications with the home world and much of our food ration had been destroyed in our crash landing.
Our captain told us she didn’t see how we could stay here as we were in the middle of a desert. She had us transform our appearance to look more like humans - which mostly involved shrinking and a change of skin tone, we changed from eight foot tall, bright blue with scales to different human ethnicities - and we were told we had to split up and take different missions in order to regain our communications and get ourselves and our technology back to the home world in one piece.
It was important that we got not only ourselves but our technology home, as we all sign an oath when we go on these missions to ensure we have as little impact on the inhabitants and the worlds we study. We are there to observe, not to change the course of other species histories. Also, the species we are studying have enough problems without us adding alien space craft and alien technology into the mix.
If I am honest, a part of me may have been quietly excited when things went a little wrong, so I could do a few things I had always wanted to do but couldn’t because of the oath. I wasn’t going to break my oath, but I could bend it a little I figured.
Crash landing on a planet with no way of leaving or even communicating what had happened does change things, if only a little.
We split up according to our skills and made a plan of action to get everything back on track, our captain taking everyones point of view into account before making the final decision and assigning everyone a task.
Some people were tasked with guarding the ship and they were told they could keep the rations and potentially travel to get food if they needed to, others were given specific tasks where we would need to go into human societies. Mine was to collect data as I normally would, only now I had a lot more time and freedom and I knew the expectation would be to collect more data than I normally would have. The captain was sure that we would be able to get everything up and running in time, and was aware of how crucial this information was to our scientists. So she was the first one to point out that we should use every moment we had while we were stuck here for the benefit of scientific knowledge and advancement.
When I was told that we were still prioritizing our initial mission but that I would be in the field for an extended period - something that never would have happened under normal circumstances - I was happier than I wanted any of them to know. I did as I was instructed, getting myself transformed to look more human I changed my mind multiple times on what ethnicity I wanted to be - I had chosen a bunch of different ethnicities and looks over the field trips, and had a few that I liked - there were just too many choices when it came to the diversity of human appearance. In the end I settled for looking kind of Nordic. I figured I would tell whoever I came across that I was Swedish, as it is more comfortable to retain some of our height if we can long-term, as humans are significantly shorter than my species and although these tricks to change the way we look generally are just holograms, the change in hight is a little more complicated and we can wind up feeling very uncomfortable if we have to take the form of small children, for example. As losing height just isn’t comfortable when it is done in an extreme way or over an extended period of time.
The bigger you are, the more comfortable you are. Especially when you know you will have to take this form for an extended period of time like I knew I would have to. When I chose my appearance, I was thinking long term. Even though I could change up my look and ‘be a different person’, I knew that humans were very into relationships, and sometimes it took them a long time to open up to new humans.
When you’re a species that take some time to open up, and I am someone who wants you to open up about things that you might not admit to the world but would admit to someone you have a one-on-one relationship with, picking just one look that I can sustain is important.
So there I was, the strong Nordic man. I was sure I wouldn’t fit in at many scientific conferences. Human scientists were always much smaller and darker than my current appearance, but I could make it work. I wouldn’t really have a choice but to make it work when I was about to head off into the world for an indefinite amount of time.
I assessed the maps of where we had landed. We had landed in the Australian desert. I knew other scientists would find this place fascinating as Australia is a very old continent where even the dirt is a fossil, but there were other things that interested me, and those things were in the city where the humans were.
With some local currency that I likely wouldn’t be using but which we had created for me in an old duffel bag, I headed towards the nearest city with a plan. I would find my way to one of the countries elite universities where I would get in touch with the countries top scientists.
I knew Australia had some of the best climate scientists in the world. Even though I couldn’t attend conferences or leave this large island just yet without the permission of the captain - which may or may not come - I could at least do a little research and actually be among the populations I found so interesting.
As I traveled to the university, assuming the role of a professor visiting from Sweden aided of course by hacking a lot of computers and changing a couple of peoples memories, I would find myself surrounded by the continents best and brightest, and there was one scientist in particular whose work was of a special interest to me. I was looking forward to meeting her, an
d maybe nudging her in the direction she should be moving with her work. That was if she needed a nudge at all. Reflecting on humans ability to keep things to themselves, I wondered if maybe she had figured things out herself and just hadn’t written them down yet.
This would be a fascinating journey, one where I would get to see humans in a way I had never had a chance to see them before, up close and personal.
Never has a space crash wound up so good for anyone I thought as I smiled to myself and went about my first day as a human.
Chapter One
That damn alarm again I thought as I reached for the snooze button and rolled over, pulling my sheets over my head as I went. It wasn’t to hide the light as it was early enough that it wasn’t light outside yet. Melbourne winter, no thank you! I thought as I came to, assessing in my mind what I would need to get done that day.
I needed to get up and ready for work. I had a big day of classes followed by a field trip with some students who were working on honors projects at some wetlands near campus. I had trained in ecology, climate science, and biology at a prestigious university famous for their environmental science program. This was something on my resume that meant I would get all the potential honors students knocking down my door every year wanting to do projects with me. That and my work on climate gaining more attention of late. Of course, this was to be expected considering the current interest in climate science from non-scientists. Even though all of my hard work meant I could choose any students I liked, I had my preferences based on my own experience. I mostly chose those who had the best academic merit at the start but over time I had learned how to choose students who would likely succeed and give me the least amount of worry and stress. Nobody needs extra worry and stress, least of all me as I chased my own career goals.
These students wanted to work near campus because they didn’t drive and were essentially academic. I wondered why they had chosen a project that was so field work rich considering they preferred papers and books but knew better than to ask too many questions. They were good students and were doing well. If they did well, I did well. I was happy to give them as much space as they needed to compare their work to others as they read every single scientific paper and report that was even remotely relevant if it meant that their overall honors thesis would be a stand out among their peers.
