Déjà Vu (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Jorgensen smiles. My use of the word fuck is deliberate. I’m a provocateur, desperate to jar his thinking, wanting to arouse his sense of reason.

  I say, “The illusion you created was so real. Strands of loose hair would slip out from beneath my cap, but I couldn’t do anything about them until the end of the spacewalk.

  “Then there was the stiff casing of my upper suit. The water-cooled mesh beneath the protective layers. The pressure bearing down on my arms. The way my fingers protruded within my thick rubberized gloves. Even the smell. A slightly acrid stench, like that of burnt metal. It was the residual smell from the vacuum of space lingering within the airlock. It permeated our suits. We’d carry it with us when we went out on our spacewalks. I don’t know about you guys, but we’d breathe pure O2 at reduced pressure during our walks. Our air always smelled processed, never fresh. It had a greasy, oily tinge to it, particularly if the consumption rate changed during the walk. It reminded me of being in a foundry rather than a forest.

  “The first time I smelled that was on a training flight. We were conducting a spacewalk to replace a damaged solar panel on an infrared telescope. Orbital debris had punched a hole in the cell, killing the array.

  “On Earth, the smell of burnt metal is not normal. To me, it was almost like gunpowder residue, the kind that wafts through the air when you take a pistol out of a drawer. I was convinced my spacesuit had a short circuit. Something was burning, I was sure of it. Mission Control told me my telemetry was in the green. I didn’t panic. I wanted to, but I kept my cool. In my day, if you wanted to fly again, you couldn’t admit to nerves. I wasted no time replacing that panel. My buddy on the spacewalk wanted to take a moment to admire the blue marble beneath our boots, but me? Okay, I’ve seen it. Let’s go. Nothing was burning. It was the smell of space. Just a few microscopic atoms are all it takes for the nose to fire up. And me? I was convinced I was going to roast out there with a failed heating element.”

  Jorgensen laughs. His eyes light up. He’s enjoying hearing about the old days when spacewalking was a clumsy, cumbersome affair.

  “And you could still smell that?” he asks. “Even when we put you outside the Intrepid?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it wasn’t just a mental association?” he says. “You know, with your imagination kicking in?”

  “It was pretty damn pungent,” I reply.

  Jorgensen is intrigued by my recollections.

  “And why do you call your missions spacewalks? You’re not actually walking along the hull with magnets or anything, right?”

  “No. We’d float. The name’s a historic thing,” I say. “I think of it as space ballet being performed on fingertips.”

  He laughs, so I ask, “What do you call them?”

  Jorgensen says, “Eva,” which sounds more like a girl’s name than an abbreviation.

  “You mean, E.V.A,” I say, “Extra-Vehicular Activity.”

  “Oh, so it was originally an acronym?”

  I laugh, surprised by how such a notion has become lost in the mist of time. Terms like ‘vehicular’ probably sound Shakespearean to him.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know it was a simulation?” Jorgensen asks.

  “The Intrepid? I dunno. Honestly, I thought I was losing it. Jensen thought I’d gone insane. Even I thought I was mad. But then it occurred to me that the real crazies don’t know when they’ve lost their minds. They think they’re normal. They’re fine. It’s everyone else that’s loco, but I knew I wasn’t okay.

  “I had glimpses—fleeting memories. I could anticipate what was about to be said in a conversation. I could mouth the words of my fellow crew members verbatim. It was as though they were reciting a Christmas play or lines from their favorite movie.”

  Jorgensen’s eyes narrow. He clenches his lips, fascinated by my recollection.

  “I’m not sure how many iterations it took me to break free, but I had a dawning awareness none of it was real. It didn’t matter how real it seemed, I knew my senses were lying, which is insane. I still wonder if any of this is real.”

  He nods.

  I’ve got him right where I want him.

  I ask, “How do you know what’s real?”

  That’s it. That’s the money ball. I want to hear him talk himself out of everything he thinks he knows is true. I want to bring him around to the question of what happened to Dr. Sarah Everton.

  Jorgensen gestures to the lab.

  “You think this is fabricated?”

  “Why not?” I ask. “Everything else I’ve seen has been an illusion. The Intrepid. A bunch of Neanderthals hunting mammoths. Lions charging across the savannah. Kids standing on a street corner in Nebraska. Why not this as well?”

  “Because it’s not,” he says.

  I hoist myself further on the virtual table, allowing it to take my imaginary weight. I’m sitting on polished wood that isn’t actually there. To my mind, this makes my challenge to Jorgensen even more pertinent.

  “Prove it.”

  “I—I.”

  “Now you know how I felt on the Intrepid.”

  Jorgensen shakes his head. “This is reality.”

  I hold my holographic hands out, appealing to his sense of reason. “So is this—from my perspective.”

  “You think Erebus has been fabricated? You think you’re still trapped within some level of the macrocosm? That we’re all artificial constructs?”

  I smile, saying, “It’s possible. Tell me why it isn’t? Convince me.”

  Jorgensen shakes his finger at me. “Oh, no. The onus is on you. If you think this is an illusion, you have to tell me why I should believe you.”

  Our eyes lock. This is no longer a theoretical debate. I pick my words carefully, speaking with precision, knowing I’ll only get one shot at making my case. “Because you’re in danger. If they can erase Dr. Everton, they can erase you too.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t you get it? I’m a glitch. I’m a bug. I’m something they never anticipated, something they never expected. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t fit in. That’s why they got rid of her.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jorgensen cocks his head. After four millennia, body language still transcends mere words. He’s trying. He wants to understand. “Who are they?”

  My words are cold. “The creatures that inhabit this system.”

  The change in his posture is distinct. Jorgensen sits upright, no longer slouching. He gets it. Present tense. I’m not talking about being dissected among the rings of a gas giant thousands of years ago. This is happening now.

  He’s restless. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and pressing his hands together. His chin rests on his fingers. His eyes are locked on mine.

  “So you want me to believe that yesterday I met you along with some other researcher—this mysterious Dr. Everton.”

  “Sarah,” I say, trying to cut through the formality and trigger a sense of awareness in the dark recesses of his mind. I’m hoping to stir a faint memory.

  “Sarah,” he says, but his use of her name is a concession and not out of conviction. “And she’s been kidnapped by—an alien race no one has ever seen?”

  I match his pose and reply with words that cut through the air like a sword.

  “Erased. Not kidnapped. And this isn’t an alien species no one’s ever seen. I’ve seen them.”

  He shakes his head. “And somehow they erased all knowledge of her from my mind and the mind of every other person on Erebus? Not only Erebus but another eight inhabited colonies in this system? Three of which orbit Styx?”

  I have to admit, the scale of the deception I’m suggesting is colossal. Dr. Everton is real, or she was real within this particular simulation. If this is just one more layer in what Jorgensen calls the macrocosm, I am well and truly fucked. That I remember Dr. Everton and no one else does tells me I’m the wild card. I’m the one thing they can’t control.

  “Why not?” I say.
“You did the same thing to me every time you reset the simulation on the Intrepid, right? Why couldn’t they do the same thing to you?”

  “There’s a problem with your theory.”

  “What?”

  “Regardless of how many layers there are in a simulation, at some point, everything has to be grounded in reality. At some level, all this must be real. There’s a first floor in every building.”

  I point at the ground. “If this is it, where’s Dr. Everton?”

  “And you think, because she disappeared, I will too?”

  I nod. I’m ethereal. I’m nothing more than a ghost. I’m an electronic projection, a holographic representation of a human. I’ve been recreated from scraps of brain matter hanging from beneath the shattered fragment of an ancient skull. I’m helpless. Frustrated. “Don’t you see? I don’t fit the script.”

  “But you haven’t seen any of this before, right?” Jorgensen says. “Back there on the Intrepid, you knew something was wrong because of déjà vu. You’d lived through it already. But here, everything’s new. Everything’s fresh. It’s unfolding for the first time, right?”

  Reluctantly, I nod.

  Jorgensen presses his point home with the same kind of logic I saw as the granddaughter of a US Senator. My granddad had the misplaced conviction that willpower alone could sway reality. A stellar argument might shift voters, but it doesn’t change facts. Like my gee-pappy, Jorgensen seems to think it will.

  “This is real,” he says. “Reality flows in one direction. No do-overs. This life is all we get. One shot.”

  “And yet, here I am,” I reply. “With a second chance.”

  He breathes deeply, weighing his words with care. “You… You exhibit all the characteristics of life. You’re sentient. You’re self-aware. You’re an independent consciousness. But to be honest, you could be a glitch in a silicon bio-connector. You could be an artifact with reflex responses that are interpolated and amplified by machine algorithms to—”

  “I—am—alive.”

  Jorgensen hangs his head.

  “Please,” I say. “Be careful.”

  I feel silly speaking like this, but I have to. I’m compelled to warn him. That probably says more about me than the danger I think he’s in, but I have to speak my mind.

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” Jorgensen says.

  How I hope he’s right. I don’t know what happened to Dr. Everton, but she was real. Oh, the irony! Here am I, a hologram, trying to convince someone their research partner is both real and missing. Dr. Everton is missing from everything. She’s been erased from memories, electronic records, and physical evidence—from everything except a four thousand year old scrap of long-dead neurons.

  Jorgensen taps on a virtual keyboard. “I’m uploading my personal contact details. You’ve got a direct line to me. Any time, night or day, you can get hold of me, okay? Your call will go straight to my neural net as an emergency message. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll help you through this. We’ll make it out the other side, okay?”

  My eyes cast down at the polished floor. As much as I appreciate his kindness, he can’t bring himself to believe what I’m saying. I know what’s going to happen. He’s next. Where will that leave me? Answerable only to Rousseau? Someone I’ve never met in person and only ever pissed off. Great. That’s just great, but what else can I do?

  “Try to get some sleep,” he says.

  Jorgensen’s polite, but he doesn’t believe me. Why should he? From his perspective, I’m an oddity. I’m the one that doesn’t exist, and I’m blathering about someone else that doesn’t exist. He’s resurrected a rambling psychotic astronaut from what borders on prehistory. Given the fragile state of my necrotic brain tissue, he has every reason to think I’ve fabricated the mysterious Dr. Everton. He probably thinks I’m confusing memories. For that matter, perhaps he’s right. Why should I believe myself?

  Jorgensen pauses by the door.

  “Good night.”

  As his comment was delayed, I’m guessing whatever electrical implant he’s carrying inside his head told him that was an appropriate parting phrase from my time. As well-meaning as he is, it came across hollow.

  I can’t even begin to pretend that’s true. It’s not good night or goodbye. It’s not even farewell. Jorgensen is going to die. And what will happen to me? I’m ethereal. My life is at the mercy of this world. I say the only thing I can.

  “Bye.”

  Am I mad? Crazy? It’s a distinct possibility. After all, I don’t have much in the way of grey matter. I could be insane. As much as I don’t want to consider the possibility, I could have fabricated my own reality. This could all be a paranoid delusion.

  Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is probably correct. What’s more likely? That someone has been erased from reality by fictitious aliens no one has seen in over four thousand years? Or that the remaining fragment of an ancient, damaged brain is suffering from hallucinations?

  Bubbles

  The lights in the cleanroom dim. I could turn on my virtual light, but my mood says otherwise. No lights tonight. Darkness is my companion. Starlight drifts in through the narrow windows high overhead.

  I pace the floor. There’s something therapeutic about moving—exercising these virtual muscles a little. I want to feel real, even if just for a moment.

  I walk up to one of the spacecraft. They’re this era’s sports car, for lack of a better term. I’d buy one. There’s a bubble cockpit designed for three people sitting abreast. Chrome-plated five-point harnesses sit retracted against plush leather seats.

  The controls look quite simple compared to what we had on the Intrepid. The joystick must be some kind of nostalgic, retro-component. I imagine most interfaces these days are like Jorgensen’s virtual keyboard or his neural implant. Perhaps pilots like a little force-feedback to give them a better feel for the handling characteristics of their craft. Given the deceptive way distances and speeds play on the mind in space, I suspect there are some serious smarts under the hood. With orbital velocities in the tens of thousands of kilometers an hour around a rock like this, no one could fly by the seat of their pants. It’s probably a vanity thing. Let them think they’re pulling a Buck Rogers, but keep a whole bunch of safety measures in reserve.

  Behind the cab of the spacecraft, chrome thrusters reflect the starlight. These machined engine bells wouldn’t be out of place in my time, although I hate to think about how fast they’d burn through their fuel. The electronics, gases, and fuel tanks must be stored under the polished hood. I can’t imagine the tanks hold much. Certainly not enough to escape a gravity well, not unless some serious gains have been made in terms of chemical engineering.

  Although the thrusters are gimbaled, I doubt they’re old-school chemical rockets like those we used to get into orbit. There’s just not enough room for fuel, not unless spacecraft like this carry an absurdly large external tank like the Space Shuttle. In my day, the propellant mass fraction was around 82%. More than three-quarters of our launch mass never made it into orbit, being just the fuel we’d burn to get there. The ratios here, though, look closer to that of the old combustion engine cars. Damn, it must take some sweet rocket science to pull that off.

  The overall shape of the craft is reminiscent of a vintage Corvette Stingray. Smooth curves, gentle arcs, long stripes. Given the lack of cabin space, it must be designed for short-range trips to… I dunno, the shops? Or wherever they go in this era? Are there shopping malls on this moon? Hah. Now there’s a thought! Take me shopping, Jorgensen.

  As impressive as the craft is, it’s horribly impractical, but since when has that stopped people from spending their money on dumb shit? That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation. I bought enough dumb shit in my time to fill a storage unit back on Earth. Damn, that was a waste of money. I pretend to run my finger along the sleek lines of the craft, hovering barely a quarter of an inch from the smooth metal. Flying this mu
st be like driving a Lamborghini. Oh, I’d love to fly one of these things if I could only touch something solid.

  I keep walking, wanting to see how far I can go. On reaching the edge of my invisible prison, my image shakes slightly and loses focus. Damn it. I don’t care. I have to press on. I step forward, but it’s as though I’m wading through the ocean, with waves pushing against me. I struggle on. I’m hit with what feels like a wall of water rushing over me, but I’m stubborn. I stride forward through the torrent cascading from what feels like a firehose. With one more step, I rebound. It’s as though I was shot out of a cannon. I blink, and I’m back on the other side of my bed, over by the workbench. It’s as though I went west, circled the planet, and returned from the east.

  “Nasty.”

  I sit on the end of the bed beside the mini-bar fridge. A tiny internal light comes on as I open the door. There are chocolates on one of the shelves. They taste like the real thing. Too sweet.

  Can holograms get fat? I dunno. I leave the wrappers lying on the floor beside the fridge.

  Ugh, virtual chocolates will probably give me a not-so-virtual bellyache. Sheesh. Can’t an illusion get a break?

  I wanted to scan the Veritas network for clues about what’s happening here. I had the best of intentions. I was going to scour the modern equivalent of the internet to learn about the history of this place. Uncover secrets. Solve the mystery. Be the hero. But what mystery? That the intuition arising from a torn fragment of brain tissue revived from ancient times can’t be trusted?

  What would someone in my age think if we resurrected a caveman and he started telling us we were wrong about relativity? Yeah. That. That’s me.

  I feel awful. I climb into bed, but not because I’m tired. I want the day to come to an end. Tomorrow, I’ll start anew. Everything will be better in the morning. Or will it? I guess I’ll find out. Tomorrow, Jorgensen will wake me, and I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. Or will he be erased from this age? Am I going to be abandoned once more, left alone on a strange moon a bazillion miles from Earth?