Déjà Vu (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  The humanoid in front of me lowers his head, bowing as he closes his eyes. He’s acknowledging my thoughts.

  Looking at his thin frame and frail bones, I suspect this species settled here because the gravity and perhaps even the air pressure on Earth would crush them.

  I’m at a loss. I have set off a chain of events that has rippled down through quarter of a million years. My actions affected the very means in which humanity continued to evolve.

  “We were trapped,” the humanoid says.

  Erebus was a frozen hell. Without their tech, life would have been hard. Cruel. The majority of each successive generation must have died. Between a running series of battles with the AI, they fought just to survive on that cold moon. They must have been able to maintain some tech as they needed air, warmth, water, and food, but it would have been rudimentary. From their appearance, they lost the tech that gave Gal and Pretty Boy artificial gravity. Their dependence on the Veritas left them vulnerable to the AI. Without their advanced technology and with the loss of access to knowledge, they must have struggled. Hundreds, possibly thousands of generations passed before they reclaimed all that had been stolen from them. By then, natural selection held sway over this emerging species of hominid.

  “The aliens,” I say, unable to complete my sentence, hoping he understands the reference.

  “The parasites.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Xerxes destroyed them.”

  So my fight wasn’t in vain, but the AI continued its stranglehold.

  “And the machines?” I ask. “The war against the AI among the stars?”

  “Even now, we fight them.”

  My mind is alive with possibilities. I’m in awe of what this species has been through. Warring civilizations on Earth have risen and fallen in a fraction of this time. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the British, the Americans, the Hindus, the Islamists, and the Chinese—they all had their time bathing in the Sun only to fall with dusk. As crazy as it may seem to me, Homo erebus has had even more time to develop than modern humans. They’ve cycled through dozens of cultures and civilizations. They would have had their Caesar and their Aristotle, their al-Khowarizmi and Copernicus. What of Shakespeare and Mozart? Did they have a Newton and Einstein? Or Rembrandt and Monet? With quarter of a million years, they’ve had them all ten times over. And now, Homo erebus has resurrected Homo sapiens out of compassion.

  “You’re giving us a chance,” I say. “You’re rewinding the clock, resetting your parent species.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re hurting.” In my mind, I’m thinking about the lame girl on the bridge. Whether he can sense that or not, I’m unsure, but I say, “Like you, we need technology to avoid heartache. We need you as a partner. Without you, our species is doomed to suffer as you did on Erebus. It took all we had to get just one person to stand here before you. Those people down there, they’ve been working on this for decades, just for the chance to ask for help.”

  Although there’s no response, I get the impression it’s because I’m not just talking to those gathered here before us. I suspect their leaders are in a back room somewhere, listening in, debating my points as they unfold.

  “There are over a thousand species of bats on Earth. Twenty thousand species of butterfly. Almost half a million species of beetle.”

  I’m not sure how well my point is communicating, but I’m a biologist. Species are kinda my thing. I hope they can relate to my rambling argument.

  “But there’s only one species of hominid in existence. Or there was only one until you showed us we’re not alone. Please—don’t abandon us. We need you.”

  The humanoid in front of me crouches, moving closer. Fingers touch my hair, running around under my jaw, lingering on my neck. I look into his eyes as tears roll down my cheeks. Telepathy be damned—he must be able to see the pain in my soul.

  “We need each other,” he says, catching a teardrop with the tip of his thumb. “If we are to face the great unknown, it should be together.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You’ve been alone for so long. Far longer than us.”

  “We were denied life on Earth,” he says. “But it is our ancestral home.”

  I touch at his fingers as they rest on my cheek. “We’re family.”

  Even though the air is cool, his hand is warm. He withdraws his fingers, saying, “We cannot survive on your world, but you can survive on ours.”

  I say, “We should work together. We could leverage the best of both species.”

  “We should.”

  “Perhaps together, we can defeat the AI. Not now, but given time. We could be allies in this grand fight.”

  He nods. “We will establish a gateway and allow your kind to pass between us. It seems there is much we can learn from each other.”

  “Thank you,” I say, knowing how excited Adrian and Victory will be to hear this.

  It’s strange, but I’m at home here in the darkness. Perhaps it’s the telepathic link. Maybe it’s something more, the sense of camaraderie with another intelligent star-faring species.

  After dying on the Intrepid, I fell through various worlds in the macrocosm. I fought aliens on Erebus. I was thrust back on Earth hundreds of thousands of years later, but I never felt at home. Before our launch on the Saturn V, Adrian and I lazed around on the beach. Even with the Sun warming my back, I was anxious. I don’t think it was the prospect of dying during our launch that upset me, it was that I didn’t belong. I was an imposter. Now, with Mac and Jansen beside me once again, I feel strangely at peace. I’m standing in a laboratory with members of another hominid species, but I feel welcome.

  Perhaps this is my destiny. I thought my future lay among the stars, but it’s on Earth’s Moon where I’ve found meaning. Rather than constantly bouncing between planets, it’s here I’ve found a new start.

  How did I get here? Me, personally?

  Out of a hundred billion people that have been born and died, why have I survived? I guess, it’s because I was on the Intrepid, but even though Mac and Jansen also made it, five of our crew mates didn’t. No one from the Constellation survived. Oh, but for the whim of the NASA flight selection committee, I could have been assigned to that later flight, and then what? Who would have been here in my stead? Anyone? Or would the fragile chain of events that led to our preservation have been broken?

  I’ve been lucky beyond belief.

  I feel a debt to the past.

  I have the privilege of living in an age beyond anything any of my peers could have ever imagined. For the first time, I’m excited about what lies ahead. I’m looking forward rather than at the past.

  For me, there’s no more déjà vu.

  The End of the Beginning

  Afterword

  Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.

  Writing is a marathon. What for you has been a journey of several hours has, for me, been a labor of love over almost five years. If you’ve enjoyed this story, please tell a friend and leave a review online.

  Déjà Vu is a tribute to H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. It was the first science fiction novel I read that dealt with deep time. Like Jules Verne before him, H.G. Wells saw beyond the confines of his own life and the infancy of the industrial age. He understood that we see our lives in a microcosm. It’s hard to see beyond the present. For us, it’s as though now is all that ever has been or ever will be. The truth is our world is in a constant state of flux. We are chained to a brief moment within the vastness of deep time.

  As astonishing as it is to consider the evolution of life on Earth over 3.8 billion years, we rarely stop to think about what’s still to come. From our perspective, it’s as though evolution has stopped, but it hasn’t. The civilization of Homo sapiens is but a blip on the radar. H.G. Wells wrote about the Eloi and the Morlocks emerging millions of years after our civilization had fallen. Inspired by that, I wanted to write a story that explored the deep future. I wanted to challenge our
assumptions about the permanence of now. Fiction is make-believe. None of this will come true, but a story like this gets us to stop and consider how our lives are caught midstream.

  “Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.” — Carl Sagan.

  Capturing the essence of our mayfly existence in a story is no easy feat. We have such a poor appreciation of evolutionary time. Roughly half of all Americans believe humans were created in the last 10,000 years. Our ability to perceive anything beyond the single day described by Carl Sagan is sorely limited. Science has opened our eyes to the existence of deep time, but too many choose to turn away.

  Déjà Vu is based on a research paper entitled A Paleoneurohistological Study of 3,000-Year-Old Mummified Brain Tissue from the Mediterranean Bronze Age. This paper examined naturally mummified brain tissue in anaerobic conditions (from people buried in a bog). Remarkably, individual neurons could still be detected thousands of years later!

  Déjà Vu was written based on the conceit that—if we can do this today, what will science be capable of tomorrow? What would happen if an astronaut was freeze-dried in space? Could they be revived once science advances? What would they experience in the deep future? How wild would their journey be?

  Making contact with intelligent extraterrestrials is a hallmark of sci-fi and genuine science. At the moment, the distances involved in interstellar flight are insurmountable for us mayfly humans.

  The social, technological, and biological differences between us and any aliens we encounter would be vast. Even on Earth, intelligent creatures rarely communicate beyond their own species. We might talk to cats and dogs, but our words carry limited meaning. They’re often not interpreted as we intend.

  Our evolutionary pedigree diverged from that of other intelligent beings on Earth millions to hundreds of millions of years ago. We’re unable to communicate with intelligent, caring species such as octopus, cuttlefish and corvids. Imagine the immense void that will lie between us and an alien race such as the one encountered in this story. The evolutionary difference would be measured in billions of years!

  Déjà Vu is also a tribute to NASA’s Moon Shot. I love the Apollo missions. To me, they’re one of the defining moments in human history. They’re on par with the building of the pyramids and the invention of the printing press. People often lament that we haven’t been back to the Moon since the 60s/70s, but this fails to recognize (a) the astonishing achievements of other programs like Voyager, Hubble, Cassini, etc, that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and (b) that Apollo was decades ahead of its time. NASA got to the Moon with slide rules and duct tape! That we haven’t returned is a testimony to just how astonishingly difficult it was to achieve in the sixties.

  The timeline covered in this story is convoluted, so here’s a brief overview.

  2132 AD: The Intrepid launches for Procyon Alpha A, but the ship is destroyed shortly after arriving in the system.

  2147 AD: The Constellation explodes in orbit, killing billions and decimating Earth.

  3902 AD: It takes almost two thousand years for humanity to regain its social, technological and environmental losses.

  4300 AD: Humans begin colonizing planets around other stars.

  5086 AD / 3177 ME: Humans settle in Procyon Alpha A. Over the next thousand years, the AI war rages and the inhabitants of the system find themselves cut off.

  6013 AD / 4044 ME: Jessica Rowe is revived on the moon Erebus from a scrap of brain matter found among the rings of a gas giant.

  This is where the story begins with Jess in a computer simulation.

  Jess exposes the inhabited worlds and moons of the Procyon Alpha A system as a wildlife reserve for humanity. The artificial intelligence that waged war against humans teamed up with an alien species to act as zoo keepers.

  ~250,000 AD: After dying a second time, Jess is revived by an advanced species that evolved from Homo sapiens. From her perspective, she’s traveled forward through time but without the aid of a time machine.

  As with all of my novels, there’s a host of background research supporting various points. Some of the details I thought you’d enjoy are:

  • Our understanding of the planetary system around nearby stars is still developing. Proxima Centauri appears to have a gas giant similar to Neptune. This novel imagined a gas giant named Styx—orbiting at 1.5 AU—slightly closer than Mars is to the Sun

  • Gal-san Kushim is one of the oldest surviving names in history. It comes from Sumerian cuneiform records dated at 3200 BC. I thought it would be fun to have it as a name in the deep future.

  • I’ve drawn a lot of information in this novel from Amy Shira Teitel and her YouTube channel The Vintage Space. Amy is also the author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA.

  • If you’re on Twitter and want to learn more about Apollo, be sure to check out Gavin Price and Chasing the Moon.

  • Spaceflight is difficult. As an example, 25 of the first 40 missions to Mars ended in failure. Over time, this ratio has dropped, but the difficulty of spaceflight shouldn’t be underestimated.

  • In excess of a hundred billion people have lived on Earth—and that’s only if you start counting from 50,000 BC. If we consider the rise of Homo sapiens occurring roughly three to four hundred thousand years ago, that figure is definitely low. You and I are just two out of an astonishing number of conscious, intelligent hominids that have had the privilege of life on Earth. We’re utterly and entirely improbable—and yet here we are! That we should have the opportunity to reflect on the magnificence of the universe and our humble place within the cosmos is an honor.

  • Due to the early cancellation of the Apollo Program, there really are five unused “Moon ready” LEMs (Lunar Excursion Modules) left over from the 1960s. They’re in various museums around the US. Whether these could be refurbished is debatable, but they have been preserved for posterity. I felt it was only fitting that they be put to good use a few hundred thousand years into the future.

  • When it came to the Apollo LEM simulator and the lunar landing, there were a host of resources to draw upon online. In particular, a simulation based on the metrics from Apollo 11, retracing the landing in meticulous detail. If you want to try, there’s even an online simulator. Jared Owen has a three-part animation looking at the various phases of an Apollo flight. It’s worth watching if you’re interested in the mechanics of the journey.

  • The lunar spacecraft in this novel uses rope core memory, which was on the original Apollo missions. Rather than having a computer program on a hard drive, it was a woven strand of wire ducking in and out of a series of tiny magnets. By our standards, it was absurdly primitive. It could barely hold a program, but it worked flawlessly.

  • The technical specifications for the full-stack of the Saturn V are available online. They’re surprisingly easy to read, with hand-drawn schematics.

  • The in-flight timings used in this novel are based on the flight of Apollo 11.

  • The Saturn V weight at liftoff was 6,220,700 pounds. By the time the third stage S-IVB separated, only 67,100 pounds went on to lunar orbit. The Command, Service, and Lunar Modules accounted for just 1% of the initial launch weight!

  • When Neil and Buzz descended to the Moon they passed through 30,000 feet faster than a speeding bullet. At that altitude, their velocity was 2,000 feet per second. Although most of that velocity was sideways, they were hurtling toward the Moon at a rate that would see them crash within minutes if the landing was unsuccessful.

  • As Scott Manley notes, fuel sloshing arou
nd in the tanks caused the LEM to sway back and forth as it descended to the Moon. That would have been distinctly unsettling for the pilots.

  • The Apollo Command Modules really were coated in a protective layer of insulation that appears sapphire blue. Later in the build process, a reflective silver layer was added to the spacecraft.

  • The spacewalk along the Service Module is loosely based on Ken Mattingly’s spacewalk during Apollo 16. I also drew on Ron Evans EVA to retrieve data cassettes from the SIMbay of Apollo 17.

  • If you’re interested in donning and doffing an Apollo-era spacesuit, the Air & Space Museum has a great article on the process.

  • The powered descent to the lunar surface is based on the NASA Apollo 11 final report and a minute-by-minute guide to the Apollo 11 landing.

  If you’re interested in learning more, you can watch the Apollo 11 lunar landing unfold in realtime thanks to the work of Ben Feist and his team.

  Déjà Vu originally appeared as a short story in Nathan Hystad’s Explorations: First Contact anthology.

  Déjà Vu is the 16th novel in my First Contact series. Most book series follow characters across multiple novels, but my First Contact series is thematic. It looks at the different ways in which First Contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species might unfold. Each novel is akin to an episode you’d find in Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. The stories can be read in any order based on your interest in a particular setting. I have over twenty books planned. I hope you’ll join me in considering First Contact from a variety of different perspectives. Be sure to check out the series and see what interests you.