Explorations- First Contact

by Nathan Hystad (ed)

  “Who are you?” I ask no one in particular, seeing nothing beyond the faint reflection of my own face in the smooth, curved glass dome on my helmet. I have a slight twist in my motion, causing me to slowly tumble. I must have pushed off with a little more strength on one side compared to the other, imparting torque to my motion. The stars are visible, then the Earth, then the tail section of the Intrepid.

  “She’s delirious,” MacArthur says.

  “Am I? Look at the planet. Look at it, Jansen. MacArthur. Look closely.”

  It takes a few more seconds before I’m facing Earth again, only it’s not Earth. A massive gas giant sits below me. Dark clouds swirl in fascinating patterns, twisting and folding over on themselves with a sheen that reminds me of oil spilled on water. Different colored bands of clouds mark the various latitudes as the rotational speed of the gas giant dictates patterns of turbulence. There are storms down there that have raged for centuries, swirling in on themselves and forming whirlpool patterns—cyclones—hurricanes.

  “What the hell?” Jensen says. She sees it.

  “Look at the rings,” I say. “The rings. They’re beautiful.”

  My suit is equipped with micro thrusters, designed to help orient astronauts in tight spots. They’re not exactly a jetpack, and couldn’t propel me back to the Intrepid, but they do allow me to stabilize my tumble.

  “Hang in there, Jess,” MacArthur says. “It’s going to take me a few minutes to power up a pod and come get you. Don’t panic.”

  “Panic?” I say. “You’re fooling around with five hundred metric tons of tritium and an experimental fusion drive, and you think there’s no reason to panic? Have you looked at the inverter? Look at it. You’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before that thing fails.”

  Commander Jansen says, “What the hell are you talking about, Jess?”

  “She’s going to blow,” I say. “She blows every time.” They must think I’m insane.

  “Uh, commander,” MacArthur says. The tone of his voice has changed. “You may need to get Phelps or Sanders to go out there after Jess. She’s right. We’ve got containment problems down here. It’s bad. Real bad.”

  There’s silence for a few seconds, but I’m sure that doesn’t equate to inaction. At a guess, Jansen is scrambling to get someone else out after me, but it’s too late. They’ll never clear the airlock in time—not if MacArthur can’t identify the leak. But does it matter? Is any of this real? It looks real. I don’t know. I’m breathing. My heart’s beating. My eyelids flicker. My arms move, bound by the confines of my spacesuit, but it’s all happened before. How is that possible? If my life isn’t real, then what the hell is it?

  Is Jansen right? Have I gone mad? Of course I have. Who would detach their tether and launch themselves out into space with no hope of return? Yet the sense of déjà vu I feel is overwhelming. ‘Already seen,’ right? Isn’t that what déjà vu means? But ‘already seen’ doesn’t do this justice. It’s not simply that I’ve seen something before. I’m convinced I’ve lived this moment a thousand times over—madness.

  The Intrepid continues to shrink in front of me. We’re in a polar orbit, rising high above the planet, still in the shadow but destined to return to the light. The rings stretch around the planet below me, providing a spectacular view. I feel small, dwarfed by the magnificence of the universe. It’s crazy to think they’re barely my height, perhaps reaching up to twenty feet in places, but no more. The rings extend for hundreds of thousands of miles either side of the planet, framing the gas giant with a halo.

  “How did you know?” MacArthur says. His voice is stressed, as though he’s talking through clenched teeth. Whatever he’s doing, it’s taking considerable effort.

  “How did you know?” Commander Jansen asks, sounding far more relaxed than I’d expect after losing an astronaut, hearing there’s a containment breach, and finally seeing this gas giant beneath us.

  “We’ve lived this moment a thousand times,” I say.

  There’s no reply.

  Flashes of light ripple along the spine of the starship in complete and utter silence. I watch as explosions compress the hull, causing it to buckle. Being half a mile long, it takes almost a minute for the Intrepid to disintegrate. There’s no nova. The tritium from the fusion drive must form a superheated plasma, consuming the displacement drive before it can rupture. For a moment, the Intrepid glows like a miniature star. There’s sorrow in watching my life’s work being destroyed, and my heart sinks at the thought of my friends dying.

  What now? Do these last moments of the Intrepid simply repeat like a vinyl record skipping and replaying part of a song? Is my life a video caught in a loop? Will another me appear down there, straddling the side of the reborn starship? How does this work?

  A shadow falls across me, which, given I’m still in the shadow of the planet, is unnerving. The darkness is unlike anything I’ve ever known. I can feel it, which sounds as mad as it is. The spotlights on my helmet allow me to see the folds of material on my arms, all the way to the rubber tips of my gloves, but beyond that, there’s nothing. No debris. No planet. No stars. No light whatsoever. I’m floating in eternity—without any point of reference beyond my spacesuit. The darkness is heavy—oppressive—malignant—alive. Whatever this is, it’s not natural.

  “Who are you?”

  Sunlight blinds me. Gravity overwhelms me, and I fall to one knee in the dust. Fine strands of dead grass reach up to waist height around me, swaying in the wind. There’s a tree in the distance—an acacia tree. A thick green canopy stretches out from the tangled trunk. The sky is azure blue. Clouds dot the horizon.

  Something’s moving through the grass, charging toward me. Dust kicks up from beneath the thundering paws of a lion. Its mane catches in the wind, being blown to one side as it pounds at the dirt, sprinting at me. I scramble to my feet, but my spacesuit is heavy. The backpack is bulky, shifting my center of gravity awkwardly. I lean over, running hard toward a thicket of thorn bushes. My boots thump against the uneven ground, kicking up stones and clumps of dirt.

  The musty brown soil beneath my boots turns to a fine white powder, and I find myself sinking up to my knees in fresh snow. I’m still running, but I topple forward, landing face first in a snow drift. I’m breathing hard. My helmet is half buried in the fine snow. My backpack is stupidly heavy on Earth, and it’s all I can do to roll on my side. Tall deciduous trees line a distant rocky cliff, appearing dead—like skeletons lined up on a ridge.

  “Wh—what?”

  It takes considerable effort to get back to my feet. I sway under the weight of the life support system on my back. I’m in a clearing. Powdered snow lies all around me, pristine and untouched for almost fifty yards. I can see where I fell, but there are no marks beyond there. It is as though I fell from the sky, but I fell while running from a lion on the savannah.

  I pick up a handful of snow, running it between my gloved fingers and watching as it falls lazily back to the snow drift.

  “Where the hell am I?”

  There’s movement behind a pocket of pine trees to my right. Dark shadows loom through the thicket. I watch in awe as an elephant pushes its way between the trees, knocking snow from the boughs, only this is like no elephant I’ve ever seen. Shaggy hair covers its hide. Long, curving tusks extend from its head. A mammoth. How is this possible? Snow rests on top of the massive animal. It stops, looking at me with as much bewilderment as I have of it, and I wonder what’s going through its mind. Will it charge at me like the lion? If I flee, will I fall into some other world?

  There are people moving quietly through the shadow of the trees on either side of the clearing, stalking the mammoth, creeping up on it under the cover of the pine boughs. They pay me no attention, keeping their eyes fixed on the massive beast as they carry spears over their shoulders, set like javelins, ready to throw. I want to call to them. I want to talk to them, but they wouldn’t speak English. I doubt they’d speak anything at all—nothing I’d rec
ognize as a language. With animal skins draped over their bodies and long straggly hair, they may not even be human. This could be a Neanderthal hunting party, for all I know.

  I try to walk over toward a woman standing on the edge of the clearing as the hunters quietly surround the mammoth, but the deep snow impedes my steps. She is horrified by my appearance. It’s difficult to move through the snow drift, more like wading through water than walking. I must look like a devil to her—a demon from another world. In many ways, I am.

  “Please,” I say, reaching out a gloved hand, only reality shifts again and I’m standing on a main street somewhere in the USA. I can tell it’s North America by the advertising signs—cola, jeans, a billboard advertising affordable funerals. Small town. Rural Midwest. I’m in the middle of a broad street. Cars drive past on either side of me. A few of them beep their horns, but not in an aggressive manner, more so to indicate they’re coming up from behind and passing to my right. I’ve seen internal combustion vehicles like these in museums, but I’ve never seen one in motion before. They’re much louder than I thought. I can hear them clearly even though my helmet visor is still locked in place.

  The snow still clinging to my suit melts under the hot sun.

  “What is happening to me?”

  There are people on the sidewalk, standing in front of a fast food restaurant. They have phones out. They’re taking pictures of me. I walk over to them, breathing heavily within my spacesuit.

  “Halloween ain’t for another month,” one of them says—an elderly woman in what I’d guess is her mid-seventies. She looks amused by my appearance.

  “Are you making a movie?” a teenaged boy asks.

  “Can I touch your suit?” his girlfriend asks. “Did you make this yourself?”

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Omaha, Nebraska,” the boy replies, laughing at my confusion.

  “And the year?” I ask.

  “What?” the girl says with genuine surprise. “Are you like from the future? Like Terminator or something?”

  “Oh, that’s rad,” the boy says.

  “Please,” I say. “The year?”

  “You’re shitting me, right?” he replies. “This is a gag. It has to be. We’re on Punk’d, Lizzy.”

  “Where are the cameras?” Lizzy asks, and for a moment, I’m confused. I start to point at the side of my helmet, thinking they’re talking about the cameras clipped onto my suit, but they think I’m part of a practical joke being pulled by some morally ambiguous television network. Someone’s trying to make fools out of them, but they’re not falling for the trap.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, turning away from them and walking on down the sidewalk. Everyone has a phone out, holding them up before their faces, blotting me out, hiding from me behind tiny electronic devices.

  “You’re stupid,” a young boy yells as his mother hurries past, holding his hand tight and dragging him on.

  I can’t take this. Where am I? How am I jumping between worlds? From a low Earth orbit to the Proc, to the grasslands of Africa, the snow covered mountains of Europe in ancient times, and now to 21st century America. This makes no sense.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I want to rub my eyes, but I dare not open my visor. For all I know, I’m still in orbit and this is some grand hallucination. Someone bumps into me. I turn, and a boy on a skateboard laughs.

  I blink and thousands of eyes peer at me. There’s no body. Just an immense wall of human eyes—no, a sphere, and it becomes apparent I’m at the center, on the inside of this alien monster. Occasionally, insect-like arms protrude from between the eyeballs. They’re sticks, poking and prodding at my naked body. I can’t move. I’m paralyzed, gripped by fear. In the depths of my mind, I’m screaming in terror, but outwardly there’s no response. I’m dead. I’m not breathing, not blinking. My eyes stare straight ahead, but I can see them—the eyeballs. I can see the aliens of Procyon Alpha A. Thousands of pupils dilate in unison, shifting, scrutinizing my body in chilling detail.

  My spacesuit’s gone. How, I’m not sure, but on the edge of my vision I can make out the pinkish skin of my arms. Smoke drifts before me. A small puff rises from the center of my chest as a laser beam cuts through the skin and bone. Thin alien arms pry my chest open, pulling back my rib cage. Bones break. Blood drifts in tiny globules, but there’s no pain. Still my eyes stare straight ahead. I’m in hell. Visions of demons in flames, with souls crying for mercy, could never be as terrifying as watching my own body being dissected.

  The eyes swivel, examining stringy blood vessels, lung tissue, arteries, strips of muscle and fat. I don’t want to watch, but my eyes won’t close. Suddenly, the field of eyes meets with mine. They know. They can see me—not my body—they’re looking beyond my eyes into the depths of my mind. Somehow, they can detect my thoughts.

  “Please,” I plead.

  “I’ve lost her,” a voice says. The accent is European. English is a second language. Male. Not old. Late twenties, early thirties? Educated. Intelligent.

  “Help me,” I yell as the field of eyeballs fades from sight.

  Darkness washes over me, but I’m not blacking out. I’m lucid. I’m falling again. I’m expecting to land in some other world—at some other time, but I don’t. I keep falling, plummeting, accelerating. It’s as though I’ve fallen from a cliff, or down an elevator shaft. The lights on my helmet illuminate my spacesuit, but I was naked moments ago. My body is intact. Once again, I’m weightless in free fall.

  “What do you mean you lost her?” the disembodied voice of a woman asks. “How the hell do you lose an archetype?”

  “I’m here,” I yell. “I’m right here.” But deep down, I know this is not my salvation. No rescue is possible. Who could reach me in the Proc?

  “Get her back.”

  “She’s a drift in the ether.”

  “Then shut it down. I want her back on the Intrepid.”

  “No. No,” I yell, knowing what always happens. I die. The Intrepid explodes and I’m sucked out into space. I’m found by some alien race and dissected while still conscious. “Please, don’t.”

  “There’s something wrong,” the man says. The more he talks, the more convinced I am he’s from somewhere like Denmark, or Norway. “She’s not following the confluence. Gamma-November is off script.”

  “What do you mean?” the woman asks. Her voice softens. She’s genuinely curious. “She has no choice, right?”

  “There’s independence of thought.”

  “That’s not possible,” the woman says.

  “Possible or not, it’s happening.”

  “Can you bring her up?”

  I don’t understand. They’re talking about me as though I’m a thing—chattel.

  “Raising her now.”

  The darkness fades and I’m floating in a vast, open clean room, the kind used by FCF when assembling space probes. The ceiling is easily fifty feet above me, while the walls are at least as distant again. There are hundreds of scientists working on a variety of craft, but the designs are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Our spacecraft favor function over form. There’s no need for aerodynamics in space. Like the Apollo lunar modules of old, starships like the Intrepid lack aesthetics, but the spaceships here look as though they’re being built by Ferrari, or Lamborghini. High-gloss dark burgundy paint glistens under spotlights. Soft curves, and sleek lines. Artistically placed silver fittings. Clear glass canopies. Engine nozzles in polished chrome adorn these craft like trophies.

  I’m drifting beside a workbench. Dozens of holograms shimmer in what look like fishbowls, providing a miniaturized view of a variety of worlds, including a snow covered clearing that looks far too familiar.

  “Can she hear us? Can she speak with us?”

  “Who are you?” I ask, but there’s no reply.

  The woman points at me, saying, “Vox is on. She’s responding to us, but I’m not picking up any sound. Jorgensen?”

  “She’s commandeered the channe
l.”

  “How is that possible?” the woman asks.

  “How is any of this possible?” Jorgensen replies. His hands ripple over a holographic interface that looks like several keyboards stacked above each other in the air.

  The woman in the lab coat lowers her disposable face mask. She’s wearing bright red lipstick and has her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Open your radio channel,” she says, beckoning with her hands. I thought I was transmitting. I look down and a red light on my wrist pad computer indicates that I’m on mute. I must have bumped it during the rush on the savannah, or perhaps while in the snow.

  “Is that better?” I ask, and my voice booms out through the clean room. Heads turn. The woman bats her hand at the air, signaling for Jorgensen to lower the volume.

  “Try again,” she says.

  “Now?” I ask, not willing to offer more than one word. Scientists and engineers from throughout the clean room wander over, standing well back from Jorgensen, but watching with keen interest. They’re talking in hushed tones from behind their paper masks, pointing, commenting.

  “Are you real?” the woman asks.

  I try not to laugh. “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  She turns to Jorgensen, talking as though I’m not hearing her every word. “You’re sure this isn’t AI mimicry?”

  “Yes.”

  “We haven’t picked up a guest account by accident, have we?”

  “I’m telling you,” he says. “That’s Gamma-November. No doubt about it.”

  “Who are you?” I ask. “Where am I?”

  “Can you bring her down?”

  Jorgensen waves his hands through the air, touching at a hologram interface, and I descend until my boots are tantalizingly close to the ground. Earth remains frustratingly out of reach, just inches away.

  “Can you put me down?” I ask, echoing the woman’s words.

  “She doesn’t realize,” Jorgensen says. “You have to tell her.”

  “Wh—what?” the woman replies. She’s flustered, unprepared for this—only ‘this’ has context—this is me—this is my life they’re talking about.