by Dave Walsh
He wheezed, “In fact, I’m one of the few alive on this floating deathtrap that has been on Earth. Granted, I was still a toddler when my parents signed us up for this death sentence, but boy, I was there -- and I remember some of it. I’m still going to be around for a while longer, too,” he laughed. “I’ll be one of the only humans to live on two different planets -- well, at least ones outside of our solar system. I’m not really sure that I count that bullshit they did on Mars as living on another planet, do you? Men living in goddamned bubbles.”
“Oh, I agree,” Jonah said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “I mean, we all know that the Mars mission was to terraform the planet, but I’m not sure what you could expect on a planet like that whose atmosphere had been gone for... sorry.” He laughed as he stopped himself. “I get kind of carried away about this stuff.”
“No, no,” the old man said, his tone finally starting to become a bit more inviting. “I like hearing a young person taking an active interest in history. Of course, some of the Martian history is a bit puzzling, though, isn’t it?”
“Well, if you mean...”
“You know what I mean, kid.” He hacked away again, chuckling through the smoke. “I still have my connections within the Ministry, believe it or not, and that goddamned thing they found reminded me of something I had heard about a long time ago. Stop being coy here.”
“Sorry, I just -- ” He paused and frowned. Trying to keep himself out of trouble was more difficult than he thought it would be. “I’ve been doing my best to not be detected through all of this and...”
“Oh,” the old man cried as he burst out laughing. “Excuse me,” he held his hand up, still laughing. “I’m just -- what did you think would happen, digging around in that shit, kid? I’m an old exiled Minister, and I still knew the right things to look for and who was looking them up. How do you think I knew who you were, because of the shit writing you do? C’mon, kid. You should know better. Did you think I kept up on employees there after I’ve been long gone?”
Jonah’s face turned red, and he began to feel the room getting warm. “Fuck,” he let out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I’d say so.” The old man shook his head and stared down at his cigar. “I’m not saying that anyone is on to you other than me, but I’d be more careful if I were you. Luckily enough for you, you're small time; they aren’t worried about you... yet. You and that Professor Cox could find yourselves in a heap of trouble if you aren’t more careful.”
“How did you know about...” Jonah didn’t bother to finish his sentence, realizing that maybe they weren’t as under the radar as he had thought. He was easy enough to figure out, and this old man knew about as much as he could.
“Please,” he said. He swallowed hard, feeling not only defeated but on the defensive. “Keep this between us.”
“I’m not telling anyone anything, kid,” he grumbled. “I’m old, I’m over this shit, and I’m probably more scared of what the hell we’ll find when we touch down than anyone else is. You want to know what that thing they found is, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Jonah wasn’t sure how much further this should go, but it looked like there was no turning back.
“See this?” He held his cigar up in front of Jonah's face. Jonah nodded. “This isn’t real, just like everything else aboard this goddamned ship. We had a supply of the real thing at one point in time, and I had my first one at age 22 -- not much younger than you, I presume.
“Anyway, I had one after I got my first big promotion. My boss was a connoisseur of sorts, of all things that were from Earth. It tasted like what I assumed gold would taste like if it were edible. I was hooked. I had to have more, and more of all things that reminded me of Earth.
“Look around,” he said as he motioned with his hands around the room. “This whole house is just a sad reminder of my childhood house, Mr. Freeman. I was meticulous in recreating it, even having that simulated daylight outside of these windows.
“This that I’m smoking now -- it was grown in one of the gardens aboard the ship. The last real cigar had been smoked years ago or is locked away somewhere in the A-Deck along with some vintage wines, the last true luxuries from Earth.
“It isn’t as good, but every time I smoke one of these, I am reminded of all that we left behind and what none of us will ever be able to experience. I think about that, and I think about what faces us in the coming weeks, and I’m about ready to find a working gun and blowing my goddamned brains out, kid.”
“What?” Jonah could feel the pit in his stomach growing and the walls starting to cave in ever so slightly. “What do you mean? What do you know?”
“It’s what I’ve known for years and why I lost that damned job but still ended up living as comfortably as I am now. I’m actually surprised that I wasn’t shot out of an airlock at some point,” he laughed. “But then again, I was high profile enough that people at the time would notice if I was missing and start asking questions. They knew that I knew, though, and all of this was for my silence, kid.”
“Silence on what?” Jonah asked, half of him not wanting to hear the answer.
“The Exodus,” McMahon replied. The old man took a larger hit off of his cigar and held it in for longer, coughing before he exhaled and shook his head. “The Exodus.”
“The Exodus?” Jonah could feel his mind racing, trying to think back to what it could mean historically. “Egypt?”
“No,” he said, leaning in close. “The Exodus, kid. We're going home.”
“Home?” The word almost came out in slow motion, and Jonah was unable to process the thought. “We left our home. Do you mean that we plan on making this new planet humanity’s new home?”
“No.” He shook his head, leaning back in the chair and laughing. “Kid, we are going home. We are going back to the planet where we at least think that we came from. No one is really sure, but we did learn about a possible Exodus from another planet long ago. All of this tech that we found wasn’t from us, and we sure as hell haven’t ever encountered any other lifeforms. That points to humanity, kid.”
“Are you saying that Earth isn’t where humanity began?”
“It might be,” he said, shrugging. “It might not be. All I know is we have enough evidence throughout history that tells us that humanity as we know it probably came from this goddamned planet that we are speeding toward. And kid, I’m not sure that they’ll welcome us with open arms.”
“So that thing we found.” Jonah had to talk slowly so that he didn't trip over his words; he had to remember to take deep breaths. “You're telling me that it was a part of some sort of ship?”'
“Yeah,” the old man replied as he smirked through the smoke in the room. His face took on a demonic form for a brief second. “It ain’t the first one, either, but it’s the first one that we’ve found in a while. It’s some sort of heat sink or something. I don’t know much about engineering, but it’s from a ship. We think that it’s from the ship that led humans to Earth in the first place.”
“Who is ‘we'?”
“Well, me, for one,” he said as he held one finger up. “But kid, the point of this mission ain’t what it seems. You seem like a smart kid; I thought you woulda figured that out by now.”
“Then what is it?”
“Curiosity, I guess.” He took another big puff and exhaled slowly. “You know, what usually kills the cat?”
“That can’t be the only reason that we’d send hundreds of thousands of humanity’s best and brightest on a mission like this, can it?”
“Look, kid.” He shook his head slowly and leaned in very close to him again. “The main point of the mission, that remains true. We fucked Earth up beyond belief. As much as I yearn for it and want to bask in the warmth of the real sun and smoke Cuban-grown cigars, that just isn’t a reality anymore back there. This was our only choice; this is all that we’ve got left. You just said that our Martian experiment was a giant fucking failure, and that was it for our solar sys
tem. We’ve been looking for a way out for as long as we’ve been stargazing, kid.
“Maybe, just maybe,” the old man started before pausing to catch his breath. “Maybe we’ve known all along – subconsciously, I mean -- that we came from somewhere else, and we're just trying to figure out a way to get back home. Romantic-like, isn’t it?”
Jonah was trying to slog his way to a conclusion. “I guess, but why did we come to Earth in the first place? What if it was the same reason that we left Earth? What if we were escaping something horrible, like another race invading the planet or... Christ, I don’t know. The science doesn’t add up, either.”
“Kid, kid,” he chuckled. “Your own professor there can tell you more about the probability of aliens or whatever else, but I’m pretty sure if there were aliens strong enough to come after us on this planet, they’d be hot on our tails and would’ve finished the job on Earth, don’t you agree?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said, not entirely convinced, his brain racing a mile a minute trying to come up with answers. “What else do you know?”
“Kid,” he said as he shrugged and laughed. “I don’t know. All I know is my poking around into this shit years ago was enough to get me effectively exiled into my own little wonderland here. What I can tell you is that something ain’t right, and as we get closer, I can feel it. I can feel that something is going to be very wrong. You ever wonder why we train so many kids how to fight, or why we have goddamned handheld nukes?”
“I guess...”
“Oh, you guess.” He gave a wry smile, now sitting on the very edge of his chair and poking his cigar right near Jonah's face. “Let me tell you, if they were expecting to find rolling fucking hills and prancing fields of deer, they wouldn’t be training you kids to be trained fucking killers. It ain’t just for keeping the peace on the ship, I’ll tell you that much.”
“They expect force?” Jonah could feel his heart beginning to race again. “There's no way that we can handle an entire planet’s force with just the few of us trained aboard this ship. It’d be a...”
“Massacre?” the old man supplied, leaning back in the chair and shaking his head. “Well, that's what the handheld nukes are, I assume, but what do I know? I’m an old man who has been written off as crazy for the better part of my years.”
“So who does know what is going on?”
“Oh, the captain does, I’m sure.” He gazed off toward the window and the synthetic sky being projected. “Probably his closest advisers, that's about it, but I do wonder.”
Jonah pulled himself up to his feet. “I gotta tell Professor Cox this.”
“Do you?” The old man crooked his head and looked up at Jonah through a cloud of smoke. “I’d be careful if I were you, Jonah. Look at what I know and where I am. You know what I know now, and while I may be an old man with nothing to lose, you're still young. And Professor Cox is well-known; his career could disappear into a puff of smoke. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were men following you, especially after visiting an old nut-job like myself.”
“I’m not sure there's any room to worry about my career right now,” Jonah said as he picked himself up and headed toward the door. “Wait, you really think that they'll be tailing me?”
“Oh, I’m just an old kook,” McMahon said as he threw his hands up. “Don’t pay me much mind -- or maybe do? I guess you’ll be off now, huh?”
“I gotta be,” he said. He looked back at the old man, imagining himself at that age and what it would feel like to be as isolated as he was. Jonah’s head was swimming. He felt numb to his surroundings but understood that it was time to leave, time to get some air. “I really appreciate you telling me all of this, Dusty.”
“Well, I figured that you’d come knocking eventually,” he said. “Just be careful in the future. If I knew what you were doing, well, any of them could know. I don’t think that you want that, do you?”
“No,” Jonah said, eyeballing the door and wondering if this old man could be trusted. “You won’t tell anyone, right?”
“Kid,” the old man said as he chortled to himself. “No one believes a damned thing I say, no matter what.”
The first thing on Jonah’s mind after the door slid shut behind him was contacting Professor Cox. He fumbled around with his holoscanner as he squinted at the false sun above, holding his hand above the holoscanner to block out the glare. The idea of replicating the sun for purely aesthetic purposes and not modifying it to be more efficient struck him as odd. As he waited for Professor Cox to answer, he decided that it was odd but also inherently human in a way.
His eyes scanned around the hall, searching for someone following him, but he wasn’t even sure what to look for. Would they be military, civilian or hidden? He sighed.
“Jonah,” the professor answered, his face appearing in the bottom left corner of the projection, looking disheveled.
“Professor Cox,” Jonah replied as he looked around him, now trying to be more aware of who was around or paying attention to him. It felt like all eyes were on him, so he quickened his pace as he headed toward the walkway for C-Deck. “I, uh,” he began before trailing off. He looked around again.
“Is everything all right, Jonah?” The Professor scratched at his brow, displacing his glasses ever so slightly before readjusting them. “You seem... off.”
“I’m fine,” Jonah said. He did his best to calm himself. “I just need to stop by.” Jonah paused as he rounded a corner. He leaned against the wall and looked around to make sure that no one was listening in. “I’ve got some new information, Professor Cox. We're onto something, and it’s big.”
* * *
“Slow down,” the professor told Jonah. He was sitting on his stool. His feet were touching the ground since he was only half-sitting and half-leaning forward, staring down at his hands, which were resting on his knees. “I don’t think I understand.”
“I’m not sure that I do, either,” Jonah said. He leaned in close, looking around the room before turning back to the professor. “We're onto something. This is huge! Mankind is probably already on this planet, and they know -- they fucking know.”
“Slow down, Jonah.” The professor removed his glasses from his face, slapped them down on the metal table and rubbed his eyes, slowly bringing his hands down. His fingers dug into his skin, stretching it out. “Slow down. I’m not sure that the evidence we have about humanity’s origins backs this up at all.”
“I know, but...” Jonah trailed off as he felt his mind swimming. He paced around the small room. “The Monolith and the device we found -- you know that there are more, right?”
“Calm down.” The professor was doing his best, but Jonah could feel himself drifting into insanity. “Look, this is from one man, one lonely old man who got frozen out for this stuff...”
“So you think this isn’t true?” Jonah stopped and looks at the professor in disbelief. “You were on board with me before this; you know that there's something wrong!”
“I know, Jonah.” The professor placed his glasses back on and held his hand up, trying to calm Jonah down. “And I still do. I just... at this point, I think I’d rather it be aliens.”
“So you just don’t want to think about it then. Is that it?”
“No, Jonah,” the professor sighed. “If we are heading to our doom, why should we be tortured during the little time we have left? The implications of this are immense, Jonah. It would mean that humanity has at one point or another existed on two planets simultaneously. It would mean that humanity maybe didn’t begin on Earth; maybe it began on this new planet. I don’t know!”
He leaned back against the back of the stool and laughed out loud. “Jonah, this could be the discovery that changes everything.”
“Professor Cox, I just think that we have no choice anymore.” Jonah pointed at the professor’s screen, at a rotating rendering of the device that they discovered. “We know too much to turn back, Professor. Please.”
Jonah could sense himse
lf beginning to plead with the professor. He did his best to catch himself, but he knew that it was probably too late to apply the brakes at this point.
“Jonah,” the professor said as he swallowed hard. He turned back around to glare at the render of the device. “A part of me feels like this can only end horribly. Where do we take this next? Who knows about this?”
“I don’t know,” he said, throwing his hands up and pacing back and forth in front of the desk. “From what he told me, it sounds like the Captain and his aides are probably the only ones. You still have some pull with them, don’t you?”
“I think that 'pull' is being a bit liberal, Jonah.”
Jonah knew the professor was trying to push him away from the topic.
Professor Cox continued, “They are aware of who I am, and we have met. I am the Chief Physicist aboard the ship, but I’m not sure that they’ll ever consort with me. I’m not A-Deck material.”
“Well, then we have nothing,” Jonah said as he slammed his fist down on the cold metal table, creating a thud. “We’ve got nothing.”
“Look,” the professor said. He held his hands out, trying to calm Jonah down. “Maybe we can figure out whom between us we could talk to. You have your boss, right?”
“My boss knows nothing,” Jonah said, sounding and feeling defeated already. “I’m shocked that he can get through every day without turning back into primordial ooze.”
“Okay, so not him,” the professor said. He sighed, and they both sat in silence for a few moments, racking their brains. Jonah had a distinct understanding then of just how his social standing was a detriment -- not that he hadn’t before, but right at that moment, it all felt so overwhelming. His breathing started to become labored, and the room felt stuffy and warm.
