by Isaac Hooke
“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.
“What is going on?”
“Ah,” the woman says, pointing at herself. “My name is Dr. Sandra Everton. This is my colleague, Dr. Hans Jorgensen. We’re historians.”
“Astro-archeologists,” Jorgensen says, lowering his mask so it hangs loosely around his neck.
I’m silent.
“We’re researchers—using the computing power of Astoria-Holidays to conduct reconstructions of significant historical events.”
“Holidays?” I ask, hung up on that one word. “This is a fucking day spa?”
Jorgensen laughs nervously. “Ah, it’s complicated. A lot has changed since you left.”
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Dr. Everton says, hanging her head.
“And you can’t put me down on the ground, because—”
“Because there is no ground,” Jorgensen replies. “Not for you. You’re a hologram—a simulation.” His hands skim madly over the various interfaces. “I can alter the physics engine—have it simulate one gee at floor height—that’ll seem real to you.”
“To me,” I say, struggling to grasp what is going on.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Everton says. “We didn’t think this would happen. We really didn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, unable to reconcile my conscious awareness with the prospect of being nothing more than bits and bytes in a computer. Impossible.
Dr. Everton stares at Jorgensen. There’s something she doesn’t want to tell me.
My boots rest on the floor. Slowly, gravity increases, and I feel my body taking up the weight of the spacesuit and life support pack.
“So this?” I ask, gesturing to my suit helmet. “There’s no need for this?”
Dr. Everton shakes her head softly.
Jorgensen says, “You’re in a simulation.”
I get that this is a simulation, but I’m not. I’m alive. I know I am, but I can see it in their faces. They’re talking to a ghost.
Although it feels wrong, I power down the life support system. I grasp the locking ring on my suit gloves, feeling the pressure build beneath my fingertips with more clarity than I ever have in my life. The grip of my hand, the twist of my wrist, the flex of muscles in my forearm, the subtle pressure running up to my shoulder, the slowly increasing pressure until the interlocking metal rings give—how is this not real? I drop the first glove, watching as it falls to the floor. Simulation? But I’m real. This is so messed up.
I remove the second glove and examine it closely, looking at the fabric, the scuff marks on the rubber fingers, a smudged grease stain on the palm, the flex and texture of the material.
“It’s not real,” Dr. Everton says with sadness in her voice. She holds her hand out, gesturing for me to give her the glove. Our eyes meet. She must see the tears welling up in my eyes as I struggle not to break down. I rest the glove in her outstretched hand, only it falls through her fingers—not from her fingers. The glove passes through her hand as though it wasn’t there. Only it’s not her hand that’s not there, it’s mine. It’s my glove, my spacesuit, my hand, my arm, my body—I’m hyperventilating.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Everton says. “Breathe.”
“Why?” Tears stream down my cheeks. “Why breathe if none of this is real?”
The silence within the clean room is overwhelming, and for me, that’s confusing. If this is real—this room—this time—this place—why is the only sound that of my own breathing?
I reach up, releasing the locking ring on my helmet. With both hands set firmly on either side, and with far more precision than I have ever employed before, I squeeze and twist. The illusion is overwhelming. The rigid casing shifts sideways, cutting off part of my vision. I stare briefly at the lining on the inside of my helmet. I’m of Middle Eastern descent—the granddaughter of a refugee from Yemen. My dark hair is naturally oily. Even with a snoopy cap on, strands get loose, and drift against the padding, leaving telltale signs. The stains that mark the padded material are barely visible, but they’re there, highlighting where my hair has brushed against the cotton.
I raise the helmet, reluctant to surrender the safety of my suit, but knowing it has to go, along with the backpack.
“So what is this place?” I ask with barely disguised disdain. I feel robbed, insulted, demeaned, embarrassed. I toss my helmet on the floor. I could place it on the bench—or could I? I’m still coming to grips with reality—whatever the fuck that is. No one answers. The helmet bounces. Sound reaches my ears, which is perplexing. Am I lost in a dream?
The two scientists watch with keen interest, but don’t venture a word of explanation. Even the engineers are curious. I guess it’s not every day you watch a computer simulation suffering an existential crisis.
“I don’t suppose you could help me with this?” I ask, working with the backpack. Dr. Everton shakes her head. “Not real, right?” I say, unhooking my oxygen hose, followed by the air return valve and the CO2 filter. “Feels pretty fucking real to me.” Her eyes drop to the floor. I’m angry. I feel I have a right to be angry. This is my life.
I release the straps over my shoulder and allow the pack to slip to the ground. It’s a relief to get that weight off my back.
Dr. Everton says, “All this, it’s a... We take virtual holidays. I know. I know it seems strange. So much about our world must be perplexing to you, but this was the only VR engine we could get time on. The owner is a benefactor of the museum. He grants us 5% of processing power during the off-season and gives us space to work in the machine shop. We run historical simulations, reconstructing events and modeling outcomes. Most of the worlds in there are tourist destinations.”
“The mammoth?” I ask.
Jorgensen says, “Paleolithic hunting is particularly popular with the Marines. There’s something about the challenge of...” and his voice trails away.
“We were trying to reconstruct the destruction of the Intrepid.”
“And me?” I ask. “How did I end up in there? And don’t tell me I’m not real.”
“You are real,” Jorgensen says. “Or you were. The wreckage of the Intrepid was found almost a century after the incident. Your desiccated remains were recovered from—”
“—among the rings,” I say, cutting him off.
“Yes,” he says. “But how did you know?”
“What about the aliens?” I ask. “Did you find them?”
“There are no aliens in Procyon Alpha A or B, or any other star system even remotely near here.”
“But I saw them,” I say. “The eyes—the field of eyes. I saw those creatures. They saw me.” The look of disbelief on Dr. Everton’s face suggests she doesn’t believe me. I ask, “How do you know there aren’t any aliens back there?”
“We’re in the Procyon Alpha A system,” she replies. “There’s been a continuous human presence here for over two hundred years.”
“How—how long?” I ask, only now getting an idea of how much time has elapsed since the destruction of the Intrepid.
Jorgensen looks at Dr. Everton, maintaining eye contact for a second before saying, “It’s the year 4044 in the modern era.”
The blood drains from my head, or it would if I had both blood and a head. My jaw drops. “Two thousand years have gone by.” I must seem like a relic to them. I’m as far removed from them as the Roman emperor Caesar is to me.
“Actually,” Dr. Everton says. “The reckoning of the era is from when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon. Technically, using your dating system, it’s a little over 6000 AD.”
“Fuck.”
Jorgensen says, “Ah, but that’s one little gem that hasn’t gone out of fashion
.”
“But you speak English.”
“In the same way people from your time might speak Latin.” Jorgensen gestures to the scientists and engineers behind him. “Most of our colleagues have no idea what we’re talking about. They might grasp a few of the terms, but our syntax is different—archaic to them.”
“It’s hard for us to talk to you,” Dr. Everton says.
“Hard for you?”
“I’m sorry,” she offers. I pace back and forth. Even though I have no legs, it feels good to exercise whatever virtual limbs I have—grounding me in the moment. This is a nightmare. Surely, I’ll wake with the dawn and find myself floating serenely around Earth in the cargo bay of the Intrepid.
“We found fragments of brain material—just scraps really. Jorgensen was able to map memories from three of the crew.”
“Jansen and MacArthur.”
“Yes,” Jorgensen says. “There were several shared memories, but the details were corrupt. They tend to blur together. One of you preparing to launch from Earth’s orbit.”
“—and another,” I say, “while in orbit around a gas giant.”
“That’s where the incident occurred,” Dr. Everton says. “The ship was destroyed.”
“Oh, I know,” I say, piecing the fragments together.
“Yours was the strongest memory,” Jorgensen says. “We ran the simulation multiple times, slowly tweaking variables, trying to learn more about...”
“The aliens,” I say.
“Yes. We found traces of non-terrestrial amino acids, but nothing that matches known lifeforms. Whoever they were, they weren’t from around here. They must have moved on long before we arrived.”
“Can you help us?” Jorgensen asks.
“Help you?” I cry in disbelief. “I’m the one that needs help.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Dr. Everton says, and I believe her. I can see the compassion in her eyes—the longing to help.
Jorgensen is working away on his multiple virtual keyboards. Around me, objects appear. An armchair. A wooden table with plush leather seats. A refrigerator.
“This is the best I can do for now,” he says. I open the refrigerator door. It’s stocked with food.
“Do I still eat?”
“Your virtual world is governed by the same physics as ours,” Dr. Everton says. “Biology is nothing more than physics arranged in a convoluted Rube Goldberg machine.”
“Ah,” I say, “Like when a row of dominos knocks over a cup, which pushes a marble down a track into a piano keyboard.”
“That’s the one,” she replies, smiling. I think Dr. Everton and I are going to get on well together. “That’s all any of us are at a cellular level.”
I pull a chair from the table and rest my weary legs on a firm seat.
“There’s much we need to do,” Jorgensen says. “We have to inform the academy. They’re not going to believe we’ve been able to recover a conscious awareness intact. This is unreal.”
I smile, saying, “Well, I’m not convinced about you guys, but I know I’m real.” For the first time in ages, I feel grounded. Everything is new. I haven’t seen this before. I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m not afraid. As crazy as it is, I’m relieved to escape from déjà vu and excited about all that is to come—I have a second chance at life.
Peter Cawdron Bio
Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.
The prospect of making contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings is a hallmark of science fiction and genuine scientific projects like SETI. In practice, the distances involved are seemingly insurmountable for us short-lived humans, and the technological, sociological and biological differences between us and any aliens we may one day encounter would be vast. Even on Earth, intelligent creatures rarely communicate beyond their native species. Sure, we talk with cats and dogs, but our words carry limited meaning, and are often interpreted differently to what we intend.
Our evolutionary pedigree diverged from that of other intelligent beings on Earth anywhere from millions to hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving us completely unable to communicate with astonishingly intelligent and caring species such as cuttlefish and octopus. In light of this, imagine the immense void that will lie between us and an alien race such as the one encountered in this story around Procyon Alpha A.
I’m tempted to develop this short story into a full length novel, so if you’re interested in staying in touch, be sure to subscribe to my email list, or check out my novels on Amazon.
Less than 2% of readers leave reviews online, so please take the time to leave a review of this story. Your opinion of this anthology counts far more than mine.
All the best,
Peter Cawdron
The Signal
By Ralph Kern
August 15th 1977 - The Big Ear Telescope - Ohio State University
Andy Gibb’s number one hit crackled over the radio as Jerry Ehman entered Ohio State University’s cluttered astronomy lab.
“I just want to be your everything.”
Jerry hummed along as he walked over to the wooden desk upon which the ancient chattering dot matrix printer disgorged endless reams of papers. They cascaded onto the floor, folding themselves chaotically into a pile which had been gathering overnight.
“You and me been finding each other for so long.”
Jerry’s humming segued into a tuneless wail, only bearing the most passing of resemblance to the static laced song. He tore off a sheet at the printer guide, knelt and gathered an armful of paper. Standing, he made his way across to one of the wooden work benches and swept aside the books, mugs and the previous day’s printouts, revealing the surface, engraved with the graffiti of generations of students.
He hopped himself up onto the uncomfortable stool, plucked his spectacles off and gave them a vigorous wipe with his shirt cuff and balanced them back on his nose.
“Open up the heavens in your heart and let me be.”
He began working his way through the data. The Big Ear had been assigned to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program, or SETI, as it was abbreviated. The papers were covered in numbers showing the intensity of radio sources in deep space. Mostly they were 1s, some 2s, more occasionally a more violent 3, 4 or even a 5, yet they were nothing more than the natural crackling, popping burp of the cosmos going about its directionless business.
He methodically continued working down the pages, tuning out the inane conversation of the presenters between songs.
He turned a sheet, the nib of his pen tracked down the page, and paused.
The numbers were replaced by a series of letters. 6EQUJ5. Jerry frowned, closed his eyes and gave them a vigorous rub beneath his spectacles. When he opened them, the letters were still there. When the intensity of the signal was higher than 9, the equipment interpreted them as letters. U wasn’t far from the end of the scale.
A signal more than thirty times stronger than the norm had been detected through the Big Ear telescope. Something strange, something powerful.
Perhaps something…artificial?
Jerry uttered a single word. It seemed to capture the amazement and wonder which coursed through him. So he wrote the word next to the sequence of six numbers and letters which had prompted those emotions.
“Wow!”
Now
I watched the glistening water curve from the bottleneck into my glass before placing it on the clear surface in front of me. Our table abutted the floor-to-ceiling window looking over the spoke of the First Contact Federation exploration program ship berths.
At the far end of the docking slips, I could just make out the metallic sphere of the Darklady, her running lights illuminated, ready for departure. That’s why we were here, after all, to watch our friends, the Diablos, leave on their long voyage.
Oh, and there was the small matter that soon, I would be leaving the station, leaving Sol, myself. Likely for decades. I felt the tug of nerves in my gut
, a hollow sick feeling every time I thought of the long voyage before me.
“You know, there was a time when you would have celebrated your last night before quarantine with something with a little more kick.” The woman on the opposite side of the table smiled as she took a sip of her wine. Carol Farris gave no sign of worry, and I doubt she would have detected any in me.
“I’m getting old now, Carol, and I get cranky when I have a hangover.” I returned her smile with a grin. “And that’s no way start off a two-month stint in isolation.”
“Oh, way back when.” She winked. “I’d have taken two months locked in a small space with you. Starting with a hangover or not.”
I gave a chuckle in response. We had some fond memories between us, from when we had served together in the USASF. Yes, my history with Carol had been interesting to say the least. Interesting, and in the past, where it belonged. I attempted to divert the subject. “How’s Gary? Did he go under okay?”
Carol turned her head to gaze for a moment out of the window, the crystalline blue and lush green of the Earth rolling by below. She looked introspective for a moment, before nodding. “Yes, Brad. He’s under.”
“He’s a good man.”
“He is a good man. He’s willing to do what it takes to make things work.” I couldn’t help but catch the edge of accusation in her voice. This was just one of the bones of contention between us. “To make a marriage work.”
“Carol…” I started to say. I had to get the conversation back onto safer ground, not that our passion filled relationship had many areas of firm ground.
“No, not this time, Brad,” she interrupted me. “You’re going away for thirty years, I’m going to be gone for at least ten. This is it. This is all we have to put things right between us.”
I leaned back; it was my time to gaze out of the station’s window. I cocked my head, watching the spark of activity around the Darklady intensify. The bright flare of thrusters could be seen pushing the ship out of its slip. Slowly, the vessel pulled away from the station, surrounded by a flurry of tenders and media drones.
