by David Myhro
There was also the issue of cosmic bombardment. The thruster pods, while having a defense system, weren't fitted with the same kind of armor as the mothership—they were largely see-through, seeing as how that would obviously be preferable for a vessel surfing the surfaces of a planet. Consequently, there was a danger of extremely small, extremely fast chunks of matter colliding with critical parts of the vessel. The probability of being struck by such objects in intergalactic space would be slim to none; while traversing interstellar space, however, such collisions would be inevitable if given enough time.
The issue of space rocks will not be significant once I enter the Milky Way Galaxy since, by that time, my trajectory will be sufficiently fine-tuned to ensure an impact with Earth. While in Andromeda, however, I will have to deplete precious energy for surveillance and deflection of incoming space rocks. This also meant that I could not use the slingshot method for augmentation of my speed because being in the close proximity of a sun would greatly magnify the risk of being struck by random rocks to the point that a collision would be inevitable; a collision in a vulnerable area would probably kill my engines and doom me to drift helplessly through the infinite void of space.
After the galactic gauntlet I will have to travel for over thirty million years before I could arrive back home; this was due to the fact that the thruster pod was so slow. Using all of my fuel (saving nothing for reverse thrust that I would need at the end), I could only accelerate up to 0.07c because the thruster pod was designed to do not much more than escape the gravitational influence of a small planet before being recharged on the mothership.
Of course, reserving no fuel for reverse thrust would mean that there will be some complications down the road. The momentum of my thruster pod will make its impact upon Earth quite significant—nothing like the rock that killed the dinosaurs, but still very destructive. If the humans were all gone, then I could use the last of my fuel reserves to refine my velocity vector so that I'd collide with Earth at any location of my choosing; however, if the humans were still around, then they'd likely have adequate technology—even if their civilization had been destroyed and rebuilt a dozen times over—to shoot down my thruster pod before it could wreak havoc upon their planet. This occurrence would convert my vessel into debris and give my body a new direction of travel through space, resulting, due to my velocity being more than sufficient to escape the galaxy, in excellent chances that I'd wind up wandering through the void for all eternity. Fortunately, there was preparation for this scenario before I'd ever even left the Milky Way Galaxy:
Onboard my thruster pod were instructions that were programmed to be continuously sent to Earth starting from several centuries before the earthlings could possibly detect me, and there was a sufficient amount of information in the packaging of the message to allow them to deduce the syntax and vocabulary of the language. The instructions would explain the situation and tell them to send a rescue vessel for me. (I would certainly prefer to send this message now, or at least during the great intergalactic migration, but my thruster pod, having been designed only to send local transmissions, could not send a coherent radio signal very far.)
But all of this wouldn't happen for millions of years. And there was nothing in this thruster pod that could keep me entertained for more than a day. There was only the massive hull hole that I could not help but stare at: as I was escaping Terra 719A—dispersing the other thruster pods in random directions as decoys—the creatures hastily launched explosive projectiles; while the other pods were destroyed, I managed to coerce my incoming missiles into premature detonation through the manual use of my thruster pod's defense system. My pod sustained significant damage, and the event could have been catastrophic due to the explosive decompression that occurred: my thruster pod's door was left wide open while I was exploring the planet, and so the cockpit had assumed the atmosphere, and thus the atmospheric pressure, of the planet that I was on; I, in my rush to escape, did not expel the air after sealing myself in, and so after the attack, which occurred at a high altitude, all of the air went through that hole—and I almost went with it. I saved myself by pressing my body against the opposite wall so that all of the gusting air was between me and the breach.
I patched the hole, disposed of all the tools and loose items onboard, and then destroyed all computer circuits to permanently secure all of the locks. I could only leave the radio and the emergency precision boosters intact, although I would have to put them on a thirty-million-year time lock. If I did not do this, then there would be no possible way that I could stare at that mended hole for thirty million years and perpetually resist the self-destructive urge to slink through it. No possible way.
And then there was nothing left to do but memorize every feature of the interior of the thruster pod and count to one quadrillion.
Chapter 52
Nothing but darkness and stars.
Even with all of these years of travel ahead of me, I managed to convince myself that fleeing Terra 719A was the best response to the situation. I would surely return safely to a metal-paved earth. If I had stayed on Terra 719A, then I would have been captured and held in captivity long enough for those monsters to rip my last remaining thruster pods to pieces.
While their technology was sufficient to take down a nonmilitary mothership, and while they certainly could have learned a lot from reverse engineering the thruster pods and the remains of the mothership, there was still no telling what their future would be like—they had no track record that I could gauge. As for humanity, there was a great chance that they'd progressed while I was gone and that they would continue to do so even more over the remaining millions of years of my journey.
The time I spent in the thruster pod was quite a bit different from the time in the vault. Here I could see the stars and galaxies. It was just the stars and I, and I dreamed peacefully. I was confined in a space that couldn't even fit a hundred men, but my eyes could see the whole universe and my mind could go anywhere it wanted.
I went into deep thought during the flight, going so far as to conjure my own languages, mathematics, philosophies, and methods of science; my consciousness was permanently altered.
Chapter 53
When you get off of a plane that has carried you across the seas, you will find that you have to change the time on your wristwatch. When I came back to the little blue planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, I had to change my watch, too. I'd reached extreme speeds in deep space, speeds that, in your day, only subatomic particles would've had any business doing; consequently, my elapsed time and Earth's elapsed time differed by several million years.
It made little difference, though, since I was gone for over thirty million years on anyone's clock. I was gone for so long that Sol's radius had expanded by a measurable amount, the gas giants looked noticeably different, and all the new constellations that I had to learn upon my release from the vault were warped utterly beyond recognition due to galactic rotation. And there were a lot of changes on Earth, too.
For one thing, the human gene pool had drifted significantly—there were thousands of different species of humans, and I was now the only being in the known universe that might have looked anything like you. Actually, instead of the word "drift" I should use a term more like "directed flow" because the evolution was by way of artificial selection, not natural selection. Their bodies, genes, and biomechanical enhancements were all customized. On the cellular level these humans were completely advanced: their cells could absorb almost anything as fuel, and general human DNA was incrementally upgraded over trillions upon trillions of experimental generations so that in its current stage it could last millions of years before beginning to decay (and even after the normal processes of decay begin, the DNA structure could yet be artificially prolonged); the average lifespan was essentially indefinite. Sex no longer even existed—there were no such parts in the anatomy. Given the progress that had been made all the way from when man first stood u
pright up until now, it was commonly believed that the final stage of trans-humanism would be realized within around another hundred million years or so.
Human civilization was so advanced now that… well, I couldn't even describe it. They were doing things now that were thought to be absurdly impossible even after my emergence from the vault. The humans had somehow solved the problem of machines, heat, and working parts, which allowed them to send volunteers deep beneath the vaguely defined surface of Sol. Also there were now thousands of human-populated cities on Venus. Mars was completely terraformed and had a new magnetic field and atmosphere, each artificially and strenuously bound to the planet, that could support naked human life (while the many different varieties of humans could survive in many different varieties of environments, each and every human was, of course, engineered so that earthlike conditions would top the list of favorable environments; the terraformed Mars was now earthlike so that all humans could inhabit it freely).
There was even a human-populated city on Jupiter. And there were sky castles on the other gas giants—from what I'd heard, the other blue planet was the most choice destination because the winds there could reach up to a thousand miles an hour, creating a magnificently serene, breezy sound in the musically shaped wind roofs of the city. The view of the aqua-blue clouds could take your breath away, and it was just so beautiful to look at Sol and see it as a pale white dot.
But all I wanted to do was stay on Earth. There was no other place in the universe quite like it. If I stood on another planet, then I'd still feel like I was in outer space, like I was still in that terrible thruster pod. To me there was just Mother Earth and outer space, and all of the other planets were in outer space and they were part of the outer-space world.
And so I sought out the last few nature reserves on Earth that weren't completely covered in technology. I went to a beach preservation so that I could feel the sand run through my toes, and I felt the old, familiar sun smiling down upon me, and I interrupted the tides with my body, and I breathed in the air that could only be found on Earth. I was finally home.
Chapter 54
There were all kinds of new technologies now, but they bored me. There was one thing, though, that was different: it was a new telescope that had found a miracle. The universe becomes opaque at a certain distance away, cheating us out of a view of the early universe; our new telescope, being highly sophisticated, found a specific spot in the cosmic sky where we could see, through a very small gap in the curtain, into the mysterious early stages of the universe.
I was only able to ponder these new wonders for so long; the astronaut in me was awoken, and I set my sights for the veiled planet.
I asked them to take me there—having no actual purpose or objective in mind—and they indulged me. Upon arrival I was, at my request, dropped from above the atmosphere of Venus. It looked the same from this spot as I'd imagined: a big blanket covering the planet, a creamy white like what you'd get if you mixed all of the colors of Jupiter and Saturn.
The sound of the air rushing by me was very weak at first—I couldn't even hear it. I felt nothing, either, except the human-preservation suit that I was wearing from my neck down—it was pressing against my body, and it felt good. I clenched my fists and felt the resistance of the gloves, like I was gripping something. As I hit the clouds I began to hear the faint sounds of wind, and it got louder and louder as I continued to fall into deeper levels of atmospheric pressure. At some point I broke through the clouds—I can tell you that much—but I still couldn't see the planet's surface because of the haze.
Near the end of the free fall I could hear a sound, many sounds, like a thousand dying dragons, like the entire prehistoric world had awoken. The impact was much softer than I expected, although it was, of course, one of the many things that would have killed any human that might have traded places with me in this inferno. I rose to my feet and looked down with pride at my impact crater, but I lamented the fact that I didn't make such a landmark on a meteorologically dead planet that might preserve it like a scar.
And then suddenly there was an angelic figure of light in the sky, like a glowing anti-shadow made of pure sunshine, and it was descending upon me. It was a winged man, coated entirely in some kind of lightweight crystal, a fiery orange in this place with twinkling sparks all over him. The wings were fastened to his forearms and held by his hands, like something that could be one of da Vinci's unfinished inventions. He swung his legs out so that they were beneath his body and then he extended them into a landing pose, ever so gracefully: one leg was straight, with the toes dipped down, and the other was bent at the knee. He landed perfectly, flapping his wings once more while on the ground as if it was a tragedy that he had to stop flying. He held out his hands like a praying mantis, wrists all limp-like, offering me his wings. I accepted them, and he then removed extra wings that he had in a sheath on his back. He immediately took off flying because he was just too good to remain ground bound, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
I wondered how exactly I was meant to fly with these encumbering wings of crystal, but then when I flapped them, almost carelessly, I gained lift and my feet left the ground. I flapped the wings some more and I was flying, like a spirit rising up out of a graveyard. Once I was up high I surrendered some altitude for speed, and my body naturally shifted itself into a flying position.
I just sort of glided for a while, flapping my wings for altitude when necessary, keeping a safe distance from the ground level because I couldn't see any hazards in the distance. And then I heard a strange noise—it was artificial, and it sounded like it was for navigation. I assumed that the humans had their gadgets and tricks embedded into the helmets (which I lacked) of their human-preservation suits, and so there should have been no need for such an audible siren since each helmet would produce its own private audio. Therefore this repetitive sound, which was definitely a guiding beacon, must have been something specifically for me.
I meandered in the direction toward the sound and, after some time, I could see a large dome below me. I circled and descended like a spiraling vulture, and then when I was low enough I executed my own professional landing: I swooped upward sharply to kill all of my forward momentum, and then I covered my face with my wings so that I would begin to free fall; I then put my wings outward again to catch some air so that I might touch down as I would with a parachute.
I was either incredibly lucky or there were doors all over the perimeter of the city dome because a door opened up right in front of me. I entered the empty room, and another door was opened and I found another empty room. In each successive empty room the air held more clarity, less heat, and less pressure. I outlasted the duration of the doors and they soon revealed to me the innards of a great city with flying people and flowing water.
Chapter 55
The wall before me had clocks on one side and a window on the other. Except, instead of these being analog clocks for, say, the time in Los Angeles or London or Tokyo, these were digital clocks to tell you the year, as reckoned by man, for the major stellar systems across the various galaxies that we'd colonized. Earth's clock was always ahead of everywhere else since we star men had left there at relativistic speeds; according to the clocks on my wall, Earth was about ten trillion years ahead of the clock here.
The only clock that really matters is, of course, your own clock, which, in this era, is going to be different for everyone since the average human—if I can use such a loose word—will travel so very far in a lifetime. There will also be well over a hundred different names for each planet or sun, seeing as how humanity was so spread out by this time and hopelessly relying upon the speed of light to broadcast a name. A sun could be named after its galaxy, after its location in its galaxy, or after its type. Sometimes a planet was named after its sun, followed by the number corresponding to the planet's ordering in the stellar system (like how we sometimes refer to Earth as Sol III); many times a planet�
�particularly if it is perhaps not quite a planet by conventional standards—would be named after one of its prominent or recurring features; other times a planet might be named Terra, followed by a sequence of digits, so as to convey that the planet is easily inhabitable and not some ferocious gas giant. One thing, however, that would never become the name of a planet was its discoverer—be that the first to observe it or the first to stand upon it—since humanity by this time had very much outgrown its own vanity, and every last human knew full well that his lifetime of achievements would more appropriately be credited to the previous generations who labored to make everything possible.
In the end, all of this bureaucracy was somewhat pointless, I suppose, seeing as how neither the time on a standard clock nor the name below it could be agreed upon. I looked out the window and saw that it was the time of day when the sky was a twisted computer-green, and I was falling into a deep depression as I tried to reminisce about the languages that I used to speak. I knew intellectually that such languages existed and that I'd spoken them, but I could not remember the languages themselves, the people to whom I spoke them, or anything from those time periods; I had only a textbook understanding of the life that I'd lived due to the mechanics of my memory. When I closed my eyes and looked really far back I could only see the vault. Well… there were a few other things, but there was nothing that haunted me like the vault. Padempire should have been expunged from my memory ages ago, but I kept thinking about him, thereby activating the information in my mind and reinserting it as a new memory. Padempire's name never changed, but I've lost count as to how many different languages I've used for my internal thoughts while remembering him.
