by Geoff Wolak
‘We think it originated in the high Andes, sir. There could be people there.’
‘People … who don’t use radios, yet develop microwave communications.’
A second man burst in. ‘Sir, that odd signal, it’s encrypted. We can’t break the code, but the code blocks are eight bit bytes, and definitely not Seethan.’
Peck was on his feet again. ‘Coded blocks. You … you’d need an advanced computer for that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Try and direct a coded message towards the source, but on a frequency that the Seethan wouldn’t understand.’
‘That’s most frequencies, sir,’ the first aide quipped. ‘They often don’t understand their own frequencies. Last week they played marching band music on their primary military frequency by mistake.’
‘Do it,’ Peck urged.
Two days later I received a message, and smiled. ‘From human colony on Antarctica, to any other humans. Please get in touch, use this frequency.’ It was being sent over and over again, a simple code used. I sat down, and stopped smiling. How the hell do we explain who we are? I created a message, and sent it, hoping that it would not cause any problems.
Peck read the message, his office full of staff all wrapped up warm, the internal window now misted. ‘We are an … advanced race of humans, but not of … your world.’ Peck took in the expectant faces. ‘We will travel to your location soon, and evacuate you to … another world? Have hope, we will bring food and advanced medicines, we are already aware of the … flu virus and have antidote.’ He looked up.
‘They’re space-faring humans,’ a man said.
‘How could they be?’ Peck puzzled. ‘We never launched people into space.’
‘Whoever they are, they’re coming,’ someone pointed out. ‘We can ask them when they get here.’
‘There is one possibility,’ a man said. ‘And that a future space-faring race sling-shot around the sun and come back at an earlier time.’
‘Time … travelling human space-farers?’ Peck scoffed. ‘I want no talk of this with the general population. I’ll not get hopes up with this … science fiction fantasy. Not till we have facts, solid facts.’
‘Sir, that signal came from sixty-five thousand feet over the tip of Chile.’
‘They … have atmospheric aircraft?’ Peck puzzled.
‘The Seethans have Spitfires!’ a man shouted. ‘Who else flies at that height?’
Peck held up a hand. ‘Send another signal, ask for further details. But nicely.’
I read the message, quietly cursing whoever had sent it. Teams had been sent to Antarctica, and ships were on their way, ice-breakers. The existing scientific stations at the South Pole were now being bolstered with supplies and staff, and clever pre-fabricated huts were being joined end-to-end and buried in the snow, to be snug and warm afterwards. But the portal would take time, and we had an open link to the Seethan world. This was, unfortunately, happening in real time.
I sent a message back.
Peck read the note. ‘Is there a chance of unrest within your population after disclosure?’ He faced his aide. ‘I like this man. Whoever he is, he’s an administrator, and he understands a thing or two about controlling populations. He understands what us administrators have to go through.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the aide said with a reluctant nod.
‘Send a signal back, saying: yes there is, timescale to formal contact? Any further message will come to chief administrator, not to population.’
‘Sir, they’re now directly above us.’
‘Above us?’
‘Signal is from directly above us.’
‘Then … then they do have some sort if high-flying ship,’ Peck realised.
I read the note. Heaving a sigh, I sent a reply.
Peck read the reply, and collapsed into his seat, a doctor sent for. When Peck recovered, he called his senior staff together.
‘Gentlemen, and lady, I have received further information from this new group of humans, apparently not in a spaceship after all.’ He paused for effect. ‘They are, apparently, time travellers from a parallel dimension.’ He faced one particular face. ‘Seems that your late father, Mr Dodds, was correct in his crazy theories after all. A shame now that they took him out and shot him.’
A chorus of whispers broke out, but the debate was not about the shot man.
Peck raised a hand to silence them. ‘They have high-altitude unmanned drones on this world, they are aware of the Seether and Preether - in fact they say they’re in contact with them, and … they are aware of our past, the war, the virus, and … the creation of the Seether.’
A roar of whispers shot around the room.
Peck took a moment, and waited. ‘We can be sure … that we have no secrets from these people, but, more importantly, they can offer us a solution.’
‘Solution?’
‘They could go back in time to before the release of the virus, and alter things,’ Peck suggested.
‘They could unwind the damage that we did to our world,’ the sole lady present suggested. ‘We would all disappear, and never be born.’
‘Isn’t that a paradox?’ a man asked. ‘Since these people are here, talking to us now.’
‘Their knowledge of us won’t matter when they go back through time,’ another man insisted.
‘Then all the work we’ve done will have been wasted,’ another man pointed out, several agreeing with him.
‘All of our breakthroughs!’
‘Can’t some of the research be saved, and taken with us?’
‘They offered to evacuate us!’
Peck raised a hand. ‘We cannot be evacuated, and unwind time as well.’
‘How’d you know?’ someone curtly asked.
‘Yeah, maybe they do have spaceships!’
‘They’ll make contact in the weeks ahead, physical contact,’ Peck pointed out.
‘They’re coming here?’ people asked. ‘How? Will they land a ship, in the snow and the blizzards! Would we have to go to the coast?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peck began. ‘But I’d hazard a guess and say that space-farers … know how to land their own ships in good order.’
‘All of our people could never fit aboard a ship!’ someone shouted. ‘There are nine thousand of us!’
A roar of murmurings and complaints swept the office. A new man stepped in, pulling his hood down. The others peered up at him, and appeared fearful.
‘Is it true?’ the man asked in a South African accent, a roughly-chiselled and weather-worn face, the man in his fifties and grey-haired.
‘We … have contact with an advanced human race of space-farers and time travellers. They say … they are from a parallel dimension.’
The grey-haired man nodded. ‘That makes sense.’
‘It does?’ Peck queried.
The grey-haired man unzipped his parker, his name tag displaying Keets. ‘You remember those rumours of a crashed alien spacecraft about thirty years ago?’
‘Yes..?’ Peck said with an expectant expression.
‘Not rumours,’ Keets said, enjoying the look on Peck’s face.
More whispers broke out.
Keets added, ‘The two dead pilots are like Seethans.’
Peck stood. ‘Seethans? In a crashed alien ship!’
Keets smiled sadistically. ‘It has a date in the ship, a date of 2164. Seems like we die out, and they prosper. And that ship, it has controls labelled up for parallel dimensions. That’s what I’ve been working on.’
‘My God,’ Peck let out as he sank into his seat. ‘The funding, the food supplies and energy you’ve had!’
‘Should have allocated me a bit more, I may have got that damn ship to work,’ Keets snarled.
A man stood. ‘These newcomers, they’re human time travellers,’ he insisted.
‘Are they?’ Keets said dismissively. ‘Out there is a crashed time-travelling ship full of Seethans. Are you so sure that these messages are fr
om humans, or from someone who wants to destroy us?’ He turned away, but quickly turned back. ‘And Peck, the controls on that ship, they’re all in English. So I’m thinking that some of us survive in captivity. How else would the dumb fucking Seether make a spaceship with English writing?’
‘Instructions … in English?’ Peck puzzled.
‘They’ll enslave us in the years to come,’ someone suggested. ‘Either that, or the ships above have Seethan pilots, but computers that send messages in English!’
Peck mopped his brow, despite the low temperature in the room. ‘Have the guards stand ready, and break out those old weapons.’
‘The Seethan don’t even know we exist, and they still revere humans,’ a man said. ‘We monitored transmissions years ago that spoke about the ancestors.’
‘Yeah,’ a few people added.
‘If they are Seethan, they have no reason to be mad at us – we created them!’
A chorus of ‘yeah’ floated around again.
Keets grabbed his crew, re-stocked his supplies, and set-off along an ice tunnel, torches held, the spikes in their boots crunching ice as they progressed deeper.
Pitons had been fasted into the ice walls in many places, most of them now rusting. Old ropes hung between the pitons, the ropes’ original neat lines broken by the movement of the ice over the years. The group stepped over lumps of ice that had fallen down from above, and stepped cautiously around holes in the floor, no idea of how deep they were. The holes sunk away to nothingness.
In places they walked across rock as they progressed, and they walked a full mile, passing the bleached white bones of walrus, seals, and the giant rib bones of whales that had perished many hundreds of years earlier. At one juncture they opened into a cavern, a rocky floor leading to sand and finally to water, the splashes of nervous seals echoing as the men progressed. They passed old fishing line, ropes and hooks used to catch seals, old wooden crates now rotten, rusted metal harpoons scattered around.
Reaching a cave system, they descended a hundred yards, soon crossing shale, which they sank in up to their ankles. A full two hours after starting out they again entered an ice tunnel, another six hundred yards to their base. Kit was dropped down.
‘Well?’ an old man asked, sat now on an old wooden box and wrapped up warm.
Keets began, ‘It’s true; they’re getting signals from … someone with advanced technology, in English. These people, whoever they are, say they will land in a few weeks, and evacuate us.’
‘Or enslave us,’ the old man complained. ‘We might need to take matters into our own hands.’
‘The others are all excited like kids at Christmas,’ Keets snarled as he took off his outer layers. ‘They’ll open the damned door.’
‘We’ve secretly run a cable to the main power station, it’s not that far,’ a man put in. ‘And they haven’t found it yet. We should power up the craft now.’
‘They’ll see the power drain straight away,’ Keets snarled.
‘Then we create a diversion,’ the old man suggested. ‘We only need an hour or so.’
‘A well-placed bomb would do it,’ a man suggested. ‘A crack in the main roof.’
‘Are you mad?’ another man growled.
‘Do we have anything left to lose?’ Keets shouted. ‘Supplies will soon run out, the seals are not returning, the fish stocks gone! We’ll all be dead in a year anyway!’
‘He’s right,’ the old man said. ‘We have little time left. We do something now, or we die here in the ice.’
An hour later Keets lifted the lid on a frozen wooden box, and rubbed a hand over the ice inside. There, staring back at him, were two frozen Seether, small tufts of black hair over their ears. Grabbing a torch, he ducked his head and followed an ice tunnel, soon on rock and shale, a massive cavern opening up. And there sat a sleek ship of dark purple metal, twenty yards long. One side was slightly damaged, and the ship rested at a slight angle. Keets clambered awkwardly up an old wooden ladder, soon to an open hatch and easing inside. He stood upright, and inched along a corridor of bare grey walls the colour of steel, only this ship was not made of steel, and cutting torches had little affect on the metal. In the dimly lit cockpit he slumped into a chair that could have been designed for a human.
Peering through his own breath, he stared at the instrumentation, at the dark screens, a thin layer of ice crystals covering everything. There were few buttons or dials evident, just screens, screens that had once come to life for three minutes, but that was almost twenty years ago now. The power drain was huge, and that power was not easy to generate, or to replace.
Behind him sat a door, and inside was the main compartment, a compartment that had not been breached yet. Maybe, when the power was restored, the door would open. And maybe, when the power was restored, Keets could wind back time. Those three minutes of power had not revealed much, but they had indicated this ship’s ability to travel through time.
I studied a report on my data-pad. Our drone had scanned the ice and found several encampments buried under the ice, the various thermal plumes easy to find in a sea of ice and snow. Radar scanning had illustrated the extent of the subterranean habitats, including long tunnels connecting some of the habitats.
I overlaid a map of our Earth, my Earth, and then slowly peeled away the snow using 3-D modelling software, followed by the peeling away of known surface rock layers, and there it was, a geo-thermal vent, right where the main colony was housed. They had drilled down to it. I ordered that a portal be assembled near it, as well as habitats on this world that would prove big enough to house the population that we might evacuate. The computer suggested ten thousand people, based on the size of the various complexes.
Since the construction of a portal at that location would take weeks, I dispatched a large drone with drugs and phones.
At the house, Sandra now took to baby-sitting Selemba, although she was very nervous around the baby, and Helen warmed to our new and unpaid Seethan au-pair. Sandra was not at all bashful, and listed how many times she had mated with Jesus, certain now that she was pregnant. Many a tin of tuna was wolfed down.
Diplomatic relations
Jimmy, Pleb, and the soldiers had waited a few days for a response from the Seethan Government, the weather holding, and were eventually approached by an official - who complained that the camp was not where Pleb said it was. The official offered to escort the group to the capital city which, at the time, was not Denver, but Great Falls, Montana. The official led the group to the nearest town, where several tatty old buses stood waiting, a handful of police officers sat on each. The group boarded and found seats, a few of the soldiers having been left behind at the camp, and the buses set off south, belching smoke and rattling along.
What the Seethan official did not realise was that real-time images of the convoy were being piped from our drones, down to the soldiers’ camp, and from there through an open micro-portal back to portal control in Manson.
Jimmy sat and stared out of the grimy bus window as they took a road he was familiar with. Dated cars passed them, trucks, and many vehicles carrying livestock. A few military-style jeeps passed by, soldiers in drab green uniforms to be glimpsed, their weapons appearing to be simple bolt-action rifles. The houses they passed looked as they should, as they should for 1940s Canada.
There were telegraph poles evenly spaced along the road, even a Seethan repair crew seen attending one, phone lines following the road south. Jimmy noticed many a lumber yard along the main road, and it seemed that the Seether built houses and businesses close to the main highway, this road seemingly far more cluttered than it should have been in any era.
After a two hour drive, many old vehicles glimpsed on the way, Jimmy’s phone bleeped. He answered it whilst being curiously observed by the official, Pleb now fast asleep.
Lowering his phone, Jimmy said into his data-pad, ‘There is vehicle accident ahead, the road blocked. Turn left at the next junction, and go around.’ The data-p
ad translated
‘How can you know this?’ the official challenged, the pad translating.
‘We are ancestors,’ Jimmy simply stated.
The convoy eased to a halt at the next junction, the official stopping to use a phone in a petrol station. Back on board, he ordered the convoy to detour. ‘You were correct, ancestor.’
Jimmy gave the man a chocolate bar. ‘Open it, and eat the food inside. Try it.’
The official reluctantly sampled the chocolate bar, smiling contentedly after a moment. After he had wolfed it down, Jimmy offered a tin of sardines, which were also wolfed down. ‘Great ancestor, kind ancestor,’ the man said, warming to his passengers.
‘Would you like to see images of our world?’
‘Certainly,’ was translated back, Pleb still asleep.
Jimmy called up holographic images of New Kinshasa, the Seethan official stunned.
Half an hour later, Jimmy’s phone trilled. ‘Ambush ahead!’ came from the phone.
‘Heads up!’ Jimmy shouted at the soldiers, waking Pleb. ‘Pleb, there is an ambush ahead in the road.’
‘Preether,’ Pleb suggested.
Jimmy lifted his phone. ‘Give me a live commentary.’
‘Next bend; they’re a hundred yards beyond. Six on the left, ten on the right.’
‘Halt the bus!’ Jimmy ordered, Pleb shouting instructions. The human soldiers stepped off the bus and spread out, the drone operators coordinating their movements, the curious Seethan police following behind with dated revolvers in hand.
Jimmy grabbed the official. ‘Is this ambush your government?’
‘No, sir. Maybe Preether soldiers,’ was translated.
‘My men will kill them, and then you can see who they are. We … see everything.’
Half an hour later the bus trundled very slowly forwards, sixteen smoking corpses laid out on the side of the road.
‘Preether,’ Pleb confirmed, the differences in clothing subtle. ‘Ambush for people on road, not for ancestors.’ He was none too fussed, and rooted around in his bag for some food. The police reported what the soldiers had done, the official now worried at the efficiency of the killings. The convoy moved on, and headed further south.
