Multiversal Yarns

Thanks to my lovely wife I got a night to myself, away from kids and responsibilities.  I closed up in a coffee shop and dedicated myself to my favourite creative pursuit.  Have a read and let me know what you think in the comments.  Thanks for taking to time to explore my work.

Drew

 

 

“This is probably a waste of time.  

 

So much of our time and effort and resources have all been for nothing, so I feel this small waste of time is only fitting.  We conquered the stars, we escaped the death of our own planet.  I guess if you are still out there somewhere and you somehow get this message…  maybe you can learn something from it.”

A small red light above his console let Abe Golden know he was being recorded.  Usually he would care that his hair was in disarray, that he hadn’t shaved in days or that there was a large stain on his torn jumpsuit.  He was always the prim and proper type.  None of that seemed to matter any more.

 

“I assume this message with get to the last of the three generations ships that were sent from Earth, but I guess I should start this story earlier in case this is received but some other life form out there.  I can confirm that we are not alone in the universe so I guess there is a chance this is falls into non-human hands.

 

We are a race called Humans and we come from a planet called Earth.  All of our galactic cartography is based on the location of Earth so I have no real way to tell you where it was.  In case you hadn’t guessed from my use of tense, the location won’t help you much as the earth is no longer there.  Some pieces maybe, but not our home.  

 

We were a greedy people, it all seems so foolish now, we chased after a meaningless currency, ignoring every sign our planet gave us until it could take no more.  In the end we had mined the planet until it barely held together, polluted the atmosphere until it no longer offered us shelter and poisoned the water until there was nothing left to drink.  Galactic expansion was the only option but we hadn’t yet found a suitable replacement for our planet.  We were left with no choice.

 

The world banded together for one final push, one final hope for the survivability of humanity. Three unthinkably large ships were build.  Every remaining earthly resource was hemorrhaged in the pursuit of one last unifying human effort.  Every human under the age of 30 had an automatic spot on board, a literal generation of our race.  

 

These generations ships were not without problems.  Firstly, we had never mastered travel beyond or even up to light speed.  Sure we had all kinds of SciFi plans for Alcubierre drives that move space rather than the ship or warp drives and wormholes, but we never got any of that tech to work.  The best we could do was 99.999% of the speed of light.  We had never done it but that was what our best calculations worked out to.

 

Speed of light is a tricky beast, as you approach it, perception of time slows down.  If you spend a full day traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light and return to your start point, the people that didn’t travel with you will have experienced and aged 223.61 days.  Pretty wild concept, I was never a huge science and numbers guy but that much I found on the ship’s computer.  That stuck with me, blew my damn mind.

 

Our second problem was that outside of a few planets that seemed to be in the “goldilocks zone” between freezing to death and being burnt to a crisp, we had no idea where to send these generation ships.  That meant that even if we could achieve the theoretical 99.999% of light speed we had no idea how long we would be asking people to spend at that speed.  Could be months, could be years.  

 

We came up with a basic stasis technology that would slow down aging and pass the time in an instant.  I myself closed my eyes on Earth and awoke here.  I simply blinked my eyes, very jarring experience, I don’t recommend it.  The sheer power needed to put that many people under meant that we were asleep before we left the Earth.  We never even got so see space until we reviewed the reports on the ship’s computers.

 

We had some ideas about where to point the three ships but couldn’t be sure what they would find so they were made to be autonomous and search predefined criteria for things like temperature and atmosphere… basic human living conditions. We essentially shot our last stay of extinction from the hip and hoped for the best, I can’t imagine what that felt like.

 

I wonder how many lived long enough to see one of the generation ships explode so soon into its journey.  I mentioned that we are a greedy race, the ship’s reports laid it all out.  We didn’t have enough materials to safely build three ships that big, I’m not sure the entire planet did.  I feel a shared guilt for humanity’s errors even though I was so young when I left Earth.  We should have been happy with two ships but we always push it and cut corners, take things too far…

 

The shared thrust of launching these gargantuan vessels into the infinite darkness of space tore what was left of the Earth apart.  Everyone human being over the age of 30 died that day, knowingly.  They sacrificed the remainder of their life in a desperate hope to prolong the complete extinction of humanity.  

 

Unfortunately the Earth demise was neither graceful nor without collateral damage.  Huge chunks of planet were hurled into space.  When we awoke, our ship’s computer was beeping with excitement to share with us the report of Earth’s demise and the ensuing explosion of one of the generation ships when a quarter of the planet collided with it.  We were treated to high definition video of the death of not only every human over the age of 30 but a third of those under the age…

 

Sorry if I sound defeatist, it was just such a herculean effort, so much sacrifice, and for what?

 

Our own ship travelled for an unknown amount of time.  I am not being hyperbolic, the computer that was supposed to keep track of speed-time dilation and elapsed time malfunctioned somewhere along the way.  They should have kept someone awake to look after all this machinery, I think programmers called that wet-ware.  It is a strange thing.  Between stasis, time dilation and an unknown travel time, I don’t even know how old I am.  None of us did.  We just woke up on this p…uh…in this place.

 

Our ship, the “Spes” made decisions for us while we were asleep based on hastily written programming from a dead race on a dead planet.  The name meant hope in Latin, fitting that they chose a language that itself was dead long before the ships were conceived.  As Spes hurled itself through space it was always scanning.  Constellations of sensors were searching for a new home for human, a new Earth.  They were given criteria to look for, atmospheric conditions, temperature, food sources, tolerable gravity, an extensive list.  Once again humanity thought they knew everything.  Why would they have thought to specify that the light source must come from a star… and not the ground itself…

 

Imagine our surprise when the computer confirmed that it was safe to open the airlock and we cast our eyes on our new home.  What looked like trees strewn about, weird and wonderful living creatures approaching our vessel with curiosity.  Calm, mild air greeted us with a pleasant aroma, the whole scene would be euphoric if it weren’t for the aberration that the planets light source seemed to be emitted from the ground itself.  The whole world glowed with a soothing, radiant light.  

 

Everything was perfect and seemed to welcome us except for that unsettling constant reminder from your lizard brain, some vestigial reminder that all was not as it should be, something was wrong, very wrong.

 

The Spes’ landing was less than delicate and it was clear that in its current state, this new orb was to be our home for the foreseeable future, so we did what humanity has done for millennia, we made the most of what we were given.  We moved in.

 

We cut down strange looking trees to build our homes, we used pieces of the now destroyed Spes to build a new community.  The ship’s computer was full of tutorials for building shelter and basic farming, there was a seed vault on board with food we were used to eating, samples of earth soil could be transplanted to grow food.  At least the creators of these ships had gotten this part right.  We built a new home.

 

Everything however was just, a little wrong.  When you dug into the glowing ground the part you scooped away lost its luminescence and looked necrotic and rotten.  Any tilled earth quickly began to smell and we decided to no longer dig into the ground.  

 

As time passed we grew concerned that we had become entirely reliant on the resources that came with Spes and chose to send parties to explore our new home, see what could be found.  Much like the generation ships from earth we sent parties in three separate directions, with no intel, in hopes that they would stumble upon what we need for survival. What choice did we have?

 

One of our groups stumbled upon exactly what we were looking for and in doing so, once again doomed a portion of humanity to certain death.  Far in a direction we began calling west (although magnetic compases had no bearing on this orb) there was a monstrous scar of a opening in the glowing ground.  The noxious fetid stench from the pit should have been all the warning we need to avoid the exposed minerals below, but we were desperate for resources and more than anything we wanted to make progress.  We wanted to prove to someone that we could bend any world to our will and make it work for us.  

 

Before long were were mining this chasm of funk and stockpiling a new mineral we came to call Spesialite.  Since it seemed the name Spes was chose as much for how much it sounded like space, we honoured that tradition by phonetically copying the suffix of previous minerals and splicing the words together.

 

Specialite proved to be a wonder material, It seemed to be good for everything.  We built homes out of it, we used it to develop new tech with the help of Spes’ computers, we even ate the stuff.  We spliced it with our food to make never before seen nutrients that bolstered our bodies in new and groundbreaking ways.  We couldn’t get enough of it… literally.

 

Why is humanity never happy with “Enough”?   We always crave “More”.  You can probably guess the next part, we over-mined Spesialite, like it was our calling to separate it from the ground.  We mined more than we knew what to do with, because we could.  We stockpiled it.  It seems so ridiculous now, now that I know what Spesialite really is…”

 

A long pause finds Abe staring vacuously, almost wistfully at nothing in particular, then he remembered his task.

 

“Sorry, I… I’ll just continue.  It happened so slowly, to gradually for any of us to take notice from one day to the next, but the askew glow of our new home started to wane.  Once again that lizard brain that we had all endeavoured to repress was shouting from somewhere forgotten, that all was not well.  

 

Once again we send out three parties to explore but this time their task was not to find resources, but to learn more about our new home.  Finally get around to learning why it glowed in the first place and in the process find out why that glow was dimming.

 

I was tasked to lead one of these teams of explorers, excited to contribute something valuable to our venture into space I was proud to be given this important job.  We travelled on foot through complex and unfamiliar terrain, but hope was high.  There was a problem but surely humanity could solve it.  The topography was at once foreign and familiar.  Rolling hills gave way to forested areas.  Time was muddled on this orb since our light came from the ground itself there was no day/night cycle or movement of a star through the sky to gauge time.  

 

After what seemed like weeks we saw something that could be described as a mountain.  Excited for the option of high ground, a vista we could use to get our bearings we pressed on, climbing the gentle slope.  Never have I risen so high only to fall so low.

 

The elevated peak afforded us an unprecedented view of the surrounding topography that made what we were looking at abundantly clear.  What at a glance seemed to be our first discovered lake was now clearly an eye.  Any attempt at description of scale will fail to convey the enormity of this organ and the immediately abundant clarity of its significance.  

As we stood stupefied, the vast expanse of ocular organ blinked.  Miles of uniform… Cloth?  Skin I guess? Sped from every shore of the gyre, slowly collapsing the “mountain” we were standing on.  At full blink the mountain was gone and we stood on flat ground, then the lid began to retract.  The speed of the ridge’s reformation threw people into the air.  The swathes of eyelid bound up beneath us and once again we rose into the sky, painfully aware that we were not standing on a mountain at all, nor had we landed on a planet.

 

We were standing on… we had been living on… mining…”

 

A pregnant pause was unavoidable as a single tear streaked Abe’s cheek.  With a pained sigh he pressed on.

 

“We mined a living creature.  Likely its bones or something of the like.  The concept haunts me.  I was tasked with explaining to our city, our world, our new hope that it was all a lie.  Everything we knew about our new home was wrong.  Even as we journeyed back to our civilization the fading light of our host became inescapable.  Despite our size difference, our mining, our greed, had hurt this galactic being, gravely.

 

We agreed to stop mining Spesialite immediately but the damage was done.  The light grew ever dimmer until we were plunged into darkness.  The trees and other living creatures we shared a home with soon perished and rotted.  The stench of the now necrotic creature drove us back into our ship.  The Spes made a survivable home for a short time, even though we knew the tight quarters soon would be our doom.

 

Once again the computers spoke to us in joyful beeps and whooshed to inform us that before the creature perished, its course had been altered.  We were…or…  are headed towards a Star.  It is my belief that the creature knew it was infected with something, a cancer, a parasite consuming its flesh and killing it.  In its dying effort, to protect others like it, if they even exist, O do so hope they exist.  I hope we didn’t kind the only one of these magnificent beasts.  In its death knell the creature aimed itself at a star and closed its eye for the last time as the light of the world faded.

 

We are done, all our industriousness was not only for nothing, but it was our very undoing.  If the last generation ship is out there, if you can hear me.  Heed my warning.  If your ship finds you a planet that humanity can live on, somewhere it can thrive… let that be enough.

 

Do not repeat our mistake, do not echo the greed of our homeworld as we have.

 

If this transmission is being received be another life form and you someone understand my words.  Look at my face, study my features, this is what a human looks like.  If a ship full of us arrives on your homeworld, desperate for help, wanting food and resources, wanting a place to live.  Turn us away.  I beg you.  We are not to be trusted, we will only bring you harm.  

 

Humanity may yet be able to overcome our greed, learn to be satisfied with what we have.  We may yet survive and learn to contribute to our surroundings rather than bleed them dry.  Until that day however, I don’t want our galactic legacy to be the death of yet another glorious species.  We have done enough harm.”

 

Now openly weeping, Abe Golden could no longer continue.  Looking pleadingly into the lens he turned off the recording and used the last of the ship’s power to transmit the signal as far as possible, in every direction, as humanity had done every time they were lost.