Quick Peek
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Science Fiction Drama | Genre
Solitude, pre-FTL travel, regret | Themes Arthur C. Clarke | Influences |
Age | Adult
Notes | Semi-finalist, Writers of the Future, first quarter 2020 No content warnings. |
I open my eyes and gasp, frigid air biting at my lungs. The light is harsh, blurred and painful as my eyes try to adjust. I wrap my arms around my body as the pod continues to warm up, and as soon as I am able, I reach up and press against the frosted glass.
The door opens slowly, pistons groaning in objection after sitting dormant for so long. I try to step forward but my legs are sore and unresponsive, sending me falling out of the pod onto the cushioned floor. When I first stepped foot in this ship on Luna, I complained about the feel of walking on this floor and debated why they would have put such a weird surface in this specific room. Now, I’m glad for it and silently thank engineers long dead. Static punctuated by occasional whines, pops, and crackling noises hiss from the speakers overhead, but nothing intelligible finds its way through. I curl into a shivering ball and enjoy the warmth for what feels like an hour until my body is still and my heart has stopped pounding in my ears.
There should have been audio updates by now, but the static continues with no sign of change. I stretch my legs and move to sitting. They gave us exercises to do on waking, and I diligently go through the motions until I can stand steady. My first thought is coffee and I make my way to the kitchen for my prize.
Here, there are screens to keep us apprised of what’s happening with the mission and the ship. I have no need to rush, I was awakened a full three days before the scheduled time for the others to be thawed out in order to get everything up and running again. Then they would have a day to recover from cryogenic sleep and the place would be busy, loud, even hectic. But for now, I’m as good as alone.
Two hundred and sixteen years, three months, eleven days, five hours, twenty-three minutes, eighteen seconds and counting since we blasted off from Lunar Colony Gamma. Some of the crew were already in stasis when we left, the entirety of my knowledge of them based on the months we spent preparing for the mission together. I don’t even know if they’ve seen the inside of our new home yet, or if their pods were placed with them already inside. It was a skeletal crew that got us moving, just Mathers and Chang and me. Each of them went to the pods once their work was done, and I was left to finalize system protocols for a long, silent journey before slipping into mine.
The static from the speakers is growing irritating. There’s still none of the information I was expecting from the ship computer, seems like I need to run some diagnostics. I go to the nearest screen with a seat and check on our status while the computer checks all its peripherals.
We’re in the Epsilon Eridani system. Well, probably. At this distance it’s hard to tell exactly when we’ll enter the system, since we haven’t yet reached any orbiting bodies and I’m not trained to recognize the point where a star’s influence is overwhelmed by the interstellar medium. What was that? The helio...something. Helen used words like that, with a glimmer in her eye that made me wonder if she could ever feel for a person the way she does for stars.
I shake the thoughts from my head and finish the rest of my coffee. That was much further in the past than it feels to me and I need to focus. The report states the speakers were damaged by the cold; there will be no audio messages until Chang wakes up and fixes them. I turn them off and make my way to the cockpit to activate the braking maneuvers. They will be mostly automated, retrojets burning in a sequence programmed into them before we ever left, dropping us down to a speed where we can safely enter orbit around a new world and plan our descent. Then we’ll establish the colony. Then we’ll live out our lives, alone, waiting, as explorers from later generations begin making their way out to meet our descendants and the world we’ve prepared.
Ah, yes, descendants. Thirty of us on this mission, and stored DNA from another thousand in the medical bay for artificial insemination that would ensure sufficient genetic diversity to survive the long break before our great-grandchildren see other humans. I’m still not sure how I feel about my part in ensuring there are great-grandchildren, but I don’t need to dwell on that while everyone else is still asleep. I need to prepare the ship for them to wake up.
The door opens slowly, pistons groaning in objection after sitting dormant for so long. I try to step forward but my legs are sore and unresponsive, sending me falling out of the pod onto the cushioned floor. When I first stepped foot in this ship on Luna, I complained about the feel of walking on this floor and debated why they would have put such a weird surface in this specific room. Now, I’m glad for it and silently thank engineers long dead. Static punctuated by occasional whines, pops, and crackling noises hiss from the speakers overhead, but nothing intelligible finds its way through. I curl into a shivering ball and enjoy the warmth for what feels like an hour until my body is still and my heart has stopped pounding in my ears.
There should have been audio updates by now, but the static continues with no sign of change. I stretch my legs and move to sitting. They gave us exercises to do on waking, and I diligently go through the motions until I can stand steady. My first thought is coffee and I make my way to the kitchen for my prize.
Here, there are screens to keep us apprised of what’s happening with the mission and the ship. I have no need to rush, I was awakened a full three days before the scheduled time for the others to be thawed out in order to get everything up and running again. Then they would have a day to recover from cryogenic sleep and the place would be busy, loud, even hectic. But for now, I’m as good as alone.
Two hundred and sixteen years, three months, eleven days, five hours, twenty-three minutes, eighteen seconds and counting since we blasted off from Lunar Colony Gamma. Some of the crew were already in stasis when we left, the entirety of my knowledge of them based on the months we spent preparing for the mission together. I don’t even know if they’ve seen the inside of our new home yet, or if their pods were placed with them already inside. It was a skeletal crew that got us moving, just Mathers and Chang and me. Each of them went to the pods once their work was done, and I was left to finalize system protocols for a long, silent journey before slipping into mine.
The static from the speakers is growing irritating. There’s still none of the information I was expecting from the ship computer, seems like I need to run some diagnostics. I go to the nearest screen with a seat and check on our status while the computer checks all its peripherals.
We’re in the Epsilon Eridani system. Well, probably. At this distance it’s hard to tell exactly when we’ll enter the system, since we haven’t yet reached any orbiting bodies and I’m not trained to recognize the point where a star’s influence is overwhelmed by the interstellar medium. What was that? The helio...something. Helen used words like that, with a glimmer in her eye that made me wonder if she could ever feel for a person the way she does for stars.
I shake the thoughts from my head and finish the rest of my coffee. That was much further in the past than it feels to me and I need to focus. The report states the speakers were damaged by the cold; there will be no audio messages until Chang wakes up and fixes them. I turn them off and make my way to the cockpit to activate the braking maneuvers. They will be mostly automated, retrojets burning in a sequence programmed into them before we ever left, dropping us down to a speed where we can safely enter orbit around a new world and plan our descent. Then we’ll establish the colony. Then we’ll live out our lives, alone, waiting, as explorers from later generations begin making their way out to meet our descendants and the world we’ve prepared.
Ah, yes, descendants. Thirty of us on this mission, and stored DNA from another thousand in the medical bay for artificial insemination that would ensure sufficient genetic diversity to survive the long break before our great-grandchildren see other humans. I’m still not sure how I feel about my part in ensuring there are great-grandchildren, but I don’t need to dwell on that while everyone else is still asleep. I need to prepare the ship for them to wake up.
The work for my first day awake is done, and I sit in the cockpit, staring out at the vast expanse of space. Epsilon Eridani shines directly ahead, just barely large enough to know that it’s closer than the blanket of points behind it. The ship is silent. There’s probably a low hum, somewhere, from the machinery that gives me air and water and gravity and all those other things we took for granted on Earth. I sip my coffee, stare out into the void, and let the points of light become little more than white noise on the surface of reality.
There are messages saved for us. Well wishes, goodbyes, words of encouragement from loved ones left ten light-years and two centuries behind our ship. A record of people who knew they would never see us again, lives we left behind forever, vows we had to break. We didn’t get to see them before we left, they were programmed into the ship’s computer by technicians to await our arrival. Some were supposed to be transmitted to the ship after we were in stasis. The idea was to have some piece of home still with us, some means of transitioning to the absence we would know from this day forward. It was meant to be comforting. With the speakers down, I wouldn’t be able to hear mine if I watched them now, but I don’t even know if I’m ready to do that. I don’t know whether it would be better if Helen left one or if she didn’t, and I’m not yet ready to find out.
It was a great opportunity. I had been training for it all my life. I had to put in for this mission. She understood, of course she did, that’s why she applied as well. We cooked up all kinds of plans, what we were going to do if we got in, what we would do if we didn’t. We weren’t prepared for one of us to be accepted and not the other. The look on her face when we read our letters together. The scar on my hand from cleaning up the glass she dropped when she realized. The fight when I accepted that we weren’t being given another choice. The applications to follow-up missions that got scrapped.
I need to focus on something else. All I have is void outside the ship and silence inside the ship, and if I don’t find anything to do I’ll have nothing left but my own thoughts. Another systems check, a survey of where everything is set right now, maybe that will do it. Keep myself busy. Get everything ready for the others. Autopilot looks good, oxygen is where it needs to be, all the essential systems are running smoothly. I’m not tired enough yet to slip away. Maybe secondary systems. Tertiary systems. I start turning on optional systems just for something else to check, and I freeze when I turn on the radio and it begins analyzing a signal.
There was one world in the Epsilon Eridani system that showed promise as a habitable target, and we were briefed on three possible outcomes. The first was considered ideal, that we would arrive and find a world ready for human society and lacking any intelligent life of its own. The mission then was simply to set up a colony and live our lives. Another was that the readings would turn out to be wrong, and the world would not be ready for us. We had a habitat module and some supplies for establishing a base like the first one on Mars, admittedly a slightly more advanced version, and were encouraged to check the other worlds and moons in the system on the way in to see if any of them would be better. Otherwise, we had to just make the best of it. It’s not like we could just turn around and go home.
The final option was that we would find a world with an established civilization. There were extensive protocols for gauging if the civilization was ready to interact with a space-faring race and rules for first contact that varied by their technological status and our reception. There had been long, heated arguments about the morality of making first contact with a species unaware of alien races, but the fact is we have nowhere else to go. The ship doesn’t have enough fuel to take us home if the mission fails, or to another star system if this one is occupied. We have to work with what we find, and no one could be expected to patiently sit in a spaceship looking down on a livable world for as many generations as it took for them to notice us. The ship itself couldn’t even sustain us that long even if we wanted it to.
As far as I know, they were still debating it when we left. Maybe they settled on an answer. Maybe they were still debating it. Maybe those we left behind now view us as colonialist monsters. I’ll never know, now; we had our orders, and we left that conversation behind.
Was this really first contact? Will I be the first human being to hear the words of an alien species? What do they talk about? Should I wake the rest of the crew early if it turns out we can begin communicating with another race?
I set the parameters for examining the signal, the main issue being that it clearly wasn’t designed to be received by what we have on board. I’m getting traces at best. It seems like they were using a technology that didn’t rely on radio or television waves but produced them as a side effect. It was clearly artificial; the patterns can be seen even in what little I’m picking up. With the amount of extrapolation that needs to be done to make sense of this, and the computer checking other systems to see if anything can receive the messages better than our surface-to-orbit radio, I anticipate the computer needing time to run without my poking at it. After all, even after it processes enough of the signal to make something of it, the computer will have to run it through the database of all known languages to try and identify and syntax and grammar trends that resemble human speech and then attempt a translation. I eat my dinner and return, finding very little progress. I read for a while and barely focus on the words because my mind keeps going back to the analysis. I fall asleep in the cockpit. I dream of discovering the signal alongside Helen, and the way her face would light up if she was here.
There are messages saved for us. Well wishes, goodbyes, words of encouragement from loved ones left ten light-years and two centuries behind our ship. A record of people who knew they would never see us again, lives we left behind forever, vows we had to break. We didn’t get to see them before we left, they were programmed into the ship’s computer by technicians to await our arrival. Some were supposed to be transmitted to the ship after we were in stasis. The idea was to have some piece of home still with us, some means of transitioning to the absence we would know from this day forward. It was meant to be comforting. With the speakers down, I wouldn’t be able to hear mine if I watched them now, but I don’t even know if I’m ready to do that. I don’t know whether it would be better if Helen left one or if she didn’t, and I’m not yet ready to find out.
It was a great opportunity. I had been training for it all my life. I had to put in for this mission. She understood, of course she did, that’s why she applied as well. We cooked up all kinds of plans, what we were going to do if we got in, what we would do if we didn’t. We weren’t prepared for one of us to be accepted and not the other. The look on her face when we read our letters together. The scar on my hand from cleaning up the glass she dropped when she realized. The fight when I accepted that we weren’t being given another choice. The applications to follow-up missions that got scrapped.
I need to focus on something else. All I have is void outside the ship and silence inside the ship, and if I don’t find anything to do I’ll have nothing left but my own thoughts. Another systems check, a survey of where everything is set right now, maybe that will do it. Keep myself busy. Get everything ready for the others. Autopilot looks good, oxygen is where it needs to be, all the essential systems are running smoothly. I’m not tired enough yet to slip away. Maybe secondary systems. Tertiary systems. I start turning on optional systems just for something else to check, and I freeze when I turn on the radio and it begins analyzing a signal.
There was one world in the Epsilon Eridani system that showed promise as a habitable target, and we were briefed on three possible outcomes. The first was considered ideal, that we would arrive and find a world ready for human society and lacking any intelligent life of its own. The mission then was simply to set up a colony and live our lives. Another was that the readings would turn out to be wrong, and the world would not be ready for us. We had a habitat module and some supplies for establishing a base like the first one on Mars, admittedly a slightly more advanced version, and were encouraged to check the other worlds and moons in the system on the way in to see if any of them would be better. Otherwise, we had to just make the best of it. It’s not like we could just turn around and go home.
The final option was that we would find a world with an established civilization. There were extensive protocols for gauging if the civilization was ready to interact with a space-faring race and rules for first contact that varied by their technological status and our reception. There had been long, heated arguments about the morality of making first contact with a species unaware of alien races, but the fact is we have nowhere else to go. The ship doesn’t have enough fuel to take us home if the mission fails, or to another star system if this one is occupied. We have to work with what we find, and no one could be expected to patiently sit in a spaceship looking down on a livable world for as many generations as it took for them to notice us. The ship itself couldn’t even sustain us that long even if we wanted it to.
As far as I know, they were still debating it when we left. Maybe they settled on an answer. Maybe they were still debating it. Maybe those we left behind now view us as colonialist monsters. I’ll never know, now; we had our orders, and we left that conversation behind.
Was this really first contact? Will I be the first human being to hear the words of an alien species? What do they talk about? Should I wake the rest of the crew early if it turns out we can begin communicating with another race?
I set the parameters for examining the signal, the main issue being that it clearly wasn’t designed to be received by what we have on board. I’m getting traces at best. It seems like they were using a technology that didn’t rely on radio or television waves but produced them as a side effect. It was clearly artificial; the patterns can be seen even in what little I’m picking up. With the amount of extrapolation that needs to be done to make sense of this, and the computer checking other systems to see if anything can receive the messages better than our surface-to-orbit radio, I anticipate the computer needing time to run without my poking at it. After all, even after it processes enough of the signal to make something of it, the computer will have to run it through the database of all known languages to try and identify and syntax and grammar trends that resemble human speech and then attempt a translation. I eat my dinner and return, finding very little progress. I read for a while and barely focus on the words because my mind keeps going back to the analysis. I fall asleep in the cockpit. I dream of discovering the signal alongside Helen, and the way her face would light up if she was here.
On day two, I begin to see that some of the other lights in the sky are closer than the background stars. These must be planets in our new star system, or very close asteroids. This isn’t my field of study, and my mind is somewhere else anyway. They’re awfully pretty, though.
Today I need to get every section of the ship turned on and warming up. I have inventories to check, labs to get operational, crew quarters to connect to the life support system, food to pull from deep freeze. Tomorrow I’ll have to finish any of that work and verify that everything is ready and then wake the rest of the crew. Between each step, I’m slipping into the cockpit to check the progress of the signal analysis. It isn’t until the eleventh time I check that I see results on the screen. The results are long and complicated and I skim through mostly to see if there’s anything that really catches my eye, anything that tells me something about who sent it. Then I find it.
The transmission is in Arabic.
I sink into a chair and stare at the screen. According to the report, the amount of signal decay suggests a local origin. The translator hasn’t gotten to it yet, but I decide to try and send a test signal back. I have the computer send a request for historical data, an origin or something, to see if maybe there’s a computer that can receive it. It will take hours for the signal to reach our target planet and then return, so I go back to work.
I have the living quarters and the dining area ready to go before I make it back and find a log of important historical events related to the source of the signal. I learn that faster-than-light travel was developed a little under sixty years ago, and a colony was established in this system about a decade after that. It appears there has been constant occupation ever since, and the original signal I detected was just idle chat between the colony and a ship passing by.
I know I should probably be happy. Mankind has established the colony we set out to establish, and seems to have done very well about it. We won’t have to be alone out here, waiting for our great-grandchildren to make contact again. With faster-than-light travel on the table, maybe some of us could even go back, if we wanted. But mostly I’m in shock, and I drift to my quarters in a daze. There’s no mention of us or any other expedition on its way here in the history log. I don’t know if they even remember we’re coming.
When I get to my room, I see the terminal reminding me of my unseen messages. I sit down and open the logs without thinking. I see a couple messages from Helen, the last sent a month after I went into stasis. I open that one to see her weak smile. I can’t hear her, but I don’t even need the subtitles to see the apology on her lips and the sorrow in her eyes. She understands, she reminds me, how important this is to me, how important it is to mankind as a whole. She tells me it hurts, of course it hurts, but it’ll all be worth it when I get to stand on an alien world and start something new and amazing for mankind. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll manage to get onto another ship, there’s still rumor a second mission will be sent to supplement ours. Maybe, but just in case, she says goodbye.
I cry myself to sleep that night.
Today I need to get every section of the ship turned on and warming up. I have inventories to check, labs to get operational, crew quarters to connect to the life support system, food to pull from deep freeze. Tomorrow I’ll have to finish any of that work and verify that everything is ready and then wake the rest of the crew. Between each step, I’m slipping into the cockpit to check the progress of the signal analysis. It isn’t until the eleventh time I check that I see results on the screen. The results are long and complicated and I skim through mostly to see if there’s anything that really catches my eye, anything that tells me something about who sent it. Then I find it.
The transmission is in Arabic.
I sink into a chair and stare at the screen. According to the report, the amount of signal decay suggests a local origin. The translator hasn’t gotten to it yet, but I decide to try and send a test signal back. I have the computer send a request for historical data, an origin or something, to see if maybe there’s a computer that can receive it. It will take hours for the signal to reach our target planet and then return, so I go back to work.
I have the living quarters and the dining area ready to go before I make it back and find a log of important historical events related to the source of the signal. I learn that faster-than-light travel was developed a little under sixty years ago, and a colony was established in this system about a decade after that. It appears there has been constant occupation ever since, and the original signal I detected was just idle chat between the colony and a ship passing by.
I know I should probably be happy. Mankind has established the colony we set out to establish, and seems to have done very well about it. We won’t have to be alone out here, waiting for our great-grandchildren to make contact again. With faster-than-light travel on the table, maybe some of us could even go back, if we wanted. But mostly I’m in shock, and I drift to my quarters in a daze. There’s no mention of us or any other expedition on its way here in the history log. I don’t know if they even remember we’re coming.
When I get to my room, I see the terminal reminding me of my unseen messages. I sit down and open the logs without thinking. I see a couple messages from Helen, the last sent a month after I went into stasis. I open that one to see her weak smile. I can’t hear her, but I don’t even need the subtitles to see the apology on her lips and the sorrow in her eyes. She understands, she reminds me, how important this is to me, how important it is to mankind as a whole. She tells me it hurts, of course it hurts, but it’ll all be worth it when I get to stand on an alien world and start something new and amazing for mankind. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll manage to get onto another ship, there’s still rumor a second mission will be sent to supplement ours. Maybe, but just in case, she says goodbye.
I cry myself to sleep that night.
I’ve spent twelve hours planning out how to tell the rest of the crew. Everything we gave up, everything we lost, it’s all gone for nothing. Our great-grandchildren beat us here. We have no great accomplishment waiting for us, no colony to establish, no history to make, no reason to be here at all. The goodbyes, the well wishes, the loved ones we left behind and never got to hold or even bury were lost to us just so we could arrive too late to matter. Maybe I shouldn’t tell them any of it. Just aim the ship somewhere else in space, climb back into stasis, and let us drift off into the void, peaceful and ignorant.
And forgotten.
The colony probably knows we’re here, now. I doubt my probing the computer went unnoticed. But I haven’t even been to the cockpit to see if anyone has tried to reach out. It doesn’t matter. What could they say, at this point? What can they offer us that compares to what we left behind and what we will never find?
I wrap my arms around myself in the cold. This room felt so much warmer when I was coming out of stasis, but I’ve since remembered that it was colder than the rest of the ship to ease us into the environment. The button to begin waking the others is next to me. My pod stands open, right down the line, ready for me to crawl back in and dream of Helen. Let the cold embrace me and imagine it’s her ghostly arms. It’s time, I know it is. I have to decide, for myself, for all of us, whether or not all of this has been worth it. I didn’t sign up for this burden, how can I know the right thing to do? So I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and push the button.
And forgotten.
The colony probably knows we’re here, now. I doubt my probing the computer went unnoticed. But I haven’t even been to the cockpit to see if anyone has tried to reach out. It doesn’t matter. What could they say, at this point? What can they offer us that compares to what we left behind and what we will never find?
I wrap my arms around myself in the cold. This room felt so much warmer when I was coming out of stasis, but I’ve since remembered that it was colder than the rest of the ship to ease us into the environment. The button to begin waking the others is next to me. My pod stands open, right down the line, ready for me to crawl back in and dream of Helen. Let the cold embrace me and imagine it’s her ghostly arms. It’s time, I know it is. I have to decide, for myself, for all of us, whether or not all of this has been worth it. I didn’t sign up for this burden, how can I know the right thing to do? So I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and push the button.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; edited by Tim McLaughlin