Interstellar Caveman

by Karl Beecher

  “A day?” replied Colin. “That’s underestimating it slightly, don’t you think? Years is more like it. God knows how long I was in stasis.”

  “Respectfully, sir, your time in stasis does not count towards your fast. That intervening time was spent in a state of non-living.”

  “Still,” said Colin, holding up one of the ‘carrots.’ “It would be nice to wake up to something more substantial than this.” He daydreamed of an English breakfast, one packed with meat that would outrage even the most passive and non-committal of vegetarians.

  “Your digestive system is likely to be in a very sensitive state. We must begin your diet gently.”

  “Have you managed to work out how long I was actually in stasis yet?”

  “All in good time, sir. Ms. Tyresa doesn’t want to risk you having another episode by bombarding you with information.”

  “I’m not asking you to bombard me. Just say it gently.”

  “Ms. Tyresa will be along presently with all the information you require.”

  Just then, the itch flared up again deep inside Colin’s ear. Instinctively, he shoved his little finger in and scratched. “Ugh! This damned thing is annoying me.”

  The thing Tyresa had inserted into Colin’s ear just moments after his revival had turned out to be something called a translator implant, apparently a tiny computer that constantly listened to surrounding noises. When it detected speech, it automatically translated the words into a pre-configured language. The resultant translation was emitted by a microscopic speaker directly against the wearer’s eardrum.

  Useful, no doubt, but the rubbing and itching was taking some getting used to.

  “Please don’t do that, sir,” said Ade, as Colin furiously jiggled his finger back and forth. “You might injure your ear. And I do recommend you eat something.”

  “It’s like being back at school again,” pouted Colin. “Having all these orders barked at me. Eat your food! Stop picking your ear! Don’t touch the airlock controls!”

  He huffed, picked up the blue leaf from his plate, and gingerly took a bite. It tasted exactly as he imagined a blue leaf might taste. He discreetly took it from his mouth and put it back on the plate. Then he took a bite of the red vegetable. It tasted even less like the carrots he remembered but wasn’t actually unpleasant. He revised his opinion a moment later when a garlic and herb sauce suddenly emerged as he chewed. The whole pulpy, reddish-pink mouthful ended up back on his plate.

  He carefully picked up the spiky fruit, a sort of offensive-looking kiwi. He was trying to work out how the heck to eat it when the galley door slid open, and Tyresa walked in.

  “It’s alive!” she exclaimed sarcastically at Colin. “Finally. You sleep more than a narcoleptic student, you know that?”

  Colin raised an eyebrow. “Nice to see you too.”

  She observed his puzzlement at the fruit and laughed. “Do you know what to do with that thing, genius?”

  Colin looked at it and then back at Tyresa. “I can think of one thing I’d like to do with it.” He placed it back on the plate.

  “So,” she said, taking a seat beside him, “how are you settling in? Everything good?”

  “Well, no actually, I’m trying to…”

  “Ade getting you everything you need? I see you’ve already got yourself some dinner.” She grabbed a carrot from his plate and took a bite.

  Colin cleared his throat. “Look, I’m just trying to get some basic facts. Ade here, he has…” He looked up at Ade. “I’m sorry, should I refer to you as ‘he’ or ‘it’ or what?”

  Ade turned his head in a smooth motion. That was one thing Colin had noticed about Ade: his movements were always very smooth. Too smooth, in fact. The way he held himself and ambulated, while not robotic exactly, was exquisitely controlled and precise. What’s more, Ade’s features—his skin, his eyes, his hair—all looked so well-crafted as to appear artificial, as indeed they must have been. He seemed sculptured, unnatural even, and Colin found it slightly off-putting.

  “Androids, strictly speaking, have no gender,” replied Ade. “However I was assigned male features, so it would be appropriate to refer to me as ‘he.’”

  “Right,” said Colin. “Well, he has been looking after me, no problems there…”

  “Good,” replied Tyresa through a mouthful of carrot.

  “… although, he refuses to give me any solid info.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Tyresa. “Perhaps we should come to that now.”

  From inside her jacket, she pulled out a piece of clear, thin folded plastic. When Tyresa unfolded it and pinched the corner with her finger, it suddenly sprang open into a flat, rigid shape. Row upon row of illuminated letters appeared on its surface.

  “What on earth is that?” asked Colin.

  “What, this?” She held up the plastic-looking thing in her hand. “Just a slate. You don’t have slates where you come from?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just a computer really. Stores data, displays info, images, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh, like an iPad?”

  “A what?”

  “iPad. You don’t have iPads anymore? You know, Apple?”

  “Um… yeah,” Tyresa replied uncertainly. “We’ve got apples. You want one?”

  She signalled to Ade, who reached over to the counter and produced what looked like a purple-coloured apple.

  “No, I mean… Never mind.” Colin sighed. “No more Apple, eh? How the mighty have fallen. Just how long have I been away?”

  “Let’s try and find out,” she said. “I’ve looked at some of the info you gave Ade. Although, to be honest, a lot of it doesn’t make much sense.” She read through some of the text. “Here we are. Name: Colin Douglass.”

  Colin nodded.

  “Date of birth: Twenty-first of November.”

  “Yes.”

  Tyresa peered at him. “What’s a ‘November’?”

  “Eh? It’s a month. Twenty-first day of November.”

  “Oh, like a division of time, I see. And what’s this number here?” She held up the slate and pointed.

  “That’s the year I was born.”

  Tyresa looked at the slate once more and hummed. “See, this is the first problem. I don’t know any calendars that look like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: I don’t know what this date means.”

  “You mean even the calendar is different now?”

  “Yes and that means I can’t work out how long you’ve been in stasis.”

  “Oh, that’s mean. Then what’s the date according to you?”

  “Depends.”

  “Huh? On what?”

  “Every star system has its own local calendar. And then there’s GST.”

  “GST?”

  “Galactic Standard Time. So, on Ceti where I come from, the date is 245.131. According to GST, it’s about 1535M8. Now, unless you give us a date in a calendar we recognise, we can’t tell exactly you how long you were out. I could find the calendar by looking up your planet, but what you told Ade about your place of birth is confusing.”

  “In what way?”

  “You said you were born ‘in Pepperton, United Kingdom.’”

  “Yes.”

  Tyresa frowned. “Which kingdom do you mean?”

  “The United Kingdom.”

  “That’s it? Just The United Kingdom? I don’t know that one. You mean it’s several kingdoms in one?”

  “No… well, yes… sort of. It’s…” Colin sighed. “I always have trouble explaining this to foreigners. I come from England…”

  “England?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not The United Kingdom?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, I do come from The United Kingdom. Pepperton is in the United Kingdom.”

  “Pepperton is one of the kingdoms?”

  “No England is, along with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Well, those last three were kingdoms, but t
hey’re not anymore. They were gradually absorbed.”

  “Absorbed? You mean their life forces were drained or something?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  Tyresa shuddered.

  Colin continued. “At first they came together into the Kingdom of Great Britain.”

  Tyresa rolled her eyes. “Great Bri— the what-now?”

  “Britain. That’s England, Scotland, and Wales together without Northern Ireland.”

  “What’s wrong with Northern Ireland?”

  “Nothing. But when you include it with the countries of Britain, then it becomes the United Kingdom.”

  “All right,” said Tyresa, shaking her head. “This is getting too confusing…”

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Colin. “Most British people don’t know this. Shocking, really.”

  “… just tell me, this United Kingdom: Was it a planet? Was it a bunch of planets?”

  “What? No. It’s a country. And it’s on one planet.”

  “This kingdom was on one planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the planet called?”

  “Earth, of course.”

  “Earth?” Tyresa seemed taken aback by the name. She exchanged glances with Ade. “You come from a planet called Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  The question confused Colin. “Sorry?”

  “Earth’s location,” she said. “Where is it? Do you have the galactic coordinates?”

  “What are you talking about? Earth is the planet you just found me on.”

  Tyresa looked sceptically at him. “Come on, get serious.”

  “What do you mean, ‘get serious’? It’s true.”

  She shook her head. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “First of all, according to our charts, the planet we found you on is called Solo III. Secondly, as I’m sure you noticed, it’s a dead wasteland. How could you have been born there?”

  “It wasn’t a dead wasteland when I went into stasis. It was alive, there were billions of people living on it.”

  “Billions? On that old hunk of rock?”

  “Excuse me, but that hunk of rock, as you call it, was full of life. It had grass and trees and cows and… um… snails. Look, that’s what I need you to tell me. What happened to it in the intervening time?”

  Tyresa sighed. “Our data show that planet as dead since records began.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” exclaimed Colin.

  “All right,” Tyresa said. “Let’s look at the charts and see if we can find some kind of clue. Ade, bring up a starmap.”

  The android turned to a plain, white wall but when Ade tapped it, a large screen—which was presumably built into the wall somehow—melted into view, displaying an arrangement of symbols. They meant nothing to Colin but were clearly familiar to Ade, who tapped on one of them. The screen displayed a black background peppered with thousands of white points of light, which Colin presumed to be a depiction of space. Superimposed above those white dots were dozens of variously-coloured blobs: a handful of large blobs surrounded by countless smaller blobs that littered the intervening spaces.

  For Colin, it might as well have been a piece of abstract art.

  “Thanks, Ade.” She turned to Colin. “This is the current political map.”

  Colin squinted. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve never seen a map like this before? Each blob represents the territory belonging to a state.”

  Colin momentarily forgot his frustrations. He sat back in his chair in awe of the image. In total, there must have been hundreds of stars covered by coloured blobs. “You mean, humans live on all those stars?”

  “Not all of them, but many of them, yes.” Tyresa looked at Colin thoughtfully. “You really have been away a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Incredible,” he whispered to himself. “We spread to all those stars.”

  “Let’s try an example search.” She turned to the screen. “Map? Planet search…” The screen made an expectant-sounding beep in response. “Name: Ceti.”

  On the map, a flashing circle appeared around one of the stars. It was located inside one of the larger blobs.

  Tyresa continued. “That’s my home system: Ceti, inside the Alliance of Free Worlds. Map? Planet search: Solo III.”

  Another circle appeared at the fringes of a neighbouring blob.

  “That’s Solo III inside Transhacker territory. Map? Planet search: Earth.”

  The screen emitted a low-pitched, disapproving tone.

  “No results,” said Tyresa. “According to our data, there’s no such place as Earth.”

  Colin was only half-listening. He was still lost somewhere in confused amazement. He managed to snap himself out of it sufficiently to think.

  No such place as Earth? Of course there was. Something terrible had clearly happened to it, sure, but it was Earth all the same. How could he prove that?

  Finally, the map itself gave him an idea. He imagined those blobs expanding over time as humans migrated. Then he imagined that process moving in reverse.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You said you come from another planet, Ceti, right?”

  “Yeah,” replied Tyresa.

  “All right. But I’ll bet the people from Ceti didn’t always come from Ceti, did they?”

  “That’s right. Lots of people migrate there all the time.”

  “No, I mean humans didn’t originate on the planet Ceti, did they?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “At some point, the first humans came and settled on the planet, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s true of all those planets. Except one. The one planet where humans originated, yes? The planet where humans evolved before going into space.”

  She sighed impatiently. “Yes.”

  Colin clapped his hands in triumph. “And that planet is called…?”

  “Erd.”

  The smile dropped from Colin’s mouth and his hands crashed onto the table. “What? No, you mean Earth.”

  “No, I mean Erd.”

  “Well, all right, so you’re pronouncing it a little differently. Erd. Earth. They’re very similar. Whatever you want to call it, that’s where you found me.”

  Tyresa shook her head. “Look, whatever you want to call Solo III is your business, but Solo III sure as shit ain’t Erd.” Tyresa searched the map for Erd. It flashed up in the middle of one of the small blobs in the centre of the map. “That’s Erd. Twenty light-years away from Solo III.”

  “N-no…” Colin stuttered, “that’s not… I mean, it can’t…”

  “It’s a binary star system with thirteen planets and its main sun is blue. Nothing like the place where we just picked you up.”

  None of this made sense to Colin. He clearly had a different understanding of history. “Hang on, wait a minute. Tell me how you think we got from this Erd place to being spread out across space.”

  “Well,” Tyresa began. “That’s a little tricky, what with the breakdown and all.”

  “What breakdown?”

  “The breakdown.” Tyresa looked surprised. “I’m not sure your amnesia has completely gone away. Anyway, recent history is fine, but go back beyond a couple of centuries, and things suddenly get fragmentary, contradictory.”

  “Why?”

  “A few hundred years ago—maybe even a couple thousand years, no-one’s exactly sure—there was some kind of breakdown in humanity. We lost the ability of space travel. We reverted to basic technology. Different planets lost contact with each other and developed in isolation. But we slowly rebuilt ourselves. A couple of hundred years ago, we rediscovered faster-than-light travel and became a spacefaring species again.”

  “What caused the breakdown?”

  “No-one’s really sure. Like I said, ancient history is patchy. I might be an archaeologist, but this area isn’t my specia
lity.”

  “So, wait… you’re not certain whether humans originated on Erd?”

  “Look,” laughed Tyresa, “I’d be the first to agree that claiming Erd as the origin of humanity puts you on shaky ground, but you’ve got to admit it’s a stronger claim than Solo III.”

  “But, but…”

  “Besides which, going round making claims against Erd isn’t a way of ensuring yourself a long life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the people of Erd make a colossal stack of money from their status. Coincidentally, people who question it have a habit of disappearing. So take my advice: keep your crazy beliefs to yourself.”

  “It’s not a belief,” exclaimed Colin. “I know it for a fact. It’s Earth! When I went into stasis, it was lush, full of life and the only planet humans inhabited.”

  Tyresa sat back and folded her arms. “You’ll understand my scepticism having just visited this planet and seen for myself that a microbe couldn’t live on it.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  She shook her head. “Not necessarily. After the breakdown, lots of worlds came to believe they were the only planets with life on them. Or perhaps you were moved at some point while still in stasis. Maybe someone took your pod and stashed it on Solo III.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “I don’t know, but the galaxy’s full of sick bastards. Another possibility is that you have a neurological or memory-related disorder. Not totally unlikely after a long period in stasis.”

  Colin became indignant. “I do not have mental problems. I was not moved, and I am not misremembering anything.”

  Tyresa leaned forward. “Which raises a topic we haven’t discussed yet. Why were you in stasis in the first place?”

  This stopped him in his tracks. Some invisible weight began to press into his shoulders. Colin realised that, in the panic and confusion of the last day, he’d completely forgotten about his ailment: the disease that would, someday soon, eat away at his memory.

  The irony was not lost on him.

  Reluctantly, he told Tyresa about it. He explained his impending cognitive collapse, how his ability to recall information, to understand language, even recognise faces, would fade in a matter of weeks.

  He noticed the glances that Tyresa and Ade exchanged.