Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction)

by Michael Brotherton

  “I guess you’re right,” said Akhil, looking at his friend as if he were seeing him for the very first time.

  “Damn straight I’m right,” said Raymond, smiling from ear to ear in his usual, and very disarming, way. This was the smile that frequently landed him his pick of female companions in whichever bar he happened to find himself throughout the solar system.

  Akhil only mused on his friend’s frequent successes with the ladies for a few moments before they returned to the task at hand — fixing a power junction box that had failed during the full systems testing of the John Quincy Adams, the ship that would soon take them and ten thousand other colonists on a one-way voyage to a planet known as Kepler 186f, orbiting an inconspicuous red dwarf about 500 light years away. The colonists mostly hailed from North America on Earth and they planned to found a republic on the apparently habitable world that circled their destination star. Kepler 186 f orbited just 34 million miles away from its red dwarf star, an orbit that put the planet clearly into the Goldilocks Zone, making it not too hot; not too cold.

  “Do you think our new home will look as good when we get there as it does in the Planet Finder?” asked Akhil.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You’re right, you wouldn’t. I just wanted your opinion, I guess. After all, we’re going there based on some data taken by the Gravity Lens Telescope. You’ve seen the data. The atmosphere seems similar to Earth’s. It’s just hard for me to forget that the light they saw has been traveling through space for five hundred years. A lot can happen in five hundred years. And it’ll take another five hundred years for us to get there from here. That’s one thousand years! What if there was some sort of primitive culture, pre-industrial, when that light left the planet and now they’re in the middle of their industrial revolution? We might be greeted by aliens with technologies as advanced as our own…”

  “Do you really believe that alien crap?” asked Raymond, putting the finishing touches on the circuit repair they’d been tasked to perform.

  “Of course I do,” replied Akhil.

  “Of course you do,” mocked Raymond, again with a smile.

  “Stop it, okay. This is important. We’ve sent out, what? About thirty colony ships so far? Most have gone places I wouldn’t want to go. That’s why I didn’t apply before now. And the people that are being turned into matter waves and zapped out through deep space won’t rematerialize and find out that the world they’ve been sent to isn’t worth shit until they get there and it’s too late. What if we arrive and find out the current residents don’t want to deal with us primitives?”

  “I guess we die.”

  “Come, on, seriously.”

  “Well, that’s a calculated risk. It’s much more likely that we’ll get there and find out that the planet isn’t as hospitable as we thought. We land, build our settlement and then something happens that causes us to be dead and gone in a hundred years. The universe doesn’t care if we live or die; it just is.”

  “They why are you going?”

  “Akhil, I’ve seen change, lots of change, and I don’t like where we’re headed. When EarthGov removed the ban on human bioengineering, I thought it was a good thing. We were going to eliminate birth defects, remove cancer genes, and make the next generation of people smarter and more resilient. That happened, along with a bunch of super babies with blonde hair, blue eyes and IQ’s at the top of the scale. And people with gills moving underwater to live in ocean colonies on Earth and now Europa. Weird, admittedly, but I could even live with that. But then the mind-numbed laborers started showing up on the corporate mining colonies and the Kuiper Belt survey ships. That’s when I knew that human nature hadn’t changed and that I’d had enough.”

  “So you’re running away?”

  “I guess I am. Our colony will be smaller and we’ll be struggling to tame a new world. It’ll be a while before we have the infrastructure and the luxury to think about changing who we are and what it means to be human. Shit. I’m starting to sound like a philosopher; I hate philosophers.” That infectious grin again crossed Raymond’s face.

  “We’re done here,” said Akhil as he put the finishing touches on the now-repaired power relay and began cleaning up the mess surrounding their repair.

  Both men tidied up their work area and performed one last systems check to make sure the repair was complete. It was time for lunch.

  ***

  Akhil didn’t sleep much that night. He shared a room with his contract-mate, Jamie, and neither was much in the mood to do more than sleep. He and Jamie were in year eight of a ten-year marriage contract that both currently believed they’d renew when the time came. They were very compatible, in personality and sexuality, and neither was apt to go looking for anything better — especially among the ten thousand amidst which they now found themselves after they’d signed aboard the John Quincy Adams. Akhil’s thoughts included a musing on the meaning of a ten-year marriage contract that would expire while their atoms were converted into matter waves and sent across the universe on a 500-year voyage. For them, their last two years under contract would be spent on a new world while back on Earth the legal documents they sealed with their retinal ID’s likely wouldn’t even still be accessible. After all, the technology to create and read them would be half a millennium out of date. The ship was set to depart in less than a week, and he was having second thoughts.

  As he listened to the rhythmic deep breathing of his wife beside him, he thought about the situation that brought them to this place and time and about what their life would be like just next week, their time, when the ship’s onboard de Broglie drive dropped them from wave-space and back to particle-space near their new home. He knew enough about the flight plan to know that they’d drop into particle-space a few Astronomical Units from their destination and rely on the ship’s fusion drive to cover the remaining distance. A ‘conversion safety factor’ they called it. He guessed there was some uncertainty in navigating across the galaxy. Hell, yes, he was nervous. And he was having second thoughts. Would he and Jamie be here if things had been different? If their daughter Chandana hadn’t fallen victim to the latest designer virus cooked up by the disaffected separatists on Luna? If only they hadn’t taken that trip. If only they’d taken the trip two weeks sooner. If only… Akhil nodded off and dreamt. They weren’t restful dreams.

  ***

  “Listen up people!” Captain Lajoie’s voice boomed into their cochlear implants to get the assembled crew’s attention away from the hundreds of whisperings and small conversations that were happening in the auditorium that contained nearly everyone who’d signed on to the John Quincy Adams. The auditorium was dockside on Neried, which has become the solar system’s port of departure for Kuiper Belt exploration and the growing number of interstellar arks. No one was quite sure why Nereid had become the waypoint, but those who came through never failed to be awed by the view of Neptune afforded by the shipyards there. That giant blue ball, taking up an impossible amount of the visible sky above everyone’s heads was simply too awe inspiring to ignore. At least at first, until the inevitable call to work sounded and the day-to-day tasks that make up a person’s life had to be performed.

  Akhil and Jamie had been talking, of course, and quickly stopped to hear what Captain Lajoie had to say. Jamie, in that way that first attracted Akhil to her, raised the left side of her lips into a half smile and winked at him. A sign between them that all was well. Before Akhil completely turned away from his wife, he again appreciated her beauty and gave a silent thanks for her to whatever deity might be eavesdropping on his thoughts. To Akhil, she was the most beautiful woman in the room.

  “This is our final all-hands briefing before we board the ship and say goodbye to the Terra System. There’s a lot to cover, most of it relates to the final ship checkout before departure, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour or so. We’ve been through most of it before.” Lajoie, who didn’t appear to be a day over fifty, probably thanks
to rejuve treatments, sounded experienced and sure of himself. Akhil was reassured that he sounded competent, but not cocky.

  Lajoie continued, “But before we have that briefing, I’d like to introduce Dr. Sakiko Murata. Dr. Murata is responsible for EarthGov’s interstellar colonization effort and she has some news to share with us. Some exciting news.” Lajoie bowed ever so slightly as he deferred to Dr. Murata who was walking toward him on the stage. Murata bowed in return as she moved front and center on the stage. She looked as youthful and ageless as Asian women always appeared to Akhil’s untrained eyes.

  “Thank you Captain Lajoie for allowing me to speak to your crew and passengers before you begin your historic voyage. Until your departure, no human ship has attempted to explore or settle more than a few hundred light years from Sol. You will be traveling five hundred light years to what appears to be a destination mostly-habitable for human life. Only you will know the real circumstances there because by the time your initial reports return, thanks to the speed of light limits, one thousand Earth years will have passed. I will be honest with you. No one knows what this solar system will be like after that much time has passed. But you know this already or you wouldn’t have been allowed to sign up. I know about the intense screening you all went through to be here today. I know you are ready for both the trip and for taming a new world. We have received some information that you need to know before you depart. Information that some at EarthGov debated, at the highest levels, whether or not to share with you.”

  Akhil heard several thousand people shift in their seats and more than a few murmur in surprise. He, too, shifted as he stole a glance at Jamie to see her reaction. She was glancing at him. Yes, they had been together enough to be essentially of one mind and each knew how the other would react in most any situation. By unspoken agreement, they both redirected their attention back toward the front of the auditorium and to what Dr. Murata might say next.

  “As you may recall, though we have only been sending colony ships like yours to promising destinations for about twenty-five years, we have been sending de Broglie drive-powered scout ships out for nearly fifty years. That means we are now getting direct communication back from some of those scouts who’ve explored other stellar systems out to about twenty-five light years from Terra. As expected, most of them have encountered scientifically interesting worlds, but few that are even remotely suitable for human life. Thankfully, the only colony ships we’ve sent out have been to planets deemed spectroscopically suitable by the Gravity Lens Telescope and the other Terrestrial Planet Finder systems. But most of them lie beyond, at distances too vast for either the colonists to have arrived yet, or for those closer in, for their first radio reports to have made it back here.” She paused and reached out to one of her aides, who handed her what looked like a small cup of tea. After an inaudible sip, she again looked at those assembled.

  “I would like to share news from one of the early survey ships. The news is… disconcerting. If you would set your retinal implants to channel C, I’m sending an image taken on Gliese 667Cc, a mesoplanet with an Earth Similarity Rating of over eighty percent that is just less than twenty-two light years away. This rating is only slightly lower than your destination, making it an early target for sending a survey ship. I am sure you have heard in the news the results from the survey, after all, it was one of the first exoplanets with confirmed extraterrestrial life and the journals have been having a field day with the data coming back from the survey ship which is now on its way home with physical samples. The last of the radio data will arrive only a few weeks ahead of the ship as it comes of out de Broglie space and returns home.” Murata again paused for a sip from the cup, which she then handed back to her aide.

  “What we did not release to the public, at least not yet, are these images.”

  Appearing on Akhil’s retinal implant was a three dimensional image of what appeared to be a city, or the remains of it. It looked a bit like what remained of Abu Dhabi after the city was destroyed in the final Middle Eastern Conflict of 2075. The tactical nuke had devastated the city’s ultramodern skyscrapers, leaving them a mangled heap of steel and fused glass lying in the desert. Little or no vegetation had regrown over the city in the intervening decades, as had occurred in the equally devastated Beirut. But Beirut wasn’t in the desert like Abu Dhabi, and vegetation had invaded the destroyed city, slowly reclaiming it from the destruction wrought by humans. It was impossible to tell anything about the nature of the previous inhabitants of the alien city from looking at the mangled towers and destruction, but was obvious that it had been created by intelligent beings and then destroyed, likely violently, by those selfsame or other intelligent beings.

  “Isotopic analysis confirmed that the city was destroyed by a fusion weapon, probably well over a thousand Earth years ago. The planet is covered with such remains. We have been extremely careful to keep this news out of the public reports until now.”

  Akhil’s retinal implant was now barraged with image after image of devastation — one destroyed city after another. Some were overgrown with plant matter, others, like the first city, were not. He was on the verge of sensory overload when the images stopped and his attention was redirected toward the speaker.

  “The survey ship found similar bombed out remains on the planet’s only moon and on the moons of some of the gas giants elsewhere in the system. The race that built these cities either committed suicide on a massive scale or someone, or perhaps something else committed genocide.”

  The room erupted into multiple, competing conversations and the news began to sink in. Dr. Murata appeared to be content to allow the moment of shock to continue among those assembled; she simply stood and stared, watching the reactions of the people in the room. Akhil briefly looked at Jamie and then motioned for her to join him in watching Dr. Murata on the stage. He could tell that Murata was expecting this reaction and had planned her talk to include it. He was beginning to dislike Dr. Murata.

  “May I again have your attention? Good. Thank you. We decided to share this information with you so you would know that one of the greatest scientific questions in the history of humanity has finally been answered: we are not the only intelligent, tool-using species to have existed in the universe. We have been searching for centuries for signs of life in the cosmos using virtually every type of astronomy you can imagine only to hear or see nothing. Until now. Now we know that we are not unique. There were others. Others that undoubtedly pondered their place in the universe and wondered about the nature of their own existence. But something happened to them, not all that long ago, and now they are gone. Based on the data from the survey ship, they were a technologically advanced civilization that were close to becoming masters of their own solar system when catastrophe befell them, and now they are no more. From what we can tell, they had not yet discovered a means to become an interstellar civilization and whatever caused them to be destroyed, destroyed them completely as a species. Which brings me to you and why I am here today sharing this information with you as you are about to begin your journey.”

  The audience was again completely quiet; Akhil and Jamie, like the others around them, sat in rapt attention.

  “The residents of Gliese 667Cc are extinct because they did not do what we, you, are doing. Spreading the seed beyond the solar system that gave them birth. You are the survival of our species. By taking humanity and Earth life to other stellar systems, that which is humanity shall not go extinct if something terrible befalls Earth or our home solar system. You and the ships before and after you will assure that. Thank you and Godspeed.”

  With that, Dr. Murata didn’t allow for any questions, she simply strode off stage and out of sight.

  Captain Lajoie walked back to the center of the podium, took a sip of water from the container he had in his left hand and began speaking, “What you just heard will become public after we launch. Dr. Murata said that EarthGov plans to release publically the news about the remains found on Glies
e 667Cc next week, the day after we depart. They felt they should inform us before we go and, I for one, am glad they did. What we’re doing here isn’t just motivated by politics, which is why many of you signed on, and believe me, I know — I’ve read many of the psych reports.” Lajoie paused and smiled as the expected guffaws ripped through the audience and released some of the tension.

  “Now let’s get on with our final departure briefing before the news of about how important you all are goes to your heads and you can’t make sure your jobs are done correctly…”

  Akhil, like many others in the auditorium, were already completely distracted by the news from Dr. Murata and had a great deal of trouble paying attention to Lajoie. But Lajoie probably knew that already.

  ***

  The departure of the John Quincy Adams was anything but spectacular to those watching from the remote cameras at the departure point. Once the mighty ship had left dock on Neried, it pulsed its fusion drive to reach the departure point a mere 100,000 miles away where it performed its final systems checks. Shortly thereafter, Captain Lajoie turned on the de Broglie generators that converted his mighty ship to a matter wave and sent it on its way toward its new home many light years away. There was no flash or distortion of spacetime that was so popular in the entertainment feeds; instead, the ship was simply there one moment and gone the next. Given the energies required to make the conversion, even those who built the de Broglie generators were often surprised and sometimes disappointed at how unspectacular the process was. To those who rode the ships and whose lives depended on their functionality, boring was good.

  Dr. Murata was with her staff on Neried when the John Quincy Adams departed. Her aide, the woman who had brought her tea laced with a mild mood enhancer while she was speaking to the crew and colonists just four days previously, was again at her side.