On a whim he used her picture to represent the computer opponent in his games, though after a particularly nasty round of Knife and Coin he decided against this. No need to paint her as an adversary. She’d simply survived. Escaped that doomed station only to realize too late that the tiny landing boat had little on board in the way of fuel or supplies. Granted she’d flown silently. A curious detail, but one that could be the result of a simple equipment malfunction.
He studied her face one last time. She’d be forty now if she’d lived. “How far did you get, young lady? How many weeks or months did you last out here?”
The picture did not reply, of course. Caswell sighed. How many hours had passed for her inside a ship just like this before she’d regretted not simply staying with her crew? They would have been friends. Like family, even. And they’d died a quick death, from the look of it. Preferable, surely, to starving out here in the chilly void. Yet she’d fled, and transmitted not a single word about any of it back home. This fact he found most odd.
With a tap of his finger her image vanished. He played six more rounds of Knife and Coin before dining on a packet of vegetable korma—spicy and surprisingly good. Then he slept.
The faces of those he’d killed haunted his dreams.
He woke eager to forget.
“HEY, MONIQUE,” he sent as his craft approached the destination marker on its navigation screen. “What’s the bounce timer on this activation, anyway? Just occurred to me you never said, and we’re already flirting with the record.”
Any activation of his implant included an automatic reversion timer. If he were to run, or fall into enemy hands, this ensured there would be at least some hope of clearing his memory of any sensitive information before a potential disclosure—voluntary or otherwise—could occur. In his career he’d never gone more than one week under IA.
Her reply amounted to yet another disquieting detail of this entire affair: “I haven’t set it yet.”
Caswell shifted uneasily, a frown growing the more he thought about what she’d just said. A trigger without a reversion fail-safe? Was that even possible?
An hour later a blinking red message on the main screen caught his eye. He’d been locked out of manual control.
The short-range nav showed nothing other than a few tiny chunks of debris he’d been tracking for days now. In his six days flying it had barely changed. Zero sign of the other lander, or Alice Vale’s body.
His little craft sped away from the Sun at a blistering clip, his distance to the star now roughly equal to Earth’s, his position exactly perpendicular to her orbital plane.
Without warning the lander turned around to face the Sun. Her engines powered up, filling the cabin with a deep, unsettling hum. The sensation of gravity returned as if some invisible weighted blanket had been laid over him.
“I’ve turned about and am under thrust again, Mo. Hope that is expected. What’s this about? Mission aborted, or…?”
Something had been forgotten, perhaps. Surely it was too late to catch the Venturi again before she plummeted into the Sun.
He cursed the delay in Monique’s response for the hundredth time. All he could do was watch his velocity decrease. Caswell didn’t know much about astrodynamics, but this seemed like a horrendous waste of fuel. More disconcerting was the fact that he’d been locked out of manual control. It implied a lack of trust. That made him squirm in his chair. His trust in Monique, and hers in him, had always been absolute. It had to be.
Another thought struck him. “Mo, it’s possible this craft has been compromised. I’m locked out, and will soon be headed back toward the Sun.”
The calm, intelligent lines of Alice Vale’s face came to him, unbidden. Had something more sinister happened to the Venturi? Was she still out here, after all this time, and had she now sent him to the same fate as that doomed station? He discarded this idea as sheer paranoia. Certainly the woman could not have survived for so long. Besides, the radar screen showed emptiness all around him. There was literally nothing out here.
He waited ten long minutes until Monique’s welcome voice filled his ears.
“Relax, Peter. This is expected. Your course was carefully programmed. I’m sorry to trickle information to you like this, but rest assured it will all make sense soon. Very soon. In fact, keep an eye on your velocity relative to the Sun. When it hits zero, I will finally be able to explain.”
Caswell settled back into the cushioned seat and waited, eyes never wavering from the tiny readout that marked his speed in relation to the Sun. What the hell did coming to a dead stop have to do with knowing his orders? He pondered this as the number dwindled, the lander’s meager rockets burning through fuel at an alarming rate. Then, the moment the display reached zero, the thrust stopped. Everything went perfectly silent. He was sitting perfectly motionless above the Sun, exactly perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane.
“Godspeed, Peter,” Monique Pendleton said.
“Meaning what?” he said aloud. Then, “Oh. Shit.”
Outside the stars began to vanish.
THE STARS DID NOT vanish as if snuffed from existence. It was a gradual fade. Even the blazing Sun visibly dimmed. Baffled, Caswell reached to pull his helmet off, thinking visor malfunction. Only he wore no helmet.
The flight instruments began to flop about as all navigational markers faded. The craft switched to the crude secondary option—navigating by recognizable stars. This failed, too. Everything outside simply dwindled like the closing scene of a film.
Fade to black. The end.
His heart lurched. He would lose his link to Earth. To Monique. “What the hell is going on?” he shouted. “Monique! I’ve…everything…” Of course, shouting was pointless. He was nine light-minutes from any help.
An icon blipped on the communications screen, a new encoded message. He let the tiny camera above the screen scan his retina and waited, swallowing a growing sense of panic.
Monique’s face appeared. He’d come to love her face. For security reasons they’d never met in person, and usually her transmissions were audio only, save for their twice-yearly joint assessment. She seemed to stare right at him. Her intense blue eyes gleamed with the reflection of displays. She’d cut her hair since the last time he’d seen her. The fine, dirty-blond strands were tucked behind her ears and falling away past her shoulders. The style accentuated her full lips and smooth, golden skin.
She smiled her conspiratorial half smile, her eyes slightly downcast as she did so, and then she began to speak in her rich, matter-of-fact way: “The following information is classified, and marked in memory as thought-accessible only. Say ‘begin’ to continue.”
“Begin,” he said.
Thought-access lock begins.
We could not tell you of the nature of this mission until now because there had to be zero risk that you might transmit any of what I’m about to tell you back home.
While you’ve been out there we’ve been very busy here, Peter. Busy reviewing the logs from the Venturi, busy studying the onboard video and audio the station captured before her destruction.
This message had to be prerecorded because I now have no way to contact you, nor you me. You’ve traveled, Peter. Entered something and come out the other side. We’re not quite sure what that something is. Be assured another ship is being prepped to investigate but that will take time. Time we cannot afford.
You were close and had transportation, so we decided to send you…through.
I’m rambling.
She took a deep breath, then fixed her gaze on the camera. On him, her agent.
You may have heard the ESA was conducting secret weapons experiments out there. That is true, but they found something else, as well. Twelve years ago the Venturi discovered, for lack of a better term, a wormhole. Be it to another place or time or…dimension or whatever, we’re not quite sure. Nobody is, and the ESA isn’t talking or truly doesn’t know. That’s not important.
The important thing i
s the crew of the Venturi went through. The whole ship experienced what you likely are now. A transition. Everything has probably faded to black, if their reports are accurate.
Make no mistake, Peter, you’re traveling somewhere.
What you’ll find there is something Alice Vale decided was worth the murder of her entire crew. She sabotaged that ship, Peter, and then she went back.
She went back, it would seem, to play God.
Outside the stars began to return. They were in different places now.
THE LANDER FLOATED, still and silent, above an unknown star.
Gradually the flashing errors and alarms on his myriad of screens returned to a stable, if somewhat abnormal, state. With nothing else to go on, the algorithms that guided his ship had apparently given up on finding the familiar and decided to lock on to this massive sphere of fusion for the simple fact that it was there.
The computer even gave the star a name: Unknown M-Class.
This did not help his frayed nerves.
Caswell did the only thing he could do and just sat there. A full-gamut frequency scan appeared on the main screen, searching for anything familiar. Nothing turned up. Another sweep began, specifically for the transponder from Alice Vale’s landing craft. It concluded with no matches. The scan repeated and would continue to do so. He relegated it to a secondary display, idly wondering if Alice had fled the Venturi only to plunge into the star on this side.
He realized suddenly that Monique’s recorded instructions had paused when the instruments went haywire. He tapped the screen and playback resumed.
This is without a doubt the greatest discovery in the history of mankind, and Alice Vale may well have ruined it. Not just with her knowledge of the ESA’s weapons experiments, though that is our primary concern.
We’ve cobbled together some data from the Venturi to help guide your ship. Unless our friends in Sci messed things up, you should start moving any moment now.
On cue the craft’s thrusters blipped and coughed, sending him into a harsh rotation on multiple axes. His stomach lurched. He suddenly became aware of a mild headache that, like a purple cloud on the horizon, threatened to become something much worse very soon. While Monique continued her explanation he set about finding medication and a meal.
A course has been set for the second planet in this system. As you may have already noticed, the planet orbits its star at roughly 1AU, same as Earth, and the similarities don’t end there.
Caswell felt silly. Overwhelmed and silly. He hadn’t noticed any of this. In fact he could barely form a coherent thought. He paused Monique’s message manually this time and shoveled a spoonful of soba noodles into his mouth. The simple movement of his jaw as he chewed served to ground him somehow, and with a few more bites inside him his unease began to abate.
Sipping a bulb of green tea he took stock of his situation.
First and foremost, he told himself, listen to Monique. Really listen. Latch on to her voice and devour every word. Memorize it, even though he’d eventually forget. Ground himself in her as his ship had just done with the star below. He could only imagine how she’d maintained such a calm demeanor through this. Certainly it all must seem as amazing—God, not just amazing, but absurd—to her. He simply had to trust his handler. He put himself in her shoes. Sending her “other half” through, of all things, a wormhole or whatever the hell it was, unable to converse with him or even to know his fate.
“This will be the most interesting mission you’ll ever forget,” he said aloud, echoing her words. He nodded at her picture. “You certainly had that bit right, Mo. Understatement of the century, more like.”
Caswell put the drink bulb aside. He tuned out all distractions: the ship, rattling at maximum burn; the lingering warnings on his screens and the near-total lack of recognizable names. He let it all become just background noise and tapped PLAY.
The similarities between this world and Earth are, in fact, astonishing. And they’re apparently why Alice Vale returned here.
For reasons that will become imminently clear, the planet to which you now approach was dubbed “Duplica” by the crew of the Venturi. Here’s a picture taken from just a few thousand kilometers altitude.
He drew an involuntary sharp breath as the image appeared.
Because he was looking at Earth.
The blue oceans and wispy white clouds, the familiar shorelines of her continents. It was all there. “Duplica,” he whispered. “Indeed.”
From orbit the planet would fool anyone. And yet it was not Earth. The planet was second out from its star. It had two moons, both rocky and with darker complexions than Earth’s. One was larger and orbited slightly farther out. The other was barely more than an asteroid.
According to the computer there was not a single artificial satellite in orbit.
His astonishment gave way to confusion and then simple curiosity. What is this place? How does a perfect copy of Earth even come to be? The implications of that made him shake his head, embarrassed at how quickly he’d leapt to such a conclusion.
I know what you’re thinking right now, and believe me, we’re as confused as you are. The folks in Sci have been working day and night since you sent the data. Those with enough clearance, anyway. I’m sure you can appreciate now the magnitude of this discovery.
“You’re damn right I can,” he growled. He could appreciate it very fucking much. Enough in fact to understand why he’d been asked only days ago to slaughter six people in cold blood. Angelina Monroe had dipped into the station’s datastore, perhaps even tried to copy or transmit the information. News like this required careful handling, surely. If Archon could own it…
His thoughts turned to the original crew of the Venturi, drifting lifeless in that medical bay. Had they met a similar fate? A remote command sent from some ESA boss to jar the station hard enough to kill all aboard?
No. It had been Alice Vale. “She went back to play God,” Monique had said. Murdered the crew. Somehow that detail hadn’t quite registered when she’d first mentioned it. But now…
We’ll know more soon enough, but these details are not the reason we sent you. They don’t activate people like you and me to do a geological survey, now do they?
“No, they do not.” Caswell steeled himself. Here it comes, he thought. The point. He could guess what she wanted him to do, but gritted his teeth and waited all the same.
Before Monique went on, the image of Duplica and her moons cross-faded to much closer footage, taken from low orbit. Viewed like this, minor differences became apparent. Most notable were the craters. A whole series of circular wounds that weaved like a mottled snake from southern Europe, down to India, and up through the Koreas. Though British raised, Caswell had been adopted from Korea. The sight of his homeland thrashed by impact depressions shook loose latent feelings of anger and sadness in him.
What he thought of as the Pacific Ocean drifted by, and the California coast came into view. The string of craters continued, all the way to the coast of Florida.
Thoughts came to him faster than he could process even their basic nature, much less any deeper ramifications. Should he think of these places in such terms? Was there an actual California or United Kingdom here, in the political sense? Hell, were there people at all? It could simply be a copy of Earth at the landmass level, a feat of terraforming never dreamed of before.
But the very fact that he saw so much green here meant plant life, at least, and that in and of itself was quite possibly the most important discovery in human history. Life existed here, something never found before despite all the effort made in that regard. Alice Vale and her crewmates had found extraterrestrial life.
She went back to play God….
A chill ran up his spine and settled across his scalp. “What did you find here, Alice?”
When England came into view the image zoomed in again.
Caswell went perfectly still. There were roads and villages. A massive city, as big as London, though no
t in quite the same location. This metropolis straddled the Severn River, not the Thames. Curiously, it seemed to be surrounded by nature, not sprawl, and similarly hard-edged towns and cities were sprinkled across the landscape. Thin roads, or perhaps tracks, connected these places.
What the crew of the Venturi found here is nothing short of miraculous. A planet almost identical to Earth, populated by intelligent life. Human life, Peter. Whoever they are, however they got here or how this place came to be, they appear to be at a technological level similar to where we were in the 1950s. The Venturi even intercepted radio transmissions that sound an awful lot like English, believe it or not.
“English?” he blurted to the empty cabin, unable to stop himself. He’d yet to get his mind around the idea of life, human life, on another world, geographic similarities or not. But English? “How the hell is that even possible?”
The footage began to cut from one scene to the next. All taken from orbit, grainy and unsteady, but what they showed was unmistakable. A train of sorts, powering along tracks. Boats with oddly curved sails bouncing along on whitecaps. A vast square of something like concrete with dark diagonal forms moving about chaotically like insects. Caswell squinted, unsure what he was seeing, and then it clicked: the shadows of people, meandering, in the late afternoon or early morning.
After their visit, the Venturi returned to Earth’s side of this wormhole and, from what we can gather, a huge debate began within the crew. They argued over what to do with this discovery, and who to tell about it.
At some point, Alice Vale formed ideas of her own. From the access logs you provided us, we know she spent the better part of a day in her bunk downloading data. Patent databases, schematics, knowledge archives on almost every topic imaginable. Mountains of information related to every technological advancement humanity has ever achieved. Even things like culture, fashion, and art.
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