Déjà Vu (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  “Roll Tide,” I say, hoping that registers with some fragment of history. “But, no, there weren’t any tides where I grew up.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “In Huntsville, Alabama.”

  “What did you hunt?” she asks, which elicits a laugh from me and utter confusion from her.

  “It’s just a name,” I say. “Like Mobile. They used to make rockets in Huntsville.”

  “Oh. Rockets. Yes, I know about rockets from your time.”

  She’s acting as though she understands me even though it’s obvious she doesn’t.

  I say, “Roll Tide is a football term. You still have football, right?”

  “Foot? Ball?”

  “Well, it’s mainly throwing balls.”

  “You threw balls with your feet?”

  I burst out laughing, trying to imagine the crazy mind-picture she’s formed.

  “No, that’s just what it was called. Silly name, huh?”

  She smiles.

  I say, “You must have things peculiar to your time, right? Cultural idiosyncrasies?”

  Dr. Everton looks at me as though I’m from Mars. I might as well be. I can see her trying to think of some equivalent from her era, but these things are generally invisible until someone steps outside their culture and looks back. I try to prompt her, but the more I say, the more confused she becomes.

  “You know—idioms—beat around the bush, pull my leg, rule of thumb?”

  Her brow narrows. I’m throwing too much at her. None of these phrases communicate. I wave her away.

  “Forget it.”

  “Ah, no. This is wonderful. It might take some time for me to decipher what you’re saying, but this is perfect. So much was lost from your era.”

  “Lost?” My mood changes. The temperature seems to drop around me as I ask, “How was it lost?”

  “Of course. You don’t know.”

  The hilarity of the last few minutes is dowsed with ice water. My face must look like it’s carved from stone. I listen intently, trying to read between her comments. I want to understand the fate of the world I left behind so long ago.

  She says, “You know of the Constellation, right? It launched roughly a decade after the Intrepid.”

  I knew the crew training for that flight.

  Dr. Everton explains. “Not much is known about what happened as so many records were lost, but the Constellation went nova in orbit, irradiating half the planet.”

  There’s silence for a moment as her words tear at my heart. It seems crazy to ask, but I have to know, “Which half?”

  “I’m not sure. Details are scarce. Although only one side of the planet was irradiated, the explosion triggered a global catastrophe. Weather patterns were thrown into chaos. Mass extinctions unfolded over the next decade. Barely a hundred million people survived. Although it sounds like a lot, it’s roughly 1% of the ten billion people alive at that time. 99% of the population died. We were thrown back into the Stone Age. It took eighteen hundred years to rebuild.”

  “It must have happened over Asia,” I say.

  “Why do you say that?”

  I reply, “Most of our population was in the triangle between China, India, and Indonesia.”

  Our population. I’ve only visited Asia once, and yet I identify with that time as a whole rather than just with America. It’s my world that was devastated. What the hell? I’m stunned to think of the devastating loss. The hurt and suffering would have been on a scale never seen before. For those living through those times, it must have been apocalyptic—the end of the world—and yet it wasn’t. Humanity came out the other side.

  I’m learning from what Dr. Everton is and isn’t saying. In my time, the defining events in history were things like the Renaissance, the Magna Carta, and the American Revolution. Later, we had the Civil War, World War I, II, and III, but these were minuscule compared to the Constellation going nova. Annihilating 99% of the population would have reshaped the world, and not just for humanity. Sterilizing half the planet would have thrown life into chaos, upsetting the balance of nature. Entire ecosystems would have gone extinct. Although it only took a few thousand years to recover, that’s astonishingly fast considering the magnitude of the loss. I’m sure plant and animal life rebounded, flooding in to occupy vacant land and empty seas, but it would have been crippled by the lack of diversity.

  She continues, saying, “For the longest time, no one knew quite what had happened. It was enough simply to survive. Entire civilizations crumbled. It wasn’t until the third millennia that historians were able to reconstruct those events.”

  “So I’m like a Neanderthal to you.”

  “In many ways. We have some glimpses into the time before, but they’re mostly constructed from folklore.”

  “Wow!”

  “You can imagine our excitement when we came across the remains of the Intrepid, knowing it was the sister ship to the Constellation. You’re special to us. You’re important, far more so than you could ever realize. Okay, I think that’s enough for today. We’ve got plenty of time to talk.”

  Dr. Everton gets to her feet. “I had Jorgensen manufacture some basic facilities for you.”

  She pushes a button on one of the virtual keyboards floating above the workbench. “He’s used technology you’d be familiar with to try to make you feel more at home.”

  As she works on her keyboard, more options appear around mine. I’ve positioned my table so the keyboard is in easy reach. Several new options appear—a bed, a toilet, a shower, and a bunch of different chairs.

  I touch at the miniature bed and a full-size bed materializes at the back of the laboratory. A flick of my wrist within the hologram and it disappears. Flick again, and there it is. Making my bed at home was never this easy.

  I touch the virtual shower. A seemingly real shower appears, only there’s no wall behind the curved glass door. A water mixer floats disembodied in the air where tiles should line an invisible wall. The shower-head hangs from thin air above the shower tray.

  “Oh, I have got to see this.”

  I walk over, open the glass door, and turn on the tap. Water flows. This is magic.

  “Try to get some rest,” Dr. Everton says. “Tomorrow’s going to be a big day. We’ll present you to the academy and seek resources to fund our study further.”

  I’m still trying to come to grips with my Harry Potter shower. Where the hell is the water coming from? I run my fingers beneath the steady stream. The water’s warm and wet, splashing everywhere, just as I’d expect from a shower back on Earth. To me, it’s real, but it’s not.

  “You’re safe in here.”

  Safe? I haven’t given safety any consideration since I fell into the lab. Dr. Everton is trying to be kind and considerate. She turns to leave.

  “Sarah?” I say, being quite deliberate in using her first name instead of her title and surname.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  As she leaves, I wave my hand over the floating keyboard. My fingers pass through the miniature hologram of the shower and the life-size version disappears. Moments ago, spits of water sat on the floor, but now it’s dry.

  The lights dim, but I have a lamp on the table. The power cord dangles over the edge, not being plugged into a socket, and yet it turns on in defiance of reality as I once knew it. Dumbledore never had it this good.

  Curious, I sniff at my armpit. Damn, I stink. A change of clothes wouldn’t go a miss. Although I’m tempted to have a shower, what would I change into? Besides, it’s all too much effort. Instead, I plonk down on the edge of the bed.

  For the first time, I’m alone.

  Reality slams into me like a car hitting a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. I’m not real. I’m sitting on a spongy mattress, but neither it nor the sheets and blankets exist. They’ve never existed and never will. They’re comfortable and soft, but they’re not really here. My life has no more substance than a dream, and that sends a chi
ll through me. I haven’t stopped to think about it before now, but the dozens of sensory inputs that grounded me in the past are all fake. Everything I’ve experienced, from working outside the Intrepid, pushing off into space, landing in the dusty plain of the savannah, falling into the snow, and standing in the middle of the street, are all part of an elaborate illusion. Everything I will ever experience going forward will be fabricated. My life is an electronic lie. My fake hands shake at that realization.

  My eyes aren’t mine. They’re not actually seeing anything. My sense of sight has been constructed for me. Some astonishingly complex algorithm is figuring out where my hologram is standing and is calculating the image seen from that point-of-view using ray-tracing. I’m that scrap of brain matter in the jar. My electronic essence is in that projector. I think I’m over here, but that’s an illusion within an illusion. My head is about to explode—or it would if it could.

  The sterile smell within the lab isn’t real. Well, it’s real, but I’m not smelling it. I only think I am because of how pervasive the illusion has become. My hand is still damp, but neither the water nor my skin are real. Nothing actually happened when I shoved my hand beneath the shower, and yet it did.

  My heart races. My fingers tremble. My breathing goes shallow. Wait? Does it?

  What the hell am I?

  I breathe deeply, thinking about who I once was, trying to reconcile that with what I’ve become. Even with a physical body, I wasn’t my arm or leg, or the hair on my head. These were merely parts of me. I wasn’t even my head or my brain. They were simply vessels that carried me through the day.

  What is life?

  At a cellular level, a billion biological processes had to occur every second and with such precision that I could ignore them. Not once did I have to think about chemicals like adenosine triphosphate moderating the transfer of energy around my body. I’d scratch my nose without giving a second thought to the electrical impulses triggering muscle contractions to achieve that whimsical goal. I never thought twice about the nerves guiding my motion, providing feedback to my brain. I just scratched. Is that what life is? An abstraction from reality? Has life always been an illusion?

  Whether physical or virtual, the processes that sustain my life have always been beyond my influence. They’re autonomous.

  My anxiety fades. My muscles relax. Given they’re not real, why were they ever tense in the first place? Because of me. Because I’m real. I might not be made of trillions of individual biological powerhouses anymore. I might not have cells that differentiate into skin, hair, blood, muscles, heart, lungs, and kidneys, but I am alive. This virtual body is as much me as my physical body ever was. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

  “Get some rest.”

  Speaking aloud, echoing Dr. Everton’s words is soothing to my soul, reassuring me there will be a tomorrow.

  “Relax.”

  I lie to myself, faking myself out, being firm with my own foibles, but it works.

  I leave the light on, even though it’s not, and slip beneath the sheets that aren’t there. My head rests against a pillow that doesn’t exist. My virtual senses, though, overrule my reason and I sink into the mattress.

  Oh, this is what I missed in space—the ability to drift off to sleep. On the Intrepid, I’d drift into the wall of the sleeping berth.

  Darkness overwhelms me.

  I wake to the sound of whispers around me.

  Bright lights flood the floor.

  I’m surprised I slept at all, but it’s been morning for some time.

  The layout within the cleanroom is such that the workbench is over to one side, with the bulk of the room off to my left. There are eight craft under construction. The space around them is generous. Instead of an assembly line, this is a showcase. There’s enough space for dozens of craft, but the vast floor is underutilized. My pseudo-apartment is just a bed and a few bits of furniture in an area slightly to one side. It looks out of place, but not violently so, more like a special project, which it is.

  I sit up, still wearing my undergarments. My spacesuit lies crumpled on the floor exactly where I left it. I’m not sure what I expected, but given things in my world can magically appear and disappear, I wondered if it might be spirited away. With no strict delineation between cause and effect, I’m unsure quite how my virtual world works. I could ask Jorgensen to remove the suit, but even though it’s useless, it’s mine. Having it around is somewhat of a comfort blanket.

  On waking, it strikes me that I still smell. Not bad. There’s a bit of body odor. As there are technicians moving about the cleanroom, there’s no way in hell I’m having a shower. Besides, I’m the only one that can smell my particular brand of virtual sweat. Given I was spacewalking and fell through various worlds, the smell’s not too much of a surprise. Well, it wouldn’t be if any of this was real. To me, the slight stench highlights the fidelity of my virtual world. Everything I experience has been modeled on real-world physics, chemistry, and biology. I’d hate to see the codebase or the size of the computer running my simulation. I wonder where it’s stored.

  My eyes rest on the tiny scrap of brain matter preserved on the workbench. That’s reality. That’s me. That was always me. Now, that’s all that’s left, a scrap of neurons hanging from a crusty fragment of my skull cap. Wisps of hair cling to shriveled skin. I’m pretty sure brains aren’t supposed to be stuck to the inside of the skull. That must be the result of the trauma that ripped my head apart. Ugh. The thought of being shredded is terrifying, and yet it’s in the past. It happened. It’s over. I survived. Against the odds, my consciousness has been preserved. The dull grey mass represents less than a quarter of my original brain, but it runs deep. It forms a wedge leading down to severed sections of my spinal cord. I shudder but as horrifying as it is, this is all anyone is at a biological level.

  Several of the technicians are talking about one of the luxury craft parked near me. They’re speaking English, but I can’t understand them. I recognize most of their words, but the meaning escapes me.

  Jorgensen and Dr. Everton make an effort to speak to me in what they call Old Tongue. The depth of time that’s elapsed is apparent in the speech of others. Vowels have softened over time. Verbs and nouns are still in use, but their syntax escapes me. The sentence structure used by the mechanics seems less precise. They seem to infer as much meaning from how someone speaks as what’s actually said. This makes it difficult for me to interpret their words as I’m slow on the uptake. To my mind, these guys are speaking Pidgin English.

  A woman not much younger than me walks past. Like everyone else, she’s in cleanroom garb. She’s friendly, speaking from behind a mask, with her hair tucked away under a white cap. She acknowledges me, but only as a work colleague might, with forced pleasantry. I thought I’d rate as more of a freak show in her mind, but apparently not. She makes idle chitchat.

  “You in mad time, huh? Always been.”

  I’m sheepish, unsure what she means, but I want to reciprocate. I want to show her I’m friendly. I guess she means, ‘So much time has passed for you, it’s crazy. Deep time has always been a difficult concept to grasp.’

  “Yep,” I say, nodding. Unsure what else to add.

  “Crazy mad time! You get.”

  “Yeah, time sure is crazy.”

  The economy of words in this century is insane, but it works for them. Tolstoy’s War and Peace has probably been reduced to a pamphlet.

  I hope my response was appropriate. I’m still trying to decipher her intent. I think I understood her. She raises a pinky the way I’d have once raised a thumb to gesture everything’s peachy. I smile. She gives me a slight nod, and what I’m guessing is a smile behind her mask. I repeat the gesture back to her.

  The guy coming in behind her is curious about me, lingering a little instead of walking on from the doorway. This is the technician that hung around last night. He’s got his face mask hanging loosely around his neck. I get the same characteristic wave. He
wants me to recognize him. As there are several other techs arriving without face masks, I get the feeling the “clean” in this cleanroom is for sales brochures.

  “Pretty flowers, huh?”

  Okay. I’m not sure what that’s about. I smile, wanting to be polite. Pretty Boy, for lack of a better name, is younger than me but well built. With a thick chest, broad shoulders, and muscular arms, it’s clear he enjoys working out on a bench press in his spare time. His skin is dark, while his complexion has an oily sheen. Pretty Boy’s hair is as black as the night. He stops to talk with me, which feels awkward considering I’m old enough to be his great grandmother to the power of ten. I get the feeling he’s sizing me up. His eyes linger, dancing over my virtual body, complete with dirty underwear.

  “Hunger’s real.”

  As he’s talking to me, I feel compelled to reply even though I’m not sure what he means.

  “Yes. It is.”

  Wait a minute? Hunger? Is this a literal statement? Why would someone say that? Did he have a light breakfast? Or is he asking me if I’m hungry? Does he want to take me out for a meal?

  He snarls, saying, “I’ll fly you any day,” and walks on, strutting, proud of himself.

  Best I understand it, he thinks I’m pretty and his hunger is real—which I’m guessing describes his sexual desire for me. As for fly me, I’m not sure if that’s sexual or literal as he’s working on a Maserati-like spacecraft. I laugh off his comment. It seems unwanted sexual advances have survived intact for thousands of years, even when it comes to holograms. My mother is a vocal feminist, or she was. She’d be disheartened to learn the future’s feral. Maybe I’ve got the whole hunger thing wrong. I sure hope so. Besides, I’m not sure if dead holograms can get up to mischief with the living.

  Pretty Boy takes one last look at me, smiling before donning his clean gear and setting to work on his spacecraft.

  I’ve seen the future, and it’s a regression to the past.

  Persona non-grata

  Waves break on the outer reef, thundering as they crash onto rocks at low tide. White spray kicks up in the distance. Within the lagoon, water laps at the shore. Gentle ripples roll in across a quarter-mile of azure, crystal clear waters. Sea birds dart and swoop, looking for fish among the corals.