From the beginning, DePat Kiefer had been well known. Initially, for being a strikingly handsome young man, but more so after he presented the Alien Planet Cube to the world. He continued to appear in society more than most of the Voyagers, and later became hyper-famous, for he was the first to fall in love with, court, and marry an Earth-born woman, my grandmother, Linia Madison Kiefer. You can imagine! From that time, through the birth of my father, and for many years thereafter, their every gesture and thought, good times and bad, became a public event.
My grandmother Linia must have been an exceptional person, but I did not really know her. She died when I was only six. She must have had great courage to marry a Voyager, and to raise a child, my father, amidst constant public attention. All of the impertinent questions she faced, wondering if her baby would be normal and all. I thought that I had some memory of her walking in the forest and standing under a large tree full of singing birds. Then I saw a video of the scene and realized that I only remembered the image. My one sure memory is of her seated in a chair, with her hair white, grasping the arms of the chair. We were alone in a room. She must have been looking after me shortly before she was taken away. I do not remember ever talking with her, only sitting in the chair. I wish I had.
My father was all but conceived and raised in public. Like Bertrand Russell, he claimed to have been famous before he was born. Every event, from his gestation onward, was in the news. When he got older and went to school, they had to hide him to give him something like a normal life, as if hiding was normal. Even the games he played as a child appeared on video. They obtained his school papers and criticized them in the national news. Then when he started to go out with girls, the girls’ wardrobe was critiqued. It must have been terrible. The thought of something like that kept me from asking out girls until the Senior Prom. What a disaster that was. Father told me that the most difficult thing he had to deal with, and what made him defensive and insecure to this day, was the fact that he had always been treated as someone special, even though he knew that he had never done anything special at all.
It is ironic that DePat and Linia were arrested after they expressed their opposition to manned space travel. The government was pretty weak and ineffectual in those days, and functioned primarily to fund big corporate projects. Their latest scheme was to revive the massive manned space program that had been curtailed after the failed Mars mission of 2057. Through much of his public life, DePat had visited schools where he spoke about life in space and aliens from other planets, and Linia had published a series of children’s books and video’s on space travel. Naturally, they were asked their opinion on manned interplanetary space flights. My grandfather knew that our technology was still too primitive to allow safe manned space travel, and at this time, the inclusion of humans on these planetary missions was expensive and essentially pointless.
“What would they do when they got there? Set up automated equipment?” DePat would ask. Manned space flight costs 100-times more than a robotic flight, maybe more, he pointed out. “If we sent a robot to Mars every year for a hundred years, we might find something worthwhile for a man to do there, perhaps not.” This was another government program intended to sound worthy and to funnel huge sums of money, in this case ten trillion dollars, to their supporters in the space industry, none of who appreciated DePat’s frank, but quotable comments.
DePat was not the only Voyager that was critical of the space program, and the cumulative influence of these high-visibility critics provoked the powerful, entrenched space conglomerates to coerce the government into conducting an anti-Voyager campaign. After the Voyagers’ statements threatened to endanger passage of the proposed space program, the government’s Media for National Security Office designated them subversive nationals, in a broad attempt to discredit their standing. Favorable news articles were banned, and a fear-campaign was started based on the Voyagers’ unusual behavior and questionable background, even raising, once again, the assertion that they were alien beings in human form. Bohemian Grove was sealed, individuals were prevented from leaving the site, and all communication with the outside was blocked. Ultimately, several of the more outspoken Voyagers were imprisoned, including DePat and Linia.
Both of my parents, Lewis and Regina Kiefer, took up an increased public role at that time. They spoke out in support of the Voyagers’ freedom and their oft-stated ideals, ideals the nation still held dear. The Voyagers were seen as a good, harmless people who staunchly maintained high principles, while at the same time, were often too shy to take part in society. The emotional bond between the populous and the Voyagers strengthened, in spite of the hostile publicity campaign, and it eventually undercut the manned space proposal.
Not many Voyagers survived that period of imprisonment for long. They did not have a lengthy lifespan on Earth; few lived to be seventy years old. It was because of their radiation exposure in space, they say. When the number of surviving Voyagers dwindled, the Bohemian Grove compound was closed, and the Voyager Trust built individual homes for the survivors. Grandfather was given a single-story home that stood on the edge of a fifteen acre enclosed park located in the hills north of San Anselmo, California. It was a peaceful, attractive place. Large trees and rounded, grass-covered hills, golden in the summer sunlight, surrounded the small, wooden house that was modeled after the famous craftsman homes of two hundred years before.
For years before he moved into his house, Grandfather had worked to decipher and organize the jumbled maze of almost random data that filled the Voyager Memory Cube. He expected to find the information that he had collected about the humans’ history while on the Outward Voyager, but he quickly discovered that the ObLaDas had loaded a tremendous amount of additional information on the cube. It appeared to contain most of the knowledge that the ObLaDas had ever acquired.
That data was, however, so random and undefined that he was hardly able to sort through it, much less make sense of it. He achieved a great deal, I think. He downloaded and organized all of the content, and he completed the difficult interpretation and sequencing work for large sections of the humans’ Outward Voyager history. The ObLaDas computers probably had some way to sort and identify the data files, he speculated, but the Earth-built machine that he had could not do it. The material that DePat gave me held vast untouched assemblies of technical information about the mission and space, as well as files on the ObLaDas and their home planet. It would to be my job to organize it and to make it public. It will not be easy, Grandfather told me at the time, but he had made some arrangements that would help. Or at least allow me to get help if I needed it.
Grandfather got me into UC Berkeley. My grades would not have not done it, I know that for sure. He saw it as a strong, protective environment. I found it pretty intimidating, but I was able to work on the ObLaDa data as a graduate student in history within Dr. Wysocki’s group, with a grand plan to publish an e-media book on the Voyagers’ history as part of my thesis. That was all confidential, of course. At the time, I did not know how important, perhaps dangerous is a better word, the ObLaDa knowledge was. DePat gave me access to his files, but he insisted that their existence be kept secret for as long as possible. The government, or some even less desirable force, would be there in a trice if they heard the slightest rumor that unknown ObLaDa data existed, and who knows what they would do with it. Nothing good I suspect.
Before doing anything with the data, the memory arrays had to be secured, with some means to access the information without risking confiscation if, or more likely when, they came after me. I do not know whom DePat found to set this up. I knew nothing about it until years later and I doubt that most of the people involved knew what they were dealing with. They probably thought it was porn. It seems that the flash arrays were kept in a shoe store. In shoeboxes, I imagine. I do not know where it was. When I needed to access one, I sent an e-mail that contained a number. Someone ordered some shoes; the shoes were delivered to some place, and the requested data som
ehow appeared.
My meager cubical was on the first floor of Dwinelle Hall. Dwinelle had housed the History Department for the last 175 years. Like any pre-computer-age building, it has been retrofitted with cables, routers, and switches needed by succeeding versions of local-area and campus-wide networks, some of which were still there years after they had been replaced by wireless networks of ever increasing speed. An old network cable ran through Dwinelle’s venerable walls, to an outlet near my desk and nowhere else. When I connected a wire to the outlet, my computer functioned as a dumb terminal, so that virtually none of that valuable information ever resided in my core memory. And it was a good thing that it didn’t.
Grandfather had downloaded a tremendous amount of information from the cube; much of it was video clips of people moving around, often without sound. Who were they? What were they about? It took a lot of time to recognize faces, put names to individuals, and string together what had happened so long ago. DePat had gathered considerable information about the People and their lives, but there were many other files, including several about the planet ObLa. It was incredibly interesting, but I could not understand a lot of the science content.
The original Gwynyth wrote a memoir of her life in the Saxon villages of the long fjord. She began writing long after she had been taken to the Outward, and she looked back on that time with a curious mix of opinions and emotions. It was fascinating to see something written about those times. There are virtually no earthly records of that dim era. Those illiterate people left nothing to history and their cherished memories are long forgotten, but the images collected by the ObLaDas robotics during the abduction were shocking. Life was so primitive. It is hard to imagine the unremitting labor that was required to wrest a living, morning ‘til night, day in and day out, from that dreary, muddy land.
The capture of the original People was coldly efficient. An almost effortless mastery was imposed by an experienced, supremely dominant force sweeping across the land, flybots swooping in, putting everyone down, helpless, truck bots inspecting, sorting, sampling, selecting, carting away. The ObLaDas’ abduction left no mark on the land, and the memory of the great silver landing craft disappeared unto the ancient Saxon pantheon of giant birds.
It was heart-rending to see those weak, ignorant, superstitious people enter into the synthetic mechanical world of their Outward Voyager habitat. They came naked, feeble, and confused after their capture and transport, and were completely disoriented by their new life and surroundings. I wanted to tell their story, present them as real individuals, people like us who had been thrust into a new and extraordinary world.
My work on the ObLaDa data became all consuming. I found it hard to leave my office. Most often, I ate lunch at my desk to save time, but some days were just too nice and I went outside, usually to a bench next to Strawberry Creek. It was beneath a large redwood so it was often littered by whatever fell from the big tree. Few people used it, and when there was someone there, I would wait for him or her to leave, but on a particularly warm, partly sunny day there was a girl. She was a petit little thing, with short brown hair, a little T-shirt, and shorter than average shorts. Her trim legs, stretched out in the sun, made her look taller than she was. I decided not to wait for her to leave.
“May I join you? I have just come to eat my lunch.”
“I, too, as you can see.”
After a few moments of silence, she turned toward me and noted, “You have no buttons.” Button wearing was the new retro fad gone mad, ever since someone started selling flexible disks that could be put through a printer, everyone was festooning their chests with self-made messages. “You probably want to be inconspicuous, but sometimes it becomes more noticeable if you opt out rather than join in.” She examined her collection and pulled one off, sticking it to my shirt. “There, no one can take issue with that.” ‘Give Peace a Chance’, a classic.
“I guess not,” I mumbled. She was prettier than I thought.
“I know who you are. You are Michael DePat Kiefer, everyone knows. I think its cool.”
I was usually discomforted by any personal notice by strangers, and by girls under most circumstances, for that matter, but this felt rather better. She said it was cool after all.
“What is your name, if I may ask?”
“Mildred Annagray Aimsley”
“Do people call you that?”
“Never.”
“Well, what then?”
She paused a bit her face twisted a little and, for the first time, wished she had a more respectable nickname. ‘Poppet’, she finally said, and with that she jumped up and ran off.
I met Poppet for lunch almost every day after that and, after a week and our first dinner date, she asked me to call her Millie. No one else did, but she said that she would prefer it if I did. I am not sure she said that because I was special to her or just different. Millie was in the School of Environmental Sciences, and was passionate about species preservation. She had more energy than she could manage and jumped from one idea to another, it was her way. She had an endless string of stories about this salamander and that frog that was about to go extinct or might do so, and would I go with her to wherever was necessary and collect issue specimens so that it could be revived. It was part of her thesis project. She had three cloned stem cells and needed two more to finish. It was all OK, because I liked her and she seemed to like me.
“But why won’t you come? Fifty of us are going to Sacramento to picket the capital building and get the governor to speak out against the land grab. This is very important, you know.”
“Millie, you know I believe in the issue, but I don’t see how another protest march in our state will make any difference to a multinational commission. It is more symbolic than effective, you know that as well as I.”
“But what else can we do?” she asked.
I was not sure that I should tell her, at least not yet. If I did what I was thinking of doing, the world would learn that there was new, undisclosed ObLaDa data, and I would have to deal with the consequences.
Those were the days of the Fallow Land Scandal. The economic depression and energy crisis of the 2040’s, the resulting population decline, and the contraction the world’s economy caused a great deal of havoc across the planet and to its environment. A long series of ecology treaties collapsed under the stress of the failed economies, deterioration of the ocean’s tidal-waters followed, important fisheries were lost, and coastal communities were abandoned. This swamp of abuse led to the formation of the International Land Use Commission, ILUC. It was the Earth’s first global governing body. DePat was outspoken in support of the Commission, and he considered its creation as his most important accomplishment. It was the first planet-wide governing organization since the ill-fated United Nations, and the first time governments relinquished powers from within their own jurisdiction. Grandfather hoped it would establish a model for future global commissions that would manage critically important areas essential to our continued wellbeing.
The ILUC created the Fallow Lands to protect coastal regions by setting aside large swaths of river- and oceanfront land in exploited areas around the world. The designated territories were reserved for habitat regeneration and preservation, and were supposed to remain that way in perpetuity, or so everyone thought. Recently, moneyed interests had purchased large tracks in the Fallow Land reserves, though few knew it, and they were now pressuring the ILUC to delist their properties. Values would skyrocket if that happened. There was a lot of money involved, some had already changed hands. The compromised commissioners argued that this land should never have been reserved, because the existing ecological composition was similar to its historic land use pattern, and certainly, if any changes might have occurred, they were not grave enough to threaten any species’ survival. The fanatic eco-group claims to the contrary were overstated and without proof, they asserted.
Millie, her friends, and a great many others, were convinced that the ILUC’s excuses
were wrong. Industrial development and population overgrowth must have caused important large-scale changes to the coastal environment, but they needed historical ecology evidence to prove their point, or so said the ILUC Commissioners.
That arcane science compares current land use patterns to those of the distant past, or as distant as they could go. Aerial photographs are the gold standard of historical ecology, which means in practice, current land use could be compared with that of the 1920s, or thereabouts, when aerial photographs started to appear. Few of these old predevelopment photos existed, however, and none of those covered the remote countryside in which the Fallow Lands were located. In a way, they were correct, the preservationists did not have the data to prove their claims, but I did.
During its approach to Earth, the Outward Voyager’s Planetary Probe conducted thorough surveys of the land from the orbiter and from the lander during its decent. DePat’s files contained high-resolution images, radar topography, spectroscopic scans, and temperature maps from across all of the Northern Hemisphere, and close up data for Europe, all from the around the year 650.
The year 650 was in the depths of the dark ages, a time of minimal human population throughout Europe. No large cities or large-scale agriculture had existed for centuries. Most of the land would have recovered from the depredations of the Roman Empire, with its major cities, supportive agriculture, and logging that were known to have altered much of the forest cover surrounding the Mediterranean. In North America, images showed signs of extensive brush fires that were scattered across the continent, but there was little direct evidence of a human population. Wherever they were taken, however, the images showed that forest cover, tree species, riverbeds, and especially the wetlands along the ocean’s coast were very different from what exists today.
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