John Moralee - Future Imperfect - A Collection of Science Fiction Stories

My wife did not reply. My coms had stopped working. I wondered if it had something to do with the weird light patterns around me. Was the ship blocking my signal deliberately or was it a natural property of being inside the tunnel? My heart pounded. I tried opening the hatch—but there was nothing to grab on this side, nothing to twist, nothing to press. I was trapped. I heard another noise then—a bone-jarring rumble. The lights flickered faster and faster, almost like they were counting down. Counting down to what? I didn’t know—but then I found out as the tunnel started flooding with a transparent liquid, squirted in through jets that had appeared on the ridges. My suit was sprayed with liquid. What was it? An acid? I sampled it and discovered it was salt water. Although relieved it was not a corrosive acid, I did not like watching the tunnel fill up. I felt claustrophobic as the water rose up the tunnel and engulfed me. If I had not been wearing my pressure suit, the water would have filled my lungs and drowned me. I feared the occupants had lured me into a death trap—but I didn’t want to believe it. Why would they kill visitors? If that was their plan, it had failed. I could live inside my suit for weeks without fresh air. As soon as the tunnel was completely flooded, the lights stopped flashing and turned a light blue.

The inner hatch opened.

Now what? An invitation?

There was nowhere else for me to go.

I swam down into a spherical chamber that made me feel like I was inside an enormous fish tank. A greenish light emanated from the chamber’s walls in all directions. The water was murky with some form of plankton. I studied it through microscopic sensors. The plankton was carbon-based like Earth’s life. It was also remarkably similar, sharing the same four basic molecular building blocks. The chamber had to be filled with trillions of them.

“Hello?” I called out. “My name is Daniel Crawford! Is there someone listening to me? HELLO? Can you understand me?”

I sensed something large present in the water. My radar signals showed a huge creature out there, circling me. I glimpsed a ghostly shape gliding by, pale and sleek, silent and ancient. The skin glowed and sparkled. The thing swam above me and under me. I knew it was studying me. I saw a huge mouth and teeth. The mouth was so big it could have swallowed me whole. I continued to speak, hoping it was listening. For an uncomfortably long time, I floated and waited, helpless and vulnerable.

Something appeared ahead of me. It was like a mirror, reflecting a distorted image of me on its diaphanous flesh. I waved. It waved back a moment later.

HELLO, DAVID CRAWFORD.

WELCOME.

The voice was inside my mind.

An alien conscious reached out and touched my mind, connecting, sending an infusion of confusing memories. I saw a vast ocean teeming with aquatic life, a ring of blue worlds around a distant sun, the darkness of deep space…another sun, a younger one, in a rocky region of space. I saw rain and water and asteroids and fiery comets and cosmic collisions.

“Who are you?” I gasped.

The reply was not audible—but it came from within me.

WE ARE YOU.

YOU ARE WE.

Ignoring its strange grammar, I thought I understood what it meant. “Did you…did you bring life to our solar system?”

YES. WE ARE ORIGIN, DAVID CRAWFORD. WE ARE THE MAKER. YOU ARE THE CHILDREN OF WE.

“You’ve been hidden on Eris for billions of years. Why have you contacted us now?”

IT IS TIME, DAVID CRAWFORD.

“Time for what?”

TIME TO MOVE ON.

THE OTHERS CALL.

An eye appeared as large as me. I looked into it and simultaneously saw myself through its eyes.

The alien sent me everything it had experienced in its long, long life. It had arrived in our solar system when the Earth was still cooling and forming. It had seeded our world with life and waited in the Kuiper Belt like a loving parent, watching us grow. It had feared we would destroy ourselves in wars, but it had taken joy in seeing us triumph over our adversities and spread from our home world to Mars, then Jupiter and Saturn, then to Uranus, Neptune, the Kuiper Belt and the even more distant Oort Cloud. And now, when we had matured into a species capable of spreading from one world to every world, it had decided that it no longer needed to watch and protect us. We were equals now—equals but different. There was no need for it to watch.

GOODBYE, MY FRIEND.

“Wait!” I said—but it was too late.

I was no longer inside the ship.

Suddenly, I was on the surface again, lying on the ground, looking up at the stars visible through the dome. I was at the bottom of a crater where the alien ship had been. The dome remained intact—but the alien ship had vanished. My coms returned to normal in a blast of concerned human voices.

“David!” Alice called out. “What happened? Where did it go? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said to all three questions. I stood up and looked at the empty crater. “Did you see where it went?”

“No,” Alice said. “One moment you disappeared into the ship and we lost your signal, then the ship disappeared, leaving you behind. There was a strange energy spike—but we couldn’t make sense of it. It’s as if it evaporated. I’ve never seen anything as strange. Are you sure you are okay?”

“I think so,” I said.

I returned to the cat feeling like I’d just woken from a bizarre dream. I could have believe I’d imagined everything—except my suit was dripping with salt water.

Back at the base, I had a full physical examination. My body was fine—but my brain had been altered on the quantum level. There was a new layer of exotic particles interspersed with my neurones—a spiderweb of new neural links increasing my brain’s capacity. I was still the same person I had been before my short visit to the ship—the same personality—but I could look at the data pulse and understand it now. The pulse contained the collected knowledge of the aliens. They had given me the ability to read the data and translate it so other humans could also understand it. The alien had turned me into a human Rosetta Stone.

That night I looked at screen after screen of the data, transcribing what I saw into Common Language until I was tired. I joined my wife in our bed, sighing. “Alice, it will take me a hundred years to translate everything, even using fast-time. Probably longer. Why didn’t the alien just send me the simplified English version?”

“I suppose it wanted you to read it first in their language,” she said. “It was a gift to you.”

“It’s a huge responsibility,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. She sighed. “Where do you think it has gone now?”

“Somewhere it is needed,” I said. “There are billions of stars out there with planets orbiting them. Empty worlds waiting for life. I think it will find one of them and start again.”

I closed my eyes and pictured an empty ocean under a distant sun.

I imagined the alien ship arriving to seed it with life.

I went to sleep smiling.

FAIL FAIL FAIL flashed up on Mazina Valentov’s eyeware when the simulated mission ended. Uncle Sergei cursed in Russian. His image was floating in the air in front of her, while he worked in another part of the ship. He had been monitoring her performance during her virtual spacewalk. After a burst of swearing, he switched to English with no trace of Russian accent. “Nobody expects you to be perfect, but you can’t make mistakes like that when you’re out on the shell. We’ll run the sim again and again until you get it right. Try one more time.”