This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions Issue #8
My eyes fluttered open despite my best efforts. Severe nausea strangled my breath, and I swallowed hard to keep my breakfast where it belonged. Learning this upgrade was more challenging than the Foldcom sales associate had led me to believe. I’d bought into her assurance that most people master the zoom rate within a few hours. I can only hope that’s true, though to be fair I don’t think the associate had guessed just what kind of camera I logged into. She’d been quite pretty, and the flicker of interest that lurked behind that smile had led me to not discuss my intended usage. It sucks when girl’s eyes glaze over when I talk about my work. As if it isn’t legit.
I picked a spot on the wall and focused, inhaling the cool humid air of my studio to a count of five, and then completing the exhale on seven. Repeat, repeat, and repeat. To my relief, the nausea ebbed without having to make a dash for the ladies’ room. The pounding in my ears faded away to the perfect quiet of my soundproofed haven. One more noisy breath of the moist air redolent with jasmine, oregano, basil, and mint and the greyness edging my vision cleared away.
With my heart still banging away in my ears I climbed from my lounger, and reached for the wall of my one-and-a-half-meter square cubicle to finger the mint leaves. I brought my fingertips back to my nose and inhaled deeply again, savoring the rush of the mint into my lungs, its cool scent seeming to tingle through my body to my toes. With my other hand, I reached to the wall pot below and bruised some oregano. The pungent heat of its spicy leaves spread its warmth through my limbs, and I felt my shoulders relax. My colleagues scoffed at my ‘green’ studio, but I didn’t care much. What better way to search for life in the universe than to surround your body with it while your mind careened through vacuum?
Even with my heartrate returning to something close to normal, I knew I wasn’t ready to dive back into the interface. A cup of tea would help, and the distraction would take the edge off my dread at the thought of getting back to it. I waved at the motion sensor panel between a flowering marjoram pot and a bristly looking shrub of English thyme. I couldn’t resist a quick sniff of each before stepping through to the corridor outside my sanctum, and a little part of me hurt when the door whisked closed and left me with the stale smelling air of the narrow public hallway. I resisted the urge to pinch my nose closed, and hurried for the food court.
While Secretariat Station was less depressing than the stations of mankind’s first steps in space, the décor was sadly dated by its lack of holo-paint. The smart paint could only change colors in simple patterns, so it always felt like you were in a tunnel or cave – even if it was a pleasantly painted one. My cubical was in the Tudor wing, so the whitewashed plaster between dark timbers with its faux stained windows shedding light into the hall didn’t fit with the dense commercial carpet. I’d heard that at one time the floor had resembled hardwood planks, but they’d covered that over when people reported disorientation from the colored glass reflections. Some people are such jellies. On the other hand, the carpet did deaden sound better than a hard surface.
This early in the work day I didn’t encounter a soul until the hallway dumped out into the main thoroughfare. Even there it wasn’t all that busy. Only the occasional laggard hurrying to make up for being late, or someone intent on one’s way to a meeting. Less than a hundred meters down to my right was my favorite tea shop, a clerk drawing out the specials of the day with a chalk pen. As I passed him he was shaking the pen through its colors to add in the witticism of the day at the bottom.
With the shop deserted, me and my London Fog were back on the way to my cubicle in under five minutes. I took a tentative sip and, pleased by the perfect temperature, slipped the cooling band off the cup and into the recycling bin just outside my door. I pressed my thumb to the panel and stepped into my gateway to the stars. Restored by the walk, I settled into my lounger and stowed my cup in the holder. I leaned back and closed my eyes once more, determined to go easier on the go-juice this time.
Mindful that I was working with a new implant, I subvocalized my main access code with careful enunciation. A pink dot appeared in the center of my eyelids, and I gave the command to find camera HG9826. The pink dot fuzzed out and was replaced by a larger green dot. I wasn’t as meticulous with my folder’s access code, so I had to resend it before I was allowed in to the main controls. You’d think two hundred years after speech recognition software had been invented it wouldn’t take so long for it to figure a user out. I hate technology when it doesn’t work right.
This particular camera had been decelerating to orbit planet MOA-192 b for weeks, a long shot because of its tiny brown dwarf star, and was finally in queue for programming. I slipped back into the camera’s viewer gingerly, fumbling for my tea cup. No nausea this time, and I sipped my sweet tea in relief. I flipped through the various readouts, highlighting the atmospheric gases for comparison to Earth normal. Nothing exciting for my department, but maybe the mining people would find something interesting. I programmed the camera for a full mapping sequence. That would take days to complete, so I set about tasking two of the onboard probes with their simpler cameras to investigate the planet’s two moons. Particularly interesting was the larger one showing an aurora dancing in blues and purples atop a polar cap.
I backed out of the interface, rubbing my burning eyes. The after images stayed in my vision, so I waited for them to clear before I got up. Three hours of concentrated programming left me starving, and I was thirsty to boot. Maybe I should get myself a little water cooler like Amelio had. It would probably be cheaper than buying teas twice a day.
I pinched off a chive leaf and nibbled it on my way back down to the thoroughfare. Since it was just ahead of the lunch rush, I had my pick of bistros without lineups. I sat alone to eat my veggie fried rice-noodle bowl; I wanted to think and daydream a bit more before going back to work. I wouldn’t be able to check back on the MOA-192 b probes today – the probes would still be in transit until tomorrow late morning. But, as was often fun to do, I thought about how mythical it would be if I were the first person to discover sentient life in another solar system. I would be remembered with the likes of Columbus, Drake, Gutenberg, Tesla, Jobs, and Mtingwa. Discovering an alien species had to be up there with the printing press and foldspace communications, and definitely as big as discovering the New World instead of the Silk Road. Children were out of the picture for me, so leaving my mark in space exploration was my only way into immortality. At least I was actually looking for aliens, unlike Columbus who had stumbled upon them accidentally.
The rest of my afternoon passed uneventfully, tagging another planet as suitable for mining after reviewing drill samples, and programming three probes for surveys of its barren moons. The only thing of note was a message in my queue announcing that our department was hiring another four surveyors and that the referral bonus had gone up to six thousand dollars. A decent bonus, but I didn’t know anyone to refer. Deleted. It occurred to me at the end of the day that I had completely acclimated to the implant upgrade. That was nice.
All the next morning I kept checking the time; so often that my AI asked me if I wanted five minute chimes. I declined and forced myself back into focus. Finally, lunch dragged by and I was able to dive back into the new MOA-192 b findings. I sucked in a green tasting breath, thankful for the humid air in my suddenly dry mouth. My whole body tense, I spoke all my commands out loud, glad for the soundproofing. The larger moon’s atmosphere was too thin for a human to breathe unassisted, but that the moon’s density was enough to hold on to an atmosphere at all was enough to set my heart to pitter-pattering. Furthermore, the probe’s pictures came back with a patchwork of lights peeking through cloud cover across the dark side, and a beautiful arrangement of fluffy white clouds on the day side partially obscuring plenty of green dotted by large blue lakes and surrounded by the deeper blue-grey of oceans.
It took everything I had to keep from squeezing my eyes shut tight. I wanted to go screaming through the halls, pounding my fists on my coworkers’ doors. It was me! I’d done it! My name would be in sparklers throughout the solar system. Women would be throwing themselves at me, even the straight ones. Hell, men would be throwing themselves at me, too. I’d be rivalling rock stars. Well, maybe not, but more than any other astronomer – alive or dead.
I gave up on trying to keep my eyes closed and bounded up out of my chair. It was a little embarrassing how long I spent pacing frenetically until the burst of nervous energy wore off. Three steps, pivot. Three steps, pivot. Three steps, pivot. And on and on. I had to alternate the direction I was pivoting so I didn’t get dizzy.
Eventually, I burned off enough excess amperage to be able to think straight. I flopped back into the lounger and reviewed the atmosphere’s make-up. Seventy-six percent nitrogen to Earth’s seventy-eight, and twenty-two percent oxygen compared to Earth’s twenty-one. The distribution of the other trace gases was also close, with argon and carbon dioxide being lower and methane higher but not enough to really matter. This was impossibly close to Earth normal. I had to stop again, and drained the dregs from my tea cup. There was no way I was going for a refill now, though. I rolled the last swallow around my mouth, soaking the tissues.
So far, I had kept my probe in the high atmosphere. There weren’t any visible structures from space, but much of the surface was obscured by clouds. I came up against my conscience. Do I report my findings and push the discovery up the chain, or see if I can get some pictures of a civilization first? I have to go below the cloud cover if I want conclusive proof of sentience. All the protocols had assumed that any sentience we came across would either have a full envelope of technology in the sky, or be without technology at all. After all, humanity had only had electricity before using satellites for something like fifty years. What were the odds we’d discover an inhabited planet during that tiny window of development? I didn’t have the concentration available to me to calculate those odds, but it took nothing to figure out they were absurdly long.
Dragging in a breath that filled my lungs to bursting, I made my decision. I’d go below cloud cover, but just barely. Too high to be seen unless someone happened to be looking in that exact spot and expecting it to move at just below local Mach speed. I hadn’t picked up any sign of radio signals, so I didn’t think it likely they’d be using radar.
I scrambled back into my chair, doing the math in my head for the course that would give me the best chance of avoiding detection by the natives. The amount of trouble I’d be in if they noticed my probe before the powers that be – both here and back on Earth – had debated every tiny detail for the next five years, then planned for every possible contingency for the next five didn’t bear thinking upon. Even if my probe went undiscovered I’d probably lose my job. The security video would show me pacing so there’d be no way I could argue I’d acted impulsively. It didn’t matter; nothing I discovered after this could ever count.
I closed my eyes and began relaxation breathing, doggedly forcing my thoughts to slow enough for a solid interface. I did _not_ want to lose control of the probe in atmosphere because I was frothing at the mouth. I’m not a fumbling teenaged boy getting his first glimpse of a naked girl. I’m a grown woman, with three decades of experience exploring the galaxy. That thought was enough to steady my nerves, and I connected with the probe. It took only moments to program the course but I spent more than an hour running it through the simple onboard AI, throwing various flight complications at it. Barring the natives flying right past it, it should go unnoticed.
Trusting the dense cloud cover to be adequate for hiding the trail generated by the probe’s half-meter thick body, I inserted the flattened spear-like probe into the thin atmosphere. Balancing the visibility of the reverse thrust against the noise it would make had been tricky, but I thought I’d gotten it. By the time the probe broke through the clouds into a heavy local rainstorm it was well below the speed of sound, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
A flicker of thought brought all the cameras fully online, and I rotated the probe to bring it from perpendicular to parallel to the surface, its knife-sharp point slicing through the air. I was tempted to dump a bit more altitude to keep from going in and out of the bottom of the clouds, but resisted and gave the probe enough thrust to maintain its current height. As annoying as the intermittent visibility was I could edit the footage, and the need to make spotting it from the ground harder was paramount.
Finally, I could turn my attention to the surface. Far below, dense vegetation covered much of the ground, broken only by a winding muddy river. It reminded me of ancient pictures of the Amazon before its denudation. Just as I began to think the forest was endless, patches of brown peeked through in the northwest. I couldn’t alter the course to check it out, but it did promise an end to the landscape. Sure enough, minutes later I was overflying a more varied terrain, some of which had lines far too straight to be natural. Civilization. An alien civilization. Well, technically I was the alien here, and they were the natives.
The probe kept on, and I brought the zoom in tighter. Villages made of sturdy materials and clustered haphazardly flashed by, but the zoom was still too low to glimpse the builders. Anxious to get at least one shot of them before the probe completed its pass I tightened the zoom still further and zeroed my focus entirely on a large village directly in the probe’s path. The speed of my passage would make it difficult to see much detail, but as long as I caught something worthwhile I could slow the footage later to get real images. I desperately wanted definitive proof that the villages I’d seen weren’t just ruins of a species long dead. There! Movement nearly perpendicular to my course! I focused the camera on it and kept it there until I was long past.
It wasn’t until spots appeared in my vision that I realized I’d been holding my breath again. I gasped for air. The slender creature driving the mechanically powered vehicle had looked up at me. The sense of awe and wonder that flooded through me was chased away by the shocking realization that I was seeing the probe through eyes other than my own. The creature had touched me, and its wonder and awe had paralleled my own. My connection to the probe shook with my confusion, and it took every ounce of discipline I could muster to bring myself back into focus long enough to see the probe’s course through to the end.
I left the probe in high altitude orbit, mapping the moon’s surface and opened my eyes. My chest heaved, pushing air through my tight, dry throat. I licked my lips and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the tremors to pass. The smart paint for my ceiling was set to the Horsehead Nebula, one of my favorite images of all time. I blinked, the lump in my airway making it painful to swallow. I lay there studying every detail of the ceiling until the image was my entire being. I couldn’t have said how long it took, but as my elation faded a strange feeling of awe remained. Awe? As much as I adored the image, the awe it had once inspired had gone elsewhere while I was still a youth. I glanced at the time display. Less than two hours had passed since I got back from lunch. I’d just witnessed the most impactful moment in human history, and it had taken only minutes.
Grunting a mild curse, I forced myself upright and told myself I was imagining things. I debated heading out for a drink of something to banish the unsettling images in my head, and decided to wait a little longer. At least until my hands had stopped shaking like I was in some kind of seizure. It would attract far too much attention if I ran into a co-worker. With faltering steps, I made my way to a dense pot of mint and snapped off a leaf to munch. By the third leaf, the knot of tension in my belly began to fade and the lump in my throat began to shrink. I couldn’t shake the feeling of awe, but even more confusing was a weird sense of delight. It had sprung up when I popped the first fragrant leaf into my mouth, which was odd since that wasn’t my usual response to mint. Normally it was simply soothing; cilantro still delighted me, but not mint. Eating mint always felt like I was going somewhere safe, not exciting.
Still feeling out of kilter but determined to get my head sorted out and work past it, I asked the AI to activate my wall screen rather than go back to the lounger. There was no way I was going to be able to sit still and work until this shakiness passed. Once the hum of the screen’s motor shut off I called up the footage I had just taken. There were seven minutes of feed in total, including the atmosphere insertion. I waved up my editing package and set to work. I cut the beginning of the feed down to a four second intro of the jungle, then changed my mind and extended it to ten seconds. Four seconds wasn’t long enough to grasp the wrongness of the vegetation, but neither did I want to lose my audience journeying through the boring white clouds. There were more than enough videos out there of gas planets with really interesting clouds, and I wanted my viewers to not click away before they got to the goods.
At first glance it looked like any other tropical Terran forest, but then subtle differences in color and shape became noticeable. I wanted my subscribers to notice those differences. Then they would be paying closer attention when the payoff arrived. Even knowing what to expect, the impact of seeing that willowy being again struck me like a wrecking ball and the air whooshed out of me with a whispered ‘Wow’. I put in a slow-motion replay of the zoom-in, and froze at the closest point for a full twenty-five seconds. Those eyes, almost human in an inhumanly long and immobile face, connected with something inside me. In those leaf-green eyes I could see wonder, surprise, and more than a little curiosity. My finger strayed to the screen, as if by touching the image I could make contact with the alien. The fabric swayed back from my touch and I shook my head, dismissing the fancy.
I kept the rest of the footage, allowing the viewer the unsettling notion of how much like Earth the moon of this faraway planet was when seen from space. I named the video ‘Another Pale Blue Dot’ and set it in my upload queue for WatchMe. If I didn’t log in to my account to stop it within the next twelve hours, the video would be posted. It might be days before I’d be able to blitz it out to the entire solar system’s population, but I’d get it out there eventually and I wanted the date and time stamp to show that I was the first one to upload it.
That done, I queued the full, unedited video for upload to the internal server and attached a meeting request for my boss. I took a step back, and told the AI to shut down the Foldcom line. I held my hand out, palm down, to see if the shaking was under better control than the turmoil in my guts and was relieved to see it improved. Maybe a snack would help my guts. Something bland, ordinary.
#
I look back now on the events that followed over the next several months and how that could have appeared to a being that had no concept of verbal language. At the time, the idea of a species that didn’t have the ability to hear using sound waves would have been ludicrous. Had I considered it possible they could be telepaths, I might have made a different decision. While I reveled in the adulation that immediately followed the public announcement, my fading fame abruptly morphed to infamy when the next atmospheric probe insertion – two years later – revealed statues of my likeness all over the planet.
I went from hero to zero in no time flat, and now I lie here on my prison bunk with only a telepath for a companion and audience for my memories of exploring the stars. He can’t think in words, but his intention to discover a way to restore my freedom comes with a lot of vivid pictures. My keepers don’t really understand what will be in store for them when they finally get around to attempting contact with the natives of MOA-192 b. Imprisoning a god is kind of a no-no, but I have no intention of telling my fellows that.