118 Years and Counting

118 Years and Counting

Chapter One

By Matthew Randquist

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Given that I was on a one-man space craft en route to a planet which, in the far distant past, had sent a probe into space, I unfortunately had no ability to test whether anyone could hear me. I am therefore creating this narration of my journey.

You may be wondering my name. I don’t have one. On my world we are given alpha-numeric codes to go by. Mine if 48 digits long and only after we have accomplished something great are we permitted to be given a name by the state. It is my hope that I can achieve that honor.

The probe had been found floating in space for God knows how long. It was clearly from an advanced civilization and many of the artifacts found in it were written in a language unknown to my planet. There was more than enough to detect how old the probe was, that it consisted of a material that was created to last several billion years if necessary and that it showed us where the planet was located within the universe at the time the probe was sent. From there we were able to determine roughly where the planet would be at the present time.

The mission was one I had volunteered for knowing full well I might never see home again, at least not as I remembered it. Due to time dilation and the amount of time it would take to reach this new planet as well as the speed my craft was going, by the time I returned home a full 117 years would have elapsed. Everyone I ever knew and everything I recognized would be gone, except perhaps for a few old buildings.

We were however on a doomsday clock. We had detected a large asteroid heading towards us at a rate of speed which would reach us in 118 years. We could either sit still and try and find a way to destroy the asteroid as it came towards us, or we could send a one-man mission to this mysterious world in the hopes that they had the technology to do it for us.

We decided to try both.

I would leave and see if we could find help while our top scientists would try and develop a way to destroy the asteroid. Its size was the biggest hurdle as it was the size of two small continents. Destroying it close to the planet would break it up but still it would kill millions and cause mass extinction. We didn’t have the technology at the time to destroy it, so we were at an impasse. With limited options it was decided that the best option was for me to go into space and try my luck. If I failed then I could expect to arrive home right before its destruction or if a scientific breakthrough had occurred, to a world on the brink of true salvation. If I did succeed in my mission, then I would have not only saved my planet but also perhaps gained us a powerful ally.

As I got closer to the system where the alien planet was located, I would be able to pinpoint its exact location.

The trip one way was long, a full fifty-seven years. I was given enough supplies to last six years before I had to go into stasis. I decided to use one year of supplies for the first year, go into stasis and wake up fifty=five years later. I would then use another year as I approached the planet and would spend two years of supplies while I tried to convince the planet to help us. With any luck I would not need that long and would be able to start back home with new friends. If I failed, I would spend the first year going back home, go into stasis and then use the final year of supplies as I came home, hopefully to spend the remaining time enjoying what little time I had left.

My world was an old one, some four and a half billion years in age. Our landmasses had once been united but over time, due to plate tectonics deep in our ground, the land broke up and began moving in different directions resulting in over half a dozen super-continents. Life had changed during this time as well as the world was once dominated by creatures of enormous size, but they died out millions of years before after what is believed to have been a massive asteroid hitting the planet. The resultant heat and dust clogged the atmosphere making life largely incapable of surviving. The extinction led to smaller creatures taking over the planet and in the past 10,000 years, my species became more prominent and eventually intelligent enough to communicate with each other, build large cities and structures, create a written language, and send probes into the stars.

Reaching for the stars almost didn’t happen.

Society had for centuries been wracked by wars, large and small. Millions died in some, dozens in others. Divisions, real and imagined had led leaders on my world to launch their nation states in wars against each other in an often-futile effort to gain new land and resources.

How did I spend my time? The computers had been equipped with a large library of my planet’s literature, music, movies, entertainment as well as knowledge in areas from philosophy to physiology. If my planet were to be destroyed, then having a record of my civilization was extremely important. I might be the last one alive for all I knew but to have records kept for future civilizations to examine might allow my race to live on for eternity so to speak.

I first began by writing my own story. Where I was born, how I lived as a child, my parents, siblings, extended family, and friends as well as the woman had planned on marrying before her untimely death. I went over the belief system I had been raised in, the city life I had grown up in, its history, the history of my people, how we had nearly been destroyed in a war but how we forged a lasting peace with our enemies to the point where only those of advanced age remembered the hostilities of ages past.

I studied the lives of some of the great people who have lived on my planet. From political leaders to musicians to those in the sciences, I read about them all to see what common characteristics they had, good and bad, that made them who they were.

I studied some of the great languages of my world, both past and present.

I learned how to play an instrument that hadn’t been popular in centuries.

I studied botany and chemistry.

I grew my hair out long and then cut it into a ridiculous fashion before letting it grow long again and going back to my regular short hairstyle.

I took up weightlifting again which I hadn’t done for over a decade.

I learned endurance running. I thought about what it would be like to run on the new planet.

I studied military history, the great battles, the maneuvers, those involved, the fate of those who were defeated, the fate of those victorious.

I learned to paint, to draw and to compose music.

I wrote a play.

I starred in the play.

I critiqued the play.

I used high-powered telescopes to see the stars and planets that I would pass by while in stasis. There were gas giants and ice giants, there were worlds where the surface temperature was too hot or too cold to make life possible.

I knew the first task would be to monitor the planet to slowly learn their language, their culture, their very way of life. Before I could contact them and ask for help, I had to first see if they could help me. This would take time, hence the two years I had once I reached the planet.

Unfortunately, due to the distance in light years my telescopes were essentially letting me see into the past. Even the planet I was heading toward was so far away that what we saw from our world was in the distant past. Old images from long before we had the probe showed that it had oceans and land. More recent images showed it looked hazy, likely from cloud cover.

My first year was almost completed and it was time to enter stasis. The stasis chamber was invented on my world as a means of keeping those with incurable diseases alive until a cure was found. Families would hold huge celebrations when someone was set to enter stasis and the festivities would last for days with friends old and new coming to bid the stasis subject farewell. When the stasis ended there would be a welcome back party for the stasis subject, often a party that would take place decades after the last living person to attend the first party had died of natural causes. It was not uncommon to see people come out of stasis only to find out that those they loved were also now in a stasis, which gave them the extra joy of knowing they would be able to surprise their loved ones when they themselves came out of stasis.

Stasis essentially slowed the aging process so much that a person could live several hundred years in the stasis chamber but from their perspective only hours would have passed. It would be like a prolonged sleep and over time diseases began to recede into history as science continued to advance.

I entered the stasis knowing that when I awoke, it would be exactly fifty-five years later. I made sure that everything was put away and that there was nothing left out that could grow in that time, lest I wake up in a forest of weeds. The clock on the wall displayed the date and I would know I was fifty-five years in the future when I woke up and saw the new year displayed.

(As the stasis chamber came on, the subject began to go to sleep until he was fully in stasis.)

In what felt like mere minutes, I was awake again. The clock showed that fifty-five years had passed but nothing else had changed while I was in stasis. I checked where I was in space, and I was just one year from my destination. I decided to look in my telescope for a closer image of the planet.

My heart sank.

The planet looked golden in color, but I could see nothing else. I decided to scan the planet for radio signals and received nothing. I scanned for any type of signal, and everything was blank. It was as if the entire planet had ceased communication which seemed strange given that this was the same planet which had once sent a probe into space. I decided to look at the contents of the probe once again for more information.

There was a lengthy record of a people who thrived in an environment of advanced learning. They had a written language which was not at all like the visual language my people communicated in which was an electronic pulse language located inside various shapes. We had once had a written language, but it had disappeared long ago.

I could see that this race of people was like mine, technologically advanced but very much isolationist. My own people had only recently begun the process of being able to explore beyond our own planet, but our power was limited, hence the reason why we could not save ourselves from certain annihilation.

I saw a history of a civilization that emerged quickly from humble beginnings to a vast empire that had many buildings and works of art that words could not adequately describe. They had accumulated a library of literature that was tens of thousands of years in age and had created harmonious music that was anything I had ever heard before.

Toward the end of the probe’s recorded transmissions, I could see hints that their society had overextended themselves by depleting their resources to the point where they began drilling deeper and deeper into their crust. I could see the increase in harmful gases in their atmosphere as well as heavy rates of pollution. It was around this point that the probe’s record ceased.

I made the decision to send my own probe into the planet’s atmosphere and scan the surface. As I was still less than a year away, this would take some time.

As the probe made its way to the surface it began to detect intense heat that was hundreds of degrees higher than that of my world. Visually I saw nothing but a molten surface that stretched forever in each direction. The atmosphere itself was clearly not breathable with high amounts of sulfuric acid and the pressure on the planet was beginning to crush the probe I had sent.

I sent several more probes into the planet at various locations from the poles to the equator.

The results were the same.

This was a dead planet.

Something in its past had caused the planet to change internal composition and become inhospitable. It was the second planet from its star and the amount of radiation hitting the planet was also alarmingly high. Whatever remained of its once vibrant civilization had long since been destroyed in the course of time. Perhaps there were ruins and bones buried deep but environmental conditions would prevent any examination for a long time to come.

My heart sank yet again.

All for nothing.

I thought of my home world and the only comforting thought was that I still had plenty of supplies left and could still arrive home before its destruction.

“At least I will be with my loved ones when the end finally comes, unless of course a solution has been found in the interim,” I said aloud to myself. I rarely if ever spoke aloud since there was nobody to actually speak with.

The probes slowly were crushed and destroyed by the intense heat and pressure that the second planet exerted upon them.

I sat and pondered what to do next. I examined the first planet but like the second it was devoid of all life, at least life as I could recognize it.

I decided to look deeper into this solar system before leaving to see what else was out there.

Then I saw it.

In the far distance I could see another planet. A blue planet. Monitoring its transmissions from one of the large continents, I could make out a word used several times over and over.

Earth.