Drifter

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. They, the progenitors of our journey into the stars, and the harbingers of our near annihilation. They were brazen fools who knew nothing of the cosmos. I will ensure their mistakes never happened. I will stop them from destroying themselves.

The morning of the drift, I walk through the gardens one last time. The flowers are small things, hardy and hesitant to bloom beyond their stems. They, like us, live on a world that is finally dying. Our white dwarf sun, the one we never bothered to name, fades into darkness in distant space. I whisper words of hope to the flowers, promises of regrowth and renewal. The words are meant for me too.

Our compound sits at the edge of a city nestled against the wall of an enormous crater. This planet is only craters now, devoid of water beyond the meager springs under the city. The planet, the crater, and the city bear no names.

We still have names, though. Names are a beacon of trust, and when our environment fails we can trust only ourselves. My name is Drifter, because my purpose was chosen at my birth twenty-seven years ago. I am she who drifts, the one who will save our past.

The drifting room is already full when I arrive. A dozen scientists who, like me, bear distinct purposes and names. We have no families, only each other. Family is a conceit we hope to restore.

Commander salutes as I walk in. He gestures to Psychologist and Nurse, who usher me into the reclining chair in the center of the room. I lay back on the cool metal; my body barely fills half of the enormous seat. This facility, this city, and this planet are the castoff remains of another civilization, long gone by the time our ancestors arrived nearly four hundred years prior. We only know the bones of their society, now recycled into our last hope.

Technician secures the electrodes on my freshly shaved scalp. As he walks away for the last time, he pats my arm. He is in love with me — another conceit.

Six of the twelve, including Technician, wanted to scrap this project. They argued that our resources were better spent discovering a way off this planet. It was very human of them, to dream of escape when escape was impossible.

The other six argued that the three-hundred-year-old plan was our only viable course of action. Send a drifter back in time, discover how humanity was nearly destroyed, and prevent it from happening. It was an equally human impulse to erase the effects of the past, and equally asinine.

But our predecessors hadn’t left behind a spaceship. They’d left a drift generator. So I voted to proceed with the drift, breaking the tie and sealing my fate.

We need only three things to succeed.

First, a sample of DNA from our destination. Biologist retrieves the hair sample, preserved in a glass slide. She carries it as one would a holy relic; perhaps there is no better description. Biologist places the sample in an open slot on the drift generator that dominates the corner of the room.

Second, a massive amount of energy equal to seven seconds’ worth of radiation from a red giant star. Our ancestors used every system they could find or cobble together — solar panels, hydroponic plants, manual generators, even hand cranks — until they wore out over the generations. We now have enough power to keep the lights on for five hundred years. It will take 99.4% of that power to activate one drift.

Third, a willing participant. A Drifter.

“Drift is ready,” Technician says.

“Time stamp?” Commander asks.

“November twenty-ninth, 2093, exactly five years before the Event.”

“Sample viability?”

“Fifty-seven percent. Above the threshold.”

“Drifter ready?”

I gaze into the familiar faces gathered before me. I never bothered to say goodbye. I don’t know if I’ll see them again after this is done. We may cease to exist, erased by the universe’s corrective spirit. There are no rules here, only technical instructions and wild speculation.

“Drifter ready?” Commander asks again.

I nod. “Ready,” I say. My hands grip the armrests. I meet Technician’s eyes, wishing I’d had the courage to tell him how I really felt, wishing there were another way to—

“Drift,” Commander says.

My body disintegrates.

This is no journey through time. No pathway can be mapped to my destination. I am present one moment, and the next I am spiraling in the void, somehow ripped away from my own gray matter. I possess no being. If there is such a thing as a soul, I have been stripped down to that very core.

In that same moment, I open someone else’s eyes.

I stand on the bridge of the U.S.S.S. Lincoln, watching through glass as Planet Earth comes under attack. Across the atmosphere below us, bright lights and clouds like mushrooms blossom between thousands of roving specks of metal. Too many of those specks are collapsing into flame before my eyes. Each one is another pilot lost, another casualty in a war we’re destined to lose.

“Helmsman!” I snap, my deep voice tinged with the rasp of stage-two throat cancer. “Send squadrons five and seven to the African Corridor. Nuke the enemy and report back.”

“Yes, Admiral!” comes the reply from a stocky young officer in rumpled dress blues. He fingers jerk in a frenzied dance as he taps my orders out on a tablet.

Drifter.

I am not the highest-ranking surviving officer of the United States Space Force. I am not the man who left retirement, chemotherapy, and an ailing wife behind to lead the last desperate remnants of the global military. I am not terrified that my efforts have robbed me of the chance to hold my darling Lucia one final time.

But Admiral Rahil Barcenes-Hebron is all of those things, and his agony sears my consciousness like a brand as I take control. All of his memories, awareness, and emotions now belong to me. They bring on the realization that these are humanity’s final hours.

Drifter! Report in.

“I’m here,” I say in Rahil’s voice. The helmsman looks up, confused, but I wave him off.

Commander's voice cuts through my thoughts like a razor-sharp memory. Are you in 2093?

“Helmsman,” I say, “what year is it?”

“Um…” The helmsman licks his lips. “2098, sir.”

“What day?”

“November twenty-third,” he says. Around us, the weary officers of the Lincoln pause to watch their superior officer lose his mind.

I heard that, Commander says. We’re off target. The Event occurs in less than a week. We failed.

“Orders, sir?” I whisper, refusing to process his words. I’m still here. I’m still alive.

At least you’re in a position of authority. Assess the situation so we can make a plan.

Rahil’s thoughts mix with my own. He believes that the stress has finally driven him mad. His memories fade in and out of focus, blurring my vision. As my legs start to shake, I rest one hand on the command console to steady myself. If I could just make sense of the admiral’s memories, I could discern exactly who and why—

“Incoming!” someone screams.

The bridge crew turns as one to face the glass windscreen that separates us from space. A barrage of missiles flies toward us, propelled at the speed of sound. They glow with an eerie green light.

“Shields at eight percent,” the helmsman says softly, as if personally apologizing.

The silence grows stronger as the missiles swerve around the detritus of battle, still heading directly for the bridge. The crew looks to me, and I have no response.

Rahil’s consciousness surges upward, breaking my tenuous hold on this doomed body.

“Voy a verte pronto, Lucia,” he says.

The missiles hit, the shields collapse, the glass shatters. Rahil stands firm as his crew braces against the impact. I throw myself out, sinking into the spiral that swallows my soul. In my mind’s eye, I glimpse Rahil’s stolid form as the howling oxygen carries him into the vacuum along with his crew. He does not scream as he starts to die.

No sooner has the spiral consumed my essence than it spits me back out. I stumble in the corridor next to Carlos, my husband. My knees scrape against the plastic tile as klaxons blare throughout the ship.

“Ricki, get up!” Carlos yells. He reaches for my hand.

Commander’s voice rises through the static of Ricki’s thoughts. Drifter, what happened?

“Mama?” cries the little girl hanging on Carlos’s other arm. Her name is Florence. She turns five next week. I smile at her as Carlos pulls me back to my feet.

“Got ejected,” I whisper, trying not to worry Florence. “Different body.”

Is that even possible?

Carlos drags us around the corner. He was always such a gentle soul, compassionate and indecisive and kind. Now he barrels through the crowd, shoving aside a man in a flight uniform as we pass a warning screen. The word EVACUATE flashes in maroon text on a white background.

The explosion from the bridge rocks the Lincoln’s hull. The drift sent me back in time, maybe fifteen seconds. Not enough to change things.

Ricki’s mind is robust. She is an engineer who works on defensive systems for the Space Force. The Lincoln was a dream posting for them, despite Carlos’s initial doubts.

Florence had finally started to make friends. Ricki had been planning a surprise party.

“I’m sorry, my loves,” I say. It’s what Ricki feels. “I’m sorry.”

Carlos doesn’t look at me. He pulls us along, toward the end of the hallway. The escape pods, if any remain, lie beyond that door.

“Where are we going?” Florence whines. I shush her with a panicked smile, knowing she deserves more from her mother. Ricki’s consciousness sags within me; she had been so strong for her family, only to become so helpless now, trapped inside her own body. Compassion is a conceit I cannot indulge right now.

Drifter, I need intel!

The hallway rocks to one side, then the other, as a rising heat singes the air. I hear the flames approaching, tearing through the door to the escape pods, writhing down the hallway toward us.

Carlos buries Florence’s head in his chest.

I drift again. The spiral deposits me into the mind of a botanist hugging his knees in the corner of his greenhouse chamber. He whimpers as the walls and ceiling tremble. The beautiful repositories of his mind, the knowledge of life, flood my consciousness, nearly driving me to tears that would have formed in his eyes. The maize and potatoes and carrots he so carefully cultivated will never be enjoyed.

The botanist buries his face in his knees—

I drift. I am a fighter pilot, leading a squadron of modified S-22 Raptors. The enemy pummels us with hot steel from every angle as we approach the African Corridor. We don’t know what they are or how they came to Earth, but our defenses have crumpled like paper under their weight. Defeat is inevitable, but we carry on. Fly-Fight-Win.

Raj, my wingman of five years, screams over the radio as flames engulf his cockpit. I scream back, punching a hole in the wall of enemy combatants as the bullets trace a deadly trail along my hull—

Drift. A civilian contractor, packed into an evac ship with twenty other refugees, begging God to let the aliens target someone else.

Drift. An elderly woman, watching the lights in the sky, wondering if her daughters are still alive up there.

Drift. Lights. Drift. Fire. Drift. Death.

Drifter! Report in!

The explosions cease. Grit and smoke cloud the air around me. I cough, shaking the dust from my uniform and covering my face with a dirty handkerchief.

This body belongs to Corporal Jay Boulder of the United States Marines. He has a picture of his wife Jessica in a plastic sleeve tucked under his collar. He misses her.

“I’m on Earth,” I say, coughing again. “Hard to say, but I might be in some kind of city. There’s a lot of—”

Jay shakes his head vigorously. He rubs his temples with a gloved hand.

“Not this again,” he says.

Again? asks Commander. What do you mean “again,” Drifter?

I wrestle Jay’s mind back into submission. It’s harder than I expected.

“Sorry, Commander,” I say. “This one is—”

Jay dives to the ground. Caught off guard, I loosen my grip on his consciousness, and he regains control of his body.

“Get out of my head, drifter!” Jay yells.

Something grabs at my essence, peeling me away from Jay like claws digging into my scalp. I try to let myself flow back into the spiral, but this time is different. I’m not drifting. I’m falling.

I land on my back, hard. A piece of rebar jabs painfully against my thigh, but it didn’t break the skin. I scramble to my feet to find Jay staring at me in shock.

If Jay is in front of me…who am I?

I look down at the creamy-white skin of my hands, the result of a life without a true sun. I feel at the six indentations on my scalp where electrodes had been attached only moments before. I am me.

But the dust still surrounds me. And Jay looks at me with the expression of a man who has just seen a ghost, or an alien. Or a Drifter.

“That,” Jay says slowly, “is not what happened last time.”

____

Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI