Top Side

Chapter 1 - Hello

My name is Haniel, but most people just call me Joy. My people are a direct, uncontaminated, line of the “original” people. The same people who destroyed the world almost 14,000 years ago.

I like coming top side, that’s what we call it, top side. I even find it amusing that the aircraft we use, you think is from another planet. It’s not, we make them right here, under the ocean, and have done so ever since before the pyramids were really built.

In all reality, you and I are almost exactly the same. I’m just a bit more original and less contaminated than you are.

No, we don’t have giant heads and tiny bodies. We don’t look like lizards either. We look just like you. Yes, we too have many skin colors amongst our people, though those of us with more melanin still tend to be a bit paler than most of you. It’s not genetics, it’s simply due to the fact that we live under artificial lighting.

Alas, as close to actual sunlight as it may be, it is much safer, so if I want a tan, well, I need to come top side. I know I risk certain cancers doing so, but the difference in light and heat just feels good. Good enough to take the risk. Nevertheless, it is true that most of us come to visit at night to avoid those harmful UV rays.

You’re wondering why I said we are uncontaminated, aren’t you? Well, the truth is that my ancestors fought over the world. And they poisoned it. Between diseases they created in labs and weapons of war that they designed and built in factories; all it took was a disagreement of boundaries for the devastation to begin. Back then, we were young and greedy, just like you are today.

My direct ancestors lived in a place you call Atlantis. They were so focused on growing our tech that they had little time for war. Yet when they saw the addition of nuclear arsenals being added around the globe, they realized what was coming and put all their efforts into discovering a way to lower our land, and others around the world, under the oceans before it was too late.

Fortunately, for all of us, they were successful.

Your ancestors were those people we left top side.

While most of your people simply died off due to disease or radiation, some didn’t. Nevertheless, those who lived were contaminated. Since then, we have found that their DNA changed, not completely for the worst and not completely for the better.

Needless to say, those people are your direct ancestors.

So, just to set the record straight, I’m not an “alien from outer space,” I’m a human who happens to have grown up under the ocean. And if you want to hear it, I’ll tell you the true history of the world as I have been taught.

In the beginning our people left the planet you call Mars to populate the Earth. That part of our history is a bit hazy even for my culture. It would seem that there are two stories to the events leading up to the move. In one version, we had destroyed Mars, in another our scientists had realized that the planet was moving too far away from the sun. Either way, it was us who terraformed Earth. It was our terraforming that caused the tectonic plates on the planet to shift, ripping apart a single large land mass and causing it to slowly drift apart into the continents we are all familiar with today.

It’s my understanding that the process took about 1000 years, and fortunately, the planet was ready for us with little time left to spare.

Again, that bit of our history is hazy. Landing on a newly terraformed planet, with no more than five million people, actually caused a setback in our advancement. Records were lost, and we had to rely on the memories of the “First Five”.

Dinosaurs? Yes, there were a few left here when we arrived. It is believed that during the changes we made to the atmosphere we actually caused their extinction. But they weren’t the only ones, we apparently killed many, large and small, living creatures who had somehow inhabited what we would have called a hostile environment. But that was about 65 million years ago.

Nevertheless, we did indeed come from Mars. Our people landed in small groups all over the Earth, although the largest group landed in a place you call the Iberian Peninsula, originally, we had made that place the epicenter of humanity. Again, that was 65 million years ago, even in our history, the epicenter of humanity has changed many times over.

I suppose I should give you a revised version of all the changes that took place during our time on the top side. Otherwise, the story would be much longer than either of our life expectancies.

After landing the colonist were fairly quick to reconnect their communications with each other. Always the types to plan ahead, they had something similar to what you call satellites in place around the Earth even before they left Mars to facilitate them in maintaining contact. But one thing they really didn’t plan for was the inhabitants that had apparently already began to evolve here. A genetic mutation had apparently taken place in some of the mammalian life that we had sent ahead of us. Why this happened had been of debate amongst our people for almost a millennium.

What is known is that a few groups of what you call chimpanzees had begun to take on more human characteristics. They had a form of speech and had also began building small traveling societies. They became what you would call Neanderthal Man. Unfortunately, we were unaware of their existence on the planet with us for a very long time and by the time our scientist discovered them some of the outlying communities had actually, mistakenly, bred with them. The results of which were more often than not seen as tragic.

We fear it is only a matter of time before your people repeat our history.

There were at least 3 near “restarts” before the last large one that my people caused. Apparently, humans have a habit of wanting and taking more than their fair share.

I would like to tell you that, given the opportunity, my people wouldn’t make the same catastrophic mistakes again. But as I said, we are human, and even with our vast knowledge, we are not perfect. Of course, the closest we have come to war in the past 14,000 years is to side with your allied forces in your second world war. You may have heard of our patrols; I believe your pilots called them Foo Fighters.