Encounter with Eden

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

You can.

I know that as a matter of fact - and this is the story of how I found out.

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This was not the first time waking from hibernation.

We’ve been through that several times – longest one being six months, conditioning our minds and bodies to raise up from the dead and focus on task at hand. After all, there were still plenty of unknowns – we had to think on our feet as we arrived at the Proxima System.

As I slowly came to my senses and began to wiggle my toes - ever so slightly - the memories of the thousands of voices and faces began to dawn on me. It has been nearly seven hundred years since I last saw them, and since the last time I’ve been awake.

Not only our contemporaries – but their loved ones, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have come, and gone.

Earth must have been unrecognizable by now – the languages, art, the countries, creeds and cultures that we’d never experience, and at most might be able to tune into their incomprehensible broadcasts, delayed by the four years it took the radio signal to reach our silver starship.

I permitted myself this gut wrenching indulgence for a few hours - thinking of what and whom we all lost, and what and whom we yet may lose. It was expected - grieving was a well predicted part of the mission.

They taught us to cope with it before departure. We were all a part of this mission for a reason – I was a single child who lost both parents to a violent crime aged three, and was divorced for nearly five years prior to departure. We were all, in our own, perverse ways, conditioned to deal with death.

My background in biology and a clean medical sheet were merely a formality. One look at my curriculum vitae, and I was shortlisted for the one way colonization trip to our own Sun’s nearest neighbor.

I heard rustling in the adjacent hibernation pod, and managed to ever so slightly turn my head to peek at my neighbour.

Gomez was ahead of me – she had already managed to raise her leg onto the side of the pod with what now appeared a herculean task. Our bodies were under regular electric shocks to reduce the muscular atrophy, but seven centuries under ice does a trick on just about anyone.

On the right, Yang Sheng was even further ahead, raising his l head to scan the cabin. Our eyes met, myself still immobile.

He tried to mumble something out but all his vocal cords managed to produce was a slight chuckle which soon turned to a semi-paralysed fit of cough.

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Five days later, ‘days’ of course being calculated based on Earth days, I finally stood up, shook off the remainder of the paralysis, and started my rehabilitation routine. Back on Earth I used to swim and lift weights. Here, resistance band equivalent to one pound seemed nearly impossible to manage.

That was our routine for the next twelve months – as a probe sent slightly in advance was to scout Proxima B – or as our crew has officially christened it before departure – Eden, prior to our arrival.

Using its imagery, we were to determine the right place to land and set up Humanity’s second home, and the place we would live out our days, and die.

Our ship, Adam was healthy, aside from the X-Band antenna that just flat out fell apart after years of exposure to space environment. It was not designed for endurance since there’d be nothing puny earthlings back home could’ve done past the orbit of Jupiter anyway.

In any case, we’ve been put to sleep right after departure to stop us from panicking and conserve the consumables.

We lost Hermann and Matsumoto. They warned us the pod reliability could not be guaranteed over such a long period of time. Nobody wanted to admit that aloud, but we were genuinely surprised how sturdy these things proved with only two lives lost, and relieved we weren't among them.

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The protocol was to eject the bodies wrapped in heat blanket to their endless slumber in interstellar space. We were all ready for this, and thought it was a beautiful way to go should the sandman take his toll while we were sleeping.

Hermann and Masumoto drifted away slowly, as the two hundred strong ship gazed at them through the narrow slits that served as portholes. Just two more souls to the countless ones we’d never meet again, and two specs of stardust, navigating the eternal seas of the suns.

Walker wouldn’t let us grieve longer than five minutes. We were now our giant, interstellar family and had to get ready for our arrival on Eden.

He was a good leader, a listening type, and a humanist. He put Spirit in the Sky on the intercom, pulled the stash of booze and we held the first wake in another stellar system, drowning our sorrows, and celebrating that we were still alive.

And I got to say – we started getting kind of pumped.

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My job was to assess images taken from the probe that had around three months headstart and coordinate with Goldwyn, who was a geographer and climatologist. Our task was to identify at least three descent and ditching zones – there were, of course, no runways on the planet and our descent ships were equipped with floatation devices instead – and be the advance party to investigate the vegetation on the surface.

We knew there was vegetation from the spectrographs on the Moon's Far Side Station. Of course, nobody before us was to ever take a closer look, and there was a chance the planet was a dead rock, but the leading planetary scientists on Earth said, I quote, there’s no freaking way all of the data is wrong.

There’s also another thing they told us.

There’s no freaking way there’d be a civilization there without us detecting it by now, and vice versa.

So, here we were.

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The day of the probe’s arrival – that we affectionately named Eve – has come. We were still six months away from our closest approach to the planet.

Due to its relatively low thrust, we had to start our nuclear electric engines within 2 months of the closest approach to decelerate sufficiently to enter the planet's orbit.

We congregated in front of our screens – back in prime of fitness after a couple doses of anabolic steroids each – to take the first glance of our destination.

We held our breath in surreal silence, two hundred human beings, gazing in trance as the first images arrived and were slowly loaded onto the screen in the central galley.

The first image included the terminator between day and night – an artefact of our arrival angle this time of the Edenian year.

We did not know how to react when the image had finally been projected in front of our weary eyes.

We saw lights – clusters, as well as lines, in the darkness of Eden’s night.

There was more than life on Eden. There were cities.

I don’t remember who else did – but I did scream.