{Transcript
of last message received from the Endeavor Expedition, presumed lost}
It’s so damn cold.
The environmental systems all say that the
temperature is within two degrees of nominal, but I don’t care. It’s still
cold.
I don’t know where to begin. This is my first
log transmission in about three months. I mean, why bother sending anything
when we were all going to get home years before any message would. But now,
well…
Okay, I can see that I’m starting to ramble.
So, I’ll try to do it by the book. At least for as long as I can maintain my
sanity.
Personal log of Mission Specialist David Frey,
Endeavor mission time 330 days,
eleven hours, twelve minutes…
Oh, fuck it. There’s no way I’ll be able to
stay on track, so I’m not gonna try. And who knows if anyone is ever going to
hear this anyway. So, I’ll just start at the beginning.
From day one, eleven months ago, the mission
had gone exactly according to plan. The ship performed flawlessly, and there
wasn’t a day when engineering wasn’t singing the praises of the designers and
builders, especially considering that this was her maiden voyage.
For the most part, the Crew all seemed to get
along together fairly well, which is important with seventy-two people packed
that close together. Even after the Transition, six months out, that didn’t
change. Sure, we were already almost fifty million miles from home, but when
the field generators kicked in, we were instantly more than a million times
further away. So no more messages from home. No more email, no more first run
movies, and no more good night kisses. Over the next few days, crew activities
started becoming more deliberate and thoughtful, as the enormity of the
distance we’d traveled began to sink in.
{Signal
integrity lost—estimated 12 seconds of recording missing}
…didn’t last long, because only a few weeks
later we began receiving radio transmissions from our destination. Engineering
got to work on the modulation schemes being used, and two days later, we were
receiving both sound and moving images.
What we saw was more shocking than anything we
could have imagined.
There were people there.
Not one-celled amoebas, not beasts, not little
green men. People. Or at least they looked enough like people that we couldn’t
tell the difference from the pictures. Sure, their clothing was different, and
they behaved differently, but any one of us could have been dressed up and
dropped into the middle of their world and not been noticed.
Of course, the science team came up with an
explanation, but I think that was mostly to save face—they had no better an
understanding of how this could be than anyone else. It became the topic of
cafeteria and hallway debate for the next several weeks. The official
explanation was parallel evolution, but that had so many holes in it that the
science guys really didn’t try to defend it with much vigor. The ship’s
engineers had come up with their own explanation, centered around spaceships,
of course; both this world and our own had long ago been seeded by an advanced
race. There was another theory involving quantum entanglement, but it didn’t
get much traction, at least in part because not many on board could follow the
math. The ship’s chaplain was the one crew member who seemed at peace with our
discovery; after all we were made in the image of God and so were the
inhabitants of this new world. Nothing odd about it at all.
As for me, well, I’m not a scientist or a
theologian or a philosopher—just a linguist who lucked out in the selection
process and got to take a long, long trip. And now? Well…
{Long
delay in recording, sound of switches being toggled, followed by sound of
speaker taking a deep breath}
There’s gotta be something wrong with that
environmental unit. I don’t care what it says.
Anyway, I’d spent the first half of the trip
doing routine service assignments, but now I was working every waking hour; as
a linguist, I had just become one of the most critical members of the crew. I
spent the first days viewing the incoming video broadcasts; you can learn a lot
about a culture by watching its television. It didn’t take me very long to
start grasping words; some of the broadcasts were intended for children, for
that exact purpose. From there, sentences, and then thoughts and concepts.
There were plenty of entertainment broadcasts that helped me start to
understand their culture, and the newscasts gave me a good feel for how these
people organized, what their values were, and even what sort of things they
feared and worried about.
Once I had that, I started putting together
training material and teaching classes in their dominant language and the
culture behind it. The crew responded the way that I’d hoped: many of them
began speaking the language to each other, even correcting each other’s
mistakes. For those who weren’t making progress, I arranged with the infirmary
for a few shots of Lexinol. Some people think that’s cheating, but it’s not—all
the stuff does is boost linkage formation in the cerebral cortex slightly. The
hard work is still up to the student.
The anticipation of our first contact grew as
each day brought it closer. It became a popular pastime to program the printers
for clothing like we saw in the videos and even to take local names. The
captain fully supported this. He even participated when his duties permitted;
in one of the all-hands meetings, he said he thought it would help us prepare
for what was coming.
The planet itself was similar enough to home
to make you want to cry. Gravity would be within ten percent of ours, there was
a similar axis tilt, and spectral analysis of the atmosphere pronounced it
suitable for sustaining life, though a few points higher in oxygen than we were
used to. Assuming no deadly microbes, it would not only be breathable but quite
pleasant. Surprisingly, the surface area of the world was covered with roughly
the same percentage of water as at home, though it was concentrated in fewer,
larger bodies. The science team speculated that that would create some weather
that was extreme by our standards. So what? Sometimes we’d have to stay
indoors. And that moon, enormous compared to what we were used to. The 4 tidal
effects would be significant, but the part that interested me most was seeing
what it would look like on a warm, clear summer night.
By the time we reached orbit, even those
crewmembers with no gift for language could speak the dominant tongue
reasonably well. Maybe not well enough to write poetry, but certainly well
enough to be understood. The bigger challenge would be the cultural
differences. We could mimic the behaviors seen on the video; in fact, a lot of
my advanced language teaching focused as much on culture as on vocabulary and
pronunciation. But this is the sort of problem any foreigner has in a new
environment; there’s a portion of it that can only be learned only by exposure.
{Message
appears to have been partially erased and rerecorded from this point}
With all the broadcasts I’d been watching and
listening to, I was arguably the furthest along in comprehending their culture.
But the more I learned, the more I became worried that our planned first
contact protocol was hopelessly misguided. The committee back home, a
combination of politicians, military leaders, psychologists, and scientists,
had spent literally years working out a first contact strategy. The intent was
to be unambiguous, nonthreatening, and direct. The unambiguous part ruled out
initial contact by radio—someone would need to go down there. Nonthreatening
meant that there would be only one crewmember. And direct meant that his
initial action would be to establish contact with some individual or group
empowered to negotiate.
That all made sense, unless you’d spent the
last several months studying their culture. It was unquestionable to me that
subtlety, not straightforwardness, was called for. I still questioned the
decision to avoid initial contact by radio. I understood that a physical
presence would leave no room for doubt, but it would also leave room for any
number of cultural mistakes or social blunders that could do serious damage to
our mission.
We needed a buffer, and our ambassador would
be far better off quietly establishing contact with a native trained in the
nuances of their legal and political systems. With the right intermediary in
place, we’d be able to avoid any number of gaffes that could never be
anticipated, and our eventual contact with the planet’s leadership would move
forward smoothly. I even prepared a formal proposal, but the contact committee
didn’t want to hear anything from the ‘language kid’. Who was I to try to
second-guess a protocol developed by the best minds back home?
{Timestamp
indicates a 19-minute gap during recording}
Anyway, on the fifth day after making orbit,
First Officer Adam Webster boarded shuttle M3 and headed down to the surface.
In deference to that nonthreatening mandate, he traveled unarmed; in fact, the
only technology he carried was a CommsPak to broadcast sound and video. And of
course that tiny Vital Signs Implant that everyone in the crew had been
injected with back home.
Per protocol, Adam brought the shuttle down in
a remote area near a major city and began the trek there on foot. He’d been
broadcasting continuously, and by the time he arrived, pretty much everyone who
could get away from duty had assembled on the Multipurpose Deck to witness the
first historic events. I watched from the middle of that crowd, surely being
the only one there cringing with the sense of imminent disaster. I suppose that
at this point I could say, ‘I told you so’.
Only I don’t know who I’d say it to.
Adam walked directly into the largest of the
structures we’d identified as government buildings, explained who he was to an
attendant in the lobby, and requested a meeting with their political leader. He
was asked to take a seat, and several minutes later was met by two uniformed
men whom I recognized as law enforcement officers.
It wasn’t clear what happened next. There must
have been some sort of altercation; the video showed jostling, then a view of
the ceiling, and then the screen showed a Loss of Signal message.
As it became clear that the broadcast was not
going to be restored, the crew began dispersing to their regular duties, but
with an unspoken uneasiness in the air. Until then, the entire expedition had
gone flawlessly, a textbook example of successful planning. Now we were off the
plan.
I suppose I was the only one on board who
wasn’t shocked. My hope was that we’d try again with the protocol I
recommended. Adam’s vital signs 6 implant was still sending; of course, the
signal wasn’t strong enough to hear on Endeavor,
but his shuttle was picking it up and repeating it. So, if we were able to
establish relations with the locals, we’d definitely be able to find him.
I pleaded my case to the contact committee
again, and again it fell on deaf ears. The committee included the captain, our
crew psychologist, and someone from engineering. The idea must have been to
benefit from diversity, but instead they became deadlocked. For two days they
stayed in session almost continuously, breaking only for meals and sleep.
Nothing was said to the crew; apparently, no conclusions had been reached. And
when nothing is said, rumors fill the void. I won’t repeat them all here, but
crew morale was definitely low, and on the way down.
On the morning of the third day, a general
meeting was announced. My turn had come up for watch duty, so I got to stay
behind on the bridge and make sure none of the green lights turned red while
everyone else was down on the multipurpose deck. I watched on one of the small
screens as Captain Anderson began.
“At 03:10 ship’s time, a series of telemetry
commands were issued to return shuttle M3 to Endeavor unoccupied. The contact team judged that the risk of the
shuttle being discovered by planetary authorities outweighed any potential
hazard that might be caused by its delayed availability to First Officer
Webster. At the time of the shuttle’s retrieval, Mr. Webster’s implant was
still broadcasting. He appears to be in good health, though under some stress.
The contact committee has therefore decided…”
I’ll never know what the contact committee
decided. Because that’s when it hit.
What hit? Beats the hell out of me. It could
have been a meteoroid. Or it could have been some orbital debris; from the
newscasts, we knew that several of their governments had flown small vehicles
to orbit. But whatever it was, it was moving damn fast, fast enough that the
hazard lasers never saw it coming. It couldn’t have been that big; if it had
been, I wouldn’t be recording this. But whatever it was, it pierced the hull
near the floor of the multipurpose deck, clipped a chunk of the central core,
and exited about two-thirds of the way up the opposite wall. The entry hole was
about the size of my head, and the exit was maybe twice that size.
Nobody had a chance. In less than thirty
seconds, the air pressure on that deck was approaching zero. A few of the crew
made it to the central core and cycled the hatch, but whatever had hit had
breached the core as well, and through it, air mix funneled from the other
decks, decks that would have been compartmentalized if the core had held. Only
the engineering deck and bridge were on separate pressure, and there was no one
in engineering; everyone was on the multipurpose deck. Except for me.
αωαωαωαωαωαωαω
About the Author
When not writing speculative fiction, he designs embedded computer systems, flies light aircraft, swims the Polar Bear Plunge, and rides on multi-day bicycle tours.
He and his bride live at an airport on Cape Cod.
Buy A Forgotten Legacy at Amazon or learn more about Larry at his website.
αωαωαωαωαωαωαω
About the Book
by Larry Allen
David Frey signed on as a mission specialist for the Endeavor's inaugural interstellar expedition - a chance to be among the first to visit another world. But after a devastating shipboard disaster, he finds himself marooned and alone, trillions of miles from home.
Greg Parker commutes between a dead-end job and a loveless marriage, his dreams of a life at sea long abandoned.
Christopher Bishop's high-tech empire has made him one of the most successful men in the world. But something he's tried to find for a generation still eludes him.
Much to all of their surprise, their lives are about to converge in a way that none of them could possibly have imagined.
Written by an engineer and pilot, A Forgotten Legacy will be a compelling read for science fiction fans, as well as those who just want to enjoy an entertaining, suspenseful adventure.
