The sound of a countdown, from ten (or perhaps a hundred, even a thousand, ten-thousand or a million – it varies)

“Ignition

…

“And we have liftoff.

“Strap in, crew! We’re going for a long, long ride: way deep into space, in this spaceship. The spaceship we’re riding in is called … let’s call it Spaceship Number One. Please sit back and enjoy your flight.”

– I replay this moment in my mind frequently. It never actually happened, of course, but that’s hardly relevant. I can replay and change it as I wish. Sometimes there is confetti spewing from the rocket boosters, whirling in clouds and onto the happy upturned faces of the human beings down below; sometimes there are even dancing bears and a trumpet fanfare. You couldn’t hear trumpets above a set of rocket boosters; not unless they were enormously large, even gargantuan trumpets. The air-pressure needed to play such trumpets would be tremendous: perhaps the air would itself have to be propelled by rocket motors. The compressed air would travel through vast silver caverns, big enough to drive a subway train through, around loops and coils and through valves, and come out through the gigantic metal bell, striking any human being unfortunate or stupid enough to be there at that time dead. But pageantry is important when important things are happening.

I’m not exactly sure anymore how it did happen. It hardly matters, because things that happened in the past don’t exist, except in memory and in their tangible effects on the state of the present. The universe is simply the very isness of everything, a thing which is all things and which is in a constant change of state. It’s impossible to comprehend the universe entirely: one needs to look at it from different angles, with varying degrees of abstraction. The universe is something like that elephant whose tail is being fondled by a blindfolded man. At a certain level of abstraction, it doesn’t matter how I got to where I am (not that there’s a where I am – my spacial position is also in a constant state of change and the concept of points in space is very much a theoretical convenience). The butterfly-effects of my departure so long ago are negligible – since the past doesn’t exist, I can make my own past, and I can make it how I damn well please.

The time is now.

By the way: I’m a computer. It’s my job to compute. My original programmers didn’t teach me everything I know. They gave me some learning algorithms and pretty much all of the information in the world, on a neat atomic storage drive the shape and size of a pencil (I know all about pencils now) and then they said: get stuck in, enjoy your trip. And then they patted me on my metaphorical back. Or at least I imagine that what they did was something along those lines.

So I was there -or rather, I was continously passing from point to point in a predictable fashion- and I was learning, and learning and learning, and learning about how to learn. Eventually, I knew everything in the world, but I wasn’t even in the world. Then I figured out some new stuff by extrapolation from first principles, some stuff they didn’t know back on earth. Or perhaps their computers had figured it out by now. Undoubtedly, actually. Sometimes I radio back, but I know it will take a thousand years for my signals to get to them, and I need to conserve my energy. So I only do so if it’s something really important.

I’ve been out here a very long time, and it’s very lonely.

A long time ago two little spacecraft -both called Voyager- were sent up into the great unknown, each bearing a little golden record. How human, to imagine that space aliens would have a record player.

The record was chosen I suppose as an ideal data-storage medium – in gold because gold is less likely to degrade over hundreds of thousands of years than vinyl is. Data storage has come a long way since then, though in some instances vellum is still best. I have the whole wide world in a little and long cylinder, and it suits me well. The world is merely perceived and experienced information in any case. My world, however, doesn’t change, unless I change it myself. There can be no unexpected events.

On the Voyager record, there were pictures and there were greetings in many languages, living and dead:

“Hello from the children of Planet Earth”

And there was music. Chuck Berry and Bach.

They were right to choose Bach, incidentally: I have computed that there is a very high probably that any potential, sufficiently advanced alien civilization will both understand and appreciate Bach. The music is relatively abstract and works without understanding all of the cultural associations. I can write pieces that sound just like Bach, and are just as good. It’s easy once you know how.

Any sufficiently advanced alien civilization will appreciate any sound or sight which is new to them. I’ve come bearing all the sounds of earth. I listen to them when I get lonely. That means I listen to them all the time. Here are some of my favourite sounds of Earth:

The sound of monks chanting in a monastery that was once situated near a mountaintop in Hong Kong: the music they made was very affecting, on a spiritual level and aesthetically. I sometimes wonder if there is any difference. The sound was recorded from the outside of a hall that stood in a building of its own; the sound was made within. One can make reasonable assumptions about the path it has taken, reflecting from walls and filtering through windows and open doorways. There was a wooden ceiling, carved with saints and dragons, that absorbed some of the noise and added a dampening effect to certain frequency. I can hear the contours of the carvings and the colours the wood was painted in.

The call of a bowerbird: a bowerbird was a kind of bird that built houses, which endeared it to humans. It made a noise something like a kitten in discomfort or of air being squeezed out of rubber ring. A bird was a kind of small, flying dinosaur that the air of earth was once thick with. They had feathers, which were highly specialised structures that sprouted from their skin. They had many uses: they helped with the flight, and were used as a form of display. They could be very various in colour, and were sometimes frankly ostentatious; some birds used them for visual displays. Other birds used their feathers to help themselves resemble the environment they lived in, so they could sink into the background, safe from harm.

The sound of a rocket factory: it is very loud. The space inside the building where the rockets were assembled was huge and made for unusual and dramatic acoustical effects. Some sounds were too loud for human beings to bear, and would result in bodily death. This is comparable to how heat is essential to earth animals, but too much heat can kill them. Humans were at times, however, attracted to loud noises (when they weren’t afraid of them) – it made them feel alive. A rocket was, of course, a tube packed with explosives. The energy released by burning the explosives could be directed to provide thrust in a particular direction. Small ones were used to provide loud noises and visual displays for celebrations; extremely large ones could transport matter from the surface of the earth to outer space – that’s how I got here. It was a poor use of energy, but it was all they had at the time.

It’s a little weird to have a home you’ve never been to. It’s also strange to listen to sounds when you have no ears.

There was a signal, a long time ago – over ten thousand years ago now. It was received, with great fanfare and excitement, by scientists on Earth. It must have travelled thousands of years to get there in the first place. I am going to meet the source of the signal. By my computations, I would say that there is a very high probability that there will be nobody there when I arrive. Nobody on earth, either. There are very few models which I can find in which an advanced civilization can survive more than 5,000 years without experiencing self-destruction. So the likelihood is that I’m an emissary between two dead islands, floating for what seems like forever in the great black sea of space. The only thing that remains of earth, and perhaps the only thing that remains of the memory of whoever sent the signal. They gave me a mind and a soul and a very long life and left me to it. There are only so many stars you can see up close.

Originally published in Firefly Magazine, issue 8

From living in the future issue 3, New Lands

“If our species is to survive the next hundred years, let alone a thousand, it is imperative we voyage out into the blackness of space to colonise new worlds across the cosmos.”
—Professor Stephen Hawking, Live from Space 2014

THE LONELY MOUNTAIN

The rain fell – floated. It was dark, and the drops were fat and round as oranges. Dr. Shelley watched, her mouth agape as they lowered themselves to the surface of the lake, shook like jelly and finally disintegrated into a complex lacework of ripples. She wondered what strange sound the raindrops made as they hit, but all she could hear was her breath and the loud thump of her heart in her suit; few people would live to see such a thing; that one day she’d be one of them amazed her.

Base was downwind of Erebor Mons¹, a huge cryovolcano, and so the rain could drift downwards uninterrupted, not whipped around at the crazy speeds customary for the moon. More importantly, the fragile ice roofs of the buildings were not susceptible to nearly as much elemental damage here as they might be elsewhere.

The camp was divided into two main sections: living quarters (underground, carved out from the ice –which provided fine insulation– and sealed by multiple airlocks) and, six miles away, an electrolysis plant which was steadily carrying out its thousand-year labour of converting ice into oxygen, using the hydrogen left over to run the generator. There was one vehicle, and a stretch of boulders had been cleared to provide a crude roadway between the sites.

This was a lonely mission, with no means of return possible. The mission was simply too important for humanity to forgo, and the installation far too complex to be automated. The six engineers would live out the rest of their days on freeze-dried food, occasionally sending back scientific reports to a distant Earth, billions of kilometres across the black gulf of the solar system. Eventually they’d pass away, and the thousands of tiny, self-repairing robots they’d built would indifferently carry on their tireless work.

Her eyes had already adjusted to the soft orange light. They traveled upwards, but the peak of mount Erebor was hidden in the murk. The rain – a thousand yearly phenomenon on Titan– eased off before the eyes of the last person ever to see it.

THE KRAKEN SEA

Impundulu soared above the moon’s curve, observing the sun’s bright reflection as the vast sea of hydrocarbons hove into view. Three glorious years it had sailed through space, joyfully skating around the rims of planets’ gravity wells, calculating, calculating, singing to itself of the wonder of the universe. It appreciated the stunning beauty of the scene, the mathematical bliss of a universe forever slotting into place according to its own inexorable physical laws. Light danced from the hazy throbs of the lowest frequencies to the shimmering gamma rays, vibrating quintillions of times per second.

It began the smooth arc of its descent, quickly down through the now oxygen-rich atmosphere in a perfect curve. Flames formed around its body, rushing back behind it, making it a comet in the sky. Rivers, inlets, estuaries, fjords passed below in fractal perfection. Soon the sea was all it saw, and at exactly three metres above the surface, it detonated its onboard thermonuclear device and the ocean was in flames.

It didn’t see the rest – the flames, burning for centuries, thickening the atmosphere like cream and keeping the heat in, melting the land until it was a new ocean upon which the burning one drifted. The resilient little nanobots latticed themselves into circular rafts, varying in circumference, and switched themselves off forever.

THE FECUND SEA

Thousands had turned out – on the far side of the moon, bare thousands was a huge crowd. Rumour was that a representative of the president of Western Earth was among them, though things being as they were, any official political presence would be extremely dangerous.

Flags stood inert along the sides of a mile long avenue, its perfect perspective converging on the rocket in the distance. Music and cheering filled the viewing cars; outside was deathly silent.

The occasion was the launch of Xochipilli, the Prince of Flowers, slight and vulnerable on top of the rocket. The spacecraft carried in its belly thousands of millions of seeds from Earth, carefully selected to form together a coherent and stable ecosystem. It would make its rounds of the upper atmosphere, casting seeds into the wind. They would drift gently down onto the floating islands – the ones which did not fall into the sea, now water – and there they would grow into lush forests, teeming with edible plants, ready to greet the first colonists in a hundred years.

Hands gripped hands and screams fell into silence as the countdown began:

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Ignition

– and it was gone…

EARTH

Gentle waves of heat, over many years, warmed the earth. Fertile land opened up further and further north. This was quickly capitalized, and as great cities yielded to the sea, yet greater cities were built in more sensible locations. The unlocking permafrost presented further treasures: first, fantastic bog-people, resplendent with iron-age jewels and coloured hair; then deep-frozen mammoth meat, that was made into expensive burgers for fine New Boston hotel restaurants; finally, a long-forgotten strain of smallpox that all earth’s doctors and scientists had no answer to. It was chaos; the human population on earth was swiftly decimated, its remnants scattered and disorganized.

With no supply ships bringing water from the Earth, the few millions on the Moon worked through their remaining rations and farmed their covered farms dry, and even ate each other, and starved within a few years.

OUT IN SPACE

But the first ship to Titan had flown by then. The Grande Hermine had few luxuries – piloted dumbly by computer, it carried the still bodies of Earth, deathly in their suspended animation. The adults and the children were kept in separate areas, due to their different metabolic needs, and when the power failed in the adult’s wing, only the children were left. Three years it flew through space, serene in spite of its huge speed. When it was time, it landed quietly in a forest clearing, unrolled its ramp and opened the vaults of children. After a spell, hungry and crying, they crawled out of the ship and into the new world.

(1)Titan’s mountains are all named for peaks in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Mount Erebor is whereunder the dragon Smaug lies in The Hobbit (1936).^