Tag Archives: space exploration

A small spacecraft drifts toward a massive black hole, its gravitational pull distorting light. A dying star collapses nearby, sending spirals of golden energy into the abyss. The lone astronaut inside watches as the unknown awaits.

Longevity, Chapter 8: 3600

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

I hate new ships. Especially this one. It’s kind of a lonely place, pretty much on autopilot for so very long. I’ve spent years and years in and out of cryogenic stasis just to make sure the food supply doesn’t run out.

For the longest time, I worked off of what was in the freezers. Designed to last a crew of two hundred for fifty years, I lasted longer than that before I’d eaten everything I could stand in there, and some of the rest. I’ve picked at it for the last couple of hundred years, but mostly, I just tend the garden now.

I call the ship my garden.

It’s cool, and nice most of the time unless the sprinklers are on. The irrigation pipes can only do cold water, and there’s usually a short when I start it up. All part of the challenge, though. I’ve worked out most of the kinks and removed anything that got waterlogged before. I’ve planted hundreds of trees in here, directly into the substrate of the ship. There’s plenty of refuse that I’ve turned into perfect compost, so nothing is lacking there. I’ve also ripped out the floor in most of the rooms and installed sunlamps and started growing as much food as I can figure out how to grow.

I’ve got a field of corn on the third deck, and I’ve transformed the aquatic center into a giant lake full of cranberries. I’ve got orange trees, and I’ve got a good number of insects too to help me keep things going. The stings hurt at first, but I’ve toughened my skin with serious wrinkles and injections in the last few years, and pretty much nothing breaks the skin anymore.

I also started walking with a cane. Imagine that. I’m feeling old. I don’t know if it’s the abuse of being alone for so long or the fact that the air in the ship is smelling like stale, moldy bread, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

The computer at the front started clicking a countdown about a week ago. I almost didn’t notice it. The ship is moving so fast it’s almost incredible, but out there in space, you can hardly tell. Occasionally we go by a planet, but it’s usually only visible for a day or so. I got to where I liked to chart them. I’d record every channel of their television and radio, and take as many pictures as I could before we went too far, download as much of their Internet as I could, that kind of thing.

It would give me something to do for a few years at least.

I’ve probably documented a dozen civilizations in various levels of development. On a few planets, there were only cave people. On another, there was a fantastic bronze age going on. A few words were like they were in the 1980s. They never saw me coming or going.

None of them did.

The countdown, though. That got my interest.

I tapped the screen with my cane, really a dead and polished branch from one of the oak trees I planted in the main cargo hold.

A message appeared on the screen saying, “Stop that.”

I waved it off. The ship tended to do this kind of thing. As its virtual prisoner, I had lost interest years before.

“Jacob,” said the computer.

“What?”

“We’re coming up on it soon.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore.”

“It’s fairly spectacular.”

I knocked on the computer monitor with my stick. It shattered the screen, but everything continued to work.

“Well, what’s that got to do with my tomatoes, then? Eh?” I yelled and staggered around. I started crawling on the floor where I had a patch of pumpkins growing in a bed I’d made of an emergency escape hatch.

I started weeding, with my fingers, just to show the computer something I could still do with my hands that it could never do.

I was pulling out some clovers that must have come over from another patch on my shoes not too long ago. When I felt it, I had been trying to grow four-leaf clovers.

It was kind of lurch in my stomach. It had been so long since I’d felt the effects of slowing down that I hardly realized that we had come almost to a complete stop. The stars don’t blaze past you when you’re going at this speed, so I could have gone for weeks without realizing we weren’t moving if I’d been asleep when the computer slowed us down.

We’d arrived.

It took the ship another hour and a half to move us around so that I could see the black hole that was currently sucking in an enormous binary cousin in a fantastic blaze of swirling light. Not that I could see it, just the material flowing toward the event horizon.

“Now that’s interesting.”

I pushed up with my stick and limped over to the viewing screens.

“That what I think it is? A computer?”

“It’s a class six black hole eating a red giant. Together, they will start a supernova in a couple of minutes. The ship should protect you just fine.”

“Is this it? What I was supposed to see?”

“It is.”

“I gotta get a better look than this, don’t I?”

I tossed down my stick and ambled for the elevator and took it down to where the life pods were.

“Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just getting a better look, right?”

The doors opened, and I stepped out into the pod bay. There were six pods, and I routinely used two of them, just to make sure more than one of them worked all the time. I used them to go out and get space junk, rocks, and meteors that hit the ship occasionally it. The arms were really strong.

The room, however, was a small jungle. I hadn’t done this for a while. I’d miss it, but I had to get out there.

The pods were little one-person jobs, about ten feet tall, and looked like little egg people with large open faces on the front where the windscreen was, and they were surrounded in the tightest brush that I could plant in here. I’d flooded the place a time or two and trucked in as much dirt as I could manage, and had made the place as swampy as I could make it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there might be a crocodile living down here somewhere. But it just wasn’t possible. If I’d had one thought, the place would be perfect.

Ah well.

Time to get out there.

I crossed the swamp, caring nothing for drenching myself up to my knees, and trudged out to the pods. They were also covered in slime and muck, but that would soon be over. I wiped one clean until I could see the original white and red finish under all the swamp slime, and opened the back of it, pressing a button at the base. The back door of the pod slid open, and I clambered inside.

I hit a small hand pad by the door and it closed behind me. Suddenly I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the pod warming up and remembered again that these things were soundproof. I pressed another switch, and the pod swung around toward the door. This was no easy feat since the way this room worked. The entire floor shifted around to move the pod to the front of the bay, taking most of the swamp with it. Trees were flung around, and water went everywhere, and this was before the door moved.

There was a hum.

Then everything in the room, all the water, all the trees and branches, and all the debris, started shooting out of the pod bay like a pitcher of tea filled with broccoli poured into a vacuum. It expanded, bubbled, and flew from the ship, then I lifted off, and whooshed outside.

Behind me, the computer was yelling something, but I had already tuned it out.

I jetted out of the ship and turned to face the black hole. It was so massive and beautiful as it was picking its neighboring sun that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Vaguely, I wondered if I could starve out here just looking at it. I punched the accelerator on my pod, and then sat back. There was a good bit of room in here, though it was little more than a work pod, it was a little roomy. You could last out here for days if you had an enormous job to do, and I had frequently.

I zoomed toward the black hole. I was going thousands of miles an hour. At this scale, it was hardly moving, but I pushed it up as fast as it would go. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and while you couldn’t see much change in the viewports, you could tell that you were moving some. I was close enough for that.

I watched the fuel. It said I had three days at this speed. I pushed it up higher. By now I knew I couldn’t go faster than I was going and that just stopping the rockets without firing the retros would keep me at this speed indefinitely.

I chose not to stop them.

Behind me, the rockets blazed out and hours later, the lights flickered around me. Then the engines cut out. I was closer than I thought. I could already feel the pull of the black hole beside my original speed, and I was falling into it fast, and picking up more speed on the way.

With the last bit of power I had left, I sent the pod into a gentle spin so that I could see the black hole from different angles. Then the power went out almost entirely.

Dim red lights replaced the bright ones inside the pod, and it reduced me to life support only. I checked the console, and it said I’d have about three days at this level unless help arrived. The pod’s computer offered to send a distress call for me.

I declined.

Sooner than I expected, the lights went out, and even so, the oxygen and heat remained.

I was alone with only the light of the binary system in front of me, and no way to turn around and see the ship one more time.

A few hours later, that failed, and I was alone.

From there, I just fell.

There was no power.

It was me and the stars, and I saw a little twinkle.

It wasn’t much, just a flash really between the star and the black hole in front of me. I couldn’t tell quite what it was, but I could tell that it was some kind of ship, hovering there.

“Now that’s interesting,” I said and promptly lost consciousness from the sheer cold of space around me and the fact that I’d depleted almost all the oxygen that was left in the little cabin.

I didn’t expect to awaken ever again.

I closed my eyes, and hit the floor, but didn’t hit because gravity failed and I was floating there in the middle of the pod when it fell into the gravitational power of the black hole for eternity three days later.

When I opened my eyes, it was so bright I couldn’t see.

I felt like I was lying on a hill covered in perfectly cut grass, the smell of the recent clippings getting into my nose.

I felt peaceful and serene.

I let the light of the sun or a moon or some distant star I didn’t know play on the back of my eyelids.

There was no pain in my body.

I was home.

On the ship, now a lifetime and a million miles away from me, the computer was calling my name. It had a syringe for me. A bi-centennial booster, it was offering to extend my life another umpteen years.

There was no one to take it, and no one to tell the computer to put it away, either. Eventually, it ran itself out of power, asking if I’d like the shot before it too fell into the black hole and out of the universe with me.

With a breath that was sweet and invigorating, I opened my eyes.

A lone astronaut stands on an alien planet with dense vegetation, facing a massive reptilian creature. Behind him, the remains of a crashed spaceship smolder, hinting at an uncertain fate on this mysterious world.

Longevity, Chapter 7: 2800

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

I sat on the edge of my seat, well it’s a throne, made of white marble, and edged in gold in what’s called the Halls of Mars. It’s not on Mars, actually on Venus, but that hardly matters at this stage. The Hall is giant and built into the side of a mountain, dug out like a giant ice cream scooper that came down from the sky and carved out a great bowl straight from the rock on the mountain’s side.

The opening was covered with stained glass. Heavy, thick stained glass, and it was reinforced to keep the Venusian atmosphere at bay, which it did a wonderful job of, even though you couldn’t see out the window at all. Deep in the confines of the cave were vast works of iron and steel, and air conditioners that kept everything breathable as well as light and frosty, even though the temperatures outside would kill you in a heartbeat.

I liked the glass, but the throne had gotten to be a little too much lately. I might have to downgrade to the one made of wood with the lion’s head carved into the back. That and a nice pillow or something. Something springy. Springy and nice.

The stained glass left the floor, and everyone else was covered in a twisted pattern of blue and orange squares all the time.

I should have that replaced. Then again, why mess with it just when I’m enjoying it?

I could call for one of my wives, or husbands. Of course, since I came to power, it’s been mandatory for all planetary leaders to take up at least seventeen wives, and to have as many children as humanly possible. I think right now I’m up to a hundred and thirty-five, but I’ve lost count.

The problem with living this long is that eventually, everyone is in power. It wasn’t long before just stayed in the same spot long enough. I became a council elder, and not long beyond that, a mere fifty years, I was the local high priest. It wasn’t a terrible job. Among the first thought about getting the treatment, I’m perpetually older than almost everyone that I know. You’d think they’d oust me and tie me up and let me live on an asteroid somewhere just for being as dang strange as I am all the time. No one even likes my funny hat. Seriously, I should just quit and become a hermit living in the south of Los Angeles Proper.

There was a knock at my chamber door.

I turned and Bill, my butler I suppose, though that’s only close to what he does come in, with two of my wives with him. Angela and Carmen laid into me about the statue of Venus. I thought they were here for something else.

I could hear them. The words were passing my ears. I could feel their hot breath and feel the tiny raindrops of spittle that were spewing forth as a fine mist. The words were there, pounding on my eardrums and I could not hear what they were. After a few moments, they came to a halt, apparently waiting for some kind of reply from me, and I didn’t have one for them. They huffed and caught their breath. Their breasts heaved a little, but it didn’t phase me.

I waited until they had stopped, and then I turned to them. I kissed Angela on the lips, hugged her, and told her I would think about it. Whatever it was. I’d heard her, which I hadn’t, and I would take her advice as if it was from one of my closest advisers, which, of course, it was.

Carmen, I took them into my arms in a huge embrace and told her I loved her and that I treasured every hair on her head. I took off my hat, a fuzzy thing with a random number of horns on it, put it on her head and hugged her again before returning to my marble throne where I told them I would carefully consider everything they had said to me, whatever it was, then I posed in a very thoughtful position, and said “Hmm” a lot and closed my eyes occasionally and shook my head every once in a while, until that no longer seemed sincere, which it wasn’t. Then I curled up, my feet tucked under me, and pretended to meditate on their complaints until they all eventually went away and I was left alone.

But then, I was never alone.

I saw them beside me.

They were always there.

They stood, seven feet tall, dark green bipedal life forms, totally smooth on their surface, and uniform.

They turned their faceless faces toward me, and I could feel their minds working their way into mine. They were giving me a chance to breathe and speak my mind, which they only did when they wanted something from me.

I could feel their questions in my mind.

Who were they?

“They are two of my wives?”

What do they want?

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear them with you controlling my mind.”

I fell to the ground.

Their thoughts bore into me, and it was hard to take after a couple of minutes.

When will you give the next order?

“Whenever you want, you’re in control already, aren’t you?”

My body fell, twitching.

I pushed up on my elbows, but they gave out.

One of them broke from the pressure of one of their minds alone as I pushed up again.

I let it lay face down on the ground.

They forced me to sit up.

We have work to do.

I already knew that, though.

Soon I was on my feet, and walking toward the hallway outside my chamber. They were invisible to everyone else, but each was in control of my next right and left steps.

They guided me into my shuttle, and I took the controls.

Soon I was airborne, lifting my little craft over the clouds of Venus.

Behind me, the two creatures sat in the rear seats. I could do nothing to turn my head and see them. Instead, I just piloted the little craft up over the city. Over the years we’d raised an enormous dome over it, and though the clouds surrounded us in a sickly sky all the time, the land beneath it was lush and beautiful and green. We rose closer and closer to the stained glass canopy that covered the capital and I pressed forward as I got closer and closer to it until we broke through, glass shattering all around me.

I zoomed up into the sky over Venus and sped through the clouds until I could see nothing else. I gunned it, swerved around, and then came through them and out over the open sky. I must be up really high.

“What do you want?”

We want everything.

“Why do you care?”

Because you do.

“Where are you from? Why do you want any of it?”

They were silent.

I pressed forward. It wasn’t the first time they’d taken me on a trip like this.

Ahead of me, I could see the dawn coming up. Before long, I’d be in virtual darkness. Below me, any of my cities would be so far under the clouds that you’d never see the lights from them. Maybe a glimmer or a slight glow from them, but nothing like seeing a city from orbit on the Earth.

My comm opened up with a burst of static.

“Sir, is that you up there?”

I touched the controls like nothing was happening.

“Yep, just me, up for a brief flight.”

“Very well, sir. You keep us informed if you need anything.”

“I’ll do that,” I said and switched it off.

I burned through the clouds, which whipped around me and did a barrel roll before turning the ship towards space and flying out into the stars, where I saw them approaching for the first time.

There would be no warning.

They have arranged a series of battle cruisers, both from Earth and from Mars. They were here to wipe us out.

My little black ship went unnoticed, but the patrol ship behind me, who had recognized me earlier, was more clearly marked, and when they opened fire, he was their first target.

They swooped down. The earth ships were bulky, but full of fighters that whipped this way and that, and ran screaming down onto the planet to destroy my cities.

The Martian ships were more specialized. They weren’t creatures of mars as they were the descendants of Human settlers like Venus was.

My home, at least now anyway.

The Martians had huge gas vacuum ships I’ve seen used out on the gas giants, and they were sucking up Venus’s atmosphere. Then they waited for the fighters to fly in and bomb the city and take out my defense towers before the gunships rained down on them with death beams that finished them.

I could only watch.

I only had this flier. It wouldn’t make it even back to Earth. I flew it over to the command ship, a long and dangerous vessel, covered in spikes and turrets, and landed it in the main hanger, right in the middle.

I watched as my little one-man flier was surrounded by army and navy troops. Guns up. Alert. Ready to kill.

I opened the hatch.

Certainly, they were expecting a single mercenary or something.

When they saw it was me, all their guns faltered.

Below us, my planet was coming to a swift end. The war, if it could be called less than genocide, was the end of my people. People who had traveled with me from the beginning when no one thought anything could live there were all dying. Some of them, many of them hundreds of years old.

I was the first and the last of us.

They lowered their weapons.

I stepped down the ladder, and walked through them like they were nothing, and marched up to the control deck. I knew where it was. I’d designed the ship.

Before I could get there, Garrison was running down the ladder.

“Jacob!”

He grabbed me in an embrace.

“Jacob, you weren’t down there!”

I grabbed him by the neck and hugged my cousin. He was out of breath.

He tugged me up to the command deck.

When I walked into it, everyone ducked. They dived under their desks and knocked over the furniture. I strode in, with Garrison behind me. Everyone jumped to salute him. Clearly in charge.

When I turned around, he was kneeling before me.

“Jacob. I can’t sit by while they do this here.”

“What?”

“I surrender to you.”

He held out his pistol to me, a small beam weapon. Nice and deadly.

“I accept.”

“You know the custom, then.”

“I do.”

Garrison fell to the deck after I fired the weapon.

The crew looked at me.

“You can join me, or you can get out. Your choice.”

I kept about half the crew.

The other half got into pods and shot out, and were quickly picked off by the surrounding ships, who must have realized what was going on by now.

The battle below was all but over already.

We fired, taking out one of the larger ships where we concentrated our firepower.

We took damage, and the armor on the ship was pretty much toast, but it was still worthy of travel, so I ordered a jump. We needed to get far out and quickly. Then perhaps we’d survive.

They were about to surround us when we jumped. In a flash of light, we left them all behind. We were supposed to be out near Jupiter. Instead, we were closer to the orbit of Pluto, but it wouldn’t be here for another couple of years yet. Then I realized I was wrong. We hadn’t gone out into the solar system. If there was an up and a down to the celestial disk where our planets all rotated, we had gone as far up as anyone had ever gone, and then some.

The sun was nothing more than a spec, and all around us was nothing.

In the months that followed, I tooled around as best I could, mostly avoiding the government ships. Venus was no more, and I wasn’t that much better off. I blasted out into the outer planets and spent a good deal of time orbiting Neptune, where no one wanted to go. There was little left for me on Earth, nothing on Mars, and a destroyed colony for me on Venus. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was just ready to leave. I’d seen what I wanted to see, and I’d done more than I could think of to do, and that’s when the idea hit me to just leave the solar system altogether. There wasn’t anything left for me.

I knew others might feel the same way. I discussed my ideas with the crew, and they were interested, but fewer of them wanted to stay, and I couldn’t blame them. I let most of them off on Titan and sent out the call. There weren’t any actual laws out on Titan yet, and no one was gunning for me here. Most of the people back on Earth thought I was dead, but the governments and leaders knew better. Not because they had intelligence on me or anything, but because I called and offered to give them back their spacecraft. I did it on a couple of occasions while we were in the dock at Neptune, and nobody wanted to spend the money on the fuel to get out there to get me.

I can say I tried, though, and that was enough for me.

The creatures in the background were still buzzing around, and one day, I just had it out with them.

I told them to get out of my life and leave me alone.

They said they wanted to show me something very interesting, but we couldn’t quite get there yet.

I told them to get to the point, or I was through with them for good.

They agreed to upgrade the engines and sent in a couple of technicians to help me take care of it.

I said to prove it, and they did.

That was when I lost almost everyone else.

I was virtually alone on the ship. Sensors could still pick up a couple of people, that were scattered here and there. I chose not to force them off the ship or to seek them out. I just checked on them every once in a while, and occasionally I’d use the ship’s comm system to call out to them and tell them that the kitchens on the fifth and sixth decks had been restocked for them.

They never went up too fast, but they always did. There were probably ten or fifteen in total aboard besides me, but I never saw them.

They came aboard, in a small shuttle, and brought in a new engine, silver and bright, and they would only ever say “because we want to show you something,” when I asked them.

One thing you could still die from as a practically immortal being was starvation, and I would forget to eat, all the time watching them install the new engines. The retrofit took about three years, and while I was stranded on Neptune, I took to watching the surface of the giant. I called it watching the ocean, because of the ways the bands swirled around each other. I took readings, did an analysis, and used all the instruments that were left working on the ship. I also ate a lot of takeout food from a local space station. Even after a while, your synthetic kitchens are no good anymore, and you have to eat something else.

One morning, I walked down to the bridge to hop in the hammock I’d put up in there, and they were standing there.

It’s time, they thought.

“We can run it now?”

Yes.

“Let’s do it then.”

I sat down in the captain’s chair and let them do their thing. They hit knobs, and opened switches, and turned dials, and the whole place lit up. We pulled out of the space station, and the ship turned towards the starry sky of space, where we could no longer see anything of Neptune but a faint blue from behind us, and they turned on the new drive.

Around me, the night sky blazed into a million streaming points of light. The ship was breaking apart. The whole place was shaking and rattling, and spinning in every direction as we sped by the stars at speeds that were supposed to be impossible. If it’s one thing that is true, it’s that saying something is a limit on how fast you can go is like telling a cat that they don’t like tuna sandwiches. It’s just not helpful, and nobody likes it, and somebody is always going to be out to prove you wrong.

We came to a halt, all the stars came back into place, and though I couldn’t recognize the patterns anymore, all became still.

Then I realized that I’d been standing for the entire flight in the same place as if I bolted my feet to the floor.

I looked down, and my clothes looked brittle and dusty like I was some kind of exhibit, then I reached down and found the long beard attached to my face, easily two and a half, maybe three feet long in places, and stark white.

I threw up on the deck, and fell flat on my face, and learned how to breathe again.

When I pushed myself up, they were standing there before me again.

“Are we there?”

We are close.

“Where are we?”

Look.

I looked out the windows of the bridge and below us was a huge alien planet, lush with vegetation.

“Can we land?”

They nodded and then vanished.

I commanded the ship to land, and it found a suitable spot, and glided down into the atmosphere, shaking all the way.

As I stepped off the platform onto the planet’s surface, I heard them say in my ear. “You can never go back.”

The ship could no longer handle its weight and cracked, and busted and fall apart behind me.

Turning, without so much as a lunch box, I found myself face to face with what I always imagined a dinosaur would look like.

It scratched the ground with its talons and charged.

A futuristic deep-sea exploration pod floats in Titan’s dark ocean, surrounded by glowing alien life. A massive, luminous whale-like creature drifts nearby, its bioluminescence lighting up the depths, while schools of silver fish swirl in the background.

Longevity, Chapter 5: 2200

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

I sat back on my little porch, a balcony really, and looked out at the ocean. Blue-green as far as the eye could see, almost crystal clear towards the shore, a beach as clean as you could get. There were scattered umbrellas here and there in patterns of fuchsia and aquamarine, and white. Few people still, but the war was long over and, though everyone remembered it, no one remembered it. Does that make sense? It is the kind of thing that’s only ever talked about anymore in movies and on the Internet if you go back far enough, and since the browsers are still updating about a version number every five months, it’s harder and harder to find plug-ins that can translate the old stuff anymore.

The sky is clear. Only a few planes are up in it anymore, but those that are can carry five thousand people at a time. There are some smaller air vans around, but most of us just program our cars and let them do the work these days. They’ll find the best route, and take us there without having to ever refuel and streets are all but useless, but no longer all destroyed. We still like to pave walking paths and I like the bike trail I use from here to the store and back every day. Just a regular bike, you know, like when I was a kid. I like it. Had to order the thing from the other side of the planet, but that didn’t matter. Everything seems to ship overnight all the time, and I’ve put away enough money to be comfortable, but I’m still on the lookout for something to do, that’s all. I want to just find something.

Mary and I were married last year. I know that sounds odd, doesn’t it? Married Mary? I refused to use the term in front of her. I figure when you’ve got a name that invites the jokes you’ve heard them all right?

I do like the pelicans, though. They hover over my condo all the time, and yes, I feed them. They’ll eat anything. I was feeding them the remains of fish that I’d already cleaned as they sat there on the pier. (there’s a pretty good pier down on the shore about two buildings down.) They are like big walking trash buckets. I could probably have tossed my whole bag of fishing gear and they would have eaten it. They’re dumb, but I like them.

One of them comes to see me all the time. I call him Pete. No particular reason. I just like him. I know that it’s Pete because he’s missing his left eye, and he’s a little slower than the other pelicans.

After the war, most of the cities were destroyed.

We had a lot of crap to clean up, not to mention all the walkers we had to get rid of. That was a mess and a half.

We did the job, though, but there weren’t as many of us after the war. We’re doing fine now, and yes, everyone still gets the shot when they are born, but it was just too hard to stay settled in some areas. Anywhere that was cold was just out, and we kept moving further and further south. Some went east and west, but no one went north. Most people ended up on the coast somewhere. We didn’t have any boats in the water to pollute it with, most stuff being delivered by air freighter, and all the cars had little atomic power cells in them. Safe. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. But things never need a battery. I had my hover bike outfitted with one the year before last, and the car came after that, though I can hardly call the thing a car since my first car was a practically rusted-out Camaro from the 1980s.

The car, if you could call it that, is more like a traveling living room. It’s made up of a large bubble top surrounded by four repulsor plates and a small two-foot wall all the way around. Inside is a carpeted room under that domed ceiling with a table that stands, bolted to the floor on a chrome pole. Surrounding the table are a series of chairs. Four can sit at the table, and there is a three-seat couch at the back. There are also little monitors all over the place. You can watch films or listen to music as you safely glide to your next destination. It seems to take about an hour to get anywhere in the United States. (Or what’s left of the United States, let’s call it North America. That’s just the way I think sometimes.) and if you’re going overseas, it seems to take between an hour and three hours to get anywhere in the world.

That’s nothing to what we’re doing in space, though.

There’s a reason there aren’t more bodies out on the beach today. It’s the fact that we’ve confirmed the existence of life outside our solar system. People are out celebrating.

I was out getting away from the video screens for a minute, but we’ve been sending probes out to distant stars and though most haven’t gotten where they are going, the one to Alpha Centauri did. We’ve been watching the reports for a while now about all the planets we’re discovering there. The first one was a big gas giant, then several smaller ones, then the mother-load. We haven’t even fully explored our planets yet, but we’ve got this. The rocket landed on the fourth planet there and touched down after sensing a lot of heat that was moving around, and when the cameras turned on, there was this enormous great white bear-like thing, kind of like a polar bear but the size of a mastodon licking the camera. Once they figured out they couldn’t eat it, they lost interest.

For the first time since the war, the bears, as they were called, had everyone glued to their monitors again, but this time it was more of a window than anything else. The space program’s channel page has no sponsorship, and no breaks, just a constant stream of television from another world. Eventually, other cameras were set up, and the observers could choose between them. Every once in a while when the bears were getting too far away from the cameras they would sound a ping or play a tune, or flash a light at them to keep them nearby and interested while they set up a roving camera to follow them with, which just took a day or two more to complete.

It didn’t take long to understand that it was a family group, that there was a father and a mother, and about six cubs from various years. Without a lot more detail, they did not know how old they might be, but then again, that would be relevant to where they were from, wouldn’t it? A team of scientists figured out that the planet rotated about once every twenty-five earth hours and that their year comprised about four hundred and fifteen of those twenty-five hour days, and then somebody realized that the planet was hurtling much faster through space than the Earth was. In the end, most people just watched them. They didn’t know what was waiting for them on Titan, just a quick hop over to Saturn, but that was still being discovered. We were regularly hopping back and forth to the moon, and occasionally to Mars and Venus with a regularity that made it commonplace, but nothing more exciting than that. But regular trips to the outer planets were still a fairly new concept. It was done, just barely enough for any real research to be done. They could get there, but by the time the astronauts were home it had been ten years or more, and faster methods of propulsion were on the rise. It wouldn’t take much longer to find them.

The family of bears was everywhere you looked. You could see it for miles and miles. It was in every window, in every coffee shop, and at every transit station across town. People ate their breakfast with the bear family in the background behind them. They took showers in stalls that were made of water-proof screens and brushed their teeth with arctic bear toothbrushes.

They even set up large screens at the beach and pointed projectors up at them to see if they could make it look like the same place the bears might inhabit.

All kinds of data came back from the probe, weather-related data, rainfall, heat, and cold. Pretty soon, they had a sidebar on the channel that listed the weather projections on the planet, and before long, they saw the birds.

The birds the bears ate were enormous, with thirteen-foot wingspans and double beaks. All the birds seem to have developed into this double-headed format. They would eat with one head, and watch for the bears, and screech if they saw one with the other. Despite having two heads, they didn’t seem to share consciousness. They screeched and fluttered and before long a family of them had set up a nest atop the primary structure of the probe, and just out of reach of the bears.

This was new to them. Most of the images of the planet were devoid of trees, but what land there was had a considerable number of short bushes and grasses on them. It seemed to be a new thing to get away from the bears without having to be actively flying away.

Before long, the birds got aggressive, and started to dive-bomb the bears, and nip at their ears, but the spacemen in charge of the probe decided quickly they’d had enough of that and set off a small shock when the birds landed on the main rocket until they left it alone for good. Soon, the behavior seemed to return to normal, whatever that was. 

The only thing to interrupt the daily drama of the bears was when a nearly forgotten probe near Saturn’s moon, Titan, crashed into the surface after a malfunction.

Everyone thought the probe was dead, but it continued to film video and take pictures, and record sound until it couldn’t take the pressure anymore from the nearly frozen ocean it was sinking into. The media didn’t make it back to Earth through space until an hour after the crash had occurred, but before long, there was an entire channel set up to display that new data.

There were three hundred and fifty pictures, three minutes of video, and one clear audio recording of the song of the whales beneath the ice on Titan. They looped through it endlessly, usually with the video playing picture-in-picture style with the stills, most of them fairly fuzzy, and the audio clip of Titan whale song looping in and out of some calm and peaceful background music. There was not only life on other planets but elsewhere in our solar system.

I wanted to see the whales for myself.

I wanted to see them, and I wanted to experience them first-hand.

And since I was among the first to get the shot, I was one of the oldest people alive on the earth, and that came with some perks every once in a while. I talked my way on board the next ship to Saturn. A ship of scientists, and a couple of robots to help them clean up after meals, and me. It turns out they were taking anyone else who would sign-up and I was the only one who asked.

You know, getting to see those whales was probably the best experience of my life, but, and this is strange… It’s not all that unpleasant to go into suspended animation either. Some say it’s dreamless, but that’s not true. I had periods of deep sleep that were frequently permeated with vibrant and delicious dreams. When they brought me out I was disappointed, at least for the first thirty seconds, until I saw the whales lumbering beneath me, singing a great slow hello to us from the water.

We were positioned on this ice shelf in the middle of nowhere, there with all the equipment that we could carry with us, and all the food and all the things we thought we would need. The spacecraft sat, with the tips of its fins buried in the ice. It would never return to Earth. There was another craft in orbit around us for that. We’d lift off and leave the rest of the lander behind when we left, but there was a huge chunk of ice that we’d uncovered and cut out of the ice, moving it to the side. It was about thirty feet thick and seemed to cover just about everything. The lander kept us well anchored, and we had a great underwater sphere, big enough for five or six people to live in for a year, and we did. As soon as we were all revived, had slapped our arms and legs, and had some time to shake the reality of where we were into our heads, we sent a message back to Earth and lowered ourselves into Titan’s ocean. There was some worry that the pod wouldn’t be able to deal with the cold, and would still crack halfway down no matter what the guys who built her had said, but we didn’t know that.

It never cracked, at least not as far as I could tell, and no one ever said anything until we got back, but we were just there to take as many pictures as we could, and then get safely home. If we got any video or any sound recordings, then that was a bonus, and we went to work.

We dived into that ice-cold ocean.

While we were still up in the areas that got some kind of light, we could already see the whales. At least they were whale-like and that was enough for me. Their song was beautiful and slow and sad all at the same time. At first, we thought they were really on their own here, but before we dived another ten feet, we saw everything else that was there for us to see.

The next round comprised almost a thick layer of silverfish that were gathering together and balling into large groups as predators slid through them with gaping maws. There were so many of them they almost looked like a solid mass, but they were no bigger than a hand span across each.

We passed down through that layer and after the pressure changed a bit; we saw fewer of the small fish, hear less of the whale song, and we saw luminescent fish, jellies, and other anglers who all seemed to glow in the dark of their own accord. These surrounded us and they started to sucker onto the outside of the pod as it lowered down into the ocean. If there was any light to be seen from the surface, you couldn’t see it anymore, but the light from the fish’s bodies, mixed with the minimal lighting on the control panels, was enough to read by pleasantly.

We dropped and lowered and eventually hit the end of our tether.

It looked like the middle of space and we couldn’t see anything.

We were just about to call it quits and raise the pod to a shallower depth, where we still had something to see, but we all agreed to stop and wait a while before going up again. We spent an entire day, at least for us, twenty-four earth hours down there, each looking out of another porthole and staring out into nothingness. Then one of us, looking slightly down below, saw something in the water.

My first instinct was to reach up and turn on the floodlights, but a colleague of mine slapped my hand away. “Not yet,” he said.

I looked down, concentrated, and stared into the darkness for another hour, and then I saw it as well. It looked like a giant Koi, or goldfish swimming deep beneath us, its body lit up dimly through its light. It was massive, much larger than any of the whales up above us, but it was hard to see how far off it was. It could have been five feet across and just a few feet below us, but it seemed to lumber along in such a lazy, comfortable way that it seemed like it must be a much larger creature than that. It swam along, and almost seemed to feel its way around with large whiskers, like a gigantic catfish in the sea, and as the lights on its skin glowed just a little brighter each moment, we could see around it great oceans of those silverfish from above all around it, though this made the fish as large as a mountain beneath us.

Then it saw us.

It did almost this double take, glancing over it, and came up to investigate us. It rose to our level, and one of its eyes was larger than our entire craft. The cable above us reached into the heavens, and it slowly circled us. It then circled us in a spiral, each time getting just a little further and further away from us until it was faint in the distance. After several days, it took an entire day to get around us.

We took as many pictures and readings as possible.

Soon it was out of sight, and checking our fuel and provisions, we hit the button that would take us back up again.

We passed through the jellies, and we passed through the silverfish, being preyed upon by shark-like daggers in the water, and then back into the realm of the whales, who almost seemed to greet us with a new song. We stayed for a while, as long as we could, and then we hauled the pod back out of the water, and into the lander.

We blasted off three days later and connected with the orbiter, and soon we were all safely stowed away in our beds to sleep on our way home.

Three years journey back, and we flitted through the night sky like a shooting star and landed in the ocean near former Greenland, and were rescued by a bewildered Captain and the crew of his fishing boat.