Original Fiction - The Listening Station

BZZZZZ

Sam Starling woke, once again, to the sound of Space Exploration Council’s most annoying alarm sound, scientifically tested to be unbearable to even the heaviest sleeper.  Not that this put Sam off at all – in fact he had the option to use a different alarm sound, but he chose to use this one. He shut to buzzer off and got out of his bed to start the day, as he had every day of the last 12 years.

Or, more accurately, the simulation of a day.  Here on the largest moon of XF-799524, natural day/night cycles had little meaning. The distance to the system’s star was so great that it was difficult to distinguish it from the background starry panorama of the galaxy.

Listening Station 64R, however, was an entirely self-contained ecosystem catering to the comfort of its sole occupant, Mr. Starling. This included simulating the day/night cycles he had become accustomed to during the 25 years he had spent on Earth.

Sam went to the kitchen and selected his breakfast from the interface menu.  8 seconds later he removed his plate of eggs and bacon and his cup of coffee from the food printing compartment.  He took these over to the breakfast table as he ran through his maintenance checklist for the day.

LS 64R was fashioned of modular components using cutting edge technology of the time. Nearly every function was, or could be, automated.  Sam suspected, correctly, that the only reason he was assigned any duties was to keep him from going insane.

12 years was a long time to be assigned to solitary confinement.

Sam came from humble beginnings, but despite that, he had always known that it was his destiny to be part of the space exploration effort. He certainly had the name for it. And the passion – he had written to the Council as a child and joined the Youth Space Exploration Club while in grade school. He was a good student, and knew he had what it took to one one day be an astronaut.  But life dealt him a different hand when his father died and his mother got sick. He was forced to quit school and take care of her. A formal education was not to be.

 Instead, he had gone the route of the autodictat, reading extensively all his life, all the while maintaining his love of space. When the Council had called for volunteers for the Listening Station Initiative, he had jumped at the chance.  And, since the educational requirements were far less stringent than most of the Council’s other programs, he had been accepted.

He’d breezed through the training, his natural intelligence and general enthusiasm for space exploration boosting him far ahead of his fellow volunteers. He set himself to his task with unabashed zeal, for if there was one thing that appealed to him most, it was the search for alien life.

That was the reason for the Listening Station Initiative – to set up posts in far reaches of the galaxy to better receive potential transmissions for non-Earth lifeforms.  It was a direct descendant of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program begun hundreds of years ago by the National air and Space Administration of the old United States. The Council leaders decided that more ears in more places would improve their chances of hearing something.  And, after perfecting (as far as such things can be perfected) the technology for creating small wormholes, it wasn’t long before they placed their portable habitats in multiple far-flung corners of the universe.

Sam wasn’t sure why the Listening Stations hadn't been completely automated –- sure, a human was still needed to look at potential positive readings and throw out the ones that were due to interference, but surely that could be done back at home.  More likely it had to do with cost of creating a wormhole to send data back -– best to do it only when absolutely necessary.

And so here he was, many light years from his home planet.  He didn’t have anyone back at home – no sweetheart, no real family, not close friends, not even a pet.  So it wasn’t like he was particularly longing to go home to be with anyone.  Besides, he had access to a vast library here, and he had made heavy use for it over the years.

In fact, it was during a fateful period seven years ago when he was deeply engrossed in the library’s collection of ancient histories that he came to a momentous decision.

He had been studying a legendary explorer by the name of Christopher Columbus. The short version of the story he had learned in school hailed Columbus as a courageous explorer who discovered a new continent, but it did not detail what happened later and how he treated the indigenous, less technologically advanced culture.  As Sam dug deeper, he saw the same pattern repeat itself, across multiple eras and locations, over and over again throughout humankind’s history.

Now, it may be that some alien intelligence has developed in a way that its nature is fundamentally different to humankinds, thought Sam, but there is no way to know before we encounter them.

And so it was that in the present day, Sam reviewed the incoming signal caught by the station’s sensitive equipment, a signal which could only be a transmission from some other intelligent lifeform, and marked it as interference. The log, which would be sent back to earth when he created a wormhole at the end of the month would be the same as it had been every day since he had arrived.

As it had been every day since he first encountered these transmissions five years ago -– no unusual activity recorded.

Many people would consider the lonely lifestyle that Sam chose to be a terrible onus to bear. But for Sam, it was a small sacrifice to make for the honor and privilege of protecting the human race – even if no one would ever know.