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.
