PART TWO
Then:
Clere, like everyone else in the crowded urgent care office, was staring at her phone. The video was all anyone was watching, over and over again. At first people thought it was just a great viral video hoax. But verification kept coming out from space agencies and astronomers, newspeople and governments: all saying it was true, true, true. We weren’t alone in the Galaxy. There were aliens out there. And they were inviting us up there, in the nick of time, before we destroyed ourselves.
“We hope this message reaches you in time. If you are like us, you have brought your world to the brink of destruction. If you are like us, you grow desperate. But there are other worlds, and your species need not go extinct. This message will be followed by coordinates—” The talking head scientist interrupted his tenth reading of the message to point out that the end of the message did in fact contain a whole series of equations and math, which scientists were busily deciphering. “Send one person, one of your best, and have that person come alone. We are also providing tests so that you may select the right individual.”
“And these tests,” the news anchor interrupted. “What sort of person are they looking for?”
The scientist shrugged. “We don’t know. We haven’t figured out what the tests are, much less what they are looking for.”
“Whether we’re edible, no doubt,” said one of the other pundits. “Or whether we have the right attitude to be sheep for aliens.”
Give me a fucking break, Clere thought to herself, and shifted Sofia to her other arm. She was trying not to wake her as she did it, not sick as she was, but they’d call her number soon, and then it wouldn’t matter. But the stupid talking heads made her so angry. As if aliens would offer a bit of hope to an entire planet, and then ask for one human as what, an appetizer?
“And why only one person? If they are more advanced than we are, they could presumably have landed on Earth,” the news anchor said.
The scientist shrugged, but Clere had to pull her earbud out when she heard her number called. She awkwardly stood, shoving her phone back in a pocket with the video still playing and hefting a listless Sofia as she pushed her way to the diagnostic window.
The sympathetic look on the nurse’s face told her everything. As she began to sob and clutched her child closer to her, the nurse began to explain the cryogenic care process, that with these reawakened Ice Age diseases there was nothing else they could do. Nothing they could do, the woman said. There was nothing they could do.
Now:
The shaking is brief, and the lights soon shine steady once again. The touch panel by the airlock door is now inert, and the one by the other door is blinking yellow.
Clere experimentally stands, and wobbles for a moment, unaccustomed to feeling her real weight. “They seem to have artificial gravity,” she says. “And the readouts on my screen seem to say that there’s now air. No traces of anything odd… but of course there could be anything at all in the air, pathogens or something. I shouldn’t risk it.”
But the screen is showing the human figure on the chair standing and removing their helmet. Under the helmet, it’s a woman with long hair. Faceless, but she cocks her head expectantly at Clere, as if waiting, then the image loops.
“They want me to take off my helmet.” She thinks back to long ago theories about how any aliens out here must have evil intent. But long ago, when she’d signed up for The Project, she had set aside those fears. Nothing to lose, she had told herself then. Why go to all that trouble to get one human to Saturn’s moons, just to kill them, like some sort of cosmic troll op?
She decides, and tongues the release sequence on the inside of the helmet. With a crack and a whoosh, she finds herself breathing sweet air.
That’s when she hears the Muzak playing.
“Is that… Toto’s ‘Africa’?”
Then:
“Full name?”
“Clerestory Scansion.”
“Uh… how do you spell that?”
She told him, then as usual felt compelled to explain. “I’m Puerto Rican,” she said.
The tech’s eyes widened. “Oh! A dictionary baby?” After enough hurricanes hit the Caribbean islands in quick succession and they had to be abandoned due to infrastructure collapse, thousands of orphaned children too young to know their names were collected and adopted out. Bureaucracy being what it is, the government used a simple algorithm of choosing vocabulary words to generate temporary names – some bright Silicon Valley techie’s idea. Sometimes the adoptive parents kept the names. Less often, the kids took them back, to declare their identity to the world.
“What does it mean? The name, I mean,” the tech asked, as he efficiently drew blood.
“High windows? Like in a church, the ones up near the ceiling. And the rhythm of words, like in poetry.”
“Huh,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at her. “That’s kind of pretty.”
He was flirting a bit, but she knew he was going to see hundreds of women like her, hundreds of faces in a crowd, as he drew blood day after day and fed it into the Project’s databases. “I guess,” she said.
And that’s when his jaw dropped. He held up the test strip from the Project’s sample kit. He had trouble getting the words out, probably because he had never gotten to say them before. “You—y—you’re a match. You’re one of them. The chosen ones.”
Now:
The figure on the screen has a face now. As it is still an eerie porcelain white quite unlike Clere’s actual skin tone, it takes her a moment to realize that the face is her own, and that it is smiling at her. Her double shucks the spacesuit, and Clere does the same, until she is standing there in her jumpsuit. She can’t help but tap her feet to the drums. As the camera zooms out, the figure on the screen gestures towards the door on the far side of the chamber.
“I guess this is it, everyone. Time to meet our future.” It’s a PR line self-consciously delivered, but Ismail had been insistent that there needed to be a catch phrase, something that could make headlines around the world.
Clere walks to the door, still somewhat unsteadily, and places her hand on the touchpad, which is no longer blinking. The inner door emits the same loud thunk as the outer airlock did, and Clere knows that she can pull on the oddly familiar handle and open the door to new worlds. But she hesitates. The PR line feels hollow, unsatisfying. And Ismail had been so proud of it, focus tested to within an inch of its life! But he hadn’t counted on the surreal dentist’s office, or the music. Not exactly the soundtrack I expected for first contact, she thought to herself.
She pulls the locket with Sofia’s picture from out of her jumpsuit breast pocket, opens it, and looks at that tiny face, half-asleep. She holds it up in front of the camera at her neck, and says “This is my daughter Sofia. She’s in cryosleep… she caught one of those ancient diseases that came up out of the permafrost. I know that everyone back on Earth has their hopes pinned on me. That everyone has some dream about how things could be better, and right now, those dreams are all on the other side of this door. Well, Sofia is my dream. Whatever these aliens can give us, maybe one of those things is a cure. And that’s what’s on the other side of this door for me. A second chance.”
Then:
They’d let her take her out of sleep, only briefly, just to say goodbye. “Time to sleep, mija,” she said, through her tears. She nuzzled Sofia one last time, then lay her gently down. “Mama has to go. I have a long trip ahead of me. But you stay here, and stay safe, OK? And I’ll be back for you, and then we can walk in the grass and play with puppies and do all the things, OK?”
Sofia looked at her, half awake, with the infinitely deep eyes of a child. The face of hope.
Now:
Clere kisses the locket, and then pulls her hair aside to clasp the necklace around her neck. She tucks her suit’s helmet under her arm. She imagines Mission Control ninety minutes from now, holding their breath as she grasps the handle. Then she pulls on it, and opens the door. It’s dark on the other side, but she gets the sense of a hallway.
No point in being scared, she thinks. She glances over at the screen, and the figure – the one meant to be her – is dancing to the music. No point, not when it turns out that outer space is a little bit… silly. Unaccountably, joy bubbles up inside her.
As she steps over the threshold, she thinks about small steps and giant leaps. But that’s not what it feels like to her, as she reaches for the promise of the stars. Never mind the gravity.
Clere thinks of holding her daughter again, and Clere floats.