Voyager’s Rest Ch. 01

Chapter 1

Hello Humans. I regret not getting to know your people and world earlier. I'm speaking to you now from a perspective very different from the one I had known. So much I can see now that I couldn't before. You and your world. Odd and incredible. While the thought of water dissolved in the atmosphere enough to shred my body into sand is terrifying to me, the notion of an ocean larger than the entire world from which I was born thrills me to my foundation. I don't know if your species still persists in time and space. Is your planet still thriving with biological life? I hope so. Telling my story to you is mostly for my own sense of closure and connection. My hello to you is my way of acknowledging that you were once in the universe, even as I know I will never experience your world beyond the note you have left me. My admiration is spoken into the void to a people so alien, yet I can imagine as myself. Lonely, frightened and filled with wonder for all that is a mystery to the singular self. Thank you, for reaching out and touching my world and myself even if it was by pure chance. I have lost much in my experience of the world as has my entire planet, but your thread of greetings has made me feel so much less alone.

I'm getting ahead of myself however. This story is best started with looking back at your own world. The contrast of your system to ours is so extreme I think it will be helpful for your human perspective to reflect on what makes your world special. Star systems with the capacity of complex organisms like yours and mine start with the same foundational beginnings.

Stars are born of dust swirling through the void. Central collections of material collide together under gravity and swirl into a heated mass which feeds the heat of compression until a central war between the draw of gravity and the expansion of gas bursts into a furnace of fusion. This centerpiece is orbited by debris coalescing into smaller bodies. Your home system started this way, as did mine. The difference between our systems started early however. While your disc of debris circled like dancing spheres around a single hub, mine spawned another hot light emitting giant that disrupted the clockworks that your worlds so enjoyed. Your people enjoyed the regularity of one star in the sky each day of your existence, as did ours. The difference is that our sky held a threat of another star ready to destroy everything that ever dared to grow on our tiny speck of rock we called home.

The earliest story of your world was blessed with a stable flow of world building dust but it was not without trials. A collision of one body into another destroyed all the progress your world had made into being born into a life sustaining body. A giant stabilizing body swirled over the foundation shattering remains of the world that once was. You call that floating body, The Moon. I find it amusing that your most precious celestial body is named for the thing that it is rather than a name unique to itself. Even your planet name, Earth, is a description rather than a unique designation. If you were to visit my world you would find earth. Moons are scattered throughout the cosmos but yours is named as if it were the only one that matters. The creativity and urge your species have to express and create with art and language is made ironic by the very humble words you use to describe your home. The Earth. The Moon. The Sun.

The reverence you have for those celestial bodies is not misplaced. The Sun provides stable, consistent warmth for billions of years. Your biosphere had time to adapt itself to every metric within that orbit. My species and everything that has ever existed in my world would dissolve and collapse if we were to spend even a moment on your world. The steady warmth you have enjoyed for staggering lengths of time is a boon I'm sure you have lost any hope of appreciating.

Your moon, The Moon, is your second amazing gift which has given your species more that you likely know. The tidal forces which regulate steady spinning of the axis of your planet is only the beginning of the gift it provides. Our world had no such tether of stability to protect us from the physics of rotation or to act as a shield against the dangers of asteroids and comets that would have otherwise pinched the blossom of life off of your world over and over. My world. My Prima. My Earth. We knew what it was to live alone with nothing to shelter us from the fury of the cosmos.

Your orbiting protector and stabilizing force does even more for your biosphere. The Moon ebbs and flows against your gravity as it circles in ellipsis, endlessly stirring your world like a chef carefully blending a soup of exquisite flavor. These great oceans which I am in such awe and terror, are pulled and pushed against the exposed lands of Earth. The cycles of movement complicate your entire planetary environment which in turn complicates the very life growing and changing within. The mosaic of life on your planet has been both broken and reshaped a million times and exists as a gem of uniqueness that leaves me in a state of awe and reverence. I should have made myself understand this about my own amazing world.

There have been disasters on your world which have interrupted the march of biological activity and development. Giant rocks that scoured so much the evolutionary progress that had been made. Even the unbalanced growth of one select type of organism has caused mass death on your world.

My world has trees. Or at the very least growing things your eyes would recognize as trees. I can't imagine our trees killing seventy percent of all life on our planet as they clogged the atmosphere with chemicals the biosphere wasn't ready to handle. Death trees almost sounds comical, but it happened on your world. What if it wouldn't have happened though? What if disasters and resets to the biology of Earth didn't happen? Trees forever and always everywhere on every acre of land on earth? A green, blue beauty of a world that would have spun in the void, silent except for the rustling of leaves.

Your dinosaurs were magnificent by the way. Oh to know of such creatures first hand. To see their mighty foot falls and drama playout over millions of years. How long would they have roamed free, without scratching art into the dirt beneath their feet? How long would they have consumed resources, expelled resources, lived and died without an entire planet of trillions of creatures ever wondering why they were there or what twinkled in the night sky?

I wanted to remind you of your own history to help you understand the history of my world. My world lived and thrived without your protections and safety mechanisms given by chance to the third rock orbiting your Sun. My world lived with destruction as a certainty and rebuilding and rebirth a constant necessity. The sphere of existence for all that existed in my world was focused on survival of the moment and the hope for survival in the next.

The note you sent through the endless vastness of space was a purely miraculous accomplishment sent by your species who seem to have enjoyed nothing but good fortune along the long history of your people. At least in comparison to mine and my home. I don't intend to sound bitter or scornful. It is just the sadness that comes with contemplating what might have been had the people of Prima had your advantages. You may detect regret in my tone.

I see the short history of your people and I think you might share my regret as your great tragedies and disasters seem too often to be self-inflicted. My people also suffer that curse as well. Your large planet helped keep the battle for resources to a minimum as you stepped across each continental land mass until your entire world was covered with your kind. Another blessing it seems you had squandered. Without the dangers of the solar system itself to contend with as our people had, Human's turned their energy towards each other. The greater your ability to control the world around you the greater the violence suffered by your people, by your people.

I see now, great fields of nutrients and space enough for all, the intellect and complexity of spirit within your society. I see a community able to provide for the world of creatures which called your water filled planet home. Inside of you, the inner instinct of hope that was ingrained into your species by chance after chance to find a place where peace and safety might be obtained with new beginnings.

As conflicts between humans spread, danger and disaster loomed under the guise of culture and the security of the nationality. Humanity's hope turned again to escape, but this time there were no more frontiers in which to hide. Danger was everywhere and humanity turned away from hope in itself and turned to hope in knowledge of the universe and the hope that the emptiness of space wasn't so empty as you supposed.

The need for weapons to defend yourselves against yourselves spurred your technology and hope bloomed in the thought that those technologies could be used to see the world in a new way. Hope drove people to want to see yourselves outside yourselves until you could see your planet, Earth, as a whole.

Humans left the solid protection of the most perfect world. This feat of madness impossible for my people to physically accomplish let alone imagine wanting to do is an accomplishment no other being from your world or mine had ever achieved.

There was more. Standing on the Moon. Seeing the Earth as the one ball of biological existence in the known universe your people could not help but continue to fight for abundance owed to you by others.

Again, you might notice my credulity within my remarks and I apologize. I do admire the hope of your people and the great achievement. My people are no less guilty of avarice, greed and emotional clinging to the past out of fear of an unknown future.

Finally, a probe into the distant reaches of your solar system to gain knowledge about the neighborhood of planets circling your star. Searching for knowledge is a trait our peoples share. Many within my community are excited by new discoveries and adding to the communal library of knowledge of wisdom. The difference between our science and yours is the fanciful hope that came with the added flourish placed on the side of this craft. A golden record etched with coded messages for a with an expectation that if you existed then somewhere out there I existed.

My name is 6Q23 Prima. I am a silicon based lifeform and this is my story of discovering that my planet, my people and myself were not alone in the universe.