I was on the first mission that found signs of
extraterrestrial life. Pockmarks in a moon’s surface, craters so radioactive
our sensors broke. All we had were a few cement structures and garbage, the
remnants of life-forms that had warred themselves out of existence before we
could even knock.
I wasn’t on the Astra Mission, whatever they called the one
that found two previously inhabited planets. Faster-than-light travel brought
us all three of those stories inside of one year. I’ll grant you the last one
might have been disease, though there’s no proving they didn’t engineer the
diseases that did them in. Even if you blame the one extinction on a plague,
the Astra and the outlier were both self-inflicted extinction. Never forget the
photos from that rift they opened in their own planet. Went down to the
tectonic plates. There were skeletons down there.
Hard for science to recover its luster after we found space
was a cemetery. There had always been that cruel joke that any life evolved
enough for space travel would kill itself off. We don’t want to believe with
the outlier, the only lonely heaven-sifters. But it got the Prime Directive
passed the Senate, didn’t it? If you find another culture, interfere before
it’s too late.
Now that's an interesting twist on the (non)interference rules.
ReplyDeleteI think the conversational tone with the fragmented sentences works well here. It makes the narrator sound exhausted and disturbed.
Thanks Anke! After reading so many cynical old scientists postulating about intelligence leading to annihilation, the desire to flip the old Prime Directive just became too strong. Glad that tone carried through for you.
DeleteWell, they always seem to break the Prime Directive when they deem it appropriate, so it's not exactly the unbreakable rule everyone makes it out to be!
ReplyDeleteNice flip; I enjoyed it!