The year is 2214.
A hundred and thirty-four standard years ago, a conspiracy of pilots, engineers, and scientists, fearing that growing unrest on Earth would spread to and destroy the colonies springing up across the Solar System, destroyed the facilities that permitted the construction of Earth-based spacecraft, and ushered in the first stages of the Fall.
By 2114, ten billion of Earth's thirteen billion people would be dead. Killed by gunshot, killed by designer disease, killed by atom bomb, killed by famine. Killed by their neighbors and killed by the disintegration of the ecosystem that supported them. The colonies, overwhelmed by refugees, struggled and starved, each riding on the ragged edge of extinction with no margin for error.
Eventually, that margin increased. Eventually, civilization on Earth began to rebuild itself, growing from arcology city-states to modest nations.
And then, in 2157, near the south pole of Mars, mining prospectors from the authoritarian Martian Federation stumbled across an alien base, buried in the red planet's sands for fifty thousand years. Utilizing the new scientific principles learned from the alien technology, the Federation smashed the rival Free Republic and lifted the first crude modern battlewagons into Martian orbit, using their implicit and explicit threat to subjugate first Mercury, then the Orbitals of Earth's local system and Luna itself, and finally the three widely-spread states of the Jovian Confederation before shackling its subjects' people and economies into the last push - to reclaim Earth.
Now, the leaders of the Solar Federation dance on the insidious strings of Venusian money, and rebellion simmers under the boot heel on every world. An economic and cultural renaissance blossoms, fed by the flow of resources from extrasolar exploration and mining, and beneath the surface fear and rage balance on a knife edge.
Rage at repression, at lost families and friends, at foreign domination, and fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night...
And of whatever force smashed an interstellar civilization that encompassed thousands of worlds in the space of barely three years, only thirty years before.
Neither the naked eye nor the living ear would have detected any presence in the darkened corridor, save for the slowly deliquescing corpses slumped against the door the intruder had entered by. That wasn’t noteworthy; all of them had been there for more than a hundred of this world whiplash-fast years.
Neither the intruder’s enemies, nor the builders of the hidden bunker, had possessed passive sensors good enough to have known with certainty that the bastion’s security had failed. Infrared, ultraviolet, dark energy receptors - all would have perceived only modest irregularities, the sort that such sensitive instruments threw up as false positives by their very nature. Indeed, since the eezo core lodged at the heart of the intruder’s armor was left inert, the only tool that might have detected it was a simple pressure sensor, triggered by the weight of wearer and armor alike.
The intruder, of course, was aware of the possibility, and watched to detect such simple traps. As was often the case, the bunker’s builders, pressed for time in what had, most obviously, been a desperate war for survival against... whatever unknowable threat... had not been able to fully conceal their instruments.
As the cloaked form moved deeper and deeper into the bunker, however, its excitement - and the significance of the information it gathered for its superiors - grew.
Definitely Culture D, was the subvocalized note taken as the mind behind the opaque visor studied the sweeping curves of the main chamber. Blue everywhere, and the aesthetic isn’t abstract enough for A. Policy recommendation: in the future, treat viability confidence estimates over eighty percent as full finds. This is completely intact; if we had a carrier here we’d be able to come away with everything rather than just what I can scan and grab.
Speaking of which... the intruder stepped up to what previous experience with the Beta Culture Complex told it was the central control computer for the bunker and the enigmatic machinery occupying its center and let the nanofunction system in its armor’s gauntlet form the molecule-wide layer knife needed to slice away the housing and gain its documentation scanners access to the data-storage solids of the computer. For all that the Beta Complex’s languages were still undeciphered, for all that only a few clues to their programming languages had been found, for all that, despite having been a thriving civilization only forty years before, almost nothing remained of the Beta Complex’s entire existence, there was still the certainty that sufficiently detailed readings could be reconstructed into the data that had been stored, once the languages were inevitably cracked.
But this time, unlike any of the few dozen working terminals previously found, there was what the intruder immediately recognized - a second too late - as an anti-tamper mechanism.
The heavy mechanical noise of releasing locks would have made a less disciplined, less controlled individual jump in surprise and horror; this intruder only looked up, watching as the central column’s armored surface cracked and began to slide smoothly apart, unfolding layer by layer to reveal...
Thermal readings told the tale - a cryogenic suspension chamber.
A working cryo chamber, hidden as thoroughly as its makers knew how, and obviously built to last... how many ages?
A time capsule...
For one of their own. A live representative - a first contact.
And she, looking up at that capsule and ready to be its owner’s first impression of her entire species, was wearing a combat exosuit, a half ton of composites and exotic materials, an obviously menacing presence that couldn’t be taken for anything but...
A mental command through the neural link peeled back her helmet and popped the main seals of the torso, letting her have just enough room to begin wriggling furiously out of the almost literally skin-tight confines of the suit, keeping up a subvocalized narrative of her conclusions, reasoning, and everything else her superiors might want to know.
Her luck being what it was, the last layer of protection between her and the Survivor lifted away before she could finish peeling herself out of the armor.
That Complex Beta had consisted of a species or multiple species with a physical size and conformation much like humanity’s had been known since the first discovery, six years after the attainment of interstellar flight. She had expected that.
She had not expected to meet someone whose differences from the human norm were far easier to note than her similarities. Legs, same length and joint structure as her own, check, hips, ditto, check. Waist, nicely fit, just narrow enough to be more ideal than real if she’d seen it on another human (slimmer than hers, dammit), check, hands, five fingers, appropriate proportions, arms likewise, check. Breasts (very nice ones), of all the absurd impossibilities, check , neck and shoulders perfectly matched, check, face (completely gorgeous), check...
Too many, an impossible number of similarities. The grooved, scale-like structures that went along her - referring to the alien as female was irresistible even if quite possibly wrong - scalp were almost a relief, especially given...
“Blue space babe,” she said out loud, aware of a corner of her mind noting that historians and proponents of human dignity would curse her name for all time, “what the hell?”
And then her hand slipped and she finished climbing out of her armor by falling the five feet flat onto her face.
Although momentarily deserted by her dignity and her usual trained coordination, the enhancements and modifications that had been made to her when she qualified for her current excessively-sensitive role told true and the impact harmed nothing but her dignity, and she started to pick herself up - then froze as she heard a footstep.
If the Survivor was hostile, she was probably dead; that was an acceptable risk for anything that could help keep this from going wrong in a way that would actually damage her country.
Carefully, she looked up, and met the other’s eyes from a distance of only a foot or so as she crouched down next to her. At this range, the fine silver wires running through the other’s skin like the finest filigree were easily visible, as well as the way they also ran through the irises of those jewel-blue and completely human eyes.
The wires vanished into a vividly fitted white bodysuit that clung nearly as tightly as her own dark undersuit, and a corner of her mind fought not to be distracted as one of those blue hands reached up to rest its (warm) fingertips gently against her temple, right next to the hairline.
“Um,” she started to say, and then the tip of the other hand’s index finger rested against her lips - they had the same gesture? - before moving up to the other temple.
The other said something that sounded sad, even apologetic, then leaned closer, and closer still until it almost seemed as though she would...
Her eyes turned solid black as their foreheads rested against each other, and she spoke two more words before Clara Shepard’s world went completely Klein-Bottle-Shaped.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
A hundred and thirty-four standard years ago, a conspiracy of pilots, engineers, and scientists, fearing that growing unrest on Earth would spread to and destroy the colonies springing up across the Solar System, destroyed the facilities that permitted the construction of Earth-based spacecraft, and ushered in the first stages of the Fall.
By 2114, ten billion of Earth's thirteen billion people would be dead. Killed by gunshot, killed by designer disease, killed by atom bomb, killed by famine. Killed by their neighbors and killed by the disintegration of the ecosystem that supported them. The colonies, overwhelmed by refugees, struggled and starved, each riding on the ragged edge of extinction with no margin for error.
Eventually, that margin increased. Eventually, civilization on Earth began to rebuild itself, growing from arcology city-states to modest nations.
And then, in 2157, near the south pole of Mars, mining prospectors from the authoritarian Martian Federation stumbled across an alien base, buried in the red planet's sands for fifty thousand years. Utilizing the new scientific principles learned from the alien technology, the Federation smashed the rival Free Republic and lifted the first crude modern battlewagons into Martian orbit, using their implicit and explicit threat to subjugate first Mercury, then the Orbitals of Earth's local system and Luna itself, and finally the three widely-spread states of the Jovian Confederation before shackling its subjects' people and economies into the last push - to reclaim Earth.
Now, the leaders of the Solar Federation dance on the insidious strings of Venusian money, and rebellion simmers under the boot heel on every world. An economic and cultural renaissance blossoms, fed by the flow of resources from extrasolar exploration and mining, and beneath the surface fear and rage balance on a knife edge.
Rage at repression, at lost families and friends, at foreign domination, and fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night...
And of whatever force smashed an interstellar civilization that encompassed thousands of worlds in the space of barely three years, only thirty years before.
Neither the naked eye nor the living ear would have detected any presence in the darkened corridor, save for the slowly deliquescing corpses slumped against the door the intruder had entered by. That wasn’t noteworthy; all of them had been there for more than a hundred of this world whiplash-fast years.
Neither the intruder’s enemies, nor the builders of the hidden bunker, had possessed passive sensors good enough to have known with certainty that the bastion’s security had failed. Infrared, ultraviolet, dark energy receptors - all would have perceived only modest irregularities, the sort that such sensitive instruments threw up as false positives by their very nature. Indeed, since the eezo core lodged at the heart of the intruder’s armor was left inert, the only tool that might have detected it was a simple pressure sensor, triggered by the weight of wearer and armor alike.
The intruder, of course, was aware of the possibility, and watched to detect such simple traps. As was often the case, the bunker’s builders, pressed for time in what had, most obviously, been a desperate war for survival against... whatever unknowable threat... had not been able to fully conceal their instruments.
As the cloaked form moved deeper and deeper into the bunker, however, its excitement - and the significance of the information it gathered for its superiors - grew.
Definitely Culture D, was the subvocalized note taken as the mind behind the opaque visor studied the sweeping curves of the main chamber. Blue everywhere, and the aesthetic isn’t abstract enough for A. Policy recommendation: in the future, treat viability confidence estimates over eighty percent as full finds. This is completely intact; if we had a carrier here we’d be able to come away with everything rather than just what I can scan and grab.
Speaking of which... the intruder stepped up to what previous experience with the Beta Culture Complex told it was the central control computer for the bunker and the enigmatic machinery occupying its center and let the nanofunction system in its armor’s gauntlet form the molecule-wide layer knife needed to slice away the housing and gain its documentation scanners access to the data-storage solids of the computer. For all that the Beta Complex’s languages were still undeciphered, for all that only a few clues to their programming languages had been found, for all that, despite having been a thriving civilization only forty years before, almost nothing remained of the Beta Complex’s entire existence, there was still the certainty that sufficiently detailed readings could be reconstructed into the data that had been stored, once the languages were inevitably cracked.
But this time, unlike any of the few dozen working terminals previously found, there was what the intruder immediately recognized - a second too late - as an anti-tamper mechanism.
The heavy mechanical noise of releasing locks would have made a less disciplined, less controlled individual jump in surprise and horror; this intruder only looked up, watching as the central column’s armored surface cracked and began to slide smoothly apart, unfolding layer by layer to reveal...
Thermal readings told the tale - a cryogenic suspension chamber.
A working cryo chamber, hidden as thoroughly as its makers knew how, and obviously built to last... how many ages?
A time capsule...
For one of their own. A live representative - a first contact.
And she, looking up at that capsule and ready to be its owner’s first impression of her entire species, was wearing a combat exosuit, a half ton of composites and exotic materials, an obviously menacing presence that couldn’t be taken for anything but...
A mental command through the neural link peeled back her helmet and popped the main seals of the torso, letting her have just enough room to begin wriggling furiously out of the almost literally skin-tight confines of the suit, keeping up a subvocalized narrative of her conclusions, reasoning, and everything else her superiors might want to know.
Her luck being what it was, the last layer of protection between her and the Survivor lifted away before she could finish peeling herself out of the armor.
That Complex Beta had consisted of a species or multiple species with a physical size and conformation much like humanity’s had been known since the first discovery, six years after the attainment of interstellar flight. She had expected that.
She had not expected to meet someone whose differences from the human norm were far easier to note than her similarities. Legs, same length and joint structure as her own, check, hips, ditto, check. Waist, nicely fit, just narrow enough to be more ideal than real if she’d seen it on another human (slimmer than hers, dammit), check, hands, five fingers, appropriate proportions, arms likewise, check. Breasts (very nice ones), of all the absurd impossibilities, check , neck and shoulders perfectly matched, check, face (completely gorgeous), check...
Too many, an impossible number of similarities. The grooved, scale-like structures that went along her - referring to the alien as female was irresistible even if quite possibly wrong - scalp were almost a relief, especially given...
“Blue space babe,” she said out loud, aware of a corner of her mind noting that historians and proponents of human dignity would curse her name for all time, “what the hell?”
And then her hand slipped and she finished climbing out of her armor by falling the five feet flat onto her face.
Although momentarily deserted by her dignity and her usual trained coordination, the enhancements and modifications that had been made to her when she qualified for her current excessively-sensitive role told true and the impact harmed nothing but her dignity, and she started to pick herself up - then froze as she heard a footstep.
If the Survivor was hostile, she was probably dead; that was an acceptable risk for anything that could help keep this from going wrong in a way that would actually damage her country.
Carefully, she looked up, and met the other’s eyes from a distance of only a foot or so as she crouched down next to her. At this range, the fine silver wires running through the other’s skin like the finest filigree were easily visible, as well as the way they also ran through the irises of those jewel-blue and completely human eyes.
The wires vanished into a vividly fitted white bodysuit that clung nearly as tightly as her own dark undersuit, and a corner of her mind fought not to be distracted as one of those blue hands reached up to rest its (warm) fingertips gently against her temple, right next to the hairline.
“Um,” she started to say, and then the tip of the other hand’s index finger rested against her lips - they had the same gesture? - before moving up to the other temple.
The other said something that sounded sad, even apologetic, then leaned closer, and closer still until it almost seemed as though she would...
Her eyes turned solid black as their foreheads rested against each other, and she spoke two more words before Clara Shepard’s world went completely Klein-Bottle-Shaped.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."