Brink of Humanity
Part One
My name is Jim Sterling, and I am, to my knowledge, one of the last remaining humans in the galaxy. This is a pretty harsh way to start the story, I know. But I think it’s better to get the bad news out of the way first. Of course, there’s more bad news throughout the rest of the story, but this is undoubtedly the worst bad news one could possibly hear. This will, of course, be a grand tale of adventure, and to protect those involved, I will be changing the names, just in case you aren’t good people, those of you reading this. Although, you can be certain that my name is in fact Jim Sterling and not something else entirely, because that would be ridiculous. Let’s begin again, shall we?
My name is Jim Sterling, and I am, to my knowledge, one of the last remaining humans in the galaxy. You might wonder how this came to be, and I can assure you, it is a long tale, so grab your blanket, turn on a good reading light, and prepare to be amazed. I am of course, writing this for the future generations, of which I’m sure there will be several.
To really understand the tale, you have to know me. I was born in California, raised in Arizona, graduated near the top of my class in high school, at pretty much the same level as all my friends, and went to college to study Space Physics, specializing in exotic propulsion. I got hired by Jet Propulsion Labs, who payed off my debt and payed for my Masters degree. I now live in Pasadena where JPL is based. I am also quite well off financially.
I am about six foot one inch tall, well built near 180 pounds, fairly muscular. I sport short curly brown hair only a few inches long. I have a fairly round face, which I hide under a short beard.
I own a relatively large two story house which I had only shared with my one yellow lab, Nova. My life was a lonely one, and I heard of a friend who needed a place to stay as she finished up Med school. She’s a year younger than me, and was the only girl I liked in high school. I was very shy back then, and never made a move, much to my dismay to this day. I, of course, offered her the bottom floor of my house.
I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Flat out wrong. I was a complete gentleman the entire two years we lived like this. By the time our story begins, I was 25, and she 24. Oh, yes. Her name is Angela. She has taken an advanced Medical degree course, and will be completed after just one more semester of schooling. That meant, that I had little time to make a move if that’s what I wanted to do.
I was something of a rising star at JPL. I had lead the project that taught us how to create antimatter in bulk, something of significant value I might add, along with developing a fusion reactor the size of a car engine. The coolest part of it was that antimatter was suddenly cheap and these fusion reactors were safe and could last 50 years on 100 dollars worth of antimatter. They could power an entire city for no more than 1000 dollars every 50 years. Essentially free, clean, energy.
One day at work, my boss, the department head of Research and Development, came up to me with a letter, and told me how proud he was before walking off. As it turned out, CERN wanted me to be the keynote speaker of exotic propulsion at its major yearly conference in Paris. All expenses paid, plus a bonus for an extra ticket if I wanted it. I was shocked. These conferences were never attended by anyone with less than a doctorate and years of experience.
My first thought was to ask Angela to come with me. She could use a break after the endless clinicals and hours of study. Plus, it was summer time, and she wasn’t in class at the moment. I headed home that night nervous as all get out. What would she think of me asking her to Paris for a week? We were being boarded at the conference center, and were given a week long stay for a five day long conference. That means, we’d have two days to explore the city, and then she’d have five to do what she pleased.
When I entered the house, I heard music playing from somewhere, but didn’t see her. I walked to the kitchen and grabbed a drink of water before asking her to come with me.
The next thing I knew, she was behind me, and the words just kind of blubbed out. I think it sounded like gibberish to her. As she replied with a questioning “what?” I repeated myself much more eloquently than the first attempt at language. The pure look of shock on her face implied that I was crazy to even ask such a question. But I knew I had mistaken the look on her face when she flung herself into my arms and gave me the biggest hug I think I’ve ever gotten. I smiled as it lasted longer than the usual “comfortable” length of time hugs usually lasted. Then it went past the uncomfortable into outright awkward.
When the hug was finally broken after what felt like an eternity, she began to ask me rapid fire questions about the details of the trip. Instead of sounding like a jerk, saying we’d only have two days, I offered an extended package to visit another city of her choice after the conference for another week of time. Angela’s jaw dropped as she realized that this extra week would be out of my own pocket, and began to protest. I, of course, insisted. She chose London as the follow up to Paris.
The conference would begin in just a few weeks’ time, but we already had things packed in anticipation. The rest of the weeks went by quickly, seeing nothing but anticipation and excitement. The weeks passed in a flash, and I spent my time preparing my lecture for the conference. It wasn't that I was nervous, I wasn't, but that I felt a great amount of pressure to show progress from the last conference. When the time finally came to leave, we were ready for a break from reality.
I knew I was close. Close to FTL travel at least. The issue was in creating the warp effect, the easiest method. In order to describe it, it's best to think of an ocean rather than space. The basic idea is riding a wave, but a self created wave. You expand the water behind, and shrink it in front, and the water begins to move faster and faster the more you change it. The same applies for space. The more you expand it, the greater velocities you can achieve.
Most people figured two different rings would create this effect, but in small scale versions, it did nothing but sap energy. I had ideas floating around in my head, but nothing had solidified into the engine I knew was up there. I had spent the last several years on the same problem, but to no effect. And with the conference coming up, I felt pressure to solve it.
By the time we headed for the airport, I was no closer to solving anything than I was before. Angela knew that I was disturbed by something, but figured it would be better to let me come out with it when the time was right. I appreciated her silence in the matter at the moment. As we boarded the plane, it was all she could do to keep the excitement from boiling out and making herself hyper. Without self-control, it would have been a long flight.
The flight was mostly uneventful, except for some turbulence. Unfortunately, the turbulence occurred when I was using the facilities. At just the wrong moment, we hit a bump and I crashed into the sink with enough force to drive me unconscious.
It was in that moment that I figured out all the solutions to my problems. First, if I wanted Angela to love me, I was going to have to make a move. Secondly, we needed three rings, not two. The reason two didn't work was due to the fact that they were out of sync in space time. An unfortunate side effect created by an incorrectly calibrated warp field was the device phasing through space time until the energy dissipates or is shut off.
A third, central ring would house the engine and would send pulses to the fore and aft rings to create the "wave" to travel through time. And as a bonus, the rings could be of any size, but had to be equally proportionate to the central ring.
As I returned to consciousness, my heart rate increased steadily as I realized what I had discovered. I wiped the small amount of blood from my temple as I walked back to my seat next to Angela, and sat down with a triumphant grin on my face. I whipped out my laptop and drafted the design for the engine in the next half hour. It was so simple I couldn't understand how I'd missed it before!
I looked over to Angela and smiled at that point. She gave me a questioning look, and I simply replied, "Oh, it's nothing. I happen to have cracked the problem that's been eating away at me for the last three years. The consequences of which will take us to the stars." I leaned my head back and closed my eyes with a massive grin on my face.
I woke up with about an hour to go until we were to land at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I looked over at Angela to see her head on my shoulder and hand holding mine. Rather than extricate myself and risk waking her, I reveled in the closeness I felt. About 20 minutes later, the captain gave the announcement to raise setbacks and tray tables, and I carefully removed my hand before she could notice.
"Hi" I said as she returned to the land of wakefulness, " did you sleep well?"
"Yeah, sorry for using your shoulder, that wasn't intentional."
"No problem, I only woke up myself a few minutes ago." If she had known she was holding my hand, she didn't give any sign. Our landing was gentle, and we managed to get our baggage and get off the plane in a relatively orderly fashion. As we stepped off the plane, we instantly felt the heat. Our hotel was where the convention would occur, right down near the Champs Elysees.
It was a perfect location as Angela could wander during the conference without straying too far. It was a Sunday morning the day we landed, the conference to begin at 8:00 the next day. That left us with all day Sunday to relax and soak in the atmosphere. Our first stop: we dropped off our luggage at the hotel.
There was, of course, a mistake. We should have had two rooms, but the convention accidentally had us down as husband and wife, booking us for one room. And as usual with conventions, there were no vacancies.
"Well, do you at least have any rooms with double beds?" Angela asked with an exasperated look on her face.
"No, we have no rooms as such," the desk clerk said in broken English. "You will have to, how do you say, make do."
"Well, thank you for trying," I replied in my best French. As we walked up the stairs to our room, I spoke to Angela, "we can work this out, I can sleep on the floor. We can ask for extra bedding I can use to pad the ground up and get some extra pillows."
"No, this is your conference, your big moment, and I am your guest. You didn't have to bring me along." She paused here as if in thought, "we can share the bed, just don't get any ideas, ok?"
"If you're sure, I really wouldn't mind the floor..." She nodded and we set our stuff down, too tired to worry about it now. This trip was simply bizarre, every time I begin to feel comfortable again, something changes and awkwardness sets in. The triumph of FTL travel had only helped for a bit, as it still felt very surreal. "I guess our next step should be to get some lunch. Shall we head out?"
"Sure, let's just get something light though." We headed downstairs and smiled at the clerk on the way out. We walked outside and found a nice street corner café to grab a bite and a drink, and just sat for an hour, chatting and planning our time in London together. I asked Angela what she had planned for the week while I was busy, and she replied that she was just going to relax and not worry about seeing everything. If she happened upon something she wanted to do, she'd do it. I figured I'd have evenings free, so we planned to have dinner every night together.
We spent the rest of the day around the Champs Elysees, and went into the Arc de Triomphe. By 10:00 pm, we were exhausted and headed back to the room. At the moment, we were so tired we didn't care about having to sleep in the same bed. I was being very careful, however, to stick to my half so as not to make things more awkward than they already were.
Days one and two of the conference went off without a hitch. I was scheduled to present on day five, very last thing. On day three, I learned of a new method for creating antimatter that simply required shooting a powerful laser at a sheet of Berkelium of one atomic thickness. That evening, I took Angela to dinner on the Seine on one of the famous dinner barges, as seen in Charade. That was the first time I noticed the man watching us. Of course, I thought nothing of it.
Day four had an update from CERN on the large hadron collider and its work on creating stable FTL particles. I chuckled to myself the entire presentation. What they were trying to do with a hydrogen atom, I had figured out how to do with an entire starship. That night, I took Angela to the top of the Eiffel tower for dinner, and saw the man again. When we returned to our room, we found the lock broken, but nothing had been taken.
My presentation would happen after a contemporary would give the keynote presentation. I was set to go on at 9:00 am. Little did I know, I'd never give the presentation. I was out in the hall waiting to go on when a man rushed up to me asking for help, there was a man who had slipped in the bathroom and wasn't breathing. I began to run that way and yelled back for him to get help. As I entered the bathroom I saw no one, and skidded to a halt. The door slammed behind me and I heard a deadbolt click.
I began to worry, I was stronger than many men my size, but it didn't mean I was unbeatable. I turned around slowly and saw a man close to six feet eight inches tall hunched in the corner. He held something looking like a gun in his hand. "Don't even try anything, or my associate will be forced to use force," came a voice from behind me.
"What do you want," I replied, knowing he would never tell his name. As I turned around, I recognized the fellow who'd been following us the last several days, and presumably the man who had broken into our room.
"I want to ensure your extinction," and as he said this, he pulled off a mask and began to grow taller, nearing seven feet before he stopped. "You see," he said, "you are a threat to our plans, and must be stopped. I have been watching you for two years, monitoring your house, your television, your cellular telephone. You are the singular threat to our invasion on this planet."
"This is a joke. My friends put you up to this. Who was it?" It was then, that the man behind cracked me in the back of the head. I welcomed the blackness with open arms.
As I awoke, I smelled antiseptic cleaning fluid and blood. There was a mirror on the wall and I saw my face all bleeding and broken. My nose was bent at an angle it usually wasn't. My shirt had been removed and my chest was also scratched to pieces in an odd criss cross pattern. There was music playing in the background. It was a song I recognized, but couldn't name for the life of me. For that matter, I couldn’t remember my name either.
"Now, I'm going to ask again: who else knows you have discovered FTL travel?" It all came back in a flash. I was being tortured. My name was Jim Sterling, I was traveling with Angela, the love of my life, who didn't love me, there song on the radio was an old Genesis tune. If I told them I had told Angela, they'd kill her.
"No one, I was waiting until my presentation this morning." There was a clock on the wall, it read 11:45. I would be missed by now. I had to be. But I hadn't been found. It had been over three hours. I must have been moved. That means, it was up to me to escape. I began to talk, "So why invade Earth? There have to be better places. Are we really a threat, or do you just want something we have that you don't?"
"Earth happens to be one of the planets in this corner of the galaxy with salt water oceans. You haven't learned this yet, but salt water can power everything, and destroy almost as much. Our planet’s salt water ran out a century of your years ago, and we've been hunting ever since. You're lucky we got here first. Those right behind us would have been much less merciful. In fact, you would have been enslaved and sent out to work 16 hour days. It's clear that you won't tell the truth, so I'm going to leave you here to think while we hunt your wife."
"She's not my wife"
"Of course not. You just share room as husband and wife and share a bed. If she is truly not your wife, then you deserve death even more. She is truly a specimen of beauty. Maybe I'll keep her for myself..."
"You bastard. If you lay a hand on her, I'll kill you."
"Then I have no problem. We don't have hands." He stepped into the light showing a hideous clawed appendage attached to a reptilian body. The sight revolted me, and I could barely keep the contents of my stomach from coming out. He laughed now and walked out of the room leaving his henchman behind.
He was closer to seven feet than I thought, and rippled with muscle. I began to think of a ploy to get out of this, but only one came. "You have a deck of cards? I had one in my bag. Nah, you look too stupid to play that game. Never mind."
"No, we play," he said in a deep rough voice. "How does one play?" The plan was taken from an episode of Star Trek, ironically enough. I had to adapt it of course, as I was no Captain Kirk.
"Well, the cards aren't perfect. The game is Russian, and they use different cards over there, but it should work much the same. The rules are simple. Fizzbin. It's, uh ... not too difficult. Each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays." I began dealing cards. "Oh look! You have two jacks! You have a half fizzbin already!"
"I need jack?"
"No, if you got another jack you'd have a shralk."
"Shralk?"
" Yes. You'd be disqualified. You need a king and a deuce, except at night, when you'd need a queen and a 4."
"Except at night."
"Right. Oh, look at that. You've got another jack! Ha ha ha! How lucky you are! How wonderful for you. If you didn't get another jack, if you'd gotten a king, why, then, you'd get another card, except when it's dark, you'd give it back."
"If it were dark on Tuesday." It was then that I dropped the card. He bent over to grab it and I stood up and smashed my chair over his head knocking him out. I kicked him in the face for good measure. I grabbed my bag from the corner only to toss it back at the sight of all my stuff destroyed and promptly tied the guy up to a pipe on the wall. He had some interesting stuff: what looked like a tablet and a weapon of some kind. If I had to describe him as aliens from Star Trek, he'd be Gorn mixed with species 8472 and the Xindi Reptilian.
My shirt was in the corner, shredded, leaving me to escape bare-chested. My wounds hurt like hell, but I knew I had to save Angela. I opened the door to find another guard who I knocked out, but not before he gave me another slash across the arm. My surroundings were foreign, made of some unknown metal composite in a dark green/black. There was writing I never had seen before. The only conclusion I could draw was that I was on the alien ship, or at least one of the alien ships.
I brought out the tablet and turned it on, and found a button that looked like a translator, and brought everything to English. It had a direct connect to the ship, giving me all their data. This species was unpronounceable in name, but appeared a forward scout. The fleet wouldn't arrive for six years. I had time to save the planet!
Or not, there appeared to be thousands of ships, millions of troops. But this ship had 10, including the commander and the two I had taken down. I was not a warrior, but I had done a stint in the Navy back in the day. I figured if I could remain stealthy, I had a chance of doing this.
I needed to hack their database. First step. If I could find a weakness in their physiology, I could take them down. I also needed to find out where this base was. I snuck my way toward where it seemed their crew quarters would be, hoping to catch more troops off guard. I always had the risk of setting off an alarm if I shot the weapon, so it'd be best to avoid firing it.
As I happened upon the crew quarters, I began to sweat profusely. I knew the odds of finding guards inside were high, and I didn’t like my odds for winning against more than one. I peeked inside, just long enough to see what was inside. There were five pods against the wall. Three were closed, and two were open. I could only assume that this was how the invaders slept. I crept in and looked at the pod controls. There appeared to be lock commands.
I locked the three after confirming that they were occupied and discovered they were cryogenics pods, freezing the scouts in a deep sleep. Now, I had five down and five to go. I went back to the door and hacked into the wall panel using the alien tablet, and discovered the rudimentary sensor system, at least by Trek standards. It seemed there were three on the bridge and two in engineering.
Of course, I picked engineering, and made my way down. I knew that I would never be able to defeat two scouts stealthily, so I’d have to break my cover. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I’d have to take the three by surprise in order to beat them, and changed my course. I turned a corner and ran right into one of the largest I’d seen. My reflexes were faster and I managed to kick his gun away before he could shoot and slammed my own into his neck where humans tend to have airways. Since they talked out of the same orifice we did, it was a logical choice.
He went down gurgling, and I discovered what happened when one of them dies. They immediately turn into a gaseous form and dissipate into the air. It did not bode well. Fortunately, there were now two on the bridge rather than three. I continued on my path and stopped at the bridge entrance, pulling out the tablet. It confirmed two life forms inside. There was one crouching at a console near floor level, and one laying down half in another console with some form of loud drill.
I charged in and brained the crouching alien, taking care to act while the drill was still loud. I then rushed the other and forced his drill thing around into his face, unfortunately killing him. I was getting angry. The longer I thought about the destruction of humanity, the more anger I felt, the more I wanted to kill every last one of them. This time, I couldn't stop myself.
It was then that I looked out a window. We weren’t on Earth. The viewport led out into a high orbit around Earth, seeming to be near one thousand miles. I sat down hard, glad the enemy in here was already dead. I hadn’t felt the ship move when the leader left, so he must be in engineering! There was ten crew, I had incapacitated eight, leaving the last two. I looked at the map again and confirmed my suspicion, and worked my way back to engineering.
My plan, was to take out the ninth crewman, and take the torturer hostage to take me back down to the planet. Then, I’d turn him over to someone, probably the Department of Homeland Security or the NSA or something. But first, I had to capture him alive. I worked my way aft, gun at the ready, unsure if it would work as I depressed the trigger. I peered into engineering, wary of the fight ahead. The alien I didn’t recognize was standing with his/her/its back to me, so I aimed and fired. And jumped a mile as a bolt of what looked like plasma fired out the end at close to light speeds.
The alien went down in a literal flash, burned to a crisp. I pointed the gun at the leader, and said, “Oh, so that’s how this thing works! Good, I’d hate to accidentally kill you.”
“Oh, well this is a problem.” Before I could fire, he flung something out of his abdominal armor, not sure what to call it, and it swirled around me, slicing up my arms, back, and stomach. I fired a shot reflexively and cringed as it blasted the swirling blade to smithereens, and heated my stomach. The interrogator, the leader, began to pull out another, but stopped as I raised the plasma pistol to aim at his head.
“I wouldn’t advise that again. I think I can shoot you pretty easily before you can manage to pull another out. Now, you’re going to tell me how to get back to the surface, or I’m going to be forced to break your legs.” He simply smiled and threw the swirling blade thing at what I assumed to be the engine.
“You’re dead, and I accomplished my mission!” With this, he broke his neck, evaporating into a similar cloud of vapor as his comrade. I began to run toward what looked like an escape pod marking on the tablets map, fearing I would be too late. I hopped inside and slammed my fist on the largest button I could find, praying to any God that would listen to save my miserable life.
Apparently there is at least one God, as I’m alive. The pod flew away from the ship just in time to see it explode soundlessly in the vacuum of space. The flames quickly drew back into the wreckage as the oxygen died out. My only hope now, is to figure out how to call NASA.
It took me two days of nonstop work to manage jury rigging a radio out of the components available. You could imagine NASA’s surprise at finding a human in a vessel that had just shown up on radar. At first they didn’t believe me, but as my story went on, they interrupted less. I asked them to send word to the conference and to Angela, so as not to keep everyone worried, and they began feeding me instructions on how I would make it out alive.
I would be spending the next three months on the ISS, but first I had to pilot my craft into an equivalent orbit. Then, I had to perform a spacewalk using the emergency life support suit I found in the craft. It was several sizes too large, but should save my life when the time came. It would inevitably take a week for me to catch up and perform the space walk to get inside the ISS, but there were enough rations in the pod to survive twice that long. Of course, the cuisine was disgusting.
I have been on the ISS for six days. The space walk went off without a hitch, but I have received no end of questions from the astronauts inhabiting the station. Ever since the Russians abandoned their half, the US has had an extra bunk available, so I haven’t had to put anyone out. The astronauts assumed it was a test of sorts for the newly christened Orion missions, but I can’t tell them. I’ve been told my NASA, who was apparently told by the CIA, that I’d be silenced if word came out. So, for now I’ve stayed quiet. My wounds are healing slower than they normally would, and at the pace they were healing I’d still quite possibly be bleeding when I arrived back on Earth.
Today’s the day. The escape pod will be sent crashing to Earth; if it survives it will be studied, if not no one will be the wiser. I was returning home after more than three months in space, something most Space Physicists never experience. I got to help the astronauts refine their equipment all while studying life in space. I have been refining my FTL drive while attempting to create some form of artificial gravity for use in our exodus.
But for now, I would be heading home…
Three months to the day after I returned, I actually returned. The CIA had been holding me for what they called a “debriefing” but what I called an interrogation. I refused to tell them anything, and managed to get them to buy my silence for a time. The pod had survived the re-entry, so my word had weight.
I had not been allowed contact with anyone I knew. My boss, my parents, my sister, or Angela. They had been told I was needed on a project that would require radio silence for the foreseeable future, when in fact I was a prisoner. My wounds had still not healed; sure, some had closed, but a good half of them were still open and bleeding without bandages. Whatever that swirling blade was, it had to have bad juju against human physiology.
The more I thought about the aliens reasoning for taking Earth, the more I realized I had been fed a lie. The combination of Sodium and Chlorine is not a rare one, so why would the aliens need to travel anywhere near as far to find a source. No, there was an ulterior motive, one that I couldn’t begin to fathom.
Angela didn’t believe my story. I told it much the same way I wrote it out on paper, skipping the parts she had been present for. She nodded her head as I finished and hugged me saying she believed me. Unfortunately, I didn’t believe her. I knew her too well to know when she was lying. She doubted my story on a deep level. I had no time to worry about that, I only had five and a half years to prepare for the invasion, and if the government wouldn’t help, I’d have to find a way on my own.
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Originally Posted by Ryan Gilpatric
