(Longpost, Scifi) Afficher plus
It took a few centuries, but eventually the Voyager missions found their way in the hearts and minds of a distant civilization, some neighbors of a distant star.
It wasn't so much a question of how they all got there before they were projected to even exit the Oort cloud, as who these people were whose shadowy figures showed on SETI screens.
We shared so much in common, and neither of us had ever met an alien before. The experience was novel, in spite of what we shared.
——
Perhaps what was more enlightening wasn't the information we could learn from each other, but the harsh lessons our distance taught us.
When we formally established contact and shared our cultures bottom-up, it was a hundred-year contract from inception to commencement. You see, bandwidth was in ample supply — we'd by that point pointed entire fleets of flying sensor arrays at each other's homeworlds — but the distance was still many dozens of lightyears
When we spoke, all our voices could be heard, but it was a rare occasion that a person would live to hear a reply. There was enough to occupy a lifetime for every individual, yet hardly a dialogue.
——
And so we watched in horror when their world collapsed in front of us. In real-time, we witnessed their media broadcasts, Internet forums, social media, political debates, home videos...
Every day we woke up to find a new video to watch, every hour another comment from officials, every minute another cry from the public.
But by the time we had heard the first of these events were happening, their world had already ended.
When the first static in millennia fell upon our eyes and ears, we had witnessed over a single decade a historical record of their apocalypse.
——
Of course we had frantically attempted to reverse-engineer the process that transported the Voyager missions so far, and we were successful to an extent:
We knew how we could meet them in person, one day, but it would still be centuries in between.
And when at last we launched our first manned mission to the outer solar system, in the direction of our old friends, who had been with us so long and as live as our own Internet (if a bit slow to respond) it wasn't a rescue, but a ceremony for the dead.
——
When we arrived, we found survivors, of course. Just like us, they were too bright not to endure the worst of adversities.
But neither could they remember us. Archaic legend, a distorted oral history to them, was all that survived over the quarter-millennium they spent in squalor.
Their world in ruin and their society reduced to desperation, what few remained could only understand us as their ancestors, come to reclaim our forgotten comrades.
Perhaps this was the best we could hope for, as surely in the ten thousand years we had known each other, we had come to know each other as the very same.
