TRIXIE & ME: 2:02 Rift Valley

Anderson was worried. His coffee had cooled, untouched. Cream settled on the surface. He looked out at the star field wondering what lay out there, who was looking back? With his eyes, he knew he'd never see anything other than the dazzling cluster of stars lighting up the eternal night, but the act of physically looking seemed somehow important.

Wisps of interstellar molecular clouds spun off to one side a mere two light years away. They stretched out for over forty light years, dwarfing the stars within the cluster. Gravitational forces were at work, forming a cosmic ballet played out over millions of years, as the cloud was drawn into the cluster and dissipated by its harsh electromagnetic winds. A newborn star on the edge of the dark cloud of hydrogen pushed back the bounds of the swirling gas. Ordinarily, Anderson would have been in awe of such a sight, but the thought of a hostile alien race hidden within the cluster around them worried him.

The darkness on the bridge of the Rift Valley was vaguely familiar. Although he'd never been in the habit of coming up here in the quiet of the evening, he knew others in his lineage had. He remembered those nights as clearly as if they had been his own memories. Having memories of a bygone age, of incidents he'd never witnessed, of events he'd never seen was a little unnerving, but that was the nature of clones. It wasn't supposed to be unsettling, but with the passage of time in his own life, Anderson felt it becoming harder and harder to distinguish his own recollections from those of his predecessors.

Not every memory stuck, it was mostly the technical thoughts, a collection of facts and figures, theories and concepts, which Anderson found handy. But those memories associated with strong emotions also tended to hang around, clouding his mind like ghosts. And now it was his turn on the bridge at night. It seemed they all ended up here at some point, for one reason or another, as though it were the rite of passage for his clonal series.

Anderson leaned on the edge of a protoplastic bench that automatically morphed into a usable surface, its artificial intelligence withdrawing the normal array of controls and holographic projectors, leaving it as a blank desktop. The section he leaned against softened subtly, providing him with a bit of padding while automatically calculating the optimum density so as to reduce the load on his skeletal structure and provide him with some comfort.

He reached back with his hand, propping himself up as he gazed out of the clear dome surrounding the bridge. The bench stiffened that area of the tabletop, adjusting its angle so it provided an appropriate amount of support.

For this particular Anderson, it was the loss of five good men that had drawn him to the quiet of the main bridge at night. Engineering had the helm, operating from deep inside the maintenance bay at the rear of the craft, doing little more than watching as the Rift glided through the heavens. The Intelligence Group was monitoring the cluster from the science deck, leaving the bridge empty.

He'd sent those five men to their deaths. Not purposefully, but the effect was the same. And as they departed, they all seemed to know what was about to unfold. Their uneasiness was almost precognitive. The goodbyes were personal, heartfelt, as they recognized this was not another training drill.

As commander, Anderson wasn't supposed to care. They were doing their duty. This is why they were here—to explore on behalf of mankind, and if need be, to die to protect the human race. Their very presence this deep within the galaxy was a sacrifice, one chosen for them by others. It was a choice they never dared question. What was one more sacrifice? They would all die anyway, sooner or later, and when they died they'd be replaced like a burnt-out light bulb. They knew they were expendable, and they accepted that, they were ordered to accept that, they were clones. Any tears that were shed were a waste. It was like crying over a broken toy. At least, that's the way it was supposed to be, but after a thousand years of isolation, separated from natural-born humans, that distinction had faded. Their emotions had grown like their memories, becoming stronger with each generation that passed. For Anderson, unspoken tension seemed to hang in the air around the crew, like humidity in the tropics waiting for the dark clouds overhead to break into a storm.

Five good men.

Dr. Phillips might be able to pull the same models off the assembly line, but she couldn't replace them. She might have scans of their memories, their personalities and interests, but it was an illusion. With the same bodies and the same experiences, their replacements might seem familiar, but they weren't the same. They were strangers as far as Anderson was concerned. You couldn't replace experience, not real experience, not experience that had been earned through blood, sweat and tears in that particular lifetime.

Perhaps his feeling of defiance was personal, he wasn't sure. One day, though, he knew it would be his youthful facsimile standing here in the cool of the evening, a doppelgänger, in every respect identical to him, in every respect except one, it wouldn't be him. He liked that, thinking of his successor as ‘it,’ depersonalizing and distancing the awful truth.

Do clones have souls? Does anyone?

And what was he? What was this personal detachment from the atoms and molecules that made up his arms, his legs, his torso? What was this intimate sense of presence and perspective that defined his life?

He was here. He was self-aware, and that meant alive. But as for the five? There was no heaven for clones.

The stars were content, the heavens were at peace, and yet, though they seemed settled, the appearance was deceiving. To him, the stars looked fixed, radiating with vibrant light, full of warmth in the bitter cold, they were beacons in the darkness. The reality, though, was that stars were seething cauldrons of superheated plasma, violent and explosive, flaring up in hellish outbursts, raging with fiery storms. Their benign appearance was a lie perpetuated only by distance. The harmony and order they portrayed hid the truth, that they would crush, burn and consume anything that drifted too close. The stars, it seemed, were as much a contradiction as life itself.

Anderson ran his fingers over his temples and through his hair.

The Serengeti, the Savannah and the Rift Valley were mankind's furthermost ventures into space, reaching far beyond the colonized zones. The Serengeti had gone north, above the galactic plane in search of intelligent life in other galaxies and the Savannah had been commissioned to explore the outer reaches of the Milky Way, charting the star-forming regions of the galaxy.

The Rift Valley had been given the core. She had been named after the cradle of humanity, that narrow tract of land in Africa where Homo Sapiens had first stepped out of the jungles and begun their journey to civilization. The Rift Valley was headed for the bulbous heart of the galaxy, the densely packed star fields that surrounded the center of the Milky Way. The Serengeti had the Hail Mary pass, being told to run long and deep, while the Savannah and the Rift Valley were barely over the celestial scrimmage line.

The Rift had been tracking the faint electromagnetic output of a potential source of extraterrestrial intelligence for over three hundred years. Buried deep within a star cluster some seven hundred light years from Earth, were three targets. The Rift had established that the point of origin for these radio waves was not stellar. They emanated from the proto-disc of a forming star, and from the outer planetary region of two other nearby star systems, one of which was a binary star group. Gravitational tides within the cluster tended to distort distant locations, but by circumnavigating a small portion of the cluster, the Rift had managed to lock down the coordinates to within half an astronomical unit, or half the distance from Earth to the sun.

Following first contact protocols, the Rift had been cautious, masking its approach by using line-of-sight stars and neutron stars, both before and aft of the craft to mask its engine bloom when maneuvering, and then coasting rather than powering into the cluster. The Rift navigated the gravity wells surrounding these stars like an eagle uses thermals, gliding between interstellar Lagrange points, taking the optimal path rather than the shortest path and, in the process, covering its tracks.

If Anderson had been navigating a mountain range on Earth, the equivalent would have been to stick to the ridge lines, moving from peak to peak and avoiding the valleys. Valleys weren't so bad to enter, but they were difficult to climb out of, and so the easiest course for the Rift was to follow the gravitationally neutral points between stars.

Three hundred years of playing cat and mouse across four generations was coming to an end. Anderson had launched scouts to conduct close surveillance and, potentially, make first contact. But, three months on, five scout ships had been lost, assumed destroyed. Four of them had reported nothing unusual. Their sensor arrays transmitting nothing out of the ordinary right up to the point static dominated the radio waves.

The fifth had detected something artificial at a distance of two astronomical units. The only reason this scout had spotted the unidentified object was because the pilot, a middle-aged man named James Berry, had been astute enough to look more broadly at the target system. When his array told him there was nothing unusual, he wanted to know what was considered usual and had idled away his time taking long-range photographs of asteroids, planets and planetoids as his craft plowed slowly through the far reaches of the system.

In a series of shots taken of an outer gas giant, resplendent in its swirling patterns of emerald green, Berry caught a glimpse of something black occulting the background stars. A dark shadow passed in front of a portion of the planet like an irregular-shaped moon, and then out across the stars beyond, blocking them briefly from view. Nothing appeared on any of his sensors. His passive radar and thermal imaging suggested it was a low-density asteroid with a poor radar profile. Although the asteroid was large, there were none of the normal echoes associated with a nickel-iron core, ice, carbon or compressed rock, suggesting it was little more than regolith, a loose collection of dust and pebbles bound together by their mutual gravitational pull.

Berry had been surprised by the phenomenal rate with which the object moved outward through the planetary system. It was moving too fast to be considered as having a natural motion, as it should have been flung apart before reaching what was an interstellar escape velocity. And its direction was wrong. It was being ejected from the system.

Berry calculated that their paths would close to within a hundred thousand miles within a week. With complete autonomy and results streaming back to the Rift, Berry expressed his concern and made the call to withdraw and observe from a distance of ten astronomical units. Anderson agreed.

When Berry changed his drift, firing his engines and actively pulling out of the gravity well surrounding the star, the alien craft realized it had been spotted and gave chase. It too changed course, arcing away toward the heliosphere as it raced to overtake the scout craft.

Berry changed course again, realizing he'd be overrun within a matter of days. He tried to drive deeper toward the heliopause, the region of space where the solar winds from the energetic young star were halted by the turbulent, interstellar electromagnetic winds within the star cluster. He said he was hoping to hide his scout craft in the noise of the bow shock thrown up into space by this star as it orbited within the cluster.

A day out from what the Rift calculated as the intercept point, just shy of the termination zone for the solar winds, number five went silent. Whether this was a countermeasure by Berry, trying to lower his electromagnetic profile and evade capture within the magnetic anomalies in that region, or whether the alien craft had jammed communications or possibly destroyed the scout, no one knew. But there were three things Anderson knew for sure.

They weren't alone.

They'd been spotted long before they spotted anything unusual.

And their counterpart’s intentions were aggressive, probably hostile.

Anderson was worried.

While making out his report for Earth, he wondered who would read it, what they would make of it, and if it would cause more problems than it would solve.

Space-time distorted everything.

Humanity was ill-equipped to handle the vastness of space and the immense passages of time that transpired within even the simplest of interstellar interactions. They'd seen this already, with the colonists around Teegarden's star, a mere twelve light years from Earth.

Even the simplest of requests could take the best part of someone's career to fulfill. With hundreds of light years between the Rift Valley and Earth, and over a thousand years difference in terms of elapsed time, Anderson wondered if he was sending a report to a dead planet, one that had already encountered this interstellar race and been driven to extinction. That was the fear, that any alien interaction would be as brutal as the Spanish conquest of South America, or the Japanese rape of Nanking in China, with atrocities comparable to those of the British in South Africa during the Boer War. He also considered that the Rift Valley's intentions might have been misinterpreted and misunderstood, their stealth having been mistaken for a threat.

Maybe this alien species had spread asymmetrically and had already made contact with mankind in other regions. They could have established diplomatic relations centuries ago, and neither he nor his alien counterpart would know. They could end up firing on each other like border guards on some long forgotten frontier, relics of ignorance and intolerance.

Intergalactic space was big enough for everyone, both species could have peacefully coexisted for hundreds of years already, and so Anderson's warning would be a somewhat quaint and amusing artifact of this chronological distortion.

The most likely scenario, though, was that this was a first contact, perhaps the first contact ever, and the exact nature of mankind’s first interstellar relationship would take years to flesh out, maybe decades or even centuries before it resolved into its final form.

Would anyone remember those five that died in the initial foray? Would anyone care? Anderson cared. Apart from the crew of the Rift Valley, at least those who had known these men personally, no one else would ever see them as anything more than a byline in history. He'd sent them out alone, and they'd died alone.

Anderson peered at the vast molecular cloud below the Rift Valley, at least it was below from his current orientation. Its dark clouds were illuminated by the solar wind streaming off a pair of newborn stars. The musty, brown cloud was the perfect place to hide, with its billowing tendrils reaching out over seven light years across, but that was precisely why Anderson hadn't taken the Rift into this region. It was too obvious. If this were his back yard, he'd be watching those clouds like a hawk. Any passage through the molecular hydrogen would leave a wake, while any powered maneuvers would leave an infrared smudge glowing behind them. Accelerating would be taxing, as the thick hydrogen would compress in front of the Rift, pushing their shields beyond design constraints. No, as tempting as it was to sit inert, drifting with the cloud, blending invisibly into the background, if they were sprung it would be disastrous.

Anderson understood his duty to the ship. It extended far beyond the four hundred men and women on board. His was an obligation to future generations, both onboard the Rift and back on Earth. He had dispatched a second wave of three scouts, but only to observe the agreed rendezvous point for the first wave. They were to remain cold for a period of five months, silently watching, waiting, but he knew it was futile. The rendezvous was at a Lagrange point between three nearby stars, just shy of the molecular cloud.

The scouts were to passively observe from at least forty astronomical units, entering a natural orbit around each of the stars so as to blend in with any far-flung Oort-cloud-like debris as they faced outward, looking toward the gravitationally neutral Lagrange point. The scouts were instructed to observe any survivors silently for at least a week before making contact.

At forty astronomical units, the distance between the scouts and any survivors would have been beyond the orbit of Pluto were they in orbit around Earth. Anderson hoped it was far enough, but his adversaries had already proven themselves adept in celestial warfare.

The hunt was on. The game was afoot.