Tareq crinkled his brow, avidly studying the readings beneath the swollen image. The planet glowed in a shroud of pixels, its varied hues threading and wafting across the surface. The atmospheric content seemed promising, strikingly similar to the climate of Earth. But there was a difference. It lay 700 light years in the direction of Chameleon—700 years into its past that he stared. A few teammates burst into cheer, but he ignored them. Something was off. Déjà vu hit him like an epiphany in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t sure he could spare even a minute of sleep for the coming weeks.
The systems engineer popped a champagne bottle and began to pour a round of dollops into the tumblers of eager hands. But Tareq couldn’t dismiss the cluster of mustatils checkerboarding vast stellate patterns of carbon-heavy land as mere natural formations. He thought of farms or cities, but for the moment he was hinging on assumptions. Glasses clinked. Though spectrographically vague, the ground was mottled in places, yet smooth in others. “To life in the void!” Someone cried and drank their fill. The spots turned out to be clastic rock, having been splintered and tossed from what originally formed it, then intermingled with the potpourri flooding the continents. One of the analysts japed at Tareq’s stolid poise fixed before the screen, glowering at the torrent of data and avoiding his peers like an arrant prude; yet Tareq stubbornly remained in his seat, refusing to budge. The graph spiked in places with high reflectivity. But it was land, not salt deposits or water, and even contained isotopic traces peppering throughout. He frowned. The conviviality continued, the perfect juxtaposition to his austerity.
His team members meant well, excelling at their individual tasks and showing passionate resolve, but failed to look past their confirmation biases while new data poured in that might have said otherwise. He could hear it in their cavalier manner of laughing like hyenas.
The keyboard clattered away, as if to rival their endless chatter. He huffed in frustration.
Without averting his gaze, he continued to scour over the planetary readings. The conditions were ripe for habitability: a calm G-type sun, a similar orbit, and the clear divisions between land and ocean. But upon scrutinizing a loose composite of the planetary surface, he reeled back, eyes flared, and slammed two fists beside the keyboard, shouting through the din. The control room went silent, and the meniscus within the bottle settled.
Securing their attention, he simmered and explained that while the finding proved beyond a reasonable doubt of extraterrestrial life, they were looking at a dead world, one whose inhabitants and technological prowess had long since vanished in what he presumed to have been an ancient cataclysm, and from the details on the spectrograph, likely self-inflicted. He listed every mark proving his hypothesis, including remnants of cesium, plutonium, and xenon, a sooty boundary line, and the vitrified lakes. But one element gave him serious pause in the course of his exegesis. He waved them over.
After exchanging pensive glances, the party gathered around the feed. Only a few seconds elapsed before their nerves iced over, their expressions frozen with shock. The topography was unmistakable. The team recognized every lithographic contour etching out what turned out to be seven continents.
It must have been some kind of mistake, perhaps an internal error, a spontaneously generated hoax, or a glitch where the AIs accidentally transfused Earth-based geo-maps as a placeholder when a loose simulacrum of the actual planet would have sufficed. He checked if his channel had been linked to the wrong satellite feed, possibly conflicting with a geosynchronous node that eclipsed the cone of observation. To his surprise, everything was on spec.
He reloaded the topographical data. When the graphs, images, and data reemerged, a pit as deep as the Mariana Trench bottomed out in his stomach. The stats never changed, nor did the planet’s recognizability. No doubt, it was the Earth.
If the readings were accurate, the team witnessed a physical impossibility, a discovery with a zero-probability rate of happening in any cosmic scenario. The cause drew puzzled looks, eluding every calculation. Tareq drummed his fingers, eyeing the director in the hope of additional input. Instead, the room plunged into a flurry of questions, and he momentarily dismissed himself in order to collect his thoughts.
It was early in the evening. He sprawled over the matted couch, staring at the parting sun while nervously twiddling his thumbs when the LAN line rang. He stumbled out of his chair and back into the control room where his director solemnly stared him down with the phone in his hand. The man slammed it into the cradle, having spoken with the science foundation over a new development. They had found evidence of stellar lensing that rimmed the field of view. A black hole had crossed paths of both solar systems, which somehow tampered with the incoming data.
Only one conclusion seemed evident: the event horizon rippled space and time, creating a mirror effect, but stemming from the distant future. No one had answers on how the events lined up with such alarming precision, that a cosmological conjunction was too slim to happen, or how the singularity bent space and time in such a way as to violate causality, but the phenomenon lay directly in front of them as real as the building in which they stood. As to when this cataclysm might have occurred, it became uncomfortably apparent that only time would tell, and judging by current events, they suspected their time was short.
Special thanks to Torin Fletcher/Agr1ppa for suggestions. Please check out his amazing work!
Issue #4 available soon! Stay tooned!
Also, please check out my other short stories: Robert Garron’s Substack
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