Jules
The click of the woman’s high heels echoed through the empty halls as she rushed across the dimly lit laboratory.
Her destination was the receiver room on the other side of the lab. She had just gotten a call that, if it were true, would change the world yet again.
The woman was Doctor Jules Radikiss. Tall and willowy, and seeming even taller due to her heels, her long brown hair fell in untamed curls down to the small of her back. She wore a labcoat and huge, round glasses, and her expression was equal parts exhaustion and anticipation.
Jules was practically running down the hall, as much as her heels would allow. Whose idea was it to put the receiver on the other side of the lab? she thought, conveniently forgetting that she was the one who designed the Charon lab’s layout. After what, to her, felt like ages, she finally tore open the door and flicked on the receiver. Half a dozen monitors flicked on in front of her, each one showing a different stream of data. She reached up to one of them and quickly tabbed through a couple of windows until she found the one she wanted. Her eyes quickly scanned through the seemingly meaningless stream of letters and numbers, and lips shaped out each character as she read it. She fed the data into her implants as she did, and her onboard AI helped her to decode the data in real time. Her eyes got wider with every line she read, and when she got to the end of the page she blinked and took a step back, lacing her fingers on the top of her head.
“It’s real,” she murmured to herself. “The Farsight is back in action.”
The Farsight was an unmanned ship. To be specific, it was the first ship designed by the scientists of Earth with the ability to travel faster than light. The technology behind it was reverse engineered from an alien craft discovered in the outer Solar System. This so-called Lifeboat had consumed the lives of Jules and hundreds of other scientists for the last two decades or so, and the Farsight was the culmination of their research. The craft was sent to the Wolf 1061 system with ultra-long range radio transmitters as well as several faster-than-light buoy drones to bring back data quicker. The buoys never arrived, and once the radio signals reached Earth, they abruptly stopped after just a few days. A few days after that, the first ever official human contact with aliens followed. The first message that humanity ever heard from extraterrestrial life was a warning.
They have found you. They are coming.
That was a bit over a day ago. Since then, there had been no more messages from either the Farsight or from whomever sent humanity that warning. Considering the content of the warning, many assumed that whoever “they” were had wiped out whoever sent the message, and probably the Farsight along with it. The governments of Earth were preparing for a potential interstellar war – one that we were woefully underprepared for – with almost no real information about what was coming.
Until now.
The data that Jules was reading off and interpreting in real time told her that the Farsight’s buoys had returned to the Solar System. She had so many questions and there was so much data, but the first on her mind was a simple one. What happened to the Farsight? The radio signals from the probe and the alien warning had reached earth via radio, meaning that they took 14 years to travel the distance across the interstellar void. That meant, in turn, that the messages were sent 14 years ago. The probes, however, traveled more or less instantly thanks to the technology of the referential drives installed on them. The probes had been in the Alpha Centauri system and collecting data for 14 years.
14 years worth of data to sift through. Contact with aliens. A potential invading force. Jules leaned back and ran her hands through her hair. She couldn’t do this on her own. With a groan, she realized that she would have to call him. With another groan, she pulled up her comm implant’s UI and punched in the numbers.
Nineteen hours later, Jules still hadn’t slept. Just before the drones returned, she had slept for a measly three or four hours, but before that she hadn’t slept in nearly two days. She had just finished a cup of coffee and went to make another, only to realize she had gone through the entire container. She felt like she had just opened it yesterday – because she had.
She sighed into her empty coffee mug and made her way back to the receiver room. Her colleague, Doctor Marcus Hatch, had his head down, consumed in the dozens upon dozens of printed papers in front of him. He didn’t even notice her enter.
Marcus was only about a decade older than Jules, but he looked as if he could be her father. He was nearly bald, wrinkled, and even his skin seemed to be grey. His glasses were even thicker than Jules’s, and his sweater was wrinkled and creased, with a coffee stain on the front.
“We’re out of coffee.” Jules said when she entered. Marcus didn’t respond. “Hatch,” she said, a little bit louder. Still no response. “Hatch!” she practically yelled this time, and Marcus jumped a little in his seat.
“Hm, oh, what is it? I was almost done with last year’s telemetry data,” he said with poorly-hidden annoyance.
“We’re out of coffee,” Jules said again, turning her empty mug upside down.
“Oh. Well, could you go get some more? I’ve been up for so long working on this.”
“I’ve been up for longer than you, you jerk. And besides,” she continued, glancing at her watch. “It’s almost three in the morning, nowhere is going to be open.”
“What about-”
“Hatch, if you think I haven’t tried to find somewhere to buy coffee around here at 3 in the morning before tonight, you don’t know me at all.”
“Hm. Fair point. Well then, do you have a spare bedroom you could sleep in so I can get right back to work in the morning?”
Jules sighed, not missing which person he said would be sleeping in the guest bedroom. “Follow me,” she said, and walked out of the room, not waiting to see if he actually followed.
Marcus Hatch was one of the most brilliant scientists humanity had ever produced. When the Lifeboat was discovered, he was the first to crack into its secrets. He was the main mind behind reverse-engineering the referential drive, the shielding system, the mass-minimal thrusters, and who knows what else. His expertise and skills were absolutely invaluable to the progress humanity had made in the past two decades, and Jules knew that there was nobody who would be able to help her with the probe’s data better than him, and definitely no one else on Charon.
But none of that changed the fact that he was insufferable. He had a classic case of what Jules liked to call the “genius ego,” believing himself to be the smartest and most important person in any room he was in. The worst part, in Jules’s opinion, is that he was usually right. At least she could console herself with the fact that it had nothing to do with her gender, age, or anything else about her in particular – he was like that with everyone.
Jules led Marcus to the guest bedroom she had had installed when she had the lab built. This lab was more than just a workplace for her, it was quite literally her home. She had an entire wing of the building dedicated to a living space for herself, and luckily she had the foresight to include a guest bedroom alongside her own. The guest room was clean and neat, rather spartan, and a little bit dusty, but it would be fine for Marcus. She opened the door and showed him in. “Bathroom is down the hall to your left, linen closet is across the hall from it if you need more blankets or a towel if you want to shower. See you in the morning,” Jules said, and didn’t wait for a response before leaving him to himself and heading to her own bedroom.
Jules’s bedroom was the exact opposite of the guest room. It was an absolute disaster. Piles of clothes, dirty and empty coffee mugs, and candy wrappers were scattered around the room. The bed was buried under a pile of blankets and pillows that stacked nearly as tall as she was. The only neat space in the room was in the corner by the window, where she kept a recliner and a bookshelf packed nearly to bursting with books of all kinds.
Jules sighed and walked to the corner, stepping over piles of mess on the way. She grabbed the book she was currently reading off the top of the bookshelf, and her gaze fell onto the holographic picture frame next to it. The picture it depicted was herself when she was about 12, with her parents and her older sister, Lyla. This picture was taken right before they moved across the Solar System, for what was far from the first, or the last, time.
Now that Jules thought about it, she couldn’t even remember where they had lived at the time and where they moved to after. The four of them had lived on nearly every major inhabited body in the Solar System by the time Lyla had turned 18. Their parents were also scientists, planetary geologists to be precise, and their research had been what had taken them across the Solar System. To Jules, it was a perfect childhood, full of exploration and learning and wonder. To Lyla, not so much, and once she turned 18 she distanced herself from the rest of the family. Jules hadn’t seen her in a few years now, but they messaged occasionally. Last she heard, Lyla had moved back to Earth and started work for some big entertainment company.
Jules sank down into her recliner with her book. Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert. One of her favorites. She knew she could just use her implants to read a book, but she had always preferred the feel of a physical book. She opened it up and began to read, but barely made it a page before her eyes began to droop. She tried to fight it just a little longer, but the exhaustion overcame her and she drifted off to sleep.
She woke with a start as Marcus pounded on her bedroom door. “Julia!” He always insisted on using her full name. “Wake up! You’ve got to see what I just found in the data.”
Jules blinked and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She fumbled for her glasses, which had fallen off at some point in the night. A quick glance at the clock her implants placed at the corner of her vision told her that she had slept for nearly 6 hours. A good night’s sleep, for Jules. She stood up and stretched, yawning, and called out “I’ll be right out, Marcus.” She took a few moments to shake herself awake and straighten her clothes and hair a bit before opening the door.
When she opened the door, Marcus was beaming excitedly and nearly bouncing in place. He looked somewhat like a child on Christmas. Jules suppressed a smirk at the thought. “What did you find, Marcus?” she asked.
“Okay,” he began, already walking back towards the room where they were working the night before. “I finished the telemetry data and everything came back exactly as expected. So, I moved on to the system scans. For the first few days, everything was fine, as we thought. And then, of course, things went crazy after that, when the Farsight stopped transmitting. I don’t even know how to make sense of what happened in the next couple of days. But then everything went back to normal. Until,” he slammed his hand down on a single sheet of paper, covered in decoded data from the probe, “this.”
Jules picked up the paper and quickly scanned over the numbers. She looked up at Marcus and raised an eyebrow. “It just went back to normal, just like the telemetry. I don’t get it, what’s so special about this?”
“That’s just it, Julia. Why did it go back to normal? Shouldn’t whoever sent the warning, or whoever they were warning us about, have been there still? Why would they come just for our probe and then disappear? So, I started skipping ahead a little bit, and this is what I found.” He handed her another piece of paper.
Jules scanned it. It detailed the scans from the Farsight a few months later. The data seemed to be mostly normal, except for one line of data. Jules read the data, did some quick mental math, and then her eyes widened.
Marcus was nodding. “It’s big. At first I thought it was an asteroid or a comet. But look at the shape. It’s too perfect, too symmetrical. The video data is still transmitting and it’s only made it to about a year in, but this data is almost at the 2 year mark. We won’t know for sure until that comes in but…”
All the color had drained from Jules’s face. “So you think it’s…”
Marcus grinned, his excitement at a new discovery clearly overshadowing the fear of what that discovery meant. “Julia. I think it’s a ship.”
The next few days were a whirlwind. Jules and Marcus spent the next hours searching for more signs of the ship in the data while they waited for the video to finish transmitting. When the video did finally catch up, their suspicions were confirmed.
The ship was huge. Estimates based on the surrounding celestial bodies placed it at roughly the size of the asteroid Juno. Jules thought it looked like someone had taken two pineapples and squished them together at the ends. The stern and bow of the ship fanned out into dozens of arched structures, and the middle widened out the cylindrical body of the ship to form a sort of eye shape. In between the spikes at either end were dozens of engines, and the scientists could tell that they were a mixture of conventional mass-propellant thrusters and the more advanced mass-minimal thrusters that Earth scientists had reverse engineered from the Lifeboat. The ship rotated lazily on its roll axis, although considering the size, “lazy” may not be the best descriptor.
The scariest thing, however, were the thousands of what were clearly weapons covering roughly 40% of the surface of the ship.
The blueshift of the video feed as the ship came in put it at about three-quarters the speed of light, but it slowed down dramatically as it entered the system. It entered the system and sent out a fleet of smaller vessels that scattered across the system, gathering resources and supplies from the planets and other celestial bodies, continuing a lazy path across the system. After about four years spent harvesting the system, it left, headed roughly towards the Solar System. For whatever reason, the ship’s occupants either didn’t notice the Farsight or just didn’t care.
Of almost as much interest to the two scientists was what happened right after the Farsight arrived at Wolf 1061’s system. Watching the video feed, it was clear what happened when the data went haywire. The probe had dived into reference, but not from its own drive. A different, and much much smaller ship, had gotten to the Farsight first.
This ship looked a lot like the Lifeboat.
It was impossible to tell where in the universe this ship had taken the Farsight, and in the end it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that the aliens who took it studied it, learned where we were from and our technology and whatever they could glean about our culture and society, and then destroyed the referential drive. They also sabotaged the drives on the buoys that Jules and Marcus were currently studying the data from, and then dropped the Farsight back in Wolf 1061.
Just hours before the giant ship showed up, another craft, similar to the first small one, returned to Wolf 1061 and restored the referential drives on the buoys. It had taken most of the twelve remaining years for the built-in generators to store enough energy for the buoys to make the jump, and then the Farsight’s rudimentary AI sent the buoys back home.
Jules and Marcus were baffled by this turn of events. Why would this ship send us a warning, but prevent us from getting it until 14 years later? Why would they help humanity with one hand and sabotage us with the other? Jules didn’t know. She wasn’t a sociologist or a xenobiologist. All she did know were the facts, and the facts told her that aliens were coming towards Earth, and they didn’t look friendly.
Jules and Marcus debated for a few days what to do next while they worked on more of the data.
“We should take it to the press,” Marcus argued.
Jules shook her head. “There would be panic. An actual alien invasion headed to the Solar System? People would riot in the streets. Or have orgies. Or both.”
“People have a right to know, Julia. Their worlds are about to change forever, and they deserve to know that.”
“Don’t act like you have some great and noble motivation, Marcus. You just know that if we go through the proper channels, you won’t get the recognition you think you deserve.”
Marcus’s face turned pink. Jules couldn’t tell if it was anger or embarrassment, but it didn’t matter. She could tell she had struck a nerve.
“Fine then, Julia. You do whatever you think is right.” Marcus turned and stormed out of the lab. Jules would get no more help from him. That was fine though: she had more than enough to make her point. Jules spent the rest of the night preparing to present her findings to the Interplanetary Council and securing a time slot to do so. Luckily, her work on the Lifeboat and her renown as a scientist went a ways longer than she would’ve thought.
She woke up the next morning to her implants showing her her’s and Marcus’s work plastered across every news site she could find. Marcus has beaten her to the punch.
“No no no,” Jules muttered to herself. “That selfish prick.” She flicked through some live coverage to see what was going on across the Solar System. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
Jules pulled up her comm implant and dialed in a number. There was someone on the Council who owed her a favor, and it was time to cash it in.
14 hours later, Jules was in front of some of the most powerful people in the human race.
The Interplanetary Council was something of a spiritual successor to the 20th century’s United Nations. Just like its predecessor, it was the subject of vitriol and conspiracy theories from the fringes of society. Unlike the United Nations, however, the conspiracy theories were closer to the truth.
The Council consisted of delegates from the dozen and a half or so most powerful political and organizational bodies across the Solar System. While nominally powerless to do anything more than pass sanctions and issue diplomatic fluff, the discussions held in the Council chambers on the dark side of Luna in practice shaped policy and action across the Solar System. In essence, the Interplanetary Council was the closest thing to a unified governing body that humanity had ever known.
Jules had spent the last 45 minutes explaining the details of her and Marcus’s findings. Not that she had needed to. The details had already been made public due to Marcus’s rash decision, including the fact that the aliens could be here as soon as a decade from now. The Council had insisted on hearing her side anyway.
She had saved the most important discovery for last. She gestured to her implant and the slide changed to the photographs of the massive alien spaceship. She had expected a reaction when she was planning this presentation, but considering the circumstances, the grim silence of the Council chamber was about the best she could’ve hoped for.
Without another word, Jules closed out the presentation with her implant and began to prepare to leave the Council chamber, but she was stopped when one of the Councillors began to speak.
“Dr. Radkiss. What do you believe humanity should do?”
Jules wasn’t sure how to respond for a moment. It wasn’t her job to plan the future of humanity or direct the actions of nations. She was a scientist, and the science was there for all to see. Nonetheless, she turned back to face the Council and cleared her throat.
“Well, Councillor, I think we should prepare for first contact.”
Cambria's Corner 
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