A short science fiction story.
Written Language Recognition Code Inserted Here: { } /Archaic English/
This is the final archival summary report logged from the last space centre still functioning on Earth
The last generation of us: EBHSU (earth-born Homo sapiens unmodified) are soon to depart Earth – to experience Star Sight for ourselves
We are destined for: MACS0647-JD
Feasibility of reaching destination: unknown
Arrival date: unknown
8,196,320 returners remain asleep: location: 50 miles beneath this location
A few radical EBHSU’s remain – inhabiting forest, jungle and desert
Earth date: unknown
Summary Report:
The first test reports came back inconclusive. Lab experiments on such a limited scale could never anticipate or even hypothetically assess the psychological, biological, even existential effects of long term hibernation. So the first expeditions within our solar system were the first catalogued experiences. 5 years in pod sleep was sufficient to know that the human body did not take well to it. Bone density and muscle mass were severely depleted and it took months of intense physical training to return to a sense of normality, to a state of pre-hibernation health. But nobody expected the dreams. What happens to the brain when it is suspended? Do the multi-trillion neurological networks just remain in stasis? Is memory simply frozen? Where does the mind…go? Scientists couldn’t predict what would happen. It was a risk. A risk the first voyagers had to take. A risk we had to take collectively.
The first voyagers returning on the 10 year space missions all reported strange dreaming experiences, even those who had previously never recalled their dreams. Vivid recollections of childhood and adult memories fused with events that occurred throughout their lifetime and before. Nothing too strange until in their recovery period they reported dreaming of the pod dreams, as though some part of their unconscious minds were processing the 10 years of brain activity as the body froze in induced artificial sleep. Some maintained that it was a consequence of the drugs that kept the human body alive, barely. Others speculated it was a consequence of the suspension liquid. It was hard to fully comprehend it all. The technology had suddenly made it all possible, one equation by one rogue biologist and the rest just followed. There just hadn’t been time to test it. And, of course, time itself was the thing needing to be tested.
The 50 year missions reported the same, but those voyagers seemed more unsettled, more disturbed by their hibernation recollections. Some also reported sensory changes. Smell and taste sensations had been dulled, and in other ways heightened. The scientists did their tests, made their calculations, but were unable to account for the phenomenon. At this point the experiences of hibernation were just minor side effects, a small price to pay for one of the most significant breakthroughs in all human endeavour. But once the missions began going further afield the side effects became more startling. Upon waking the voyagers reported acutely vivid ‘visions’. Some described the experience as floating, some felt they transcended the physical enclosure of the pod, others felt that they had travelled deeper inside themselves. Perhaps the brain tuned in on itself, created new neural networks, explored deeper enclaves of memory, thought and human cognisance. The science offered only speculation. The science only revealed our still limited knowledge of the human self…of where the ‘I’ lurks, of the separating lines between thought and matter, being and physical embodiment. Besides, despite all the questions, speculations and philosophy – physical survival was the only aspect of suspended life that truly interested anyone, was the only thing, ultimately, that mattered. That was until the 100 year missions were successful – then everybody started paying attention. Brief notes made on the voyagers’ post hibernation experiences and their ‘revival adjustment’ became long transcripts, and the long transcripts turned into entire books…page after page of vision, testimony, lived experience, recollection upon recollection sometimes bordering on the supernatural, sometimes incoherently surreal, sometimes undecipherable as though what had been encountered could not be put into words, perhaps some things, new things, were simply beyond the parameters of known language, beyond the tongued walls of known articulation. Some of the returners, unable to verbally articulate their dreams, chose to paint, creating spectacular visual forms. Some assembled enormous representations of unrecognisable regions of the universe. Imaginative dream-fabrications perhaps, perhaps not. Other images were impossible to understand – swathes of colour, twisted nebulae, swirling constellations, undocumented stellar forms, strange symbols and undecipherable mathematical equations.
And then everything was made public. Wild hypotheses were constructed. Some of the old religious zealots came out of the brickwork, resurrected the buried myths, dusted off the discarded texts that once blindly led man through millennia – led him through the misery of countless wars and eventually forced him to battle through his barbarism and come out the other side. Wiser, freer, knowingly alone and still as lost. Then, as before, religion lost its way, was outgrown…and the gods once again were laid to rest.
Once the 300 year missions were successful, people on the ground became more curious. New generations set to work attempting to decipher the dreaming experiences reported by the voyagers. New sciences sprung up, new theories invented. Patterns were emerging which were painstakingly decrypted by the new generation of computers. The old dreams of AI were cast aside, once these new machines had captured the collective imagination. New ways of thinking and living developed – civilisation continually evolving with the passing seasons. By the time the 500 year missions returned the focus of humanity changed. The old interests died a natural death, a small number continued their passions – their creativity and intellect still focused on the earth, still rooted to the old ways, but mostly the eyes of man were turned upward…wondering how far we could go…how long the human body could survive – drifting, suspended, unconscious. As the climate changed, worsened, the majority of survivors left – taking the hopes of man to new worlds.
Centuries came and went. Fewer people born, more leaving, the earth gradually repairing itself. The great cities of the world crumbled to towns, then deteriorated further to villages populated by clans who mainly lived surrounding the space centres – carefully constructed structures designed to send out new pods and receive returners over the ages. Eventually the ruination of cities crumbled away leaving little sign of the grand buildings, towers and dwelling houses that once littered the land. For those left, existence on earth was the best it had ever been. War, illness, politics, the divisive scourge of countries, race and nationalism, divergent and conflicting human endeavours, currencies, and the fight over resources – all became remote history. The richness of the natural world returned to a bountiful state prior to the crises of the 22nd century. The fauna of the planet largely went unobserved and undisturbed – left to run its own evolutionary course. And everything human became driven by one desire – to reach ever further into the universe, and in so doing learn more about the workings of the human brain in deep pod hibernation.
The very concept of time radically altered too – it had to. And with the shifting of time came a major shift in the very concept of being human. Individuality lost its meaning, the personal and temporal lost its allure, communities changed, the concept of family vanished, the limits of one lifetime expanded to encompass multiple centuries and beyond. The panic of death was overcome with the overcoming of isolated oneness. This was a by-product of the returners’ dream experiences. Consciousness itself continuously redefined itself – perpetually expanded with the insights accumulated from ‘Star Sight’, because ultimately that was what it was: seeing the stars. Some, however, argued it was not space and stars the voyagers saw but the vast internal geography of the human mind. Some philosophers argued they were one and the same – that the ancient Cartesian divisions existed on a grander scale – a scale encompassing the very possibility of infinity, of multiple universes.
After the 10,000 year missions returned humanity’s project shifted again. The desire man once had – to exist in multiple solar systems, to inhabit multiple planets had been achieved, and later down the line, lost its appeal. The project of being then became directed singularly toward Star Sight – to travel vast interstellar distances purely to experience longer and deeper expanding (un)consciousness, with no other agenda. For countless centuries the visions and experiences of those who returned were deciphered, analysed, picked apart any way possible – and then reassembled with the perpetual reworking of the craft once known as science. Until it all came to a sudden end. Past 10,000 years the mind seemed to close down – the stories, pictures, descriptions, philosophies and myriad artistry created by the returned travellers lessened. For a while panic set in. The first new returners came back blind and deaf, until at 10,500 years their bodies came back to earth silent and motionless, but still alive. The space centres decided to connect the hibernating minds to the largest computers ever built – in an attempt to understand what the returners were experiencing, in an attempt to reach them, revive them.
At 10,500 years of hibernation the human body, it was concluded, finally reached its limit. Beyond this the perpetual stillness and immobility seemed to pacify the flesh – make limb, bone, cell and gene – redundant, obsolete. Yet the mind continued, and still needed a warm home to thrive in, still needed a host to feed and sustain it. And what the vast technological brain of the computers churned out was, ultimately, undecipherable. The only conclusion possible was that Star Sight had grown beyond the comprehension of earth-bound thought. Some analysts thought there was movement in the black silent screens, some detected obscure sounds, some were convinced they felt something strange move within them as they gazed into the dark abyss. And some thought, radically, that the darkness, at times, was actually omitting light.
Unlike most voyagers born on other worlds who either volunteered to return to Earth for research purposes or who felt psychologically compelled to return ‘home’, these computer-connected returners never woke up – never regained conventional consciousness. So they were put away, held in pod-tombs beneath the surface of the earth – left to dream their dark dreams with flesh still warm and hearts still beating. Occasionally they were looked upon…the suspension fluid keeping their bodies in stasis – the rot and decay of time kept at bay just enough for their brains to go on existing. And the computers, however long the scientists stared, never gave back any clues. The detachment – of brain from body, mind from matter, once a dream desired by many, was never possible. Without a beating heart the machinations of the mind slowly go out – a flicker of light finally extinguished.
Despite the distances reached by the voyagers, no evidence of other life forms have been detected, this remains a catastrophic disappointment. We always hoped others were out there. Some returners claim to have had mysterious encounters but tangible evidence remains elusive. The colonised planets sustain pockets of life established by us – orchestrated by the endless stream of voyagers who found inhabitable zones and executed the protocols to establish sustainable life. Some offspring of the voyagers, born of extricated and modified DNA, chose not to experience Star Sight – chose instead to live out their days on other planets reviving the habits of their distant ancestors. Talking in old dialects, using the old tools, reliving the old rituals of birth and death seamlessly stitched together with that one enduring human trait that never quite disappeared – biological desire. But most of man drifted out to sea – alive, sleeping, on rustless, ageless ships pulled by the gravity of myriad planets, moons and stars – achieving man’s enduring aim that was with us from the very start – for Star Sight has given us, not a detachment from blood and bone, not just other worlds to call home – but cognitive immortality.