A Meeting under the Stars

It's a sunny day when I leave.

Fitting, for a Sunday.

The world spins, faster and faster, rotations reaching light velocity.

Not much can be seen in light velocity, in truth, and I have to rely on the AI to get me to where I'm going.

When I'm going.

I'm not worried though. It hasn't failed me yet. I'd have warned myself if it ever did.

Despite not really being able to see anything, the lighting does change, as the heavens shift around us.

The absolute darkness of wormhole shifts to the dull gray radiation of a black hole as we get expelled from it.

White quasar light brightens and then darkens again as we pass by it, and then there is nothing but waiting to keep us company for a long time.

Time is a relative term here, but my father's old analog watch - a family heirloom, passed from one-star scroller to the next - tells me the hours as they pass.

My heart is beating so fast I can do nothing else but wait.

And then, a yellow speck in one corner of the dome. It gets brighter and brighter and suddenly it fills my world.

The machine slows, and a distant blue dot approaches me. The light speed at first, but it slows and slows and my breath catches.

Earth Prime.

Humans are so interesting. We've found everything there is to know about ourselves and yet we are so constantly, completely caught off guard, not by our minds but by our hearts.

I can't describe what I feel. Nostalgia, sadness, bitterness, joy, ecstasy.... home.

I know there must be an infinite number of time travelers, superimposed onto me in space-time, and maybe their emotions are influencing mine, but... somehow I feel that's not the case.

This pale blue dot. It means so much more... thirty-seven million years of history. Of tragedy and pain and heartbreak and everything evil inside of us made real. And yet. We persevered. We would persevere. I was living, walking, and visiting proof of that. We'd make it. We HAD made it.

Our hope, our curiosity, our willingness to do whatever it takes, whenever it takes to move forward, to go where no one has gone before, where nothing has tread before. It is who we are.

It's who I am.

And now I am entering Earth's gravity, and the machine quiets as it lets magnets and math do their magic. Every celestial object has a magnetosphere and the machine will use it to move in three dimensions to conserve battery. It's the least impressive thing about it.

The console lights up. I've already told it the time and the coordinates of where I want to go, but it gives me some leeway to navigate within the general vicinity if I wanted to.

I see no reason to.

And then we descend. Some island in the middle, next to Europe I think? My history was never very good, and I didn't bother to take Earth's Prime geography. Ah well.

The retro-reflective panels collect condensation as we pass through a cloud, and drape the world in rainbows. It shouldn't do that. Interact with clouds like that. I make a note, but it's not too worrying.

We're about a hundred meters from the ground and the buildings look remarkably droll. My mum would eat up this old Earth European architecture, but it all looks the same to me. Well, except for some very familiar spirals in the distance.

Ah. Here we are.

I get up from my seat. This is it. I run my suddenly clammy hands over my suit to get rid of any wrinkles.

Why am I sweating? ...I know why.

We settle down. Right next to a tree, not a sound, in the courtyard of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

The hatch opens. I should be completely invisible. Showtime.

It's a sunny day outside.

Fitting, for a Sunday.

On the Sunday morning of June 29, 2009.

I walk to the tree, careful not to make a sound.

There's a man there, in the shade.

He's in a wheelchair. Bulky archaic technology makes his body look absolutely fragile. And it's obvious his form is broken, from the way his head is tilted, the way he sits so stiffly.

We could've caught and fixed that at birth and the thought brings a tear to my eyes.

Still, he looks more baseline human than I do, though I think that won't matter much to him.

I stand in front of him, still invisible. He's typing away, slowly, on a keypad at the wheelchair's console, eyes focused on his work.

I touch the screen on my gauntlet and my distortion falls, my physical form present in three dimensions.

And he continues typing.

Ah. Well... okay.

I cough gently into my fist.

"Mr. Hawking", I say.

He glances up at me. And his fingers stop. His neck moves a bit or tries to, and his eyes widen, the only sounds being the wind and two worlds colliding.

We both stand there. A man in a wheelchair and a distant cousin, no longer even the same species. But still.

His shaking hand pushes a button. The voice of Dennis Klatt pipes up.

"Hello."

And it's so wonderful. It's so beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. Even though we've recreated the program, even though that's the voice I picked for my AI to teach me physics, it's still... so beautiful.

And I realize I'm crying. My two big eyes compared to his. My pale skin and gangly limbs and absolutely disproportionate head. None of that scares him. He knows I'm not an alien. He knows exactly what I am.

"Hello, s-sir", and I'm allowed to break down, just a little. When meeting my idol. "I'm afraid I can't make it to your party later today." I smile. "My professor specifically forbade us."

And he smirks at that. He catches the meaning behind my wording. Us.

"But I just thought I'd stop by and say hello, so you didn't think we didn't want to come."

And now I'm crying. Like a babe. Crying and laughing.

And so is he. His little tiny body, so fragile and holding a mind so beautiful, it's shaking from the loud guffaws his body is trying to push out and tears are running down the sloppy half grin he has on.

Shivering, he pushes a button, and of course, he has a button exactly for this question because this, THIS is the man who we named a whole star system after.

"Are we alone?" In the stars, in the universe, in time. So many questions but the answers are still the same. They've always been the same.

I gently lean forward and touch his little shivering hand with my own, covered by an organometallic coating to prevent DNA cross-contamination. An infinite number of time travelers are doing the exact same thing because time doesn't really follow our rules. Having their moment with our idols.

But this moment is mine. I clasp his hand with mine.

"We never were, sir."

*****

THE END.