Wake Me In The Future (9 page)

As I sipped my coffee and finished my cereal, I began to brace myself for whatever I was going to face today.
Whatever they tell you,
I thought,
don’t react,
give yourself time for it to sink in and discuss it with Ankit afterwards
.

By the time my friend arrived I was so tense and psyched up, I’d given up guessing what the next shock could be, all I was aware of now, was that I was becoming extremely nervous, and I wanted it to be over.

The journey to the Information centre did nothing to calm me. It served only to jog my memory of the protesters I’d seen on the screen in the township, but before I had time to even consider raising it, we were there.

A barrage of sound and vision accosted my senses as soon as I released control to the system, and I was taken straight into a similar telling of history to the one I’d been shown about the search for immortality the previous day; only this time I was being shown a series of vignettes about the technological developments of the human race.

I saw the beginnings of mathematics, and various discoveries and inventions such as explosives and the printing press. Then old British newspapers hailed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and American ones proudly boasting the first manned flight. People were talking on telephones and a nuclear mushroom faded out to the sound of Neil Armstrong’s words from Apollo 13. The double helix gave way to a Japanese woman sitting at a PC before another put on a pair of glasses to reveal a heads up display that acted as a combined communications and media device.

Human technological achievement throughout history was playing out in front of me and so far it was all pretty much as I’d remembered it.

Then images appeared showing the terra-forming of Venus and Mars and a media announcer introduced the opening of the first domed city on the Moon. The image of Neptune surrounded by the moon sized machines and then a group of Asians began morphing different parts of their bodies – I assumed these were the new human bodies. A headline said ‘Next stop – the stars,’ against an image of huge space arks hovering in Earth orbit.

Then the technology was left behind and I saw a scene from a debate in some sort of studio. A presenter was asking one of his guests why they thought they were qualified to say how everyone else should live their lives. From the supporting arguments and theological quotes the man was using, he was obviously a religious man; another guest tried to interrupt and managed to propose the opposite extreme of an
anything goes
society, where open sex, nudity, violence and no discipline prevailed.

The presenter interrupted and said, ‘isn’t it true that these extremes meet hardly any of our needs for living together?’ Turning to the religious man he said, ‘you can’t dictate how people behave in the privacy of their own homes, even religious people have human needs.’ Then turning to the man with tattoos said, ‘and you can’t force people who are different than you to be comfortable with you being naked or having sex in front of them and their children. Doesn’t ‘
Open Society’
offer the best compromise we can hope for; a common set of rules when interacting with general society based on decency and respect, as the Indian government has adopted? Where there are no restrictions on what you do in the privacy of your own home as long as it’s consensual and within the law?’

The religious man looked at the presenter with a look of disgust, ‘do you think I’d live in a country where creatures like him can corrupt my children and carry on like animals?’

The other guest interrupted with his own tirade, ’I am not going to be told what to do in my own country. This is a free society and I’ll do whatever I want in it.’

‘But,’ said the presenter, ‘India has now started to create separate communities to cater for certain needs and beliefs,’ and looking at the tattooed young man said, ‘for example a society where everything you want is allowed because everyone in it has opted to be part of it.

Surely where these fundamental ways of living are concerned we’ve got to live separately, and when we do come together it should be somewhere we conduct ourselves in a manner that most people accept. When you're both in ‘
Open Society’
neither of you will be offended because
you
,’ he said looking at the religious man, ‘wont make comments about sex and debauchery, and
you
,’ he looked at the other man, ‘won’t take your clothes off and make offensive remarks about other peoples beliefs. After all, both of you just share this society with the rest of us, neither of you own it.’

The tattooed man said, ‘I am not going to be told what to do – I’ll do whatever I want, it’s a free country and I am not going to be restricted by any dictator.’

Ironically, the religious man seemed to have found some common ground with his opponent, but not realising it said, ‘And I won’t stop fighting till your type of people,’ he pointed at the other man, ‘and your disgusting ways, are wiped from the face of the Earth.’

The presenter turned to the screen and with an air of resignation said, ‘will we ever learn?’

Then the scene changed to show quite different headlines. These were about the wars and horrors from human history; oppression of the masses by the few. Images of dictators, massacres and terrorism filled the windows. An image of the world war two death camps made my stomach turn and bombs exploded before the twin towers fell. A nuclear mushroom appeared in the distance and I heard a newsreader ask, ‘Are we too weak to survive?’

Then the windows disappeared and I was floating in Earth orbit looking down over the American continent. It was covered in nuclear mushrooms, and as the Earth moved beneath me I saw that it wasn’t just the Americas, it was a global catastrophe.
How could we have let this happen?
I thought.

One of the floating windows appeared before me and showed an image of the front page of the ‘
Moon Times’
and its headline, ‘
Earth lost – no survivors’
. Then another confronted me, ‘
Venus and Mars uninhabitable – Moon creeks with refugees
.’ And then I saw the Moon and as I watched, the domes above the cavern cities began to silently blow out, losing them to space. No-one could have survived. Three planetary bodies and a Moon had been wasted.

But there must have been survivors,
I thought. How else could this huge population be here? Thank God at least some of the human race had survived that disaster.

But the worlds that were floating before me seemed dead and sterile, and as the surface fires died down the images faded and went black for a few seconds. Then everything turned outwards, the scene in front of me blinked out of existence and when it blinked back I was deep in space, in a far off corner of the Milky Way, floating above an alien world.

The planet before me hovered at a vast distance from its Sun, a gas giant dominating its system, like Jupiter dominated ours; only unlike Jupiter this world was populated. The beings that inhabited it were huge amorphous creatures, with brown and grey patches moving over their surfaces, semi transparent and floating in the sky like diaphanous cousins of the clouds.

I heard sounds, like a fax machine but duller and at a distance, fading in and out in a repetitive pattern. The beings were communicating, and then I realised that the sounds were starting to make sense. I now heard English; their language was being translated.

One of the huge creatures was surrounded by a crowd of others and was calling to them in its strange whale like shrieking, ‘we cannot continue our existence on this planet; this is a dead end for our civilisation. We’ve relied too long on our relationship with the creatures on our nearest moon. They help us create and use our artefacts but we need to be able to interact with our surroundings independently. We have to leave Manoora and search for another planet, where we can transform and be free.’

The other creatures surrounding the speaker were agitated and restless. They made their alien sounds and I could tell that not all of them were in favour of what was being proposed.

‘The moon creatures have been building ships under our instructions and they’re ready to take us onto our destiny. Once we find a suitable planet we can transform ourselves and gain the freedom we’ve waited for so long.’

I then saw the planet surrounded by huge star ships and inside the aliens floated and had purpose. They set out on their journey to find their destiny, away from the futile existence they’d led.

My mind was once again racing towards a possible conclusion to what I was being shown, but part of me was trying to suppress the acknowledgment of something so absurd. But nonetheless, I was feeling strangely far calmer than I had before, and so I continued to follow the story.

What transpired next confirmed the conclusion my subconscious had already reached.

The alien ships were entering our Solar system and inside the first one to enter Earth’s orbit one of the creatures was once again surrounded by its fellow Manoorans and there was a great sadness in its tone.

‘We’ve travelled so far to meet these creatures; following the transmissions of their remarkable culture and achievements, and now we find they’ve destroyed themselves. How can it be? They had so much and now they’ve thrown it away, as if scared of achieving their potential. We have to carry the lessons from this tragedy into our own future.’

Then I was aware that the scene had skipped to a future time, and a group of the gas creatures were once again floating in one of their ships, looking at something below them. The image panned down to where they were focused and to my surprise there was a human man and woman standing on a platform. One of the floating creatures spoke to them.

‘What does it feel like?’ it said to its fellow Manoorans.

Chapter 12
– Coming to terms

It felt to me like I'd emerged from some kind of surreal fugue; I was bemused by my calm composure. It was either shock that had numbed me, or I’d been sedated in some way, if that was actually possible with one of these bodies.

It didn't mattered how long I'd had to consider it, or how hard I'd tried; there was no way in normal circumstances that I could have prepared myself for what I’d just discovered. But these were far from normal circumstances, because I’d found myself revived in a future populated by aliens living in artificial human bodies! Surely that was enough to drive the sanest person crazy.

I felt cold and lonely as if some kind of ethereal link had been broken between me and my kind. I sighed with the whole of my new body. But at least I could console myself that I wasn’t entirely cut off from the rest of humanity; I wasn’t the only true human left. Because even though my fellow Cryogens and I were a million miles away from what anyone in my time would have recognised as real human beings, the thought of their existence gave me a sense of belonging.

But for now I was on my own, and my feeling of loneliness was compounded by having woken somewhere totally different; the relative safety and refuge of the White Room was gone.

And I didn’t even know how I’d got here from the Information centre,
had I passed out from shock?

The room I'd woken in wasn’t clinical or sparse; it seemed strangely normal, and had stand alone furniture, not chairs and tables that belonged to the walls. Just looking around from my cot, at the multitude of colours playing around me, caused me to feel dizzy, but at least this place looked comfortable, relaxing and warm.

Even though I’d only just woken, the thoughts racing around in my head were beginning to affect me; I felt that peculiar physical exhaustion that comes with the stress of mental exertion. I really needed more rest, so I closed my eyes to shut it all out and spiralled down, once again into the welcoming safety of sleep.

Then I woke with a start, having dreamed of being in a real life version of the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. I’d just been cornered by a group of the pod people and they were all coming at me, arms reaching out, with vacant expressions and murmuring deep ugly moans. I shivered then smiled, firstly at realising there were no pods around slowly turning into me, and then at the absurdity of it all.

As everything started to rush back, a moment of panic overtook me until I realised I wasn’t alone. Ankit was sitting on the far side of the room in a bright blue easy chair and looking at an info-tablet. He looked up from it as I rose slowly from my cot and walked over to him.

‘Are you one of those aliens?’

He nodded.

‘And we really did wipe ourselves out?’

‘I am afraid so Richard. It happened so quickly we were powerless to do anything other than watch while we travelled here to make contact. It was like watching our dreams die, we’d planned to trade with you for your technology to enable us to create our own artificial bodies, and although the design we’d chosen for ourselves was vastly different than yours, we hoped our two races could live peacefully together in friendship.’

‘But when you got here we’d already killed ourselves off, so you didn’t need to create any new bodies did you? You had a ready supply of them just waiting.’ a hint of accusation was creeping into my voice, I couldn’t help myself.

‘Everything that was left behind had been created to serve the human form. All we had to do was clean the environments of radioactivity and we could start again. After all, we’d become so awed by your culture and achievements there was no reason not to take up where you left off.’

‘And try not to make the same mistakes?’ I added.

Ankit gave a resigned smile, and then said ‘The Information System we found had been damaged by the war, so a lot of records were lost, including any reference to the existence of you and your fellow Cryogens.

It’s been a major dilemma for us since discovering all of you hidden away on the far side of the Moon. And the last one hundred years, since we've started to revive people have been the most difficult. Many of us feel guilty, as if we’ve stolen something from you, but others feel we’re doing the right thing by reviving you and giving the original human race a second chance.’