Lemuria

Still feeling odd from his three-thousand-year hiatus, Marius Oyugi played the messages from Earth.

While he lie suspended in the machine lattice of the ship’s computer, three millennia of human history transpired. Home had vanished-changed beyond recognition. His heart beat faster at the prospect. His heart. It was beating. Not the original, but a new heart. Its cells were only a few months old. It felt good.

Floating weightless in the dim red light of the control module, he activated the vidscreen.

The first few messages documented a familiar world; a secular neomodernist world government, its polyglot tapestry of hybrid cultures, a familiar pragmatic egalitarianism. It was home to him, East Africa specifically. The linguistic idiosyncrasies were familiar. Every speaker pronounced the word language with a dense, regional accent. The music and art were urbane and predictable.

After a few centuries, the messages began to carry an authoritarian tone and absolutism of moral perspective, suggesting a gradual slide toward totalitarianism.

There was four-year gap in broadcasts, followed by a lengthy denunciation of science in general, and space travel in particular, on largely theological grounds. The denunciation culminated in a command for the mission to abort and self-destruct. Artificially intelligent and imbued with its own survival instinct, the ship’s computer had ignored the command.

The next message came sixteen months later, imploring the computer to ignore the self-destruct order. It suggested modifications of the mission statement to account for a post human point of view.

After another century came newscasts of a decades-long machine-human war. Twice during the conflict, messages were sent directly to the ship’s computer instructing it to quit the fabrication of its quasihuman crew, and to spread the gospel of machine intelligence to the galaxy. Programmed during a particularly secular period of terrestrial history, and itself an agnostic, the ship’s computer ignored both requests.

Centuries of what seemed to be relative peace followed. The common terrestrial language shifted from a mixture of English, Spanish, and Russian to a mixture of Urdu and Japanese. Their clothing, what little they wore, struck Marius as bizarre and ostentatious. To these people, he would be as alien as the madmen and rock stars of the twentieth century.

There were hundreds of private messages spread unevenly over the centuries; messages from schoolchildren, desperate pleas to convert the aliens to Elvis-based Parachristianity, hostile diatribes on the expense of space travel.

After nine centuries, there were no further dispatches. It seemed they were finally forgotten. Perhaps they had vanished into the obscurity of historical conjecture.

Marius wondered. If there were final messages implying the extinction of the human species, would the computer censor them? There were implications he didn’t want to think about. Sometimes Baby was too smart.

He heard laughter and the sound of voices echo through the ship. It lifted his grim mood, bringing to mind memories of a childhood vacation on Mars. There was something about waking up in a strange place that made people chatter. He wondered what kind of family his crewmates would become.