I’m Lisa Wilson, biologist. In the winter of 2079, a viral cold swept the world. It caused people to briefly experience spots of blood in the urine and feces, but otherwise was unremarkable, and people recovered from it like any other cold, so not much was thought about it at first. But it was persistent, with more and more outbreaks among people who had not yet suffered from it throughout the year. In the fall they confirmed that those who had recovered from it still carried the virus and remained contagious at a low level, but no longer suffered symptoms. That was how it was continuing to spread, and made it impossible to avoid. By the end of 2080, every person alive had been infected.
At the same time, there was a dramatic drop in male births. People were having children at the same rate, but an increasing proportion of them were female. By the start of 2081, there were no more male births. People suspected the virus was responsible, and discovered that the way it remained in the body was that it latched onto the X and Y chromosomes, but it did so in different ways. When new cells were produced, the virus was copied along with the X chromosome. The way it latched onto the Y prevented that chromosome from going through the duplication process, and the new cell was created without it. The virus did not otherwise damage the genome. As a result, it didn’t continue to harm the women in any way, and it even had no immediately obvious effects to the men. Where it had an effect was in the sperm cells, which carry only a single copy of each chromosome, and one sex chromosome. Now half of them had an X chromosome and the other half had no sex chromosome. As the result, the half of their offspring that should have been male instead became females who had only a single X chromosome.
In 2082, with no male children having been born for a year, they started calling it the Male Crisis. It was indeed a crisis. We could still make children, but they all came out female. If we didn’t find a solution, the next generation wouldn’t have any males and wouldn’t be able to make children at all, fertile women or not, and that would spell the end of the human race.
As time passed, and cells in men’s bodies were replaced, they had more and more cells without Y chromosomes. Among men who already completed puberty, this resulted in a somewhat lower testosterone level, but everything still functioned. It was different for boys who hadn’t yet entered puberty. At that time, the genes on the Y chromosome were critically important, and with many cells not having a Y, the changes that were supposed to happen either did not occur or happened to a lesser degree. Without active ovaries, they did not turn into women, but they remained boyish-looking into adulthood, and they could not get erections or ejaculate.
We weren’t able to get rid of the virus. Though many potential treatments were devised, none of them worked. This insidious virus had worked its way into the nucleus of practically every cell in the body. The treatments to destroy such nuclear viruses destroyed the infected cells, but usually these viruses weren’t so pervasive. If 2% of the cells in an organ were destroyed, the organ could generally regenerate itself. In this case, those treatments inevitably killed the patient.
One of many strategies to attack the problem found that testosterone supplements helped the younger males to experience a partial puberty and become fertile, with the same limitation of producing only female offspring. This would buy us another decade or so of making children. Such treatments did not help the single-X females of the next generation. Without any treatment, they developed small breasts at puberty, usually an A or B cup and never larger than a C, but their reproductive systems never got started; they didn’t ovulate, didn’t experience menstruation, etc. The treatments could give them bigger breasts, but did not succeed in kick-starting their ovaries.
In 2097 I started a program to impregnate women with sperm from sperm banks saved before the virus had spread. This didn’t solve the problem. The virus was still present in every woman, and any male embryos were attacked by the virus. The result was that so few cells had Y chromosomes that they might as well have not had any, and they developed into single-X females in the womb. But it did accomplish one thing. We knew we could get women pregnant using the banked sperm. When all the men were dead, we’d still be able to make more people, for a while. Nobody was really sure how long frozen sperm could survive; nobody had ever used any which was more than 40 years old.
So in the next phase of my research I tracked down some of the oldest frozen sperm in existence. We had some from the 20th century, over 100 years old, and we produced children from it. Still all female, though. We weren’t sure how long it would last, but this discovery delayed the end. I failed to come up with a real solution, but the men now alive banked lots and lots of sperm, potentially postponing the end of the human race by centuries. The idea was that we could save some of the old sperm that had its Y chromosomes intact for when we found a solution, and use the newly banked sperm to make generations of women.
I’m Dana Bradley. I was born in 2087, part of the first all-female generation, which some called Generation XX, despite the slight inaccuracy in the name. We were all aware of the problem at a young age, roughly from when we started school. Being in classes of all girls, taught in some cases by men, indicated the problem. We understood that little girls grow up to become women and little boys grow up to become men, but there were no more little boys.
There were still facilities in the world meant for men, but over time they were closed or simply relabeled. For instance, my elementary school had men’s restrooms which had simply had “women” signs pasted over them. They still had urinals inside, urinals none of us could use, but the toilets worked. They kept just two men’s restrooms across the whole school, the men’s faculty restroom and one on the other side of the campus, for male teachers and any other men visiting the school to use. As I grew older, and women made up more and more of the population, I saw this happen more and more.
Most parents had their kids genetically tested when they were infants, as I was, and it became mandatory to do so by age 10. This let each child know whether she would grow up as a fertile potential mother or as an infertile female who would never have any chance of producing children. The approved ways of referring to these groups were fertile and either sterile or infertile, or as nouns, mothers and “infers” (short for infertile). We were discouraged from calling infers “fake women” or “fakes,” though you heard those terms used sometimes.
In my parents generation, it was accepted for some people to form same-sex couples. As my generation became adults, there were only female-female couples, since all the older generation men were already claimed. Most people tried to make couples of one mother and one infer in order to have a chance at having a child in the family someday with donated sperm. So people were generally open about that status, and a tradition started that when you were looking for a partner, mothers would wear pink ribbons and infers would wear blue ones, signifying “I was supposed to have been male.” Though infers tended to have smaller breasts, the distinction wasn’t clear-cut, and the ribbons were useful identifiers.
Another tradition that developed in my generation was that each mother would have at least one child and preferably two during her lifetime, to maintain the level of the population. I had two choices: I could either get sperm from a sperm bank, or I could find an older man to have sex with to get pregnant. It didn’t really matter which, because by that time it had been established that using old male sperm wouldn’t let you make male children, so they saved it for experimentation and gave us the new sperm. Effectively, we got the same sperm either way, so it was only a matter of whether you knew some man you cared to have sex with.
I got married to an infertile woman, and I indeed had two children using the sperm banks, the first an infer and the second a mother. By the time my second child came of age to have children, everybody was getting pregnant only using the banks. The men were much older then, and there were a lot fewer of them still alive. But by then it had become standard to filter out the corrupt sperm with no sex chromosome, so that at least all the children produced would be fertile females.
People had started trying various genetic engineering techniques to make Y chromosomes that could resist the virus, but so far nothing had worked. They did know by this time there were three areas on the Y chromosome where the virus could attach to it; once it attached itself at one of these points, it would clog up the entire chromosome. Most of what they tried consisted of modifying or removing these sections. However, the modified chromosomes either failed to resist the virus or they didn’t work to produce viable male children.
I’m Jenna Jacobs. I was born in 2266 in a world where actual men were only a legend from the past, one whose reality was established by the vast banks of sperm still in existence which everyone used to impregnate themselves when they were ready to have children.
The genetic engineers of my generation were trying to solve the Male Crisis by making entirely artificial Y chromosomes that contained none of the vulnerable genes, using alternative mechanisms to replace the processes those genes governed. This was considered the least favorable solution to the problem, because there was no guarantee the altered genes wouldn’t cause other problems, but at this stage of the crisis people were considering all possible solutions.
Many people called me and my colleagues engaging in such behavior mad scientists, and worse. And it was with good reason; a lot of bizarre mutant children were born in this era, and some of them even survived to adulthood, but most of them had severe defects. They usually weren’t intelligent, and none were fertile, and for that reason they were all considered failures. But the situation was dire. The old pre-crisis sperm was starting to fail, and we figured we had another 50 years or so before it was no longer possible to find viable sperm within it, and another 50 years before the post-crisis sperm also failed, and then there would be no more people. So we were searching for any solution to keep the race alive, no matter how horrible. If one of these experiments had generated a viable male who could never learn the skills normal people master, and had to be raised like a pet, but it could father human children, it would have been considered a success.
I focused on something a lot of people had ignored. The virus didn’t only affect humans; a number of other species of animals died out in the early 2100s because of it. But not all animals died. My idea was to make an artificial Y chromosome using fragments of DNA from the surviving animals. It was time-consuming and expensive; each artificial Y chromosome had to be individually nano-assembled. It suffered from a lot of compatibility issues, and I went through a series of more and more stripped-down versions, ultimately making a creature that would only have a male reproductive system and some features that allowed it to live parasitically, and none of the other organs of a human body.
The first volunteer hosts were older women who had already borne their customary one child to keep the population stable. It didn’t work, because what I’d made produced an infant male’s reproductive system. It needed to be exposed to certain hormones to develop into adulthood, and adults didn’t make the right sequence of hormones, nor did injections work. It was possible that might work in time, but time was a limited resource. We needed a plan that was more likely to succeed.
So the obvious idea was to install them on infants. This was definitely controversial. Those infants didn’t get a choice. But in the past infants who were born male or as infertile females didn’t get a choice either. But some infants were volunteered by their mothers to be the hosts, and that was all we needed. My artificial organisms were grafted onto them, grew with them, and when they reached puberty, though these people developed like women in other ways, the male reproductive system was active, and they could get erections and could ejaculate.
Their sperm was tested, and it was as normal as possible, considering the situation, and it resisted the virus. And it was all male. When I made the prototypes, eventually about 100 that were successfully deployed, each artificial Y chromosome was placed into a sperm within which all the other DNA had been removed, and this was allowed to fertilize an egg cell from which the X chromosome had been removed, producing a haploid male organism, one which contained only one copy of each chromosome rather than the usual two, and only one of my altered Y sex chromosomes. Once they matured, the sperm the 100 first-generation males produced had a complete copy of the graft’s DNA, and this sperm did what I hoped when mating with normal eggs: It formed diploid embryos with the normal human number of chromosomes, which were all male due to the sperm all carrying a Y chromosome.
The male diploid children were still parasitic males requiring female hosts. But there had been no other viable solutions in the intervening years, and there was no shortage of volunteers; just as in the first generation, we used infant females born in the traditional way and volunteered by their parents to receive one of the parasitic males.
It was proposed to deploy this on a large scale, by having the 100 first-generation males donate large quantities of sperm from which a million second-generation males could be produced by a million different women. My team had chosen egg cells from 100 different, genetically diverse women to produce the first 100 males, so while they all had the same Y chromosome, they had a good variety among the other genes. And the second-generation males would all have different mothers, so generic diversity was maintained.
Through the end of my lifetime, no other solutions were found. I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and every other relevant prize. The second generation males produced haploid sperm from their diploid genome, so the third generation consisted of half parasitic males and half normal females, which allowed those males to be installed on equally many infant females born around the same time. By having two-thirds of that generation be produced by my second-generation males (or at least by their donated sperm) and one-third from the post-crisis sperm banks (the only other ones still having viable sperm), they established a 50-50 gender ratio in the resulting people.
I’m Dan Smith. I was born in 2342, a third-generation male in the new human race. I was one of the 50% of female births in my generation to be chosen to have parasitic males grafted on and become functionally male. That happened the day I was born, so I don’t remember it. Some parasitic male was born the same day I was, and we were bonded. I was raised by two mothers. My sister, who wasn’t chosen for such treatment and stayed female, was actually born from the other mother, so we were genetically unrelated.
Males were scarce in the previous generation. Many people didn’t even know one; they simply knew they existed somewhere once male children were being produced in larger numbers, and new, virus-resistant sperm was available in sperm banks. Our generation was having to redefine “men” after centuries without there being any, or so small a number that they didn’t factor into everyday activities. There were stories of the pre-crisis world when real men existed, but things are different now. We studied them extensively, but didn’t expect everything to be the way it was back then.
For one thing, we don’t have the kind of bodies the pre-crisis men had. We have women’s bodies, but with male reproductive systems grafted on. When we were starting puberty, a class in school explained the anatomy to us. Every one of us has a complete female reproductive system: ovaries, tubes, uterus, vagina, labia, and clitoris, with the urethra running into the middle of it all. The parasite bonded to all this, completely covering everything but the outer labia.
The penis I’ve peed with since birth is actually part of this thing. The way it bonded with my nervous system, I can’t tell; it all feels like a part of me. I pee, and the pee comes out, in the same way as pre-crisis men peed. One difference is that after puberty, when my female body started having its period, during those few days each month, the menstrual fluid comes out when I pee. There’s usually only a little of it compared to the amount of pee, so the first brief burst of it is red or orange and then it goes back to normal. They tell me that the way it’s hooked up, it’s impossible for sperm to get back into the vagina. My female body can never become pregnant.
I should say that I pee anatomically in the manner of pre-crisis men. There aren’t urinals, those having all been removed in the century-plus during which there were no men at all. There aren’t even men’s restrooms. The scarce men of the previous generation used the same restrooms as women, going into a stall to do their business, since they didn’t have separate restrooms for men and people didn’t choose to build them for the rare times a man would be in a particular place. There was some debate about this, but ultimately society decided to let that system remain, rather than build extra restrooms or partition and remodel the existing ones everywhere. As a consequence, however, they didn’t remake urinals. I can either sit or stand at a toilet.
At the same time my breasts were growing in and the periods started, I also had to get used to erections. They tell me this is not as bad as it was for pre-crisis men. Only occasionally do I have an erection when I am not playing with it, while pre-crisis men might have one just looking at a pretty girl, or even just one with big boobs. But we all have boobs now, and mine are bigger than those of most of the women I dated. If I got an erection from seeing big boobs I would have one all the time!
The sexual sensations, they tell me, are not quite the same as pre-crisis men felt. Some of them are from the graft, but they are filtered through nerves in the clitoris and elsewhere. But the erectile tissue of my penis also extends up into my body, at least a couple inches into the vagina. I feel the sense of being filled there when I get an erection, and some of that feeling is actually from my hidden female parts being stimulated directly. Whatever it is, it works, though. I enjoy sex.
Before the crisis, there was men’s clothing which was shaped differently, for men’s bodies. New men’s bodies are shaped the same as women, save for the genitals, so for the most part men wear the same clothes as women, apart from underwear. The men of the previous generation pioneered new underwear with more space in the front for the genitals, and which usually are designed to hold the genitals in place. It’s common for them to have two layers between which a hard athletic cup can be inserted. Wearing such a cup is now a rule in any school athletic activities for which boys change clothes.
But of course, women have always had a lot of different styles of clothes available, and both men and women now wear all styles. There are now men’s and women’s versions of clothes that fit tight in the crotch, but loose pants, skirts, and dresses are now considered unisex. So while some new men are “traditionalists” in wearing the styles closest to pre-crisis men’s styles, doing that doesn’t necessarily distinguish them from women, and it’s only the tight-fitting pants which show off the cup of male genitals or lack thereof that make a person’s gender obvious.
Dating and choosing a partner is different from anything any previous generation experienced. Women of recent generations paired up, anybody free to choose anyone else. Now women are expected to pair up with men. It felt weird and artificial for us to do so, since the men and women of our time are so similar, differing only in something we never see until we are intimate with a partner. Nevertheless, most of us went along with it, knowing that by doing so, we’d be able to make children in the natural way, unlike our parents and the previous few generations.
And it was weirdly difficult to tell who was who. The clothes didn’t help. Except during athletic activity, the kind of tight pants that would reveal the shape of the genitals were banned at school. And during that activity, boys and girls were segregated, so you’d only learn that a handful of your classmates were the same sex as you. Even names didn’t help; my given name is Dana, and most of the other boys had traditionally female or unisex names when we were growing up, because our parents’ generation had forgotten about traditionally male names. We changed that with our children, but it became a comedy trope from the eldest of our generation for Leah and Michelle to date only discover they were both boys.
It wasn’t until I was in college that the fashion started in which we adopted male names, though. When we were in high school, to avoid disappointment after asking “Are you a boy or a girl?”, kids who were looking for a dating partner wore pins of blue male or pink female symbols in school to indicate their gender. This obviated the question, and also showed who was looking. Don’t want to be asked for dates? Don’t wear a pin.
Clothing was, however, a factor, because some women prefer traditionalist men, and they are usually traditionalist themselves, opting for longer skirts and dresses. So-called moderns of both sexes tended to wear stretchy pants that made the genitals obvious, and at school, wore the shortest skirts allowed over them. Other people, called metros, were flexible and could switch among all styles.
I didn’t know anyone at my school who actively sought-out a same-sex partner, but a few such couples formed among people who had a strong attachment to one another before realizing they were the same sex. Later in life I did learn of people who sought same-sex partners by wearing two of their gender pin, or wearing gay symbols of the distant past such as the pink triangle and rainbow flag. Gay couples were expected to donate to sperm banks and lesbian couples to draw from them to have kids, or to use one another as surrogates.
Our generation is the first since the crisis to have kids primarily by individual men and women having sex. There are genetic tests to qualify couples, though, because men are providing genes from their parasitic part, while they were raised by the parents of the human part. Nobody knows the parents of their parasitic part, so you could literally be having sex with your genetic sister and not know it. Couples are disqualified if they are at least as close genetically as first cousins, or if their kids would have the chance to have certain genetic conditions caused by recessive genes they both carried. So this was a second level where a couple could face disappointment. Sometimes those couples split up on such news, but usually they stayed together and had kids via a sperm bank, or if it was the recessive gene problem, by confirming each embryo did not have the combination of genes to cause the problem.
We did the same as our parents did with the male children. They are small, born in the sac, and easily birthed at home, and every hospital that handles births has a drop-off station for males. The difference, though, was that in the previous generation, they were making only enough males to match with half the females by distributing old and new sperm from the sperm banks, and they wanted to use every male. Our kids come out 50-50, so we need to use only half the males to maintain the gender ratio. The hospitals manage it, though, deciding by time of arrival and whether they are ahead or behind on male children, and sometimes by genetic factors whether to use each male who arrives. Just as our parents didn’t know who their male children ended up bonded with, we don’t know whether our male children get used at all. It is a shame half our parasitic male children die, unbonded, but it is a necessity for life. My recent ancestors were willing to tolerate much worse than this to ensure my generation and the following ones would be able to exist, and we and our descendants will have to tolerate it forever.
I found a wife who preferred I wear traditionally male clothing, but wasn’t too picky about it, and could go with pants or skirts or dresses herself. We had 4 kids because it took that many tries to have a girl. As I mentioned, we don’t know how many of our 3 male children got used, but our girl did not get picked to bond and stayed female. We were happy to have Gina, and expected that at least one of the males we produced was helping to keep the human race alive.
There was a medication I took to let me lactate during the first several months of Gina’s life, so Molly and I could share that responsibility. This was something that wasn’t possible before the crisis. I won’t say this made the crisis a good thing, but it was something we could take advantage of.
I’m Melissa Bradley. I was born in 2401.
When we were all 10 or 11 years old, in school we learned about what it meant to be a boy or girl, and why it mattered. Most of us had already learned the visible differences because we’d seen the bulge boys and men had in their pants, or the lack of one in girls and women, and we had asked a friend we knew and showed each other in private. And we knew those parts were used for sex, because it was talked about a lot. But that was still only a tiny bit of the story.
Some of us had seen animals born, and cared for by their mothers, and we knew that only the mothers provided milk to their young. So why did both mothers and fathers do so among people? It all had to do with the Male Crisis that happened centuries ago, was only resolved less than one century ago, and almost destroyed the human race. Effects of that crisis remain with us, the most shocking of which was that boys are really girls inside. Some scientists had made artificial male parts after a virus had prevented people born after it appeared from developing natural male organs the way all other animals did.
Where had the virus come from? I later learned about evolution, and how living things evolve over time by random mutations, errors made when living matter copies itself. Sometimes those errors are harmless, and often they result in an organism which is less able to survive or to reproduce than its predecessor, but occasionally there is a beneficial mutation which survives, outcompetes its cousins who lack the mutation, and becomes the dominant form. Evolution happens in viruses too, typically at a much faster rate than in large creatures like people, but there were no records of a virus disabling Y chromosomes like this one did, nor of one as pervasive, to infect every cell of its host, before the one that caused the Male Crisis. How had it happened? It was extremely unlikely a single mutation would have caused both of those effects. But it was also unlikely two different mutations having such effects would have arisen simultaneously. It was a paradox.
In the early days of the Male Crisis, three centuries ago, there was a lot of research into the virus. It was not much of an exaggeration to say every biologist on Earth studied the virus. And the ones who considered its origin were just as flummoxed. It wasn’t widely known until the start of 2079, but they had traced its likely origin to a fishing village on the Yucatan Peninsula in the late summer of 2078. How it had gotten there, nobody knew.
It didn’t make sense that it could have come from fish. The genes it attacked weren’t present in any known species of fish, and there were no Caribbean or Atlantic species of fish that died out early in the crisis. That theory had been exhaustively searched and there was no chance it came into people that way.
But I looked into records about what other animals lived in that region before the crisis but were later found to be extinct. One other theory which had been proposed was that it came from the spider monkey, a monkey that lived in the jungles of Yucatan and was last seen alive in 2130. Much of the interior of Yucatan is covered by jungle, and in places, including this village, the jungle comes quite close to the coast. It was possible the inhabitants made contact with spider monkeys.
They had indeed found dead monkeys with cells containing the virus, but there were no known monkeys who died prior to 2079 who had it. That didn’t mean there weren’t any, just that nobody had found them. If they had died within the jungle, other animals would have eaten them and there would not likely have been corpses around to test.
The problem with this theory was still how it got into the monkeys. If we assumed it had developed there, we had the same question we would have had about how it got into the people. How had it evolved? Neither in the corpses of monkeys nor people had we found precursors for the virus. If the Y-chromosome-destroying ability developed first, we would have expected to find a greater incidence of people or monkeys born in that era and conceived before the virus spread with single-X mutation. This was already a thing that happened to people sometimes, but rarely. If the ability which allowed it to infect every cell had evolved first, we would have expected to find viral residue in the corpses. Neither was found.
The other problem with the origin of the virus was that we had no record of other viruses remotely like this one. Though it manifested symptoms similar to a cold, it was completely different from every other known cold virus, and those viruses were among the most studied ones prior to that time. It was worth comparing this to the situation with COVID-19 six decades earlier. They had traced the origin of this virus to a lab in China within months of its identification, and China’s unwillingness to provide information had led people to believe it had been a biological warfare experiment gone wrong. But the evidence ultimately supported China’s claim that the researchers in that lab had been studying a virus found in the wild, and sloppy lab techniques had led to one of the researchers becoming infected, becoming Patient Zero for the COVID-19 outbreak. Viral precursors were found in other animals. And while it was quite different from the cold viruses which were then common, it was at least recognized as belonging to the same class of virus. That couldn’t be said for the virus that caused the Male Crisis, which didn’t seem to belong to the same class as any other virus.
I don’t know why I thought it would work, but I organized an expedition to the jungles near this village to hunt for clues. What I found was startling! A metallic artifact lodged inside a dead tree trunk. This didn’t look like anything anybody had ever seen. But what it did look like was a device that was meant to disperse a biological agent. It was quite possible that this was the delivery device for an engineered virus, released deliberately. But by whom?
There was some writing on inner components of the device, but it wasn’t in any language anyone had ever encountered. And those inner components didn’t resemble anything manufactured on Earth now or then. It was even more of an enigma. Who would have released a biological weapon that nearly destroyed the human race, and made a completely custom delivery device, every single component unique, not using a single off-the-shelf part? It didn’t make any sense.
The answer came from one of the brilliant researchers I had employed. It was aliens.
The idea that aliens were responsible for some of our problems was a concept that dated back to the 1950s, but never in all that time had anyone found actual evidence of aliens visiting Earth. The concept had long become a joke. There was an Asimov Prize named for the 20th century science fiction writer for the best proof of the existence of alien life, and it was awarded several times but only to astronomers, for discoveries of unexplained phenomena in space, all of which were subsequently explained as natural phenomena not requiring the existence of life.
So if it was aliens who created the device, how could we prove it? How did people back then prove that suspected alien artifacts were actually hoaxes created on Earth? The answer was isotopic signatures.
All matter is composed of atoms. Each atom belongs to a specific element, determined by the number of protons in its nucleus. There can also be variations in the number of neutrons in the nucleus; these variations are called isotopes of the element. In almost all cases, the different isotopes of an element behave identically, chemically, and over time the isotopes of each element present on or near the surface of the Earth have become well-mixed and present in the same proportions in any substance containing that element. But the ratios of isotopes can vary in matter taken from the moon or other planets. We collected samples of matter from the moon and Mars and confirmed different isotopic ratios in that matter. We have also found different isotopic ratios in meteorites. We assume that every body in space would have its own ratios, collectively called an isotopic signature of that body. If we knew those ratios for a sample of matter matched those of a specific planet, we could with reasonable certainty attribute that planet as the origin for the matter.
There were several elements present in the artifact that existed in multiple isotopes, and the ratios of those isotopes didn’t match the Earth, moon, or Mars, nor any of the few asteroids and comets we had brought samples from back to Earth and analyzed. Unless someone had taken unusual pains to do isotopic separations of the material it was constructed from to make a brilliant hoax, this device was manufactured somewhere else! And why would they and then just leave it lying there like that?
Some people accused me and my team of doing just that, creating a hoax for publicity. But the next year, another team, following up on a mostly forgotten a second early outbreak of the virus in Africa which was assumed to have been due to a traveler never identified, found a second identical release capsule there, and a third one was found in Siberia. They matched the isotopic signature of the one I found.
Unless we could find more traces of the aliens who created it, this was as far as we could go. But for discovering the true origin of the Male Crisis, I received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. For successfully using isotopic signatures to identify an alien artifact (as opposed to merely a meteorite), I and coworkers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I became only the fourth person to receive Nobel Prizes in two different fields and the first to ever do so in the same year. I also received the Asimov Prize for the best evidence to date for the existence of alien life. The Asimov team admitted that if they ever gave the prize out again, someone would pretty much have to present actual aliens. And I and my team and the teams who found the other two artifacts received numerous other honors.
Clearly, someone had tried to murder the human race. But who out there knew about us? Who had been here, found our DNA, back on their homeworld devised a way to kill us, and delivered it here? If they had done so with the intent of taking Earth for themselves, why hadn’t they come back? Or were they here and we just didn’t know it?
We compared the isotopic signature against all known meteorites, but we found no match. Many meteorites had never been studied in this way, and in the process, we found that some meteorites came from the same source, but not from the source of our alien artifacts. It wouldn’t have helped much because we didn’t know where the meteorites were from, but a match would have suggested it was from somewhere relatively close, on an astronomical basis. The lack of a match didn’t prove it was from farther away, simply from a source we had no sample of.
Other people took notice, and the human race went on alert. Someone had attempted to kill us all and the obvious assumption was that they wanted to move in. We built bigger telescopes and other kinds of sensors to try to detect objects in space, and established a worldwide system sharing the information from them for the best opportunity to detect any threat.
And we improved our space defense systems. One of the international arms-reduction treaties long ago had resulted in 20 of the long-range nuclear missiles being turned into space defense missiles, designed to be fired into space to destroy meteors before they could cause serious damage to the Earth. We had never actually used them, and during the crisis time, both these and the missiles countries had aimed at each other were largely forgotten about. The crisis had changed things and made everybody a lot more willing to work together, and the discovery that the crisis was not a naturally occurring event but an attack by an alien power forged a lasting partnership among major nations to prepare against the threat. We converted a lot more of the missiles to act as space defense weapons. We still kept some aimed at the Earth, meant to be used as a last resort if aliens landed and took over parts of the Earth.
I’m Leeza Veda, UN space defense commander. In 2490, after four decades of looking, we found them. Out beyond the orbit of Neptune we detected 8 large ships, what we believed to be colony ships containing thousands of aliens each meant for establishing a settlement on what they believed to be a now uninhabited Earth. If they targeted us four centuries ago with the virus, they would have assumed that over such a length of time we would have died out. At this stage we could not tell whether they had any smaller ships with them.
All we could do was wait. We hadn’t set up deep space defense systems, because where would we put them? We could not set up defenses far from the Earth in every direction they might come from, and any defenses on the wrong side would be useless. In order for the defenses to be useful, they had to be near the Earth. But we watched and gathered more data.
As they came closer, we determined that unless the other ships were very small, they only had these 8 ships. And they were clearly braking, firing some sort of engines toward the Earth in order to slow the ships down. Naturally, they would have traveled at a very high velocity in deep space in order to cross from wherever they had come from.
We tried communicating with them. Since they knew enough about us to develop a specific virus to kill us, maybe they would understand our communications. We sent out, on various frequencies, and in all major languages, messages such as “Stop! You are not welcome. You may not land here. Go away.” They showed no signs of having heard us and they sent no communications of their own that we could tell. And we had all the SETI stuff aimed at them to pick up any form of transmission. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence had never yielded any, so when it was now coming right for us, naturally we looked there for it.
We made one final attempt to communicate before attacking them. We had a limited number of high-speed space-capable shuttles and we sent one up as a boarding party. It had limited weaponry, as this was an entirely new thing for us. We were making the first contact with an alien race... if you ignored the part where they tried to murder us all centuries ago. The shuttle continued broadcasting the messages to stop, and got no response. Instead, the ship that our shuttle approached opened fire, sending several small missiles at our shuttle. The shuttle attempted to evade and to destroy the missiles, and they managed to only get hit by one of them, causing significant damage but not destroying the shuttle. They abandoned the mission and headed back toward Earth, but they were attacked by more missiles and this time the shuttle was destroyed.
I gave the order. “Launch missiles at the invading ships, plan alpha.” We had already prepped a number of missiles to target the ships, four for each ship in case some missed or were not adequate to destroy the ships. There were also some drone ships which maintained a certain distance from the invaders to report on our success.
The ships fired their small missiles at ours, and hit a few, causing the hit missiles to explode in space, doing little or no damage to the ships. But 27 of the 32 missiles we fired hit their targets, causing significant damage to the ships. One of them lost its structural integrity and fell to pieces. In space, those pieces didn’t immediately explode or burn up or anything of that sort, but it was clear that if any of the pieces reached Earth it would burn up during entry and cause no damage.
The remaining ships kept coming, still with no communications, so we prepared and fired three more barrages of missiles. They were ready for us this time, and launched their own missiles early enough to destroy half of the next two waves at a great enough distance to keep them from doing any damage, but the other missiles hit their targets, destroying three more ships. When our last group of missiles arrived, the invaders seemed to be out of missiles, and our missiles all hit and destroyed the remaining ships.
The ships had been on a course to enter Earth orbit, presumably to finish decelerating from there in order to land, and most of the debris ended up in the orbit they were heading for, a slowly decaying orbit which started about a third of the distance to the moon. We now began a recovery mission. Learn about these ships, their crew, and the beings who sent them, while also trying to corral the debris into a stable orbit rather than having it all eventually burn up while entering Earth’s atmosphere.
We first sent up a bunch of drones to take photos of the debris field and scan it for radioactivity and for its content in general in order to help determine what poisons may have been on board. There were some radioactive materials, but another round of drones were able to collect those and deposit them on the moon. There were trace biological materials, widely scattered among the debris. There was no real way to collect it short of gathering all the debris, so we worked to coalesce all of it in a single mass and raise it into a stable orbit. In the process of doing this, we sent up a drone base, essentially a large solar panel where drones could dock and recharge, in the same orbit and a short distance from the debris field. Some of these drones remained in gathering duty indefinitely, placing pieces which strayed from the orbit back with the remaining material.
Besides the orbit-maintaining drones, we also developed a set of drones to analyze the debris. Of course, one of the first analyses we did was the isotopic analysis. The material these ships were composed of contained the same isotopic signature as the capsules that released the virus on earth. These were the aliens who targeted us, without a doubt.
I’m Peter Wilkins, head of the UN xenobiology team formed in 2493.
My team was assembled to try to understand the DNA of the aliens who attacked us. We weren’t sure this was ever going to be of practical use. We might never encounter them again! But we hoped to learn as much about them as we could, because if we did encounter them again, it could help the human race survive, again.
It took many years to analyze the data. The aliens were DNA-based, but with a different genetic code and different nucleotides from DNA on Earth. This settled the debate over panspermia, a theory that stray bits of organic matter riding on meteorites could populate the universe with life forms related to those on Earth, or that life on Earth had its origins elsewhere. The different genetic code meant that life on Earth and on these aliens’ world were not related via panspermia; the aliens had a separate origin of life. We sequenced the DNA, and many years later figured out their genetic code. That allowed us to understand what proteins the DNA encoded and thus some idea of how their bodies worked. Only “some idea” because DNA is not the total picture.
As I explained it in one meeting: DNA is comparable to binary computer code, the sequence of instructions the CPU carries out. The genetic code is comparable to the CPU instruction set, the meaning of each instruction within the code. But we still lack the understanding of the whole environment; in the computer analogy, where the program starts and what input data is provided.
Despite this gap in our knowledge, we did figure out quite a bit about them. Although some of their body chemistry is different, they are still based on hydrocarbons and water, and likely some of the same chemicals which are nutrients and poisons for humans also apply to them. They probably live on a world a lot like Earth, and so Earth is a viable home for them. And we are pretty sure they reproduce sexually, though the nature of their sexes isn’t clear.
For them to have created a virus that so specifically attacked humans and our closest evolutionary relatives in the way they did, they must have had at least as much information about us as we have now about them. How did they get it?
Several theories were proposed. One theory suggested they encountered one of the Voyager spacecraft, got our DNA from it, and used the informational plate 20th century Americans naively installed on it to find Earth. Some people doubted they could have gotten enough DNA off Voyager to analyze us to that degree. Another theory is that, either from Voyager or from our radio signals, they found Earth, and visited us to get our DNA.
The problem with Voyager being the information leak is it was a really slow spacecraft. It took decades to leave our solar system, and by 2079 when the virus struck, it was only about three times as far from our sun as Neptune. Anyone who found it had to be practically in our neighborhood already. It made much more sense that they picked up our radio signals, and even then, the timing was tight.
It was only in the 1890s that we developed radio communication at all, and 1904 when we started long-range broadcasts that could potentially travel into space and be detectable decades later in other star systems. The virus struck in 2079. They would have needed time-of-light from the broadcast to get our signal, and we estimated about twice time-of-light to send a ship here to collect our DNA, assuming they could get it up to near light speed for a good chunk of the trip. They they needed time-of-light again to send the DNA back home, assuming the ship sent here could sequence it automatically, some time (say five years) to develop the virus, and twice time-of-light again to send the ship here with the virus. If six times time-of-light is no more than 170 years, they had to be within about 28 light years of Earth. We knew there were no habitable planets within 20, so we set about searching for potentially habitable planets in this range.
Some people worried about one aspect of this timeline. The peak of UFO observations was in the 1950s and early 1960s. This timeline makes the arrival of alien ships to collect our DNA start no earlier than 1964, well after people had started reporting UFOs. So it required that the 50s UFO hysteria was just that, and the actual DNA collection ships came later.
The search was, however, successful. We found one star with a habitable planet 24 light years away, and right in the direction where we found their ship coming. They had basically revealed themselves to us; if we’d just started looking for them straight off, we would have found them faster. So now what? Attack them? Put up defenses? Just monitor for more ships? There were arguments for all these strategies, but ultimately we decided to try and spy on them. We had developed the basic principles of how to accelerate small ships to a significant fraction of the speed of light back in the 21st century, before the Male Crisis. It still took years for them to reach such a speed, so it was only practical for interstellar travel, and we’d never found a good target, so it had only been done once, sending a ship to Alpha Centauri which sent back high resolution photos of the system as a proof of concept. By the time we got the pictures, the Male Crisis was happening, and while somebody received them and set up an automated system to save the pictures, we never really did anything with them.
While we figured twice the time-of-light for an advanced civilization to get here, the ship we launched 3 years later was not quite that advanced, and was expected to need about 2.5 times the time-of-light or 60 years to get there, and another 24 for the signal to get back to us. We personally wouldn’t live long enough to see the results, not most of us, anyway.
I’m Chandra Sekar, astronomer.
I was was happy to participate in the search for the origin of the attacking aliens starting in 2502. 21st century astronomers had studied all the stars within 20 light years to the extent of confirming they had no planets in the habitable range comparable to Earth. We would have looked further, but the Male Crisis sidetracked all that. Once the analysis of the attacking aliens suggested they came from no more than 28 light years away, we restarted that program to study all the potential candidates.
I was the one who first discovered it: A planet with about 90% of the mass of Earth, an orbital distance from its star 105% of that of Earth, and a binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a main sequence star slightly smaller than our sun. The white dwarf was inconsequential in supporting life on the planet, but the main sequence star put it within the habitable zone in which liquid water exists and we could potentially live on the surface.
There was a bit of debate over whether we should attack them back or just watch them, and ultimately we sent a probe to study the system. It was going to take 84 years before we would get the data back, so that was a thing for future generations, and instead I participated in studies we could do based on what we could see from Earth now. And those studies were troubling.
The main star had dimmed over time; we had observations of it from the 20th and 21st centuries showing it used to be slightly larger than our sun. It seemed the main star had lost 15% of its mass over 500 years. The only way for it to dim that fast was a process which happens in some of these binary systems in which the white dwarf draws matter off the companion star. The problem with this is that if the white dwarf accumulates too much matter, it can explode with a supernova. This would destroy the planet, and be clearly visible here. Fortunately, this type of supernova does not generate a gamma-ray burst, which is one of astronomers’ greatest fears. We had detected many of these gamma-ray bursts from distant stars, and they were occasionally strong enough to briefly disrupt electronics on Earth even though they originated thousands of light years away. If one of those happened this close, it might have catastrophic effects for life on Earth.
While this kind of supernova does not generate gamma-ray bursts, there is a shockwave of matter as the star’s entire mass is dissipated throughout space. We did some quick calculations and determined that we could expect approximately 500 million kilograms of high-energy stellar matter to be headed for the Earth. It’s matter, not energy, so it doesn’t travel at the speed of light. It would take approximately 400 to 1500 years for the shockwave to reach Earth, and it would be distributed over those years, not all at once. It would arrive as individual particles called cosmic rays. Fortunately, there are two regions, the heliopause at the edge of the solar system and the edge of Earth’s magnetic field, which each deflect about 90% of incoming cosmic rays, so maybe only about 5000 kg per year of cosmic rays would hit Earth.
There are cosmic rays hitting Earth all the time, but the usual rate of them reaching the surface amounts to only a couple hundred grams per year. So we’d be getting perhaps 20000 times the usual rate for a millennium, the equivalent of one of the worst of the solar storms that disrupt communications on Earth, but lasting for a millennium instead of only a day or two. That wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of life on Earth, but it would have some serious effects. The health effects, we estimated, would probably be pretty minor, an increase in fetal anomalies caused by genetic defects and an increase in cancer rates, but neither to such a degree it would become a major health problem. The aliens would probably have figured out the same thing, and decided that Earth would still be a viable home for them. But we’d have to design electronics with much stronger shielding than we have been doing.
Fortunately, the supernova didn’t happen during my lifetime.
I’m Beatrice Bond, astronomer.
In 2598 we got back the first pictures from the probes our ancestors sent out. It was immediately obvious what was happening, although we’d never seen actual photos of it where you could see the process in action. The main star in this system was starting to turn into a red giant. It was orangish, rather than the yellow star we had seen from Earth in the past. This was due to changes in how the fusion process inside the star was proceeding. The hydrogen in the core was being used up, and fusion was now proceeding only in the outer layers of the star. This led to those outer layers having a lower temperature, which caused the change in color. Why this caused the star to expand in volume over time was complicated, and not easy to explain to non-astronomers. But we had expected this, because it was a known process observed in other stars much farther away, and we had already observed the change in color from Earth. What was new was we had clearer evidence to support some long-accepted theories of stellar development.
This was also the kind of situation my predecessors worried about, because in such situations the giant star extends around the white dwarf star and the dwarf star begins to collect more material from the larger star, drawing it tightly into its mass of carbon and oxygen which the star is not hot enough to fuse. When it reaches a critical mass, the carbon and oxygen do begin to fuse, and once they do, it ignites fusion throughout the rest of the star, and the massive amount of energy released at once causes the star to explode.
We could see that the dwarf star was already drawing matter away from the main star. Now that we had the detailed photos, we were able to better determine the masses of both stars. And it looked like the doomsday scenario; there was enough mass between the two stars to cause the white dwarf to go supernova once it had collected enough. Fortunately, it was still quite some time from doing that, perhaps thousands of years.
But that wouldn’t help the residents of the planet there. They wouldn’t even survive that long, because the changes in the stars would lead to fluctuations in energy output that would cause temperature swings on the planet. They were probably already suffering these swings, and that was why they’d sent out what we estimated as 40,000 of their people to establish a colony on Earth. We might have actually let them, if they hadn’t tried to kill the human race first.
Within a few years, the probes approached the planet, and we saw massive activity in space around it. The equator was ringed with space elevators, each launching shuttles into orbit multiple times a day, sending supplies to two dozen space stations, each of them building a colony ship like the ones that came to Earth.
The planet itself was best described as frozen over. The decreased output of the star had led to an ice age, unless it was just that icy all the time, but their behavior suggested it was a new thing. But there was not really anything we could do to help them, and their past behavior had made us unwilling to help. If they sent any more ships to Earth, we’d have a dilemma, to let them land or continue to destroy them in space.
One group of colony ships was almost done, and over the next few months we saw it finished. Then different ships came up the space elevators and quickly left. We assume those were the people movers. Less than a year after our probe arrived in range of the planet, these ships left orbit and headed off into space, but not toward Earth. They must have other targets. And that makes sense. Your home world isn’t going to survive, so send out colonists wherever you think you might be able to establish viable colonies in the hopes that one of them survives. There was no telling if they had genocided the residents of the other planets.
The probes were programmed to take note of the course any departing ship took, and over the subsequent years we saw groups of them heading off in various directions. There were indeed other stars with planets in those directions. Some of them were quite far away, and we hadn’t identified planets in the habitable zone there. Maybe they were more advanced than us with such detections, or maybe, if they thought all their people were going to die anyway, they were just hoping. But as soon as one group of ships left, they started building more in their places.
It took about a year to build each ship. With three groups of ships like the ones that arrived at Earth being produced each year, they were evacuating perhaps 120,000 of their people per year. They would never clear them out that way, though we assume they had been at it for centuries and had sent out tens of millions of their people this way. If they had, say, a thousand years left before their planet became uninhabitable, they might send out a hundred million more.
What we didn’t see was any indication they were communicating with the ships they had sent out. There should be hundreds of these 8-ship fleets out there, and they would have to have a significant satellite system dedicated to communicating with them all. Of course it would mostly be one-way communication due to the massive delay; maybe that’s why there wasn’t any. There were some communication satellites, but they didn’t seem to be active, some of them damaged hulks of junk floating in orbit. Perhaps they were something they used in the past when they were obtaining data from candidate planets like Earth. But their space activity today seemed to be 100% focused on building and launching these colony ships.
We had sent multiple rounds of probes, and most of them arrived intact and began operating. Automated programs we had placed on the probes identified the other probes and allowed them to share duties. For generations, perhaps for the remaining lifetime of the people here, we would have good data about what they were doing, and we’d have decades of advance warning of any more groups of colony ships headed for Earth.
I’m Dirk Jotull, UN president in 2655.
Several interesting events happened in recent years. In 2614, we got a signal back from the probes watching the home of the aliens who attempted to genocide us reporting a fleet of colony ships that appeared to be headed for Earth. We weren’t sure how long it would take to get here, but we got ready. Our probes crossed the distance in 60 years, and we figured their probes were faster. But due to the size of the ships, we estimated the colony ships would travel no faster than our probes and make the journey in 60 years. Since they already had a 24-year head start due to the radio transmission time, we figured the ships would arrive no sooner than 36 years later.
In 2650, with the fleet of colony ships still not visible from Earth, another fleet of never-before-seen ships was seen arriving at the alien planet... and they nuked it into oblivion. It was like the kind of nuclear war Earth worried about starting in the 20th and 21st centuries with mutually assured destruction, except there was nothing mutual about it. These had to have come from a third civilization. The probes recorded every ship they had in space abandoning operations at the ships still under construction and heading for one of the fleets that was then boarding, many of them simply plunging back down to the planet after unloading their passengers and/or cargo. Those colony ships took off, somewhere, and that was the end of activity around the planet.
At the start of my term as UN president, we spotted the fleet coming for Earth. We are not quite so democratic that the people of Earth all get to vote on what to do, but at the same time, we’re not going to ignore their wishes. And they were united in the opinion that we cannot let the aliens land. Since some other aliens came and did what we had considered doing, what perhaps a quarter of the people of Earth wanted to do in destroying the aliens’ home world, the only reasonable assumption is that the aliens we were watching had probably tried and failed to murder that other alien species too. In the eyes of those on Earth, this species was found guilty of genocide and had been sentenced to death by a second alien species.
A significant fraction of Earth’s population wanted us to destroy these ships the same way we destroyed the first fleet. Now, we have significantly more firepower ready to deploy. If they did not significant up their weaponry, we can take them out easily.
Another large fraction wanted us to see if we can take control of their ships. If their defenses are like the last ones, we target them until they use up their defenses but with decoy missiles. When they actually hit the ships they do insignificant damage. Then we send in drones and/or manned ships to take control of the ships.
We were only able to figure out so much from the wreckage of the other ships, and there weren’t any functional computers. But controlling them would be a priceless opportunity, if we can do it. We decided to try this while the ships were a couple months out in space from Earth, and if we can’t control them, our crews evacuate and we blow them to bits.
We sent out two fast, highly maneuverable crewed ships equipped with airlocks and docking ports we think match the ones on their ships. And we sent up a large arsenal of guided missiles they will be able to control from those ships, all without warheads, for now. The only actual live weapons were on the crewed ships themselves, to be used mainly in defense.
The missiles did what they were supposed to do. They wore down the ships’ defenses until they had nothing left and a group of these decoy missiles crashed into each ship without doing significant harm.
Then one of our crewed ships held back while the other docked with one of them and sent in a drone, first, to survey the situation. As we thought, the bulk of the ship was devoted to stasis chambers for their crew, and they were still out cold. There didn’t seem to be any real defenses against intrusion or security systems. They probably never expected intruders to board the ships.
So they sent in a fleet of drones, enough for the entire crew to each direct one and explore the ship VR-style, until they found what looked like the control center. The drones provided a map to get there, and we sent half the crew in. We had only a partial understanding of their language, mostly from the observations of the drones at their planet rather than from the wrecked ships here, so it took them a couple days to figure things out, and they took turns with the other half of the crew.
Once they established control, they turned over that control to the undocked ship, and they then proceeded to board the remaining ships in the fleet one by one and take control of each one. And we let them mostly continue on their course, but for our safety, we put them into orbit around the moon.
The space crews returned to Earth as heroes, and we proceeded with various scientific operations. We downloaded the contents of their computer systems, and linguists together with AI translators completed the translation of their language, so we were able to translate the documents in bulk. Then tens of thousands of people sifted through the data, because we had no idea what we’d find, and obscure memos could be important documents.
We found many documents regarding the genocide programs. There were, in fact, just three such programs, three planets where they had found life already there and tried to wipe it out. And there was a lot of debate among their people about them. Some of the people did not want to do this. But the three populated planets were considered by far the most suitable for them to live on. At the other planets, they were going to deploy terraforming systems to adapt the planets, perhaps over hundreds of years, before the crew was awakened.
Here, they were just going to fly down into the atmosphere and drop off the entire crew via landing modules. We got control of the ships about one to two weeks before the crew was going to start being awakened. Based on this schedule, we figured some of the crew aboard the first fleet was awake when our missiles came and destroyed the ships. If it wasn’t for the fact that their people had tried to genocide us, we might have felt bad about that.
We awakened a few selected members of their species to study the live beings. They were not happy about the situation of being captives, but they accepted it. They knew that anything was possible.
We had learned quite a lot about the aliens from their DNA, and from drone observations from afar, but getting to examine real live aliens was another thing entirely. They were gray-skinned elephantine beings with trunks and four legs. They could stand and walk bipedally, but went down on all fours and galloped to travel longer distances. Their front legs had retractable fingers, allowing them to serve as quite capable hands when they weren’t running on them, and the trunk also had fingers, allowing it to serve as a third hand even better than elephants on Earth use their trunks.
The captives described their society in detail for us. Their sexuality was interesting. They all started life female, and at what might have been menopause for humans they transformed into males. As the children matured into female adults, they stayed with their birth families, groups of 8 to 12 adult females and typically a slightly smaller number of males, because they lived less than half their lives as male. When they became male, they left this family and looked for another family needing more males either because of the death of one or the advancement of a female to adulthood. Usually the males then stayed there for the rest of their lives.
Within their families, there was a kind of seniority pecking order for mating, but with limitations. Nobody was allowed to mother more than two children, father more than two children, or be the parent of more than three children in any combination. Every three years, there was a re-pairing event. Starting with the most senior male, measured based on his time in the family, but only counting those still eligible to father another child, they would pick one eligible woman to be their mate for the next period. She couldn’t be one that male had picked before, had to still be eligible to bear children, and had to have reached a certain minimum age. If there were too many males, the leftovers would have the first pick among any females who advanced into childbearing age during the term. If there were not enough, the family would look for a new male who would be paired with the leftover female upon joining.
Because of the need to keep males and females of various ages, they sent whole families together onto the ships. Most families had between 15 and 25 people, including children, and they paired them up so that two families totaling 40 people filled each module. There were a few odd spaces filled with modules of other sizes where a whole number of 40-person modules did not fit, which could accommodate outlier family sizes. A few of these modules would also contain some single people without families. In all, there were 130 landing modules on each ship with a total capacity of 5140 people.
When we learned about the single people, we looked into this further; there were documents in the computers explaining the roles such people had in their society. About 1 in 200 of the people on their world lived alone, most of them itinerant workers who had no particular home but traveled from place to place. They included infertile females, ones who didn’t want to bear children, males who had trouble finding a family, a few of the males who had fathered their limit of children, and people who for whatever reason had fallen out from their families and chose to leave them. There were other occupations for them in the past, but at the time this group left their world, almost all such people were either involved in transportation, the equivalent of truck drivers, or they lived permanently in space assembling the ships. About a third of the ship assembly workers fell into this category, with the others working shifts, arriving via space elevator with a shipment of materials and going back down aboard an otherwise empty transport module.
We also learned from their computers the locations of the other two populated planets. One was 60 and the other a bit over 90 light years from Earth, so it would have been quite a while before we located them ourselves, if we ever did. There were a bunch of different opinions on them. Some people wanted to attack them, thinking that the aliens had genocided people on these planets have taken over, but due to what happened to their home world, it’s likely that at most one of them was taken over, and perhaps none.
Given that one of the planets is occupied by a race who acted in a more warlike manner than humans had done, though not beyond what we thought of doing, we decided the best course of action was simply to watch. Watch for anything coming from the direction of either world, and if visitors ever came, to either welcome them or be prepared to fight.
And we also learned about hardening electronics. These people had already suffered worse magnetic storms than we probably ever would from the impending supernova, and they had figured out how to make very effective but thin and efficient shielding for their electronics. We still had generations before we would need that, but learning how to duplicate what they had made was an important skill for our future.
I’m Lana Lazarus, linguist.
In 2671 we received an interesting transmission from the home of the aliens who tried to genocide us. It wasn’t from one of our probes. Part of the message was written in some attempt to use their language, but it was obvious it didn’t come from a native speaker, and I led a team to try to fully understand it.
We used what we could understand of the part in their language to help figure out the rest. The bulk of the message seemed to be written in an unknown language, but parts interspersed with the part we could understand we took to be translations. We used these, Rosetta Stone-style, to learn the new language and to understand the full message.
The people who nuked the planet were from the the world 90 light years from Earth. We call them species N, for nuke, and the ones who got nuked species G, for genocide. Species N were a very long-lived species, apparently living a few hundred years with a very slow metabolism. Species G had done something similar to their world as they did to Earth, but species N wasn’t able to overcome it.
However, species N found one of the release capsules as it was landing, and they were able to detect the other ones arriving. With a more advanced space program, they tracked them back to species G’s home planet, even before the colony ships arrived. Certain of their own doom, species N sent their entire arsenal of weaponry aboard the fleet our probes witnessed nuking the planet. They didn’t use stasis modules; a single pilot lived aboard each craft for the entire journey.
These pilots didn’t have any particular orders after accomplishing their mission. They sent messages of success, but they themselves were chosen among the youngest members of their species in order to complete the journey. There would likely be nobody left to receive the messages, and they themselves had mere decades of life left.
The other pilots just suicided their ships into the planet after finishing their mission. But this one, who we call John, landed at one of the ships under construction. Species N is apparently capable of holding their breath for hours, so John went aboard the ship and found one of their computer cores that was still functioning, brought it aboard his ship, and then proceeded to spend years figuring out their language and communications protocols, and discovered the list of planets they were attempting to colonize.
So he programmed a communication device on this ship to send the message repeatedly until it ran out of power or was destroyed, to all the planets species G was targeting. The message was quite long, but in summary, it said to species G that species N found and destroyed them. Species N was itself doomed by species G’s genocidal acts, but he and his fellow pilots delivered retribution. John sent the message to every planet species G was hoping to colonize, so that if any of them survived, they would know their species had been fingered for their deeds, and if any of the people they tried to genocide survived, they would have a warning about the genocidal species. It included galactic positioning information for all the planets, so any others would know the places they might be found. It included pictures of the species, and other information about them we had also found from their computers. It also warned of the impending supernova.
The longer part, in only John’s native language, gave the story of their people, how they’d discovered the attack and traced its source, how they responded with this death fleet, and in detail John’s actions after landing at their space station. It concluded by saying John only had a few years left to live, and by the time anyone got the message, he would surely be gone, so not to bother trying to contact him. He only asked that if any other species survived, to try to finish his job on any of the planets they tried to flee to.
In effect, he asked us to help track down any surviving members of species G and destroy them. That wouldn’t be an easy mission. Some of the planets were up to 150 light years from Earth. And if species G was there, they would be warned they may be subject to attack. Even though it was the action of a single person, John’s plea convinced the people of Earth to do what many of them had wanted to do from the start, except now to try to do it across all of the conceivably reachable parts of the galaxy.
Since there was no way we could send planet-destroying fleets to so many worlds, many of which might turn out to be uninhabited, what we needed to do first was send out probes. Effectively, do what we did to species G’s homeworld to all these other worlds, and if we found species G on one of them, then we could send in the weapons.
I’m Bart Bandora, head of the UN Task Force to Eradicate Species G in 3022.
John’s mission was a difficult one, but for his sake, now knowing that species G actually succeeded in killing off one species, in addition to their attempt on us, we accepted it. We developed and launched probes to all the worlds species G was targeting with colony ships, and one by one, they sent back pictures of bleak wastelands. Most of them showed signs of the colony ships from one or two fleets having arrived and dropped off their passengers. However, these weren’t terraforming ships. While we had found plans for terraforming other worlds, it appeared that the impending supernova had scuttled such developments, and instead, all the ships were identical to the ones that came to Earth. As a result, they didn’t live very long on these worlds. We don't know whether the vast majority of their people knew they were heading for near certain death, but then, there was death waiting back at their homeworld, too.
One we were most interested in was the planet 60 light years from Earth. There were clear signs of civilization on the planet. But it was a decayed civilization, with buildings in disrepair, overrun by plants and small animals, and no signs of the intelligent life that built it. There were heaps of wreckage at various places on the planet consistent with two fleets of species G colony ships getting shot down when they came down into the atmosphere to discharge their passengers. Perhaps they had atmospheric missiles but not space missiles, a level of technology consistent with late 20th-century Earth. Or perhaps they all died and they had only automated defenses still running. Nothing attempted to harm our probe, which stayed well up in the upper atmosphere. The probe circled the planet and took detailed pictures, but it did not appear the former residents here or the defenses they left behind let any of species G reach the planet alive. So make that two species that species G successfully genocided.
The planet 90 light years from Earth, species N’s planet, had a similar deserted civilization on the surface. There was space debris forming a ring around the planet, and indications that pieces of this debris had fallen to the planet beneath this orbit, all the way around the world, but no indication anyone was alive there or had lived there for centuries.
There are still several farther planets we haven’t gotten reports back from, but this year species G’s homeworld’s sun went supernova. None of the remaining planets are directly behind the supernova, so we expect to still get signals from them before the shockwave reaches Earth. Our fleet of space nukes based on the moon is as yet unused. We’ve made a plan that if we do not find species G on any of these planets, we will disarm the missiles, because we cannot risk them going awry when the shockwave comes. We will know that with more than enough time to spare.
We got a few amazing photos of the supernova from the probes there. The photos were being described as a “once in a civilization” event and we felt that we’d done something special in having probes on site for this, even though it meant they were destroyed seconds after the event. We got centuries of useful data from them before it happened.
Spurred on by seeing the supernova itself, people are getting serious about shielding all electronics from cosmic rays. The first significant increase in cosmic rays is still centuries away, and they will recycle all these devices and their shielding before that happens, but we can’t argue with establishing good habits.
I’m Jacob Wald, head of the UN Task Force to Eradicate Species G in 3064.
We finally found them, 126 light years from Earth, where they found a planet where they could survive. They were living a rudimentary life, but we got good photos of beings matching the ones who arrived to Earth. It was definitely them. It appeared their colony ships had crashed on the surface after discharging their passengers, but in different parts of the planet. They had set up 8 cities with 100 to 300 kilometers between them, presumably where each ship had dropped the majority of its passengers, and there appeared to be about 100,000 population in each city, meaning they had doubled since landing perhaps a century or so ahead of us. They would have already doubled again in the delay it took to get the images from there, and would do so maybe three times more before our missiles could get there.
The people of Earth had one last chance to grant mercy to these people, who had done something no other intelligent species we were now aware of in the universe had done: They had colonized another world. There were some calls to let them be, that maybe we’d want to preserve the world as a future possible place for us to colonize. However, such a mission would likely be thousands of years off. The radiation from the nukes would have dissipated. And we had two closer worlds that were also candidates, and several others that would work if we sent out advance terraforming fleets.
The people of Earth said no mercy. So away they went, one planet’s worth of our arsenal. It would take them centuries to get there, and the supernova’s shockwave would hit Earth first, so we weren’t sure if we would truly be able to witness the results. They would arrive ahead of the shockwave at their destination, so we felt certain they’d work. Ironically, the shockwave wouldn’t affect species G much at all, if they were there when it arrived. They were much farther from it than we were, and they appeared to have no electronics to be damaged by it.
I’m Trisha Quinn, head of the UN Task Force to Eradicate Species G in 3458.
Once our probes reached the last planet in on Species G’s roster on potentially habitable planets, and we found none of them alive save on that one planet, we started disarming the remaining missiles on the moon. The launch fuel and the nuclear material were brought back to Earth safely, with the nuclear material in a fleet of small drones each with less than half a critical mass of cargo, so that even if two of them were to collide, it shouldn’t cause a catastrophe. Fortunately, there were no accidents. The material was used to provide nuclear power on Earth for more than a century. The rest of the structure of the missiles we left there, as it was harmless, and potentially usable construction material should we ever need to build something there again.
The next focus was the oncoming shockwave. We sent a series of probes far out into space, not really aiming for any particular targets, but headed toward the supernova, to get a more precise prediction of when we’d be struck. So we had two years’ advance notice of the first significant wave arriving in 3413. Not everything went smoothly; some things were not as shielded as they should have been, but the critical infrastructure was safe. Several neighborhoods lost power, but compared to how it would have been without preparation, it was pretty minor.
We did lose contact with the fleet of missiles, though; it took more sophisticated strategies to find their signal in the much noisier space environment inside the shockwave. By 3433 we had it, though, and apart from not being able to find the signal during two more particle waves, we kept receiving their signal. In 3457, the missiles deployed their drones, which would monitor the planet from a safe distance and give us ongoing footage of the results of the destruction. Species G had set up a pretty decent civilization, which we estimated at 20 million beings, but they were still mostly focused on growing food and the basic necessities. The people of Earth still were not feeling sorry for them, though, not that we could stop the missiles at this point anyway. The missiles struck, they were wiped out, and the drones continued to broadcast images of the now-lifeless planet.
With the mission accomplished, in 3458 I closed down the task force. We would go to space again someday, but we would, we hoped, do so in peace. We gained from this experience a long list of potentially habitable planets, and we sent probes to them which gathered information about them. We might have to send new probes due to the existing ones failing under the shockwave of the supernova. It might be thousands of years, after the supernova had mostly blown past us, before we tried.
Comments
Whoo!
Quite the span of time (just under 1400 years). A very interesting story overall, but VERY long. No offense intended, but to me it seems like you wandered way off the original plot. If intentional, you might want to rethink that approach as most will give up well before the end.
I agree.
The original plot isn't really relevant by the end. It starts out as an interesting take on gender and sex, but it eventually becomes a more typical sci-fi plot.
The story plot.
Like the two previous commmentators, this is really two stories or 'books'. The first 'book' is about gender issues affecting the Earth, and the second book addresses the causes of those issues by describing an interplanetary / interstellar war in typically 'scifi fashion'. Nevertheless the writer treats the science in both 'parts' of the story very effectively whilst keeping the science plausible. Well done, Beverly.
I liked this
The science was plausible and did not require any hand-wavery for the plot to work. I just wonder whether the captured aliens were allowed to live and breed on Earth in captivity or were they either killed or prevented from breeding and die out naturally?
I was going for the realism
Thank you. I was going for the realism in the science fiction. Several aspects of this story borrow from science fact, including the fate of single-X females (underdeveloped feminine attributes and usually sterile), the times required for sub-light-speed space travel, and the aspects of the supernova and the kind of binary system that generates it.
A deleted scene was going to give the fate of the aliens orbiting the moon. The interviewed ones are put back into suspended animation and they remain there for a century or two, theoretically for use in further research that never happens. Then there's a public outcry about how we are searching the galaxy for more of these people to kill them but we are holding a bunch of them captive nearby, and so they kill them and crash the ships into the moon.