Ethertravel report #247, received January 12, 2481.

I was Martin Dreyer on old Earth before I volunteered to ethertravel to a new world. By having somebody sit in those machines and scan the sky, they had identified thousands of possible targets, but they had only sent people to a few hundred of them and only gotten reports back from a few dozen. The goal was to send enough people to each planet early enough that we could get reports back from those where it was possible, but send them in groups so we had a better chance of them finding one another and cooperating to build ether communicators and report back.

As a ninety-year-old with terminal cancer, I could imagine nothing better than getting to live a new life starting from infancy, even if it was as some weird alien being. As a well-educated man still able to learn new things, I was a candidate for the program so long as I could survive long enough to be sent. I had to take two years of classes to learn how to build an ether communicator from scratch, from literally nothing but dirt and a few bits of metal if necessary, to maximize the chance I could report home from any kind of planet at any level of technology. Getting stuck on a “dirt and metal” world might mean it would take dedicating my entire life there to build a send-only communicator. Fortunately, my world was not that primitive.

The darkness, warmth, and sounds where I arrived told me I was still in my mother’s womb. Naturally, before long, I was born. And this is my report.

The People

This world features a blue sky, and an atmosphere I eventually learned is similar to Earth’s. And there are people who look... not quite human.

I was reminded of the term “uncanny valley.” When somebody tries to make a human-like robot, or a realistic but fake video of a person, or if they merge two photos of different people together, sometimes the result is something that looks sort of like a person but there’s just something off about it that gives you the creeps. That’s the uncanny valley: The gap between, say, a caricature of a person and a photograph of that person, where it looks like it’s trying to be a photo of a person but is messed up in some way. The people here look like that. The faces are downright ugly by human standards, with wide noses, a big gap between the nose and mouth, and huge mustaches. Every adult has a mustache and they cut them just above the mouth so everybody has hair about an inch and a quarter long right above their lips.

Nobody ever wears any clothes here, except when needed for protection, so I got a good view of the anatomy pretty quickly. Every adult has two bulging, female-human-style breasts a bit lower on the chest than in humans when standing upright. While this (despite the mustaches) made me think of them as women, it’s not right to call them either men or women; there are no different sexes here, and every person has the same parts.

The arms are short and thick, while the legs are longer. The hands and feet... you might call them all hands, or all feet, or both. There are 6 dexterous fingers on each limb. Well, four fingers and two opposable thumbs, one on each side of the hand. All four hands are capable of grasping things, but the two thumbs make for a very different type of grasp from what humans have. Imagine holding something like a baseball bat. You have the thumb on top, the four fingers curled around the other side, and then a second thumb curled around the same side as the first thumb.

People walk bipedally, in an uncanny valley imitation of a human walk, but run down on all fours, with butts high in the air. Running is the common mode of transportation for moderate distances; the bodies are capable of getting up to horse-like speeds. For such trips, they have a kind of shoe they wear on all four feet.

People here have both lungs and gills, or their equivalents, and can survive unlimited time underwater. It’s assumed that all life here developed in the water, where the temperature is more stable. All the land-dwelling animals have kept their gills to allow them to live in water during times of extreme heat or cold. But the norm for the people here is to live out of the water during the day and sleep in water at night. Instead of beds, people have oversized bathtubs, big enough to completely immerse their bodies in, temperature-controlled to near body temperature, and filtered to keep clean. It’s common to have several of these in one room, which are the only fixtures in the room, and they serve both for bathing and for sleeping. In my infancy and early childhood I had a smaller one and my caretakers put me in at night and took me out in the morning and dried me off.

People pee and lay eggs from holes between their legs. The eggs are a combination of actual egg and solid waste disposal; there’s a real shell, and but the interior is filled mainly with bodily waste rather than what you’d find in an egg of an animal on Earth. The normal way to dispose of these is in something like a compost pile which you can find outside every home. Food waste, yard waste, and other organic waste is dumped there, but people also pee there and lay their eggs there. They use a poker provided near each compost pile to crush up the eggs and push them down into the compost.

Adult eggs are slightly smaller than a chicken’s egg. Even as a baby I made eggs like these, but they were smaller. They wrapped me in a thing sort of like a diaper, which collected my pee, but it had a rigid cup in it to collect the eggs. By the time I could walk on my own, I was expected to use the compost pile.

People here commonly sit in a style of chair where the butt is far back but the legs angle upward, so they can have their hands and feet up on a tabletop to write, draw, and do other detailed things with all four hands. As a child I had a miniature one of these chairs with a desk attached. The length of the legs and the position of the desk were adjustable for use as I grew. As soon as I was able to get paper and pencils (or what passes for them here) I started writing out my observations, in English, which of course nobody here could read. I decorated the pages with intentionally bad drawings of the plants and animals and people here so they would not think I was totally crazy, just creative. And as I learned the language I added the local names.

Infancy to Starting School

From just after my birth, I was cared for in a facility with a number of other infants by four wet-nurses, any one of whom might breast-feed me. When I got a bit older they started feeding me pureed food to supplement the breast milk. They also replaced my diaper and put me into and took me out of the tubs. I learned later that they weren’t my parents. People do not raise their own children here; this was a full-time job for the people caring for me.

Not long after I was able to walk upright I was transferred to another facility. This one was more like day-care for toddlers, except that I lived there all the time. I was no longer breast-fed, and quickly graduated from pureed food to soft food to smaller portions of the same food adults eat. There were lots of toys, and simple educational things to teach the beginnings of language, but just like toddlers on Earth, I had no set classes and the time not dedicated to the tub or meals was free time. I was taught to use the compost pile on my own upon first arriving here; it was in an area behind the building enclosed by a roof and screens, and when it was cold they would pull down solid shades all the way around it so that the area could be heated.

There were four caretakers here, and a varying number of kids. There were 24 tubs for kids, but I don’t remember there being more than about 18 at one time. Kids arrived individually as they were deemed not to need infant care, but they left in groups to go to the first actual school. I was labeled as age 17 when that happened, though I had been in the place for what I thought of as about 4 Earth years; I hadn’t learned the calendar system here yet. At the time I left, four of us left at once, and the others went to the same school, but they weren’t in my living group so I didn’t commonly see them again.

At my first school, we lived in suites with up to 18 kids and two caretakers each. The one I was in actually had 17 kids. Each suite had a sleeping room with 18 small tubs, but larger ones than I had used before, and two adult-sized tubs placed sideways compared to the others, for the caretakers. There was a play room, where we spent our free time. And there was a classroom. The caretakers made sure we were there at the right times, but there were separate teachers who came in to teach us classes. A physical education teacher would come to us but lead us outside on most days, and sometimes we would put on shoes for this.

There was also a pee pad in one corner of the play room. We were taught upon entering the school that these took the place of the compost pile in larger buildings. There was a bumpy rubber pad on the ground that you squat down and pee on. The pee goes into slots in the pad and you spray some water to wash it down someplace that handles it. There was also a chute nearby for you to put eggs into, which is also used for food waste. We didn’t see it, but we were told a machine down below grinds everything up.

We had three meals a day at this time, and before each meal, one of the caretakers would go somewhere and bring us back packages containing prepared food. Each of us got a pre-filled, covered tray with different foods in different sections and utensils for eating it. Any uneaten food went in the chute, and the empty trays and utensils went back in the bags and one of the caretakers would take them away, presumably to be cleaned and reused.

In one of my classes there in the first year, they taught us about the calendar, which was based on the planet and its sun. This planet orbits its sun quickly, a smaller sun which produces significantly less energy than Sol, but is much closer. Our years are 115 “days” long, with days of a length similar to those of Earth. The planet has a 75 degree axial tilt, which means most of the surface has several days at a time with no sun. The poles get too cold to live in, but people live in places that have up to 6 days in a row with no sun and it gets quite cold during those times. Where I grew up, the most was 2 or 3 days without sun. Naturally, they also have air conditioning for the periods where we get multiple days in a row of sunlight.

The year is broken into 23 five-day weeks. The last day of each week had no classes, and there was a week in the middle and two weeks at the end that were also breaks with no classes. There were also 5 holidays in some of the 20 weeks with classes, always on the first day of the week, which left 75 actual class days out of the 115 days each year. Of course, we were together all the days of the year, so on the holidays we did things to celebrate why those were special days. There were various activities for us to do on the one day off each week, including sometimes activities outside with the other kids from the other rooms, practically the only time we saw the other kids.

There were levels or “grades” as the term is used on Earth, but we spent three years in each grade. Kids start at this school when they are 16, 17, or 18 of these years old at the start of a year. This school has five grades, so I was here for fifteen of the very short years, and left it when I was 32. The same group of 17 of us stayed in the same suite, with the same other kids in nearby suites who were the same age as us, for all five grades, though most of the teachers changed each grade.

Reproduction

In our last year at the first school, we were educated in how reproduction works. People have an orifice on their stomachs which I had taken to be a navel. This class explained it is actually best described as a vagina. There are no penises and no body-to-body mating here, though. No passionate coupling, no sex drive. Clearly there must have been something of the sort at some point for the species to have developed, but somehow this has been bred away, and now mating is only a duty.

The eggs we usually discard as waste are actually used for reproduction. When someone wants to have a baby, she opens up the vagina and inserts another person’s egg through it into what is effectively a womb. You have to purposefully open your vagina to get an egg inside; otherwise it stays shut tight and any attempt to force an egg in will only crush it. And we weren’t old enough to open them yet, but we would be soon. In the coming few years we would reach puberty, and our breasts and mustaches would start to grow, and we would be able to open our vaginas. Just like any sex ed class on Earth, they taught us not to, for now.

After we reach puberty, every egg we make, in addition to containing solid bodily wastes, contains an unfertilized egg cell. Inside the womb, it gets bathed in material from the mother containing tiny cells which can perforate through the eggshell and wastes. If one of them reaches this cell, it will fertilize the egg, which develops into a larva.

The larval form lives on the matter in the egg for the first few days. Even though it’s bodily waste for us, the larva feeds on it. Once that is used up, the larva undergoes a metamorphosis in which it turns into something actually resembling a tiny person, which then lives on nourishment provided by the mother’s body. If the metamorphosis or attachment fails, or the egg fails to fertilize, about 5 days after its introduction into the womb it is expelled. If it survives, after that point it’s like a human pregnancy and birth, although shorter and with the baby born much smaller. There isn’t the equivalent of a menstrual cycle here. The process in the womb is triggered by the introduction of an egg, and is available whenever the womb isn’t busy with another egg, larva, or fetus; at such times the vagina will not open.

There are also certain, not entirely known genetic restrictions on who can successfully mate with whom. They don’t have DNA analysis here, and since people don’t live with their parents, most of them don’t know their family history. In olden days, they only knew you could never mate successfully using your own or a full sibling’s egg, Modern studies have led them to believe there are several classes of people, and you can never mate successfully with an egg from your own class. Parents of a given pair of classes always have children in the same classes, sometimes a different one from either parent, and some pairs of different classes also can’t mate. Two people at random are a bit over 50% able to mate. Even with eggs from pairings which can mate, the mating is not always successful. The standard is to try three times with any potential partner; three failures is taken to be a sign that you are incompatible.

Each adult is expected to give birth to one child at some point after they finish school, except the child care workers, who are forbidden, and certain people who are selected by some process to have a second. It’s generally assumed each adult contributes one or two eggs to make children, as well, but this is less strict, and especially in cases where someone has trouble finding a compatible partner, they can seek eggs from those who have already contributed to other children.

Milk production begins in the mother before birth, but simply being around infants is enough to stimulate milk production. This is why the system I have described was set up. It is inconvenient for those without infants to feed to have their breasts full of milk, so infants are isolated and cared for only by the wet nurses who are expected to be forever producing milk.

Secondary School

After the first school, we moved to a secondary school for four more grades (12 short years). On the move-in day, our caretakers helped us pack up our protective clothing and school supplies and such, and with each of us carrying it all in a backpack, we marched together to the school, with one caretaker in front and one behind like the parents of a group of goslings.

Students at this school were expected to be able to care for themselves; there were no live-in caretakers, though there were still plenty of adults to help us out. There was someone like a maid who came by to help us clean up, but she acted more in the role of helping us learn how to clean up after ourselves rather than just doing all the cleaning. Other than that, usually nobody else came into our suite unless somebody reported a problem or one of us didn’t show up for class.

Instead of the large suites I lived in before, this time we lived in smaller suites with room for only 4 people each. Again, they spread out the vacancies so there would be some with only three people living in a space made for four. Each suite had a main room, a shared sleeping room with 4 tubs, a closet for each student for those clothes worn when it was cold, a pee pad, and two study rooms with two desks each. The building had three floors, with a large cafeteria and other services occupying the entire first floor. The other two floors each had ten wings, 5 on each side of a central hallway. Each wing had 25 of these 4-person suites and 5 classrooms which corresponded to the five classes we took indoors. Each hallway had a sign at each end giving the floor number and one of the first ten letters of their alphabet to identify it; they were otherwise identical. One class was physical education which was either outside or in the nearby gymnasium which had an enclosed path to reach it during bad weather.

This building was entirely occupied by people in my grade, and our teachers, who lived in rooms at the ends of the main hallway and between the wings. There were three other similarly sized buildings, one for each other grade. During the two-week break at the end of each grade there was a designated moving day, in which we gathered up all our stuff in our backpacks and moved to the same room number in another building. You got to know your roommates really well, because you had all your classes together and stayed with them as you advanced in grade levels.

Early on at this school, they told us about the next school, where we would end up in one of six or seven “tracks” that determined the kind of career we might end up in. At the start of our last year in this school, we’d apply to two or three out of six tracks, specifying an order of preference. There are actually seven tracks, but the child care track was treated as a punishment or default place for poor students who couldn’t learn other skills, and wasn’t offered as a choice you could apply to. The tracks are:

• A science-oriented one
• A technical one where you learn a trade like building or repairing equipment
• A creative one for artists and musicians and writers and the like
• One that is broadly speaking medical but encompasses a lot more than merely doctors and nurses
• One that covers a variety of subjects not fitting into any of the above, including history and law
• One that focuses on education, specifically for producing the teachers for various levels of school
• One that focuses on child care, which only produced wet nurses, day care workers, and the caretakers at the first school

There are many specialties within most tracks, and these descriptions only loosely cover them. When you finished that school, based on your track, specialty, and grades, you’d be assigned to some job. It was possible to move between different kinds of jobs over time, but a lot of people stayed in the same field and only advanced in seniority and the amount and importance of work they did during their entire careers. So getting in the track you wanted was critically important, and the grades in certain classes in this school would be counted toward your eligibility for each track. That’s why they were telling us so far in advance.

They gave us lots of information about the tracks, the specialties within them, the selection process, and statistics from previous classes. The selection process tried to give the better students their first preference, the less good ones their first or second preference, and the passing students one of three preferences, based on filling a quota within each track based on the expected jobs needing to be filled many years from now when we graduated. If you didn’t make it into one of your preferences, but your grades in some group of classes were good enough for it, they might assign you to a track you didn’t select which didn’t have enough people accepted.

If you didn’t make it into any of the six tracks, you would get trained as a child care worker. This was considered a failure and the worst possible result, though some people actually like the work. The second-worst result was to make it into one of the six tracks, but fail. There were other low-skill jobs you could be assigned in such cases, such as a deliveryman.

Apparently some kind of fairness law required them to provide us with statistics from the past ten graduating classes on the size of each track and how many people got into it as a first, second, or third choice, the minimum averaged grade over the relevant classes among those accepted for the track, and more. This was supposed to help us include in our decisions for tracks to try for the level of competition for the tracks.

The general advice seemed to be, for students with average or better performance, pick what you most want first, what you next most want second, and what you least hate from the rest third, or no third choice if you really want one of the first two and you’re sure your grades are good enough. Generally speaking, those who did consistently well in the classes for their first preference got it. For the weaker students, the advice was to take one or two choices you most wanted, as long as you weren’t clearly unqualified for them, and fill the rest with one or two out of the two or three other tracks with the greatest ratio of acceptances to applications which you were best in classes for, leaving out the one you were least qualified for.

It was clear pretty quickly that I needed to get into the science-based track to understand what the state-of-the-art was here and how I might construct an ether communicator, based on the materials and technology available on this world. It was surely beyond what they were capable of here, but they had some rudimentary electronics, so it was definitely possible. But this gave me a set of classes to focus on. It would also really help to have some allies, because some of the stuff from the trade school might also be useful. I would, for instance, not be likely learn how to solder a circuit together in the science program (or whatever technology they used for hand-building circuits here). We could split up the effort and focus on different areas. If not, I would just have to try to take the right trade classes.

But they hadn’t invented the equivalent of the Internet on this world yet; they barely had computers. And I couldn’t exactly make up a T-shirt to advertise myself in a way only ethertravelers would recognize, since people usually didn’t wear clothes. There was one thing I could use, though: a visor.

It was common, on sunny days, for people to wear something that looked a lot like a visor from Earth - a hat that strapped around the head, open on top, size adjustable in back, with a flap that extended out over the eyes, and for exactly the same reason - to help keep the sun from shining directly in your eyes. And sometimes those visors were decorated. I just had to figure a way to either have a custom visor made, or get one I could draw on.

In this school, we were on our own on the days without classes. There were a number of activities set up during those times, and we were free to go to any of them, as well as do other things. One of those things was to visit the store on the first floor. We weren’t given actual money, but we had credits: Each student was allowed one coat, one set of shoes, one visor, and some other things each grade, a replacement backpack once during our whole time here, and several credits at the start plus two per year for school supplies and other things.

As soon as I got a chance after starting school, I went out and found a customizable visor. It turns out that’s actually a thing here. They sell visors that you are meant to decorate, along with markers that work on them and a sealant to protect the image when you are done, and I got the set for a visor credit and two school supply credits.

So after doing a rough sketch on paper onto which I’d traced an outline of the flattened visor, I drew my design on the visor. There was a common sort of creeping vine around here that sprouted flowers here and there. It looked sort of like a morning glory, though unlike a morning glory, once each flower opened it stayed open until the flower wilted and fell off after a few weeks. I drew flowers at the ends and intersections of the lines in the letters and drew vines spelling out TERRA between them. At each end of the word, I drew a round pond with what people would take for some of the common pond plants around here, but I drew them in the shape of the Americas on the left, and of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia on the right. Anyone from Earth would see unmistakably the Latin name for our planet and depictions of it. Everyone from here would just see a nature scene. There was a common soil around here that was a pale orange color. I used that color to fill in the rest of the background. Once I had it looking good I sprayed on the sealant. I wore the visor whenever I was going outside and it was sunny, which meant to some phys ed classes and lots of things on the non-class days. A lot of kids had visors of one sort or another that they wore the same way, though most had the generic solid-color ones or ones with various pictures or designs.

Eleven of the short years here passed, and no other ethertravelers identified themselves to me, despite circulating among every kind of activity and trying everything once. So I assumed I was alone in this endeavor, and I listed my preferences as science, trade, and nothing because none of the other tracks would help me at all. I got into the science track, so that much was good.

Tertiary School

The tertiary school was like a college, where students would individually go to their classes at potentially different class times and in different buildings. Each track had a separate dorm which was located near the buildings for most classes in that track. You might still go to another part of the campus for certain shared classes and electives you could take a limited number of from other tracks. There weren’t official grade levels here, but the programs were designed for you to complete them over eighteen years, the equivalent of six grade levels at the other schools. And we stayed in our same room with our same roommates the entire time.

Within the sciences, there were electives within every program, which allowed me to take a class in astronomy, critical to help me find the Earth in the skies here, and a little physics, while mainly focusing on electronics and the rudimentary computers which, if their progress was anything like Earth’s, would become vastly less expensive and more capable over my lifetime here.

I was able to get into basic electronics repair from the trade track to learn how someone on this world would actually assemble circuits from resistors and diodes. That was approximately plan D for building an ether communicator, but at least I wouldn’t have to mine for my own circuit elements. While I was in this class, I drew out from memory all the circuits I would need.

I kept wearing my visor at every reasonable opportunity as well. By this point, since I’d had the opportunity to get one each grade, I had some spares and I was on my third actual decorated one. But I never found anyone.

Moving on Past School

During my last year in the school, I got several job offers. All the companies were owned by the government, but there were still people within them who made significant decisions on their own, and I was basically being offered first choice among several jobs based on my good grades and class choices. There was an offer from a company looking to build space exploration telescopes which seemed perfect, and I accepted. After I finished school, I moved into an empty space in company housing, a group of 6-person homes that was dedicated to housing people who worked at this company and located within the same block.

There were some down sides. Just like on Earth, the telescopes were built in remote places where light pollution was low. This meant that I was out on the fringes, where I’d have spans of 6 days of complete darkness and 6 days of continuous sun, and even then, I was out in a tiny neighborhood where we didn’t use street lights, to minimize the light pollution. But it was only a few minutes walk to the local train where I could get anywhere in the city, such as it was. Because of people with similar interests to mine living around here, there was actually an electronics store in the city, though I think everything cost about 50% more than it might have near where I grew up.

The price was actually competitive with ordering it and having it shipped, at the exorbitant shipping rates to get stuff here, except for the shipping time. There was no air mail on this world. It would come up here the same way I did, on a train, and then it would get hauled from the train station by a pull cart. The train network is extensive; you can get practically anywhere by train. There are long-haul trains that go across the continent (and via underwater tunnels, to the other continent which, combined with this one, make up about 90% of the land area and essentially all of the inhabited land of this world). From there you can take regional trains and then “connector” trains that can bring you into any city in the world. They are called connectors because they connect with the local rail within each city that can get you into individual neighborhoods, from which you can walk to your destination. And that’s why it might take 10 days to get something like that delivered.

Because of this, most people and even companies don’t use motor vehicles. The few I typically saw were electric carts used by disabled people. The delivery service, which handles everything from letters to appliances, uses a kind of cart that people can pull in 4-legged running mode. There’s a yoke that extends out from the top of it with a harness, two straps you’d fasten across your chest, one above the breasts and one down low close to the legs. A person could easily move two or three other people that way, but the carts are not used like that. They are only used for moving goods. The entire set of deliveries for one city coming off the train each day is loaded on one or more such carts and taken to a nearby sorting facility, where they are divided up into individual neighborhood routes, and typically loaded on similar carts that go out, via the local trains, to the equivalent of neighborhood post offices near each station. There, they’d be divided up into individual carrier routes, usually hauled by backpack by the individual carriers who would deliver them, but packages might still come on one of these carts.

I got an unlimited clothing allowance for dealing with cold weather, and I didn’t even necessarily need to, because the people here also got an extra construction allowance and people had shared theirs in the past to build an underground network of tunnels. There was basically a second front door on our house in the basement which opened into a public tunnel that followed the path of the street above. The tunnels have heat and lights, and they connect all the streets in my neighborhood with the handful of workplaces here, and to the local train system, which can get you to other parts of the city and, in many case, their tunnels.

The basement was only otherwise used for our home’s heating system and storage, and my housemates were fine with me claiming a part of it to set up my project. This took time, and lots of trial and error, but I tested each component. At the same time, I had access to some of the best astronomical data available on this world, and I spent hours poring through it to find Earth. By the time I actually had an ether communicator ready to test, I knew where to aim it, and I only had to wait for this planet to be on the right side of its star. That gave me time to finalize this report.

Indeed, when the planet was in position, I aimed into the right sector of space and found Earth. I sent a short message, and got a response, then I sent the full report and considered my duty to Earth complete.