Echoes of Earth

Humphrey,” I yell, banging my fist against the observation deck door. “There's something wrong with Jansen. Humphrey!” I try to push the door open, but it’s been barricaded from the other side. How long has Humphrey been holed up in there…three months? Three years? It's hard to tell.

“Humphrey!” I yell one last time before giving up. This whole ship is going crazy. Four years in space and I'm the only one holding it together.

I make my way to the Navigation room to find Jansen in a state of mania. He sits tuck-kneed in the captain's chair whirling between the wall-to-wall display panels. Each panel is playing clips from the historical archives, and as far as I can tell they’re looping rapidly through Earth’s worst atrocities – bombings, murders, riots and the like – all firing off on the screens at once.

“Jansen!” I yell over the cacophony of noise, and he turns to me with a look of glee like an over-excited child. He pushes a button and the clips immediately stop. The panels go black.

“I was wondering when you'd stop by.”

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I'm educating myself on the marvels of human ingenuity. Have you ever seen a flamethrower? It's fascinating. Or a guillotine? Or a hand grenade? We used to create such beautiful destruction!”

“But why? This is all ancient history.”

“Oh you know… Ignorant of the past, doomed to repeat it. But here’s what I think…if you know the past, then you know all the best tricks. Why wouldn’t you repeat it?”

https://fkrtt.in/en/v2AXmd?user=

I'm at a loss. It appears Jansen is having a manic episode. “When's the last time you slept? I’m going to get you a sedative.”

“No!” Jansen jumps up in protest as I start toward the mess hall. “We received a message!” he blurts out nervously, like he accidentally spilled a secret. “It's from Earth.”

I stop and turn. “Why wasn’t I notified?”

“I added a new directive in the mainframe. All messages come to me.” Jansen pauses as a look of confusion flashes across my face. He then laughs in delight, like he played a clever trick.

“How did you get into the mainframe?” I ask. All sensitive areas on the ship - the Mainframe, the Biovault, the Nursery - require two out of the three of us to gain access. Each door has a pair of biometric handprint locks; it keeps any one of us from doing something unilaterally stupid. Jansen smiles sheepishly.

“Humphrey helped you get in, didn’t he?” I say, more as a statement than a question, and Jansen's smile widens.

“Humphrey's not so bad. You bring him food packs and empty his bio-matter, and he’ll do anything you want.”

I start to get angry but calm myself. “Okay, what is the message?”

“It's a good one,” Jansen says, sitting back down and twirling around to type on a console. The paneled walls light up with a video of an empty bunker. The director of the Allied-Earth space program appears and sits down, looking at the screen with a grave face.

“Gentlemen…I regret to inform you that this will be my last transmission…I must be brief…The alliance has broken down…The nukes have been released… ALL of them…This is what we feared…I felt it my duty to inform you as your…”

A flash of orange lights up the screen and then it cuts out and the panels go dark. I stare in shock as Jansen starts giggling to himself.

“The world has ended”, says Jansen. “The spectrometer picked up the explosions right as the message cut off.”

I force down the nausea in the pit of my stomach. I have to keep it together as Jansen has clearly lost it. “This doesn't change anything,” I say, doing my best to project solemn authority.

“Doesn’t it?”

I turn to look at Jansen and get irrationally angry. “Of course not, this is the whole reason we were sent. To find a new home. To rebuild.”

Jansen starts to reply, but I cut him off and turn to leave. I don't have the patience for his games. “Going to see the missus?” he calls out as I exit the room. Something about his tone rubs me the wrong way, but I refuse to be baited.

I make my way to the Biovault. I can't gain access - not by myself at least - but I press my forehead against the small view window and stare inside at the body of my wife - frozen within a cryopod in a state of suspended animation and only partially visible through the frosted glass panel on the front of the pod. I admit I've been doing this more and more often, sometimes for days at a time. The loneliness of space seems to bring out the crazy in everyone.

The Biovault is a large room with a row of cryopods flanking the right wall, and a mirror image of incubation pods along the left. The pods look like metallic eggs standing erect, a tangle of tubes and other life support systems connected at the base. The cryopods now contain the last true remnants of humanity, each holding a volunteer from Earth, my wife among them, carefully selected for their relevant expertise and scientific knowledge.

The incubation pods on the other hand hold a batch of cloned human specimens, still gestating. By the time we land