Secrets of the Antiwave

PART 3 | Chapter 12: Three... Two... One... Twenty-One Hundred!

Now I know what some of you might be thinking. When the MFC hit and Rutherford's money ran out, why didn't we find a sponsor? Why didn't we enlist help from the government? We'd discovered alien life right under our noses! Surely, this was the discovery of the century, a discovery to change all times!

For that exact reason we agreed to never resort to a sponsor. Far too well did we know the genocidal tendencies of our species, the misinformation and hysteria that ruins what it tries to save. Here was our chance to finally meet another civilisation without decimating half the native population before we remembered that killing is wrong.

We vowed to never let such a thing occur. Either we would be the first to establish contact with the Celestials, or the project would die with us.

Even when we were living beyond the brink of poverty within the squalid corridors of the crippled SMO, the idea of ever divulging our secrets, or the prospect of publicly releasing the antiwave before we understood its effect on the planets, had never crossed our minds. None of us were capable of doing such a thing.

That's why we were so surprised when we found out that someone could.

* * *

In late December of 2098 Huxley invited me to meet the new millennium at his opulent mansion just north of Clarke City in Xanthe Terra. He'd also invited Stevenson, McGregor, and Keller, along with Dimitriev and Xu, who flew in from Ganymede and Europa respectively. Huxley's journalistic talent, combined with several slightly-dubious corporate investments, had made him unfathomably rich. Yet you'd never be able to tell, judging by the humble, reserved manner in which he always held himself. I was flattered to be invited to such an event.

Planet-nationalists always made a big fuss about "non-Earth New Year's", but the dirigible habitats on all the gas giants, the underground cities of Mercury, and every orbital station in the System have always been synced to the 24-hour day. As for Mars, we did away with 'sols' in favour of Earth days back in the 40;s, just for convenience's sake. Interplanetary time zone's were still a bitch, though.

* * *

The inter-state mag-rail from NMT to XT gave me a lot to think about. Every other passenger had probably seen me a thousand times over on their holoscreens, but not a single one remembered me now. Celebrities are young and new, celebrities are relevant and modern -- no one ever sees the broken scrap heaps they eventually become. Their leftovers are brushed between the floorboards of the stage to make way for new idols. We forget that the scraps ever existed.

And yet all these commuters were dreaming of fame of glory. All these white-collar, blue-collar, family men and lone-wolf riders dreamed of seeing their name in the spotlight. Oh God, I thought, if only I could give them two weeks on holovision, if only I could give them fourteen all-access passes that bar all access to freedom! Maybe then they'd appreciate the bliss of obscurity?

Admittedly, it's less of a bliss, and more of a love-hate, push-pull relationship, especially for the creative-types. We rely on publicity to continue creating, and then the very same publicity that elevated our careers, ends up asphyxiating our dreams... There's really no right or wrong when it comes to being famous. Right or wrong don't even exist, really. Life is merely a struggle between arbitrary convictions, caught within our incomplete, black-and-white abstractions of an indigestible grey reality, a toddler attempting to shove a cube into a triangular hole.

Then again, maybe all the other passengers weren't dreaming of fame? Maybe they were prodigies in hiding? Wanted criminals laying low? I had absolutely no way of knowing.

Across from where I sat was a man in his forties, and although I could meticulously describe the creases in his longcoat, or the scarred expression of his beautiful eyes that were trapped inside a chubby, unshaven face, I realised I could only see the deceptive crust which encased a bottomless well of thoughts. Just like none of us could hear the Celestials' songs surrounding us, none of the expressionless sardine-commuters could hear each other's true thoughts, even if they decided to try. We were packed against strangers and all we saw were reflections of ourselves.