Chronesthesia
The reports were understandably difficult to believe. A public that occasionally saw a revival in moon landing conspiracies found itself reexamining old footage again, in addition to the images coming back over the stream.
It was empty. How long had it been empty? Pripyat was still empty, and the documentation of that city’s decay just made estimates more and more confusing.
The probe had a delay, even tapped into the stream. Several crews were en route, but wouldn’t arrive for two weeks, and that was the rush job, breaking them down and feeding them through the stream one particulate at a time before the probe reassembled them on the other side. It wasn’t an elegant way to do things, shoving a soul and body through eight layers of space to be put back together by a device that was supposed to make nothing higher grade than circuit boards and research tools on a good day.
In the meantime, the probe crawled among the empty.
The layout wasn’t right, and people argued over whether that was a relief or a concern. Cities weren’t where they were supposed to be, mostly because the continents weren’t the same. They followed the basic patterns though, and it was easy enough to see where centers of civilization had been (or were supposed to have been), where they spread (or were placed to appear more recent), and where resources had run dry (again, assuming any sort of chronological progression).
Back on Earth, which some jokingly said could be renamed “Earth-1″, while others joked “Earth-2″, waves of panic and uncertainty clashed with calm insistence that there must be a reasonable explanation – a sentiment espoused by both some of the sciences and some of the world’s religions. “Dual convergence,” science said. “Proof of God,” replied religion.
Others pointed out that taking this as proof of God wasn’t necessarily comforting, and that it implied strongly he had been hedging his bets all along.
Lights swept into hallways with open doors. Images returned of bookshelves full of wondrous titles never written in chain stores never opened. The probe hummed alone in a stadium with seating for 105,000 people. The new world sang back with a two hour delay.
After its first exhaustive exploration, the probe settled down in a forest clearing and waited to give birth to the world’s first people again.
Rivka Jacobs
Another brilliant scifi story. Pripyat? It gives me goosebumps. The place that was abandoned after Chernobyl, that we use to measure how human civilization decays? What happened? Did some “reset” of the space-time continuum occur at that point of space and time? You present a puzzle, and a lot of possible ways to solve the puzzle. Most fascinating to me is that your “religious” answer is actually plausible — in a disheartening and cynical kind of way — i.e., God was hedging his beats all along.
I’m really amazed at the consistent high quality of your stories, and how you manage to pack so much into such a brief piece of prose.
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Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Pripyat is just a reference point, right? This is fascinating – I wonder if it’s an easy story for a comic fan to parse, but the notion of an alternate world where the difference is a lack of any actual people is a great twist.
(Of course, there’s that empty-city trope beloved of zombie fiction, but this place feels much more deliberate, for some reason…)
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