From the Ashes - 1. From the Ashes

Hiroshima after The Atomic Bomb

The Phone Call

“Poppy, Poppy!” a young voice shouted out as our daughter ran into the living room. At nine years of age, Theresa was just beginning to take on the appearance of a young woman. She was one of a new generation of humans born after the liberation - a generation that had no memories of the invasion - a generation that never knew the world the way it was before.

“What is it, Sweetheart?” asked Lansley, my boyfriend, my lover, my partner in life.

“Can I spend the night at Maria’s? Please,” she replied.

“Why don’t you ask Daddy, OK?” Lansley responded.

Before I could even begin to process the request, I had an armful of girl sitting on my lap. The sight of her smiling face, however, was more than I could resist.

“Of course you can, precious, as long as it’s OK with Maria’s parents,” I replied, “but don’t you even think of being outside after dark.”

“I won’t, Daddy, I promise,” she answered, just before skipping out of the room and into her bedroom to grab some things for her sleepover with her best friend.

After she left the room, I glanced out the window to see our son, Miguel, playing one-on-one basketball with his friend, Bobby, in the driveway. At fourteen, Miguel was strikingly handsome with his dark skin glistening in the sunlight as sweat poured down his torso. Seeing the two teens together reminded me so much of when I taught Lansley how to play basketball all those years ago.

Yet I still remembered it as if it were yesterday. I’ll never forget the day Dad told us we’d be having a top secret guest coming to live with us. After swearing us to secrecy, he explained that Lansley was a boy, about my age, but from another planet! It was only later that I learned that calling him a ‘boy’ wasn’t really correct. Although he looked a lot like a human boy in spite of his bluish-grey skin, his fur-like red hair and his eyes with their vivid purple irises set against black sclera, his species lacked sexual dimorphism. In his kind, there were no males or females.

Among Lorans, as they were called, fertilized eggs resulted from the joining of two equal oocytes. There was no sperm and egg - Lorans produced only eggs. But to Lansley, it was we humans who were the strange ones. To him, being limited to choosing a mate of the opposite sex was incomprehensible. To him it seemed perfectly natural to be able to mate with anyone of his choosing. Perhaps that was why he had no problem accepting that I was gay.

The interesting thing was that while Lansley had all the equipment necessary to become pregnant, externally he looked much more like a boy than a girl. His mammary glands were internal, giving him a flat, muscular chest, and he even had vestigial nipples on his chest, too. His forniculus looked for all the world like a penis and, during sex, he ejaculated just like I did, except that his semen looked and even tasted a bit like chocolate and was laden with oocytes rather than sperm. He even pleasured himself by jerking off, just like human boys do.

Where he differed from humans was in that he had an ovulum, which served much as does the pouch in earth’s marsupial species, like the kangaroo. During sex, the center portion of the ovula, or perinaculum, opens up and joins with that of their partner, allowing the fornicula to come into contact and the oocytes to join. Hence there is no need for sexual differentiation.

One might think that two such different species would find it impossible to have sex with each other, but Lansley and I found we could do pretty much everything that two human boys, or two Lorans, could do together - and we did!

“Does that remind you of anything?” I heard Lansley say as he too looked out the window at our son and his best friend.

“I was just thinking about that,” I admitted, “about how we met and how I taught you how to play basketball.”

Placing his hand on my knee, he continued, “Those were special times, getting to know each other, learning new things, just being together and enjoying each other’s company . . . and more.”

As Lansley spoke, he started to rub his hand along the inside of my thigh, causing me to get an instant erection.

We froze when Theresa ran back into the living room and said, “OK, Daddy. OK, Poppy. I’m going over to Maria’s house now.”

“Did you remember to pack a toothbrush?” Lansley asked, causing our daughter to roll her eyes.

“Have fun, sweetheart,” I called out just as she disappeared through the door.

Although my erection had gone down the moment our daughter entered the room, it didn’t take long for it to return full-force as Lansley resumed stroking my inner thigh. The thought of us as teenagers, bare-chested and covered with sweat, was enough to make me achingly hard. I could almost smell the delightful scent of his sweat, which smelled for all the world like baked apples. Reaching for his hand, I led him to our bedroom so we could finish what he’d started in privacy.

Even now at the age of thirty earth years, Lansley looked beautiful to me. His skin was a slightly darker shade of blue, but it was still smooth and taut, with sinewy muscles underneath. His full, moist lips were alluring and his kisses were divine. The feel of his tongue against mine, even though it felt different from that of a human, owing to its smooth texture and its being attached in the front of the mouth, was almost enough in and of itself to send me over the edge.

And then there was his forniculus, which felt so like my own penis and yet delightfully different. Sex with Lansley was the perfect expression of the love we shared and had shared with each other for sixteen years.

It was just as Lansley was preparing to enter me that my phone rang. Talk about spoiling the mood!

Climbing out of bed and grabbing my jeans, I pulled out my phone and, after noticing the caller, answered, “Hey, Clark, what can I do for you?”

What came next were the dreaded words, “Steve, there's been an incident.” An ‘incident’ was a phrase we used to describe any kind of contact with our Cerenean enemies. It had been thirteen years since the end of the Cerenean invasion of earth and a decade since we’d last had contact with them. Although we’d thoroughly vanquished the Cereneans, they were hell-bent on domination of all species they encountered and one of the most important things we’d learned from Lansley was just how tenacious they could be. With a lifespan measured in centuries, the long distances involved in space travel meant nothing to them. They were relentless, and they were patient.

Even now Loran was still under Cerenean occupation and would be for many years to come. Our message of hope in the form of instructions for constructing a biologic weapon had been en route to the Loran Resistance Movement from the time of the initial Cerenean invasion of Earth, from when we first figured out how to construct a virus that could target Cereneans without affecting native human and Loran populations. Traveling at the speed of light, that message wouldn’t arrive on Loran for another five years. There was truly no one we could fall back upon to save Earth from another Cerenean invasion other than ourselves.

Taking a deep breath, I asked, “What kind of incident, Clark?”

“It’s not something I can discuss over the phone. Even with encryption, there’s too much risk that someone might overhear us. We’re all going to convene in the capital tomorrow at noon.”

“Thanks for the extensive notice,” I responded.

“I don’t need to tell you that time is short, my friend,” he replied. “We’ll send a shuttle to pick the two of you up at five AM, and be sure to fill in your boyfriend on what’s going on.”

“We have children, Clark,” I reminded my colleague. “We can’t simply drop everything and go without making arrangements.”

“But Miguel is, what, sixteen?” Clark asked.

“He's still only fourteen,” I replied, “and even though he’s very mature for his age, we’re not about to let him face the dangers of San Francisco on his own. There have been several incidents of wild animals attacking humans in recent weeks, and there are bands of looters literally out for blood.”

“It certainly gives new meaning to the phrase, ‘urban pioneer’,” Clark quipped, “but it’s a choice you made.”

“That we did,” I agreed, “but someone has to take responsibility for rebuilding our cities. I don’t need to tell you how hard America was hit in the initial barrage of antimatter bombs. Out of 57 detonations, twelve were in America. Twelve of America’s most populous and strategic cities were vaporized. Even China and India weren’t hit as hard, and their populations hardly decreased at all. We lost more than a third of ours.”

“And Japan lost more than half of theirs. Even still, we’re the third most populous nation on earth,” Clark challenged, “and with an open immigration policy, we’re well on our way to regaining what was lost.”

“Which is why we need to rebuild our cities,” I countered. “You have no idea what it’s like for us pioneers, living as you do in your comfortable home in Atlanta . . .”

“Steve, you know better than that!” Clark practically shouted into the phone, and I knew he was right. “I’m personally responsible for more than a million scientists who were displaced by the Cerenean invasion. Thank God we had the foresight to get them out of harm’s way.”

“And for that we are all grateful,” I acknowledged. It had been a last-minute decision based on what Lansley told us we could expect of a Cerenean invasion. He warned us the Cereneans would waste no time dismantling Earth’s institutions of higher education, rounding up all our scientists, intellectuals and leaders and executing them before they could become a threat to Cerenean rule. We tried to warn the rest of the world of what would happen, but not even Europe would listen. As a result, millions of the most learned men and women throughout the world perished during the first days of the invasion. That was everywhere except in the United States. Our scientists and scholars were dispersed to rural communities and they survived.

We were the only country with the knowledge and the expertise to apply Cerenean technology to rebuild the world. Had it not been for that fact, I had little doubt that the Chinese would have taken advantage and invaded America long ago. Indeed, it was only the threat of American force that caused them to back down when they made their move on Korea and Japan.

“Steve?” Clark asked, bringing me back to the moment at hand.

“We’ll make arrangements,” I assured our friend before hanging up the phone.

“The Cereneans?” Lansley asked and I nodded my head.

“Clark wouldn’t tell me over the phone,” I went on to explain.

“What are we going to do about the kids?” Lanlsey asked.

“Well, Theresa is already staying with Maria tonight,” I suggested. “Perhaps the Hernandezes could take her for a few more days.”

“I hate to impose, particularly since we can’t exactly tell them why,” Lansley replied, “but it's probably our best option. And perhaps the Wallaces can take care of Miguel,” he added.

“Miguel and Bobby are really tight,” I responded. “I'm sure his parents would be willing to help out. We just need to ensure our kids don’t slack off on their studies while we’re gone.”

“That, my love, is a given,” Lansley replied and then gave me a quick peck on the lips. San Francisco did not yet have an infrastructure for a school system, so it fell largely on the parents to ensure their children kept up with their studies over the Internet.

Reaching back for my phone, I gave the Hernandezes a call while Lansley called the Wallaces. A few minutes later, we were set.

We said our goodbyes to Theresa over the phone but we had yet to tell Miguel what was going on and so we called him and his friend into the living room. Moments later, we had two very sweaty boys sitting across from us.

“Boys,” I began, “there’s nothing to be afraid of, but Lansley and I have been called away to St. Louis for a few days.”

“To the capital?” Bobby asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Pop, Dad, what’s wrong,” Miguel asked. “Is it the Cereneans?”

Miguel knew about our work, and he knew we wouldn’t be called away unless it were very serious, so there was no point in sugar-coating it. Bobby was equally aware of our work - one of his best friend’s parents was an alien from another planet, after all, and his parents were among the scientists that had been saved.

“Yes, it’s the Cereneans,” I replied, “but we don’t know anything more than that at the moment. I’ll be able to tell you a lot more when we return, if there’s anything to tell, that is.”

“We don’t know how long we’ll be away,” Lansley added, “but Bobby, your parents have agreed to let Miguel stay with you.”

“I know the two of you will be there for each other and take care of each other wile we’re gone,” I threw in.

The Flight

The sound of the alarm clock going off was enough to unnerve anyone. It was only four fuckin’ o’clock in the morning. Dragging ourselves out of bed, Lansley and I managed to shower, eat and in my case, shave. Having packed the night before, we were ready when the shuttle arrived in front of our townhouse promptly at 5AM. Powered by antimatter and emitting anti-gravity waves rather than sporting propellers or wings, it looked more like a minivan than a flying machine, which was probably why shuttles are ‘driven’ rather than flown.

With sleep still strong in our eyes in spite of three cups of coffee for me and quart of tomato juice for Lansley, which had much the same effect as caffeine on his physiology, we boarded the shuttle and prepared for the trip ahead. The sun was just coming up as we got ready for our flight. The view from our home was spectacular as the entire city, such as it was, and much of the San Francisco Bay could be seen from our vantage point near the summit of Twin Peaks. In the distance, the form of the nearly complete, rebuilt Golden Gate Bridge could be seen just poking through the dense layer of fog that enshrouded the ocean and the nearby areas of the city.

The city itself was much less impressive, with only a few tall buildings completed and the ugly forms of cranes just about everywhere else. It would take generations to rebuild the city to its former glory and it would be just as long before vegetation could truly take hold. It was amazing how barren the city appeared without any greenery at all. Ironically, although it was Cerenean technology that was being used to de-vitrify the ground, which had turned to glass under the intense heat yielded by the antimatter bomb, it was human genetic engineering that developed the microbes to convert the resulting sand back to soil.

Climbing into the air, our shuttle turned east and headed out across the bay. The East Bay, which was where the actual epicenter of the bomb had been, was not nearly as far along in its reclamation as was San Francisco itself. There was a small cluster of buildings in Oakland and there were a handful of housing developments up in the hills, but everything else was still completely barren. I knew that their time would come, as we were rebuilding at a feverish pace.

Lansley reached for my hand as we passed over what was once Livermore, my home. It was in Livermore that Lansley and I met, but it was in Livermore than my parents died. Dr. Albert Johnston had been a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was because of my dad that Lansley was brought to Livermore in the first place - to work on developing weapons with which the Cerenean attack could be repelled. I was just Dr. Johnston’s son but it was with me that young Lansley fell in love.

The whole story of how Lansley came to Earth was one that boggled the mind, even today. Fleeing Cerenean tyranny, his parents joined the resistance movement and volunteered to search for a potential base from which to mount a counter-attack. Unfortunately, one of Lansley's parents was killed during their escape from Loran. Fleeing in a badly damaged Cerenean ship, they lacked the range needed to reach their original goal. With little choice, they set their sights on what they hoped was an uninhabited binary planet circling the star they called Arkenza.

As they approached Arkenza, however, they discovered to their dismay that Arkenza 3a, the oxygen-rich planet they’d hoped to use as their base, was anything but uninhabited. With no where else to go and wishing to avoid contaminating our development, Lansley and his remaining parent established an underground base on Arkenza 4, the planet we Earthlings call Mars.

I cannot fathom what it must have been like for the two of them living in such a stark environment, fabricating solar arrays and mining Mars for the raw materials to use as fuel to escape our sun's gravity. Then tragedy struck - a sandstorm destroyed most of their solar array and, with it, the power needed for their hydroponics bay. With insufficient resources to sustain both of them, Lansley’s sole remaining parent took his own life.

For one year - one fucking year - Lansley lived alone on Mars. He was only thirteen earth years of age and an orphan struggling to survive in an alien environment. With no other choice, he worked to rebuild the solar array, to mine the necessary raw materials and to plan for his eventual escape from our solar system. His plan was to try to complete his parents’ mission - to find an uninhabited world that could serve as a base for the Loran resistance, but then something happened that changed everything. The Cerenean invasion of Earth began.

“Driver?” Lansley’s voice boomed out, bringing me out of my reverie. “Will we pass over Salt Lake City and Denver?”

“Not directly,” the driver answered, “but near to both. We could easily divert if you’d like to take a look at them.”

“That would be excellent,” Lansley answered, “and while you’re at it, could you fly over Escalante Canyon?”

“I’m not sure why, but it’s not too far out of the way,” the driver answered.

Smiling at my boyfriend, I reached for his hand and squeezed it tightly. I knew very well why Lansley wanted to visit Escalante Canyon. He and I spent many steamy nights there hiding out during the Cerenean invasion - until we were captured.

When Lansley first detected evidence of a large Cerenean fleet headed Earth’s way from his hidden base on Mars, he faced a dilemma. If he failed to act, the Earth would be conquered by the Cereneans and the human population would be subjugated. On the other hand, if he intervened, he would be giving the humans advanced technology that they probably weren’t ready to handle. Earth’s societies were primitive, engaged in countless wars with each other, overpowering billions in ways that would have shocked even the Cereneans, and destroying their environment beyond repair. Having had ample time to study human civilization through its transmissions, however, young Lansley had developed an affinity for humanity and he could not sit idly by.

Lansley came to Earth with a simple message - put aside your differences and work together and I will help you. Fail to do so and you will be enslaved. It should have been an easy sell, but Earth’s leaders were reluctant to cede their power. However, in the face of the overwhelming evidence Lansley presented to them, they ultimately made the only choice they could have made.

Unfortunately, there was precious little time to prepare for the attack. Because the invasion fleet was traveling at nearly the speed of light, they were literally right behind the ‘signature’ Lansley had detected using his radio telescope. The one thing in Earth’s favor was that it takes time to slow down from relativistic speeds. The Cereneans couldn’t slow down any faster than the maximum G-forces that their physiology could tolerate. This bought us a matter of months with which to devote the entire productive capacity of the Earth to building and deploying defensive weapons.

Even with our dedicated effort, however, it still wasn’t enough. We managed to decimate the invasion fleet, but enough ships still got through to devastate the Earth. In desperation and perhaps to teach us a lesson, the Cereneans nuked more than fifty of Earth’s most populous and strategic cities using a series of antimatter cluster bombs. These bombs literally vaporized everything on the surface within a 50-mile radius, melting the surface and leaving behind a glassy, rocky, lifeless void.

This, according to Lansley, was not their usual style. Although the Cereneans did not care about life, they generally liked to salvage the infrastructure of the civilizations they conquered so they could put it to their own use. However, we’d mounted such an effective defense and they apparently did what they felt they could do and had to do to destroy Earth’s civilization in advance of the next wave of the attack, which was already on its way.

Little did they know we had a surprise waiting for them when they arrived.

“Would you look at that?” Lansley exclaimed, once again bringing me back to the present. Our shuttle had slowed and was descending into what used to be Salt Lake City. As far as the eye could see, the ground was nothing more than a sea of glassy rock. Where the Great Salt Lake had been was only dry land and the city itself was equally barren. What used to be an expanse of tall buildings, the state capitol, a great university and, of course, Temple Square, was nothing but an endless empty landscape. Not even a tiny speck of green was visible - anywhere.

“I can’t say I’m saddened by the demise of the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints,” I said. “Not that I wished this on anyone, but the Mormons were among the most intolerant people on Earth when it came to gays.”

“The Mormons?” Lansley asked and so I filled him in on Mormon beliefs and on their extensive missionary work, which involved liberal doses of proselytizing.

“Where they as bad as the Muslims?” Lansley asked, recalling the time I spent in Malaysian prisons after the invasion, simply because I was gay. Why the Cereneans took me to Malaysia in the first place was beyond our comprehension. Still, even though homosexuality was a crime punishable by death in Malaysia, I was well-treated overall and ended up helping the Malaysians make use of the Cerenean technology left behind.

“I know you’re still bitter about how you were led to believe I was dead,” I answered, “but the officials you met with couldn’t have known I was alive. No one could have known, even if it had been in America,” I went on to say. “Everything was chaos after the Cereneans were defeated. Yes, it was wrong to hold me in prison just because I’m gay, but I was never ill-treated and, once I was released, everyone bent over backwards to be nice to me.”

By now our shuttle was headed south and in no time at all we were skimming over the Grand Staircase and Escalante Canyon. The landscape was no less rugged in appearance than that we’d left behind in what used to be Salt Lake City, but here there was life. Even in the desert, there was an abundance of plants. The last time we’d been here was sixteen years ago, when our love was still new. I remembered how the landscape seemed so bleak to me the first time I saw it but now, even compared to San Francisco, it was alive.

As we passed through the rugged terrain, I slipped my hand into Lansley’s and we looked at each other and smiled. Sixteen years had passed since those dark times. Sent here by my dad in the hope that we could evade capture, we were only fourteen and I was on my own for the first time in my life. Desperately trying to survive and armed with little more than an e-book survival guide, we learned to forage for ourselves while we pondered the future and made love every night.

It was here that Lansley explained why his parents thought the earth uninhabited - from all they knew, the Solar System was too young to harbor intelligent life. It was thought that advanced civilizations develop late in the life cycle of a star - that it was generally a race between the evolution of life and the death of the star that supported it.

Earth was different. As a part of a binary planetary pair along with the moon, the oceans of Earth were subject to strong tidal forces - tides that allowed organic molecules to interact in ways not possible on other planets. Tides accelerated the evolution of life on earth. Elsewhere in the Universe advanced life forms were a rarity, so why did the Cereneans feel the need to dominate them?

It was also here that I learned of the secret weapon we had developed to fight the Cereneans. Even with all their technology, the concept of biological weapons was entirely foreign to the Cereneans. Human, Loran and Cerenean biology used completely different base pairs in their DNA to code for different amino acids. Although we could ingest most of the same foods, our DNA was incompatible and, hence, a retrovirus that was lethal to Cereneans was absolutely harmless to Lorans and to all life forms on Earth.

By the time the Cereneans arrived, we had a retrovirus ready that incubated within them over a period of days without evidence of infection, spread among them like wildfire and then killed them all in a matter of hours. Barely a week after the invasion of Earth began, the only Cereneans left alive on the planet were those who’d agreed to cooperate in exchange for a cure, and a tiny handful who were naturally immune for reasons unclear to us.

We were hardly in a position to revel in our success, however. The decimation of Earth’s cities was the least of our problems. There was still the second wave of the invasion, the Cerenean occupation fleet, that was already on its way and Loran, our potential ally, was still under Cerenean occupation. Fortunately, Lansley had in his possession secret encryption codes provided to his parents by the Loran resistance movement. Originally, these were to be used to send back the coordinates of the location of a suitable planet to be used as a base of operation.

“Why not use those codes to send the formula for the virus instead?” I suggested to Lansley during one of our nights in Escalante Canyon. Why not indeed? Fifteen years ago the formula along with complete instructions for its manufacture, dissemination and activation were sent to Loran. Traveling at the speed of light, these instructions would arrive on Loran in another five years. We could only hope that the resistance movement was still active and would be able make use of the information.

Still reeling from the first invasion fleet, the Earth, however, was in no shape to mount a counteroffensive of its own against the second one, or so we thought. Even if they failed to discover our secret, biological weapon, they would likely annihilate Earth’s remaining cities before they landed. It was Lansley and one of our colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, however, that came up with a simple solution. It turns out that the Cereneans have on-board replicators on their space ships that manufacture nutrients otherwise lacking from the foods they grow in space.

As was the case with biologic weapons, the Cereneans were completely unaware of the concept of malicious computer code. They’d simply never encountered it, nor had they even conceived of its existence any more than the Lorans had. Our intelligence community, on the other hand, had decades of experience in developing viruses and worms designed to infect specific enemy systems and co-opt or incapacitate them.

With the aide of the Cerenean Heroes and a team of more than fifty of our best computer scientists and cryptographers, we were able to develop an elaborate Trojan horse that the replicators on board the Cerenean fleet recognized as an ordinary software upgrade. Once infected, the replicators then manufactured the Cerenean virus, wiping out the entire fleet in a matter of hours.

It took two years for the first images of the destruction to return to Earth. By then the Cerenean Occupation force was long gone, their ships destined to pass harmlessly through and ultimately leave the galaxy, traveling at close to the speed of light.

“Denver sure didn’t fare any better than Salt Lake City,” Lansley exclaimed, bringing me back to the present. Again, everywhere I looked I saw devastation. There was only a barren, glassy rock surface visible for nearly a hundred miles. There was no plant life anywhere - not a single speck of green.

I believe the epicenter was near the town of Castle Rock,” Lansley stated, “resulting in a blast radius that encompassed most of Denver and Colorado Springs.”

“And with it, the nearby Air Force Academy,” I added. Although not vaporized, NORAD, America’s primary base for missile defense systems, was located underground and essentially baked by the intense heat of the surrounding rock. There were no survivors. The landscape looked more like that of a volcanic wasteland or the moon than that of the vibrant city that had once thrived there. As with Salt Lake City, reclamation of the land had not yet begun.

“Seen enough?” the driver asked.

“There’s not much to see,” I responded, and Lansley nodded his head in agreement.

“Exactly,” the driver replied as we ascended and sped up, “and we need to make tracks if we’re going to get to the capital in time for your meeting.”

An Echoe from the Past

I woke up as our shuttle banked in preparation for landing in St. Louis, the temporary seat of American Power. I hadn’t even realized I’d fallen asleep! St. Louis was probably a much better location for the capital than was Washington but, for symbolic reasons if nothing else, Washington had to be rebuilt and the government returned to its rightful place.

Some people mused that it was a shame the U.S. Government had been evacuated from Washington in advance of the Cerenean invasion - everyone loves to hate politicians - but it really was essential that the government of, by and for the people not perish. Once the invasion was over, a temporary capital was established in St. Louis, a city that was unscathed by the invasion and that was centrally located.

As our shuttle approached, the St. Louis Arch could still be seen, looming over the Mississippi River as a testament to human engineering. With the Cerenean technology brought to us by Lansley and unwittingly by our invaders, we could have undoubtedly erected it in a fraction of the time it took back in the twentieth century, but it would have been no more beautiful than its human designers had intended it to be.

Crossing the Mississippi River, the driver set us down on a platform amongst a series of low-rise buildings in what had once been a dilapidated neighborhood in East Saint Louis, Illinois. Built to be functional rather than attractive, one would have never known that the unimposing structures around us represented the seat of military power for what was still the most powerful country on Earth. Much of our population might have been destroyed and our great cities laid waste, but we had more than three times as many scientists versed in Cerenean technology than did the rest of the world, combined.

“You’re late!” Dr. Clark Jefferies called out as he approached our shuttle.

Looking at the time on my phone, I responded, “The hell we’re late. It’s only 10:30! The meeting’s not until 11:00.”

“Yeah, but there’s a reason I sent the shuttle to pick you up so early,” he replied. “I didn’t want to have to worry about you being delayed. You made me worry . . . ergo you’re late!”

“You can blame me for the delays, Clark,” my boyfriend spoke up. “I asked the driver to fly over Salt Lake City and Denver . . . and Escalante Grand Staircase.”

“I understand fully,” Clark said with a knowing smile, and then he added, “and it’s great to see you,” as he pulled Lansley into a warm hug.

“It’s great to see you too, Clark,” Lansley replied as he returned the hug. Clark and Lansley went way back. They’d become very close friends in the intervening years between my exile to Malaysia and my return to The States - an interval during which Lansley thought I was dead.

“So . . . dare I ask what this is all about?” I asked as Clark led the two of us off the landing platform and toward one of the nondescript buildings nearby.

Taking a big breath and letting it out slowly, Clark replied, “We received a communication from Loran.”

“From Loran!” Lansley practically shouted. “But that’s impossible!” The Cereneans didn’t even know about Earth’s existence before I came here,” he went on. “The Cerenean fleet tracked us here from Loran. Even if they managed to discover that Earth was inhabited before we did . . .”

“It would have been enough time, Lans,” Clark responded. “You’ve been assuming the Cerenean technology on board your ship was the state-of-the-art at the time, which it was not. The Cereneans had the means to detect intelligent life as far away as Earth from Loran. You were just unaware of it.

“There’s something even more obvious than that, however,” he continued. “Think about it. Why would the Cereneans send such a massive fleet after your ship? A single destroyer would have been enough to take you out. Why send enough firepower to invade a planet?”

“That’s something I’ve never really understood,” Lansley admitted. “It seemed like tremendous overkill, but the Cereneans are not always rational. They think differently than we do.”

That was for sure. We’d learned a lot about Cerenean physiology from the Cerenean Heroes and from autopsies of the Cereneans that died from the virus. Knowledge in the Cerenean brain was much more ‘hard-wired’ than in any brain we’d encountered before. It took Cereneans years to learn what a human child could learn in a day but, once learned, they would never forget it and could act on it far more quickly. To us they were inflexible. To them, we were unpredictable and slow. Dealing with Cereneans was frustrating beyond belief. Things that seemed incomprehensible in their complexity were blatantly obvious to the Cereneans and yet they lacked even the most basic sense of logic when confronted with new situations.

“Lansley,” Clark went on, “I think your basic premise was wrong in the first place. You assumed the Cereneans were after your tiny ship when it was Earth they were after all along. They knew of the earth before your parents were born and the planning stages of the invasion of Earth took place even as they were invading Loran.”

“But how . . .” Lansley started to ask, but Clark held up his hand.

“Save it until the meeting,” he interrupted. “There will be much more to discuss that you can possibly imagine. The important thing . . . the thing you have yet to ask me, is what was in the communication we received from Loran.”

“So what was in the communication from Loran?” I asked.

“The demise of Cereneans on Loran,” Clark reported smugly.

“What do you mean, ‘the demise of the Cereneans’?” Lansley asked. “They were entrenched. We were subjugated. The resistance movement was minuscule and in it for the long haul . . .” he started to ramble, but Clark once again held up his hand.

“It wasn’t the Loran resistance,” he reported. “It was the Cerenean virus. It was the biological weapon developed by humans here on Earth.”

“No! No way!” Lansley shouted. “The formula for the virus won’t reach Loran for several years! And then it will be another twenty years for any kind of confirmation to reach earth. There are a lot of things the Cereneans may know of that I do not, but they do not know how to travel faster than the speed of light. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. Nothing can. The speed of light is the defining property of the Universe. We are a part of the Universe. The very fabric of our existence is defined by the speed of light. There is no escaping that fact.”

“Unless you create a ‘straighter-than-straight’ path,” I countered. “Our scientists spent years in the laboratory trying to create a small micro-wormhole. We never did succeed, but our technology and our understanding of physics was infantile compared to yours. Surely the Lorans and Cereneans must have explored the possibilities.”

“Wormholes are the stuff of science fiction,” Lansley challenged, “and it’s a miracle you didn’t end up creating a small black hole that consumed the earth and even the Solar System.”

“We didn’t have the power to create a black hole,” I explained. “We weren’t that advanced.”

“Look . . . of course we explored the concept,” Lansley admitted, “long before the Cerenean invasion, but the Cereneans destroyed whatever science had existed on Loran and I have no idea how far we got with it. All I know is that the Cereneans told us it was impossible.”

“And you believed them?” I asked indignantly.

“Even if they were misleading us,” Lansley replied, “the amount of power needed to bring together two points in time and space is astronomical.”

“What if the wormhole was dimensionless?” I suggested. “If the goal is only to send communications through it rather than an actual person, it wouldn’t need to have physical dimensions. It would only need to serve as a conduit for electromagnetic waves and nothing more.”

“An interesting thought,” Lansley stated, “but you would still need to harness the power of a singularity . . . a black hole . . . to pull it off.”

“Perhaps you could create a series of microscopic black holes that would ultimately coalesce into a dimensionless wormhole.” I suggested.

Laughing, Lansley responded, “There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t know where to begin. I’ll give you one thing, however . . . it’s certainly original. The biggest problem is that, even if a way were found to ‘generate’ a string of artificial singularities at will, how would you ever make them stable? Make them too small and they’ll dissipate before they accumulate enough mass from the space around them. Make them too large and they’ll gobble up all of space for light years around.

“But get it just right and they will be stable, Lans,” I countered. “You hit the nail on the head. If a way could be found to generate black holes with just enough mass so that matter and energy accumulation is balanced by dissipation, you would achieve a perfect balance. We already know how to generate the temporary singularities used for propulsion in space ships. Making them stable isn’t that much of a stretch. Once created, a singularity string would act as a wave guide, allowing communications to pass along it instantaneously rather than at the speed of light.”

Laughing, Clark broke in saying, “Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to hear you banter ideas back and forth like that, but you’re way off base.”

“Paired quantum states?” Lansley suggested.

“Finally, you’re on the right track, my friend,” Clark answered as he moved us along, “but we need to get going.”

“Paired quantum states?” I asked my boyfriend as we walked briskly with Clark.

“It’s a strange concept, even to us, Steve,” Lansley answered. “As you know, our universe has six dimensions . . .”

Yes, I did know, but the concept was still alien to me even after all these years. The concept of relativity first introduced by Einstein was still sound, but it contained a fatal flaw - time was assumed to be the fourth dimension. As any child can appreciate, however, time is not like the other dimensions. One cannot arbitrarily visit any point in time the way they can any point in space. Time isn’t even universal - it’s not the same on the moon as it is on Earth, let alone between points light years apart. Time depends on the density of space in a given region and on the path taken to get there.

The bottom line is that time is an illusion created by the occurrence of events around us. We perceive of the passage of time because of the happenings around us and not the other way around. For all intents and purposes, time does not really exist. So then how does one account for the passage of events if not for time? I’d asked this question of Lansley a thousand times and I probably still wouldn’t fully grasp it, even if he explained it a thousand times more.

But without time, one needed six separate dimensions to describe any point in space - three of them representing speed and three representing gravity. None of these dimensions is ordinal in the conventional sense. For example, on any of the three speed axes, the speed of light represented infinity. One couldn’t exceed the speed of light because it represented infinite speed. Gravity was even less intuitive, with infinite gravity being at the origin - a state that existed only in the instant before the big bang that gave rise to the universe, when all matter and energy were concentrated in a singularity.

“. . . and at least sixty-seven pairs of quantum states,” Lansley continued.

The concept of quantum states was even more foreign. Quantum mechanics never did fit into Einstein’s universe and, for generations, Earth’s physicists tried in vain to reconcile Newtonian physics, the theory behind the way the world worked at large, and relativity, the way the Universe worked, with quantum mechanics, the theory behind how things worked at the atomic and sub-atomic levels. In reality they never could be reconciled. The problem was the fundamental assumption that everything was comprised of particles.

A particle-centric universe was intuitive and comforting. Particles made sense. We could see particles all around us and so it wasn’t difficult to imagine smaller and smaller particles, atomic solar systems with electrons orbiting a nucleus, itself comprised of smaller particles. But subatomic particles didn’t behave like anything familiar. Electrons restricted themselves to orbitals, many of which looked nothing like the orbit of a planet around the sun. These orbitals could be described by a wave equation, but there was something inherently unsettling about the idea that a particle could behave like a wave. Yet there were many experiments that proved that particles were, in fact, wavelike, producing interference patterns not unlike those seen when ripples collide on the surface of a pond.

Then on top of everything else there was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Because one could never observe something without altering its trajectory, all models of fundamental physics were probabilistic. One could only compute the probability of a particle being in a particular state and in a particular location, a concept that was soundly rejected by Einstein himself. On numerous occasions Einstein was reported to have said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ to which Neils Bohr responded, ‘Don’t tell God what to do with his dice.’ A probabilistic, quantum view of the universe had some very interesting, far-fetched consequences as exemplified by the thought experiment embodied in Schrödinger’s famous cat. Without getting into the details, suffice it to say that a particle that can be in one of two states, for example, a clockwise or counter-clockwise spin, is actually in both states until and unless one does something to observe which state it’s in.

This was all stuff I’d learned about before I even met Lansley. Indeed, much of it was fundamental to my dad’s research in weapons design and so we often spent hours discussing particle physics without actually getting into the specifics of my dad’s work. I never did understand why a particle would care whether or not it was being observed. However, as Lansley explained it to me, the problem was in describing the universe in terms of fundamental particles in the first place. As with time, particles were nothing more than an illusion - a convenient analog to something that truly did not exist.

“The things you call atoms, bosons, quarks and photons . . . they’re not real,” he went on as he thought aloud. “They’re no more real than the holographic image that results from the projection and interference of light waves.”

I understood this in principle but it still seemed counterintuitive. “Yes, but I can pass my hand through the hologram of a table,” I challenged. “I cannot pass my hand through the table itself.”

“That’s because the hologram represents only the image of the table,” he tried to explain. “It does not represent the mass and other properties of the table. The hologram is not a true representation, any more than is a sculpture. A sculpture may be a truer representation than a hologram . . . it has mass . . . it has substance . . . but it lacks the cellular matrix inherent in the wood of which the table’s comprised.

“Space, matter and energy are not separate entities. What you perceive as particles are tiny packets of space with specific combinations of quantum state properties. The stable quantum states are represented by the prime numbers. There are probably an infinite number of possible quantum states, but only the first 67 have been observed and are necessary to describe all the states of matter and energy that have been observed in the Universe . . .”

“I’m sorry to cut you short, Lansley,” Clark interrupted, but we’re almost at your quarters and you barely have time to freshen up before the meeting begins.

Politics

“That was so noble of you, taking in children like that, especially with you both being men,” the Chinese ambassador told us in halting English. Lansley and I were hobnobbing with the political elite while waiting for the meeting itself to get underway.

“You must keep in mind, Mr. Ambassador,” Lansley replied, “that where I come from, there are no ‘men’ or ‘women’. Parents share equally in child rearing.”

“Yes, of course,” the ambassador replied. “With your appearance, it’s very easy to forget.”

“And there are plenty of gay couples all over the world raising children,” I added.

“Still,” the ambassador responded, “You’re not a typical household. In fact, you’re probably the least typical household on the planet, and here you are raising two earth children on your own.”

“You’re right about us being atypical,” Lansley agreed, “but we probably share more with ordinary households that you would think. We’re still two parents doing the best we can.”

The decision to take in foster children after the invasion was an easy one. Sure, Lansley and I would have preferred to have solidified our relationship as a couple before taking in children, but there were so many of them displaced by the war. With so much devastation, the relief agencies and the governments of Earth were ill equipped to handle them. A desperate call went out to all who could help and we could hardly say no.

We were really kids ourselves, just starting adulthood, and we were totally unprepared for life as parents. We took in two children initially and another three in the following years, all of whom were now fully grown. Of course all of the children born before the invasion were now adults. We did the best we could without any experience, learning as we went along. Sadly, a number of people who never should have been allowed took in children a well with dastardly results. There were reports of molestation, rape, outright slavery and even murder that surfaced.

Thankfully no one gave us a hard time about being gay and, all in all, Lansley and I did a very good job of parenting under the circumstances. As most of our children were older, the youngest being nine years old at the time of the invasion, we found ourselves with an empty household just twelve years later. By then we’d grown tired of Atlanta, which had only become even more congested than it was before the invasion, and so we decided it was time for a change.

Moving back to the Bay Area was tough on me - although this was where I grew up, it was also where my parents had died. San Francisco is not Livermore, however, and I really did miss the mountains, the ocean and the California weather. San Francisco offered an opportunity to start over and to help rebuild what was once one of the world’s great cities. Further, we could have much more house than we could ever have afforded in Atlanta, and in a prime location too. Finally, UCSF was rebuilding and it was a real opportunity for Lansley and me to get in on the ground floor of a great teaching institution. Little did we know we would not be alone for long.

Scarcely a week after we’d moved into our new house, we thought we heard some sounds behind the house, late at night. Our fears were confirmed when there was the sound of something falling over. Lansley and I ran outside to find our dumpster overturned and to see the retreating form of a boy heading down the hill. We hated to see anyone resorting to scavenging to survive, much less a child, but he was way too fast for us and he was long gone before we could even set out. Two nights later, however, we again heard the noise and this time we sneaked out and grabbed him before he could get away.

The look on his face was one I would never forget. He looked utterly terrified. “You don’t have to raid our dumpster,” I said softly. “We will feed you.” However, the boy looked no less terrified.

“¿Tienes hambre?” Lansley asked. I didn’t even know Lansley knew Spanish.

“Sí, me muero de hambre!” the boy replied.

“No hay por qué tener miedo. Vamos a darte de comer,” I told him. And that was how we came to acquire our sixth child, our wonderful Miguel. That he’d managed to walk all the way north from Mexico City at the age of nine, still boggled the mind. Born shortly after the invasion to a woman who eventually succumbed to the widespread diseases that plagued much of the world afterwards, especially in the third world, he was left to beg and forage on his own. Hearing of a land of great wealth to the north, he set out to find a better life for himself, which he ultimately did.

When we were approached about taking in yet another child, Lansley and I did not even hesitate. Theresa’s parents were killed by one of the gangs of marauders that plagued San Francisco. Theresa was such a beautiful child but, oh what a terror she could be! Lansley and I wouldn’t trade her for anything in the world.

“If I could have your attention please,” the President’s Chief of Staff called out, “you all need to take your seats so we can get started.” Thank God! The wait had been interminable, but a necessary evil as world leaders schmoozed with scientists and experts on Cerenean technology. I never did understand politics all that well, but I’d learned to slip into the role of a politician when necessary, much as my dad had. Lansley and I nursed our drinks as slowly as we could, not wishing to become loose-tongued when it really counted. We also filled up on finger foods, as lunch would not be served until much later.

We all made our way to the enormous horseshoe-shaped table that dominated the conference room. Cardboard placards located at each place alerted us to where we were expected to sit. Plopping down into one of the plush leather chairs that seemed to have been designed for people several times larger than any human I’d ever met, Lansley did so in the seat next to mine. I couldn’t help but smile that we were seated together. We were the only couple in the room, but then we were both experts in our work - me in Cerenean technology and Lansley in Cerenean and Loran physiology.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Chief of Staff announced, which made me chuckle since my boyfriend was neither, “the President of the United States!” There was a moment of shocked silence before we all began clapping. It was highly unusual for the President herself to be involved with one of these meetings. Her presence here significantly underscored the importance of what was happening.

“Good afternoon,” the President began, “and welcome to the Interim Capitol in St. Louis. I want to thank all of you for rearranging your busy schedules and in many cases for dropping everything to be here on just a moment’s notice. To get right to the point, a few days ago, we began receiving Cerenean distress signals not unlike those received after our countermeasures against the Cerenean Occupation Force. These distress calls used standard Cerenean protocols and included not only data, but video and audio as well.”

Pausing to drink some water, she went on, “Perhaps the best way to describe what we’re dealing with is to show you the video portions of some of the signals received. General Tau, could you please narrate this portion of the program?”

“Certainly, Madam President,” the general responded as he made his way to the podium. General Tau was the U.S. Army’s commander in charge of Cerenean affairs, a post that had been largely ceremonial since the conclusion of hostilities more than a decade ago but, nevertheless, essential as was being demonstrated today. As the General took his place behind the podium, the lights in the room dimmed and a holographic projection materialized behind him.

“The images you are about to see are graphic. This video is typical of many that were received and that continue to be received from radio tracking stations around the earth. These all use Cerenean conventions for split spectrum communications using Cerenean digital transmission protocols.”

Behind the general could be seen a room of some sort. There were several Cereneans in the room, some of them decorated with clothing and insignias that I knew signified high rank. Also present were a number of Lorans and the Cereneans were constantly barking orders to the Lorans, who seemed to be at a loss to do anything as several of the Cereneans expelled viscous fluids from their orifices. There was a Cerenean directly in front of what must have been the camera, attempting to talk as best he could as he too vomited fluids.

“I think we’ve seen enough,” the General said as the scene faded and the room lights returned to full brightness. “Although difficult to understand,” the General continued, “the messages in all of these videos is pretty much the same . . . that a terrible plague has befallen the Cerenean outpost of Loran and they have been unable to stop it, that mortality is nearly complete and that the outpost is doomed. They don’t ask for assistance, but warn all Cereneans to stay away and vow revenge on anyone who might be responsible if the pandemic turns out to be artificial.

“What is particularly chilling is that the transmissions also contain data. The data stream includes the complete formula for the Cerenean virus designed right here on earth. Not the one that was deliberately sent to Loran, but the one that was used to neutralize the occupation force.

“But how is that possible?” one of the non-scientists asked. “The virus that we used to defeat the occupation force was sent after the Loran version was sent, and that one wasn’t supposed to arrive on Loran for five more years.”

“Correct on both accounts, Mr. Ambassador,” the general replied.

“So how did it get there ahead of schedule?” someone else asked. “How is that even possible?”

“It’s not,” the general answered. When he didn’t elaborate further, a buzz started to fill the room. The buzz ended abruptly and was replaced by gasps when a door opened and a lone Cerenean was brought into the room in shackles. It was evident he’d been roughed up quite a bit as several large, white-ish bruises covered what in Cereneans functioned as a face. Even from a distance I could smell the fetid stench that emanated from him.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the general continued, “I bring you B’Laie Hfargch Kourlz, lieutenant commander of the third infantry of the Cerenean Invasion Force.”

The Cerenean spoke in surprisingly good English as he began. “General and honored guests, firstly I’d like to apologize for my appearance. Believe me, it looks a lot worse than it feels, and it is nothing compared to what one of you would have received if the roles had been reversed.

“I also apologize for withholding information that was of critical importance. The information is top secret, even among the Cereneans and I feared that you might use it to annihilate us. Sadly the opposite is true. By withholding information, I may well have doomed my people when you could have saved us. Now it may well be too late.

“For centuries our scientists have secretly been working on technology for instantaneous travel through space . . .”

“But how is that possible?” one of the scientists asked. “The speed of light is infinite - nothing can ever reach it, let alone exceed it.”

“Yes, that is true,” the Cerenean acknowledged, “and we have yet to succeed in transporting ourselves or even objects through space instantaneously, but we have succeeded in establishing instant communications between two points in space. For nearly a half of one of your centuries we have had a functioning link between Cerenea and Loran.”

Again there were gasps around the room. The potential ramifications of instantaneous communications between the Cerenean home world and Loran were enough to make one shudder.

“What about Earth?” the Russian ambassador asked.

“The technology wasn’t ready in time for the first wave of the invasion,” the Cerenean answered, “but we’d hoped to have it ready in time for the arrival of the occupation force.

“Our scientists were also working on a scheme for instantaneous transmission in transit,” the Cerenean continued. “Apparently a prototype of that technology was in use at the time your virus struck.”

“So it was transmitted straight to Cerenea!” the Russian ambassador exclaimed.

“Unfortunately so,” the Cerenean replied. “believe me, had I known such a thing were possible, I would have warned you in advance. The Trojan horse you designed to carry the virus was designed to prevent its spread . . . otherwise I would have never helped you. I just never foresaw the possibility of it spreading right to Loran.”

“So how did the distress calls reach Earth at this time?” I asked. “If they were transmitted right back to the occupation fleet, they should have reached us the same time as did those sent by the fleet itself. If not, traveling at the speed of light, they shouldn’t have reached us for a few years yet.”

“I suspect that’s a reflection of the compromises made in getting instantaneous communications to work with a fleet in transit,” the Cerenean answered. “But before I can explain, you need to understand the basics of instantaneous communication.”

At that point, the room lights again dimmed and one of our own scientists made his way to the podium. “Good afternoon,” the scientist began, “for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Alan Weinstein, Director at Sandia National Laboratory.” Unlike Livermore, The Sandia Labs in New Mexico escaped being nuked by the Cereneans and were quickly restored after the invasion was over.

“The concept of instantaneous communication isn’t really all that difficult once you understand the basics,” Dr. Weinstein began. “Indeed, we at Sandia Labs explored many of the concepts long before we’d even heard of the Cereneans or the Lorans. Of course our abilities were limited by our lack of understanding of the physics behind the concepts, but the concepts were still sound.

“We have long known of the existence in Quantum Mechanics of paired quantum states. There are many examples in what we used to call particle physics of particle interactions where two particles are ejected, each traveling in opposite directions at the speed of light, but linked in their quantum states. Of course there really are no actual particles involved but, for the purposes of this introduction, the analogy is still helpful, especially with a lay audience.

“Now as these ‘particles’ travel through space, they remain indeterminate. Their quantum states are not just unknown, but undefined until and unless we measure them. However the moment we do measure the quantum state of one, the quantum state of the second particle is immediately known, no matter how far apart they may be. Without going into a lot of detail, it is the removal of uncertainty that is of use to us. By encoding a coded signal within a known sequence of certainty versus uncertainty, information can be sent instantaneously from one point in space to the other.” As he spoke, an illustration played behind him, demonstrating his points.

“But don’t the particles still have to travel through space at the speed of light?” someone asked.

“Yes, but by sending a stream of particles, there will always be linked, paired particles at both ends of the data stream. It’s like having a hose filled with water. When you first turn on the faucet, you don’t have to wait for the water to get there. Water comes out of the hose immediately.

“Another useful analogy relates to when the telegraph was first invented,” he went on. “Before the telegraph, messages had to be carried across the continent by stagecoach or on horseback, or later by rail. It took time to build the infrastructure for the telegraph but, once in place, messages could be sent instantaneously.”

“But this isn’t exactly like the telegraph,” someone else countered, “and it’s not a water hose. We’re talking light years of separation through space, and the particles are flowing out in both directions at once . . . not from one end to the other. To use your analogy, it’d kinda be like making water flow through your hose by using a pump in the middle.”

“That’s a very good way of putting it,” the director answered.

“But there aren’t really any actual particles involved, are there?”

“In the old parlance of particle physics,” Dr. Weinstein replied, the Cereneans made use of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Because these particles don’t interact with ordinary matter, they can travel through planets and even stars and still remain intact. The reality, however, is that they used the cataclysmic collapse of a discontinuity in space to create a propagating quantum tunnel. The technology is not unlike that used for space ship propulsion.

“In a space ship, an artificial singularity, what we would refer to as a black hole, is created to serve as a spatial funnel. As the ship moves through space, the curvature of space created by the singularity funnels spatial quanta . . . what we would refer to as matter . . . into a focused beam. The quanta collapse at the point of focus, generating energy in the form of a gravitational vector that accelerates the ship forward.

“The process is very efficient. Once the ship reaches critical velocity, which is accomplished using a standard fusion or antimatter reactor, the reaction becomes self-sustaining, fueled by the conversion of the quantum states of space itself . . . in other words, from the conversion of matter to energy. The only energy lost is that required to establish and maintain the singularity.

“For instantaneous communication, it is a spinning anti-singularity that is established. As ordinary spatial quanta, or matter, accrete onto the spinning black hole, the reaction between the quanta and their anti-counterparts in the singularity results in the generation of a propagating, bi-directional gravity-antigravity displacement, which is equivalent to the aforementioned neutrino-antineutrino particle streams.

“What is required, then, is a quantum displacement generator located halfway between the two points in space, and at each of those points, which could be considered the transmitter and receiver nodes, a de-randomizer and a random signal detector.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why we received the distress call now,” I pointed out.

This time it was the Cerenean who answered. “Establishing and maintaining an instantaneous communication channel with a moving fleet of spacecraft creates special challenges. Ideally one would simply launch a ship containing the quantum displacement generator . . . that is the rotating anti-singularity and accelerate it at half the rate of the fleet. It would therefore always be located halfway between the point of origin, Loran in this case, and the fleet itself.

“The problem in doing so is that at relativistic speeds, the perception of time would be different at all three locations . . . Loran, the quantum displacement generator and the fleet. This would result in significant differences in quantization, leading to erroneous decoding. There are probably more elegant ways around it,” he continued, “but the method we chose, which was perhaps the simplest and certainly the fastest to implement, was simply to establish a chain of quantum displacement generators along the path taken, with transponder nodes in between.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Lansley added, speaking for the first time. “We designed the Trojan horse that carried the virus to do two major tasks. Firstly, it was supposed to infect the occupation fleet’s replicators, reprogramming them to synthesize the Cerenean virus. The second was to infect the communications arrays, redirecting all the ship’s communications back to earth.

“Obviously, we didn’t know about the instant communication channel back to Loran,” he continued, “or we would have done something to prevent the virus from spreading any further. As a precaution we did make the code self-destructive. It was designed to infect but not replicate beyond local systems and to inactivate itself after some time, but there was nothing to prevent the original transmission from entering an instantaneous communication channel and infecting systems back on Loran. Once the virus entered the atmosphere on Loran, there would have been no stopping it. The version sent via the Trojan horse lacked the encoded sequence for an antidote that was present in the version we sent to Loran. There was no need nor was there a desire for an antidote as far as the occupation force was concerned.”

“So how is it that we are only just now getting the distress signal?” someone else asked.

“I was just getting to that,” Lansley answered. “Assuming that the Trojan horse infected each of the transponders in the chain of communication, it would have ultimately disrupted their normal function, redirecting all communications back to Earth using conventional radio waves. When the Cereneans on Loran sent their distress signals, they would have undoubtedly traveled to the first node in the chain, at which point they would have then been sent to Earth at the speed of light, arriving a few years ahead of when they might have if they’d traveled all the way from Loran using conventional communications, but well behind when they would have if the instant communication pathway had remained fully functional.”

“I’m curious,” the President herself asked, “why did we even bother with the virus in the first place? Why didn’t we simply use the Trojan Horse to disrupt ship navigation, or life support?”

Smiling, Lansley answered, “Because we needed to infect the ships’ systems without detection. A direct attack on a critical system such as navigation or life support would have been detected immediately, risking the possibility the Cereneans could have repaired the damage and resumed their course toward Earth. The replicators, on the other hand, were considered a non-critical system and the Trojan horse was easily able to co-opt them, infecting the entire fleet with the Cerenean virus without their even being aware of it. By the time they became symptomatic, it was far too late.

“It was only after the virus had been given sufficient time to incubate that the communications subsystems were infected. By then, even if they realized what was happening, it was too late for them to do anything about it.”

“So presumably the Trojan horse entered the instantaneous communication channel and was carried back to Loran,” the President confirmed, “and from there it spread to systems all over the planet, taking over replicators and causing them to manufacture the Cerenean virus.”

“It would have taken over virtually any chemical synthesizing facility,” Lansley elaborated, “spreading the virus far and wide.”

“And if the Trojan horse then entered the instantaneous communication stream to Cerenea?” the President asked.

“It would have undoubtedly infected the Cerenean home world, leading to cataclysmic genocide and, given the nature of the virus, perhaps even the total collapse of the Cerenean ecosystem. Cerenea would have been rendered habitable only by non-Cereneans.”

“Given the distance between Cerenea and its other subservient planets, and the earth, that is not our immediate concern,” the general interjected. “The immediate threat is that some Cerenean elements on or near Loran may have survived and taken it upon themselves to avenge themselves on Earth. To that end, we need to proceed with utmost speed to check out the situation on Loran and to establish a communications channel with the Loran people.”

Suddenly it dawned on me why Lansley and I were at this meeting. We were going to lead a delegation to Lansley’s home planet!

The Journey

“I’m not going, and that’s final!” our son shouted at us as he stormed out of the living room, acting more like a four-year-old than a fourteen-year-old. Lansley and I just sat there looking at each other, dumbfounded by Miguel’s tantrum. He’d always been the one who was adventurous - who liked to explore new things and visit new places.

Surprisingly, it was Theresa, our shy little girl, who seemed eager to go. She had no qualms about leaving everything and everyone behind that she’d ever known and embarking on a journey that would take five years of our lives, but during which 26 years would pass on earth. We thought she might be too young to understand that, were we to make the complete round trip, more than fifty years would pass on Earth before we would return. Theresa demonstrated surprising comprehension. “By the time we return, everyone I know will be very old, or dead,” she acknowledged, “but think of all the friends I’ll make on Loran! And think of all the things I’ll see and do!”

“But it’s a very long journey,” Lansley explained. “For more than five years we’ll be alone out there. Yes, we’ll be part of an armada, but there will only be some fifty people on our ship and you’ll be the only one your age. You’ll be sharing a room with a fifteen-year-old girl. You’ll be the youngest child on board.”

“But you said there’ll be other kids my age on some of the other ships,” Theresa replied.

“And getting to any of those other ships will require a four-to-nine-hour shuttle ride, and you’ll be stuck on the other ship for up to a week before the next shuttle run back to our ship,” I responded.

“Daddy, Poppy, it’s all cool. Really, it is,” Theresa stated calmly. “Besides, you guys have to go, don’t you? I love you, you know. If it’s a choice between going with you on a long, dangerous journey or staying behind and starting my life over again, there really is no choice. I’ll take my chances. I’ll spend the rest of my life with you.”

Wow! Lansley and I both had tears in our eyes after our daughter said that. Yeah, Lorans cry, just like humans do.

But now we had to deal with our son, who was beside himself with anger and grief. Lansley and I just looked at each other and with a subtle nod from my lover, I got up off the sofa and headed to our son’s room to talk to him. Lansley and I both had discussed this before and we were pretty certain we knew what was eating at our son at the moment. After all, we were not so old that we didn’t remember what it was like to be in love. It was only logical that it be I that confronted young Miguel. After all, I knew just what it was like to be in the closet.

Knocking on his door and finding it unlocked, I entered his room and said, “Hey, Miguel. You know your Poppy and I want you to be happy more than anything.”

“Then don’t go!” our son shouted back at me.

“You know we have to go, and we’d really like it if you would come with us,” I responded. “We love you more than the universe, but the future of humanity could well depend on this trip. We have no choice.

“You, on the other hand, do have a choice,” I continued in my softest, gentlest voice. “You can come with us and leave behind everything and everyone you have ever known, or you can stay here and make a new life for yourself with new parents. For a boy who made his way all the way from Mexico City to San Francisco, and at the age of nine, you’re capable of doing anything you want to. You’ll survive this, either way.”

“I left Mexico City because I had to,” Miguel replied in tears. “And things were different back then. I’d already lost everyone I cared about. I was truly on my own. Now it’s . . . different.”

“Would it make a difference if I told you the Wallaces are going, too?” I asked.

“Bobby’s going?” Miguel practically shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t exactly give us a chance,” I replied with a chuckle. “I have to warn you that we may not be in the same ship, so what we told Theresa would hold true for you, too. However, I think I can pull some strings to make sure you and Bobby share quarters. It may not be on our ship and it may be in a dormitory with other young men but you’ll be together.”

“You’d let me stay on a different ship, just so I can room with Bobby?” Miguel asked in awe.

“Poppy and I know how close the two of you are and we wouldn’t want to see you separated if we could help it.”

Coloring up furiously, Miguel said, “Dad, as wonderful as this sounds, I don’t think you’ll let us share quarters once you know just how close Bobby and I are.”

“We already know how close you are, and we’re OK with it,” I replied, to a shocked expression on our son’s face. “After all, Poppy and I were exaclty your age when we became boyfriends. We’ve been together ever since.”

Coloring up even more, Miguel replied, “But if Bobby and I share a room, you know we’re prolly gonna . . .”

“When Poppy and I spent our time together in Escalente Canyon, we did a lot more to stay warm on the frigid desert nights than just crawling into our respective sleeping bags.”

“Eww, Dad!” Miguel exclaimed in seeming revulsion. “I don’t wanna hear about it.”

“The most important thing Poppy and I need to know is that you’ll come to us if things don't work out between you and Bobby. Everyone needs a little space and it’s critical that you know you can always spend time apart from each other if you need to. Sometimes two people have to have some time away from each other in order to be together.”

Getting up off his bed, Miguel crossed the room and threw his arms around me, hugging me tightly as he said, “Thanks, Dad. You’re the best.”

Preparations for our journey took the better part of three years, which was far longer than I’d expected or felt was prudent. In reality, three years was an amazingly short time for all that was accomplished. When we started the initial planning phases for the journey, we had in service small, military vehicles and we had large freighters that regularly made the run to the asteroid belt, where we mined the materials to help rebuild Earth, and to Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where we’d established outposts. Neither of these were suitable for longer journeys and certainly not for travel outside the solar system.

In the Cerenean databases that we inherited from the invasion there were numerous ship designs, ready to be adapted for our needs. Unfortunately, building a fleet of large ships would involve starting from scratch and a lot of time.

The biggest challenge, however, was establishing a leadership structure. That Lansley should be in charge of the mission was never in doubt, but anyone and everyone wanted their say. There was spirited debate on how much of a military component there should be on the mission. Everyone recognized the threat of encountering residual Cerenean forces, but we wanted this to be a mission of peace. In the end it was Lansley who prevailed with the right theme - a peaceful armada of civilian vessels, conveyed by military spacecraft capable of defending the armada and nothing more. Still, it was decided that everyone on the mission, including the civilians, would log time in military training vehicles, just in case.

From a factory built on Mars and using raw materials mined on the Martian surface and from the Asteroid Belt, an armada of forty civilian vessels, each capable of carrying fifty passengers, and twenty military escort vessels was constructed. By choosing a modular design, the vessels could be fabricated quickly in the Martian factory and then assembled in space. Each vessel had its own hydroponics bay, capable of providing an indefinite supply of food to the occupants while processing and recycling their wastes.

Just prior to our departure, Miguel and Bobby were married in a beautiful, double ceremony with Lansley and me. After all these years of being boyfriends, it took our son to talk us into making it legal. For their part, Miguel and Bobby made a beautiful couple and as married partners, they were entitled to their own private quarters.

Finally the day of departure arrived and with much fanfare the three thousand of us making the journey departed on a series of shuttles for the short trip to Martian orbit, where we boarded the vehicles that would serve as our home for the next five years of our lives and the next 26 earth years, the difference owing to the relativistic effects of traveling near the speed of light.

Before departing the Solar System, we spent more than another month familiarizing ourselves with ship’s systems and in verifying that everything was working properly. There would be no one to turn to on our journey if anything broke down. If that happened, we would all need to work together to fix the problem using available parts and materials on board.

Finally the day of departure arrived and we began our slow, steady acceleration toward Loran. Accelerating at just slightly more than Earth’s normal gravitational acceleration, we would approach the speed of light in a matter of months and continue our acceleration until we reached the half-way point in our journey, at which point we would reverse the process and decelerate all the way to Loran.

Although humans could have tolerated a somewhat faster rate of acceleration, Lansley could not and his presence was critical to the mission. Over the years, he had accommodated well to Earth’s gravity, which was 40% greater than that on Loran. Earth’s gravity was near the limit of what his physiology could tolerate, so going any faster would have been fatal to him.

In order to prevent the propulsion systems on the ships from interfering with each other, we needed to maintain a distance of at least three million kilometers between vessels. That was roughly eight times the distance between the earth and the moon and, although still close enough for real-time radio communications between adjacent vehicles, the ten-second lag time was more than frustrating. It took hours by shuttle to travel between spacecraft and because each shuttle had to have its own propulsion system to keep up with the fleet, they were fairly large and limited in number. The shuttles therefore operated on set routes and a set schedule, taking weeks to make a full circuit. Therefore it could take days to travel between any two spaceships.

It took very little time for the novelty of space travel to wear off and for the routine of daily operations to become, well, routine. We all had our assigned responsibilities - even Lansley took his turn on clean-up duty. Much of our time, for both children and adults alike, was spent on our education. We learned how to speak Bornlick, which was the closest thing the Lorans had to a universal language. Most Lorans could speak Bornlick, much as most humans could speak either English or Spanish in a pinch. We also learned the Cerenean language. Whether the Cereneans evolved with only one language or a single language was imposed on them, much as the Chinese tried to force the entire population to speak Mandarin, Lansley didn’t know, but it certainly made things easier on us.

We also learned a lot about Loran culture and history - things that would be helpful when we met with our Loran counterparts. We learned about Cerenean culture, too, as we didn’t know what we would face when we arrived. Our coursework proceeded at a comfortable pace, as we had five years to become experts.

Our living quarters were extremely cramped as was to be expected, consisting of nothing more than a double bed inside a rectangular tube. We were basically there only for sleep and for intimacy. We all worked in shifts and slept in shifts. To save space, Lansley and I shared our quarters with two other couples. That essentially restricted us to only having sex during the eight hours per day allotted to sleep. At least the quarters were ours alone during our sleep shift. The unattached crew slept in small, open dorm rooms that offered no privacy. If they wished to become intimate with another crew member, they had to sign up for one of two unassigned double compartements on the ship.

Shower facilities and restrooms were communal and cramped. Clothing was kept in individual lockers and laundered automatically, minimizing the need for changes of clothing. The one area that was surprisingly spacious was the ship’s gym, which was well-furnished with exercise equipment. Exercise was critical to our well-being on a long space flight and we were all expected to adhere to a rigorous routine. Likewise, sports were a critical element, both in terms of the exercise provided and in terms of relieving boredom. We had basketball, racket sports and simulated golf, all with organized teams and regular competitions. The inter-ship competitions were particularly fierce.

In spite of everything done to keep us busy and to stimulate our minds and our bodies, it was hard to get beyond the isolation. There were just fifty of us on each ship and travel between the ships was infrequent. Tempers often flared and it occasionally became necessary to rotate supporting crew members to another ship to deal with conflicts that arose. The separation from our friends and families back home on Earth was palpable and, at times, oppressive. We’d considered the possibility of implementing an instantaneous communications link throughout our journey, but dismissed it as impractical until the technology was better perfected.

The problem was that the central quantum displacement generator in an instantaneous communications link needed to be at the midpoint between transmitter and receiver at all times. To do so, it would have had to travel at exactly half the speed of the fleet. Someday we might develop fully automated modules, but for now they had to be manned. As the module would never reach relativistic speeds, it couldn’t make use of the singularity funnel that is central to space ship propulsion. It would have to carry all its fuel with it and, for the crew, the passage of time would be slowed only negligibly, so a 26 earth-year journey would seem to take the entire 26 years. Further, gravity would be halved for the crew.

It was an easy decision - an instantaneous communications module would be launched from Mars once we’d reached the half-way point in our journey to Loran. If all went according to plan, then, a fully functional communications link would be in place and ready for our use by the time we arrived on Loran, and not a moment before.

The half-way point, other than being the time at which the communications module was launched back home, was interesting in other ways, too. It was the point at which we reversed thrust and transitioned from accelerating toward Loran to decelerating. This did not involve simply turning our ships around and using the same thrusters to slow us down. Although that would have been far simpler, it wouldn’t have worked.

The artificial singularity that funneled spatial quanta into the engines was permanently ensconced in the front of the ship. Turning the ship around would have placed it behind us, where it would have done precious little good. The ship therefore had to remain in the same orientation, with the engine polarity reversed so as to create drag rather than thrust. Changing the polarity of the engines was not a matter of flipping a switch, either. All of the engines had to be shut down and allowed to cool for at least 48 hours, and then a space walk was required to manually turn and realign the injectors.

Of course that meant that for 48 hours we were without gravity. Before we even reached the point of shut-down, everything that could possibly float in weightlessness had to be secured. Conventional toilets, which used water, just like any toilet on Earth, had to be fully shut off and drained. The hydroponics bays had to be sealed and secured. Even our clothing had to be strapped down.

Once we shut down the engines and began our period of weightlessness, we had to take precautions to ensure we did not spray our urine or fecal matter into the environment. Special self-sealing vacuum siphons were used to collect our wastes and dispose of them properly while washing the area with water. Other than that we couldn’t shower and felt pretty disgusting by the time we fired our engines back up and began the deceleration phase of the journey.

The second half of the voyage seemed to pass more quickly as we got back into the routines that had become so familiar to us. I had expected the opposite - that we’d all become increasingly bored as the journey progressed, but that never happened. The other thing that changed with time was our modesty, or rather our loss of it. Given the tight quarters, it was just too difficult to maintain privacy. By the time we reached Loran, we’d pretty much seen all there was to see of each other, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

Arrival

“Something’s very wrong,” Lansley said as he peered into the telescope at Loran for the first time on our Journey. We were still a few days away from our arrival there and finally close enough to see his native planet. “That’s not Loran,” he added as he pulled away from the eye piece.

“What do you mean by, ‘That’s not Loran’?” I asked. “It’s exactly where you said it should be.”

Pulling further away from the telescope, Lansley simply said, “Take a look,” as he moved aside to let me peer into the telescope.

When I did, what I saw was a complete shock. Loran appeared to be the most perfect sphere I’d ever seen in space. It almost looked like a giant marble, with glassy swirls of orange and yellow across its surface. There was even a specular reflection of its sun off the perfectly smooth surface. Not a single mountain or ocean was visible, anywhere. There was no haze around the margins and there were no clouds. There was nothing to suggest the presence of an atmosphere.

As I continued to peer into the telescope in disbelief, Lansley said flatly, “The Loran I left behind looked much like your Earth with deep blue oceans and swirling clouds in the sky. There were mountains and valleys, and there was the greenery of life.

“Now it’s nothing more than a billiard ball. There’s nothing to it. There’s no life . . . there’s no Loran.”

Pulling my husband into me, I let him cry his eyes out on my shoulder as I comforted him the best I could.

“It would have taken a lot more than antimatter cluster bombs to do this kind of damage,” Lansley went on. “Even if they blanketed the entire surface with cluster bombs, it wouldn’t have done this. Even the mountains are gone. Even the atmosphere is gone.”

“They must have used some sort of doomsday device,” I answered. “Perhaps some sort of antimatter mist dispersed into high orbit that then settled into the atmosphere, reacting with the atmosphere as it drifted down, vaporizing all in its path and melting the surface.”

“What a sick thing to do!” Lansley growled.

“Not that I can defend it but, as far as the Cereneans are concerned, it was we who started it. To their way of thinking, their conquest of Earth was legitimate, but our response was nothing short of genocide. If our Trojan horse reached the Cerenean home world via their instantaneous communication link, the result would have been nothing short of total annihilation. They would have felt justified in destroying Loran with their last, dying gasp. Lord knows, the same fate may already have befallen Earth while we were in transit.”

“God, Earth is all we have left,” Lansley wailed. “I hope you’re wrong about that.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” I stated matter-of-factly. The horror of what I’d seen not fully sinking in as of yet.

The remainder of the journey seemed to take weeks rather than mere days as the reality of the situation slowly sank in. There was always the hope that there might be survivors living below ground on Loran or on ships in orbit, or perhaps in outposts throughout the surrounding region of space but, regardless, Loran as a living planet was no more. The possibility that the same thing had happened to Earth was one I didn’t even want to think about.

Of more immediate concern was the possibility that surviving Cerenean forces might still be in the area and pose a serious threat. We now knew that some Cereneans are naturally immune to the virus and on a scale the size of their population on Loran, there would likely be enough survivors to outnumber us by a factor of one hundred to one.

At last the day of our arrival came as we slowed and entered orbit around what was left of Loran. There was no point in landing on the surface, as there was nothing down there for us to find. Hence we once again experienced weightlessness, but this time it would be indefinite until we decided to leave for elsewhere.

For days we scoured the surface of Loran and the surrounding region of space for any kind of signal at all, be it radio, microwave, light or even x-ray. We found nothing - not a trace of anything that could be construed as a form of communication.

Likewise, we trained our equipment on the region of space from which we expected to hear from Earth but found nothing. Not a trace. Slowly it dawned on us all that we were almost certainly all that remained of humanity, and that Lansley was the sole surviving Loran.

But then we received a communication from an unexpected source - Cerenea! The instant communications link between Loran and Cerenea was still operational. Although the link should have been disrupted by the Trojan horse, much as had been the secret link to Earth, the surviving Cereneans on board the central quantum displacement generator had worked to repair the damage and bring it back on line. On Cerenea itself, Lorans, surviving Cereneans and two other species they’d previously subjugated had worked to rebuild Cerenea, working together as equals. They’d long since dissected the code in our Trojan horse and realized that we’d never intended for the virus to spread so extensively and wipe out Cerenean civilizations everywhere. It was the Cereneans in their secrecy that had made it possible for the virus to spread where it was never intended to go.

The surviving Cereneans from Loran had long ago departed, choosing to return to Cerenea and begin life anew in a federation that included Lorans, Qxinglu and Faronians. They regretted having destroyed the Loran home world, but the thinking behind that action was from another time and another place - one that would hopefully never return.

There was, however, hope that additional pockets of Lorans had survived throughout the quadrant. The Loran Resistance Movement had sent thousands of small ships out over the years in search of suitable places on which to build outposts. Some of them were known to have succeeded and outposts had been established, the locations of which were secret even then.

There was certainly no reason for us to stay in orbit around Loran and living in a weightless environment was taking its toll on us all. Reasoning that there was nothing left for us back home on Earth either, it seemed the only reasonable course of action was to undertake a long, hundred-year journey to Cerenea. Thanks to relativistic effects, the journey would only take a little more than ten years of our lives, but a lot could change on Cerenea in a hundred years. Would we even be welcome a hundred years from now?

But before we could undertake such a journey, we needed to re-provision our ships, perform routine maintenance and refine fuel for the time it would take to reach relativistic speeds. With such a long trip, there’d be an even greater need for redundancy, as there would be no way to recover from a serious malfunction in the deep reaches of space.

Months passed as we mined Loran’s tiny moons and refined the minerals we needed to retrofit our ships’ systems with rebuilt components. It was as we were nearing the completion of our preparations for the journey ahead that we picked up a signal - a signal from Earth!

Lansley and I were having dinner with some of the other senior staff and military brass, discussing the final preparations for the trip ahead when one of our ship’s communications officers burst into the room with a look of pure excitement on his face.

“We’ve received a communication from Earth!” he shouted, and then he repeated, “We’ve received a communication from Earth!”

“Are you sure?” Lansley asked as he took the tablet the young man was carrying from him and started to read.

“It’s properly formatted, coded and encrypted,” the communications officer assured us.

Rather than waiting on my husband to read what was on the tablet, I pulled up my own display and quickly searched for recent communications, readily identifying the one from Earth. I started to read.

Dear members of the Loran mission. A lot has happened since you left on your journey so many years ago. We hope that you arrived at your destination safely and trust that you have established peaceful relations with the liberated citizens of Loran. We hope that you did not encounter Cerenean forces, and that all has proceeded according to plan.

You must certainly be wondering why you have not heard from Earth for so many months after your planned arrival date. The situation has been complicated, but is finally stabilizing.

Not long after you left the Solar System, one of the Cerenean Heroes broke down and told us of the existence of a Cerenean doomsday weapon - a weapon of such destructive potential that it can vaporize a planet’s atmosphere and melt its surface, leaving nothing more behind than a giant glass marble. Fearing that the Cereneans might use this weapon on Earth, the Cerenean worked with us to help us develop defenses against it. In time, other Cereneans joined us in the project, allowing us to complete a defensive infrastructure far more quickly than we otherwise might have. Had we not acted quickly, the Earth would not be here today.

Even with our preparations, our defensive strategy was not perfect and when we were attacked some fifteen years ago, a small patch of the atmosphere over what was once northwestern China was sprayed with antimatter. The result was a fireball that ignited an area roughly six hundred kilometers in diameter. The land directly under the fireball was melted and turned to glass and the shockwave that propagated around the Earth laid waste to much of the infrastructure that had survived the initial Cerenean invasion.

Worse still, a ‘nuclear winter’ arose, the effects of which linger to this day. Much of North America and Europe lies under a thick sheet of ice. The disruption to humanity has been massive, but our civilization has once again survived.

The revelation of what had happened to Earth left the members of the armada divided on what we should do. Many now wished to return to Earth to help to rebuild human civilization up from the ashes, so to speak. Others felt we should forge ahead, continuing our journey to Cerenea, establishing relations and building new lives for us there. Still others recognized the need for an ongoing presence on what was left of Loran, serving as a communications node between the citizens of Earth and the citizens of Cerenea.

In the end we decided on a compromise, allowing some to return to Earth while at the same time forming a delegation to travel on to Cerenea and establish diplomatic relations. After conducting a straw poll to determine how many people wished to do what and after debating what kind of critical mass would be required to keep an outpost at Loran versus to make a successful journey to Cerenea, we decided we could accommodate most people’s wishes.

The result was that a delegation of eight hundred of us on non-military ships would proceed on to Cerenea, twelve hundred would return to Earth and just over a thousand would remain on Loran, making a life for themselves on a lifeless glass marble. Although it would be tough, the same technology that had been used on Earth to reclaim the soil in the cities the Cereneans nuked could be used to revitalize the surface of Loran. In time the atmosphere could be reconstructed and the oceans reconstituted in a process that could well take thousands of years. Some thought it an exercise in futility, but those who wished to stay were determined to try.

The split-up of the mission into three separate groups meant the splitting of some families, ours included. As the leader of the mission and the sole remaining Loran, Lansley had a responsibility to continue on to Cerenea. As his husband, so did I, but I also wanted to. I could hardly think of anything more exciting that exploring a new world once again - it was what we came to do in the first place.

Miguel and Bobby, however, wished to stay on Loran. They were both grown men now, being 22 years of age, and were looking forward to the challenge of terraforming a new world. They also saw their role in establishing and maintaining a communications node as being key to the survival of all the species that had come under the Cerenean sphere of influence, including the Cereneans themselves.

Finally, Theresa was now a young woman of eighteen. Although she was tempted to follow her parents or to stay and work with her brother and brother-in-law, she was in love with a young man who desperately wished to return to Earth. We ourselves loved Charlie and we certainly didn’t begrudge him the chance to return to help Earth survive and rebuild yet again. Earth would be lucky to have Charlie and Theresa, but we would miss our daughter terribly.

And so it was that we exchanged tearful goodbyes as Lansley and I prepared to depart for Cerenea and Theresa and Charlie for Earth, while Miguel and Bobby stayed on Loran. We knew we would never see each other again, but we were steadfast in our desire to contribute to rebuilding from the ashes, each of us in our own way.

Hiroshima Today

 

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