The Rosetta Archive: Notable Speculative Short Fiction in Translation by Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas

Author:Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas [Shvartsman, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UFO Publishing

Five years later, on the day of my departure, Hefei Ye was not beside me.

I boarded the second immigrant ship, dubbed the Birrarung Marr, alone and headed for Uluru along with five thousand others.

The voyage aimed to be “as diverse as possible,” so it included five hundred kakyō who had given up their customary Lunar New Year trips.

We were traveling for six years, so I fell in love during the flight. By the time we reached Uluru, I had just ended the relationship with my second partner.

The first was an agricultural engineer from Germany. We dated for quite a while and had fun, but around the middle of the trip, he got busy, and our relationship cooled off and faded away. The second was a kakyō by the name of Qingming Huang, chief engineer on the improved GSA. Since he wasn’t hung up on the Lunar New Year or other parts of Chinese culture, he was easy to date, but he reminded me too much of Hefei Ye, so I distanced myself, unable to deepen the relationship.

When we landed, my subjective age was thirty-seven. By the Western calendar, which didn’t mean much at that point, I was forty-eight. Either way, I would never return to the Earthsphere.

I started spending more time at the lab in pursuit of the piecemeal Uluru updates.

The objects moving with the seasonal changes had been found to be bubbles of fat that couldn’t quite be called life just yet. Still, we knew the bubbles moved seasonally in groups of like chemical makeup, to places where it was easier to maintain surface tension. Though it was unclear if they had metabolisms, much less intelligence, I was excited to see them traveling together, but the survey had ended there.

The survey on the ground to ascertain what was inside the bubbles was entrusted to a team of five that I would lead.

Having agreed to gene therapy for methane respiration, I and my team members, who were also immigrating to study the life forms, analyzed what little data there was. We could hardly wait to land on Uluru. By the time Tau came into view, sparkling pink, in January of 2133, we had resolved to set foot on the planet.

That was when it happened—unexpected news arrived.

“Chunyun Special Flight?”

I repeated what the team member who brought the report said.

“Where is it planning on returning to?” another confused team member asked.

“China, apparently.”

“Even if they hurried using the latest black hole fall drive, it would take thirteen years. Even light takes eleven years and eleven months.”

“Yeah, I know. But they told anyone who wants to go to gather at the GSA tower—the central lobby. All the kakyō are there.”

“...Seriously?”

When I took my staff and went to have a look, there was an apparatus we’d never seen before in the back of the lobby.

The easiest way to explain it would be a dome that ten people could fit under. It was attached to a graviton track branched off from the accelerator.

There were kakyō working around the dome.

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