Return From Zeta
Apr. 29th, 2014 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyLet's take the example of Doctor Morrison Rand. He was a professor of anthropological archaeology at Banfield College in Humboldt, Oregon. It was 2041, which really wasn't a bad year. Oh, the world's resources were getting a little tight, but really, Professor Rand was living a pretty good life in a pretty good place. He had one of those Mister Handy robots, an early domestic model. He had a mid-sized Chryslus Motors car with a respectable gas tank. He had a nice secure job and three square meals a day, which was plenty for him; life was pretty good. It wasn't luxurious- he was an expert in the Clovis culture, which got you tenure but not big bucks- but that was all right. He spends a lot of his time in the field fiddling with potsherds and looking forward to coming home to a nice thirteen-inch black and white TV and spaghetti and meatball dinners that didn't have to be freeze dried to be hauled out to the dig site. The worst he's had to deal with for most of his life has probably been dust storms and bureaucrats, with maybe the occasional interference from wild animals and/or chem dealers. He's a very knowledgable man overall; he earned his place at Banfield.
And then in August of 2041 he stepped out of his office and headed for his car and there was a bright, bright light overhead. He's not clear on what happened next, not for all his trying; he wound up with a lot of patchy memories of little green faces and a lot of patchy scars he doesn't like to think about.
And then one day he goes from seeing the canister close over his face (they do it every time they start an experiment- wake up one or two of the more obstreperous prisoners and make them watch) to unconsciousness, and then to consciousness again, and this time it's a human face to greet him. Only now it's been two hundred years. The world went to hell a few decades after he last left his office, apparently. The oil dried up and the coal followed and China invaded Alaska and America conquered Canada and Tel Aviv got blown off the map and Europe gave up on union and went to war with itself and the United Nations was replaced by a department store, and and and. But that doesn't matter any more because it went from ordinary hell straight to the Malebolge shortly after all that. He doesn't even have enough time to let how bad things got sink in before he finds out about the nukes. The planet's been scorched, and the government he knew and (mostly) trusted was partly responsible. His last dig site is somewhere you can't go without a Geiger counter. His offices... might exist, theoretically- there were places worse off than Oregon- but if they do, they're a load-bearing wall or two and a particularly stout filing cabinet surrounded by rubble and mutant plant things. His private library probably burned. Everything he ever knew isn't changed, it's lost.
Oh, there's civilization of a sort in California, they tell him, but the people who took the ship away from the aliens can't make contact with them. The best they can offer him is a place in a relatively secure farming community- if you can call it 'farming'; the cows have two heads and the scorpions are as long as he is tall, and the water (clean, thank God, and better than he used to get on his Clovis digs) arrives by caravan once a week. He's got supplies he can start off with, they got those from the alien ship, but he's got to manage on his own with the help of people he's never met before, who might or might not be from anything like his own time and place, who might or might not know how to take care of themselves.
Every day.
For the rest of his life.
At least he doesn't have to regularly defend himself. There's a military to do that. They look almost exactly like what he remembers of the U. S. Army, power armor and lasers and all. They check on him regularly and talk to him regularly and respect him as an academic, but... every last one of them was born literally hundreds of years after everyone he ever knew died; they barely share a common frame of reference with him at all. The whole place feels like a psychotic episode, only it's one he can't ever snap out of or wake up from. The only way out of this future is to live out what's left of his life and try not to wish they'd left him frozen.
Maybe if he's lucky they'll thaw out a headshrinker next. Or a minister.
Or just start taking people back to the ship.
And then in August of 2041 he stepped out of his office and headed for his car and there was a bright, bright light overhead. He's not clear on what happened next, not for all his trying; he wound up with a lot of patchy memories of little green faces and a lot of patchy scars he doesn't like to think about.
And then one day he goes from seeing the canister close over his face (they do it every time they start an experiment- wake up one or two of the more obstreperous prisoners and make them watch) to unconsciousness, and then to consciousness again, and this time it's a human face to greet him. Only now it's been two hundred years. The world went to hell a few decades after he last left his office, apparently. The oil dried up and the coal followed and China invaded Alaska and America conquered Canada and Tel Aviv got blown off the map and Europe gave up on union and went to war with itself and the United Nations was replaced by a department store, and and and. But that doesn't matter any more because it went from ordinary hell straight to the Malebolge shortly after all that. He doesn't even have enough time to let how bad things got sink in before he finds out about the nukes. The planet's been scorched, and the government he knew and (mostly) trusted was partly responsible. His last dig site is somewhere you can't go without a Geiger counter. His offices... might exist, theoretically- there were places worse off than Oregon- but if they do, they're a load-bearing wall or two and a particularly stout filing cabinet surrounded by rubble and mutant plant things. His private library probably burned. Everything he ever knew isn't changed, it's lost.
Oh, there's civilization of a sort in California, they tell him, but the people who took the ship away from the aliens can't make contact with them. The best they can offer him is a place in a relatively secure farming community- if you can call it 'farming'; the cows have two heads and the scorpions are as long as he is tall, and the water (clean, thank God, and better than he used to get on his Clovis digs) arrives by caravan once a week. He's got supplies he can start off with, they got those from the alien ship, but he's got to manage on his own with the help of people he's never met before, who might or might not be from anything like his own time and place, who might or might not know how to take care of themselves.
Every day.
For the rest of his life.
At least he doesn't have to regularly defend himself. There's a military to do that. They look almost exactly like what he remembers of the U. S. Army, power armor and lasers and all. They check on him regularly and talk to him regularly and respect him as an academic, but... every last one of them was born literally hundreds of years after everyone he ever knew died; they barely share a common frame of reference with him at all. The whole place feels like a psychotic episode, only it's one he can't ever snap out of or wake up from. The only way out of this future is to live out what's left of his life and try not to wish they'd left him frozen.
Maybe if he's lucky they'll thaw out a headshrinker next. Or a minister.
Or just start taking people back to the ship.