The return of Voyager 1256

“Captain, we’re entering the solar system,” said Hans, my official deputy, the words almost trembling out of his throat. It was an emotional time for all of us.

“Let me see,” I said to Wanda. She manoeuvred her arthritic fingers across the dials and the solar system spread out on screen before us. Barely visible, at the far end of the view, a bright, distant dot, was our home. Just a day away now.

Our mission had taken fifty-two years, during which time we’d travelled through five different solar systems, visited an alien planet, taken over a hundred billion readings and neither seen nor spoken to another human being in all that time. We were finally in radio range of our home.

I opened the radio transmitter. “Hello planet Earth, this is Voyager 1256 returning home.”

It would take a few minutes for the message to reach Earth, and a few further minutes for the message from Earth to reach us. That’s assuming they identified our signal, technology will have changed a lot in 4,000 years.

It’s a very strange phenomenon, the fact that because of the speed we’ve been travelling, from the perspective of people on Earth we’ve been away for over 4,000 years. Such are the oddities of space time.

It’s one of the main things we’ve talked about in our ‘preparing for return’ seminars, not knowing what to expect.

“The big problem,” Wanda suggested at one of our sessions, “is the time difference. 4,000 years is almost the period it took from man to go from naked monkey to putting a man on the moon. Who knows what could have happened in that time.”

“That took more than 4,000 years,” said John (I should say that John died a few months ago now, he won‘t be facing the problems that await the rest of us, he‘s floating out there somewhere in space). “Our ancestors were already farming 4,000 years ago. That’s a big step up from your average baboon.”

“Yes, but the change is still amazing, from simple farmers with nothing more technical than a pointy flint and a few bits of metal, to skyscrapers and microcomputers. Heck, we‘re sitting in the first inter-stellar spacecraft. All this happened just a few hundred years after the dark ages. Our knowledge will be ridiculously out of date, we‘ll look like the philosophers arguing over the number of angels that can dance on the head of pin to them.”

“And it’s not just technology that will have changed,” I said. “Everybody we knew will have died, not one familiar building will still be standing, lands we have trod will have been flooded other lands will have been reclaimed from the very oceans in which we once swam.”

Wanda nodded thoughtfully. “And the whole culture will have changed, even the language. Think of the change in English between Shakespeare and today and multiply that by ten.”

Hans hit the nail on the head at the last session. “In many ways,” he said, “we’re not returning home at all, we’re visiting a new planet.”

He’s right, of course. Our ‘home’ no longer exists, our home is a world from 4,000 years ago. We can never go back there.

Maybe we were foolish to have gone on this expedition. We knew that we’d be losing touch with everything and everyone we knew, but maybe we were just too young to really understand what that meant. I was just twenty-three when I left, John was the eldest at twenty-five. They needed people who could survive fifty years in space, as it was John proved too old. We were full of energy and hope, undaunted by a fifty-two year mission, simply excited to be the first to explore new solar systems.

We were so full of passion, and not just for science. Within just a few weeks I’d started a relationship with Wanda. There were no rules against it, with one woman and three men in the crew a relationship was always likely, we were only human after all. It was all so outlandishly sexual, there is something truly wonderful about sex in zero-gravity, though it must have been difficult for Hans and John in such an enclosed space. We barely managed to keep our juices to ourselves, with no gravity to contain them. I will spare you the full details.

Our passion showed itself too when we split up, the two of us resolutely refusing to talk to each other for months afterwards, even though the miniscule scale of the ship meant that we were never more than a few metres away from each other.

Of course Wanda could have paired up with one of the other crew members, but I think the experience left her scarred. The knowledge that if another relationship went wrong she’d have fallen out with two-thirds of the population of her world would have been daunting.

This all seems such a long time ago now. By the time we’d reached out late twenties it was already ancient history. We were just four friends in a box, slowly growing old together, dabbling in science as a hobby that paid our way.

Despite the fears, we’re really looking forward to coming home. After fifty-two years in a space-bound metal box, with just three other people, there are so many experiences we’ve all missed, that we’re all longing for.

Several of our ‘preparing for return’ sessions have focussed on the positive things about returning to Earth.

“It’s the food I’m looking forward to,” I remember saying, “tasting real food, juicy, smelly, non-synthetic.”

Wanda agreed. “Hmmm, think of it, peach juice dribbling down you face as you eat it, too much juice to eat even.”

“And the cheese,” said Hans, “first thing I’m going to do is go to a cheese shop and try a bit of everything. Think of the smells.”

I did. I was never a fan of cheese, I decided to leave that area of exploration to Hans alone.

“Gravity,” said Wanda, “to feel the ground, the pressure of gravity holding you down. To sleep without floating.”

“I want to walk,” announce John, “not just trot up and down on the Exerciser in my Grav boots, but to walk over fields, by lakes, over mountains. The Dales, The Lake District.” Sad to think that he never made it, that he’ll never set foot on Earth again, that he’s destined to float forever in a vacuum.

“Just to breathe air,” said Wanda, “not endlessly recycled and filtered air, but fresh, real, outside air.”

“And to see people,” I said, “no offence, but to see other faces, hear other voices, other views.”

We talked for hours and hours about everything we’d missed.

For fifty-two years we have been confined in the ship with each other, with just a few days stretching our legs on an alien planet in all that time. We’d lived for all that time on food without taste, regenerated air, no smells, no textures. We’d had less freedom than a prisoner.

“What about you Hans,” I asked, “apart from the cheese, where do you want to go, what do you want to do?”

“What I’d really like to do,” said Hans, speaking slowly as if relishing the possibilities, “is take a really long shit in the middle of a deep, dark wood.”

It sounds daft, but we all knew exactly what he meant. After fifty-two years of daily removals using the Extractor, the pleasure of a poo in the open air, with gravity helping it out, seemed beyond possibility. A tear welled up in my eye at the very thought of it.

I opened the radio transmitter for a second time. “Hello planet Earth, this is Voyager 1256 returning home.”

There was no sign of a reply to our earlier message, which reinforced our fears that Earth technology had advanced so far that they were no longer remotely interested in simple radio waves. What sort of planet would we be coming back to? What sort of people were we coming back to?

I feel I’ve never properly explained our expedition. Let me try. It involved travelling through five different solar systems, a mini-tour of the nearby universe. Our mission was designed to solve the greatest mysteries of science. The problems of dark matter, the rate of expansion of the universe, the baffling weirdness of black holes.

When we left Earth these problems all remained unsolved, the numbers never quite added up, the universe continued to expand more quickly than made sense, we had been unable to find any of the dark matter our theories predicted and black holes were simply beyond our understanding.

By taking measurements from other star systems it was hoped that we’d be able to identify errors in the readings from Earth and produce a definitive unified theory of everything, one that actually added up. The data we’ve collected will keep Earth’s scientists busy for decades, if not centuries, no matter how advanced their computers have become.

However, 4,000 years is a long time. We share an unspoken fear that since we’ve been gone science will have solved all of these mysteries and our mission would prove pointless. It’s an issue that came up time and time again in our ‘preparing for return’ sessions, the fear that the whole thirty-six light year tour was completely unnecessary. A waste of our time.

As Wanda said, “It would be like a caveman inventor who’d been asleep for forty centuries waking up and boasting ‘I’ve discovered the wheel,’ only to find that everyone is driving around in cars.”

We’d live the rest of our lives as some quaint relic from the past, not the groundbreaking, world-wandering explorers and scientists we had set out to be.

The last ten years, the journey home, had been particularly hard, with no exploration to look forward to, at the same time the ageing process really started to kick in, the aches, the pains, the difficulty attached to doing any of a thousand actions we used to do without even thinking, going to the toilet even. We’d grown old and disillusioned together. Four old people in a tiny box with nothing to do except discuss the problems awaiting them when they get home. It was worse than one of the reality TV shows we had fled Earth to escape.

Visiting new solar systems has been a thrill though, which makes the monotony of the journey there seem almost worthwhile. We were the first, the very first humans in history, to enter another solar system. We had visited Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B, then on to Barnard’s Star and Ross 154 then back to Earth. Not the most glamorous stars in the universe, perhaps, but well, they were there, shining in the sky every night, who wouldn’t want to travel there if they could. To be able to say “I’ve been to the stars.”

As leader of the expedition, I was the very first human to step foot on a planet outside our own system. We landed on Tiny Centauri, to take some samples, test for water and any signs that it might once have contained life. No chance, there was nothing there, no atmosphere and it was too hot, old crocks visiting hot rocks. Well, not so old then, I must have been about forty. God, that’s so long ago.

Pity it was such a dump, I‘d love to have set foot on a world teaming with life. What a joy that would have been, discovering alien life-forms, even if it was just foliage and insects, to encounter non-earthly DNA had been our secret wish when we left home, it‘s what makes us explorers, the mindless optimism that drives an expedition.

“Any response yet?” I ask Wanda. She shakes her head, we’ve had no answer to our messages. I say nothing to Wanda and Hans, but I fear the worse. The Earth is silent. It’s not just the lack of reply, there isn‘t even a beeping satellite or TV signal. Somehow, during our 4,000 year absence, mankind has contrived to destroy itself. We are the last humans returning home to a desolate Earth.

On the screen the blue/green planet is clearly visible now. This is the view I remember from my first mission to Mars. This is home.

I send another message, ‘Voyager 1256 returning’, but the responding silence is deafening.