Alita 1: An Unidentified Flying Love Story
A time pilot's voice log recovered and published
I hope you enjoy this serialized novella. We begin with a Foreword by a sympathetic soul, a researcher who was able to patiently reconstruct a voice log, about 4000 years from now, of a pilot named Alita, who will depart from her time 10,000 in the future to travel back to what we call the year 2018, to do some seemingly mundane research about us for her anthropology thesis. (If you ever wondered what UFOs really are, here’s a clue!)
At the start it may seem a bit sci-fi but it’s really just an Unidentified Flying Love Story.
Foreword
by Ranlen
Although we are in the middle of raging skirmishes and possibly a full-fledged war with the Gulans, this voice log by a pilot whose family came from here in Alitana should be an inspiration to us all.
In it she references the events of today, but from a calmer perspective, nearly 6200 years into the future, a time when pods will have been developed to travel back – in this case to about 3800 years ago! – and research ancient civilizations in person.
Despite pressures from Dr. Finnean, but ultimately thanks to his support, I have hung onto this project stubbornly to complete it at the risk of my health and position. There has been little time for sleep. We have just begun to understand circular emanation waves, which clearly will be in common use in the future. This kind of wave causes simultaneous reception of different parts of the transmission, which then must be matched up correctly. Missing any part of the wave could render the whole unintelligible. In addition, the flattening of the wave over time causes reception to take far longer than the original transmission. The task is complete, the result now in front of you on your reader.
On a personal note, I hope that if the remembrance of Alita still has a presence at some place and time of this world, she may be happy to know that, like David and the Ranlen of her time, I too fell in love with her through voice, words and deeds. Ranlen being a very unusual name, I feel a kinship in feeling if not in childlines, to Alita's Ranlen, and wish them, and poor David too, well in their other-dimensional journeys.
--Yours,
Ranlen Carviorin, Associate Researcher, Eastern Alitana Institute
1
I'm coming to.
Chemical smell.
Violent turbulence.
Now intense heat. A blinding flash, increasing – I – Aiee! – Uhh.
Okay. Catch my breath.
Gone. It's all gone now, in an instant.
Oh. Oh. Still catching my breath. Okay. That was almost like an explosion, but in reverse. In reverse, yes, of course, I’m still going backwards in time. Just about to stop. Almost there.
A swooshing sound. I think there’s some sort of vehicle out there.
Now silence. No, I hear a faint whistling sound.
The vectors are slowing down. There is interaction between my body and this environment.
I am near the destination. My most critical task is upon me: steer clear to quiet open air for a safe bounce point. I am very near Earth. The gravity navigator did its job. The flight-end will be near perfect.
Closer. Not too close. There, a placid space close enough to Earth for me to capture full data with my recorders, but far enough not to risk damage. They trained us thoroughly for this part. That's why I'm the pilot, and not a robot. Everything is going right. Almost there.
The whistling sound must be gas molecules outside the pod, actually colliding with it physically.
My time vectors are being subsumed now by spatial forces. Gravity, substances, even air, have increasing power and weight. Now activating air jets. They are successfully countering pull of gravity.
I can see better, my sensory devices bring me clearer information through the suit. I feel discomfort again. My scalp itches, bladder voiding. Pain in my right shoulder, maybe from the strap. I probably overreacted to the intense heat and light. I was scared. That really felt like an explosion nearby. They did not warn me or train me for that. I have been aimed farther back in time than any living pilot. Maybe the Institute did not know what I would encounter here, and could not train me for everything.
The pod has stopped. I can let the pod coast back from this bouncepoint in real time until acceleration takes me home. I’ll have three days local time before acceleration. Everything must go smoothly. Must maintain total composure, total control. Must not disrupt body rhythms or pod routines while conscious. Move slowly and deliberately when speed is not needed. Most important task after this – conform myself to all necessary spatial and mental patterns by the time acceleration engages the pod for the return time-vector trip.
Setting timestamp. 7.4585 in universal time. Year at my current location, 18-311. Day in local year, 158.
Activating DNA spectrometers. Unlocking. CEFIA 321 is under preparation, temperatures recovering, Sipious numbers are stable.
All systems in process of warming and presenting. My eyes are not yet completely adjusted. I see very little out of the pod lenses. Cloud cover is thick just now. We are not hoping for many humans to study but expect as a side benefit a great number of interesting vegetation sources for replication, and possibly more dry land for historical mapping. However, humans are my primary focus. They are likely to be relatively sparse with only local communications, relying mostly on direct relations.
My parents preferred direct relations. Prefer. Will prefer. I do too. Not everybody agrees.
Signal aperture viewing device is penetrating cloud cover at this time. Receiving images. Will examine them when my eyes are back to normal.
Setting speed positioning to offset Earth's rotation by five degrees per hour. Using Earth's rotation to do much of the work, the pod will use the Sipeous Orbital 3 pattern for two circumnavigations in three days, except for the deviation to pick up and return specimens. My instruments will constantly chart 3/16 of the planet at a time as of 18-311 at a height of about 700 miles. When compiled, the results will build a complete DNA spectroscopy and geographic image of the planet.
I have energy reserves to transport four humans to the pod for evaluation. When I get down to an altitude of 100 or 120 miles, it will take about a minute of warmup plus six or seven seconds to get them here. Must be less than 10 seconds, for their safety and for accuracy as specimens. I'm programming the pod to change speed the moment the humans are inside the pod so we can track the loading point and return to the identical location in 12 hours for specimen return. Then we'll return to the Sipeous Orbital pattern.
First, all other operations have to be initiated and functioning smoothly. For my anthropology thesis, I am conducting a full examination only of humans, charting physical, psychic and behavioral capacities. I will report here all observations and results I become aware of. The full computational analysis of total data sets will be brought back with me on my return acceleration home.
It will be very exciting to have this data back home. The furthest point a human pilot has surfed! Professor Diltren will supervise after I execute full analysis, and once I present my thesis to the full panel, I will be inducted into the faculty of the Institute. They never go that far with students who limit their thesis research to local and contemporary topics.
My mother didn't want me to go. She wanted me to do local research, like studying the Gulans. Ha. As if that would be safer than a journey like this. Yes, it's local, or at least wouldn’t have involved time travel, but it would have been far more dangerous than this. I'd have to do remote captures of data from above their 200-mile high airspace limit right through their data shields, and even then could be shot down. If I was captured by them, they wouldn't care that I was just a student — or maybe they'd care that much more, and consider me a spy for the Institute. In fact, that’s exactly what I would be, a spy. If they took me in, they’d have me altered. If I ever got home after that, I wouldn't be anything like myself again. Who would care if I got a good position then? I wouldn't know the difference. I’d be stored in the public homes after that. Do maintenance work. Read what I was given. See what they want me to see. Like Ranlen, if we could have got him back.
My Dad didn't want me to go either but didn't even try to offer other suggestions. He just sulked about it. He started by pointing out that we've only been doing these journeys since he was a tween. Yeah, but the research has been going on for more than 5,000 years. I took a whole class in the history of surfing the time wallows.
“We have known how to do this for a very long time,” I told him. “When you were a tween, it just happened to be when they actually sent off the first robots.”
“And they never came back,” he said.
“But we know why that was. That's why people have to go. We haven't lost anybody since the robots.”
Dad wondered where the robots might be now. Now? Funny word to use, since we not only don't know where they are, but when, either. We're pretty sure, though, that it takes a human to respond to the final sensory inputs at bounce point, and adapt to density field changes. The robots, when they slowed down near destination, probably became fused with solid material as the spatial forces overtook their time texture. Or they could have been destroyed. Or not come back all the way.
“I wish I could stop you,” Dad said, finally. I think I spooked him, telling him all the possibilities.
“We’re in the wrong continent for you to stop me. We don't live in Alitana. Your fault, you and Mom. You came from there, you named me after the place, but you wanted to take the better job teaching here in Serdinane. You knew what you were in for.” I took him to task. I was pretty harsh. He had nothing to say, really, because it was all true. But I think our Institute is a better school for me than the one in Alitana. I like that your parents have to sign you away to the school. The school needs that control. It gives us more consistency. The Institute knows it can count on us and make use of us, so it can concentrate on what's best for our learning and for our society. In Alitana they have to always go back and forth getting everyone's approval for everything, and expecting the students to know what they want.
Continues next week…