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Echoes


55555

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It's kind of a helpless feeling. The feeling that something is falling apart, and there's nothing to be done about it. Just another world ending. But it always gets me a little bit.And the darkness took it, as it takes them all. But not mine.The survey class ship Revelations fired up her engines and moved on, flitting back through dimensions. Home.It just seemed wrong somehow, even though it makes sense, and I know they aren't really real. Once we discovered inter-dimensional navigation it became obvious that the things we could learn from it were invaluable. With the push of a button and a few minutes of our time we could see the horrors that we've avoided. The best kind of evidence, gathered from a million apocalypses, could save us from our own. It already has, we believe. Several critical eco-system failures have been traced to the extinction of a particular micro-organism (ultimately dubbed the Apocapolyp), a finding which saved our world.
But it does something to you, to see the world end, so many times. We could save some of these worlds, with what we have learned. But our department doesn't have the resources, and we may learn more be letting them burn.
Plus, they aren't real anyway. They can't be, because we are. All of these others are mere reflections, projections, the imaginings of our universe. The screams from these worlds that I watch are not the screams of real people, they are just echoes.
The Revelations blinked through dimension after dimension on its way to Terra Prima.
That was when disaster struck.Something failed. I'm not an engineer, I don't know what it was. In an instant we had come to a halt, in a dimension far, far from home. I could tell from the life sign readings. This was a small earth.
But as my ship approached, I realized that it could just as well have been my home. There were cities, satellites, even a moon colony. A quick scan of radio traffic indicated the correct frequency for emergency communications and indicated a language mutually intelligible with English. I swung into an emergency landing sequence and flipped on the radio.
"Come in Terra Echo, this is the survey ship Revelations. Request emergency landing instructions, over."
"Receiving you, Revelations. You have permission to land at Bogota Spaceport, coordinates following..."
A string of numbers flowed through the comm unit, and were automatically plugged into the navigation systems.
The ship blazed down through the atmosphere, and came to a smooth landing only minutes later. There was a small delegation to meet him, the local authorities seemed to have realized where he had come from. They looked so real.
He lifted the cockpit and climbed out of his ship. As he walked toward them, the welcoming committee exchanged whispers. His headset detected it and amplified it in real time.

"He looks almost real."

 

- John

Edited by 55555
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