Exploration can take you to some amazing places, and some places that make you wonder…what was this place like? Does it remind you of home? Someplace you’d like to return to? Can you really go home again? Let’s find out.
—
Blackened houses flanked Xander as he made his way through the suburb. It was the fifth he traversed that day, one overlooked by a sprawling city full of crippled towers that loomed in the distance like obelisks from a forgotten past. He moved through the urban labyrinth, carefully surveying his surroundings as he followed the long winding sidewalks. They scraped the roads in figure eights and other odd and convoluted lines, hopscotch marks tattooed into their scorched pavement. On the cemented slabs of the driveways, children were at play. Here, a little girl suspended in midair, a jump-rope frozen beneath her feet. There, a boy on a bicycle, his arm outstretched, a finger pointed toward the horizon. Further ahead, a man could be discerned standing idly by his grill, and a young woman in a sunhat sat cross-legged on porch steps smoking a cigarette—a snapshot of a summer afternoon captured in a single camera flash of heat and gamma radiation. Xander stopped after reaching a cul-de-sac and turned his attention to the yellow, boxed-shaped device he carried. It had been crackling like a broken radio, the needle on its meter steadily twitching.
“Maxed out,” he said under his breath. “This place is worse than our last encounter.”
He looked up from his device and back at the still-life menagerie — traces of a people reduced to nothing more than shadowy phantoms.
“Any signs of life on your end, Captain,” asked a voice through the static rasp of the radio in Xander’s helmet.
The question was hopeful — naïve. Despite hearing the words, Xander didn’t answer. Instead, he stood silent, almost hypnotized by the dark figures, believing, if only for an instant, that he could even hear them. First in faint whispers, then in stifled laughs and chattering voices, attempting to break free from their concrete prisons.
He closed his eyes.
He listened.
There was a pitter-pattering of small feet as children scampered up and down the sidewalks, and the clicking of pedals as bicycles zipped through the streets. He remembered such days from his youth. They were careless, thoughtless days without clouds or rain, when one could look up and get lost in an everlasting blue. He had not lived one like it in nine years…nine miserable years.
“Captain?”
He opened his eyes. The voices and sounds which had come to him so sweetly, like music from a carousel, fell and disappeared.
“I asked if you’ve found any signs of life.”
Xander shook himself back to reality. “How could there be with these readings,” he answered, a little roiled by the foolish question. “What’s your current location, Ensign?”
“Me — I’m in what was apparently a park of some sort, about ten miles from where the bomb dropped…or one of them, at least.”
Xander turned away from the dead end and set at work retracing his steps.
“Bet this used to be a real lovely place before all this went down,” the ensign continued. “And these shadows. Aren’t they extraordinary? Fifty million lightyears apart and they’re—”
“Just like us.”
The radio fell silent as the ensign briefly contemplated the discovery.
“This could’ve been it, Captain,” he finally spoke. “This could’ve been home.”
“Yeah, well, there’s no use musing over it now.”
“They really had themselves something here though, didn’t they? How foolish it was of them to throw it all away like they did.”
“Were we any less foolish?”
“No,” replied the ensign after another moment’s reflection. “I suppose not.”
Xander didn’t hold the young man’s ignorance against him. He was only a boy when they left home, after all. Xander already had traces of silver in his hair. He recalled the events leading up to that fateful day with more clarity.
“What do you think it was that made them do it, Captain?”
I don’t know was Xander’s answer. Though this wasn’t all together true. He knew full well that there didn’t need to be a reason. Man was just hardwired for destruction. There was something encoded in their DNA that made it come just as natural to them as hunger or thirst, or procreation for that matter.
“Well,” resumed the ensign, not discerning the slight irritation in Xander’s voice, “it’s just not right. I mean, us coming all this way…and for what? It’s just not right.”
“There’ll be other planets. We’ll just have to keep searching…that’s all.”
“At this rate, there won’t be enough of us left to adequately inhabit the one we do find.”
Xander fixed a pensive gaze through his visor to the ashen rubble before him.
Maybe we shouldn’t find another….
He wanted to say it out loud, but stopped himself. The words were treasonous. Such an utterance could prove detrimental to crew morale and so the mission itself, a mission on which the continuation of their species relied. Besides, who was he to kill the hope, even if he had now lost it for himself? He just sighed instead.
“Go ahead and teleport back to the ship. Report your findings. There’s no future for us out here. We’re just wasting our time, really.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you. I want to take one last look around.”
The ensign copied, then did as commanded. Soon, all was silent again. Xander took some solace in it. He couldn’t remember the last time he was alone with his thoughts. He couldn’t remember the last time he was alone.
He ambled over to where the woman in the sunhat was sitting and stood in what had once been the front lawn of her house. He bent down and scooped up a composite of dust and ash with his hand, letting it sift through his gloved fingers. The planet had met all the right criteria, had the qualities that made him and the others hopeful. Oxygen, water — he had been thinking about the water before he came down. How he would let it fall in torrents down his face, and cup it in his hands, and run it through his hair and fingers. But now, all that was left in the derelict land before him were these silhouetted memories trapped in their endless summer. Never would they know the heavy gray clouds which shrouded the day and choked the air, turning all to poison. Nor would they know the cramped, musty fuselage of an intergalactic ship, full of wailing children and unwashed bodies. They would not suffer the fate he had suffered — to be a member of a planetless species, regurgitated by their home world after generations of misuse. He hadn’t a single moment’s rest, nor peace of mind, since their departure nine years ago. Walking among the shadows, he found he envied them and their blissful final moment.
“Got room for one more,” he asked the shaded woman, half-expecting an answer. None came.
He stood up, brushed his hands together, and looked, as if for the last time, at the towers like spent candlewicks, and the jump-roping girl, and the boy on his bike forever pointing into the sky. And as he stood there, alone in that still silence, the voices and sounds he had heard before returned. They came in a gentle breeze, green and full of life, like summer leaves swept into the air. And they smelled of summer. Of freshly cut lawns, and flowers, and cool water from garden hoses raining down on sun-baked cement. Despite the suit and helmet that encased his body, Xander could somehow perceive these sensations as if he were completely naked to them.
He closed his eyes and listened, more intently than before.
Where are you from? the voices spoke.
Xander was not taken aback. There was a soothing familiarity in the voices, as if he’d known them all his life.
From far away, he answered, simply.
But where?
A planet, not unlike this one.
The voices began to whisper among themselves. Xander didn’t know how it was he understood them. He decided not to trouble himself searching for answers, afraid that doing so would dispel the sweet psychosis of the moment, as attempting to cipher some jumbled words in a dream induces waking.
And where am I, he asked. What planet is this?
Earth, they said.
“Earth.” The word was like honey on his tongue.
Then there was laughter, everywhere children’s laughter, almost tangible enough to touch. Somewhere along the houses and the streets, an ice cream truck chimed out a nursery song, and screen doors slammed as little phantoms raced from their houses, down the porches and across the walkways.
“Take me with you,” Xander softly spoke. “Take me.”
He felt a tiny hand in his.
He opened his eyes.
#
Dusk had set in. A slight fissure in the clouds allowed for a moment’s twilight, which bathed the rubble and ruins below in burnt orange. Throughout the graveyard of houses, the ensign and a team of others desperately searched. Xander’s radio: long silent; his location: untraceable. And when the night had fallen, and all hopes of finding their comrade were abandoned, they boarded their ship, and set on their way, never noticing the woman in the sunhat, nor the newly formed shadow of a man sitting close by, without helmet or gloves, breathing in the soft summer air.
END
