Nanoprep 2023 Day 7: Under a Red Sky
By Robin de Voh on 2023-10-10
I never knew. But now I do, and the world will never be the same again. As far as I had known, we were alone in the universe, the only sentient life form. And though we had the capacity to go into space, we'd never found anything really worth finding beyond the red sky. Besides, as everybody knows, what's out there constantly changes.
No, as far as I had known, Jueene was the only inhabited planet anywhere. And now, now these... Aliens, they show up and say all kinds of crazy thing. That Jueene is not the only inhabited planet, and that we, the Jueeans, are finally "back into the fold", whatever that means. They seem happy about it, though.
These aliens from a place they call "Earth", for some reason pretending they know us.
They showed up, out of nowhere, a few months ago. And obviously everyone was all in a tizzy, because yeah, aliens had shown up, that's a good reason to start questioning all kinds of things. They looked a lot like us, just mostly very short, and they seemed to know our language. Well, they claim it's their language originally, and we don't speak it exactly the same, but it's close enough that within a few weeks the conversations became a lot more understandable.
So they went on the news, and they spun this story about how we had descended from them, but that makes no sense. Our origin story is clear -- God had decided Jueene was perfect for his Chosen few, and they had been placed here. We no longer know their names, but there were nine of them, and they had populated and nurtured Jueene in preparation for the generations that would take care of God's perfect world.
I am one of the descendants of the Chosen. We all are. And this is our world.
They claim Jueene was started as a colony, and when our leader, the King, argued that that could not be true, due to the Chosen being the ones who started life here, an argument ensued. The Earthers claimed the Chosen were, in fact, from Earth. They claimed that they had been sent to colonize this planet. It had been called something else at the time -- a random string of letters and numbers, so that was hard to believe as well.
The King asked, rightfully, how it could be that we had at least 200 years of recorded history, yet they -- if they indeed had started Jueene -- never even bothered to check in? How could we believe they were our actual progenitors if, unlike the Chosen and God themself, they had simply never cared?
I can say a lot about the Earthers, but one thing I cannot claim is that they lack imagination. They answered in short that time moved differently for them than it did for us -- note that a lot of these conversations were over a period of time, and they were shared through the network in both vid form and writing.
How could time possibly move differently for one person compared to another? Another yarn was spread, and I'm loathe to admit a far too significant number of people were starting to believe it.
According to the Earthers, Jueene is in orbit around a red dwarf, which supposedly is moving through space at an exorbitant speed. Which, I also have to admit, would explain at least why what's in the sky keeps changing, but other than that it makes no sense. But, according to them, it's moving at such a high speed that 1 second for us is 7 seconds for them. So our 200 years of history would equate to about 40 years for them.
I, personally, find this all very difficult to believe. They're implying that we're going almost the speed of light, and that shouldn't be possible.
Of course, in a way it is kind of odd that the Chosen already knew space flight, but that's just how things are, I'm not going to dwell on that.
They kept going on about how hard it was to "catch up" to Jueene due to our speed, but then, obviously, the King interjected.
Why, in heaven's name, would you build a colony on a planet that is going so fast you can't really get to it? This casts doubt on the entire story.
And again, as if completely pre-scripted, the Earthers had an answer. They hadn't. They hadn't intended to, at least. A "cascading supernova", whatever that is, had kicked our sun out of its galaxy, and they had spent the past 32 years trying to catch up to us. Well, 32 years, 160 to us. Something about having to actually figure out near-lightspeed travel, and then actually getting up to speed for a decade. Absolute hogwash.
So I still don't believe it. I just can't believe it. There's too much coincidence being claimed. The Chosen would have told us. They would have left information behind.
But the Earthers were polite. They were patient. They answered every question posed to them, by our King, our scientists, our priests, and even children at one specific meet and greet. They scanned a lot of us, the soil, our plants, and even some of our animals. But they were gracious in how they treated us and over time, people just started accepting it all. Not me, though.
Eventually, with approval from a majority of Juneeans, the King agreed to send some of our scientists with them on their way back. The Earthers stated they would be back in 10 years. Again, that means 50. I likely will be dead by then, and our King is definitely not young anymore, so he won't be there to see it happen either.
It'll be hard to verify if anything they said was true, so the King decreed that history booresources on the network needed to be updated to include this information. The Scientific Guild was also tasked with making sure this knowledge would not get lost.
Chosen help us. If this is true, this changes everything. And if it's not, well, we still met some aliens.