Archaea

Archaea


“Is there anything? Any life at all?”

“You kiddin’?” Vasquez replied. “It’s thick with life here.” He ran his fingers along the leaves of a creeping blue vine crossing the ground. “There’s every sort of insect and animal possible. Just nothing with more intelligence than a goat.”

It was hard to believe. After all, we were standing in the center of a nearly pristine city, towering silver spires climbing toward the heavens. Our shuttle deposited us in a broad expanse, probably an old thoroughfare in happier times, derelict alien vehicles scattered in every direction. Other than the whistling of the wind through the city, everything was eerily quiet. We’d discovered life before but who could have known our first discovery of any sentient aliens would end up being a ghost-planet. “You know what I mean.” I wiped the dust from one of the automobile windows. “Here’s something.”

Vasquez peered over my shoulder then pulled away. “Yuck.”

The two occupants looked like they’d basically melted, their dripping blue skeletons staring lifelessly back with four empty eye sockets. One was probably a child, its bony arm still gripping a stuffed animal that was a cross between an elephant and a giraffe. Vasquez popped the door. “What the hell are you doing?”

“We’ll be fine. Our suits are fully contained.” Of course as Mission Biologist, he set to work immediately, scanning the corpses and recording every bit of biometrics. “Let’s see. This tissue’s been decaying for weeks. Hmm…silicon based physiology…metabolizes nitrogen, water, and hydrocarbons. That’s odd.”

“What?”

“This says the genetic material is 99.98% non-terrestrial.”

“So? This is an alien planet after all.”

“What’s odd is the 0.02%.”

“And?”

“Believe me, from a cellular perspective, that’s huge.”

“Lieutenant Nelson…copy back?” my communicator blared.

“This is Nelson. Go ahead.”

“I’m sending coordinates. Get your butts over here. You’re gonna want to see this.”

“I’ve got what I need,” Vasquez explained. “It’ll take a while for the processors to analyze the data anyways.”

“Copy that,” I replied and we tossed our hoverboards onto the slick pavement. Sailing through the deserted city was pretty surreal. I mean, the civilization was definitely developed enough, with sophisticated road systems, sleek skyscrapers, digisynth communications. All of it just a little bit behind Earth…completely obsolete now on a dead world.

We drifted toward a fortified compound at the edge of the city, and two marines at the gate saluted as we sailed past. Our boots finally met the pavement in front of two massively paired open doors. There was a company of our crew inside, soldiers and scientists, everyone donning a sealed environmental suit.

As ship’s engineer, it had to be something unusual for the Colonel to call us off our patrol. Not a single head turned my direction as I pushed my way through the assembly and, reaching the front, I couldn’t believe my eyes. “What the hell is that?”

“One of ours.” The Colonel was standing opposite a large machine surrounded by alien tables piled with parts and pieces. It looked like our aliens had been disassembling the thing meticulously. Amongst the collection, there was one particular item which caught my attention immediately, a shimmering golden disc, and I knew right away what it was. One side resembled a golden record, an old LP. The other was etched with diagrams and figures, two naked humans, mathematical definitions and even parameters for our own solar system. “You know what this is don’t you?”

Of course I did. “This is impossible: Voyager 1 – the first man-made object to leave our solar system. How’d it get here?”

Then, a ping sounded from behind me and I turned to Vasquez who held out a little machine which scanned the captured spacecraft.

“This is it,” he discovered. “This is the source…our 0.02%”

“How’s that possible? Since the beginning of space exploration, every component has been assembled in an absolute clean room.”

“There’s no such thing,” Vasquez corrected. “They’re still assembled by humans, who shed hair and skin. It only takes one cell…one organism. Anyways, these aliens were killed by an archaea infection.”

“Archaea?”

“Microorganisms from Earth; kind of like bacteria but pretty much harmless, at least to us. Most people don’t even know they exist. They don’t really cause any diseases but are just about everywhere. Some are extremophiles too, meaning they can survive in really tough conditions…even frozen in the vacuum of space. But for the people of this world, they became the most deadly pathogen ever.”