Korridorium

♫ Secret Mat­ters ♫

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I enter the cor­ri­dor in the crew quar­ters and close the door behind me to the small com­part­ment hold­ing my bunk. A sign on the out­side reads my name with the addi­tion: “Xeno-Lin­guist.” When­ever my eyes fall upon it, I still feel the urge to rub them in dis­be­lief. What incred­i­ble twist of fate brought me all the way from Papua New Guinea here aboard a research space­ship that has left the solar sys­tem and is on the verge of mak­ing con­tact with an alien civ­i­liza­tion?

Out of nowhere, the words “Tea nubunubu mataa” come to mind. Ten years ago, I was a lin­guist work­ing with endan­gered lan­guages. Then came Decem­ber 21, 2012, and after that, every­thing hap­pened at break­neck speed. One moment I was trav­el­ing through Ocea­nia with a voice recorder and a lap­top, and the next, or so it felt, I was launch­ing toward dis­tant stars and plan­ets on behalf of human­ity, serv­ing as a trans­la­tor for first con­tact with alien civ­i­liza­tions.

The Cos­mic Bea­gle embarked on its jour­ney five years after the quar­an­tine was lifted—an extra­or­di­nar­ily short time­frame to plan and build an inter­stel­lar space­craft. Aside from the mas­sive effort to curb cli­mate change, it was human­i­ty’s first truly uni­fied project—barring a hand­ful of protest­ing fun­da­men­tal­ists and con­ser­v­a­tives.

The fact that I am actu­ally on board still has­n’t fully sunk in. But of course: they need a lan­guage expert. Instead of a soli­tary Dar­win, an entire team of spe­cial­ists is en route—plus a cat, Lady Wow, named after the Wow! sig­nal of 1977, that lit­tle fore­taste of what awaited us once the quar­an­tine was lifted.

*

Lady Wow is more than just a mas­cot to us: in my opin­ion, she saved all of our lives on board. We actu­ally had our first encounter with extrater­res­trial life as we were leav­ing our solar sys­tem and passed Voy­ager 1—a route cho­sen purely for pub­lic rela­tions. The space probe Voy­ager 1 was up to that point the far­thest object human­ity had ever sent into space, and some believe it was the cat­a­lyst for lift­ing the quar­an­tine. After 35 years of travel, the probe reached the heliopause (another word I would­n’t have dreamed a decade ago I’d not only use, but actu­ally know what it means). It may have col­lided with the shell or bar­rier shield­ing us humans from the radio sig­nals of other civ­i­liza­tions, trig­ger­ing the fil­ter to shut down. But why that hap­pened on Decem­ber 21, 2012, of all dates—the infa­mous dead­line from the Mayan calendar—nobody can explain. Coin­ci­dence? Fate? A self-ful­fill­ing prophecy? At any rate, it was­n’t the end of the world for us, but a new begin­ning.

The Ter­mi­na­tion Shock was already well behind us. We sent pho­tos of our approach to Voy­ager 1 back to Earth. And then, while I was sit­ting at break­fast with Lady Wow in my lap, a cold chill spread inside me, freez­ing me in place. It felt as though I were stand­ing naked beneath a micro­scope with thou­sands of eyes, dis­sect­ing me pore by pore in a frac­tion of a sec­ond and scan­ning me inside and out—coldly, with­out a shred of emo­tion or human­ity, except that it was hun­gry. Very, very hun­gry.

Lady Wow hissed and bared her teeth. She leapt from my lap and darted fran­ti­cally between the chairs as if hunt­ing an invis­i­ble mouse. The cold, inhu­man gaze that had been dis­sect­ing me alive van­ished all at once, and I thought I caught a lin­ger­ing trace of regret. Then it was gone.

Lady Wow came back over to me, curled up on my thigh, and purred. I was shaken to my core. The voice of the Galac­tic Fed­er­a­tion ten years ear­lier had felt gen­tle, almost empa­thetic. This thing, what­ever it was, was a predator—and I was its prey. I have no idea how Lady Wow man­aged to scare off the entity, an imma­te­r­ial crea­ture or per­haps one com­posed of Dark Energy, roam­ing the inter­stel­lar space beyond our solar sys­tem.

Or was it the quar­an­tine shield itself, or rem­nants of it? Opin­ions among our crew remain divided to this day. And we cer­tainly had plenty of time to debate the expe­ri­ence, which each of us had per­ceived dif­fer­ently.

*

In my pre­vi­ous life as a lin­guis­tic researcher, I did­n’t care about sci­ence fic­tion in the slight­est. But how else was I to pre­pare for first con­tact with aliens—which, until it actu­ally hap­pens, is noth­ing more than fic­tion? So I began study­ing every­thing writ­ers had imag­ined about encoun­ters with extrater­res­trial beings.

And do you know what’s strange? Among all those sto­ries, I found one where a cat named Cap­tain Wow fights off inter­stel­lar drag­ons that she per­ceives as rats. In doing so, she saves the space­far­ers who would oth­er­wise lose their minds upon encoun­ter­ing these “star drag­ons,” because those crea­tures hunger not for flesh, but for the mind.

A strange coin­ci­dence, isn’t it?

I haven’t men­tioned any of this to the oth­ers on board, but I’m a lit­tle afraid of our return in twenty years. Will Lady Wow still be alive then? Her nat­ural lifes­pan will be draw­ing to a close. But per­haps frol­ick­ing in the ship’s zero-grav­ity zone has man­aged to slow down her aging process a bit. I cer­tainly hope so! Because the Dark Dragon will still be wait­ing at the bor­der of our solar sys­tem, hun­grily lying in wait…

Teop:

Helios­phere:

The Game of Rat and Dragon: