The Lookend

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But what humans don’t understand about sound waves is that vibrations travel through anything, not just Newtonian matter. Human stereocilia don’t interact with or detect pronomatter, so their scientists don’t investigate regular sound through vacuums – a major blind spot in their understanding of the universe.

Humans’ worst weakness, though, is their categorical assumption that because they don’t hear a scream, no one can. The scream doesn’t exist. This is an understandable but debilitating handicap to their scientific and philosophic endeavors. Incalculable wisdom and technology has floated right by them like a jellyfish on the gulfstream, or been revealed to specific populations but lost to history as hilarious codswallop or legend and lore. Our philosophers and moralists tsk-tsk at the violence and suffering wrought by their primitive empathic and emotional senses, and our scientists marvel at the disproportionate advances between disciplines – splitting the atom before they explored the moon or the ocean depths?

Communicating across the globe through electronic devices with strangers as easily as family for hundreds of years, while relational telepathy remains fantasy fiction?

Nanotechnology deliberately allowed to infect the population like man-made viruses to repair cellular damage, preventing and curing most of their diseases and ailments of age, but limited to subscription by governments and employers, when their own mitochondria would cease to degrade if only they’d learn how to ask?

And soon, to be magnificently surpassed in interstellar space travel and exploration by a species evolved to many times the pressure, the oxygen requirement, the sensitivity to UV and other radiation, and who must also hide their physical departure from the planet from the humans who live in-between themselves and the stars?

Generations ago our science-fiction authors imagined traveling with the humans, making contact after their age of reason eradicated their superstitions and fears about us, sharing scientific breakthroughs and leveraging our different physical capacities to accelerate both of our journeys to the heavens. Many of their visions for the future have become our reality. Many have been proven if not impossible, at least more complicated than we thought, and many have been surpassed far beyond our wildest dreams. But the strangest difference between our people’s hopeful imaginings and our reality, at least to me, has been the consistency of humanity’s role in our future – these magnificent beings, the next most intelligent lifeforms on AcquiTerre after us, with innumerable complex languages and technological contributions and art and ethical philosophies and mathematics and organized religions, who nonetheless will not grow past their ancient misconceptions and see us right in front of them.

The strangeness and sadness of their absence struck me especially strongly today. In four cyclics my team and I would become the first psyidons to leave AcquiTerre, and shortly after, the first AcquiTerrians to see the edge of the universe. Strange that we would join the humans in space for the first time and then surpass even their most advanced unmanned probes in the same day. Thrilling that by meridian low tide I would be staring into the unknown, the unknowable – the cosmos past the edge of what humans call the observable universe and we call The Lookend.

Half-conscious, achy yearnings swirled in my head of how much faster we would have come to this day if the humans had been working alongside us, if we'd been sharing technology and ideas and pushing our progress in collaborative competition, rather than our only knowledge of human scientific advances coming from reverse-engineering their failed spacecraft. I pushed them aside. Today was not for bittersweet hypotheticals, but for celebration and action. I’d been training for years for this mission. Someday, perhaps, the humans would join us on the horizon of our existence, but I needn’t dampen my own ascendance with sorrow for their loss. I finished my breakfast and headed toward the med check station for the last time.

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-Amelia