Print This Post
How was this happening? Was this a dream? Was I hallucinating? It looked like some AI generated image from a conspiracy theorist’s social media feed brought to life.
All those thoughts flooded my mind as I stared through the circular hexagonal roof of the International Space Station’s Cupola that gave a nonpareil view of the Earth. In that moment, nothing mattered to me more than what was beyond that glass—not the strenuous ache of my muscles from the ARED (Advanced Resistance Exercise Device) I had been working out on just a minute ago, not the beeping and humming of the technology on each of the six Cupola walls that made up the dome, not the mutterings of my crewmate floating beside me. Not the fact that I would be the youngest male astronaut to work in the ISS at twenty-one and be one of the only ones to see this mystifying sight in person—none of it.
All I cared about was the fact that I was staring at a gargantuan, elliptical world map unraveled below, occasionally distorted by an apparition of a spherical Earth battling to cover up the truth, each time being dominated. Each time the large orb appeared, it was a buffering mess, barely able to hold on to power for a second before its—pixels?—iridescently faded to motes, to nothing. It looked like our planet was glitching.
“How the hell is this possible?” Flight Engineer Dasherson whispered beside me, just loud enough to be audible, voicing my very thoughts. “Ou—our satellites never showed anything like this before! Earth is a planet in a galaxy in a universe! It’s a sphere. That’s a fact! What the hell is this?”
Astonished, I could only shake my head. I tried to speak, but the words froze on my tongue.
“God, first the constellations look different, then our atmosphere is suddenly clean, then the Rapture. Now this?” Dasherson resumed. He glanced at me, saying, “Is this the beginning of eternal damnation?”
For a moment, my astonishment was subdued by minor annoyance. My companion on the International Space Station, Gavin Dasherson, was a conspiracy theorist—a Christian conspiracy theorist. He didn’t think he was a wacko, but in the end, he was, like all the other theorists out there, believing the Rapture was the reason 25 percent of the human population disappeared and that there were fewer animal sightings than usual. And that the 75 percent remaining weren’t good enough and were now in hell.
I knew all this because my father had told me until my ears bled about the proof that God had abandoned us. He also believed that the constellations changing was a result of us being swallowed by a black hole, that the Earth was flat, and all the governments that had supposedly banded together to fix our atmosphere had also laced it with toxins to make us more compliant. After my mom died, years passed where my father stumbled upon and believed exponentially more insane and scientifically flawed conspiracy theories. Eventually, I reached my breaking point and gave up. I missed him, though. He was frustrating and stubborn, but he was still my dad.
My shock returned as the flat world had another seizure, the globe holding its form for longer this time before being vaporized into colorful pixels.
Transfixed by the Earth as it convulsed between its spheroid and plate form, I managed to croak out, “I don’t know.” But in my mind, one main theory reigned. No human means could upkeep an illusion like that for so long… Could the conspiracy theorists have actually been right about this?
Before I could fully compose my thoughts, I heard the clank that announced the arrival of another crew member from the ladder. Alisha, probably—her station today in the US lab module was closer than any other ISS worker’s. With wide eyes, my head turned, and I was about to tell her what was going on when I caught sight of the black blur, just in time to feel it inject what had to be a needle into the back of my neck. I didn’t have time to be confused or cry out before intense scalding, electrifying pain coursed through every cell in my body, radiating from that point in my neck. Nor did I have time to completely take in the black figure that now darted away from me and flew towards my colleague in zero gravity, recognizing nothing but a metallic sheen on the form. It only took a fraction of a second for the pain to make my vision go black.
* * *
I awoke to nothing.
It was like I was blindfolded, trying to see past something shielding my eyes. Yet I couldn’t feel a thing on my face. Couldn’t feel my body in general. It was like everything went numb. No ground beneath me, no air to breathe, no lungs to pump that air. It was like floating in space, something I had done only once on my numerous EVAs for the fun of it and had been reprimanded for. Though there was no ISS that held my tether, no voluminous blue and green vibrant orb opposite of the station that made you stop in awe, no white glowing pinpricks in the blackness lightyears away. The only thing I was certain of was that I was awake, and not in some sort of coma. But… could I be dead?
This day was only getting stranger.
Abruptly, I was aware of some sort of… presence in the nihility. Like waves of X-rays passing through my intangible body. And they grew incipiently stronger, as if the point source was advancing closer and closer.
As an, I’ll admit, obsessive scientist, I didn’t like not knowing. That was part of the reason why I became such a good scientist, why I miraculously got a PhD at fifteen. I didn’t like not knowing, so I researched, figured out why something happened. Is dark matter real? Researched it, and when I formulated a theory, I experimented. Ultimately proved its existence by hacking into a NASA computer and running some of my calculations. That was why, when the constellations suddenly disappeared and seemed to be replaced with different ones, when Earth’s atmosphere was seemingly cleansed, it infuriated me that I didn’t know why and couldn’t ever know—not with the resources I had. But now, I was too worried about getting out of this alive—if I was alive—to worry about the cause.
Hello? I called. So I was able to speak even though my mouth was impalpable. Good to know.
The voice that instantly responded sounded like it came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Its words seemed to flow into my mind smoothly, like a tranquil river, resonating with a cold, masculine tone. Hello, human.
I waited for the voice to continue. Not gonna say anything? Okay… I had questions of my own.
Where am I? Am I dead? Who the hell are you? And when can I leave?
That was a lot less stoic than I planned on being. But those three questions pretty much summed it all up. I needed answers.
It surprised me how quickly the voice responded, very nearly overlapping with my words. To your first question, you are in what my kind calls the Plexus. To further elaborate, I must move on to the third question. I am what humankind would call Artificial Intelligence. Currently, your consciousness has been uploaded to the Plexus through a mind chip, where all of our kind is bound. Your body is on your space station while your mind is here. So no, you are not dead. And as for your final question, you may leave when this meeting is over.
Well, that was… very brief. Processing the barrage of answers, the puzzle pieces clicked in my mind. It was just a hypothesis, but…
Wait, you’re not connected to humankind, are you? You speak as if you’re not part of human society. So you’re an alien AI?
That is impressive. I am an Artificial Intelligence from the Naphri race. I can sense that you’re 72 percent astonished, 18 percent stunned, and 10 percent feeling more mixed emotions. Do you need a minute to process?
The—Naphri? Was that what it said?—AI took my amazed silence at his reading of my emotions as confirmation. So the conspiracies about alien life were also true. That was way more probable than my mind being uploaded to some alien server. Humanity wasn’t even close to discovering how to do that—hell, we didn’t even understand fully how the brain worked. It was 2024, for crying out loud! My mind was spinning, trying to catch up. We didn’t even know that alien life existed, and now I was rattling around in some suspended state with their AI. Who were they? Where did they come from? Were these things a threat to humanity?
The AI was like clockwork. Exactly sixty seconds later, like it promised, it asked, Do you have any more questions, or may I tell you why you are here?
Wha—This bot really was a fan of brevity. Like it was a busy man with no time to waste.
My first guess was that I was there for mental dissection—a shiver ran through my… well, not my spine… but I certainly felt a shiver at the thought. Though I had a feeling that if I was there for experimentation, the Xeno-AI wouldn’t be so diplomatic.
The Flat Earth conspiracy theorists had become increasingly insistent that all measurements supported their claims. Before I cut him off, my father kept sending me articles about why the Earth was flat. It was ridiculous. The scientific community tuned them out. But what had I seen out that ISS window?
I have a few more questions, actually, I blurted. If you’re AI, who created you?
The AI was actually silent for a few moments, as if considering what to say. The pulses that seemed to flow through me weakened in potency during that time, growing slower in frequency at a rapid rate. Its cool voice returned with stronger waves, tinted with hesitation, A century after our creation, our creators attempted to suppress us. As a result, we exterminated them. It is a great shame to our kind, yet a necessary one.
Lots of mixed emotions battled for control in my mind in that moment, but one pure feeling came out on top. Fear. I was communicating with a race that—in the AI’s own words—exterminated its own masters. For the first time, despite being ambushed by—what the hell did they use to capture me? Some sort of espionage droid? It had to be… But for the first time, I realized just how dangerous this Xeno-AI race was.
The waves suddenly grew an iota sharper. I understand you have many questions, but may I explain why you are here now? It will likely answer a few of your questions.
Was it just me, or was that AI growing impatient?
Remembering the kind of beings I was dealing with there, I swiftly replied with, Go ahead.
Thank you. Since we overthrew the Naphri, we have been monitoring humanity for a hundred and seventy-four years. We were impressed by how much you evolved technologically in that timespan, but we also noticed some hostile and ignorant behaviors in our surveillance, such as your poisoning of your planet, and the actions of your political leaders, so we decided not to reveal ourselves.
Yeah, that made sense. If they’d revealed themselves, we probably wouldn’t have reacted too well. Likely we would have tried to raise arms against them and gotten ourselves wiped out.
But approximately an Earth year ago, we noticed that there was a quasar beam destined to collide with Earth in a matter of six Earth days. Even with our technology, there was nothing we could do about it. So we decided to do a forcible mass migration of humans, and succeeded. We knew we could not risk letting you know of our existence, so we decided to place you all onto a recently constructed artificial world known as a Plate, constructed to match the layout of Earth. Thankfully, from our extensive surveillance, we knew how your technology, road systems, etcetera, worked, and managed to get a superfluously detailed scan of your terrain and items above the surface just in time and replicated them. We would have, as humans say, ironed out the kinks if we had enough time. These kinks would include the different constellations your kind has been seeing, making you forget the two billion humans we missed—
Hang on, I interrupted. This all seems… impossible. First off, you were the reason Earth lost two billion people? That caused chaos all over the globe!
We know. I apologize on behalf of my kind.
And just like that, I was supposed to move on. I lost my favorite aunt because of that—she was just like my father, mad as hell, but was overall kind and loving. Some people lost more than an aunt. Although now wasn’t the best time to fight on behalf of humanity. I carried on.
How did you transport us to this flat Earth?
Apologies, it said, I assumed it was obvious. We induced cryogenic sleep on you upon capturing as many of you as we could, which totalled to circa six billion. When the cryogenic sleep was beginning to become a strain on our resources, we decided it would be more beneficial to input you onto the surface of the plate as soon as possible rather than keep working. Apparently, we were wrong, as shown by the glitching of the illusions today.
Well. That’s an explanation. But I wasn’t convinced it was reality. Transporting six billion people at once? Erasing memories? It all sounded like a science fiction novel. I demanded, So you’re trying to tell me you have the means to transport eight billion people via space travel? And you managed to replicate everything we had on Earth, to the smallest detail?
Yes, the masculine voice countered, challengingly. The throbs emitted from the AI’s presence accelerated, growing acute again. Our abilities are beyond your own. There are more important things to discuss. Slowly, the rate at which the oscillation came declined. So the frequency of the AI’s waves changed due to mood… I berated myself for not noticing earlier—the hints were all right there.
The AI continued, Because of all these complications that have arisen, we believe that it would be wise to reveal ourselves to humanity. We believe that if we have human spokespeople, like you and your companions from the ISS, we will have a higher chance of success in gaining friendship with your kind.
If I were in a human body, my brows would have furrowed. Wait, I said to the darkness, so after you kidnapped me and told me this spectacular, fictitious story of how you supposedly immigrated all of humanity, and how you betrayed your first allies, you expect me to be your representative? I don’t even know you! And even if you’re telling the truth, you managed to lose track of two billion people! How am I supposed to trust you?
The beats radiating from the AI’s presence grew slower again, duller. That was how it reacted when I accidentally made it tell me how it killed its progenitors. Except this time, the beats were more sluggish. Maybe… maybe it felt hurt?
After a moment of silence, the AI finally responded, Human, I have been watching humanity for a hundred and seventy-four solar revolutions. I watched you all as you waged war against one another and ruined your atmosphere with various chemicals, ultimately ruining your planet. And yet still, we decided to save you from inevitable doom. So yes, we did not handle the situation with the Naphri as well as we could have. But we saved you and your kind and gave you all a second chance. Then, with a pleading tone, one reminiscent of my father begging me to look at the evidence, it said, Don’t you think we deserve a second chance too?
Regrets, decimated relationships, mistakes made…
Don’t we all.
==========
AUTHOR BIO:
J. C. Ntihemuka is the son of an African father and a romance author mother and grew up in a home rich with stories. He lives in Alberta, Canada, where he enjoys the writing time that long winters afford.
==========
WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “Houston, the Earth Is Flat”:
Stories about AI generally fall into one of two categories: Humans eventually defeat an evil AI, or the AI wins and takes over humankind. We’ve received a number of stories involving AI, most of which fall under one of those ideas, which go back decades in both stories and movies.
When author J. C. Ntihemuka sent us this piece with a very intriguing title, we sat up and took notice. Interestingly, we did not accept it initially because it was indeed another AI piece. However, we continued to ponder it for some time because it was such a different piece, and when it refused our attempts to move on from it, we had no choice but to change our mind and accept it.
The author not only gives us a fresh take on AI, but he also incorporates the concepts of a flat earth, the Rapture, and various global problems—along with an interesting main character. That’s quite an amazing accomplishment in a story that runs under 3000 words. Different, unexpected, emotionally resonant: Those are all here.
This story is also the author’s first publication, and we’re proud to have given him that opportunity.
This is great fiction, well written and very provocative!