scientists on my team, Dr. Mark Spencer, pointed out that this timeline
roughly matches up with the meteor impact ‘extinction event’ 66 million years
ago that created the Chicxulub Crater on the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. That
event wiped-out 90% of all plant and animal life on Earth. Perhaps the ‘second
wave’ aliens didn’t like dinosaurs?
Ironically,
the Noridians know more about the ‘first wave’ civilization than they do the
second. Besides seeding planets throughout this arm of the galaxy they
apparently left behind some artifacts. Dr. Anzio Spelini calls them Stasis
Bubbles.
Found
at seemingly random points throughout explored space they are speculated to be self-contained
stasis fields – in other words, for whatever was inside them no time would
pass. This theory was proven correct when over the last two thousand years a
very few had started to ‘pop’ – and for the contents time had been suspended.
Theoretically
a live being could be waiting to take their next breath in any one of these
bubbles but so far only inanimate objects had been found. It is an incredible
look back (500 million years) at a preserved piece of galactic history.
Perfectly
reflective and perfectly round, the size of the bubbles vary from that of a
basketball to the largest which is in orbit around a solitary gas giant
orbiting a G Type star. It is big enough to hold a good size space station or
ship. There is no known way to shut off the field from outside the bubble and
the few that have turned off have revealed no ‘stasis machinery’ to reverse
engineer.
Enough
has been learned however to know that these ‘first wave’ Prometheans (as
everyone has started calling them) are the ancestors to all known sentient life
in the galaxy. In addition, much of the non-sentient plant and animal life are
of similar genotype and phenotype. Our
theories on Last Universal Ancestor (LUA) were going to have to be re-explored.
All of this information on first and second wave
civilizations was revealed during an interview that was trying to focus on why
both the Coridians and Noridians were becoming involved with us; why us, why
now? It turns out that the Coridians ‘discovered’ us when a Stasis bubble
popped.
The
latest bubble to turn itself off was originally discovered 1,334 years ago deep
underground in a large mining operation in the Sirius III system and was about
the size of a small room. For 1,057 years it just sat there until one day it
revealed what may have been a small office or workstation. Although the
contents had not deteriorated over time the work console itself appears to have
been damaged before it was bubbled – the smell of smoke and burned relays were
still present when it popped. While very little information was salvaged one
important datum was determined. On what appeared to be a star chart some
importance was placed on the fourth planet of a solar system far out in the Orion–Cygnus
Arm. Extrapolating backwards 500 million years it was determined that the star
was Sol and the planet was what we now call Mars. The Coridians, they explained,
discovered us when they went to investigate the Sol system and it was only
through happenstance that word of mankind later reached Noridia.
We
are fortunate, they said, that Noridians feel a sense of responsibility
regarding the actions of Coridia; they share a (binary) star system and the
rest of galactic society doesn’t always distinguish between them. The
Coridians, left to their own devices, would have no use for Earth and their
aggressive nature would have led to certain conflict – and with their
technological advantage…
∆∆∆
“So,
is Earth arming for war?” asked Captain Ito Hiromi.
We
were in my wardroom (which my service, the Army, calls an office). The biggest
concern on everyone’s mind, of course, was how much danger we were in. It’s one
thing to contemplate your personal risk on a mission but