Last Contact, page 1

LAST CONTACT

We live in a Hubble Volume about 101% the size of yours, in the universe next door. You can’t see us and we can’t see you. That’s because we are precisely at the center of our own observable universe, just as you are, and our view is just as limited by our own Hubble space-telescope program. Though we have been taking our own deep-view pictures of distant galactic superstructures for 10,000 years, we haven’t actually reached any further than our own big-bang, and can’t image your universe --or whatever’s left of it anyway-- directly.

But we knew you are there. Or were at some point, and we have the math to prove it.

Our Hubble was a man called Edward, who was – like yours – a fundamentally decent person. As young boy, he participated in athletics, particularly Basketball, and did well in school. Edward was a copy of your Edwin Hubble in nearly every way, except his father was a completely different man. Edwards mother was born with a slightly variant brain-pattern, compared to the woman from your universe who gave birth to your Edwin. She developed a synaptic affinity for short men who loved books at a very early age, and found one in particular –irresistible-- the year before Edward was born.

Edward grew up, as yours did, in Wheaton, Illinois, and if Mr. Hubble suspected his son was the product of an indiscretion on his wife’s part, he never let on. His parents were kind, for their time, and reasonably affectionate. His mother encouraged Edwards love of books, and his father encouraged his own love of sports and athletics. The problem was simple: Edward wasn’t long or tall enough to do track, and he was too clumsy to dribble properly, or even score a basket, under any kind of pressure.

One thing Edward was great at was the foul shot, and he rarely missed. Edward had a head for figures, and could calculate the precise arc required to throw the ball through a hoop at almost any distance. Because his father loved to drill the foul, Edward knew precisely how far he had to bend his knees, generating energy from his feet and transferring it to his toes, hips and shoulders, before discharging the ball towards a target. While his mechanics were flawless, he couldn’t score at all during actual games. Fans of the other team would invariably tease and jeer at him, inviting him to “choke,” and he –inevitably-- would. This bothered Edward and his father, greatly.

Eventually his father conceded that his son was not the star athlete he had hoped for, and –though he loved his son-- he believed his lack of confidence might limit his ability to effectively study or practice law; --a discipline he believed required a kind of “grit” young Edward lacked. Though it pained him, he advised his son to concentrate his studies in mathematics, and Hubble promised to do so. The day Edward left for university, his father presented him with a gift --a T. Cook and Sons brass telescope, with a fine Mahogany tripod, which he had procured for his son at great expense. Edward dutifully thanked his father, cleaned his telescope, and packed it with his things, which he brought with him to Chicago, by train.

Edward never studied law, or joined the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. When he traveled abroad to study at Oxford, he studied mathematics, instead of jurisprudence. Edward and his father exchanged long letters, and in them, Edward described his ideas about cosmology, and his passion for plotting the distances between stars. Edwin earned his master’s degree, as well as a degree in literature and philosophy, and he picked up Spanish from a young woman he met in 1912, while on holiday in Spain. She encouraged him to pursue a PhD in astronomy at Queens College, and --when his father passed away in 1913-- they returned home together. Edward volunteered during both world wars, and remained close to his mother, until her death in 1934.

The balance of Edwards story differs little from Edwin’s. Our first Hubble space-telescope was named for him for precisely the same reasons yours was named for Edwin Hubble. The major difference between our two universes was Edward never met or married Grace, as he was already married to Maria Carmen, and they had 4 children together. His oldest was Angela, and she was possibly the most gifted cosmologist in our Hubble volume, at that time. It is largely due to her pioneering work the fields of cosmology and physics during the latter half of our twentieth century that we were able to work out the details of the Flux between parallel worlds. Our understanding of the Flux spawned an entirely new branch of science and engineering, which eventually altered our technological evolution, in ways yours never did.

We were able to plot our energy requirements out several hundred years in advance, and accurately predict the heat-death which generally dooms worlds like ours, as a byproduct of an exponential energy budget in a post-information, consumer paradigm. We immediately spread out, went green and took to space-- colonizing the moon, and eventually Mars, Venus, and Saturn by 2055. I was born on a small moon called Pre, in orbit around Saturn, in the year 10-995. After university, I took a job as a game designer for The Terrandyne Group, one of three corporations responsible for running “alternative” ancestor simulations --which we “play” to help study the flux signals received from yours and other parallel universes --outside our own Hubble volume.

I have always had a soft spot for your world, and it is an honor to be part of the development team behind our company’s latest expansion to your historical universes’ most popular game:

We call it, “Last Contact ™.”

You call it, -- “Life.”