Borrowed

And suddenly, everything falls into place at the right time. We can tunnel. We have received a clearly unnatural interstellar signal, and we were able to associate it with a planet.
The transport works roughly like this: Every object has a wave function of its probability of being somewhere. At least for submicroscopic objects, this is the case; for larger ones, not quite, because this wave function collapses and assigns the object a definite location. The reason why this does not happen with submicroscopic particles—the collapse—is related to the size of a certain natural constant.
The last generations of physicists believed that natural constants are always and everywhere constant… but that is not true; at least locally and for a limited time, we can manipulate this particular natural constant. Thus, even heavy, large objects can manifest with a certain probability in distant locations.
That is tunneling.

This process requires outrageous amounts of energy. Providing it is impossible, even today, but here too we could “scale up” the behavior of the tiniest things to our large-scale measures: Just as in vacuum energy, particles—and thus energy—constantly appear and disappear, borrowed for a short time, we can apply this principle on a large scale: We borrow the energy for a certain period, and through the collapse of the wave function at the end of the tunnel journey, we return the energy.

We were a handful of people, all specialists in our field. A homogeneous group, all roughly in the middle of their lives. The uniform-like clothing added to this, so that at first glance we were hardly distinguishable.
My specialty was geomancy—or at least that’s what some dismissively called it. Regardless of opinion, I had the ability to find places that were special. Due to the extraordinarily long travel time of the planet’s radio signals to us, we expected the civilization to have long since vanished, the planet likely a wasteland with hardly any distinctive topographical features. With my ability, we were to identify places worth excavating.

The tunneling itself did not proceed exactly as I had imagined. There were several brief stopovers: a few minutes in a spacesuit on a dead, small celestial body without an atmosphere. At least one thing became apparent: it was getting darker around us. “Interstellar” apparently was not accurate; rather intergalactic—we were increasingly in areas of lower star density. Each of these short stopovers pressed on us more and more with their enormous loneliness. Why they did not explain this detail of the journey beforehand, I still do not know.

We found a dry planet, as expected, with only a few standout topographical features—in other words: a desert. And, rare but not impossible, slightly larger in diameter than Earth, with lower gravity.
But we were able to move around well; we even had a few flying devices, and our air and other supplies should give us enough time to search thoroughly.

The overflights were as monotonous as the landscape. But after some time—interestingly, I did not document the flight duration, although I should and must have—I flew over a place that looked more or less like all the other places here: long dunes of sand, frozen-wave-like in appearance. Yet at the bottom of a trough of one such dune, it was unmistakable and undeniable: “Landing is worthwhile.”

I called the colleagues; we dug, probed, measured, and found: a wall of rock with a door. The opening mechanism was as self-explanatory as it was robust; despite apparently many millennia having passed, we were able to open the door easily. The door itself was quite imposing in size. Inside awaited a hall; we expected technical equipment, and we were not disappointed. Its original purpose was not immediately clear, though it reminded us of a swimming pool’s technical room—albeit on a truly larger scale.

Far more interesting was a side room, easily recognizable as storage thanks to transparent walls. There were seemingly endless rows of boxes on shelves. Here too we found a technically excellently built door, easy for anyone to open, yet airtight even after millennia.
The objects on the shelves were cassettes, containing further cassettes, in which were small, fingernail-sized components. Every few dozen meters, the cassettes and their contents looked slightly different. At the boundary of each transition was a palm-sized object with a pictogram, making it easy for us to understand that these were storage media along with their playback devices. Whoever designed this did not want secrets, no hiding—anyone and everyone was enabled to play the media. The images were displayed on the opposite wall.

What did they show? A wave, dozens if not hundreds of meters high, with creatures visibly enjoying themselves, swimming on it, shooting down with the wave, plunging into the water.
Each medium showed the same motif, the same section. And essentially the same sequence: the same wave breaking in the same way, with the same swimmers inside. Well, not exactly the same—there were very slight differences in detail: here a crest broke a little earlier or later than in the previous recording, there one of the creatures had a slightly different posture.

“Fast-forwarding” was unfortunately not possible: the media were arranged in order (recognizable via a simple dot system) and had to be played sequentially. This was the first time it was not made easy for us: play everything before seeing the end? How was that supposed to work with this quantity of media?—I will never forget the endless, seemingly eternal rows of shelves.

And indeed, to this day, I do not know how we managed it, how the timing worked out. But we watched each medium and observed changes: the swimmers gradually decreased, the water changed color, from a light, transparent blue to a murkier, darker shade. The amount of water decreased. The camera perspective remained identical—and another element did not change, or not as expected: at the beginning and end of each recording, the starry sky was visible. Based on the visible changes, we assumed the recordings were taken daily, spanning many thousands of years, but small seasonal shifts in the sky should have been reflected. It was an unknown starry sky, of course, out here far away, but still: stars move against the background; over long periods, such changes should be visible in the recordings.

Yet nothing was discernible, no change, apart from the repeated daily cycle. The sky always showed the same day.

Back to the water: it receded. Increasingly, from recording to recording, a beach appeared. More and more creatures came into view on the shore, few remaining in the water; they were not unlike us, longer and more slender, adapted to this planet’s lower gravity.
At some point, one could see a handful of these beings dragging something behind them with ropes. The dragged object was not yet in frame, but over the next many recordings it appeared. Another being was dragged—smaller, stockier, clumsier.

Did it wear clothing similar to ours? Yes, but worn. Worn in color and fabric, not torn.
Did this being resemble one of us? I will not say whom we believed to recognize, and I will never do so. But it was one of us. Grey hair, beard, wrinkles, less graceful movements—in a word: one of us, but decades older.

It increasingly entered the camera’s view. In the background, the wave still, now clearly smaller than before, with hardly any swimmers in it. The colleague’s skull was opened. Blood and other matter—which I will not describe here—spurted out, swelled, in a wave mirroring the form of the wave of swimmers in the background, perfectly covering it, exactly the same shape.