14 September 2483 AD

Extract from Commander Frank Chambers Journal, downloaded from Daedalus Two

We feel alone. We are so far from the Earth. Something strange has happened. Something we cannot comprehend.

The computer woke us up as planned. It was supposed to wake us after a certain amount of ticks. It performed the task perfectly. Except, the date is not 2171, as anticipated in the ISOE. The ship’s timer indicated on arrival that we are in the year 2483. We are over three hundred years late.

PMC-04 wasn’t there when we intercepted its orbit. All our timings are wrong. If the date really is 2483, that would explain why the planet and its moon are gone. They are elsewhere along their orbital path. The physics match up, but why is it the year 2483?

If we really have been travelling for more than three hundred years in cryogenic sleep, then we would be much further into space than just Proxima. The distances are correct but – again - the timings are all wrong. Did the spacecraft team back on Earth mess up the calculations?

But there are stranger things going on. Things that challenge my ability to think straight.

Time on the Daedalus is travelling backwards. Or, at least, that’s what the ships clocks are reporting. Everything to us seems to be running normally. Yet time is counting down on the Daedalus. Loretta says that all the circuitry is fully functional. What is going on?

But it gets even stranger than that.

When we woke from our cryogenic sleep, we found a number of strange artifacts littered around the ship, strange metallic sculptures and wood-like carvings. Most of them were located in the accommodation module, where the centrifugal force prevented them from floating around the ship. We have no idea how they got here. So far we have found about thirty of them, but we keep finding more. God knows how many there are. There is no sign of forced entry to the ship.

Our only estimation is that someone or something is trying to tell us something. Somehow, they got inside the Daedalus while we were asleep and placed these items here knowing that we would find them when we woke up.

The thought of unknown beings moving about on the Daedalus while we lay asleep frightens me deeply. If they had been a more hostile race then we could have been killed. I am so scared.

What if they come back?

Each artifact has an engraving on it. Beautiful depictions cast in the wood-like and metallic materials. Pictures of the Earth, all

geographically accurate. Pictures of the Daedalus etched in stunning detail. Pictures of the Lincoln Outpost and the NEO Rig. A picture of a young boy throwing stones on a beach. There is even a picture of Loretta, reaching towards a handle or switch of some sort. Some of the other pictures are also a little cryptic. There is one of Ian with a tentacle like object burrowing through his leg. One of Harold, looking up at the moon through a hole in his hand. If they are in sequence, then I am sure there are some missing. We have devoted our time to locating all of the artifacts. Hopefully in time we will piece together this extraordinary puzzle.

19 August 2483 AD

Daedalus time is still running in reverse. I am logging my journal entries as depicted on the ships computer. This is such a strange phenomenon. Can time really be travelling backwards? Is this some strange side effect of extra solar travel? Has Proxima’s star messed up the time programs on the Daedalus? If that were the case then surely we would never have woken at all. The ISOE item that triggered the computer to wake us would never have occurred. We would be floating forever in empty space.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed the Daedalus intercepted PMC-04 orbit when the planet was actually there. That we located the source of the beacon. That PMC-04-A was the home of the alien civilisation that created these artifacts. That we finally made contact with another intelligent race. But it felt as though I was looking at the Daedalus through a frosted lens. It’s lines and curves distorted and fragmented.

I woke with an empty feeling in my heart. As though I was only seeing half the story, and that the other half was far more significant.

We have begun to piece together the artifacts. There appears to be a numbering system on the underside of each carving. The sequence resembles the dot-dash structure of Morse code. It is becoming easier for us to put them into order. The artifacts seem to construct a story about the destruction of the Earth by an asteroid. One picture shows the NEO Rig being torn apart by a massive chunk of rock from space. The Eiffel Tower in the shadow of the immense stone. The Sydney Opera house being destroyed by a colossal tidal wave. The statue of Liberty broken into pieces.

I recognise the shape of the asteroid. God knows I’ve seen it often enough.

It is 418-Minos.

How did these items get here? The complexity of the situation is maddening.

If an alien intelligence is trying to tell us something about the destruction of Earth, what can we do from four light years away. Are we too late?

Too late?

If time is running backwards, then perhaps we are too early.

18 August 2483 AD

I have just finished a meeting with the crew. The implication of the story of the carvings means only one thing. Earth is in the grip of an extinction level event, and someone or something that wanted to tell us, possibly to help us, visited the Daedalus and left behind these artifacts. We do not know if the asteroid has hit Earth or whether the destruction is imminent. Perhaps it won’t happen for a hundred years. Maybe it happened a hundred years ago. But there is little we can do from this great distance. Turning back to Earth, climbing back into our cryogenic pods and beginning our Hohmann transfer out past PMC-07 would be futile. For all intents and purposes, we are stranded.

Loretta suggested the only thing we can do is start transmitting a signal to Earth. Try to warn them in case the disaster hasn’t happened yet. The rest of the crew is in agreement. Loretta has set the transmission beacon to point to the Lincoln Outpost, in case the destruction of Earth has already taken place and there are no telescopes on Earth left to receive our signal.

Hopefully, the moon will be able to pick up our signal. Loretta informs me that the telescopes at the Lincoln Outpost are only a fraction of the power of the Earth based scopes. We can only hope that our efforts have some effect, even if it is only an advance warning of Earth’s imminent destruction.

12 July 2483 AD

Morale is extremely low on the Daedalus at the moment. We are getting at each other and having arguments. Everyone is so disappointed to have our mission objectives become so radically distorted. We are at a loss.

Ian put forward the theory today that the extraterrestrial visitors are bluffing us. That they entered the Daedalus and left these

carvings here because they wanted us to think that the Earth has been destroyed. I have no idea as to what possible end their actions would have if that were true, but we are not in a position to rule out anything at the moment.

Yesterday we began a six-hour long TCM burn. Loretta has been performing some theoretical calculations and is convinced that a few minor attitude adjustments can get us on course to intercept with PMC-04-A. Of course, she has to work in with reverse orbits due to the time reverse anomaly, but she is an extremely clever scientist and I trust her postulations. Throughout the manoeuvres, she is doing an excellent job of keeping the antennae pointed towards the Earth’s moon.

21 June 2483 AD

I am reminded of the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.’

But today I feel justified.

I have become somewhat troubled with the philosophical question of time moving backwards. With no point of reference it is a very difficult notion to comprehend. If we travelled through some kind of wormhole while we were asleep then it supports the belief that there are multiple planes of existence and that the wormhole acted as a doorway between two of those planes, or perhaps more.

Perhaps perception of time becomes more distorted the further into the wormhole we travel. This anomaly may only be the beginning.

Note: Euclid’s first axiom. A straight line can always be drawn between two given points in space. Have we broken this law?

Wormholes are only theoretical in the field of science. There is no evidence to support their existence. But if they do exist, and we travelled between two parallel universes, why should we believe that time in other universes are travelling in the same direction. Time only exists because we perceive it. And time only runs forwards because that is how we perceive it. But the main thing about perception is that it is a single viewpoint, which means that there are other viewpoints. The human perspective is a single and very narrow-minded viewpoint.

It’s like we are ants on the inside of a balloon. With only the balloon as a frame of reference, who are we to speculate on the world outside it.

Beneath the reality we know is chaos. We are balanced precariously on a knife-edge between infinite realms of crossing lanes. Time, or perception of it, like so many other things, has been shaped and moulded by humanity in an attempt to make sense of the things we do not understand. We give it names and we try to rationalise. But we don’t really have any answers.

A further thought. Imagine if time were like an old roll of celluloid. The images would be presented in a certain order, which can be played forward or backward. However, despite the viewer’s perception of the images (forwards or backwards), the images themselves remain in the same place. A constant, proving that time is really only an illusion, and that things just do what they do, regardless of how you view them. It is the perception of an object, rather than the object itself that creates the illusion of time. But beneath the order and stability that we so desperately cling to, lies a chaos that beckons our curiosity. Put one single toe into the ocean of things we don’t understand, and the mind is changed forever. Ideas take on a new form. Perspective becomes confusion, and we try to forget that we ever went down to the water’s edge.

Ian once said something that stuck with me for a long time. It feels appropriate now.

‘The universe’ he said, ‘is far more easily explained with maths than with magic.’

12 December 2482 AD

Loretta has achieved a masterful piece of navigation work. Two hours ago the Daedalus fell into a geo-stationary orbit over the planet PMC-04. We are delighted to have completed this part of the mission even under the obscure circumstances.

We are still troubled to find however, that there doesn’t appear to be a moon orbiting the planet. It seems as though many aspects of this mission were not as carefully planned out as we had first thought.

10 September 2440 AD

It has been some time since my last entry. The situation has become so desperately demoralising. I have let my crew down. My leadership skills were not able to create the cohesion needed within the group. I have had my eye on the airlock for some time now, and it seems like the way out of so many things. Maybe that is the only way I can conclude this. To become a part of the universe I came out here to explore.

5 September 2440 AD

My name is Frank Chambers. This is my ship. My Daedalus. God help us all.