Orbital Turf War

Sandbox Earth #4

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An Interview

“Mr. Graham, it is a pleasure to sit down with you!”

“Happy to speak to you, Mr. Broaddus! Thank you for coming!”

Mr. Peter Graham’s is not a household name, but perhaps it should be. He was on the International Space Station (ISS) during the events and immediate aftermath of what we have come to refer to as Contact. He is seated comfortably at his home near Grand Island, Nebraska—an unlikely place for a retired Astronaut to set up shop, but according to him it helps him to feel “grounded”. His home is small, and modest, but is filled with memorabilia from his days as a NASA astronaut. He is a tall man, but not at all like the man in the commemorative photos and memorabilia—his brown hair is now white, his broad shoulders are now bent over with osteoporosis, yet the twinkle in his eye and his charming smile remain the same. Despite his age and condition, his hospitality is unfailing, and the interview was repeatedly interrupted by attempts to variously feed me or get me something to drink. I have omitted these interruptions from this transcript below for the sake of clarity, but the recording of the full interview—unedited, just as it occurred—can be found on my website.

“Mr. Graham, when you think about Contact, what sticks out in your mind the most?”

“I hate it, honestly, can’t stand the thought. It was not a happy time. The subsequent years have been hard as well. I am only now coming to peace with everything. It has been hard, very hard, I’m afraid.”

“If you don’t mind, I would like to dig deeper into that day and the events that followed. Is it ok to talk about?”

“Oh, yes, yes, really, it is. As I said, I am coming to terms with it all, finding peace. In my mind, the thing that I remember most is this overwhelming feeling of…shall I say, inadequacy? I joined NASA to be a scientist, I wanted to go to space because I wanted to be on the only living frontier modern man has ever known. There is an old quote, somewhere, I cannot remember where I read it. It goes something like, ‘Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’ You know it? Wonderful, wonderful quote. Modern man had conquered the world, there were no hidden continents, there we—we—” he laughs mid thought, “we got to a point where we could reimage the entire surface of the Earth every ninety minutes. Where on that map do you put ‘Here there be dragons’, eh? Where is the mystery? The only mystery lay in the stars and beyond. I went to space to pursue that. And yet—I found myself playing, diplomat; playing explorer; playing soldier. None of this was what I wanted. I wanted science, discovery. I was not the man for the job—yet I was the man in the job. What more could I do? ‘Get Cracking’ my father would say. Get cracking indeed.”

“Tell me about the time you first saw the ship.”

“Marvelous, marvelous! Ah, it was a beautiful, beautiful moment. So I was on the International Space Station at the time, yes? Back in those days it was a big international effort to get the thing built, but I always felt it was a dramatic underutilization of resources. Growing broccoli, blowing bubbles in zero gravity. Hogwash! I was in charge of making social media videos for the internet. I never showed myself—too shy in those days, I hated being on camera—but I gave people a slice of life on the space station.

“NASA told us they had detected a N.E.O.—Near Earth Object, usually for an Asteroid or something. It was on a collision course, of course. So the first response was sheer terror. What in God’s name are we going to do? We are stuck up here in orbit, if an asteroid hits—a big one, by the looks of it—we are first going to watch our friends die and then we will die ourselves when the debris reaches our orbit. Our orbit is low, by the way, so it is fast as well. We would not last long in this scenario.

“NASA asked us to try and make observations of it, and we did—as it approached, over six or seven days, it came into clear vision. It was far too regular and symmetrical to be an asteroid. It’s trajectory was odd too; like it was changing speed, or slowing down. So we needed a clear image of this thing. One of the other Americans on the station at the time, what was his name…Charles Elmhurst—wonderful, wonderful man. He and I were good friends, we kept in touch until he passed away. Anyway, Charles took the first image of the blasted thing and showed it to us. We could see it was diamond shaped, and it had little holes that looked like, I don’t know, windows to me. There were these little dots, like flies, buzzing around it as well. After two days we could see with certainty it was not a natural object. After another day we were convinced—even if NASA wouldn’t say—that it was alien. Where from, who knows. We only know what our gut was telling us.

“As it approached it became brighter and bigger until we could see the whole thing in all it’s glory. It entered a higher, slower orbit than ours, so we would pass underneath the blasted thing every 90 minutes. All our cameras switched from looking at earth to looking at the underside of this magnificent spacecraft. It was enormous—it took us nearly sixty seconds to cross underneath the whole thing, I cannot understate how large it was. And the flies buzzing around it, they were little starships, they seemed to be doing some kind of repair work. Absolutely remarkable. We were all silent on the Station for a few days. Every 90 minutes we would pass under it, and our jaws would drop. We didn’t know what to do. NASA told me to stop the social media nonsense so I wouldn’t accidentally reveal something classified. The military started joining our check-in calls and advising us about safety hazards and other such.

“When the SECOND ship arrived, our wonder turned into fear again. Something was going on—this was deliberate. I thought it was an invasion, I thought we were about to witness some devastating attack on human kind. I was not prepared for what actually happened.

“The second ship…that was the scariest 24 hours of my life. Imagine, now, passing underneath a raging battle every 90 minutes for 24 hours. It was horrifying. Debris was flying everywhere, we lost at least two solar arrays. We folded them up after that and ran on battery power until it was over. We didn’t know who was who, who to root for. Were the heroes winning, or the villains? We had just passed under the ships when the laser fired. It fried Charles’ camera, it was so bright—he was missing pixels in every photo after that. The first ship was utterly devastated—we felt heartbroken, in a strange way. We had never seen any of the aliens, we had no idea who was who. But the diamond ship had arrived first, we felt a kinship with it—it was our first contact no matter what. We were on the other side of the world when the second ship hyperspaced away, and good thing too. I am not a very religious man, but I never prayed so much as I did when I learned that they had EMP’d half the globe. Much of America, Spain, Africa, South America were radio silent. We didn’t hear anything from NASA for several hours. We really didn’t know what to do next.”

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Thank You For Reading!

I am really enjoying writing this series and I hope you are enjoying reading it. Sandbox Earth serves as a prequel to the Adventures of Tylus Worran, and presents some deep lore about the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars. I am having a lot of fun, so thank you for reading!

God bless you!