This fusion of various sci-fi elements (but mainly Red Dwarf's 'Timeslides' and Farscape) spontaneously combusted in my mind when making morning coffee, so I thought I'd better get it down.
Nostus
It had taken some painstaking virtual navigating through countless star systems, occupying the rough distance from galactic centre where he sort-of remembered his homeworld to reside, but the North American coastline was unmistakable, and neighbours Mars, Venus and the rest were all accounted for too. The galactic equivalent of Google's intrusive street cameras had compiled a comprehensive database when zipping around the Milky Way, even if it was missing specific details for distant and unimportant backwaters like these. Not even a 'mostly harmless' caption. Maybe he should remedy that.
Because it was far, far away, further than he'd dared to imagine. Barring another freak incident, the distance was untraversable in a human lifetime, so Asdfghjkl had said, literal-minded as ever, but Odie preferred to think outside of boxes. Out here, site-to-site teleportation was an everyday convenience for the busy and lazy. These maps are snapshots of galactic coordinates. What if, Odie theorised aloud, his body was atomised and sent down the line to be reconstituted at the other end? Would that be possible?
Asdfghjkl stroked their beards and pondered the human's wild notion. It could work in theory, they hypothesised, but there is a complication. The coordinates are four-dimensional in space-time, so travelling there would necessarily involve going back in time to the point when the image was taken.
When they looked up the timestamp for the Earth image, Odie's glimmer of hope became determination. Through remarkable chance, the shot had been snapped a mere two days after the interdimensional tornado had whipped him up from Kansas and taken him on the fateful psychedelic journey out here. It would be as if he'd never left, sparing his family and friends all the heartache of the intervening years. Sure, the time compression would make his tall tales of high space adventure even harder to believe than they would be already, but he could live with incredulity. It would be ungracious to pass up such good fortune.
His shipmates took the news worse than he'd expected. 'Why are you even considering this?' Zxcv Bnm musically guilt-tripped. 'You could have a long life here. We're not so bad, are we?'
Their familial concern quickly turned irritating and even offensive. The cosmopolitan cosmonauts didn't seem able to conceive of choosing to live on an unconnected, backwater rock like Earth. His natural homecoming urge was treated with the gravity of self-harm and flared up his normally dormant patriotism. He was Earth born and bred, and it was where he wanted to die. The way they were talking, it was like they had foreknowledge of the planet's inevitable nuclear armageddon or something!
When they realised they couldn't change his mind, they didn't stand in his way. His last day aboard the Q'wertyuiop was a morose one, Asdfghjkl shutting themselves in their quarters in silent awkwardness and Zxcv Bnm inconsolably shedding the equivalent of tears. Be like that, it made it easier to move on, Odie figured.
He walked into the science lab for the last time wearing the clothes he'd arrived in. He'd long since swapped his stained T-shirt and shorts for more practical Colonies attire, and because he'd got tired of explaining what Transformers were. But he was a new man again, same as the old man, Season 1 Odie in reverse, stepping from the unknown back into the familiar. He was going home.
He stepped into the teleporter and the body of Odie Seuss disintegrated, his consciousness put on hold as his atoms zipped across space and time. Reconstituted without missing a beat, he arrived intact, right on target. That was Kansas, all right. 100,000 miles down.
Zxcv Bnm couldn't bear to look, but Asdfghjkl described it to her later. How the planet's image in the database now also featured their former crewmate, an astronaut in a stained Transformers shirt and shorts, having lost his former composure and seemingly writhing around in panic, captured in the moments before suffocating death. Perhaps it would serve as a warning to potential visitors. 'Tis a silly place.
'You don't think,' Asdfghjkl pondered at a future date, after stroking their chins for several spons, 'that he somehow thought he'd arrive on the planet's surface?'
'Don't be stupid,' Zxcv Bnm sang scoldingly. 'Odie Seuss was a fool, but he wasn't an idiot.'
October 2024
