Olivia rubbed her hands together, trying to keep her panic at bay. 40% of the final grade, right here in a little dish. She had gotten back before the report was due, but she didn’t have time to alter the report to be accurate to the Earth she actually visited. Now, she had to pretend that there was still a planet called Earth full of humans who turned their whole planet into one big city. Not the burnt pile of death and debris she had turned it into. The report was submitted, and now she just had to repeat her lie in verbal form. She had gotten to the classroom twenty minutes before the finals period, and had been staring at Las Vegas for the whole time she waited, thinking that early arrival might help her calm down. It did, until people started to show up. Now, everyone was here, all with little boxes and jars of their samples. A bunch of thick trees on one desk, some kind of swamp with purple water and blue plants on another, the girl next to her had a box full of what looked like cats the size of Las Vegas’s buildings. She was suddenly feeling her city would be inadequately interesting, even with all the lights. Please, professor, find these little shits cool.
Professor Wu clapped her hands together to start the finals period, “Alrighty gals! Let’s start right away. We can get all of you through with some time after each for questions. I’m looking around at what you’ve brought me, and I’m interested to hear more about what you’ve all got. Okay, first up is Olivia!”
FUCK. I forgot I was first! Olivia would be setting the bar for the rest of the class. Now, she was bound to be usurped by some other girl’s collection. She walked up to the front, hands so shaky the city was nearly tossed over as she held it in her grasp. She set up her presentation on the projector and began her final speech,
“Uhh, Hi! S-So, I went to universe EM5YR3-I910-Teal where planet 7POFBM4-A01-03 is. This planet is like a lot of inhabited terrestrial ones, except this one has been totally taken over by the apex species. Their entire surface is coated in one massive city as you can see by this image! These guys are the ultimate in ecosystem engineers, since they altered the whole biosphere! Even cooler, here’s a couple close-ups. They look a lot like we do!” The class all looked surprised, at least the ones actually paying attention. “Yeah, kinda cool. So I looked at some more biological scans to see if their habitats create pollutants that…”
Olivia went on, her nervous shakes dissipating as she seemed to be convincingly telling the story of humanity before she tunneled in and changed their reality. She showed off Las Vegas, terming it a “pleasure center” where humans congregate for psychological health and mating. From reading the minds of the humans, she knew the real purpose of Las Vegas, a haven for wasteful spending, drug consumption, and general debauchery, so her lie wasn’t really far off. “I picked this part because this section of the human habitat is very old. From archive scans, it seems this place was built on top of a barren desert. That little lake there with the dam? It was built centuries ago, and the existence of the lake is the only way the primitive humans even sustained it for a long part of its history. Here’s proof that they were good ecosystem engineers a long time ago, too.”
Eventually, her presentation concluded. Professor Wu looked up from her desk, having been taking extensive notes the entire time, and spoke, “Alright, let’s all snap after each person is done,” The room briefly sounded like a bunch of crickets had moved in as the students awkwardly snapped at the presenter. “Now, who has questions?” The room was utterly silent, each student avoiding the teacher’s gaze. “No one? Okay, well I have a question, then,” Olivia turned to Professor Wu, her shaking returning as the lecturer seemed to wear a face of both confusion and suspicion. She asked,
“I’m looking at the cross-dimensional scanners, and here it looks like ‘Earth’ is… well, uninhabitable. I don’t see any cities or space stations. Are my scanners glitching?”
Olivia stammered, “N-no, when I left the whole planet was destroyed --I mean-- I didn’t destroy it, it just got destroyed,” Her anxiety spiked, she felt like her guilt was obvious.
Professor Wu cocked her head, “Oh. They had space travel, right? Were there any other places they lived in?”
Olivia shook her head, “Nope. They were all congregated on Earth,” At least that part isn’t a lie.
The professor sighed, “So, they’re probably all dead, in that case. Damn. Never good when a cool species like that goes away. What happened?”
Olivia was in the danger zone now, “Well, it was going fine, then all of a sudden there was a flash on the moon of the planet and everything went black for a minute. Then, the entire sphere, and its moon, were all burnt up. My city was already in the jar and I kept it protected in my spacetime bubble. I think it was the humans themselves. Their communications did say there was a lot of experimental physics research on that moon,” This was the riskiest part of the lie. What she was describing was a textbook reality break caused by tunneling.
The professor’s eyes narrowed in confusion, “Wait, you’re saying the humans broke their own dimension?”
Olivia was drenched in cold sweat now, “Yes. That’s the only explanation for this phenomenon.”
Professor Wu stared at Olivia for a moment, then shrugged, “Yeah, I guess that is the only good faith explanation. Anyone else have a question?” The room was silent again. “Okay, let’s snap for Olivia. Up next, Anna,” Olivia took Las Vegas and walked to her seat to the sound of awkward snapping, still shaky but ultimately satisfied with the presentation. She sat back, half-listening to her fellow classmates talk about their strange little lifeforms.
After all fifteen presentations were done, Olivia was starting to agonize about her results. I should just wait till final grades get released, but that could be weeks. Grrr, I need to know now. She gingerly walked up to Professor Wu as she organized her presentation notes. “Hey professor. I know you probably can’t answer this right now, but I was just looking for a ballpark about the grade. How’d I do?” Being direct worked a few weeks ago, maybe it’ll work again.
The professor looked up, “Well, I haven’t made anything finalized yet, but I’ll say that was… good! You’ve almost certainly earned an A.”
Olivia beamed with pride, “Great! Thanks! And, thanks so much for teaching! Your passion for this subject is super infectious,”
This attempt at flattery was blatantly about assuaging suspicion over her weird story, but it seemed to work. “Well, thanks,” Professor Wu responded, “I’m hopeful you take at least something useful from this class in whatever you do in the future. Again, nice work on the presentation, Olivia.” The professor turned to talk to another student. That was messy, but I guess it worked! Smiling, Olivia left the classroom, content with her efforts.
Back in her apartment, Olivia placed the city on the desk in her room and went to fold some laundry she had been putting off for the last week. Professor Wu’s question still rung in Olivia’s mind. She thought her answer was at least convincing enough to not get her in trouble, but she found it interesting to contemplate the devastation she wrought from another person’s eyes. The damage she did was extensive. The humans definitely weren’t coming back to dominance anytime soon. But the professor said the planet is uninhabitable. Could she have killed off all the humans? Clearly, it’d be easy to do, but Olivia thought she had been careful to at least leave some humans alive. There had to be some lucky ones, she speculated.
Truthfully, Olivia wasn’t bothered by the idea of wiping out a lesser species. It was just curiosity that spurned her to ponder the question more. She decided to scan the real Earth, to see what the real damage was. She put her laundry away, pulled out her phone, and entered in the information for the planet and universe she visited. A bio-temporal AI scanner would predict the fate of the planet and its species. This would tell whether her visit doomed humanity.
The scanner worked for a few minutes, then her phone beeped as its analysis finished, “Massive damage to planet biosphere detected. Cause: extreme seismic and volcanic activity. Likely effects: mass extinction, life only supported in deep aquatic environments. Likely effects on user-specified species ‘human’: toxic gas and pollutants likely to cause respiratory issues. Toxic gas likely to cause infertility and damage to biological functions such as vitamin metabolism and immune system function. Five-year extinction probability: 99.3%. Intervention strongly recommended.”
Well, no intervention’s coming from me. The planet was a fun distraction, but going back is too risky. And besides, there’s no guarantee that she can help them, she doesn’t know how much abuse they can really take. Olivia looked back at her city, its lights coming back on as the sun went down in the window behind them. Not all the humans are on Earth, though… maybe we can test their resilience here. She walked up to her petri dish, gazing at the city while the city gazed at her crotch. She opened her phone and texted a lovely woman she knows.
“hey sam”
“you up?”