Alyce surveyed the landscape from the large hill she stood upon. Luxuriant greens formed a tableau below her in the canopy of the woodland, stretching to the horizon. She recalled a story that her parents always told, of her surprise at the first time seeing a tree that wasn’t on a screen. She had said that the trees seemed taller and thinner than expected, that something wasn’t quite right with them. Her parents had laughed and promised to take her out into nature more often.
That was a feeling she had never managed to shake though, despite the frequent trips into the outdoors, and as she had grown she had come across other things that didn’t sit well with her. In the oldest of paintings people were squatter, the proportions of buildings in ancient digital photographs didn’t quite match anything in her experience, and the blue of the sky was a different blue. On average. It was subtle.
Her friends and colleagues laughed at her whenever she voiced the thoughts, but it never put her off. She reflected that the sentiment was likely what had shaped her career as a biohistorian. Countless times she had put forwards the hypothesis that plants all over the globe were the descendants of genetically engineered species, that nothing else explained just how well suited or high-yielding the various floras were, and the same went with animals. No matter the genus, there were certain genes common to all, and when their evolutionary history was traced, those genes seemed to have appeared in every animal in unison only several thousand years ago.
People always asked the same condescending questions and never listened to her well-reasoned answers. No, this is distinct from the genes that point to a common ancestor, yes, I do think that we once had greater capabilities. It was arrogance and pride, pure and simple. To accept that humanity had forgotten what it once could do meant accepting that humanity had moved backwards. And that was heresy: “Humanity Progresses”, that was what the church always said.
Once, she had dredged up old climate records that were just plain wrong, that had cited atmospheric values as far different to those of the modern day. Carbon dioxide had been stated as making up less than a thousandth part of the air! Of course, the archaic data had corrupted as she extracted it, dashing her rising hopes of presenting a new piece of the puzzle.
Aching feet brought Alyce back into the real world, and with a start, she realised that the sun had finished setting. She hadn’t had that much time to spare! Well, if I’m going to be ridiculously late, I might as well be outrageously late instead.
Lying down on the pale grass, she watched the stars above her, and was rewarded with a sight she didn’t often see. The three inner planets were all in her field of view, bright and flickering.
Mercury, Venus, and Terra.