The Press Conference: Part 2

Before Gabe had completely made it into position the room was practically silent. The eyes of 400 people from all over the planet were fixed on him. This was how it was to be told. This is how they had told him to let the world know. Since his return to the planet the government had been pleading with him to tell them and them alone. They had tried every method they could think of to get him to tell them the truth, but he had refused to say anything until he could tell the entire world at once.

For several seconds he just stood there and watched the faces of those before him. He looked at the cameras and thought about the hundreds of millions of people who would be looking at his face right now with unimaginable anticipation. Briefly he mentally ran over the past 2 years of his life; the signal SETI picked up that started it all. It had contained a set of coordinates to what seemed like a planet in a binary star system on the far reaches of the galaxy. But most importantly it had held the specs and mathematics required to make a rip in space time and travel to those coordinates. The implications had been amazing. All at once humans had received proof beyond any doubt that they were not alone in the universe and at the same time a means of meeting one such race that we shared space with. After the initial amazement, subsequent testing and construction, the question of whether or not someone should be sent was never even raised, but instead simply, who it was going to be. Gabe had been the obvious choice. He was the first man to walk on Mars on August 4th, 2014. He had a seemingly uncanny resistance to solar radiation and had therefore spent more time in space or on another celestial body than any other man or woman on Earth.

After that, there had not been much training for Gabe. There had not even been a great deal of testing of the medium they would use to get him to what astronomers were soon referring to as 21k-Beta. The alien system. NASA and the Russian Space Agency were instantly all over the project, building the machine that would later be simply named Rapture. Within days after the publication that Gabe would be the sole traveller on the mission, his name and face were tattooed across the world. Within weeks there were religious groups holding internet and phone-in radio services for him, praising the almighty and newly dubbed Emissary. As most intelligent people would, Gabe hated it.

That thought brought him back to his senses. He thought once more about Matthews calling him by the title and silently wondered (not for the first time) about the mental stability of the man. He pushed the thought from his mind quickly however, Matthews meant nothing, and he was here to tell these people what he had learned. He only hoped they would accept what he was about to say.