For Cara, greatness wasn’t a choice, it was an obligation. She’d felt this way as long as she could remember – from the first time she held a number two pencil, any test scores not in the ninety-ninth percentile were met with universal disappointment. It was often explained to Cara that if she didn’t succeed, it was only because she wasn’t trying hard enough. She found that difficult to argue with, mainly because she usually didn’t have to try very hard.
While her gifted classmates bemoaned the pressure put upon them by their teachers and families, Cara did not. She understood that she had won the lottery not only genetically, but temporally and geographically. She was born to supportive parents in a nurturing environment during an extended period of prosperity in the wealthiest country on the planet. To be anything other than extraordinary would be disgraceful. To achieve anything less than perfection would be to commit the most heinous sin of all: wasted potential.
So, at an early age Cara knew she would do something great with her life. She spent her high school years asking herself just what that might be. Defend the powerless as a civil liberties attorney for the ACLU? Play principal oboe with the New York Philharmonic? Save lives as a top neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic? She had a hard time deciding what form her greatness would take.
It wasn’t until college (at Harvard, of course) that Cara realized she’d been thinking about greatness all wrong. To be truly great, being brilliant isn’t enough. In a world of billions of people, hundreds of millions are in the ninety-ninth percentile. There were scores of phenomenal attorneys and oboists and neurosurgeons, none of whom would be remembered a hundred years from now. The great men and women in her textbooks weren’t simply outstanding in their fields, they did something no one had ever done before. They weren’t remembered for merely being the best, they were remembered for being the first.
Cara vowed to be the first at something, and it wouldn’t be something small. It didn’t take her long to pick a suitably grandiose goal: being the the first to visit an extrasolar planet. Not just the first American, or the first woman, or even the first human – the first living being to brave the vast void of space and settle on an alien world. And yes, she would admit to those who questioned her plans, there was some hubris involved in this objective, but the impossible is never achieved through humility.
For the first time, Cara had a clear aspiration aside from just excelling at whatever life threw at her. And it felt good. She planned out the next ten years meticulously. The first step was to transfer to MIT, where she got a dual degree in aerospace engineering and astronomy. After graduation, she spent a few years in the Air Force – not out of a sense of patriotism or duty, but to make connections and get requisite experience as a test pilot. From there, she moved to the private sector, co-founding a deep-space rocketry company with a classmate from Harvard who had made a few billion dollars betting on tech start-ups.
Through all of this, Cara pursued her mission with absolute focus. She eschewed any friendships or social commitments that wouldn’t serve as a stepping stone to leaving the planet. On the occasion that someone would ask her on a date, Cara would stress that she aimed to be a protagonist in her story, and protagonists rarely have partners. In her mind, things like companionship, family, and happiness were extraneous distractions from her goal. They were sacrifices that the pursuit of greatness wouldn’t allow her to make. The only diversion she allowed herself was the occasional glass of aged scotch at the end of a long day.
Cara had initially set a personal deadline to blast-off at age thirty so as to make it on a certain magazine’s list. Unfortunately, supply chains for revolutionary ion propulsion engines are stubbornly slow, so Cara was thirty-three when she finally strapped herself into the cockpit of the starship she had helped design. As the G-force held her fast against her seat, Cara realized that for the first time since settling on her goal, she had nothing productive to focus on. She let her mind wander. This is it, she thought, this is me turning dreams into reality. This is me achieving greatness.
The craft broke free from Earth’s orbit, and Cara floated into the stasis chamber that would keep her in an ageless sleep for the next one hundred and sixty years. As the ship began its acceleration to a quarter the speed of light, Cara pictured herself barreling through the cosmos and whispered, “I’m the first.”
###
The stasis chamber hissed open as the spacecraft successfully finished decelerating into the Goldilocks Zone of a red dwarf known as TRAPPIST-1. Cara had expected to be groggy after spending the better part of two centuries in cellular hibernation, but waking up farther from Earth than any living being made her more alert than ever.
She circled the fourth planet from the star – the world most similar to Earth and most promising for habitability – when she noticed the first sign something strange was going on. Her scanners were picking up faint radio signals from the planet’s surface. Not the kind naturally emitted by large stars, either. These were clearly artificial. Of course Cara had thought about the possibility of encountering advanced extraterrestrial life, but she, like most of the scientists she’d studied and worked with, thought the chances were pretty slim. Well, she thought, I’ll just have to make first contact. That’s another pretty damn good first.
As Cara directed her craft toward the origin of the radio signals, she had a brief pang of regret. Because TRAPPIST-1 was so far from Earth, the messages she sent detailing her extraordinary achievement wouldn’t be received for nearly forty years. She’d be dead long before anyone would be able to congratulate her on her greatness. As she initiated the craft’s landing procedure, Cara reminded herself that truly great people never know how long they’ll be remembered – that greatness is its own reward.
Cara walked down the ramp from her ship and paused at the bottom. She took a breath and lifted her foot, the first human foot to ever land on an alien world. As she prepared to take the greatest step any human had ever taken, Cara heard a bell ring. Not an alarm bell, but a cheerful dinging that reminded her of her childhood.
Cara stumbled onto the surface of the new world as she turned in the direction of the noise. The sound suddenly made sense, though what she was seeing did not. A woman – a human woman wearing shorts and a t-shirt – was riding toward her on a bicycle, smiling and ringing the bike’s bell. The woman hopped off the bike.
“Hi, I’m Lucy!” She stuck out a hand. “Welcome to Albion.”
Cara stared at her, desperately running through the options of how this could be happening. Was this a higher-level being presenting itself to her in a way that it thought she would best understand? Were the radio waves she’d detected somehow causing hallucinations? Was she still in the stasis chamber, stuck in a bizarre dream?
“You don’t need the suit. We finished stage-three terraforming sixty years ago.”
Cara started to realize what was happening. She disengaged her helmet and took a deep breath of the alien planet’s air. It was crisp and fresh. She looked at Lucy. “You’re from Earth?”
“My grandparents were. I’ve been a few times. Neat place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Lucy gestured to the distance. “You landed pretty far from the spaceport. Which was probably smart. Some of the other legacy migrants have really screwed up our landing pads with their old ships.”
Cara held it together as best as she could. “Legacy migrants?”
“We get them every few years. The mid twenty-first century was full of people leaving Earth on slower-than-light spacecraft. We beat them to Albion when curve-travel was developed, obviously.”
Cara’s worst fear, one that she’d never let herself fully consider, was materializing before her. “What year did humans first get here?”
Lucy furrowed her brow. “The Archaic Earth Year? I’ve never been good at these calculations. I think it would be… sometime in the 2090s. And this year would be 2180 on that calendar, give or take a few years for time dilation.”
Cara sat down on the planet’s loamy surface. “I was supposed to be the first.”
“The first what?”
“The first human on an extrasolar planet.”
“No, that was Francis Miller. He piloted the first curvecraft.”
Cara looked up at Lucy hopefully. “Have you heard the name Cara Handler?”
“Not personally. Let’s see if you’re on the omnibase.” Lucy pressed a finger to her temple as Cara furrowed her brow. “Right, you’re new. It’s a neural database cataloguing the lives of every human who ever lived.” A quick shiver ran down Lucy’s body as a stream of data trickled into her brain. “Cara Handler… Oh! You were the first migrant to leave Earth. Neat. Since you had the least advanced ion drive, I guess makes you the last one we’ll get here.”
Cara stared into the distance and squeezed her eyes shut. Lucy spun her bike around. “Let’s head back to the settlement.” As Cara stood and followed, Lucy smiled and added, “The colony bar has a great single malt.”
