It sat in the middle of the room, if you could call it a room. It was a cell that had been erected around the chair, with a triple air lock entry. At a casual glance, it looked like an ordinary chair although a closer look would reveal differences. Not that I needed to look —I had studied the reports and knew that the section of the chair below the seat was in two parts— apparently the beings that had used the chair had legs with three sections, two “knees,” if you will, and that the legs were slightly shorter than the average human male, although well within the human range. But the torso apparently was much larger in proportion to the legs than the vast majority of human beings. The seat was wide enough that the creatures could have had three legs, though no one seriously believed that. There were other, subtler differences but it was clear that the beings who had used this chair could almost definitely be classified as humanoid.

A triple-paned window, each pane separated from its neighbor, lay between the chair and me. The only three people who had ever touched the chair were now living in private worlds inside their heads, fed by hand, their every word recorded and examined. None of the technicians who had gotten close to the chair but had not actually touched it became ill, no matter how close they got. Some of the instruments had touched it but no illnesses had resulted from anyone who touched them. 

The instruments revealed that the chair was covered with a material that was similar to leather, with some plastic-like chemicals. This material had a very thin layer of a viscous chemical which did not adhere to our instruments but was found in the blood of the three men who had touched it as well as those of any mammals or reptiles held against it. It had no perceptible effect on plants, fish, and lower animals. We had been unable to obtain a sample of the chemical from the chair but the chemical obtained from the various bodies had a composition similar to curare.

In short, there was no need for me to be there. All the experts had already examined the chair as fully as it possibly could have been examined. They had made their hypotheses, some of them contradictory; they had had their fights over the data; and in the end they had a dozen or so hypotheses and no firm conclusions. So, they called me in.

I am a generalist, with a lot of knowledge about many disciplines but not a lot of depth in any of them. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of something else, I am frequently able to come to conclusions that the specialists are incapable of drawing.

“What do you think, Zele?”

Doctor Mognatia, the director of the laboratory that had grown up around the chair, was standing behind me.

“I think it’s a chair.”

“But what was it used for?”

“For sitting in.”

“For rest or for execution?  That chemical may have been as fatal to them as it is to us.”

“Or maybe they sat in it to digest their food.”

“And how would they evolve to the point that they needed something like that to survive?  That makes no sense, Zele.”

I turned to her. “Nothing here makes any sense, does it, Marita?”

We had been lovers a long time ago and close friends for many more years than the months when we had been lovers. Now we both had parchment skin and gray hair. Hers was thinning even more than mine. We had been searching, with so many others, through the fringes of the galaxy for evidence that we were not alone.

 Oh, there had been life enough, simple multicellular animalcules, even a few creatures that had reached a reptilianesque level. But of intelligent life, the ubiquitous aliens of science fiction, only a few tantalizing hints— traces of organic chemicals not found in nature on Earth, strange formations that seem to have been sculpted on empty planets, no chisel marks, just a smooth unnatural surface.

 And then this chair was found, on an empty featureless unnatural plain on a planet surrounded by an atmosphere full of noxious and unpleasant gasses. The room had been constructed around it, then enclosed in a building, and then it was examined for several years, accumulating several terabytes worth of data and numerous contradictory conclusions.

“Come on, Zele, work your magic on this one.”

“There’s no magic to work this time, Marita. This is a one-off, like everything else you’ve needed me for. It’s just another dead end.”

“It doesn’t matter, Zele. It’s what we have to do, keep reaching out, searching and exploring. Sleep on it; let your subconscious do its work. And, if you have any questions, I’m here.”

I nodded my head slowly. “I don’t have any questions right now, Marita. I’m still digesting all the information your team has come up with. Looking at the chair was the last thing and it’s anticlimactic.”

“Sleep on it.”

“I will. Meanwhile, rerun all your tests.”

I went back to my cubicle and lay down, the sweet susurrus of space surrounding me, the symphony of cosmic rays and collapsing stars, of exploding galaxies and the ever-present hush of the Big Bang. I cleared the walls and ceiling and looked up into meaningless star patterns as I had done so many times before, far from any of the stars to which the ancients had given names. Out here the stars were scant and aged, ready for the stellar old folks’ home.

I looked into my subconscious, as much as anyone can look at a part of their mind that doesn’t want to be looked at. I have a lot of experience doing this and usually I can discover that my subconscious is chewing over something, though never what it is masticating until it finally decides to let me in on the secret. Tonight there was quiet, not so much as a tiny ripple on its surface. My subconscious had found nothing to gnaw at. It was a dead end.

I woke up in the middle of the night. Where was I?  The stars overhead were no longer stationary; they were moving slowly in patterns across the sky until one bright yellow star became larger and larger and I could see planets rotating around it. I was not at all surprised that it was our own solar system. Another star became larger and brighter as it approached us, five planets in orbit around it. A swarm of dots came from one of them and went to the Earth then returned to their original planet. Then I could see the solar system from that planet and once again the star patterns began to move as the planet moved away from the sun, changing until they became the same pattern that was the same as that over this unnamed planet with a chair on its surface.

That’s when I really woke up. The star pattern overhead was the same as that at the end of my dream. I had no idea how long I had been asleep or how much longer night would last. Before I could even query it, my chrono said, “You have been asleep for two point three standard hours. It is seven point three standard hours before star rise.”

It didn’t matter. I called Marita. She answered as if she had never been asleep. I told her my dream.

“Interesting. I’ll get the programmers on it immediately.”

They may have gone to work on it immediately, but it took nearly a standard week before they had run the system backwards.

“Of course, we’ve done this kind of thing with Earth itself before,” the head programmer said at the meeting. “It’s called the n-body problem. But the job is too massive to do for single stars and we have to simplify by treating associated star masses as one star.”

Get on with it, I thought.

“But, using both Sol and this star as separate stars, we were able to retrace their journey to the point of intersection.”  He paused dramatically. “Four billion years ago, give or take a half billion.”

About the time when life began on Earth.

“It’s what I had expected,” Marita said. She looked at me. “What does that tell you?”

It was obvious, of course, but I had to say it anyway. “They left for somewhere else, leaving behind a planet with an atmosphere that is poisonous to us, empty of any trace of them except a chair that turns people catatonic on contact.”

“They couldn’t be that dumb,” Marita said. “They had to know that only a few of us would touch it.”

“A warning,” the head programmer said.

“A warning not to follow them?” I couldn’t keep from smiling. “They aren’t that dumb either.”

Marita and I found ourselves outside that room again.

“Could it be that they are the ones that created us?” Marita asked. “How?  It was billions of years ago, long before we existed.”

“It’s like our AIs. The current ones were created by earlier AIs. But go back far enough and you’ll find a human programmer who built a program that was able to create other programs blindly, without intelligence that then evolved into our AIs.”

“And you think that’s what happened on Earth?”

“A set of simple instructions that could evolve into an intelligent creature.”

“And this is a test. They want us to follow them.”

“But they don’t want to make it easy. We haven’t evolved enough for them yet.”

“But I guess we show promise.”

“We’ll find them. We have to. Otherwise, why are we here?”

Mankind’s last war was nearly a thousand years in our past and we few who remained inherited their technology and their mangled genes. “Or maybe they’re just getting themselves ready for us, knowing that we will always need conflict. Or maybe we will be repulsed by their appearance and want to wipe them off the face of the universe.”

”It doesn’t matter. We’ll want to know who made us. We’ll follow them.”

“We’ll try.”  I wondered what, if anything, my next dream would show me. Then my subconscious reared its ugly head again. “I want to sit down in that chair.”

“What?”  It was an explosion, so I unnecessarily repeated myself. “It’ll kill you, Zele.”

  “I don’t think so.”  What had my subconscious gotten me into?  And was it really my subconscious?

It took a lot of arguing and it wouldn’t have happened if Marita didn’t swing more weight than all the scientists combined. But I suspect she still had to call in a lot of chits.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I.”

I sat down in the chair. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t comfortable, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that I had on a full protective suit with air and power hoses. Not a square nanometer of my flesh was exposed to the poison and still my heart was beating like I’d run a marathon and I had a great big knot of fear in my stomach.

Nothing happened, of course. 

“Just sit tight and we’ll get you out of there,” Marita said.

“This may take some time,” I said. “Let me just sit here a while and see what happens.”

After about an hour, my subconscious gave me another nudge and I started to take off one of the gloves.

Then I dived into that maelstrom of stars, dust, and emptiness. I zoomed over planets where the surface was molten, others where seas roared over uncontinented surfaces, then grotesque forms that might have been animals, mobile plants, or something else entirely, crude structures of animal-like hide or of some kind of adobe or mud or something like timber or dug deep into the sand or floating on the air on some kind of graceful living platform, then larger cities, some roiling with creatures beautiful and terrible, others with only a scant populace, and many simply abandoned. And all of them, regardless of the creatures that I saw, reminded me of Earth and its history and I felt it viscerally, deep within my psyche.

You must grow beyond your current limitations , the voice said.

We are not gods. A chemical formula appeared in my mind. This will return them to normalcy.

I was talking to an empty room but somehow I knew that there were so many more that hadn’t even made it to a test. Nonetheless we would try to reach that third star because that is what we do. We are like the spawn of salmon. We will seek the sea and, if we survive, we will swim alongside those who begot us.

If you liked this story, please consider donating.

DreamForge is a volunteer effort supported by Dreamers like you. Every small donation helps us to buy hopeful stories and help new authors learn how to bring hope into this crazy world.

Hope is not an illusion; it's a perspective backed by engagement with the world, whatever the condition of the world may be. Like the crew of the Enterprise, we don't expect everyone to share our values, only that we will engage them with ours, and in the course of doing so, possibly, just possilby, win a better future.