I'd been down maybe four hours, long enough to go through the newest version of decon--a ray of light that poked every part of the body with gentle warmth--, not long enough to get a sense of this American 89 years in my future.
Technology was different--that seemed obvious; laws were different--noticed that just a few minutes ago; but people seemed to be the same, preoccupied with their own agendas, too busy to hear let alone answer questions.
Not that there was anyone to ask. I was sitting in what passed for a police precinct interview room, a windowless square with blank white walls so clean I could almost see myself, a table (also white) with tiny fingerprint shaped indentations. No one sat across from me. I got a sense they all huddled outside the room, watching the 100+ year old man who looked like he was thirty-five--or, depending on your point of view, the thirty-five year old man who was actually well over 100.
My stomach was tied in loops--this certainly wasn't the homecoming I'd been expecting. Not that I'd been expecting a particularly good one. Hell, anything could have happened--an asteroid could've wiped out all life on Earth for all we knew--at least until we reached Earth Central (and managed to jury-rig our communications equipment so that we could unscramble their messages) somewhere around the Moon.
We'd been celebrating during our glide from the Moon to Earth, celebrating and trying to figure out how to land the damn ship, according to the parameters Earth Central had sent to us. Everything was different, which we had expected, but we hadn't expected our equipment to be so antique (by Earth's point of view) as to be nearly non-functional.
Someone slipped up and told us they thought we were dead. Seemed they never got our transmissions once we left the solar system. Or maybe they'd get them years from now, when it no longer mattered.
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