Codename Alpha: Intervention

'Temporal range of twenty-six million years,' the page read. Without any context, this would probably seem normal.

"Twenty six million years..." I muttered.

After looking away, and back at my laptop screen, it still read the same unbelievable thing.

It was often said that every generation has its own "where were you when this happened" moment.

For my parents, it was probably something like "Where were you when the Kreml War began?" For their parents, it might've been something like "Where were you when Mount Höyryä erupted?" For my own generation, those unfortunate enough to be born during and after the war, it would be a question of "where were you when they discovered alien life?" If word ever reached back home, this question could easily be asked twice.

The first time was on October 9th, 2083. I was only fifteen, though it now felt like a lifetime ago, when it was announced that the Veta Exploratory Fleet had confirmed the existence of alien life on one of the exoplanets orbiting Veta. It was just algaes, lichens, and a bunch of microbes in geothermal pools, but the discovery wasn't any less exhilarating, even if it paled in comparison to what we now knew. It was a memory I held close, of me and my older brother crowded around a tv alongside a dozen other people in a community center.

The second time was... somewhere in December of 2095. Really, it was difficult to remember the specific date, though it wasn't like it really mattered, either. What mattered most was that these aliens were aliens in the more traditional sense, and they called themselves "Humans," being just eleven light years away. It was an unreachable distance from Valdera, but it still felt... bizarrely close.

The circumstances of it all were unmistakably dire, though. Half the crew had been killed and the ship was left disabled and stranded in an unexplored star system due to a disaster that we still knew very little about.

The discovery of an actual, intelligent, organized alien civilization, groundbreaking as it was, helped somewhat to offset the pain of it all. We really had stumbled through the whole thing, as the original "ambassadors" we had sent down to investigate the planet had no clue there was anything there and then ended up getting shot down by a local air force. They'd all survived, of course, and eventually made it back. Our relationship with the people of "Earth" had greatly improved since then.

There was just one major thing that could not be explained, no matter how hard we tried. As is, the humans shared an alarming amount of characteristics with us, like their use of spoken language, bipedal locomotion, and a long list of other things. As might've been expected, their planet was also inhabited by a long list of animals. However, and there really was no nice way to put it, they were almost all unmistakably devolved versions of us.

Between our arrival and now, far more had happened than I could really keep track of. I'd certainly been kept busy by troubleshooting various medical machines needed to do something with viral samples being sent up, working on making the wide array of replacement communications equipment compatible with our own systems, and a long list of other things. There had really been not much time to actually give consideration to what the hell was going on.

I sighed, as stepping back to try and put this all into perspective didn't help. Over the past few weeks, life had just been a constant, unending blur of 'wait, what?' moments. The question of whether or not we were alone in the universe had been answered, and apparently it had just been sitting in our little relative cosmic backyard this whole time. This was of little comfort, as we were not faced with many more existential questions, with two standing out in particular. How did we get here? How were the animals presumably native to Earth so... strikingly similar to us?