First Contact?

This story was inspired by a prompt from Reddit, here is my take on it.

When humanity sent out our first interstellar mission we didn't expect... this

Link to the original reddit thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/iq2gdl/wp_when_humanity_sent_out_our_first_interstellar/

Ram was feeling left out of the new years gala event. Middle aged Indians, he’d discovered, never partied. They participated in galas. It was just his bad luck that his name was drawn out of the crate; a list of names was chosen to handle the night shift at mission control at Antaryani Space Tech. He glanced at the large “HAPPY NEW YEAR 2041” over to his left and sighed. He glanced at his messages. It was Jay. Beer was being served. Ram was both envious and surprised.

Three rows over Vikram and Zen Senthil were huddled over at their Vikram’s monitors. They both seemed to be unusually animated. Pointing and gesturing. Too animated. Too agitated. Curious he walked over. “Hey, What’s up” asked Ram looking a little concerned. “This” said Zen. That’s weird thought Ram. The numbers were wrong. The telemetry of the last health check from “The Cosmos” placed it in the orbit of Neptune, 7 light hours instead of the expected 12 light hours away from Earth. “Huh...... you better call Australia. Wait... call Abhi first”.

“The Cosmos” was Earths’ first Interstellar ship. A collaboration between almost all nations of the planet. Costing almost 1.7 trillion US dollars to build and assemble in orbit, it was manned by 127 stellanauts from every nation that could train it’s personnel on time to leave. Leaving Earth’s orbit on its nearly 100 year journey to Ross 154 system on the 11th of March 2034 it crossed the Heliopause, an important event, on 26th June 2040. Telemetry from The Cosmos was received from radio observatories from all around the world and was designed with many overlaps and redundancies. Over the course of its journey out of the Solar system it had accelerated to nearly 12% the speed of light. Once every two hours the space colony ship beamed back telemetry data containing nearly every aspect of the ships’ health. This included it’s distance from Earth.

2 hours before new year, Ram remembered seeing the distance as 11.4 light hours. Running back to his console, he checked the logs to confirm. Confused, he called Abhi. She still had her party hat on all crooked and everything when she huffed over to the control room. The party hat looked completely out of place on an otherwise stern woman. Taking over Ram’s console and she began poring over the logs. “Have you called Andrew”? Abhi asked. “He’s already here” said Vikram pointing over to the big monitor at the center of the control room. “We’re seeing the same thing” said Andrew. “I’m calling everyone”.

A few hours after everyone was assembled over the conference it was decided to call the ship. The logs and the telemetry didn’t make sense anymore. Crew health seemed fine. Weird thing was, none of the crew of the ship seemed to get on the radio to call home. A call was made beckoning The Cosmos to send over crew audiovisuals confirming they were okay.

It took 8 hours for the audiovisuals to arrive bouncing over the many transmitters and receivers of the deep space network. When the message was finally decoded back to video everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Louis the captain of The Cosmos seemed oblivious to their situation but otherwise looked in good condition. Everyone was relieved. Everyone except Mark.

“Something isn’t right. Look at him. He seem right to anyone here?” asked the most experienced scientist over at NASA. He was right. Closer inspection of the video did reveal something of off about Louis. His eyes seemed smaller. His mouths seemed just so slightly crooked. This definitely looked like Louis but a facsimile. A badly made one.