Already Here
Creative Fiction with Critical Commentary
(First Class)
‘Everything’s set then?’ Cherie called from the launch pad.
Russell closed his laptop and glanced at her through the viewing window; a sense of accomplishment rested over the nervous jitter in his chest. He smiled to himself and made for the exit while Cherie watched him leave with a look of concern in her glassy eyes. With another week until launch day, Russell had filled his schedule to the brim. With tired thoughts of social events and conferences filling his psyche, he powered up Sonia, his most prized car computer, and drove into the setting sun towards his sleeping pod in the adjacent mountain range: a decoy designed to keep the station’s location a secret. Sonia offered him a story today; tuning into his pensive mood and mirroring it back to him, her monotonous voice tried to create life where there was none. He switched her off and played rock music instead. The sun disappeared behind the mountain as his headlights illuminated the magnificent Glade Valley in a blue-purple mist and right here, Sonia did the unthinkable. She glitched. Pressure seized Russell’s heart as his breath shortened. He reached for the manual controls but they weren’t wired in. Saboteurs, he thought, shit. The car emergency stopped in a nearby layby, Sonia blacked out completely with no error message. Her failure tripped the phone signal too. Russell glanced around, suddenly starkly aware of the thick dark growing in the mountain crevices that towered over each side of the valley.
As time dragged by, Russell’s logical brain searched for a solution. The station was twenty-four miles back, the pod thirty-three miles forward. Nobody came to the station anymore; he hadn’t entrusted a soul with its location. Too many competitors, too many risks. The surrounding valley had been cleared of civilisation, a power that rested on his wealth and status. They were too scared to say no. Russell’s mouth grew increasingly dry, his stomach increasingly empty. They were feelings he hadn’t had to know for a long time, Cherie always picked up on it before he had to, but tonight he would have to drink from the river and spend the night in the car after examining the engine and finding the Safetech cable missing. Now he knew it was intentional. Still, at least his T-Watercell™ trainers kept him dry as he waded through the rushes and clambered down the river bed to the rocky beach. With relief, Russell dipped his hands into the gushing water. He immediately felt a tingle, and not the good kind. The water quickly turned hot and burnt onto his skin. His stomach sank and he realised that the yellow glow across the river he so admired driving past had never been down to the setting sun. He put it aside, his survival instincts fighting through the thick layers of knowledge, media and computer programming. He racked his brains, deciding to do what any spaceman would do: search for signs of life.
Remembering a mediocre adventure drama he once watched, he knew he’d need to gain height to check his surroundings. Behind him was a well-marked path winding up toward the mountain ridge, a natural curve in the earth that refused to be destroyed with a bulldozer. He followed the path until he looked down on the forest below, and surely enough, as if by his own virtual design, there was a soft, subtle plume of smoke drifting from its centre. Russell laughed awkwardly, unsettled by the coincidence, questioning if he had really left the station, or just ventured too far into a virtual simulation. Still, he pressed on, descending with confidence until he reached the forest clearing and caught the first glimpse of the warm glow of flickering flames. Dread rose into his chest, beside the fire would be a man, perhaps a woman. It could mean danger, or even worse, friendship. Russell hated them already, the fire dwellers, but still, they had the means to survive and Russell saw clearly the opportunity to take advantage of them. A niggle at his conscience wanted him to understand this feeling more, but he pushed it aside and marched towards the smoke with false bravado. A brown-skinned man sat beside the fire, small and slight, wearing nothing but a loin cloth. He had grey dreadlocks piled upon his head and wooden beads hanging from his neck.
‘Come, take a seat. I see you are in need,’ the man’s voice echoed through the clearing and Russell froze. He stared into the flames, unable to comprehend.
‘I see…’ the man nodded patiently, his gaze running over Russell’s modern, silver clothes with a sense of bewilderment. ‘I’m Birdhi, from the Rishah tribe. Tell me, why have you come to our land?’
Russell clenched and unclenched his fists and ground his teeth.
Birdhi handed over a recently boiled pot with a few remaining sips of tea.
‘Is it clean?’ Russell said with ingratitude.
‘Sure’, he breathed. ‘But that’s the last of it. The spring is over the mountain, the river’s no good. Too much pollution, too far gone.’
Russell tensed with guilt, but Birdhi spoke without accusation. He broke the awkward silence with a laugh and Russell’s heart did a strange somersault. Russell felt as if right then, alien life had appeared before him.
‘Rest in the hammock, we’ll walk at dawn,’ Birdhi offered, rising to his bare feet, disappearing into the grove and leaving Russell with dying embers and an even drier mouth than before.
He finished the tea and began ordering tea leaves into equal piles, all the while thinking how the project was slipping through his fingertips. The more he thought about it, the more he clung. But the adrenaline soon came crashing down, and before he knew it, his usual three-hour sleep had come by and Birdhi was handing him a piece of stale bread and ushering him up the mountain in the pale dawn sunrise. As polar opposites, they walked side by side. The tense silence gradually dissolved into natural conversation while Birdhi probed deeper into the curious soul of the spaceman who’d come for tea.
‘It’s a rocket launch,’ Russell tried to explain, but the logistics went straight over Birdhi’s head.
‘A rocket? To where?’
‘Artu9, we recently discovered an anomaly, a potential sign of life,’ he explained.
‘Life?!’ Birdhi laughed, gesturing to the abundant greenery and stepping closer to gaze deep into Russell’s eyes. He frowned, a glimpse of sadness flickering across his innocent face. ‘And what happens when you find it?’
‘We stick to protocol.’
Birdhi smiled with amusement.
‘And what if they don’t?’
Russell shrugged, uncomfortable in his bold questioning, something Cherie was never programmed to do.
‘Let me tell you my way,’ Birdhi offered. ‘It’s simple. We live, we die and everything in between makes us who we are. The earth is our reflection, nature is our mirror. Everything we need to know can be found in its orchestration. Everything in existence is also created within our bodies.’
Met only with Russell’s silence, Birdhi began to hum a tune. An owl landed in a nearby cedar, calling their attention. Russell’s ears pricked up when he noticed something of use: Birdhi’s voice had a unique frequency. One beyond earth, an anomaly. A sign of extraterrestrial life. Energy coursed through his veins with no machine in sight; he felt excited, alive, and he wanted more. He glanced back at Birdhi slumped against the rock with eyes closed. He was in a trance, but the frequency had already taken effect. Russell jumped to his feet, pacing up and down. He wanted to grab Birdhi, shake him, scream at him to sing again, anything to take the creeping void from returning to his heart. He fought the loneliness for a while, codes and passwords streaming through his mind, out of reach. They consumed him, he had to get back, but all around was infinite internal darkness and he had never been so lost. This is it, he thought, this is madness.
He rose his face to the sky and screamed with terror, collapsing on the floor with violent shakes, falling into another world. He lashed out as Birdhi rose to help, quickly gathering water from the spring and wiping it over his forehead.
‘Drink, quickly,’ he held the bowl to Russell’s lips who took a sip and fell back into his nightmare.
The cool water ran down his throat, infiltrated his bloodstream and landed in his heart. A sense of peace eventually fell over him; his demons screamed into the surrounding darkness and faded away. Birdhi held him still, pressing a cool cloth over his forehead. An echo of his humming tune rang softly through Russell’s consciousness and it was there that he saw the first beams of light. A hand reached out to touch him. It was gentle, coated in translucent grey skin with long slender fingers, and beyond it were the eyes of a friend.
‘Of course we know you’re there,’ she called with laughter in her voice. ‘But we don’t want you to know we’re here!’
Her melodic voice trailed off into the silence of the mountain. Russell stirred, catching a glimpse of Birdhi before he slipped back under. His visions were plagued with vast wastelands, yellow rivers and human bones, Cherie smiling manically with the Safetech cable in hand, the entire planet on fire before him. He woke in pure terror, grasping Birdhi’s arm with blood-stained fingertips and strained to croak in his ear.
‘21° 13’ 35.6” N… 145° 29’ 61.8” W. Destroy it,’ he begged. ‘Everything. Before it’s too late.’
Critical Commentary
Already Here is an attempt to articulate how technological advancement and the persistence of ancient culture are both constantly seeking a connection beyond what is currently understood. This paradox is represented in the two main characters, Birdhi and Russell, and their unique embodiment of ‘the sublime’ as mentioned in Cornel Robu’s essay. While Birdhi, a mystic who lives a life of simplicity, expresses ‘sublimity in nature’, Russell’s automatic car system Sonia and AI robot Cherie display the idea of ‘artificial infinity’. Cherie’s betrayal as she ‘[smiles] manically with the Safetech cable in hand’ highlights themes of devastation and dystopian theory as found in the fear of the sun in Wandering Earth: if Wandering Earth is an eventual outcome, Already Here is the seed that was planted when there was still time to turn things around.
Another aspect the story draws on is the psychological reasoning behind the search for alien life. Interdimensional theories in physics have now spoken of alien experiences that emerge out of non-physical realms, accessible through consciousness or altered states. The theory outlines the existence of hyperspatial entities (beings from higher spatial dimensions that interact with our world in fleeting ways) and dimensional crossings (altered mental states enabling perception or interaction) as perfectly acceptable definitions backed up by anecdotal reports. Already Here demonstrates this theory during Russell’s purification process and resulting spiritual realisation: the direct outcome of his connection with Birdhi’s spiritual frequency is a multidimensional interaction that unlocks a gateway to extraterrestrial communication and therefore the answer he was looking for, though one that he perhaps did not expect: ‘Of course we know you’re there,’ she called with laughter in her voice. ‘But we don’t want you to know we’re here!’(Already Here, p.5)
This brings us back to the question ‘why?’. Chandran Nambiar follows a similar school of thought when he highlights the challenge scientists currently face: the ‘mirror’ reflecting back our own ‘developmental possibilities’ but also, in my view, our natural human shortcoming in assuming contact is desired by the other. The quest for extraterrestrial life might therefore benefit from Henry Lanz’s perspective that ‘what is ‘out there’ is an intuitional projection of what is ‘in here’. I would agree that we are ‘a little unmindful of the ‘infinity within ourselves’’. To constantly externalise universal exploration is to neglect the possibilities of extraterrestrial communication that stem from our internal access to consciousness: a method that protects the rights of alien life from alternative Capitalist agendas that seek to profit from natural curiosity. In other words, the internal revolution will not be colonised, and perhaps it is this fact which makes Russell so uncomfortable when he lands face to face with his inner demons.
Bibliography
Bec, Christophe, et al., Cixin Liu’s The Wandering Earth: A Graphic Novel (Online: Head of
Zeus, 2021) pp.9-19
Conversation Trust Authors,‘Robot developers keep making it seem like housebots are
imminent when they are decades away’ The Conversation, (October 2024)
Lanz, Henry ‘Toward Metaphysics of Space’ in The Philosophical Review, 46, 4 (1937)
pp.377– 92.
Nambiar K C, Chandran, ‘Extra-terrestrial Life in the Light of Quantum Dialectics’ in
Philosophical Discourses by Chandran Nambiar K C (August 2025)
NSE Staff, ‘Interdimensional Theories Beyond the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis’ in New Space
Economy (July 2025)
Robu, Cornel, ‘A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime’ in Cornel Foundation (1988) p.21