"Are you sure you want to hear it again? You hear it every night," I asked Jonah, sighing as I dragged a chair across the metal floor of our cabin.
"Yes, I need to know it," my son said, with far too much sadness for a child his age.
I sat down in the chair, and let my elbows rest on my knees. Looking out at our pale blue dot, the home Jonah would never truly know, I thought back to when I first knew things were going to change.
"I know I have said this before, but you have to remember, people thought climate change was our biggest worry. There were protests about polar bears losing sea ice during the summer, fears of water levels rising, and a mass extinction caused by our need for fossil fuels. To be fair, it was our biggest worry. We didn't know anything about the planet 3C90-B8, yet. It had only just been found by astronomers in New Mexico. But once scientists took notice of the planet, they knew something was interesting. 3C90-B8, or Gemini, as it became called, was found to have the same atmosphere as Earth, the exact same mass, same distance from its local star, and mostly oceanic like that dot there. It was more than appealing for the scientific community to focus on Gemini, and teams from around Earth won grants to study it closely. Over the next 5 years, they learned more and more and the similarities between Earth and Gemini became a long list. Rudolf Gustaf, was the first scientist to suggest a bold claim, and he was right. We weren't looking at a different planet. Our recent studies of black holes led Gustaf to believe that 2 light years away from Earth, between Gemini and us, was essentially a mirror. A warped span of space was stretching time and showing us a reflection of our Earth. An old Earth. An Earth 1 billion years in the future and devoid of human life. Within months after Gustaf's discovery, the signals started pouring in from Gemini. And since we couldn't easily understand what the signals meant, we used our latest technology to try and help us. The neural net that first received the stream of signals was a supercomputer outside of Boston. It was connected to the internet, and that turned out to be a mistake. Our first gift from the stars was true superintelligence."