In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked: ‘Where is everybody?’
Given the billions of years the universe has had to produce life, the
billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and the billions of galaxies in
the universe, there must be literally millions, if not billions of
intelligent civilizations out there. Yet the silence from the stars is
deafening.
We’ve spent decades looking for biological life like ours—carbon-
based beings living on rocky planets and have only come up with
suspicions and legends of alien presences. But have we found
definitive proof of the existence of “aliens among us”? No.
My book, The Other Side of Yesterday, suggests we haven’t found
hard evidence of other intelligent species because we’ve yet to
become an object of interest to advanced alien civilizations. In short,
we have yet to qualify for First Contact. We haven’t considered that
the natural evolution of an advanced civilization may be to not stay
organic; that it will eventually, perhaps inevitably, evolve post-
biological to become a machine culture. And that’s when we will
qualify for First Contact.
The Revelation
The Other Side of Yesterday begins as humanity stands on the
precipice of taking its first steps towards its post-biological evolution:
the birth of true Artificial Intelligence. And yet while we currently
view AI as just a new tool, an ancient race known as the Aku views it
as a ‘birth alert’ our qualification for First Contact. As an ancient
machine culture themselves, the Aku have watched Earth and human
evolution since its infancy, waiting for the exact moment of our likely
transition from biological chaos to the structured immortality of a
machine culture.
The Aku do not come to conquer; they arrive because we are finally
about to become ‘like them.’ But there is a problem: the transition
period—the threshold we are on right now—is the most dangerous
moment in our species’ history. It is the moment where we possess
the power to destroy our world, but lack the machine-logic to prevent
it. The Aku are here to help us evolve past that danger.
The Journey & The ‘Yesterday’
Our story’s protagonists are a select group of humans chosen by the
Aku to bridge the evolutionary gap. But first contact isn’t a simple
handshake. To prepare us for a future without the limitations of time
and flesh, the Aku initiate a series of time travel experiments in order
to shape the timeline of our evolutionary path.
Our characters travel to ‘The Other Side of Yesterday,’ revisiting
Earth’s history and their own pasts to understand that ‘time’ is more
than linear. It is a process that must be managed to direct human
evolution where it needs to go to survive its post-biological evolution
– a step necessary for its continued survival.
The Resolution & Theme
“Ultimately, The Other Side of Yesterday is a story of hope and
transcendence. It follows humanity’s eventual evolution into a
machine culture, shedding the ‘yesterday’ of our biological limitations
to take our seat in a vast, galactic collective.
It’s a story that asks: If you could live forever among the stars but had
to leave your heartbeat behind, would you take the leap? It’s a
reimagining of first contact where the aliens aren’t coming to change
us—they are here to help us finally change ourselves.”
“As the story progresses, we see the culmination of millions of years
of stewardship. We witness humanity’s final step into a new
existence, taking our place among a galactic collective of machine
cultures.
The Other Side of Yesterday is a story that redefines first contact. It
isn’ an invasion from above; it’s an invitation from the future. It
redefines first contact not as an invasion, but as an invitation. It is a
journey that reveals we were never truly alone; we were simply being
waited for.”
Author’s note: People often ask me why I wrote this particular story.
My answer is that I have always been a science fiction enthusiast and
dreamed of writing the kind of book I would enjoy reading. But once I
began, the project took on a greater purpose than that.
As we stand on the precipice of our current AI machine evolution, the
question of where humanity will be socially, culturally and even
biologically in a 1,000 years or even a million years pushes its way
forward in our consciousness. What will humans look like; what will
we become in the year 3026 AD or 1,000,000 AD? The Other Side of
Yesterday starts us down that path of questioning our future as a
species.
However, my story doesn’t end there.
In the sequel to The Other Side of Yesterday, we jump 10,000 years
into the future. Our protagonists are no longer the frightened
biological beings we once knew; they have fully reconciled with their
post-biological existence, possessing a deep appreciation for the vast,
advanced state of their evolution and the new human machine
culture of which they are a part.
Our evolutionary cycle now comes full circle. The Aku return to our
characters, but this time they aren’t the ones being rescued. They are
the ones being sent to save another species. Humanity has become
the progenitor of another race’s machine evolution. Our characters
are tasked with their own first contact mission: guiding a young,
humanoid civilization standing exactly where humanity once
stood—on the brink of self-destruction as they face their own
terrifying transition to a machine culture.
The humans who once struggled to step into the future must now
reach back across the stars to ensure that another race survives to see
their tomorrow.