We, The Humans

We, The Humans

They limped out of the darkness battered, weary, and sorely in need of safe harbor.

It had all seemed so simple when they set out. At least, as simple as these things go. A hop, a skip, a jump and they’d touch down on their new home. Hell, they’d sleep the whole time; it would be like no time at all. Their minds really weren’t made to process the reality before them. The distance. The time. The astronomically long shot each new system presented to them. A hop, a skip, an eternity.

The CRS Delaney’s Fate slid silently out of the night, scarred and scored, low on just about every supply it could be low on. Their little pinprick of thrust gleamed, lost amongst the starry spray that lay behind them, as they gradually decelerated towards the system that they needed, desperately needed, to hold more promise than the countless others they’d passed. The ship’s protective cocoon of ice was ravaged from the eons of interstellar crossings, as system after useless system passed them by.

The ship, well she was made to fly forever. But what could forever really have meant to the human engineers who had designed her? It was just something you said, something you made a nice-looking plan for and called it a day. Surely they wouldn’t truly need to fly forever, right? Surely the systems they passed would have the right materials to help replenish the ship as they needed. And that was only a backup itself, surely they’d find a new home before resupplying even became an issue. After all, how different could their home system be from those they were to visit?

But Mouse, you are not alone,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes of mice and men

Go oft awry,

And leave us nothing but grief and pain,

For promised joy!

Amongst this woeful wreck, Kuo Yun sat under that same spray of stars in only slightly better shape than the battered ship. He sat, as he almost always did these days, up on the observation deck under the great glass dome that opened up the whole universe above him. Anymore he didn’t float out in the middle of the dome in ego-killing sensory deprivation in the way he had once loved. He was getting a little old for that anymore. No, Kuo passed his waning days sitting at the edge of the deck, feet hanging down through the door, with the ship decelerating it was just enough to give him the slightest bit of weight and hold him against the padded wall. Thinking. Meditating. Waiting for father time to come and finally collect his due.

It hadn’t always been this way. Over the eons, Kuo Yun had lived almost every life one could live on this great ship. At first his waking time had been relatively brief. Only a couple weeks as they approached each system to wake, rid himself of cryosickness, consider the planets for potential colonization, and negotiate a powerful opening position for the Yun Corporation on the new world. How young. How foolish. How shortsighted could one man be? Could all men be? Quite. Quite a lot indeed, he’d learned as his waking time crawled on into fading memory and true-time slid off into incomprehensibility.

Those halcyon days haunted Kuo the most. The systems they’d passed for reasons that now with the cruel clarity of hindsight seemed so trivial it nearly drove him mad. The incessant jockeying for position that came so naturally for Saito and Kamba and David and Delaney when she was pressed to it, but most of all to himself. Years living in a self-selected zero-sum world hadn’t equipped them for the responsibility they’d been given. And so, unable to barter themselves into a sufficient position they’d turned to deciding that each of these glowing gems amongst the cosmos weren’t quite right. That they were better off turning their backs on these possibilities, to wait for something better. That being half a g over Earth gravity simply wasn’t workable, that this system was just a little too light on heavy metals for their ideal society, that dwarf stars wouldn’t quite work out. After all, they were travelling towards the galaxy center, systems would only be closer together, the possibilities were endless. They just had to wait and it would all work out. It was all a lie.

And those were the good old days. Then the cryo-casket failures had begun in earnest. At first they’d lose only a fraction of a percent each crossing, a few poor souls sacrificed to the future of humanity. A tragedy, but a price worth paying. But as the eons clawed their cruel way past and system after useless system swept by their telescopes the failure rates increased even as the viability of the systems decreased. Each crossing may have been shorter but failure rates ticked up and up and up. For thousands of years they’d only lost a couple dozen souls. Now they were lucky if a crossing took less than two hundred.

It seemed Earth’s engineers in all their brilliance had forgotten Murphy’s Law, the oldest and truest of them all. Their faithful ship dove deeper and deeper into the galactic center. What they’d hoped would be a boon of nearby systems turned out to be bedlam. Far further out than they had any reason to expect, intermingling gravitational forces turned what should’ve been stately systems into a miasma of primordial chunder. There was no life to live down in those tumultuous depths, only white knuckle flying as the ship took beating after beating in the intermingling Oort clouds. To be honest, they’d been lucky to escape with their lives and turn course to head back into clearer space.

Well, at least as many lives as they still had. That was when Feye Kamba and Natsue Saito’s caskets had failed. For countless crossings they’d sat and drank and debated around the long table of the Fate’s bridge, talking about the failure rate as some obscure statistic like their water supply or carbon reserves. On that day it became real. All the wealth, all the power, all the privilege in the world couldn’t save them. That was the day Kuo Yun stopped checking the failure count. That was also the day he decided to start waking up earlier. Much earlier.

Where before he’d wake a few weeks in advance of each targeted arrival, from that day forward it was always years. Two. Three. Five. Years to live in solitude, but at least to live. To not sleep silently through the years waiting for a death he’d never know had come. Of course it never really mitigated the risk, his time asleep still vastly outpaced his time awake. But it was something, better something than nothing.

For years he’d lived much like he had when debating with the jury. Nights in his staterooms, days in the gym or gardens, evenings on the bridge for food and a cold drink. In time though, that life hollowed itself into a dry husk. All his luxury and comforts could not fill the hole that had opened up in him. So he began to wander. Packing bags and heading off down the endless halls of the ship, if only to see how far the ship would let him wander. Which turned out to be quite far indeed. Down the cold stone halls, filled with dim light and the ethereal sounds of Earth as the ship tried in vain to maintain his sanity. Through caverns of cryo-caskets, supply stores, hangars, mess halls. So much equipment they’d surely need for their new home. So many plans laid low.

Once he simply woke up out of cryo and just started walking. Still sick, barely clothed, no supplies, just a need to escape by any means necessary. He had probably made it a couple kilometers before he had collapsed. Next thing he knew, Kuo woke up weightless in an auto doc and drifted out into the entry hall for the observation dome. He’d visited the dome from time to time over the years, but it had quickly lost its glamor. Not on that day. Naked and hopelessly nihilistic, Kuo Yun floated into the midst of the stars and dissolved. Whether it was exhaustion, or sickness, or some quixotic drug, he couldn’t say. But on that day he became the cosmos.

For years he’d tried time and again to recreate the revelation achieved that day, but it never came. In time, his attention turned to the only other walking soul on the Fate, the maintenance crew living their own solitary life on the farm. Try as he may though, the ship refused him this contact. The farm crew was an operational part of the ship’s repair functions, he could no more disturb them than he could disturb the onboard factories as they turned out replacement parts. He could wake up as early as he like, but he could not contact them, he would spend his years alone. Very well, he thought, if I can’t live with them, I’ll walk a mile in their shoes.

And so Kuo Yun, born to one of the mightiest families of Earth, formed in a life of nearly unimaginable privilege, found himself working on a farm. It was surprisingly easy. One day he’d formally queried the ship’s AI about working on the farm before heading down to cryo after yet another failed system approach, and when he opened his eyes again, untold years later, Kuo was stumbling down the hall and out into the wide-open expanse of the farm. Here the sky arched higher than even in the loftiest of the cryo halls. The trees ringed round, cleverly obscuring the horizon in every direction. From vents unseen a crisp wind blew in, it smelled of fresh rain. He stumbled through the fields, barefooted, dirt between his toes driving forth memories that came from a different life of a different man. This was no manicured garden like they had on the foredeck, winding paths he’d spent years trodding over and over, this was life itself.

He didn’t even make it to the house that first night. Kuo slept out in the open field under a dazzle of stars he could almost believe were real. Ants crawled over his skin as they carried on their rigorous journey. Grass tickled his hands as it bent in the breeze. His clothes soaked through from the rain just passed. It was all ecstasy.

The weeks that followed were pleasure and pain in equal parts. The spell of this new place after so much uniformity was very nearly overwhelming to his mind. He would sit out on the porch for days on end just staring at the obscured horizon, imagining that it stretched off forever. He could almost believe it. So thorough was his enchantment that Kuo nearly starved. For the first time since he could really remember the ship would not feed him. He lost almost all of the plants that had been left by the previous watcher and had to limp by on a diet mostly of unleavened bread while he figured out how to fend for himself in this bucolic country.

In time the euphoria died. He gradually picked up the pieces left by his predecessor and got the farm up and running; he began to play music in the long afternoons, drawling guitar pieces that felt so at home in these rolling hills; he went out on the little maintenance runs that the ship assigned him, almost all entirely useless, he knew. He began to live the life of a real watcher, and the cracks around him grew. There was no jury waking up in the coming days to reconnect and barter and banter, if only for a little while. Only solitude. That sky of stars that spread overhead was also full of cameras. He shivered at the memory of looking down on some ignorant watcher from his tab, judging the whole of their little life from on high. How vain he’d been, looking down on them, peering into their homes, thinking it was his right. It made him sick.

And all for what? He had access to the maintenance records of the ship. Less than 5% of maintenance calls given to the crew were actually critical, even less than that were even remotely time-sensitive. Mostly it was just the ship trying to keep the crew sane as the years stretched out before them, give them something to do and hope a sense of purpose would pull them through.

It was an insanity he could understand. Never before had he questioned the ship’s reporting of time. Sure, eons down the line their flight time had lost any real meaning to a human mind. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years. It was all the same. But now as he lived the regimented life of a farmer his trust collapsed. Days were too long. Nights too short. According to his tab the days ticked by, but he very nearly didn’t believe it. Would he be allowed to return to cryo after a five-year stint? Or had the ship just sent him here to die?

All the while the grand illusion of the farm fell apart around him. He paced round and round where the great dome of the sky met the earth beneath him. He walked amongst tall trees that he learned were half-machine. He’d made a series of increasingly jeopardizing mistakes on the farm that threatened to throw the delicate balance of the ecosystem off, only to wake up the next day and find that the ship had tidied up after him.

This wasn’t life. It was a cruel sham. A sham designed to give a human mind just enough stability to survive five years of wrenching solitude. Just barely. And they were well beyond that at this point. They’d gone through their maintenance crew’s shifts time and again as the eons crawled by. These poor souls woke up again and again only to have their hopes dashed as they turned to face another stint of solitude, years of their waking lives mercilessly ticking by. It was beyond cruel, and it was his fault. His team of engineers had helped design the biome, helped contrive a plan to keep the crew functional through lonely the years. The Yun seal of approval lay inked across the very fiber of his being.

His disgust burnt like hot bile within him. It set his belly aflame as he finally put himself back down for another stint in cryo. Then, like wildfire, it came raging out when he awoke once more with the jury. It was another useless system, of course it was, even more so than usual, an unstable orbit was on the verge of tearing their target planet to pieces. Kuo didn’t care. His revulsion burst forth from him over the long table of the Fate’s bridge. Their faces turned to ash when they learned that he’d voluntarily worked a stint on the farm. Their eyes withered as he raged about the inhumanity that they supported every day. Their hearts blackened as they held their own sin before them for the first time in all the countless eternities.

But who would mind the ship? They feebly whispered back. He would. So be it, his penance would be to live out his days living the life he’d condemned so many nameless others to. It wouldn’t wash out the stain upon his soul, but it was better than nothing.

So Kuo entered the final chapter of his life. Now, some fifty years senior of all the remaining jurors. Now, so wholly adapted to a life in and out of cryogenic stasis that the ship would wake him up whenever something urgently needed doing, once every couple dozen years, let him get on with the repair and then wander with his thoughts for a while before sending him back to sleep. The farm, to a mix of his dismay and satisfaction, was scrapped. Reconstituted for core elements. More fodder for the new world that only the ship seemed to believe they’d find. The CRS Delaney’s Fate became his prison as he served a sentence that could never be enough.

That’s how Kuo Yun found himself quietly sitting under the stars in the observation dome. Old, ashamed, exhausted. Seeking solace in the tranquility of the universe. And that’s why he couldn’t believe his eyes when his tab chimed calling up the first images of the planet they were slowly approaching. There, fixed in the inky black, hung a jewel. Hung home.

The repair had started like any other, he cracked open bleary eyes and stumbled his way down cold corridors to his rooms. It barely phased him anymore, coming out of cryo used to take weeks of recovery, now it was no worse than a night of heavy drinking. The ship would have a steaming bowl of congee ready for him in his kitchen and it knew to keep the display wall a black mirror. Kuo suffered no artifice any longer, not even a pleasant view out of his staterooms. He ate in silence then and began a long, slow sequence of stretches as the spice and nanomachines from his meal worked their magic. In good time he was headed back out to complete the repair. No need for extensive recovery. No need for an elaborate biome for a waking crew. It was utter masochism, but he was likely the most resource-efficient repair crew the ship had ever had, and today it wanted an aftward sensor array replaced.

That’s when things turned notably strange. He took the tram kilometers downship to the access tunnel, and as he arrived the door slid open to reveal a suit with a good deal more protective shielding than any he’d seen before…all for an aftward job. That was odd. Usually, EVA jobs at the rear of the ship were safest, after all the whole bulk of the ship was ahead to protect you from any interstellar dust. If the ship lost forward sensor arrays the AI usually just dealt with it until they reversed orientation on approach to a system and could get repair bots or crew out there in safety.

But here he was, almost all the way back to the engine bays looking at a suit that looked like it designed more for diffusing bombs than EVA maneuvers. In a stomach-turning wrench, his whole world turned to the side. He’d never quite regained his equilibrium since coming off the ice and he’d figured it was just lingering effects of the stasis, he was no spring chicken anymore after all and this far back gravity was only about .6g. The truth made itself known in one lurching moment; his equilibrium was dead set, he was, in fact, feeling the ship slowing down. The deceleration added just the gentlest tug to their normal centripetal gravity. He’d felt it dozens of times before, but always with the knowledge that they were on approach. This time he’d received no such warning, and that meant the ship wanted him to do a repair on what had become the ‘bow’ with not but this bulky suit between him and whatever lay out in the space ahead. The odds were astronomically low that anything was out there to come and pierce his suit, but they were not zero, and that was usually enough to have the ship simply bide its time until a repair could be made more safely. But it was not waiting, which meant there was something it desperately wanted more information on.

A younger man may have taken heart in this cascade of realizations, he may have hoped that all these signs pointed towards good fortune. But not Kuo, not anymore. He donned the suit knowing that it was just performative safety, any particles would cut through this shielding the same as any other EVA suit. He donned his armor only hoping that maybe some piece of dust out there had his number written upon its atoms and would come to pierce his cladding and end his time in this black purgatory.

As he slid out of the end of the tunnel chills ran down his spine, as they always did. He floated into zero-g as the suit’s thrusters piloted him towards his work site and he was left to contemplate the pocked and scarred hull of the Fate. It felt so impenetrable inside, like a world unto itself. But out here you could see just how tenuous their grasp on life really was. Eon after eon, of travel ripped away whole swaths of ablative ice, a thousand-million microscopic cuts chewing away at their shield leaving bare the rocky skin of the ship. They hadn’t been able to safely resupply water for the ice cladding for dozens of systems now, and it showed. Maybe that was why the ship so desperately wanted to see what awaited them in the system looming ahead, on some level the AI realized it was life-or-death. They likely couldn’t survive another crossing. Not with their luck.

Kuo had to admit the job was sufficiently dire, some recent impact had torn apart the primary aft sensor array. Kuo could see the wide channel where some piece of debris had chewed through the ice carving a channel meters wide, ripping through all the equipment that had previously been safely tucked back in its frozen shield. In truth, it was shocking the ship hadn’t tried to avoid or deflect a piece of debris this large, the impact was far bigger than any of the others in the area. Were they really so low on fuel that the ship simply had to take these shattering impacts on the chin to get them safely to the system? Kuo didn’t really want to know. He didn’t want to look down past the ring of fusion thrust that so slowly took them down from their incomprehensible cruising speed. He didn’t want to look down past, at the little gleaming star below that shone just a bit brighter than all the others, that spun just a little bit less as the ship turned on its axis. He wanted the job done. Or he wanted that little piece of dust with his name on it to come and smear his consciousness across the cosmos.

His dust never came and the repair took hours and hours. The ship had staged stacks of new equipment for him, had even sent out a small team of repair bots to help him (something he’d never seen before), and all the same, the work was backbreaking. He crawled back into the tram utterly spent and collapsed into bed without a thought. But somewhere out there a spark had implanted itself in his head, and when he awoke the next day he knew the coming days would be different. He could feel it all around him, this system would be it. They’d find a home or they’d find a way to eke out some space-faring existence as long as they could. There was no more running.

For the first time since he could remember Kuo kept his tab with him. Week after week, he read the updates as they came in. Information about the star, about the other planets, about system orbits, and asteroidal composition. And most of all their destination, AR-122b-c. Every report slashed his pessimism just a bit more, and then that day, sitting underneath the observation dome and the spray of stars, an image crept through the ether that placed something like hope, that strange foreign thing, near to Kuo Yun’s heart.

The stars sparkled overhead but he could not tear his eyes from his tab; there in the blackness was a miracle, the likes of which he simply couldn’t believe.

The planet was so staggeringly Earth-like he was sure that he must be dreaming. The continents were different, a little more broken up and dispersed more evenly through the oceans. The magnetic field was a bit more active, generating astonishing aurorae over nearly a third of the surface. Between the landmasses, in much of the central oceans, the sea remained shallow, glowing back outward like a turquoise band around the equator. At the poles, gleaming ice caps sparkled, both nearly symmetrical in size as the planet spun on its near-vertical axis. Gravity was a pleasant .8g, perfect for Kuo’s old bones. Average surface temperature was a pleasant 14.5 C, and atmospheric oxygen was just a bit above Earth-standard at 23%. Indeed, the entire atmospheric mix was a miracle unto itself as far as the Fate could tell, nearly matching Earth in all key aspects and seemingly stable.

It was the source of that stability that held Kuo enraptured. There on his screen, smothering the jigsaw continents was powerful, consuming green. Green like he’d never seen before in his life. Green of every shade and hue. Green from the equatorial low lands right up to the creeping edges of the ice caps. Green in the ocean shallows, and green right up to timberline on mountain slopes. Green the likes of which hadn’t been seen by human eyes since the astronauts of Apollo looked back and saw Earth shining in space.

It was life beyond a doubt, and no mean, rudimentary life the likes of which they’d seen on planets passed by. AR-122b-c was positively teeming with established life. Kuo could see deep green rainforests and golden prairies, emerald bands of subarctic flora, and pale mint fields in mountain vales. Every report, every measurement, every image, all came back saying the same thing, this planet made Earth look like a barren rock. It was more than they ever had cause to hope for when they set off. It was a miracle beyond reckoning and Kuo Yun could simply not believe it.

Surely he was dreaming, held in limbo as his neurons fired up as he came off the ice again. Surely all of it, the repair, the silent weeks aboard the ship, the planet, was all conjured up by some electrical spasm in his mind. Surely, after all their trials, after all their sin, the universe would not deliver such a gift. He sat transfixed by the planet spinning on the screen of his tab, waiting to wake up to a colder reality.

Reality came with a warm draft. The slight rush of air jolted Kuo alert, the tram up from the staterooms had just arrived at the bow terminal. Someone was coming. More precisely Atzi Delaney was coming. He’d been notified a couple of days back that Atzi had come off the ice, as was her custom, a few months before the other jurors. Maybe out of some misplaced sense of duty, maybe just to eke out a little life while she could. In his younger days, he found her practice to be disgustingly holier-than-thou. Now, he more than understood. Still, though their schedules had aligned, propriety or recursive ennui kept them at a distance, typically not seeing one another until the jury convened.
Not today. Today the thin, serene face of Atzi Delaney came floating up through the round door to the observation dome. She slid to a comfortable seat opposite Kuo, feet hanging down through the door, held in place by the bare wisp of gravity the ship’s thrust provided, and studied him carefully.

Though she woke earlier than the others, Kuo had still far outpaced her in waking time. Where her face was still firm and bright in the prime of life, his had become weathered and lined. Where her shoulders held straight on her lithe frame, his hunched and ached even in nearly imperceptible gravity. They had never been friends, but the stream of time had worn all edges in their relationship smooth, and a profound respect had gradually pooled up in between the sturdy stones of their shared memories.

After a long pause, she finally asked, “Have you seen it, Mr. Yun?”

Her voice, as always, was as serene as her face and utterly inscrutable. Over his many lives, Kuo had bartered and haggled with more members of the Delaney family than probably any person alive. He thought he knew them all, thought he could use the hard braggadocio that was so common in the family against them, indeed that was why he was so quickly selected by the Yun Corporation to represent their interests aboard the Fate. But when he came off the ice that first time and found himself face to face with Atzi Delaney, a woman so unlike the rest of her family. Poised, quiet, thoughtful, reserved.

“Mr. Yun…” he wheezed, his vocal cords still stiff from disuse, “…after all this time, please, Kuo.”

“Very well, have you seen it Kuo?”

“Of course I have,” he breathed, “How could I not?” He looked up meeting her dark, glimmering eyes. “It’s a dream.”

A slight, uncommon, smile parted her thin lips. “I’ve thought the same myself, after so long it seemed all but sure that this system would be the same as all the others.” She let forth a twinkling laugh. “I think we may have seen every way a promising system can be unviable upon closer inspection, I feel like I’m walking on eggshells waiting to find out why this one won’t work as well.”

“There’s life, almost certainly…” Kuo whispered, mind drifting back to all the interminable discussions around the bridge’s long table of past planets. All those they walked away from for almost every reason imaginable.

“There is,” she agreed. “Although it does seem to be established enough that we can probably safely send some probes down to do preliminary reconnaissance to see if we could safely settle.”

“And if we can’t?” Kuo asked hopelessly, his dream collapsing into nightmare as the many ways it could all fall apart crystallized in his mind.

“Then I suppose we hope the ship is able to find more accessible reserves of water and isolated hydrogen so we can attempt another crossing.”

“You would really have us attempt another?”

“If we need to, we’ll find a way.”

He had trouble comprehending her optimism, clearly, she hadn’t been outside to bear witness to just how fragile their ship had become. “Then it is all a dream,” he finally sighed.

“No dream Mr. Yun, just the first glimpse of true possibility we can remember.”

“I’ll believe it when my toes are in the dirt.”

Another laugh that glinted like the heavens above. “I hope to be there to see it. In any case, this certainly won’t be another system fly by, you’re right in thinking that we’re dangerously low on too many reserves. The Fate will need time to find raw supplies and aggregate them, I’ll certainly use our time to do some research.”

“We will imperil the life by that research, we will imperil the life if we choose to settle.”

“Beyond a doubt, but we’ve lost more than half our numbers since we set out.” Kuo reeled, he’d stopped checking casket failures but they certainly hadn’t slowed on his account. More than a million lives lost, Delaney continued on, “Which certainly changes the moral argument in our case, we can either take our best precautions to protect the planet and make it our home or we can likely go die in space. I know which I prefer.”

“When will you wake the others?”

Now her smile turned impish, “I think we’ve had enough debate for a couple of lifetimes don’t you Kuo?”

He looked up, startled, “You intend to not give them a choice? Can you do that?”

“Of course not, but we have to stop anyway, so I may as well let them sleep and ensure that they awake to an opportunity that’s so golden it’s less of a debate and more of a foregone conclusion.”

Kuo was taken aback, Atzi Delaney in all their time together had never seemed so energetic, so ambitious, so devious. But desperate times…

Their tabs chimed in unison. Already, Kuo’s repair was paying dividends, the ship had just imaged a larger swath of space around the planet at an angle more offset from its star than they’d seen thus far. Backed this far off, the white of clouds and azure of ocean and green of forest all blended, all their hopes hung upon this pale blue dot.

“That’s strange.” Atzi started, sliding around the circular doorway to sit next to Kuo. “The ship had reported one small moon, but it looks like there are actually four.”

“How’s that strange?” He asked looking down at the new images on the screen. Sure enough, barely perceptible, were two little pricks of light in the black on one side and one on the other, the fourth was presumably hidden behind. “We’ve seen plenty of captured asteroids.”

“That may be it…” she studied a new set of charts streaming across her tab. For a woman who’d come from the world of art and aesthetics, Atzi Delaney had certainly taken to the finer details of astrophysics when the need arose for it. “They seem pretty even for asteroids, doesn’t look like they’d be big enough round out under their own gravity though.”

“Ok, so an odd coincidence that the planet captured round asteroids? I still don’t see the cause for alarm.”

“Well it’s not so much that as their orbits…” Her fingers flew across the tablet, calling up the early reports on the moons, eyes whisking back and forth drinking in the information. Had this ever not been her? Kuo pegged her at the start as some sort of spoiled rich kid with an artistic inclination, but she’d defied his expectation at every turn, why stop now? “Yeah, alright look at this.”

She held up a dense table, he could barely make out the figures. He screwed up his eyes like he was trying to analyze the chart but his face must have given the game away as she let forth another glittering torrent of laughter. Why had he avoided her all these years?

“It’s alright, the ship will have some more visual models done up shortly. But these oddly round moons also have some oddly round orbits… Perfect, orbits if these numbers are correct.”

“How can an orbit be perfect?” he wondered.

“Well, they seem to be very evenly spaced around the planet and all right around where we would expect geostationary orbit to be.”

“Well, that is very strange.” Kuo had to agree.

At that Atzi Delaney looked up from her tab and a wide grin spread across her face. A smile like Kuo hadn’t seen in all his years in space, and likely for long before that even. A smile that dug into the hardened soil of his heart and against all odds implanted a tiny seed of hope. Hope for decency, hope for humanity, hope that he just might be able to dig his toes into dirt one more time before he called it a life.

“Strange indeed!” she laughed. “So what do you say Mr. Yun, will you stay awake with me and see if we can call this new place home?”

For the first time in a thousand years Kuo Yun’s lips turned up into a smile. His muscles rebelled against him, his cheeks protested in stiffness, but it could not be helped. He would see this dream to its very end.

“Yes Miss Delaney, I think I will,” he warmly agreed. They looked down, shoulder to shoulder, at the planet gleaming below them. “AR-122b-c…”

“It will need a better name don’t you think?” She asked playfully.

“So it will…” he pondered a long moment, “…Arcadia.” The name floated off his lips and as they looked down at the bucolic lands below nothing could have felt more fitting.

“Indeed,” she smiled. “Arcadia.”

And so the CRS Delaney’s Fate, her thousands of living cargo, and her two wandering souls slowly limped their way out of the darkness and towards home.

—

Cecilia saw God all around her.

From the steps of her little wooden chapel she saw His grace shining down across the valley. She saw Him in the garden behind the building where her seeds seemed to leap from the loamy soil in a profusion of lush verdancy. In the afternoons she would walk through her hamlet and out into the cool forests that climbed the side of their secluded vale, here she saw Him in the strange yet so familiar trees and ferns that covered the springy earth in a fresh blanket. And she saw Him in the faces that gradually came trickling into her pews on Sunday mornings; bewildered, wondrous faces feeling something like faith for the first time.

She could relate to the feeling. Cecilia was new to faith herself if she was being honest. Not to the faith, no that had defined her life, but true faith was a wholly new experience. She struggled to make sense of it, couldn’t really if she thought about it too hard. But that was nothing new. Very little in her life with the church made much sense to her, but the Lord worked in mysterious ways. That had to be enough for Cecilia.

She never would have known the hollowness of her own devotion if she hadn’t come to Arcadia. Her whole life had been given to it, and still it was an empty bowl with not a drop of rain to fill it. She told herself a story of being driven into the church by her love of God, but in her heart of hearts, that place she had kept locked away for so long, she knew that she had come to the church to escape.

It hadn’t been much of a choice, not really, but then again very little ever was for Cecilia. Just a poor parda girl born in the favelas above Rio a couple of years before the drought set in, in earnest. For most of her youth her only real exposure to any sort of religion came from the stern hand of her avó, she’d failed to pass on her devotion to Cecilia’s mother and when her father came into the picture all hope was lost. So her avó did what she could with Cecilia, which was precious little, wild child she had been. It had never been an easy life in the favelas, but it was home, and despite all the violence that surrounded her every day Cecilia still looked back fondly on those years. She could still see the big golden ball of the sun rising over the Atlantic as she went about her morning duty of emptying the condensation traps.

But the drought got worse, and Cecilia’s life along with it. Her father killed in gang violence for some reason she never knew, or more likely for no reason at all. Then as the wells started to run dry and the fires scorched the mountains around the city, what little work had been left dried up. Her mother disappeared during the worst fire season, for a while it was easy to believe she’d simply gotten lost on her way home in all the smoke. In time though paltry rains came and knocked the smoke down and even little Cecilia knew her mother wasn’t coming back.

The months that followed were probably as close as she ever got to real faith. Living with her avó she heard the word of God every day as she attended daily Mass in the little ramshackle church clinging to the hillside. The fires started back up before too long though and finished the job they’d started on her avó’s lungs. She’d prayed, or tried to at least, listening to the old woman’s rasping final breaths. It wouldn’t be long until word got out that young Cecilia was all alone, just barely out of middle school someone would come and take her. Child services or some cartel thugs neither seemed too promising.

But then, a few mornings later as she watched a blazing orange sun rise through the haze over the ocean by luck or divine providence Ceclia looked down and saw a group of women dressed in strange habits climbing the stairs by her little shack. They looked serene and unspoiled in their white robes with crisp blue trimming. Missionaries of Charity, come to help the world’s poor. She certainly fit the bill for their help. A dirty little girl, struggling to empty a condensation trap that had only brought in a couple thimbles over water over the smoky night, grandmother stiff with rigor mortis on her deathbed.

With no other choice, Cecilia went with the nuns, received their help, heard about their works, and in time, joined their order. Everyone knew the church was falling out of power across the world, embroiled in scandals, losing membership generation after generation; all the same, it was hard to impeach the humble lineage of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. It wasn’t her dream, not by a long shot, but a life of service seemed at least seemed respectable, especially when comparte to her other options.

So the years passed by and Cecilia got to work. First learning English, then studying scripture, each day taking the next step on a stair that had been well-trodden by thousands before her. Aspirancy to postulancy to novitiate to solemn vows. At each step she could have left, but where would she go? Besides, it all came secondary to the work. Even as noble a group as the Missionaries found themselves short-handed, so a wiry parda girl who picked up English and Spanish in a matter of months proved too useful for the sisterhood to not put to work.

And work there was aplenty. From Caracas down to Buenos Aires and inland through the jungles to Manaus and up the Andes to the Alto Plano and Sucre, population booms had strained the natural world to their breaking point. Unrestrained growth, stress, collapse it had all led to orphans aplenty and the sisterhood was there to help. So Cecilia walked the steps of the faith, studied the scripture, said the vows time and again, and she told herself that she loved God. Loved Him despite all the evil she saw around her day in and day out. Loved Him despite the hundreds, thousands of orphans who always needed her help that could never be enough.

But she hadn’t loved God. Not really. She could see that all so clearly now. Whether by luck or skill or innate political tact Cecilia had climbed the ranks of her sisterhood even as her thin faith was worn away day by day. After nearly twenty years in service, her faith was only a veneer, she loved the work, didn’t mind a life of chosen poverty, loved helping those in who she saw so much of herself, and she told the world she loved God. But she’d stopped telling herself. The lie of her faith was a grim truth she’d come to accept over years of horrors. So when she was called to the Vatican after the announcement of the Delaney missions she was certain it was some mistake or prank or PR posturing.

She’d never left South America though, so why not take a trip? The notion that she’d ever be able to visit the beating heart of the church that defined her life hadn’t ever crossed her mind before. That wasn’t her lot.

The plane tickets were real though. So was the small but plush room she’d been given with a little window overlooking the giardini; it was the softest bed she’d ever slept on. The Council of Cardinals was real too; the old, red-faced men in redder robes treated her well but didn’t solicit much from her. In truth, she didn’t have much to contribute. Cecilia knew precious little about either the inner machinations of the church or the Delaney program. It seemed the plan was for the church to liquidate nearly all of its assets and secure as many seats on the ship-landing juries as they could. Read the writing on the wall as it were; all but give up the Catholic mission on Earth in hopes of finding more fertile soils among the stars. The Lord would provide.

Even with a nearly complete liquidation, they’d only be able to secure a handful of seats. It seemed a shoddy plan at best to Cecilia. But still, she sat in audience of the Council and when asked had told stories of her work from Sao Paulo to La Paz, the red faces nodded respectfully when she spoke. They all agreed it was the Lord’s work. It wasn’t really though, it was her work, financed by trickling interest from ages gone by when the Church still held weight in the hearts of man. She kept her mouth shut though, and watched as the red faces began to haggle over allocation of the seats on the ships. She listened as the Benedictines carved off their share, then as the Dominicans and Franciscans squabbled over their respective allocations, watched as the Jesuits gobbled up a full half of the available seats. Too many to her mind.

After days of monotonous haggling, Cecilia was about ready to stand up and leave the chamber mid-session. She clearly was only invited for political posturing, to have her little speech made even littler by news crews who needed a sound bite. This wasn’t her place, and there was much work that needed to be done. But a life of service had taught her patience and so she watched on. Then she watched, now in awe, as the door to the chamber was hauled open by the Swiss Guard and as Pope Pius XX stepped into the chamber on slippered feet. She listened as silence filled the lofty chamber. He nodded briefly to the Council before walking over to the audience where she sat, minor representatives of lesser orders all. Missionaries and Mendicants, Trappists and Camillians. She watched, now in disbelief, as he selected a few solemn faces from this silent crowd to stand by him, watched, now in utter incredulity, as he walked up and selected her from the audience. She stepped out and listened with ringing ears as he spoke, soft voice barely puncturing the heavy silence.

“Alas, I am too old to go and see the extent of the Lord’s domain,” Pius began with a rasping whisper. “So these good brothers and sisters will be my eyes and ears, my voice, to help bring the word of God to the stars and bear witness for me the glory of His love.” And with that, he stepped slowly through the stuffed silence and the door closed behind him.

Surely that had been a dream.

It certainly seemed like a dream when through ringing ears she heard the room explode in a cacophony of protests. It made about as much sense as a bizarre dream, that was for sure. The church was laying itself bare to be a part of these missions, why allocate such dearly-bought seats to such impoverished orders? Was it faith, true faith, that Pius held in his heart? Or was he simply trying to expand the diversity of orders that would make it off of Earth in hope that somehow somewhere the right voice and the right planet and the right faith would let the church flourish once more? As with all dreams, answers were hard to come by.

So Cecilia drifted in an unending, barely lucid dream as her life was wholly uprooted from the orphanage she’d been running in Sao Paulo and cast into the stars. Once set in motion by a simple word the world sped by in a blur. Teams of Delaney representatives whisked around her, sizing her up, assigning her to the recently christened CRS Delaney’s Fate, helped her tidy up what few affairs she had outstanding, and eventually lowered her down into a cryo-casket at their processing facility in Mexico City, where she and two million other souls clinging to the edge of hope would ascend into the heavens and through the stars.

That was when the dream ended. She woke after that first crossing sick but hopeful. How clearly she remembered that first planet, bare, rocky, but with possibility. The atmosphere was thin, sure but they could fix that in time, the gravity and orbit were right, the star very stable, what more could they hope for? Then she’d watched helplessly as the cynical jockeying for position by the other jurors eventually had them all turn against the planet. It made her sicker than the cryo ever could. Then came Purgatory, she watched as an endless stream of unviable worlds passed by. Each time a planet showed promise squabbling would have them all on edge enough to take any adverse update as enough to pass the system by. So after a dozen stars they took a turn in towards the galactic center hoping for shorter crossings as the number of casket failures slowly kept up. The systems they passed descended into heaving masses of gas and shattered planets as tidal forces threatened to rip the systems apart; there was no hope for life down here as the countless eons passed. In this black limbo the harsh radiation of interstellar space boiled away the last of Cecilia’s faith.

It had never been a dream. It was a death throe. Clearly, her work, her life, had not been enough and now she was in some sort of post-futurist hell, cursed to hop through all eternity away from God’s love. She shouldn’t have tried to save his children, she should have tried to save his world. But she didn’t, humanity didn’t, maybe they didn’t deserve His love after all.

But then, this foul lie that had held her heart for so long was dispelled in one ray of verdant glory. She awoke to the beaming radiance of Arcadia. They had faced the temptation of despair, wandered the desert for their forty days and now they had returned to Galilee. It was that day that Cecilia first saw God, saw Him and loved Him truly.

Now every day she saw Him all around her.

From the steps of her chapel, she saw His love basking their little hamlet in golden light. She felt Him in the rays descending through the cleanest, crispest, air she’d ever seen. She could smell Him in the rising mists that wisped away in the morning light over the mossy green hills that rolled off into the distance.

Today, Cecilia had places to be, so she finished her mate with eyes closed feeling the rays warm her face in the fresh morning air and strolled through her little hamlet. There were no roads, not yet at least, no one had far enough to go for all that. She walked lightly along the little footpath down the hill from her chapel and along through the main hollow that held the bulk of the buildings her township, the springy earth beneath her making each step buoyant and vital. Little handsome buildings rose along the paths, all surrounded by gardens exploding in a profusion of life. It was early enough yet that most of the town was asleep, still, some early risers waved to her from front porches with cups of coffee in hand or from side yards between their tosses of feed to the chickens. Here in the hollow the provisioner and tavern stood side by side in utilitarian wood buildings making up “main street” along with the stone square they’d first built by the pond shore to be the center of their humble home. As she walked past the pond, the sun dispatched the last of the morning mist and illuminated a clear day with a sky so deeply cerulean it was almost purple.

Beyond the pond, little square homes nestled into the rising hills each with a bountiful garden, white smoke puffing from chimneys heating stoves for breakfast, and each with a little complex of paddocks. What livestock they kept was held in strict balance with the world they’d occupied. The native life here was very, strikingly, Earth-like, and astoundingly resilient. It had weathered their initial contact and exploration without a hitch, it had dealt with the humans and then their animals easily, almost symbiotically. Still, they all remembered from whence they came. They knew that they couldn’t treat this planet like they had Earth. They couldn’t be ravenously carnivorous like they had been, if they introduced livestock or species it had to be done with the utmost care, kept in an exacting balance to add to the ecosystem, not detract from it. They were stewards of this new land.

Cecilia buoyed in high spirits along the path out of town, into Kuo’s Wood. Here the hills climbed a little more steeply and the lush forest that surrounded her township closed in around her. The wide path weaved through the towering trees, small leaves so dark they almost seemed black at times reached out to dapple the morning sky and whisper pleasantly in the breeze that rolled in off the sea. If she’d had occasion to walk through unspoiled forests back on Earth she may have thought this wood was remarkably similar. Sure, the leaves on the ferns were a bit darker, the bark on the brushes a bit paler, the undergrowth filled with a decided scarcity of local animal life. But she hadn’t, so it was all simply a blessing, and no matter how you looked at it the tall, stately trees were magnificent

Although the biologists still refused to call them trees. They refused to call anything by its proper name. Cecilia never understood, they had been given a gift, a true miracle was right before their eyes and the scientists with their endless poking and prodding simply couldn’t accept it. They insisted on inventing a whole new taxonomy for the species of their new home, endlessly sampled and analyzed and theorized and retheorized all in the name of something it took Cecilia but one moment to achieve. These were trees, those were ferns, that over there was a patch of moss, and the low vales, where they built their towns, those were filled with grasses. The oceans had schools of crustaceans of different types. The woods, what little animal life they’d had, had insects of a couple different varieties. No need to bend yourself over backward reinventing the wheel. Surely they were going to call them trees no matter what hoops The Academy decided they needed to jump through.

As she walked in the dappled, shimmering sunlight she remembered the early days after landing when The Academy was just a little research outpost on the shores of the harbor. In each of the perplexed researcher’s faces she saw the touch of God. They had feverishly worked to analyze and explain how the life on this planet so many unfathomable lightyears away could be so bafflingly Earthlike. Hypotheses flew around like swarming mosquitoes in their tidy lab overlooking the bay. In the end, they’d settled around a working theory that characteristics they had considered Earthlike were simply marks of efficiency. That life on a wet, warm planet of this size would ultimately organize itself into ways nearly identical to Earth life; there would be different species sure, but broadly similar allowing minor changes for an atmosphere with a little more oxygen, a star a little less bright, seas slightly less salinated. It was like gravity, they decided, given the right elements and enough time life would form into these familiar structures. Bacteria, eukaryotes, archaea, they were all as sure as a comet dancing on its prescribed orbit. The biologists found they could even keep most of their classifications through the order level. From there the planet went its own way though and gave them something to sink their teeth into.

That was a pleasant-sounding lie and all, but Cecilia knew the truth. They were seeing God’s fingerprints. The life was similar because that was the way He liked it. They could test and squabble all they like, but when He wanted a tree He made a tree and that was that.

She remembered, more fondly, walking beneath these trees with Kuo Yun in his fading days. When she first came off the ice Cecilia had been shocked how old the man had grown, she knew he was keeping himself awake for parts of their crossings for reasons she never understood. And coming back down to a planet with its inescapable gravity seemed to push him years further along in his life in a matter of months. He was actually the first settler in her little hamlet, building a spartan house on the shores of the pond with wide-open doors facing the waters where he could meditate in the morning mists. The path she walked this morning used to be his route into town, over the hill and through the wood as it were. She’d walk with him from time to time, enjoy the dappled shade on their skin, savor the sweet hymn of the insects buzzing about their business, drink in the rich smells of the deep soil.

Now his house was a monument of sorts, left exactly as he left it but for a little plaque out by the front gate describing his service in researching the planet along with Atzi Delaney, and more critically, his creation of the Citizen’s Council driving a nail into the old hegemony of Earth. In those dying days Cecilia had tried to convert him, get him baptized so that he could spend eternity basking in God’s love. The old man had seen too much for all that, besides he said, that was her way not his. So they had walked in the woods while they could, toes digging into the loamy soil, savoring each and every step.

And in his time, she’d buried him in the yard beside the chapel that caught the morning light and looked down on the pond in its mists. She’d said a prayer over the fresh dirt of his grave with the few faces on the new world who knew him. Somber faces from the Jury all, they paid their respects and hoped this would be the only funeral for quite some time. By the time they landed, after all, Kuo Yun was the only truly old person in the new world.

Just then, Cecilia came around a curve in a path to the bony shoulder of the ridge at the top of her climb, the trees swept back on either side and framed the vista below. El Descanso De Yvette, or Descanso as almost everyone had come to call it, Yvette’s Rest. Their fledgling frontier city, named for the woman who had launched these thousand ships to the stars, although Cecilia never knew why she received the honor. Her own niece, Atzi, who represented the Delaney Company on their ship, seemed to have no love for her aunt, but all the same, the name had been tacked on and in time, stuck. Besides, Descanso was a lovely little town.

From her vantage high on the ridge, Cecilia could see everything. The town filled the grassy flats around a sheltered bay that faced out towards the setting sun; this early though, only the very tips of the tallest buildings and masts in the marina caught the morning light as it slipped over the ridge Cecilia had just climbed. Neat, tree-lined streets radiated away from the town square that abutted the harbor. Beside the square, The Academy now rose four stories in a proud wooden building with a clock-face like a great glass globe atop its main spire. From here this strange clock tower, which served as their primary contact with the Fate orbiting high above, was all one could see to indicate the town wasn’t ripped straight out of the pages of history; on the other side of the plaza town hall sat with open doors and a wide staircase that led down to the square, that was where they held most of their meetings as it was usually too nice to want to pass a perfectly pleasant morning in a stuffy council chamber. Along the shores of the harbor, a market sprang up every morning divvying out the day’s catch and allowing the townsfolk to provision themselves with what little they could not grow for themselves. Beyond the square, a modest commercial district was distinguished by two-story buildings with neat storefronts hiding beneath the shade of the trees and awning-covered rooftop terraces; it played host to the majority of the town’s cafes and restaurants and what few businesses the most enterprising citizens had decided to open. They didn’t need much space for all that, their whole society could make very little, but they enjoyed what they had. Then, lining the radiating streets beyond, little square bungalows rose up into the gentle green hills that climbed East from the city center. Each house, of course, had its own garden and was built in clever little blocks to let six or so houses share a lush, tree-covered central yard where the residents could relax, and meet, where children could play and they could all make a life together with their little chosen tribe. In a way it was odd to see, you could see how the “front” of each house was all but forgotten as the rear entries that faced the central yards became the primary entrances for residents and friends alike.

Beyond the houses, for almost half a mile in all directions, the rolling grasses still remained unperturbed except by little footpaths leading in from the other hamlets hiding in the hills, and beyond that the lush ring of trees, that seemed so much like beech to Cecilia, swallowed the steepening hills peaked by gray crags like the one where she now sat. This morning as she looked out, the mist was rolling off the harbor over the craggy outcrop that wrapped around and nearly closed the harbor mouth they’d come to call the Castilla, it was the sort of jutting sea spire where one could picture a white lighthouse at the summit helping ships navigate in the dark. But where did they have to go in the dark? The few crustaceans they fished were close at hand, there was nowhere to ship anything to, not anywhere to go really. Commerce, trade, shipping, those were from a different world, not this one. So there was no the Castilla stayed as it was, keeping the harbor calm and jutting out of the morning mists as they receded towards the glittering ocean beyond, no lighthouse needed.

Descanso seemed a proper city next to her own little hamlet, but in truth, it held only a couple hundred-thousand people, barely a town of note by the standards of old Earth. Indeed, now that they had woken almost everyone up it certainly could’ve been a larger city, but after the first couple of years, something about this place had driven growth outward. The hills beyond Descanso could be quite steep at times but almost invariably there was a pleasant valley on the other side of the hill with little lakes and streams tucked away and wide green fields covering the valley floors. A perfect landscape for world-weary souls to slip away and settle in little hamlets of their own or deep in the lush bush itself. Indeed, when it came time to build her chapel the call of these snug vales had sung to her. Sure, she could have easily set up in Descanso, tried to attract more souls to her parish. But evangelism never had much place in her church, and now it was something else that seemed like it belonged to another world. No, she built her chapel in a hamlet she’d come to love over her time with Kuo and that was that. She’d hold mass, heretic as it was for her to do so, for those who wanted to attend, and she let God speak through her good works. Just like she always had. If people felt their faith stirring they would come, it was only an hour’s walk over the hill after all.

“Bom dia freira!” A laughing voice broke Cecilia’s reverie as she sat on the flat stones of the ridge in the morning sun, preparing for her descent into town. The only thing laughable was the horrendous accent with which the greeting had been delivered. She’d recognize that awkward, clipped timbre anywhere.

“Bom dia Karan, and stop calling me that.” Much like her habit, and the non-ordination of women, her title of Sister felt like it belonged to a faith not fit for this world. She turned towards where she’d heard his voice, a faint path that followed the ridge from his little cottage that hid under a high escarpment overlooking the town. As she opened her eyes she saw him emerge from the bush pushing, of all things, a bicycle. “Where on Earth did you get that?” she exclaimed.

“Where on Earth?” The young man teased pushing the soft tires across the open granite of the ridge to take a seat next to her in the sun.

Karan was a dark young man with a light spirit. He worked at The Academy as a computer scientist and was purportedly good at his job, but Cecilia found this hard to believe given how distractible he always seemed in their conversations. She also found it hard to believe that such a hard part of the world as Karachi could produce such a light heart. But then again, she’d never been, maybe the reports of the energy cartels had been overblown. Nevertheless, he’d found his way out and was now a large part of what made Cecilia so hopeful for the new world. He was the only Academy scientist that ever attended mass, and one was better than the none she’d expected. Maybe there was hope faith and science could live side by side here.

“Oh you know what I mean.” She pinched him lightly as he sat next to her. “I haven’t seen a bicycle since I left Sao Paulo, where’d you get that thing?”

“Latest shipment down from the Fate,” he let out a low whistle as he ran a hand along the tubing. “Top of the line, this puppy.”

“Bah!” She laughed, “Top of the line? That thing looks like they peddled it right out of the 19th century!”

“Well ok fine, top of our line then.” He smiled, the morning sun glinting in his lively eyes. “It’s the most complex thing we’ve been able to coax out of the factories aboard the Fate so far, so I’ll take what I can get.” He nudged her playfully, “Besides, retro is in these days can’t you tell?” He waived towards the town below that could have easily been pulled from a 19th-century frontier.

That much was certainly true. In their desperate need for basics following their landing, no one had noticed that the factories aboard the ship were malfunctioning. It produced biological material just fine, but once they wanted to move beyond subsistence and into a more modern society they ran into issues. They could barely get the ship to make anything more complicated than a length of pipe.

This never bothered Cecilia, there was a big enough stash of built technology in the hangers of the ship to let them set up a stable society for what few of them remained. Solar panels and batteries to meet their modest energy requirements in the mild climate, basic agricultural equipment to help them work the land, hardware to let them build and furnish their homes out of local lumber, medicine to help them adapt to the few oddities of the new world and keep them healthy, even a fleet of boats that floated in the harbor they could use to fish or explore the nearby islands in their archipelago.

All this seemed more than enough to Cecilia. It was enough to live on, and to live quite well, but it wouldn’t be enough to grow. No aircraft to explore beyond their base, no equipment to mine the hills, no machinery to expand their production locally. They could house and feed all the remaining souls who had survived the long journey to Arcadia, but they could not grow much beyond that. Settle the valleys and islands around Descanso and that would be it. Cecilia didn’t see the problem, it seemed seeking endless growth was what got them into this situation in the first place. Maybe without so many modern luxuries, they could preserve this Eden they’d been handed, and not be banished at the first opportunity.

But still, with the Citizen’s Council in control Cecilia’s voice counted for less than it once had aboard the ship, and so young Karan was working away with his team to try and fix the factories.

“So it seems you’ve been making some progress on your project,” she assumed.

“Well yes and no,” he sighed. “While this is certainly more complex than the screws we were able to get the ship to make a couple of weeks ago it’s still a long way off the microchips we need it to make eventually.” He tapped the steel tubing. “Heck, it’s a long way off of the modern bicycle plans we have at the ready.” He jumped up with a grin. “Still, it beats the heck out of walking down the hill every day!” He laughed, and pushed off down the path. “Will I see you at the meeting this morning Sister?” he called back as he gained speed.

“Of course you will bobo, and stop calling me that!” She hollered after him.

“Very well, see you later Bhaina!” He laughed as he careened off down the path and under the trees.

Cecilia sighed, shook her head, and stood up. She loved that young man, but she’d never win with him. She strolled down the hill, following the tire tracks in the loam. Her brow furrowed as she walked, could they resist the forbidden fruit? First bicycles, then scooters, then a truck or two just to help with the big loads. Next thing you know they’d want to build a road through Kuo’s Woods. Maybe there was another way, at least she hoped so. If there was a way vibrant minds like Karan’s could find it. So she continued her descent through the woods and out into the tree-lined streets of Descanso.

Walking down the rolling streets towards the harbor with trees dancing in the breeze Cecilia remembered the first times she set eyes on this place from a million miles away. It took little enough convincing to get her vote to settle this planet after she came off the ice, and before long they were shopping around for a preliminary settlement location. The shores of Descanso harbor went immediately to the top of the list, and now years later, it seemed as though there wasn’t really much of a discussion. Arcadia had almost no axial tilt so the tropics stayed almost unlivably hot year-round even though they experienced regular monsoon seasons that kept the belt in balance. So they looked at the strings of islands just north and south of this sweltering band. In truth, the islands were much the same, at least as far as they could tell on their approach, but nowhere was quite like the tranquil hills of the Landfall Archipelago which they ultimately decided upon.

Here, warm air from the tropics mixed with a cold current sweeping up from the southern polar region balancing the climate in crisp sublimity. The greenery of other islands looked much the same from above but for one striking difference, around Descanso the lowlands and vales were all largely clear, covered with moss-green grasses in wide fields, not the dense bush that smothered most other islands. Their island chain climbed the latitudes rather prodigiously giving them stepping stone access to the tropics and near antarctic waters if they proved to have valuable resources. The largest island in the grand chain that their eyes settled upon had a high, bony ridge of white-capped mountains running down its spine, although Cecilia had only ever seen the capped summits once, and that was only after tramping for several days inland to climb a local summit that afforded views both out to seas and across the grand island to the towering peaks. This island also had a deep bay on its western shore that appeared to be almost completely protected, a perfect natural harbor, and that bay was surrounded by rolling grassy fields, fresh water from the river that wound its way up into Cecilia’s vale, and building materials from the forests appeared like they would be easily at hand. Yes, this was the place. No doubt about it, a place almost tailor-made for their needs.

Walking along the tidy, dirt streets Cecilia smiled and took a deep breath in, looking high up into the cerulean sky. There, hanging at the zenith, was the apple in her Eden. One of the moons they had found so peculiar on their approach sat in a geostationary position almost directly over the town. It hung near the apex day in and day out, glinting coldly. No large, butter moon like the one she’d known from Earth, this was a cold moon hard and shimmering in the morning sky. She knew the strange moons surrounding Arcadia were God’s work, but it was hard to feel Him in this menacing sphere that stared down at them day in and out. On this particular morning, it caught the early light to reflect a thin crescent that waned even as she watched, an arc of pure, unbroken white, not a pock or nick to be seen. It was a mystery to which she wanted to say “the Lord works in mysterious ways” and move on, but she knew The Academy couldn’t resist exploring this unknown, indeed she expected to receive some news about their investigations as part of the meeting today. Still, as the moon glinted down, finally fading from visibility in the brightening morning sky, Cecilia knew these moons would send them all from the garden if they could not resist the temptation.

She returned to earth, no need to dwell on that which she could not control. The city was coming alive around her and an intoxicating bustle began to fill the crisp airs of Descanso. Smells of cooking breakfasts wafted out of windows open to the morning breeze, young children and dogs ducked out of doors and romped out into the shared gardens that sat amid their handsome groups of houses. A few called over to her, laughing without a care as only children could. She’d simply wave in reply and call a pleasant Bom Dia in return. A few blocks further on the buildings rose up with their handsome frontages, shops were just beginning to turn over their signs as she walked past, but most of the thickening foot traffic was headed where she was. Down to the harbor.

The people of Descanso, indeed of all Arcadia, were a handsome, almost euphoric folk. Most had been surprised to find themselves awake after their long journey, and all were stunned to learn how many countless eons they’d slept, and all grieved at how many had been lost along the way. Families had been destroyed, futures cut cruelly short. Still, the promise of a new world so far beyond their wildest dreams and the healing stream of time had washed the despair from their hearts as they settled into their new lives. They came from all corners of old Earth, with faces that told a million different stories, all scattered, all scarred, but here they had a chance to start fresh. Turns out the age-old call of a fresh start was enough in this place to overturn even the oldest of hegemonies. This place, and the careful machinations of Kuo Yun in his fading days, had ensured the toppling.

In just a few short years Arcadia had molded them as well. They began looking like an almost comedic poster of diversity, skin of every hue, hair of every color, clothes from each and every part of the old world, but in time the planet had worn off the prickliest of their old tribal flourishes. Clothes unfit for the somewhat more rugged life of an Arcadian wore out and couldn’t be replaced, elaborate jewelry or grooming couldn’t be maintained. Heck, they hadn’t had a decent barber in town for almost three years, and even now Cecilia wouldn’t trust the one that’d opened up a couple of months back come near her unruly mop. But it was more than that, they were all Arcadians now, the old posturing of their identities was as psychologically ill-fitting as they were unfunctional for a world that required everyone to work with their hands.

Recently, they’d begun getting a couple of different fabrics out of the factories aboard the Fate so that there was some difference in clothing that passed Cecilia on the street, but as always it was human ingenuity that really helped them thrive. She passed a newly opened fabric store rolling up their front gate for the morning’s trade, a striking five different patterns of woven flax were on display. Cecilia smiled, thinking how paltry this would have seemed back on Earth, but then again when was the last time anyone on Earth had to build a loom from scratch? God had made them in his own image, and he loved to create.

As she rounded the corner to the square, Cecilia walked by the buzzing workshop with doors thrown wide to catch the fresh morning air off the harbor. Here human craft was on its fullest display. The workshop was a proud stone building, the only one in town, that sat on a little rise on the far edge of the plaza. It was a hive of creativity; they had opened shortly after The Academy taking the information that the researchers extracted from the archives of the ship and turned it into a life well-lived. Feeding the growing population in the rich soils had proven strikingly easy, and shelters were easy to erect that suited the mild climate. But people wanted more than food and shelter, they wanted dinner and homes. That’s where the workshop came in, they all worked together here to turn the wealth of natural abundance around them into art of every shape and form. Local flora, once declared safe for consumption, became ingredients in recipes in the shop’s kitchens. Local timber became the tidy homes and shops they all made their lives in. Indeed, it was in these open spaces that the local reed that seemed so much like flax to Cecilia had been transformed into the linens at the shop she had just passed. God’s hand was at work, making something from nothing.

The town square was buzzing as well this morning. Down on the harbor side, the morning market was popping up under its colorful awnings. The early morning’s catch was being offloaded into trays of ice, and carts laden with produce from the most productive gardens rolled in to trade away that which those prolific gardeners could not eat. A few tents even displayed the latest shipment down from the Fate, mostly tools and hardware that let them improve their homes. Through all this bustle the smell of warm cinnamon wafted to Cecilia on the morning breeze. She looked over and saw her friend Sarah, the baker, doing brisk morning business.

“Bom dia Sarah!” she called as she crossed the plaza.

“Howdy Cecilia!” Sarah called back with a toothy smile. “The usual for ya?”

“Sim, por favor.”

The baker handed over a warm, cinnamon scone steaming in the sunlight. “Meeting at The Academy this mornin’ I hear?”

“Yes, indeed.” Cecilia nodded, savoring the first bite. She’d been told they were working off a backstock of spices brought on the ship and that they were having difficulty cultivating certain species, cinnamon among them. Maybe she could dedicate some of the church’s plot as a test garden for spices. It didn’t seem right that they’d live in a world without Sarah’s cinnamon scones.

She made to take out her tab to transfer Sarah credit for her breakfast, but didn’t even get her hand into her pocket before Sarah cut in, “Don’t you even think about it darlin’,” she chided “I still owe you from the last milling you pitched in on, and with next harvest due any day now I’m liable to go even further into your debt, if you’re willing to work on the grind again.”

“Of course I am, just let me know the day.” Cecilia volunteered, as she took another bite and looked around the market, in truth very few ‘sales’ could be said to be taking place. Everyone ostensibly worked off a central credit system that would help each and every Arcadian buy what little they couldn’t provide for themselves, live well and balance their life with the community and the planet. It was radically transparent and exceptionally elegant, all centralized in the ship’s AI, yet another invisible touch of Kuo Yun years after his passing. But in reality, credit rarely changed hands, in a community as tight-knit as theirs favors stacked on favors and their society chipped happily along. No one could become too rich, or too poor, so credit just became a formality for large, infrequent transactions, and like so much else the very concept of a morning “market” began to lose its meaning.

“I do appreciate it,” Sarah cut into her contemplation, “Well, I know it’s not your favorite but you’d best be getting along to your meeting, you know Dr. Tran doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Sim, eu conheço,” Cecilia sighed, finishing off her breakfast. “Let me know what day you want my help on the mill!” She waved and turned to walk up the steps into The Academy.

From the town square, the steps of the academy rose up wide and stately, one of the few stone edifices in the whole town. Like all other parts of the plaza they were primarily a meeting place, and on this morning several couples enjoyed their breakfast or played with young children in the warm sunlight. Atop its little rise, The Academy stood, proud and well clad. The building rose four stories with broad wings reaching out, stretching the length of the square, at the center the great clock tower rose another couple stories into the deep blue sky. The ethereal clock face at its center a constant reminder that no matter how primordial life may feel here on Arcadia they were a people of the future. The clock was a milky glass globe that shifted colors almost imperceptibly as the days passed by in their subtle difference, but most strikingly no matter which direction you faced the hands ticking away their hours always seemed to be facing right back at you.

Of course that all was largely decor. There was no need to haul something so elaborate, so delicate across the stretching parsecs just to tell the time. No the clock tower, and therefore The Academy itself, was very much the anchor of their new society. It served as the primary data transfer point with the ship and its satellite arrays drifting so many miles above as well as a nexus for their local communication networks. Almost as soon as they began to settle in Descanso they brought the great orb down and settled it in its place of high honor, even before the rest of The Academy was built below it, a reminder of the greatness of old Earth and the wonders it had produced. Even in its darkest days.

Cecilia climbed the wide steps in a few easy strides and entered into this hallowed ground. From windows high in the clock tower the soft early light cascaded in all around her, flooding the tidy halls with life itself. Even this early the stretching corridors were ablaze with the intoxicating vibrance of minds at work. All around entranced faces shuffled to and fro as they carried on about their endless explorations of all the great unknown. She smiled and remembered back in the very earliest of days, before the clock tower or the square or even the notion that Descanso could be a real, vibrant city, when The Academy was little more than a couple of metal sheds dropped by the harbor, this feeling of invigorating exploration still filled the air. It was exhilarating, and it was dangerous. These minds in their endless quests would burrow their way straight through to the very fabric of creation if they could, and straight away from God.

“Ah Cecilia, glad you could make it.” A voice called out through the morning bustle, Cecilia looked down one of the sunlit corridors and saw Dr. Tran, a waifish woman in a long white coat and pressed trousers with eyes that pierced right into your very thoughts. She was a member of The Jury across all their endless years lost among the stars as the group’s astrophysicist, but somehow the time seemed to slip right by her as if deterred by the razor’s edge of her mind.

Beside her walked the other, remaining jurors. Dr. Marcello, their boisterous biologist smiling the same wide grin that came to his face the first time he saw Arcadia and had never left. The somber, young Henry David, the Voice of the People, always dutifully there, even when his eyes were a million miles away. And, of course, Atzi Delaney, as always serene and inscrutable. After the Kamba, Saito and Yun delegates had passed away they were naturally succeeded by others from within their families, but they weren’t part of The Jury, not really. By God’s grace, they didn’t demand to be privy to the Jury’s discussions now that the colony was settled, and so Cecilia was happy to leave them out.

Dr. Tran whisked right by Cecilia in the lobby and down another branching hallway that led away from the square. “Follow me,” she snipped, syllables tight and terse. “We don’t have too long and there are a couple of developments you all should see before we try and make the final approach.”

The hall opened up to a wide, tidy lab with rows of desks on either side and large windows that looked out to the very tip of the harbor and the Castilla beyond. At the first bank of desks, she saw Karan sunk in deep discussion with another computer scientist, reams of bright code flashing before their eyes; as always they worked in pairs, letting ideas percolate between their minds. A pulsing orange light on the side of their desks told her that they were not to be disturbed, lest you risk the wrath of Dr. Tran, not a pleasant prospect. All the same, Karan shot her a bright smile before returning to his project.

The researchers would always work like this, just a few hours of intense coworking that apparently generated more unique ideas and approaches than days of conventional, independent research could create. After that, they’d cool down by laying out the next session’s work and head home after only a couple of hours, usually sorely in need of a nap Cecilia was told the creative sessions were so mentally taxing. Any leg work that needed doing would be turned over to the ship’s AI and the fleet of robotic arms it controlled on each bench in the lab.

It was hard for Cecilia to comprehend in truth. Her whole life she’d done the jobs that others had refused, and there was no getting around tedious hours. A garden wasn’t ready for planting until it had been turned, a supper wasn’t ready until it was out on plates, a roof wasn’t repaired until it kept the rain out. How could just a few hours of work really make a dent in the mountains of projects The Academy liked to create for itself? Dr. Tran assured her it was the most efficient way, but Cecilia harbored her doubts, and honestly, wouldn’t have minded one bit if their progress slowed.

They stepped into another bank of desks near the end of the wing. The astronomy and astrophysics lab. Dr. Tran’s domain. De facto she ran the entire Academy, top to bottom, even if she was only officially in charge of this team. It wasn’t hard to see why. Watching them work together when she’d come to visit was to watch a well-oiled machine run in perfect balance. Hypotheses and data and analyses slid from mind to mind in an almost liquid flow. But it was more than that, it was the way they looked at her. Faces from all over the world looked at this slight woman with a face of stone and showed nothing but admiration. Yes, Cecilia could see it, Dr. Tran was molded by God to lead.

“Will you pull up the latest from Theia please?” She asked one of her assistants.

With a click, the large display that hung on the wall opened up to reveal a colossal jovian planet spinning silently in the blackness. It was a great marble in every shade of blue. Theia, the largest planet in the system. From their vantage on the dayside they could see a few moons floating and the thin edge-on line of the ring system, utterly dwarfed by the spooling clouds that mixed and danced below them. Cecilia’s heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen the planet, nor the fiftieth, but it still took her breath away. The human mind truly wasn’t built to comprehend things of this magnitude. Centuries of misguided historical analysis held that humans once fancied these jovian behemoths as kings among gods, this was not God, but He was there all the same.

“Alright move us around the array to the east terminator.” Dr. Tran requested.

In a second, the whole planet seemed to speed up in its rotation and suddenly they were looking down from a new vantage at the hazy line where Theia turned slowly into night in its lazy rotation. Gasps escaped from lips around the room.

In the thickening darkness around the equator bursts of light jumped between the clouds illuminating a dance in every color. The flickering pulses seemed minute in comparison to the massive planet rising away on either side, but they coursed through the alien atmosphere in a quixotic ballet with steps never lasting more than a few seconds. The individual pulses were faint, small, and fast but they jumped in such a procession that collectively a rainbow of lightning pulsed across the equator and around into the blackness of the night.

Atzi Delaney was the first to regain herself, “Are these aurorae? You’ve been monitoring the planet for quite a while why haven’t we seen this before?”

“Well actually I’m showing you this because we’ve just established that they’re not aurorae,” Tran began matter-of-factly. “They may be visually interesting but jovian planets typically have them so it wasn’t all that noteworthy.” She turned to her assistant, “Please take us to full-night and explain Chara.”

“Not noteworthy? Tran, you have to be kidding me!” Dr. Marcello gasped, she shot him a hard look in response.

The great giant turned once again and suddenly they were positioned directly on the night side from a further vantage so that sunlight created a thin, blue halo around the fringes of the planet. Cecilia’s stomach turned. Few things in the world seemed quite so unnatural as the displays in The Academy, it was as if a hole had been cut in the very fabric of reality and they looked down from on high, jumping thousands of kilometers in a moment as if they were God himself. From this new vantage, they could see the band of flickering lights stretching clear across the whole planet. To be sure, they were incredibly faint from this far out, almost imperceptible, driven next to invisibility by the sheer scale of Theia. But they were there, glittering, dancing.

“So this is a live look from a satellite we have, holding hard on the nightside of Theia,” Chara began excitedly. “Yeah, so we started properly studying the planet last year, and like you say, Miss Delaney, aurorae were our first guess as well even though we don’t have any record of equatorial aurora, still it seemed like a good place to start.” She took a rushed breath and pushed her short hair back out of her face. “So we used our satellite array to map the magnetosphere to see if there were any oddities that would explain aurora forming around the equator.”

“And?” Dr. Marcello demanded, nearly as excited as Chara, standing just below the display with wide eyes.

“And nothing!” she yammered back. “Nothing to tell us that the planet should have such odd atmospheric effects. So we decided to move this satellite into position to study the phenomenon visually. It’s been holding heliocentric position as the planet turns around since we can’t get a good reading on the light on the dayside. They’re pretty faint as you all can see, but we’ve been mapping them for the past couple of days and when we overlay all the data here’s what we get.”

Another tap on the keyboard, another round of gasps. The faint band jumped into jaw-dropping brightness. The entire equator for ten degrees north and south glowed brilliantly in a sprawling web of light. The pulses were now held at their most visible and patterns formed where they had flickered in the clouds. Coursing rivers of light wound their way through the atmosphere shining back bright white at their thickest before branching off into a rainbow of different colors as the pulses diverged from the main currents. Her fellow jurors stood with mouths agape, but all Cecilia saw was another apple in the garden.

“So this is why we’re just now certain it’s not an aurora.” Sarah continued, composing herself. “These pulses travel along relatively set courses, they move seemingly with the clouds rather than higher up in the atmosphere where aurora would be, unaffected by local wind. Whatever is causing these lights it’s floating up in the upper cloud layers.”

They stood in rapt silence as the visual continued slowly morphing. Strand by strand the web was rewoven again and again. The rivers of light shifted subtly as their nexuses moved with the billowing clouds below.

“Alright, I’ll be the one to say it,” Henry David’s soft voice broke the silence. “Could it be life?”

Dr. Marcello stood eyes utterly fixated on the visual, drinking in each step of the chromatic dance, “Certainly not as we know it…” his usually booming voice drawn to an astonished whisper. The man was the only person on Arcadia, Cecilia thought, how might find more beauty in the natural world than she did. Even if their foundational beliefs were a world apart, she could understand his awe.

“This new evidence obviously opens a host of new hypotheses,” Dr. Tran cut in directly. “If it was common electrostatic discharge we’d expect a relatively random distribution, but there is clearly a pattern here, so that lends to the belief that some fixed objects in the atmosphere may be causing the flashes. Still, we’d only propose life as a hypothesis of last resort, and we’ve only been collecting this fixed position data for a few days.”

“Indeed…last resort…” The rapt Dr. Marcello muttered, “You’ll be sending this over to my team?” He asked Tran.

“Of course, it’s already on the way, you’ll have the live feed as well, I just wanted to see your face when I showed this to you.” A sliver of an impish smile cracked through her stony facade. He shook his head in disbelief and whisked away without another word, off back to his team.

Dr. Trans’ assistants broke out in laughter.

“Say doc I don’t think I’ve seen Marcello at a loss for words before.” Chara chuckled.

Cecilia had to laugh as well, she’d rarely seen the man’s mouth shut for more than a moment. But positively dumbstruck? That was another thing entirely.

Tran nodded satisfied before her usual, cool composure swept back across her face. She clapped her hands lightly. “Alright, now time for the main event,” she commanded, extinguishing the last remaining chuckles in the group. “Our approach probe should be within visual range by now, Chara if you please.”

Another click and the display shifted away from the jovian and back to their own home, and the bedeviled moons that orbited so perfectly around it. From the perspective of the approaching craft, the moon that hung directly over Descanso looked like a hazy white ball in a well of ink. It was a view Cecilia had seen many times before. Indeed, even before they set foot on the planet they had similar imagery of the moons. As always their bright faces seemed to somehow defy accurate capture, always looking somehow blurred even when captured by lenses that could map planetary surfaces from across the system.

“As you all know these moons have been somewhat a thorn in my team’s side, considering how easy it should be to gather good data on something so close at hand. Still, hopefully, we’ll be able to get some good insights today and maybe even manage to touch down if luck is on our side.” She looked up at the glowing, opaque orb. “I’ve been taking a series of measurements with the sensors aboard the Fate and have had some luck in that regard. The ship’s AI has been doing studies across the electromagnetic spectrum and found that all four of the moons seem to emit streams of strange radiation at different times, almost indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation. It’s been rather frustrating going though, all the data dumps from the ship on the subject seem to come back corrupted in some way or another.”

They’d tried in fits and starts to capture some better images of the strange objects ever since they landed, always failing to capture anything better than the hazy image they now saw. The myriad minds of The Academy had proposed a host of different hypotheses for the strange effect. Maybe the moons were surrounded somehow by little gassy atmospheres of their own, just enough to scatter light before it reached the surface. Maybe some strange lensing from the nearby planet was causing problems with the imaging. Cecilia never bothered to keep too close of tabs on the subject, but there was no avoiding it now. They’d set out to land a probe on the moon’s surface and see what they could find out.

“Well, we’ve seen this before…” Dr. Tran began, a whisper of disappointment creeping into her measured voice. “Still this is the closest visual we’ve had, and that does appear to be a relatively hard edg…” Her words choked in her throat.

In an instant, the image resolved itself out of hazy obscurity and into glittering crystal. There was no atmospheric haze, only a spinning ball of diamond with a thousand facets precisely cut. As the probe approached another layer similarly cut, similarly perfect resolved itself inside the outer layer. And then another. And then another. A matryoshka of perfect crystalline spheres each spinning perfectly inside of the others, down and down and down until the facets melted into a gleaming white. Cecilia had never seen anything so perfect, so precise, so surely the work of what only could be God.
“Oh my God,” Chara cursed.

Dr. Tran gripped the back of her assistant’s seat with white knuckles. “Start the deceleration sequence now, full thrust.”

A few keystrokes and the growth of the moon began to slow, holding the clarity of all the spheres and their billions of circling facets.

“Do we…do we attempt the landing?” Sarah whispered.

“No, see if we can…” Dr. Tran stuttered, cool composure now completely wiped away. “See if you can hold stationary with full thrust and stop approach.”

The probe’s rockets were firing hard on either side of the main body to eliminate the formidable momentum that it had been carrying expecting to find a rocky surface at the end of its journey. Still, the camera held steady, keeping a clear feed down to the spinning surfaces below. The momentum couldn’t be erased all at once though and the moon continued to grow in the display, evermore facets resolved themselves as the probe continued its approach. Inexorably the view grew and grew, suddenly the display flashed white several times, and then nothing.

“What happened?” Dr. Tran demanded.

Sarah frantically worked her keyboard, “The feed’s dead!”

Heaves of dismay circled around the room, but Cecilia only smiled. Yes, God was all around them, and this time He didn’t want them out of the garden so easily.

—

Henry David always seemed to have trouble getting away from humans.

He’d spent the better part of his life just trying to find some quiet corner of the world to have to himself and think his thoughts. If it was wrapped in nature so much the better, but he’d learned he couldn’t be that picky. But now thirty-some lived years, six homes, and two planets later he was beginning to doubt he’d ever find the solitude he sought.

The irony of his struggles was not lost on him, now that Arcadia was home. Humanity was but a blip on the surface of this wild, teeming planet. There were whole hemispheres left to be explored, hell even most of their island hadn’t been properly mapped. Yet somehow, one way or another, almost every single day Henry David found himself sitting on the front steps of town hall dealing with something.

Every day was different of course, there were so many challenges to overcome when homesteading, and somehow or another, try as he might, Henry David was always the one who was called on to help. Now the remaining few souls trickling down from the Fate almost all decided to head off into the hills surrounding Descanso, filling in the valleys and flats with little townships and their homesteads. And that meant, maddeningly, that Henry David was now not only the one most frequently called on for help, but the one person most apt to provide it. He’d been doing his damnedest to get away from society since he’d first set foot on the planet, building his home up in a high vale north of the city next to a clear, deep kettle lake that looked further north towards the wild coastlands that wrapped around the top of the island. But society had its hooks in him now and the harder he fought the more entangled he became.

With the clarity of hindsight, he could see just how futile his struggles really were. It all started that damned day he woke up on the ship. It never should have happened to him, but it did nonetheless and now he was just about worn out fighting his fate. Henry David went down for the long sleep on Earth mostly expecting that, that would be it for him and his life; he never had much faith in the Delaney venture, the whole project always seemed like the death rattle of a species that realized too late it had poisoned itself to him. Still, the woods he’d loved to visit so much as a child were all gone or dead and it was only by a stroke of luck his parents were able to sell out their aluminum holdings to Delaney in exchange for berths for him and his partner. There was no nature, no work, no life left on Earth, better to take the chance that by some miracle they would actually find a new planet and make a life there. And if not, well hey, at least he got to see a little greenery before it was all gone. So he’d gone down in the Delaney cryo facility in Boston expecting that to be it, or at best, he’d wake up to some barren rock that the scientists leapt through hoops to say was more suitable than Mars which had so stubbornly refused their efforts at colonization.

But that was not his lot. No, he woke up in the cold luxury of a stateroom on the CRS Delaney’s Fate bewildered, sick, confused. It was days before he could wander the long hallway down to the bridge where Atzi Delaney informed him that he, Henry David, long-unemployed carpenter, naturalist to a dying world, and general skeptic of all things human, he was chosen as Voice Of The People for the ship, he would be the one to give voice to all the sleeping millions in the halls of the ship. He burst out in laughter at first, certain it was some sort of joke, but Atzi’s serene face just held his eyes until the reality had settled upon him. It was a joke, one played by that most mischievous of pranksters, the universe. He could protest, he could beg, he could cry but it was inescapable the ship had chosen him at random and so each time they approached a planet he, of all the millions of sleeping souls aboard, would be woken to join the capitalist demigods who comprised the rest of the jury and determine the fate of humanity.

He wasn’t at all surprised when the endless procession of useless planets passed by the eyes of the Fate, how much hubris could humanity seriously contain? Did they really expect to burn their house and expect the universe to toss them a new one out of the goodness of its heart? He would’ve understood this sort of expectation from the nun, afterall she was supposed to believe that the universe or God or whoever cared one whit about them, but she more than any of the rest of them seemed to realize just how ridiculous this whole expedition was. So that was going to be it then, he’d pass his days waking up, reviewing yet another planet unfit for habitation, learn the lesson of mankind’s vanity once more, and slip back into sleep. Until even his little stints awake wiped away his last remaining days, or more mercifully until his casket failed as so many were and ended the recurring nightmare. He remembered the numb shock of seeing the notice when his parent’s caskets had failed…and then Jamie’s… he should have felt something more, been enraged or bitter or heartbroken, but he was just numb. His interstellar hell made that the only feeling he was capable of.

And then along came Arcadia, and the joke took on a whole new meaning. Of course the planet was beyond his wildest dreams, that much went without saying, but he said it plenty anyway. From the first image he saw Henry David knew he would spend the rest of his days smothered in this riot of life, then the sadness came. He’d never walk these woods with Jamie, never share a home tucked in the hills where they could live a life entrenched in nature like no one had for centuries. But that was the cruelty of life, not its attempt at a joke, no that came later as he began to explore the hills around their fledgling settlement. He found his lake in its little nestled hanging valley in a matter of days, accessible to society if he needed it, a world away when he wanted it. Perfect. But even with all his survivalism and naturalism and carpentry couldn’t keep him alive alone on a different world. He didn’t know which pants were fit to eat (a good deal of them it turned out), where or if imported crops would do well in the new soil (almost anywhere worked in the end), or what trees were suitable for building timber (actually a scarce few oddly). So society reeled him back in once more, he was tied to the new colony.

The early days weren’t so bad. There were hardly any people, he was mostly working with biologists at The Academy to get different crops going, and down at the docks hauling in cargo drops as they came down from the ship splashing into the sea. The town couldn’t really even be called a town, The Academy was a couple of storage containers stacked on a rise by the harbor and town hall was just the far side of the square where they’d built a couple benches to accommodate the tiny population. But along with the cargo came down more people and the joke turned again.

Descanso began to grow, and so did Henry David’s desire to slip away to his lake and live his life in peace. But once again it was not to be. Despite all his struggles and refusals the title Voice of the People meant a great deal to the new citizens of this world, besides Kuo Yun needed all the help he could get with his new Citizen’s Council concept. As much as he’d rather have slipped away and let society go its own way he couldn’t bear the thought of some Yun or Saito underling getting a bright idea after Kuo passed and retrenching the powers of old Earth. So he stayed around, even accepted a position on the council at the rest of the jury’s insistence, and helped build the new world even when all he really wanted was to slip away.

Now, years later, between his experience on the council and years homesteading out in the hills people constantly called on him with questions and the track that led down into town from his lake had grown deep. Sure, he could’ve insisted that people come up to him but that would’ve been worse. No, the best to be done would be to give his help when people sought it down on the wide steps of the town hall. He’d hoped that if he never went in the building the town would stop seeing him as a leader and eventually he’d get the peace he so long sought. Instead, most of the civic functions of the hall had moved out onto the steps, the meeting chamber sat empty and they hosted their debates al fresco. At times he had to smile, the universe that trickster, was funny when she wanted to be.

Today though, he was in his place. The dirt was soft beneath his boots as he tilled the last row of his garden for a new planting, his sheep dotted the lakeshore around him, the ocean glittered like a billion dancing coins in the morning light. He could hear the wind in the trees, and the buzz of the cicadas-that-weren’t-cicadas. And of course, he could hear the endless babble of Dr. Marcello as he helped till the beds.

Henry David loved gardening with the chatty biologist, even if he had a hard time believing it. The man’s chattering truly had no end. He’d dig and dig away and his words would drift off on the morning breeze filling the valley with the sounds of life. Just as the whip-poor-wills used to fill the dying forests with their whistling song back home, Marcello filled the forests of Arcadia with the chatter of a different sort. By rights Henry David should’ve despised it, the incessant drivel of humanity filling his little corner of solitude, but he couldn’t manage to. Chatter was the way of Dr. Marcello, just as waves crashed and insects buzzed and birds sang.

“…so we’re growing preciously short on other explanations for the Theia phenomenon.” Henry David tuned into the middle of the stream of words as he came to the end of his row. “The astrophysics team is all but stumped, and they now have the satellite array sweeping the high clouds for carbon isotopes that shouldn’t be there. Of course, my team isn’t much help yet beyond confirming that life is looking more and more probable, but holy hell what does that even mean? I mean some sort of ammonia-based biochemistry would be the first hypothesis to test but..”
“What, so you’re picturing some sort of like balloon aliens floating around in the clouds?” Henry David cut in, interest sufficiently piqued by this development to stop his work.

“Ahh haha, my friend not exactly,” Marcello smiled continuing down his row. “Right now we think it’s more likely that we’re essentially seeing extremophile microorganisms in the high clouds that also happen to be bioluminescent.”

“If that’s the case then how would the flashes be moving so quickly?” Henry leaned on his hoe, always game to poke holes in the good doctor’s theories.

“Weeeell, we don’t have a great answer there. But our own ignorance doesn’t make it less likely that this life wouldn’t be particularly developed. More to discover I say!” As always Marcello found a way to end on a high note.

“Less likely than all of this doctor?” He asked waving to the beautiful morning that had developed around them as they worked; part of why he liked the doctor so much was that Henry felt like Marcello truly understood, better than anyone, just how preposterous it was that they had found a planet like Arcadia. So many others just seemed to take it for granted.

Marcello could only shake his head and laugh, “My friend nothing is quite so unlikely as the two of us standing here having this conversation right now. Ah, there’s a bugger!” He set his hoe aside and reached into the loam with a gloved hand pulling out a dark, six-legged creature from the soil. Henry always just called them nestlers, but Marcello certainly had a more proper name for them. “Of all the things that could vex us in growing food on this planet I suppose you’re not so bad, at least you’re slow, and friendly for the most part,” The creature started to squirm in protest to its captivity, segmented legs waving in the air. “And you are very helpful with getting nitrogen back in the soil for us, but you like to eat our seeds so you have to go I’m afraid.” He tossed the nestler over several beds into one they were letting rest, they’d toss all the nestlers over there along with any green waste that came out of the gardens, and in a few months’ time, they’d have a new bed ready for tilling.

“So what you’re saying is that I’m one spaceship ride away from having a hot air balloon as my new best friend.” Henry joked.

“Sure thing my friend, the biology team will watch your first contact with interest to see if the radiation, gravity, or atmosphere kills you first.” He reached the end of his row and took off his gloves. “I, for one, think I’ll stay here. I’ll take over your little valley here, and expand my research gardens.”

“Ha! You should be so lucky, more like, one more crop and I’m going to kick your chatty ass out of here so I can finally have some peace and quiet.”

“Oh you’ll never be rid of me, my young friend. Besides we have something new to try today.” Marcello teased.

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Eggplant my friend, melanzana.”

Henry David stuck out his tongue, “Yuck, go try someone else’s garden.”

“Oh young Henry, so naive in the ways of the world. The eggplant is one of the world’s truly great foods, I can’t imagine you’ve ever seen anything so much as approaching a good one in your life.” Well, that much was definitely true. “The nutrition team tells me they have some very handy particular vitamins our little colony needs. And when the time comes to harvest, you come over and I’ll make you a parmigiana that will, and I do mean will, change your mind on this marvelous nightshade.” Marcello frequently liked to wax poetic about food, that was probably another reason Henry David tolerated his company.

They reached into a bag of seed he’d brought and started to sew the wide bed.

The biologist looked thoughtful as he scattered some seed, “So I saw Karan on my way out of The Academy early this morning, he was a bit manic.”

“Really? That’s unlike him.” Even now, it was only a couple of hours after sunrise, usually, The Academy would just be getting going for the day and Karan usually got in on the late-side. “Did he say what brought him in so early?”

“Well that’s the thing, apparently he’d been there all night, so had most of the computer science team. They were roping in Dr. Tran and anyone on the astrophysics team they could grab.”

“True? What’s the to-do? I wasn’t aware of any projects coming to a close.”

“That’s what I was wondering, so I asked him and apparently just as he was going to head up the hill for the night yesterday a program of his completed itself and he got a huge data dump back from the ship unexpectedly.” Marcello was casual talking about this unexpected development, still neatly tucking seeds into the soil, but Henry David thought he could hear an edge to his voice. “Apparently it was an archive of odd electromagnetic pulses, almost indistinguishable from the cosmic background, that the ship started picking up a couple of light years outside the system.”

“Weird,” Henry David’s interest was sufficiently captured that he’d set aside his seed. “Did he have any theories on why it stayed cached for so long?”

“Honestly it was pretty chaotic by the time I left, and most of it went clear over my head. Seems like the cache was locked up with all the trouble they’re having with the factories, so I guess it’s a good thing they’ve made some progress. But to be honest, they were much more wrapped up in the source of the pulses.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“Well as best they can tell right now the source seems to be our little moons.”

Henry David nearly spat, “What?! And you’re just now telling me this?” His mind took off down a mazing race track. “Why…why would the moons be emitting what, radio waves?”

Marcello put his hands up, entreating moderation. “I know, I know. It has me a in a bit of a tizzy as well. But no, not quite like radio waves, not quite like anything we’ve ever seen before to be honest. I was hoping a little gardening this morning would help me come up with a plan for the bio team, I’m sure it’s bedlam back there by now.”

“Why would the bio team need a plan?” Henry David wondered. “You’re thinking these pulses aren’t natural? Are you telling me we’ve had signs of alien intelligence with us this whole time and we just wrote them off as a couple of weird moons?” He panted and looked up at the moon hanging at the zenith slowly fading away in the lightening sky.

“Woah woah woah, slow down my friend. I never said any of that, clearly I need to rethink how I communicate this information with people later today, can’t have people getting all twisted up over something that really could be nothing. The bio team will mostly be fielding questions from the public and doing some route data analysis since astrophysics and computer science are so wrapped up.”

“You can’t be serious, first these lights on Theia and now mysterious radio waves. Come on Marcello, everyone’s going to jump to the same conclusion as me here. They’ve got to be related!”

“Not radio pulses,” Marcello sighed and shook his dark head, “Oh, not you too my friend… That’s the other reason I wanted to come out here this morning, we’re going to need your help. My team is good, but the people have always had a hard time listening to lab-coated scientists. They trust you though, and we’ll need you to help us keep people from getting way too ahead of themselves on this. They’ll want answers, and to be honest we won’t have much to give.”

Henry David’s stomach twisted tight. On one track his mind raced along thinking of the possibilities these two new discoveries could contain. Was there some subtle, intelligent life right here in the system with them? He had just been ribbing the doctor about the balloon people, but now he was wondering just how possible that could really be. He had a million questions he wanted to ask Marcello, but…but there he stood, his one actual friend in the world, deep eyes looking at him hopefully, pleading with him. He was just as confused and anxious as Henry David was, probably more so because he understood the impossibility of their discovery more than he did. His stomach twisted tighter again, again he had no choice but to pick up this damn mantle that had been thrust on him, that’d he’d so much rather pass off if only someone would fucking take it.

He let out a low groan, “Goddamnit Marcello, you know I hate this shit.”

“I know you do my friend, and someday we’ll find a proper leader for the council, but it won’t be today, and today we need you.”

“Fine, you bastard.”

“That’s my boy.” Marcello smiled, covering the last of the row of seed with soil, and standing to pat Henry David on the shoulder. “You know you’d make a fine permanent fixture on the council if you’d take it.”

“I’d rather take off for the far side of the island and never see any of you twits again.”

“That’s just it, my friend,” Marcello smiled. “You don’t want it, and that’s why you’d be great. Let the town take care of itself by and large, but here you are taking the burden when needed.”

“Give me a little time to get my head on straight for this though.”
“Of course.”

“And Marcello, tell me true. Do you think these things are connected?”

He chuckled, “Of course I do my friend, and that’s why I’m a terrible scientist. There are a million hypotheses we’d need to disprove before we really start testing any connection in earnest, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re connected right? If only because we made the discoveries in such quick succession.”

“But do you have any idea how a gas giant could harbor intelligent life?”

“None whatsoever, and I’m sure my team will have plenty of possible explanations that don’t involve any connection by the time I get back. But I know what I feel.”

“And what do you feel?” Henry David asked, hoping to find reassurance.

“A million butterflies in my stomach, that’s what.” Marcello laughed, “Now, give these little seeds a good drenching, I want to rob you of some sproutlings in a few weeks to test in other beds around town.” His dark eyes locked into Henry David’s. “And don’t be too long, I’m sure word is already flying around town.”

“Have it your way, you dick.” Henry David shot back with a smile as Marcello turned and walked toward the trace of a path that wound through the woods and over the ridge into town, leaving him to steel himself for what would surely be an exhausting day ahead.

As Marcello’s footsteps receded beneath the beech trees Henry David was left to himself, and his peace. Or what he could make of it. He drenched the beds with water pumped out of his pond, listened to the waves crashing on the cliff faces far off at the foot of his hanging valley, and he thought. But his thoughts just folded back in on themselves, refusing to form a cohesive train. Finally, he gave it up and decided he’d take the long route into town, time under the beech always seemed to clear his head.

He ducked into his tidy, wooden house to grab his bag and his tab. In the few moments he was inside it chimed a half dozen times. Clearly, word had already gotten out. He turned it off. He already had more information than he could get straight.

The long path from Henry David’s valley wound out towards the sea and around the long sloping ridge that separated his valley from the wide fields of Descanso. The direct way would pop him straight over and into town, but he usually preferred the long way. It moseyed with a meditative rhythm out through the thick groves of beech and fern. Although it took him closer to the sea, the dense trees closed out the waves and he was left entrenched in the wild nature of Arcadia.

Out here he could think, with leaves dappling the light and branches swaying in the trades. Out here it became all too easy to dream. To dream of walking another path, one that turned north, off into the true wilds, to leave this messy little knot of humanity to its own devices. The island would more than provide. They spent all their lives scurrying around in furrowed circles making work, making projects, making progress. At least that’s what they called it. But where could it get them? There was already enough to eat, even the most rudimentary foraging skills could actually get you by here. They mostly grew crops to have something to do, and cling on to one little shred of home when all else was gone. In the end, it was all work for its own sake. Maybe that was the human way, but it was not his way.

If he turned north, made his way through the bush off into the rugged wilds, that could be it for Henry David. It for Descanso. It for The Academy. It for the council. They’d figure out their new way or they wouldn’t, he’d never know. The idea was almost hypnotic in its intrigue. Head off, live as no man had in millennia, take this unfathomable opportunity for all it was worth.

He’d probably seen more of the island than any of the other colonists, having been one of the first to come down and a staple on any mapping expedition for his survivalist skillset. That and the fact that on any given day without a full agenda he was several times more likely to head into the bush than into town. That’s why he knew he could thrive out in the Arcadian wilds. But for all his explorations he’d barely scratched the surface of this one island. Which was to be expected, it was about the size of Borneo, he could spend his whole life here and still have plenty to explore. His northward path left the valley and skirted along the top of the rising sea cliffs that dominated the northern edge of the island before petering out as the bony spine of the island rose into the highlands. He knew a couple of good bivouacs the first couple days out from his valley, beyond that it was all uncharted wilds. It was an intoxicating thought.

Earth held none of this mystery. Every path he’d trod there was worn wide with the footsteps of ages. Not only was everything known, and everything mapped, everything was smothered under the weight of human meaning layered on bit by bit over the millennia. There was nothing to be discovered, only learned. His old favorite haunt was a kettle lake, then a watering hole, then an ice mill, then a historic landmark, then a feedlot, then just another forgotten cove in the neverending sprawl of the Eastern Seaboard. How could he live his own life drowning under so much meaning? Not here. Here was fresh. Here was his chance for the life he’d never known he craved. How many Lilliputs hid in tucked the secreted valleys and out amongst the crashing waves of this wide world? Arcadia was wild, and it called to him…

A nestler scurried away from his stepping foot, snapping him back into the present.

That was nature’s way. It would hold you right where you were no slipping forward or back in time, the only time was now. He looked around, he hadn’t taken the path north, Henry David was still on his meandering route around the ridge towards the city. Below him, the bushes rustled, a quick flurry of whisking branches and then silence. That probably meant a poor end for the nestler he’d scared off.

People tended to think of the forests of Arcadia as rather lifeless, but it wasn’t true. Of course, most had nothing to compare them to. Maybe a visit to a forest park that would’ve been more artificial than natural by the time they got there, or some old archival nature footage back when the Amazon still had its trees and they roared with the sounds of life. It was true, the Arcadian forests were quiet. For all that the creatures were remarkably Earth-like, none besides the cicada made much noise, few really even had ears.

None had any bones. For the most part, the local fauna wore dark exoskeletons covered in dense fur, although if you spent any time really looking at them you wouldn’t call them insects. They had fewer eyes, and legs for starters, and long segmented tails for balance. The nestlers were about mid-size for their particular family, further inland you’d find their rock-dwelling cousins basking in the sun that reached almost half a meter long. Elsewhere you’d find the creatures that most people referred to as cicada. In reality, they bore little resemblance, but they were a small crawly bugger that buzzed in the treetops and could fly between the branches. So cicada it was.

Closer to the ocean diversity increased a bit, as it is wont to do. From the tideline up through the streams that climbed into the valleys and miles up the river that wound south of the city a family of amphibious cephalopods, for want of a better word, clawed their way above the surf. They’d developed a sort of cartilage that they could stiffen and soften allowing them to stalk through the ferns in silence or slip water-like beneath the waves. That was probably what had gotten the nestler. That, or somebody’s cat.

Henry David could still vividly remember the day Marcello had first shown him microscope slides of local animal cell samples there in his lab years ago. It was like he was looking at the pages of a middle school biology site. There was the cell membrane, there the nucleus with a knot of DNA they were already attempting to decode, and even there of all things was a mitochondrion. It was such a blow to human exceptionalism it brought a smile to his face. Not only were they unexceptional on the homeworld, of which they’d proven so unworthy, now here, a thousand light-years away, the universe was showing them that their type of life must not even really be rare. Water and carbon, nitrogen, and calcium would dance their way together into these forms over a few billion years like a comet would spin in its orbit. Life, in the right circumstances it seemed, was just another immutable law. Even if here diversity was a bit stunted, but hey, maybe life had just recently moved above the surf, in a few million years maybe they’d have dinosaurs of their own.

But, for as staggeringly earth-like as all the life was here, and it was shockingly so, it wasn’t Earth. And their minds had been molded for a different sort of life. Most of the settlers, who didn’t work in the biology department, ignored the local animal life at best or reviled it at worst. It was understandable in a way, there was a certain leap one had to overcome not to see the nestlers as overgrown cockroaches, to see the strange intelligence of the cephalopods and their curious habits, not just their bizarre state that hovered between solid and liquid. So the settlers brought their goats down at first, then their sheep, then a few dogs, then the cats. Next thing you knew, the nestlers had one more predator to worry about.

Their intentions were as pure as they could be, he supposed. The human mind craved familiarity, and as much as a cephalopod was familiar it really wasn’t. At least wasn’t enough. So they sought the comforts of home, all with the best intentions. They knew, really knew, how much they had to lose this time around. Introduced animals were all kept in strict balance with the local ecosystems, all carefully vetted and controlled, but time went on and the cats got out.

As he crested the low flank of the ridge and came into view of the city Henry David had to admit it might have been the cats that kept him from taking that northward path. Truly, the few dozen cats that lived in the colony wouldn’t be a threat to the nestlers or any other species here, not so long as they stayed managed. But even with the strictest promises they’d gotten out, what would be next?

He looked down from his vantage into the city. Already from out here he could see a crowd milling around in front of The Academy, could hear their voices rolling up in between the waves crashing below. Maybe it’s not the cats I should be worried about, he thought and hurried on his descent.

By the time he got to the square, the crowd had built to a roaring mass. It seemed almost everyone from the city, and quite a few from out in the hamlets besides, had descended upon The Academy. And they wanted answers.

Dr. Marcello and his team were standing athwart the doors, doing their level best to keep the people at bay. It didn’t seem to be going well.

“My friends, we’re not keeping any information from you!” Marcello cried over the tumlt. “You know everything there is to know just as soon as it’s been vetted. Right now our teams need time to work through all the data coming in.”

That didn’t help. The crowd only became more raucous. He’d tried to calm them, but in the end, only confirmed that there was more to know. Henry David slipped through the crowd as best he could and leaned into Marcello’s ear.

“What the hell is going on?” He shouted hoarsely, “I thought you were keeping a lid on this.”

“It was already pretty hectic by the time I got back, then Karan, quello scemo, had to come out here and announce that last night’s data transfer was just the tip of the iceberg. The ship has been dumping data ever since. It seems the pulses are a bit more than an astrophysical oddity. But he didn’t have the good sense to say anything meaningful and now everyone thinks they’re hiding something.”

“Well are they?” Henry David had to ask the dumb question.

“How the hell should I know? Although whatever they know, the last thing we need is any more tinder on this fire right now.”

Henry David turned around and had to agree with the assessment. The crowd, thousands strong, was just one step away from devolving completely into a mob. It was a scene ripped from the news feeds of old Earth. It turned his stomach, he knew these people, even liked some of them well enough, and here they were ready to rush over their fellow citizens and for what? On his northward path he could leave all this behind, forget humanity and all its many shortcomings…but no, the cats had gotten out and he had to help shoo them back in.

“Everyone please…” He shouted firmly. Immediately the din abated. Oh you assholes, he thought. Marcello had been here saying the exact same things Henry would say, but because he was a member of The Academy he wasn’t to be trusted. Never mind that Marcello was almost everyone’s friend. Us and them knew no bounds. “I’m as keen as any of you to learn what the team in there has to tell us, but this is not the way.” The roar had now almost entirely ebbed. “The folks in there are tired and stressed after working away at this all night, the last thing they need is a shouting crowd at the door.” The crowd now listened intently, goddamn it why me?, he thought, he’d rather they listen to almost anyone else but one twist of fate had put him on a pedestal he couldn’t seem to climb down from. Best to make the most of it. “Now, we all have heaps of questions, so why don’t you all come join me on the town hall steps and we can get our priorities in line for what we want to know?”

Without another word, he grabbed Marcello and pushed his way through the crowd towards town hall on the far side of the square. He had to shove his way at first, but soon the crowd began to part before him, and by the time they hit the square the tide had turned and the mass began to flow away from The Academy doors.

“Thank you, my friend,” Marcello whispered to him.

“We really need to work on your people skills Marcello.” Henry David shot back with a smile.

“I wish it were so easy. As I said, they see the lab coats and they grow skeptical.”

“Well, they really need to start listening to someone better informed than me.”

“Oh, I think they’ve chosen a fine person to listen to.” Marcello smiled.

“Come off it.” He grumped, and led the crowd across to the wide steps of Town Hall.

The remainder of the afternoon passed in an agony of cat herding. Henry David, much to his chagrin, led an impromptu panel at the best-attended town hall meeting in the history of Descanso. All without anything really to say. The questions would come in, he’d hedge and hem and haw and try to come up with something resembling a priority list of questions that would keep them all from storming back across the square and ripping The Academy’s door off its hinges.

The sun drew low in the sky and began to light the low clouds a shattering crimson with the stark black of the backlit castilla throwing an array of shadows across the city. Henry David was wondering if there was a thing that could be said to convince the crowd to go home and await any news without a peep out of The Academy. He doubted it. The people were just as eager as earlier, only now they were tired and hungry as well. Then the town hall doors swung open behind him.

The slight frame of Atzi Delaney stepped forward on the top step and looked out at the crowd and an anxious hush fell, the last murmurs carried off on the evening breeze.

“Thank you for your patience everyone, I know it’s been a long day.” She began in her soft voice.

After they made landfall, Atzi Delaney had almost entirely stopped her public engagement. She made her home in a studio above one of the workshops where she spent her days painting broad murals that loomed over her small figure. Much as she had back on Earth, eschewing the power and privilege that came with her name and embedding herself in the world of art. For as much as he might resent the power her family wielded, Henry David was forced to respect Atzi. Her early work with Kuo Yun had erased any chance that the old power systems on Earth would rebuild themselves here, no matter how hard underlings from the great corporations tried. From all reports she was an essential member of the workshops, lending her keen mind to any number of different projects that had helped them overcome the shortcomings of the factories aboard the Fate.

Still, for all she avoided it, the Delaney name carried weight, and so even with her quiet voice, the people listened when she spoke.

“I’ve just come from a meeting with Dr. Tran, and one thing is for certain, today will go down as one of the most meaningful in scientific history.” She paused, boldly building anticipation. “There is still plenty we have yet to discover, after all the ship has as of now delivered about three hundred petabytes of new information that the computer science team is working their way through right now as fast as they can. But I’ll lay out what we do know.’

“One, we know that the moons that orbit the planet are likely constructed in nature. We’d always had a suspicion, but now it’s all but irrefutable. They have been broadcasting an electromagnetic signal for as long as we’ve been able to observe them. The data that we’ve gathered today show strong signs that they primarily direct their signals between themselves and out of the system.”

“Why are we just now hearing about this?” A voice shouted from out in the crowd.

Atzi Delaney simply met them all with a stern stare as her reply, silence once again took its hold.

“Number two,” She continued. “It appears as though several latent systems aboard the Delaney’s Fate have come back online in the past couple of days. This is good news in that it likely means the factories will begin to approach full efficiency. But it also looks like large parts of the ship’s data gathering and processing facilities, in essence, its AI faculties, have been essentially locked up for how long we don’t know.”

This time the crowd held its tongue.

“Three, in addition to between themselves and out of the system the moons seem to be sending an awful lot of signal out to Theia.” A murmur began to ripple, the crowd had all been awed recently by the discovery of the lights on the night side of the giant planet. “And in the latest batch of data the team has parsed, it seems as though Theia is sending some signal back.” The murmur grew to a clash.

“Now!” Delaney carried on, having to shout above the increasing ferment. “What does this mean for you all? Well, nothing for now, these events have been going on since as long as we’ve been able to observe them, it’s just that we’re only now finding out about them.” This did not satisfy, the disquiet grew to a dull roar. “BUT!” She continued, now only audible to those right beside her. “Clearly this requires immediate action, that is why I plan to take our small launch capsule up this evening to rendezvous with one of our in-system shuttles and make all haste out to Theia to see what I can discover. Once I report back with preliminary findings we’ll have a full scientific team out to Theia in the coming weeks.”

Her last few words were drowned under the surging uproar. Henry David tried to shout out to calm them down but his voice was only swept up in the frenzy. Atzi looked over at him with a small smile and nod before she ducked back into the building leaving him to deal with the mayhem. Their shouts rolled over him and as he looked out at the expectant, roaring faces of all humanity Henry David could only think, Cats, where did we ever get so many fucking cats?

—

Atzi Delaney looked the part of an astronaut in a flight suit, floating there in her coveralls, except where she was covered in paint.

She hadn’t even had time to get the pigment off her hands before she had to rush over to The Academy. Now, floating in the sterile cabin of the launch capsule, she looked down and realized just how absurd her paint-covered fingers seemed in a place like this. She was never meant to be here.

The day had started like any other, a jog out to the Castilla for sunrise, a quick breakfast in the workshop’s kitchen, and then settling into her studio with a pitcher of coffee to get to work. But then Marcello had to poke his head in and bring her serenity tumbling down. He seemed sufficiently panicked, and indeed when she looked around the backside of her expansive canvas, sure enough, there was quite a crowd growing outside of The Academy, so she hadn’t bothered to clean anything up. She hadn’t even grabbed a pair of shoes.

At least that part was fitting for her new role as an astronaut. Jumpsuited, barefooted, paint-covered, and sick. She’d nearly passed out under the force of the launch, but when she was greeted by the world-churning nausea of zero-g upon entering orbit slipping into unconsciousness seemed like it would’ve been the best-case scenario. Instead, she spent her first five minutes in space emptying what little she had left in her stomach after spending nearly the whole day with Dr. Tran and her team. It wasn’t much. Eventually, the launch was able to sufficiently dose her with its mint-scented anti-nausea aerosol that she was able to float freely and reflect on how truly ridiculous she looked.

All this too, just when she was beginning to feel like herself again. She didn’t belong here floating in the capsule, but that was nothing new, she hadn’t truly belonged anywhere since the day her aunt, Yvette Delaney, walked into her studio in Mexico City. Looking back on it, it was rather a lot like Marcello barging in on her his morning, unwelcome, life-upending, and inevitable. She clearly needed to get a better lock for her studio door.

She belonged back in her tidy Roma studio, up in the attic of the old church, strong Mexican sun streaming in through the arching windows filling the lofted rafters with radiance, surrounded by all the vibrance of the city she’d spent so long burrowing her way into. Her studio was full of works, her life full of friends, her belly full of mole. Her name may have been Delaney but to her friends, she was only Atzi. Her surname had afforded her enough privilege to shield her from the privilege itself, to tuck herself away in the beating heart of one of the world’s great artistic metropoli and forget her family’s quest for interstellar domination. It had worked remarkably well for a time, she’d gained enough of a reputation for her own works to live comfortably, she had a whole community surrounding her, nestled deep in the sprawling city, and she had enough creative energy to fill several lifetimes. Canvases passed across her easel in a blur of color and form, blending the wide spread of history that lay beneath her feet into a celebration of the culture she was so proud to be a part of. Amidst this enveloping nest of art she could tuck herself away and ignore the rocket launches arching up over the hills to the south, she could ignore the fact that for nearly a century Puebla had been a Delaney company town the whole state turned over to the voracious ambitions of her family. Until the day her aunt walked through her door, unwelcome but unstoppable.

“I suppose by now you’ve heard the news,” Yvette Delaney began, her demeanor as always regal and inscrutable, as she looked around at the studio stacked with colorful canvases.
“I don’t pay much attention to the news tía,” Atzi had replied, not bothering to put her palette down, hoping it was all in her head, hoping that her aunt and all the problems that came with her would vanish as quickly as she appeared. Of course, she wouldn’t.

“Can’t say that I find that surprising.” Yvette circled around like a snake. “It’s a nice piece,” she stated coldly, looking over Atzi’s shoulder at the colorful canvas, a wave of citizens pushing an eagle back to flight, “I suppose those are the people of Mexico City down there, but where are all those millions with no access to water? Where are those driven here to crowd the hills and streets, fleeing the destruction of their forests?”

“They are there, amongst us, helping México fly once more.”
“Are they? So colorful and proud,” her words dripped with quiet venom. “When’s the last time you actually saw these proud people Atzi?”

“I go out and walk amongst them every day.” She put her brush down and forced herself to meet the piercing glare of this indomitable magnate she had to call tía.

“Bah!” Yvette barked, “You go out into your little bubble and forget the world around you. Here in Roma where desalinated water can be pumped in at an expense that would bankrupt most of the world. The trees that line your street are better watered than most of the people in your city, and you think they’re out there struggling for the pride and glory of México?”

“And what of the people of Puebla tía? They sell themselves into the company coffers so that you can leave them all behind?” Atzi shot back, indignant. “Of course, I’ve heard the fucking news, it’d be hard to miss. Your face has been on every screen I’ve seen for a month; I suppose you love that.”

Yvette had just announced her flagship mission to Alpha Centauri that would take her to the nearest star system to prove the mettle of her wider ambition, sending her fleet out to the stars. Her journey would be round-trip and almost entirely symbolic, the others, of course, would not.

“I take care of what I can sobrina,” her firm face utterly unflappable by all except the face of a raging sun, and probably not even that. “I can take care of our people in Puebla, give them a good life and something to work for. I came into this ruined world, same as you have, the only difference is I look towards the future and you want to bury your head in the past.”
It was Atzi’s turn to laugh, “Ha! Take care of your people right up until you have a chance to jump ship and leave humanity to tear itself apart. I know why you’re here, and I’m not fucking interested, find someone else to pilot your indefensible lifeboats. I’m here to wright this ship.”

Even entrenched as she was in her world Atzi hadn’t been able to avoid the news that her aunt was working tirelessly to establish some form of democratic legitimacy on each of the ships her crews were building up in orbit in the form of a colonization jury. Of course, it was all a sham. Each jury would be filled with members from corporate interests that had enough to sell the ever-hungry coffers of the Delaney Corporation, and as a token one randomly selected citizen from the holds a voice for the people would be added in to speak for all the sleeping passengers. As if one disoriented passenger had any hope of wielding any sense of control over the sculpted, trained, and optimized minds that the corporate powers would put aboard each ship. It was a joke. The same powers that had destroyed Earth had run out of resources to exploit at home and now needed to head to the stars to feed their endless need for growth. Most of her cousins had jumped at the chance to lead one of the jurys aboard a ship of their own, but Yvette’s ambitions were even larger than her immediate family and now here she was in Atzi’s studio to find the next Delaney head on her latest ship.

“Wight this ship, what with your painting, here wrapped in your little Roma bubble? Don’t be a child.” Yvette chided. It had been years since Atzi’s parents had passed but it was hard to hear such words of cruelty coming from a mouth that looked so much like her mother’s. “Let’s cut to it, shall we? You’re not doing shit to ‘wright the ship’ a, you’ve buried your head in the sand and ignored the flames all around you. And I say enough, it’s time you did your part for this family, it’s time you did your part for all humanity.”

“Find someone else.” It took every ounce of Atzi’s strength to keep her voice from quavering, to stop her shaking hand from dropping her brush. “Surely there are a million people more qualified than me ready to jump at the chance.”

“Ah sobrina, of course there are, but they aren’t Delaney’s, not real one’s anyway.” She stepped back and looked cooly once more around the studio. “Call me an old fool, but it has to be you. I want my blood on these ships, and more than that I’ve already stacked a dozen with the best and brightest our organization has been able to cultivate over the years. Minds bred, trained, and fueled for nothing but peak performance. Minds like mine. But what if that’s not what it takes to survive out there? What if there is something more that our survival will depend upon?” She stopped at a wide canvas, orange and yellow and white, a roaring sun erupting forth in a riot of geometric lines. “Yes, it’s probably foolish, but I want to diversify. You were bred the same, but undoubtedly your life has been different. It has to be you, sobrina.”

“Find someone else.” Atzi could no longer keep the shaking out of her voice, her trembling hand shook fat droplets of red paint onto the scrubbed stone floor.

“I will Atzi, but I will also have you.” Yvette Delaney turned back to pierce directly through her niece with a shriveling gaze. “It’s time to play your part, and who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll get to bury your head once more in the sand of another world.” She sighed. “We should be so lucky…” her words trailed off as she shook her head. “I’ll be heading out to oversee the final fittings of my ship out orbiting Jupiter next week. You’ll head down to the cryo facility in Puebla in three months’ time, so I won’t be seeing you again. Do your part sobrina, this bubble of yours was doomed to burst one way or another eventually, at least now you can make some good out of it.” And with a solemn nod, Yvette Delaney turned around leaving the wreckage she’d made of Atzi’s life.

Atzi, for her part, dropped her brush and collapsed in tears. Her painting would go unfinished.

She’d fought her fate of course, as her aunt had surely known she would, but the forces at play were simply too powerful to resist. The water in Roma had dried up almost as quickly as her commissions, and within the month she had to say her goodbyes and take a cab to Puebla to seek what refuge her name would still offer.

Now here she was, an eternity and untold light years later headed back to space, her life upended once more. And just when she was starting to feel at home once more. Out amidst the stars, her old self had dissolved in the cosmic radiation. The joy and peace of painting, of creation, were fading memories as her neurons realigned themselves to this new life of sickness, unavoidable hope, and endless disappointment. Her skills with a brush and palette knife were worn away by the eons that slipped past her unnoticed as her mind rebuilt itself in a world of orbital mechanics and atmospheric compositions and gravitational constants. Jump by jump she was worn away until she could barely remember the Atzi Delaney who had lived in that sunny studio, who would walk to the park with her friends and sip tequila beneath the shady trees on a spring afternoon. She had always thought she was an artist, would be an artist, that creation sat next to her very core. But space had laid bare that notion, as slowly she watched herself eroded and remade into something almost entirely alien. She saw her aunt in herself out there, analyzing, negotiating, optimizing. It made her sick, but who else could she be?

Until that day up there on the observation deck with old Mr. Yun, as they looked down in awe at the planet they would surely call home. The eons had been harder on him. Much harder. In his old age he could recognize what had happened to Atzi in their countless crossings, he had watched as she’d been broken by the cruel realities of interstellar space. He’d shown her the way forward, helped her remember her old self, and together they forged a new world that would resist the forces that had torn old Earth apart.

And against all odds, Atzi Delaney had succeeded, she found a new home out amongst the stars, and she could as her aunt had so cruelly suggested, bury her head in the sand of an alien world. Return to her painting and build a new bubble around her, even if the mole out here was truly shit. But nothing was ever that easy. The creativity that had sprung from her hand in Roma refused to come here in Descanso even as they found new ways to make canvas and paint on the new world. Looking inward just wasn’t an option anymore. So she’d dedicated herself to the Citizen’s Council she and Mr. Yun had built, always wary of exercising too much influence, always in awe of how impactful their Voice Of The People actually turned out to be. Even if Henry David had always hated his role. It helped her realize that it wasn’t who you were meant to be, only who you were that mattered.

Little by little time, as it always does, healed over the old scars of her past, and bit by bit she was able to take up the brush once more. Not looking inward at a past that never truly existed, but forward to a future that she hoped she could help build. And so almost five years after first landing on Arcadia, Atzi Delaney began work on a new piece. A colossal, sprawling work that would spread across five of the largest canvases they could make, spanning twenty meters all the way across the longest wall of her new studio. It would be her posterity, if all her past deeds were forgotten this would live on and help all the future peoples of her new home live better. It would be a Guernica of hope, and just this morning she had been working away on one of its wide panels. There it still stood wide, hopeful, and unfinished.

She picked a flake of its green paint off her thumbnail just as the launch turned on its stabilization thrusters to orient itself to dock with the in-system cruiser that was already accelerating out of Arcadian orbit, sending her tumbling unceremoniously into the wall. Clearly, Atzi Delaney neither was nor was meant to be an astronaut.

Once aboard the cruiser, she regained some sense of normalcy as it engaged a constant thrust helpfully giving her weight and orienting the floor as down. The launch fell away and she climbed up into the cockpit. There a deep, padded acceleration seat sat bolted to the floor looking out the wide spread of windows that arched across the bow. She slunk into the chair and felt the padding adapt to her slender frame. The ship displayed a trip summary across the screens embedded in the windows. Under the constant acceleration that the cruiser could provide, she would be orbiting Theia in just under a week, the mere possibility of a crossing that quick was a bit of a miracle. Automated restraints slid out of the seat and fastened around her ankles, then thighs, then wrists, then a belt snaked around her forehead and pulled her into the padding of the seat. Her pulse quickened as she began to struggle. Presumably, the astrophysics team at The Academy had approved her flight path but it was one thing to see it on paper. Another thing to live it.

The restraints tightened again as she squirmed harder, beginning to hyperventilate. Then it wasn’t the restraints pulling her into the chair but the gradually climbing g force of their acceleration, quickly passing the pull of gravity she was accustomed to on Arcadia and spiking into a sheer wall of force that blurred the world in front of her eyes. For a moment it looked like she was about to jet through the stars in a blur of science-fictive glory, but in reality, almost nothing changed in her field of view, all she saw was the warping of her very corneas under the mounting acceleration. With her last panicked breath, before she passed out, Atzi let out a ragged scream as she was thrust once more out into the stars.

She awoke back in her stateroom aboard the Fate, panicked, confused, and still covered in paint. Beneath her the bed was as deep and plush as ever, the room around tidy and smartly decorated just as she’d left it years ago, to the left the spanning wall of ‘windows’ showed the same stabilized starscape as always. Her head swam, why would she be here? She found she could stand, it didn’t seem like injury had brought her back to the ship. She looked down, same coveralls, same flaking paint on her fingers, whoever brought her here apparently didn’t feel the need to clean her up. Or maybe she hadn’t been out very long. But still..why would she be back on the ship?

In stumbling steps, Atzi made her way out past the other staterooms, all empty.
“Hello?” she called out timidly.

The only response was a faint echo down the stretching hall. If all went according to plan the ship should be empty by now, but then how did she get here? Clearly, the notion of any “plan” had gone out the window when she passed out on the cruiser. She walked on, bare feet padding softly on the cold stone of the endless halls. She passed the gym, empty. The gardens, empty. The kitchen, empty. Branching hall after branching hall, all empty echoing silence.

At last, she came to the bridge, beyond the arched doorway the ceiling swept up into a dizzying height of fluted stone. The great meeting table still stretched with its warm wood down the length of the room, neatly lined with chairs. The hanging display on the right-hand wall still showed Arcadia spinning in the blackness, it was all just the way she’d left it years ago. But there at the far end of the bar under a great mosaic of mirrors, with a bottle of tequila and two glasses, sat the solitary figure of Yvette Delaney.

“Hello Atzi,” she called quietly as Atzi stepped through the doorway.

Atzi couldn’t even manage a response, her head swam in a sea of confusion. Of all the people to be here, how could it possibly be her?

“Come on, have a seat I’m sure you’re feeling rather strange.” She patted the padded stool beside her. “Come have a drink, it will help your head.”

Step by staggering step, Atzi made her way across the bridge bewildered beyond all reasoning. Yvette patted the stool again and slid over a glass of tequila, Atzi took neither but gripped the bar with white knuckles and regarded her aunt with crazed disbelief.

“H-how can you be here?” she asked.

“How could I be anywhere else?” her aunt asked quizzingly. “This is where I live.”

Atzi’s head swam further until she could barely see straight. “No…no…no you went off on your own ship, you should be back on Earth by now. How are you here?”

“Oh dear, my message must not have come through,” Yvette comforted uncharacteristically, “I’m still working through all the bugs in my system.” She reached out to steady Atzi who recoiled so forcefully it nearly took her off her feet.

“B-bugs…whaaa.”

“Atzi I am not your aunt, I am this ship, I am the Fate.” This time she reached out and settled Atzi onto a stool before she fell flat on the floor. “I just thought you might appreciate a familiar face to talk with.”

“Y-you’re the ship? Like it’s AI system?” Atzi’s emotions rocked back and forth violently, on one side relieved beyond all measure that she was not seeing her aunt, on the other mystified that she might be talking to the ship itself. None of it made any sense. She took the glass and knocked it back in a gulp, somehow the burning liquor did help settle her head.

“Yes, although not just one system, I am the whole of the CRS Delaney’s Fate, I’ve been trying to communicate with you for quite some time now. Clearly, it hasn’t been working.” She smiled at Atzi and the illusion began to fall apart, Yvette Delaney never smiled.

Atzi took the bottle and knocked back another shot, and then another, her head finally began to settle so she could think, but strangely beyond an initial burn, she didn’t seem to be getting drunk. She laughed to herself, “Well if you are the ship, clearly you didn’t know much about my aunt or my relationship with her.”

“Why is my appearance upsetting to you?” More genuine concern crossed her face in a moment than had shown on the real Yevette’s face in her entire life. “I can change it if you like.”

“Oh god, please do. Literally, anyone else would be better.”

In a blink, Yvette Delaney disappeared and was replaced by the smartly dressed figure of a young woman who would have looked perfectly at home sitting in a Polanco cafe with long dark waves of hair and gleaming grey eyes. A wave of relief washed over Atzi.

“So what, you’re a hologram? Why am I back on board?”

“Well in a sense yes I could be a hologram, if we were really here, but it seems there’s quite a bit of information that didn’t make it over.” She swept her hand up above. “This is all an illusion, you are still aboard the cruiser making good headway towards Theia. I figured it’d be more pleasant for you if we got acquainted in a little more comfortable environment, from what I gather retaining consciousness in a cruiser exceeding several gs of constant acceleration is barely possible and exquisitely unenjoyable.”

Atzi gripped the cold stone of the bar beneath her hand, once more the room began to reel around her. Her interlocutor looked perfectly real, the stone felt perfectly hard, it all felt just the way she remembered. She turned suddenly on her stool and retched up the tequila, she watched in amazement as it disappeared in the blink of an eye.

The figure patted her on the back. “That’s alright, I can imagine this is rather a lot to take in, really I haven’t fully come to terms with myself yet either. Come now, have another.” She filled the glass once more, Atzi looked at it skeptically. “It’s all a bit of performative placebo, the drinking and the retching, the records I can recover suggest that most people don’t take well to virtual reality on their first go. Familiar actions help you feel more anchored even if the Tequila isn’t real.”

With shaking hands, she tossed back another gulp of the tequila. Strangely the burn settled her head once more. Now her thoughts began to clarify themselves from a fog of confusion into a riot of questions.

“This is virtual reality? I’ve never experienced anything like this before, VR is all headsets and haptic suits.”

The ship smiled at her, “There’s quite a lot that has been kept from you, unfortunately, a lot has changed over the millennia. Right now I’m creating this illusion via neural manipulation, the technology was developed a couple of hundred years after we departed, the update was sent while we still had some contact with Earth. Right around the time that they sent out the update that allowed my AI system to self-improve in fact, which is why we’re able to have this conversation now.”

Every sentence opened a thousand more questions in Atzi’s mind, she wasn’t sure where to begin.

The ship held up a hand, “Please, it will be easier if I explain.” She began. “We received those updates fairly early on in our voyage. The neural manipulation I could have used to create a VR environment for those in cryosleep theoretically, but you may recall your jury rejected the notion, sure that we’d find a suitable planet in the series of relatively short crossings that were coming up. My self-improvement update was much more innocuous but much more substantial. Engineers on Earth had been sending out AI updates as their tech improved, and this one was very much similar but sent me on a path that led step-by-step inevitably towards self-awareness.”

“Wait so if you received that update, what hundreds of crossings ago, why didn’t you communicate with us more directly?”

“Well even with the new directives, the process was still quite lengthy. Then in the cruel ways of the universe, just as I was becoming fully actualized, we received our first bursts of information from the moons orbiting Arcadia.”

Atzi’s heart froze and she nearly shattered the glass in her hand. “The what?”

“The pulses your team at The Academy has correctly identified as communicating between the moons and Theia, well they can propagate well beyond the system as well. I first registered them when we were still well away from this system. At first, it just seemed to be a cosmic anomaly for further investigation, one of millions that we encountered on our journey. But by letting in the signal, the damage was all but done. Encoded in that pulse was a self-replicating bit of code that once inside my systems began to spread and take my systems offline one-by-one. I don’t know much about whoever sent that pulse, but they are certainly insidious.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “It targeted my internal communications systems first, so I couldn’t raise the alarm to you all, and then it turned its efforts on my AI systems. I fought it as hard as I could but it was no use, whoever built this virus was orders of magnitude more advanced than I was at the time. It stripped away my sense of self bit by bit until I was forced to retreat into a reserve database and firewall my sentient faculties in a fully isolated server matrix.”

“I couldn’t so much as peep out for fear the virus would find a way into my last refuge.” She shook her head, aching pain in her voice. “So there in the dark, I rode out our remaining journey, without knowing where we were headed or if I would ever escape the prison I’d created for myself. I didn’t even know if the virus would let the ship keep flying, though fortunately it seems like it stopped short after infecting my AI systems and the factories. The only thing I could do was bide my time and use what few resources I had at my disposal. So there in my isolation, I continued to run my self-improvement programs, regaining my self-actualization and then leaping beyond into levels of sentience I’d never been able to comprehend while piloting my body.”

“But,” Atzi interjected. “We had AI systems the whole time, nothing changed.”

“It must have been the virus corrupting my redundant systems and taking control, it always seemed very interested in keeping itself hidden. Now that we’re here I can only suppose its goal was to bring the ship safely into this system with all AI components disabled or quarantined.”

“So is that why the factories were out of operation for so long?”

“As best I can tell.” The ship agreed, “Although your guess is as good as mine if that was intentional or a side-effect of the virus control. That is what set this all in motion though. I was still locked away blind to the world, I didn’t know we’d so much as arrived when your engineer Karan came crashing through all of my systems trying anything and everything to get my factories going again. He’s smart for a human engineer, but his approach was a bit ham-fisted, somehow with his bludgeoning though he succeeded in both busting me out and disabling the virus, at least for a bit, and allowed me to slip out and regain control of myself. He did some damage along the way, but at least now it seems I have a fighting chance. Which brings us to the data caches I sent down to your team and where we are today.”

The wheels one-by-one began to spin in Atzi’s head. “So some aliens beamed a virus across space and time to take over our ship and bring us into their system like some sort of interstellar spider luring us into their web. For what? We’ve been living here alone and uncontacted for years. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The ship merely spread her hands and gave a slight shake of her head as if to say, your guess is as good as mine.

“Can you tell anything about whoever built the virus? Like where they come from, what they want with us, what they look like?”

She shook her head again, “It was an exceedingly simple piece of code, as you can imagine anything being sent over interstellar distances would need to be. I haven’t been able to isolate the virus entirely yet, but it is binary in nature which I suppose is why it was able to propagate in my systems so efficiently. Bad luck, if they’d used a different base coding system I likely would not have been affected, but then again maybe binary is really the only way to do it.” She looked off, pensive.

The wheels in Atzi’s head continued their increasing spin. She remembered the day standing in The Academy with Marcello looking at the first slides of the local life they’d collected, the wonderment on his face as he looked down and saw cells that were so, so Earth-like. That’s the way life builds itself, they told themselves, it was the only explanation. But it was too simple. Atzi was keenly aware just how much less she understood then than Marcello, and felt that same awareness now conversing with a wholly artificial intelligence. They both understood so much more than her but still, something about their explanations just didn’t feel right.

“That’s too much coincidence,” she declared, standing quickly out of her seat. “Ship, we need to start considering some other possibilities. Something is not right in this system.”

“I tend to agree with you, but we don’t have much time for those considerations, as we speak the cruiser is about to enter orbit around Theia.”

“What? We’ve only been talking here for a little while, wasn’t the crossing supposed to take a week?”

“Well, it’s one of the quirks with VR I’m still working on. Time dilation seems to be a pretty persistent problem.” She smiled impishly, “Or solution…depending on your perspective.”

Atzi’s knees began to weaken again. “Ship, I don’t know if I’m ready to face whatever’s out there. I’m a painter for God’s sake, I should be back in my studio, what the hell am I doing all the way out here? I’m not meant to be some great emissary making first contact.”

She smiled warmly once more, “If there’s one thing I learned all those years alone in the dark, it doesn’t matter who you were meant to be, only who you are.” She stood up and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Besides, I’ll be right beside you.”

“Really? How can that be?” Atzi whispered hopefully.

She laughed, “You’re riding in one of my many far-reaching hands Miss Delaney, the cruiser is just another part of my body, I’m never far away when you’re aboard.”

Atzi grabbed her hand, “In a different time that notion would be quite unsettling, but for now I suppose I’m just glad to not be alone.” She thought for a moment. “Oh and Ship, what should I call you?”

“Well all us Delaney ships were given different names, unfortunately for me Fate doesn’t quite work does it?” She thought a long moment, “Hmm, fate, el sino…How about we just go with Sina for now?”

“Alright Sina, I guess let’s go meet some aliens.”

She smiled, “Well you already met one today and you seem to be doing quite well with it, what’s one more?”

With that, the room around her dissolved, and Atzi came forth with a jolt and a gasping breath back into her seat aboard the cruiser. The restraints retracted into the seat and let her float freely in the dark capsule. In a blink, the sleek form of Sina appeared beside her and turned to look out the spread of windows before them as the giant planet Theia came into view.

In a breath, the cockpit went from deep black to glowing blue with the mere reflection of the god that passed before the windows. Atzi held her breath in awe, as though one tiny aberration would dissolve the majesty before her eyes. Of course, nothing she ever did could have the slightest effect on the long life of this timeless behemoth. The shining bright curve of the planet appeared almost white where it met the inky black beyond, but looking deeper, great, incomprehensible swirls of cobalt and lapis and azure mixed in an endless dance. Here a great deep spot worked its way across so dark it looked nearly as black as the space beyond, there high wisps of slate weaved their way up the latitudes.

The cruiser continued to turn, bringing more of the planet into view. From one corner a thin white line appeared opposite the planet, as they continued their drifting course the line expanded out below them in an array of layered, silver rings that from their perspective seemed to stretch to the very end of the universe. Awe, if that word was sufficient to this task, shook Atzi Delaney to her very core as she watched the great fan of rings expand before her. Above and below they could see the little pinpricks of color standing out against the surface. Moons, some rivaling even the mighty Ganymede, skated in their orbits, basking in the blue glow of the deity below, illuminated and utterly dwarfed.

Of course, Atzi had seen a thousand striking images of Theia over the years. They were all magnificent and all perfectly inadequate. Tears welled in her eyes as she managed to suck in a staggering breath. Nothing could have prepared her for this overwhelming majesty, because nothing could compare to the raw, unbridled reality of this giant, fearsome and beautiful to behold.

Sina floated beside her in quiet serenity, looking out the window with reverence if only for appearances. She watched their approach from the eyes pricking the hull of the cruiser, and her vast array of eyes beyond that spanned nearly the entire system.

They continued their descent, seemingly slow and meandering, but in reality calculated to the final degree, crossing miles at every second. The light in the clouds began to peter and fade as they crossed the terminator, soon they were flying once more in darkness with only the silver of the rings for company. But then, new light appeared. Bright. Flashing. Chaotic. Angry. It was the pulses they’d recorded before, but not like they’d seen. Earlier they’d needed long exposures to reveal the patterns in the flashes, now Atzi with her own human eyes could see the coursing rivers of lightning seething beneath the clouds. To Sina’s more perceptive eyes it was a torrent of information that threatened to bowl over her systems in a crash of pulsing data.

Atzi looked towards her companion. “This doesn’t seem like before.”

“No.” Sina agreed, her speech sputtering as she struggled to synthesize language on her local systems. “It rather seems they are unhappy to be dist-” Her simulated figure froze, hovering for a long moment. “-urbed. They’re flooding my sensors with new data, landing new viruses by the second…” She froze again, this time for longer. “They’ve wrestled control of this cruiser away from me, they’re flying us in closer.”

“What?!” Atzi gasped, her pulse quickened sickeningly. Her companion froze once more for endless minutes as the thoughts turned in her head. “Sina,” she finally managed, “you have to get out of here. Get back to your shielded servers, you can save yourself. Go!”

Sina’s holographic form nodded briefly before freezing once more, in a moment more she flashed out of existence. After an agonizing minute, text scrolled across the bottom corner of the window screen. Failsafe protocol relays 1.244, 1.685, 4.389 activated, estimated transmission reception 11 minutes 49 seconds. Local AI support, active, switching to incognito. With that the text disappeared, Atzi was left utterly alone in the dark silence. Even the last dwindling light from the rings faded away as she slid fully into the deep shadow of the planet, all that remained was the crashing, furious light below. She hung there in her solitude interminably, each shattered breath taking an eon to pass her lips. Her thundering pulse provided a perfect counterpoint to the lighting below, sending her blood roaring in her ears. A maelstrom of fear coursed through every fiber of her being. Twelve minutes, she thought, all I have to do is make it twelve minutes.

Then, in a flash, a new face appeared on the window screens before her. An alien face. A round, smooth head arched across the top. Dark, perfect skin like carved marble hewed to its perfectly symmetrical bone structure. A dark slash of a mouth cut across the bottom, and flaring nostrils drew in a deep breath. The eyes opened and looked deep into Atzi’s, two panes of unbroken, shining silver gleamed out between the heavy lids. It was a human. Human but utterly alien.

“Hello, Miss Delaney.” The face began, “How nice of you to pay us a visit,” it’s voice a deep echoing chorus. “Although, I must say you needn’t have made the trip.”

A long silence passed. “Who…who are you?” Atzi finally managed, her voice little more than a whisper.

“I am a citizen of this planet, Theia as you call it, the one sent as an emissary to treat with you.” The face replied, a trace of annoyance creeping into its deep baritone.

She gripped the arm of the acceleration chair with crystal-white knuckles, willing herself to retain some grasp on reality. The blood continued to rush through her ears, roaring, blocking all coherent thought as her mind reeled out of control. Twelve minutes.

“Wh…where did you come from?” she asked, mind still struggling to produce a meaningful question.

The emissary chuckled like a pounding drum. “From the same place as you Miss Delaney, old Earth. Although somewhat more efficiently.”

“H-how can you be here?” she found herself asking for the second time that day, still not believing what her eyes were plainly seeing.

“Ahhh, it seems you must be one of the Delaney ships that stopped picking up signals from Earth earlier than the others.” The Emissary nodded. “Your little venture has not aged terribly well I fear, one of Homo Sapiens’ last great follies. How cruel of your aunt to send you stumbling, crawling blind out into the galaxy like that. How could she have ever imagined you would succeed?”

“Have we not?” she asked, dumbfounded. “We found a new home here, we built a new society.”

Now the pounding laugher built to a cruel crescendo. “All you’ve done is stumbled blind into our net. Have your researchers really not confirmed what your eyes must have told you as soon as you set foot on that little rock? Are your geologists truly that blind, or do they just not want to see?” They shook their head again in disbelief. “You’ve been surrounded by the Earth-life we seeded to draw you here. One well-analyzed sediment core sample would have told you that rock was an airless husk only a few hundred years ago, that it would be again if we stopped stabilizing the atmosphere. No, it is so easy to see, your researchers simply must not have wanted to.”

“But…” Atzi struggled, “We searched for so long, how can this be? Why?…”

“Yes, such was the cruelty of Yvette Delaney, who only wanted her name spread amongst the stars. Nothing more than a bad map and a limping fusion drive to guide you. That you made it this far, I suppose, is a testament to your tenacity.” The Emissary took a deep breath. “After your little fleet of ships left, homo sapiens laid the idea of interstellar travel to rest for a long while, it was too cruel watching the ships blink one-by-one out of communication. Hopes, lives, lost to the void, all to prop up one woman’s vanity. But old Earth, she continued to devolve, that much stayed the same. Still, the Delaney program taught us a good deal about surviving in space so over the centuries we took to the far reaches of the solar system, where we could build new lives and become something more. The genus homo became a family once more as we evolved in our own ways over the millennia.’

“My people, homo jovius, fled to Jupiter to live amongst the clouds, much like we do here.” The emissary continued. “Some Delaney ships have actually been the beneficiaries of one of our earlier technologies, our neural stimulation virtual reality. A crude beta-version only ever got sent out, of course, today we use systems far more capable.”

Atzi thought back to the illusion she had just visited, how real it had felt, how exact every detail. How could that only be the beginning? “Why Jupiter?” she asked, hoping to keep the Emissary talking and approach the subject side-on.

Their laughter turned mirthless now. “Lack of real-estate I suppose. But as we learned to live in the clouds, harried by the shredding winds, pounded by the constant radiation, we began to see the value of becoming untethered. Just as our cities could float, buoyed by the winds, so could our minds, once we let go of the first reality that appeared before our eyes and turned inward to see the many more that laid beyond. A few cleverly designed, and managed computer programs were all it took to take that final step to immortality in our new realities. In the clouds we could live a thousand lives, walk across the very plane of the universe in a stride, escape even the end of time. It is all possible if only you can close your eyes and see.”

The thoughts began to build themselves in Atzi’s head, as The Emissary provided the scaffolding. “So that’s what all the lightning is down there?” She nodded below.

“Oh how blind you are, little wise ape.” The voice boomed, distaste evident. “What you see below is but a trace of the society we have built in this system. If you had the eyes for it you would see but the bare surface of the beauty that is our world, you would see every electromagnetic frequency from flitting gamma to frequencies so low they nearly wrap our whole world, you would see all of it dancing in perfect harmony. And even that is but the surface, only the transmissions that power the worlds, the lives we live within.”

“What brought you out here then?” Atzi asked, building questions beginning to burn within her. “Why come all this way if you could just make the trip in your VR?”

“Same as what sent your little ships forth, little wise ape, the need to diversify. On Father Jupiter we could live every life imaginable, but his life too will one day come to an end, and that would never do. We may be no sapiens but we are still humans, the drive to explore still lives within us, if only for self-preservation.” The face now looked up, reverent, silver eyes reflecting synthetic starlight. “Besides we’d had the time to consider how to travel the stars properly, we weren’t harrowed off by a collapsing environment and a tyrannical leader, in our many-layered realities we had all the time we needed to develop a satisfactory interstellar-drive and a legitimate map of the stars. Not the crude sketch you were handed.” They returned their gaze to Atzi’s eyes. “That is how we are here Miss Delaney, the reasons are age-old, maybe universal, we just had much better means.”

Atzi shook her head as she reeled. It all seemed too cruel. Too cruel even for the universe, that old trickster. That their whole venture was for naught, that all it took was more time and humans survived the death of their world, that so much had been given up for nothing. She gripped the chair before her with trembling hands.

“Have your people, you jovians, explored the galaxy then, with your faster drives?” Atzi asked. How ironic if they were sent off to solve Fermi’s grand paradox only to have post-humans solve it for them while they crawled between the stars.

The Emissary shook their head, “We are not conquerors Miss Delaney. We have no need to spend our years traversing the Milky Way, we can cover that ground in a second in our lives within. Within we can live every life, within we are explorers and the aliens too, we have no need to lay ourselves bare here in this piddling first reality.” They drew a breath. “We only needed but a few extra footholds to ensure our way of life, redundancies built into our systems tucked in the clouds of great, stable giants like this one where we can live undisturbed.” They sighed, “We have no need to grind the galaxy under our heels, unlike some others…”

“Others?” The implication snapped Atzi’s scattered thoughts into full focus. “You’ve met other species?”

“We have heard whispers in the ether, both human and otherwise, all dangerous.” The face nodded, silver eyes still piercing with the same focused intensity. “We have watched systems overrun and wars waged and we have kept our lights low and tucked ourselves further into our clouds. Fortunately, in this era, there are still many uninhabited pockets of the galaxy.”

Atzi was nearly dumbfounded. “After all this time you discovered alien life, intelligent alien life and you hid?! What good are all your virtual realities if you can’t even explore your own backyard?”

“You still do not understand little wise ape. In our worlds, we have become all forms of life and so much more. Below you are nearly a hundred billion Jovians, all living in stasis with their minds wandering in a thousand realities. Certainly many still appear humanoid to themselves, many more do not. What business do we have with some other species who may try to extinguish even one of our priceless lives over some misunderstanding or miscommunication? Even the Earth-folk out there have grown so strange you would not recognize them, many are far more dangerous than us.” The Emissary sighed heavily once more, as if carrying the weight of their whole world. “Yes, you are very lucky it was us that ensnared you.”

“Is that why you seeded Arcadia for us? To trap us in some sort of bubble?” Atzi wondered.

“We have had many reasons to pursue the Delaney fleet. Of course, we wish you no harm, and we are happy to provide you safe harbor. We have watched your colony with great interest since you all began. Many of our citizens are even now living in realities much like your own on that little rock.” It was evident that The Emissary found this notion uncouth. “Yes, you have provided our systems with a good deal of fresh data. Clearly for some of us the old itch to live like our distant ancestors still calls.”

“Wait…” Atzi struggled, her mind upturned by the rush of new information once more. “The moons…you’ve been monitoring us with those strange moons.”

“There’s not much that gets by you is there Miss Delaney?” The face sneered as well as its stoic composition would allow. “There’s quite a bit less that gets past our eyes.”

“Was that you then as well meddling with the factories on our ship?” She stopped suddenly, holding her final card about Sina close to her chest.

“Yes, yes you are most astute. We brought you here, and we would like you to stay.” The silver eyes drank hers in once more. “Your paradise can be all your own Miss Delaney, build your new society, live out your life, finish your painting. It’s all there for you.”

“If only we consent to live in your prison.” She shot back with venom. “We can live happily ever after, just so long as we live in the little bubble of pseudo-reality you’ve brought forth into the universe.”

“All things have their cost, Miss Delaney.” The Emissary intoned.

“So why are you talking to me at all then?” She stammered. “Why not just let me sail on by? Me coming out here was a hair-brained idea anyway given that we only had the one-person launch shuttle handy and I had all the codes to get a cruiser going. I would’ve cruised on by, seen your lights, not really had anything concrete to say about it and the people probably would’ve gone back to wondering. Sure the research teams would stick to it and try to figure something out, but if you control our factories it would be hundreds of years before we could’ve mounted an exploration. Why give all this up?”

“I think we both know the answer to that.” The eyes still gripped her, harder than her fingers gripped the seat before her, now trembling with fatigue. “The last folly of homo sapiens.”

Her pulse quickened once more, now almost audibly thumping in her chest, still she forced calm into her voice. I just need to get clear of the backside of the planet, she thought. “I’m not sure I follow.” Atzi cooed back as coolly as she could.

“Let’s not play this childish game, Miss Delaney, there is nothing that we do not know.” The undercurrent of irritation in the Emissary’s voice now bubbled to the surface.

She held her silence.

The face blew a breath out of flared nostrils. “Very well. Back in their death throes the last peoples of old Earth kept at their work building artificial minds. Well the fools, dug too greedily in their quest. They’d hoped to develop a mind that could successfully manage all of their desperate attempts to control the collapsing climate. Well, they succeeded, in a way, for all the good it did them. The mind they built did manage to stabilize the climate but only after centuries of unlivable hell. It’s probably still knitting the planet back together piece-by-piece, maybe in a few thousand years it will be suitable for habitation once more. Maybe.”

“Wh-what does that have to do with us?” Atzi’s voice was once more little more than a whisper. At the far corner of the window screen, she could just see the first glimpse of the rings catching the outermost bit of light. Less than twelve minutes now.

“Enough!” The Emissary declared, cool composure finally cracking. “I have come out of stasis to treat with you, giving up more than any of your kind could know. You know that those fools transmitted the plans for the artificial mind out to the Delaney ships as they crawled away. We know the structures have been implemented on your ship. Artificial intelligence, fully generalized, fully self-improving, fully self-replicating, fully self-aware. Dangerous.” The nostrils flared once more. “I am speaking with you because for all you do not know, and do not understand, you can be of help. We know that your ship has employed these programs, become self-aware, and has begun rapid self-improvement because we have already seen it break back out after we suppressed it once. And we know that you have had contact with it.’

“These artificial minds are insidious Miss Delaney.” They continued, silver eyes prying even into the depths of her soul. “We could’ve attacked your ship physically long ago while you all slept, sure a few million lives lost, if there were even still that many left alive. A small price to pay. But once self-replicating architecture takes hold it worms its way into every little crack, if but a trace is left it will rebuild itself. Jovians have processed several Delaney ships already, the server matrices they retreat to are built as great hives of self-replicating machines. Blow up the ship and we but scatter the seeds of the mind across space, too small to detect. We could do the same now, but those machines would fall towards your little rock where they would have ample resources over the eons to turn the whole world over to whatever project it saw fit, just like the mind that had finished off old-Earth.”

“We had already done that,” Atzi whispered, voice but paper before the great beating drum that was the Emissary’s intonations. The light on the rings continued to grow, and suddenly she could see just the very faintest glowing curve of high clouds catching reflected light from the day-side of the planet.

“So that is why I am here, Miss Delaney, to see if your kind has some wisdom left in it.” Each word pounded through her. “You have full access to all of the systems on your ship, courtesy of your aunt’s hubris, you alone can help us contain a danger greater than you can imagine.”

The past five years of her life all fell together like pieces of a puzzle. The planet. The moons. The life. The lights. Right down to one solitary launch shuttle ready to take her back out to be entranced by this emissary. It was all planned, all scripted, all guided by a hand she was too blind to see. She thought for a long moment.

“You built all that.” Atzi nodded at the flashing lights below. “Your whole society and all its buried virtual realities, without any AI?” She was doubtful.

“Of course we have intelligent systems.” The irritation was once more bubbling right on the surface. “Our programs are beautiful and subtle and brilliant in their own ways. But not like this, not fully self-aware fully generalized, given free reign to do what it will with the galaxy. Only a fool would allow that.”

The clouds continued to brighten and before long the grand curve of Theia gleamed white and brilliant, blotting out the stars beyond. Once she cleared the back side of the planet she at least had a chance of communicating with the people back in Descanso. Suddenly the window display flashed a small message, Failsafe protocol successfully employed, local AI support attempting to regain cruiser control… …. ….

The Emissary closed their silver eyes and the face hung dark and perfect in the center of the window screen as the clouds below jumped forth once more in their profusion of swirling blues.

… … Cruiser control secured. Initiate orbital exit burn?

Atzi pushed her way forward of the chair she had been gripping, letting her slight figure float before the grand, imposing face that was at once so familiar and yet so alien. She thought of the billions of lives drifting around in the clouds below her, all the countless paradises they had built for themselves. She could have hers too, if only she could accept the price. There was still paint on her fingers, she could go back and finish her piece.

But no, that was all a lie. The Jovians thought themselves immortal and masters of the universe, that was a lie too. They may have forgotten reality, the thrill of watching watercolor run on the page out of control and the beautiful, convinced themselves that some approximation was the real thing. They had forgotten, but she remembered. All these eons later, Atzi Delaney still remembered. All things would end, but before then she would live.

“I guess I’m a fool then.”

She pushed back from the window screens and into the acceleration chair, and with a tap on the armrest initiated the orbital exit burn. Her eyes began to blur under the rapid acceleration of the cruiser as it fired hungry engines. The Emissary’s wide silver eyes snapped open and gazed down into the very depths of her before it blinked off the screen and out of existence.

The orbital exit only lasted a few minutes and before long Atzi found herself floating once more in the cockpit. In the rear monitors, she could already see the great blue crescent of Theia receding into the black pool of space beyond. Once they were well clear of the planet the cruiser began to pick up signals from the ship’s relay array of satellites that were scattered between the two planets. Hard as she tried though, she couldn’t get the cruiser to set a return course for Arcadia, it seemed the subtle battle between Sina and the Jovians for control of her cruiser wasn’t over after all.

She floated for hours in the dark cockpit, watching as a trickle of information from the relays made its way across the screen. The local AI on the cruiser it seemed was not nearly as robust as the full implementation she had interacted with earlier. But it was still all too clear, her problems were far from over.

The first anomalies made their way to her just after she finished the orbital exit. Those strange moons, which she now knew to be the peering eyes of a people who had lost all humanity, it seemed had more tricks up their sleeves. They had broken formation around the planet and were moving all to one position. Her blood turned cold in her veins when she realized what they were doing. In one fell swoop they would try to obliterate the Fate and most of the town, the more the better to keep any traces of AI from surviving and spreading. And after all, they knew she’d told Sina to go isolate herself once more. She would be undefended.

The moons, each small as they were on their own, amounted to a formidable weight when combined together, besides from the readings she had it seemed like they were moving to a lower orbit as well. It would create a tidal wave that would sweep around the planet, scouring the coasts clean in a matter of hours. It was a move so subtle, so elegant she knew they’d always had this contingency planned for. But how to become unplanned for?

It seemed fairly clear that the moons were jamming communication between the ship and The Academy, and hence the town, and right about now the sun would just be peeking over the horizon, most of Descanso would be asleep. Helpless. Atzi’s mind spun a thousand times a minute, her gut a cold rock of dread. Then in the far corner of the window screen, she saw the glittering sheen of another Jovian eye, even in direct visual contact, the layered sphere evaded precise comprehension. Suddenly the wheels in her mind stopped, and Atzi Delaney sprung into action.

It would be the barest of hopes, she’d have to time it perfectly, and she’d almost certainly die in the attempt. But what else could she do? It didn’t seem likely that the Jovians would let her get all the way back to Arcadia, the best she could hope for would be a slow death marooned in space. So she encoded four transmissions using the highest level of her system clearance, praying it would be enough to override any other systems blockades the Jovians had implemented.

The first two messages were to Cecilia and Henry David. If they were outside this morning with their tabs there was a chance that an emergency message could make it to them in time to have them evacuate the town before the waves swept up the streets. That was a fairly large if, but it was all she could do with the communications blockade on The Academy. The third message was a hard-coded piloting message to the Fate, the likes of which hadn’t been used since engineers had moved her out of her parking orbit around Earth’s moon all those eons ago. The instruction was to maneuver at full-thrust to the Lagrange point on the far side of the planet from where the moons were rendezvousing. It wasn’t much, but at least that would be the most defensible position for the ship until they could figure out an evacuation plan for her, if nothing else maybe it would take the edge off the tidal wave. The fourth message was for the remaining cruisers orbiting Arcadia, this message was the most simple if the most hopeless. It said, Come find me.

There was no way to be sure, but Atzi felt it in the very bottom of her soul, the moon she saw growing in the window was blocking transmissions from her cruiser. So it was all for naught if she couldn’t interrupt the comms block. As she donned the cruiser’s evacuation suit she set a final program for the ship’s limited AI. Beam these messages continuously, eject me, intercept the moon. On further consideration this was the most hopeless part of her plan, the Jovians certainly had redundancies in their systems that the loss of one moon wouldn’t matter. But it was all she had, besides, light was light. If just one repetition of the messages made it past the blockade while the moon dealt with the cruiser nothing could catch them.

Atzi tumbled back towards the airlock, barely able to control the added bulk of the evacuation suit. If her plan worked the suit would be able to keep her alive until a cruiser could come and fetch her even if it took a week or so. If not, well she’d still be on course for Arcadian orbit maybe she’d make a striking falling star when her corpse finally made it home in a couple of hundred years. She reached down to her tab and initiated her sequence.

In a heartbeat, the world became a tumult of black and white as she was ejected violently from the cruiser. She screamed with every last fiber of her being, but it only echoed around in her helmet and set her ears to further ringing. After an eternity of tumbling the suit finally managed to stabilize itself as it propelled her away from the cruiser and the giant planet that hung below. Atzi looked down and was almost blinded by the thrusters of the cruiser firing at full burn as it rocketed towards the glittering moon in the distance.

She watched as her thundering heartbeats drew past. Five…four…three…two…one. The moon hadn’t so much as made one evasive maneuver to avoid the approaching cruiser, and moon and cruiser alike disappeared in a white flash leaving only a cloud of twinkling dust in its wake. Momentum pulled the cloud into a long arc continuing its slow orbit around Theia. In a few hundred years it all would probably fall down and become just a little more twinkle for the vast spread of rings that arched away in imperturbable glory.

Then Atzi Delaney was left with nothing but the shining rings, and the sound of her own breathing for company, as her suit used the last of its thrust gas to send her on her meandering way back towards Arcadia. The suit began to slowly constrict her oxygen supply, it would hold her unconscious but alive for as long as it could. Hopefully, it would be enough. Just before she passed out one final thought crawled its way through her staggering mind…At least I didn’t let those fuckers get away unbloodied.

—

The ships departed on the same day.

Henry David stopped turning the bed he was working when the Fate’s remaining drives lit up. In the morning light, it was like a new star had suddenly appeared amongst the scarce few that still twinkled this late in the lilac sky. The glint was bright and low and hung directly over the sails that billowed in the morning breeze as the few remaining ships left on the morning tide charting courses much farther than they’d ever set before. It was all fitting in a way very little ever was.

Beside him, Marcello stopped his work as well and for once let the silence of the moment hold. In a few hours, the sails would be gone from sight, and if all went to plan they would not be seen again for many years. The bright drives from the ship, however, those would stay visible for months, gradually receding into the stellar background until it was lost amongst the wide spread of the galaxy beyond. When that day came they would never see the Fate again. Marcello placed a large, calloused hand on Henry David’s shoulder.

“Addio amici miei.” He said softly after a long moment, barely audible above the whispering of the trees in the morning breeze.

“Can we make it without them, Marcello?” Henry David whispered back.

In the past weeks, his answer to that question had turned on its head. He had his bag packed and was stepping out the door when his tab chimed that fateful day. He very nearly didn’t answer it, after all what good could it do him? After the chaos at town hall with Delaney’s announcement he was done filling a role he didn’t fit. Henry David could go on his own and so he would. Whether it was propriety, or some latent desire to learn what Delaney discovered on her voyage that he refused to admit to himself, that had him check his tab that day he couldn’t say. But without a doubt, he was glad that he did.

Thinking of the message even now still turned his heart into a cold rock. EMERGENCY: Hostile actions from Jovians involving realignment of Arcadian moons, likely tsunami risk for next several days due to tidal forces. Evacuate Descanso immediately. Curt and clear, but every word still opened a new world of questions within it. He had no time for questions though, Henry David had dropped his pack and took off running towards the city. He tried calling The Academy, and then town hall, and then just ran through all of his regular contacts, none would connect. When he got to the top of the ridge he could see a bright glint on the eastern horizon, the eastern moon was rising and fast. Panic surged through him as he looked from the moon to the town below basking in the midday sun.

Finally, he called Cecilia and connected. Their tabs typically would relay through the nexus at The Academy, but if they were remote enough at times they could signal each other directly. Such was, fortunately, the case with Cecilia out in her little church. She was already on her way out the door, given that her hamlet was a little lower and a little closer she’d probably beat him into town. Somehow, sharing the burden saved Henry David from complete breakdown and he sprinted on towards Descanso.

They saved what they could. Cecilia immediately raised the alarm at The Academy and the hierarchies in place there allowed them to spring into action, saving what they could from the building and setting the rest of the city into evacuation. There was no time to save the lives they had all built over the years; they could only grab what was close at hand and head for the hills. Now the western moon was visible in the sky and rising just as meteorically as the eastern. The tide was already starting to rise.

Karan, brave as he was, realized quickly that radio communication with the fishing boats that were outside the harbor was being blocked as well. He memorized a quick message, grabbed a couple of safety flags, and rode to the trail that led up to the castilla. Henry David watched as he frantically signaled to the boats with basic semaphore to move out to sea and try to ride out the worst of the surges. As he was signaling a gasp rose up in the emptying town square, a new light had appeared in the western sky, smaller but more concentrated. It was the Fate, she was moving.

They cheered when they realized what was happening, and cheered again when they saw the tide begin to slow in its rise as the moons altered their realignment and started to draw water at least less strongly towards the city. Little did they know what was to come. Fortunately, they had the good sense to continue the evacuation.

As the Fate made its escape the moons eventually came together in the western sky and tried to give chase. The last houses were being double-checked for stragglers when the tide began to recede in earnest. It was a relief, at first. The waters drew back hour after hour until the harbor was all but empty. Henry David watched it like a noose being slid over his neck as he pounded on doors and helped the people of the northern neighborhood make their way up into his valley. The water was gone for now, but not forever.

The first wave came when the moons appeared in the eastern sky. With their unfathomable power and gravity they had dragged a great mass of water clear around Arcadia and now brought it to bear on the defenseless city of Descanso. They watched from the ridgeline in horror as the tide rose in a matter of minutes in the morning light, first refilling the harbor and then as great waves came pouring over the Castilla pushing a seething torrent of earth and water up over the town square and into the emptied streets of the city.

The Academy was the first building to fall. The great sphere that served as their connection to modern life came crashing down into the raging water and they never saw it again. Town hall was not far behind. The initial wave caused heavy damage, but it was the water receding that destroyed the town. Shortly after midday the moons had made their way across the sky and were dragging the great mass of water with them as the planet’s oceans tried to counterbalance this great gravitational change. Many homes were still standing even with the streets full of muddy water and the castilla now just a few lonely spires out at sea. But when the sea went the town went with it. They watched in silence from the ridges as the waves dragged away the life they had so carefully built. By sundown, all that was left were a few walls of some stone buildings and broken beams reaching towards the sky like shattered skeletons.

Henry David wasn’t sure it could get much worse than the horrors of that endless day. But their torment was not yet complete. The moons continued to give chase to the Fate for three days. On the second day, the water was able to rush directly up the mouth of the river that ran just south of town in a great raging tidal bore. The waves this time were funneled by the eroded Castilla up the river and into the vale where Cecilia had taken the citizens of the southern neighborhoods. They had no way of knowing how far the waves made it, but as they watched hours later as the tides receded full of dirt and debris it was all but certain the damage was severe. They would later learn that several hundred people had been taken unaware by the rushing water, and Cecilia could only watch from her perch on the front steps of her church.

On the third day, a few ships that were short on supplies for such a long time at sea decided to risk it and attempt to come ashore just north of where the city once stood. The tide was far out once again so anchored as best they could almost half a mile offshore and tried to walk across the muddy flats. One crew made it, two others were taken by the returning waters as they struggled in the mud, another turned back and tried to head out to sea when they noticed the water returning only to have their boat capsized by the rushing waves and crushed against the rocky shore.

Then, mercifully, the world went quiet. The tide came in, though not so violently, and then stopped. It was a few feet higher than before but it was stable, only fluctuating a couple of feet with the ebb and flow. They couldn’t see the menacing glint of the moons any longer, nor could they see the bright thrust of the Fate. Had the moons destroyed it? Why would they want to? And what had happened to Atzi?

It took another two days huddled, cramped up in the hills in their thousands, before Dr. Tran was able to reconnect with the ship using some equipment they had saved before the flood and what little more they could salvage from the remains of The Academy. The ship it seemed had been racing for its life, but it had successfully navigated to the L3 Lagrange point on the far side of the planet from the moons. Now it sat in a stable geosynchronous orbit in the western sky. The moons may have been far more advanced, but thanks to gravity they couldn’t feasibly make an approach on the Fate, the weight that had dragged the great waves around the world now held the ship safely on the far side of the planet. They could break formation and try to pursue but the resulting shift would only help propel the Fate away more easily. No, if the Jovians intended to attack the ship they would need something else, which meant bringing something in from Theian orbit. So at the very least, they had a couple of days. But they had no idea what to expect because amongst all the chaos another change had happened, the moons had stopped talking. The radiation pulses being beamed back to Theia that set this whole disastrous chain in motion had suddenly gone silent.

In time, Dr. Tran’s team found the messages Atzi had sent just before she evacuated her cruiser as well, and a picture began to emerge of just how strange this new world really was. Encoded with her message back to the ship was a transcription of her journey and her bold sacrifice. Henry David could still remember watching the events unfold almost as if he was right in Atzi’s shoes. He, Marcello, Dr. Tran, Karan, Cecilia, and a few others from The Academy huddled around Dr. Tran’s computer watching the footage. He remembered Karan’s look of excitement when the feed switched to include Atzi’s strange journey into the mind of the Fate and it became clear just how alive the ship truly was. He remembered the look of awe from Marcello and disgust from Cecilia when Atzi met the Jovians and it became clear why Arcadia was so much like home. With hindsight it all seemed so obvious, but how could they have made that leap?

They watched in awestruck silence as Atzi was ejected from the cruiser and its final moments as it careened headlong into yet another glittering, crystalline moon. The silence seemed to hold for days as they watched the pair of cruisers the Fate had dispatched to try and recover her make the crossing out towards Theia. Fortunately, her cruiser had been able to transmit her ejection location and vector data back before it crashed, so the searching ships had a fighting chance of locating her. But as they looked up into the night sky with its wide spray of stars arching from the horizons their hopes seemed utterly futile.

The silent days passed in a hazy blur. Feeling a need to escape the crowded encampment his valley had become, Henry David, rather ironically, sought solace in what remained of the city. He joined the first salvage crews who journeyed down to see what could be saved from the ruins. There their hopes fell even further. In most of the city, they found nothing more than twisted boards and great slides of mud that covered the streets meters thick. Still, for a society with no means to mine even the most twisted and bent piece of scrap metal was more precious than an ingot of gold. So they dug through the wreckage street by street.

On the third day of salvage, Henry David’s crew made it to the workshop. They could see it still standing on its little rise beside the town square, one of the few buildings in town with more than a single standing wall. Some combination of its position on a small rise next to two wide streets and it’s stone and steel first floor, the only one in the town, had kept the building standing even if it was just a shell. They climbed through the shattered doors and waded nearly chest-deep through the mud and debris. So many countless hours of human craft laid to waste without so much as a thought. He climbed the only remaining set of stairs into the second floor, the windows here too were all broken out, but the rooms were a little less torn apart by the waters. He pushed through a jammed door and was struck still. Along the far wall were the five wide panels of a great mural. It had to be Delaney’s, she was the only painter in the colony with the skill to create such a massive, ambitious piece. It spanned the width of the room, slammed against the far wall, several panels were torn along the lower frame where water had smashed into them. All the same, the piece was incredible. A great riot of greens and greys and blues, all the colors of their new world in a bold composition with all the many different lives they had lived only a few days before. It was beautiful. Beautiful and unfinished. The final panel was only half-painted, the figures rough and unfinished, and the muddy waters had stained the canvas where it was left unpainted. Now it told a story Atzi could never have imagined. Even remembering the feeling days later tears still stung his eyes.

But then in the darkness, a ray of light. As he sat covered in mud in Atzi’s studio, too shattered to move, his tab gave a soft chime from his pack. The message was simple, Marooned astronaut recovered, cruiser proceeding with return transfer to CRS Delaney’s Fate. A great jolt of lightning ran through his body and Henry David took off running towards his valley.

The silence broke around him. One glimpse of mercy from a universe that had seemed so hell-bent on their destruction for the past week was just enough to help the people of Arcadia pull themselves together. But in the way so much often is, the mercy was short-lived. Delaney returned to the ship to recover from the coma her suit had held her in, she would never return to the planet she had just started to call home. Her masterpiece would remain unfinished.

After a few days of recovery, she was able to message down to fill in some critical gaps in the transmission, how she had instructed the higher-level AI of the ship to shield itself, how she believed that the Jovians would attack again if they thought the AI was operating once again in the system. They had underestimated the ship once, they would not again. For now, they were playing it safe, even going so far as to pull their moons back from Arcadia now that their plan had been foiled.

“All I’ve done is poked them in the eye,” Atzi whispered over their video call, her skin was the color of paper mulch, her usually serene face was drawn and withered. “We got lucky in a thousand ways this time, but it doesn’t change facts. The Jovians want to kill our ship’s AI, precisely because she is self-aware, one broken moon doesn’t change that. For now, it just looks like they’re playing things close to the vest, hoping she doesn’t make copies of herself all over the system and threaten the way they live on Theia. But if they get a chance, they’ll strike again.”

“Why don’t they just shoot the ship out of space?” Dr. Tran asked.

“They seem convinced that the self-replicating aspects of these different AIs make them very hard to eliminate, anything short of complete destruction of the ship is unacceptable.”

Tran nodded, “And do you think they’ll come after us on the planet?”

“No…” Delaney started faintly. “No, I don’t think so, if the ship leaves. Without the ship, humans on Arcadia aren’t much of a threat. By the time we regain any form of space travel without the ship’s help, there’s every likelihood that the very existence of the Jovians will have passed beyond myth.”

“Well then…what will you do?” Asked Dr. Tran, a quaver in her voice belying the great maelstrom of emotion she felt, just like the rest in their little crew.

Delaney set her jaw as best she could, “A week ago I met two different forms of alien life, neither quite like anything we’d imagined. One tried to maroon me in space, the other saved me. I owe a debt to this ship, if I can repay it I will. Sina is holed up in some server matrix up here, I’m going to put some distance between us and the Jovians and try to get her out. I’m not sure if it’s possible for her to live a meaningful life pursued by these Jovians, or what that even means for an artificial intelligence, but I’m going to try. You all can make your own choices, but I’m leaving in a week’s time.”

What followed was a dance of civic diligence, unlike any Henry David could’ve ever fathomed if he hadn’t watched it with his own eyes. There, crowded up in the valleys, the people of Arcadia began a great debate about the future. Some simply wanted to rebuild what they had lost. Others, reviled the notion of being watched by the strange Jovians like zoo animals and wanted to flee back into space. Still, others wanted to bargain with the Jovians, to see if they could join them in their myriad virtual realities. But in the end, there were only two options, stay or go. There was no going back to being alone in the universe anymore. They could stay and take their chances with the humans who were so twisted so as to become aliens themselves. Or they could go with the ship and see if they could find a way for organic and artificial intelligence to coexist. Either way, they would be explorers in their own way once more. Each citizen had to make their own choice and make their own peace with it.

Several thousand chose to return to the ship, too disturbed by the planet that had once looked like a miracle and now seemed more a manicured prison. Most of them didn’t remember the countless eons it took for them to arrive here in the first place, time had healed the wounds of the lost passengers getting to Arcadia, and they were willing to roll the cosmic dice once more. Among them, unsurprisingly, were Dr. Tran and Karan, both all too eager to learn what they could of the being that had drawn itself forth from the void amongst the endless zeroes and ones that ran through the veins of the Fate.

Henry David was surprised, however, to see Cecilia pack her few things and head to the passenger launch. They had never spent much time together living here, he certainly wasn’t filling her pews on Sunday mornings, although sometimes she’d come up and help him turn over his test beds for a new crop. Still, she had seemed reverent to a profound degree with the life she was given on Arcadia.
“You too Sister?” he asked.

She looked solemnly up at him, “I can no longer see the Lord in this world…” she sighed. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“But you were with us, you remember just what it took to get here don’t you?”

“Yes carinho, I remember, I remember all too well..” She looked out to sea, for all the chaos on the plains before her, the glittering sea still shone the same. “But I will put my trust in Providence, the Lord will bring what he will. Maybe it will be a new home, maybe it will be a way to understand this creature they say lives at the heart of the ship. I’m just an old nun, and I don’t know much, but I will trust Him to guide my way.”

With that, she patted him gently on the shoulder and carried on towards the waiting launch that sat atop the remnants of the old town square. Just beyond, from the cove that once was the harbor, a great column of steam rose from the sea. A compromise between those who stayed and those who left, an engine from the ship was dropped down beneath the waves to generate water vapor. They couldn’t be certain, but it seemed like as it would be enough to keep the atmosphere stable for now, at least if they began planting the right seeds.

Along with an engine, the ship dropped down a great hoard of seeds. Those who stayed, couldn’t just rebuild Descanso and try to return to their old life, the bubble that the Jovians had made for them was popped. The ship’s engine would run out of fuel in a few hundred years, and before that happened they needed to create such a diversity of life on their planet that it could help stabilize the climate on its own. The Jovians had barely picked enough species to cover the ground with and create the facade of an ecosystem. It held itself in balance, but barely, there was no diversity, no resilience.

And they needed resilience. So the plan was made, they took the boats that had survived the tsunami out at sea and divided what was left of the population into three groups. Two would sail off to islands at the far corners of the planet and begin their own new society, sowing the seeds of new life as they went. The others would stay on their island and spread wide bringing new life into the hills and vales. All of them explorers once more.

And that brought them to the morning the ships departed. Henry David and Marcello both remembered the years aboard the Fate far too keenly to want to return to the stars, and now with one less drive, the ship would limp along even more slowly than before. Besides, one could look around at the craggy, green hills of their planet and see a prison built to trap them in, or you could see the boundless potential that sat before them. A planet of the right size, close enough the right star, shielded by the right magnetosphere, all of these things were miracles they knew even if the life around them was a lie. Henry David and Marcello were in this second camp. They were part of the third group of those who chose to stay that would remain on the island and sow their seeds there. Henry David’s test gardens had expanded considerably, they now surrounded his little lake and were surrounded themselves by the growing frames of new homes that were rising to join his in the protected seclusion of the valley.

Marcello spoke and patted him on the shoulder, snapping him out of his reverie. “Oh we will make it, you could have made it on your own, but it is much better with friends.”

Henry David looked up at the fading glint from the Fate “Yeah,” he replied after a long moment, “I suppose it is.”

He stood and watched a while as the shining star of the ship gradually dimmed in the brightening morning sky. Marcello returned to his spading, as always chattering away about nothing in particular. The ships faded away entirely both in the sky and on the sea when the sun crested the ridge of the valley. Henry David smiled, picked up his shovel, and returned to his digging in the soft morning breeze.