Sunday, 5/2/10 - Alone

Evelyn stirred the campfire with a length of copperwood and watched the embers spill upward like so many fireflies scrambling for a space amoung the stars. The evening is cool and a gentle breeze moves the firesmoke out over the grassy expanse and disappears it over the lake beyond. Stalks of fountainfern clack together, their bamboo wind-chiming softly sounding behind her.

Off to her left, rising two stories into the night, are the giant ribs of her crashed starship.

Evelyn looks up at the stars shining like diamonds spilled on the black velvet night and understands why she was chosen for this mission: there are few that can be this isolated without going crazy.

She was not unique, there were hundreds in her class that could have qualified but she and eleven others were selected to be a part of this, the farthest reaching exploratory space venture. What did make her unique, what qualified her for this trip, in addition to her physical and mental attributes, was her compatibility with the other crew members.

She thought of them now and remembered the cobwebs that whispered that they were all gone.

Unlike many deep space explorations, this one started not with the terrestrial launch of a rocket but with the cleaving of part of an existing space station. The partly organic nature of the ship allowed it to be grown, equipped and launched from space. The crew, like the ship, had never known earth except through vids in full dimension sym-rooms.

The fully provisioned starship was programmed to transport the twelve crew members, cryogenically suspended and their sleep pods, to a galaxy beyond Andromeda and to then begin a search for a planet suitable for human life.

Cryogenic suspension was a proven technology but not without complications. The biggest problem was the length of time it took to re-animate the subject and the sequence of events during that process. Mental functions were restored several weeks before any physical functions. During this time, subjects remained in a half-aware state where awakening senses sent scrambled signals to a disconnected mind. The result was pure confusion which often escalated to panic and, without the ability to respond physically, to a complete mental breakdown.

To keep subjects calm during the re-animation process, brainwaves are constantly monitored. At the first sign of agitation, sedatives are administered and the subject's mental functions temporarily suspended.

During her re-animation, the first thing Evelyn became aware of was a spider web. When her mind filled in the blanks with large, grotesque spiders, the computer pushed her down into sleep. Each time she awoke she had a bit more awareness, each time she saw the spider web and each time the computer made it go away.

At the end of her re-animation period, Evelyn opened her eyes and lay still looking at the web-like fractures in the cover of her cryo sleep compartment. A dread yawned and stretched and awakend fully within her then stung her with the barbed realization that something had gone horribly wrong.

Over the next three months on this new planet Evelyn learned a lot. She inventoried the ship, surveyed the surrounding area, catalogued the local flora and identified potential food sources.

As best she could tell, no higher life forms had evolved here.

Here.

Where was here?

She checked the computer often but its only response was No Point Of Origin Determined. Basically, the computer was telling her that it was lost.

She had also learned that she was alone. The contained no information on the crash of her starship but it was evident that the other eleven crew members were casualties of that crash.

Evelyn dealt with the death of her crewmates with business-like detachment. There were important tasks that needed to be done and she wasted no time in getting them done.

With all of the essential tasks completed, Evelyn worked with the computer to piece together the past and to try to make sense of where she was and how to let others know her fate.

The first thing the computer revealed was that she had been in suspension for almost three hundred years while the ship searched for a suitable planet. Interesting information but quickly forgotten when she started searching the computer's memory for the most recent communications.

She did not expect to find anything from today, or yesterday. The time it took transmissions to flow out from earth and be repeated and retransmitted along the glactic web could take years.

As she searched she found nothing. Not from this year, or ten years ago. Not from fifty or a hundred years ago. Not from two hundred years ago.

When she finally located the most recent communications they were from two hundred and seventy eight years ago - only twelve years after her mission had begun.

She sat for days reading the messages and watching the vids on earth's final days. It appeared that man had done what men had always done: he manufactured a political enemy, demonized him then manufactured the weaponry to destroy that enemy. Each time man struck an enemy he invariably lost something of himself.

This time, however, he had annihilated his foe but in doing so had also completely destroyed himself.

Even though she had never been there, she had been in enough sym-rooms to know that earth was a beautiful place - all green and blue and golden. The images of its final days showed nothing but death and destruction.

With earth gone it was only a matter of time before inhabitants of orbiting space stations and planetary outposts also perished. She watched their pleas for help go unanswered and finally dwindle then stop completely.

It seemed that the only human left alive was sitting by a campfire on an unknown planet in an uncharted galaxy.

Her initial mission directives had been clear: upon emerging from cryo, use all of the ship's resources to create a self-sustainable environment and then to start families. It was known at the start that the original crew would never return and that follow up missions would take longer than one lifetime to reach them. Other generations would be needed.

Evelyn stared into the fire and thought about this new world that she was inhabiting, its strange rhythms and its dual suns chasing one another across the daytime sky.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the cylinder - no bigger than her finger - that contains a fertilized human egg that was cryogenically suspended and is now being re-animated. Within the next thirty two hours she must either become host to this new life or allow it to die.

Her mission directives were clear. She knows what she should do and she knows that the genetics contianed within the cylinder are perfect as are the genetics of the ninety-nine other cylinders in the ships medical store. Only the best human gene strains were supplied. Each chosen for specific qualities then engineered further to eliminate any imperfection.

The child that will be born from this egg will be as perfect as humanly possible.

Evelyn looks over at the broken starship and thinks about the earth, cold and dark. She turns the cylinder over in her hand then pushes it down, deep inside her pocket.