Strategy 2030

The capsule was empty. The lamp smothered the walls in a diluted amber, the occasional ripple of blue flowing on either side of the room. It had been several days since the life-ship had departed Perdita station and the computer had decided to turn off the gravity generators to conserve energy. I pulled my knees to my chest, pressing them in tight. The sensation sent a cosy fizzle down my spine, warming me as I aimlessly floated.

          ‘Radio transmissions are still silent.’ The computer’s intercom fizzled out. It had previously tried to persuade me to reenter Cyro but I’d wanted to experience the zero gravity. It was a novelty not permitted on armed convoys or star liners, and besides no one was here to bark at me for behaving like a child. I’d take the time to soothe myself, safely tucked away from their rules and regulations. A metal chain tickled the strands of my tied hair, the links floating around my neck. I grabbed the pendant in my palm, feeling the soft skin of a tiny silver spear grate against my skin, the words ‘To shape life’ inscribed into its hard flesh. I unclipped it, pushing the now debris into the cabin’s void. That never got old.

          While browsing the catalogue for the deep space mission,  I’d stumbled on a file, slotted away in a folder simply called ‘Pre-collapse fiction.’ Fiction was generally disdained by the Directive, but I’d decided I would need a distraction from all the numbers and graphs. Something to fill the lonely days.

The book had been composed in a primitive form of some dead language from a bygone era and rather than ask an official Directive translator I’d instead relied on the ship’s AI. Better not to be caught, I’d thought. Not again. I gazed into my holopad and returned to the greens and blues that flickered from the screen. The Living Planet. Chapter 4.

          I pressed a gloved finger against the pixels, imagining how they must have felt, how they must have tasted. None of them followed any of the design philosophies we’d been taught on Atsali, contrasting the dedication we applied to our lifework. Everything in the core was terraformed, designed to meet a comfortable symmetry. But these trees and river twisted, seemingly following no pattern. Yet there was something there, a driving force that allowed it all to…flow. It seemed more than just fiction but all I’d ever known was empty corridors and silver panels, perfectly aligned. Even the trees had been biologically engineered aeons ago to simply grow in a straight line.

          ‘Approaching undiscovered satellite orbiting an unknown body.’ The computer went silent.

A gleam of light seeped into the room, covering the cabin in a pale embrace, eclipsing the lamps. The lamps shut off, leaving the capsule to fester in the decaying ambience. A small moon covered the source of the light, but from the bland rays that scathed my face it was from my basic navigation that this was a dead star. The cratered mess ebbed out of view, the shuttle gliding past its cracked surface. I leaned forward staring at a metal graveyard that floated in the dark abyss between me and the organic satellite’s cracked skin. Where had all this junk come from?

          A brown smudge on the viewport disturbed my pondering. That surely wasn’t possible. No contaminants ever got aboard. It was a prime directive that all candidates had to follow, and I wasn't about to be caught out by a bit of dirt. I tried to wipe it off with my suit, initially hesitating to get my cuff dirty.

But the smudge resisted, becoming bigger by the second. It wasn’t a smudge at all but a planet covered in clouds of gas that polluted the space around it.

          ‘Please brace. Further, debris from nearby exoplanet incoming.’

          But this surely was no exoplanet. The sheer amount of litter that cloistered around this ball of waste was surely a lost civilisation of some sort. I held my hands still, trying to stop them shaking, attempting to recite the First Contact Directive.

          More pieces of scrap flew into the ship, archaic logos of all different kinds smashing into the starboard, rocking the capsule and thrusting me forward into the viewport.  A piece hit the energy repulsor, an unfamiliar language plastered onto their metal sheets. They immediately dissolved into a thousand granules as they hit. They seemed so human but they didn’t fit any specs from my holo manual. Strange.

‘Computer, translate.’

          ‘Please wait. Attempting to decipher… Several detections of archaic English were found.’

          ‘And?’

          ‘Possible interpretations of these words are…Nasa … Amazon…Tesla.

          Perhaps these had been ancient humans, descendants long forgotten. But this couldn’t be a human colony. There were no records of any in the quadrant and the debris below must have been centuries old, surely from a primitive species who didn’t truly understand space flight yet. That much evident by the mess below. Besides, why would the Directive forget to note such an evidently large colony? I rubbed my hand against my thin jawline, thinking of a possible scenario.

          ‘Computer, re-check archive files for colonies in this sector.’

          ‘Please wait. Re-scanning… No colonies have been recorded in this sector.’

          There was only one explanation. This planet had been hidden away. But why? The smudge became bigger as the ship glided around the planet. Massive structures covered every inch of the surface, rising high into the musty atmosphere. They had none of the grace of the core world’s architecture, and instead followed a design of obtuse and clunky rectangles that stretched for hundreds of miles, rowed in lines next to each other. It was as this world had been cased in a cold metal which had smothered it. There were neon lights, no symmetrical patterns embedded into the framework of the structures like the core. It was simply clunky and…dark.

          Whatever had happened here, this planet had been taken over by metal, its structures dilapidated and bent. That explained the brown haze that swamped the planet in tears of rust. We continued our orbit, circling the dead world, a wasteland of dead grey plating the world in a metal coffin.

But then something caught my eye in all that decay. In the midst of this dying world there was a patch of black, sprayed across one of the structures. ‘Computer, enhance camera, sector 4215.’

          A force grabbed hold of my stomach, wrenching my soul. The holo image formed in front of me, displaying the anomaly below. It was something from book… but how?

          I tried to keep my hand fixed on my jaw, to remain clinical in my analysis but I began to tremble.

          I picked up my holobook and scrolled to the Living Planet and flicked to the section on plants, placing the two images side by side. The image revealed a small green stalk that sprouted from what I assumed was soil, bubbles of soft lilac protruding forth. It was something called a Chrysanthemum. I had no reason to be so unnecessarily emotional so why was I crying? I’d never seen this species of plant before and surely it was fictional, yet it seemed so familiar.

          Tears swelled in my ducts, the hairs on the back of my neck rising. My analysis protocol was being overridden, years of training being replaced by an innate sadness. Though there were no records, I knew what this planet was.

          It had been a home, a place for life. Now it was a tomb of metal.

          I scanned the holobook, looking for the name of the place the author had always referred to. Earth.

          The holo image panned out of view, becoming smaller as the ship continued its course further into the void. I placed my hand onto the viewport, imagining the feel of the soil crumbling on my toes, the smell of that singular, wild plant that was trying to hold onto its little patch.

          ‘Would you like me to mark this planet on the map for further investigation by the Directive.’

          The pendant floated back into my view, those haunting words flashing in the dying light of the dead star.

          ‘No.’ I stared back at the planet as it became a brown smudge again, smirked across my viewport.