X & Y - Part 2/5

The Dark Arts of Xeraforming

Hello! and welcome to part 2 of this 5 part sci-fi story. If you missed Part 1, please click there.

This is part of my Immigration Control collection, in case you were not already aware. This one, and the remaining stories are the paid subscriber only bits of the collection. Hmm, how about one of those buttons?

Although I would love to give away everything for free, especially given my liberal socialist tendencies, I’m quite a poor person and would love to make a living out of all this lovely writing. So for now, at least, it remains behind a hopefully enticing paywall. To see beyond the paywall, you know what to do, my darling readers.

Anyway, in the first episode, Xaya has awoken out of cryosleep, taken up orbit about Planet Venus, and initiated the Xeraforming process. She didn’t realise there were intelligent lifeforms on the third planet until she received their anxious message.

Time to consider the implications of that message. And get a little intel on this disturbing primate species in the meantime.

A very wise decision, as I am sure you would agree.

---

---

Why was it only her? Out of all the three hundred and seventy of them, why only her who survived? She had asked the Fates, time and again she had implored them for an answer, but none came. They remained silent.

It’s not that she felt guilty. She just needed to know.

It wasn’t Qyi, calculating that she, as an exobiologist, would be the one to awaken. Qyi confirmed that, she had no influence on it. At least not until her pod showed green whilst the others were all red and she focussed on the awakening. But Xaya could not accept the randomness, that luck, if that’s what it was. That the first impact would dislodge something in only her pod, but no one else’s. It was only those precious seconds of the awakening cycle that saved her. For the others, it was too late.

It still only came in flashes. She fell out of the pod onto the floor. It was freezing, she remembered that. She screamed for Qyi. “…catastrophic… impact… diverting to life-support. The temperature will rise. Remain where you are.”

Chlorine and methane rushes into the stasis chamber, she gulps as desperate a lungful as she can, then another. And another. It was dark. Dim red. Then the greenish tinge to the air as it grew more breathable again. The ship shuddered. Lyexa? Lyexa!

She crawls over to his stasis pod. Pulls herself up and peers inside.

That’s when she can’t remember anything else except for her own terrifying howl.

---

At approximately the same distance from the exosphere as the third planet’s natural satellite, Motherprobe opens and releases a thousand spawn. Nanoprobes, too small to be visible to the naked eyes of primates, and not detectable by their level of technology. They fan out in all directions streaking through the mesosphere and descending further into the troposphere without the slightest trace of a heat signature.

Motherprobe, perhaps a few metres in diameter, closes up her birthing canal and settles calmly into a fast orbit, beginning at the equator and then tilting a fraction of a degree with each round. All her sensors come to life, receiving and transmitting all that data back to her parent ship via quantum teleportation faster than all the best supercomputers these primates possessed together.

Of course they detected her. And they studied her in return. But they detected no transmissions and knew not what she was sensing. They needed to know, but couldn’t. They could not penetrate her. Their fears did not abate.

And they did not understand Xaya’s signal. It did not answer the one question being asked by the entire population, in unison. Perhaps in unison for the first time in their entire social history.

Interesting, for sure, how it takes something like this to wake them up and realise they’re all exactly the same.

“What must they think of us, when they find out?”

---