On Distant Worlds: The Prologues & Colibri. Brian Gonzalez
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was an economic boom.
The project itself was hiring more and more workers as it began new stages of production, each of which demanded both specialists and a generalized labor force. Each new stage also created multiple lines of subcontracted external employment to fill its specialized needs, be it the mining of rare earth minerals in the rain forests of South America or the designing of self-repairing smart metals in an office in Western Europe. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs who had bought into the Plan began founding companies to produce products and services complementary to the Plan; everything from clothing designed to last a lifetime, to underwater construction facilities, to family line DNA storage services, to the MyLifePods which sold almost fifty million units. The MyLifePods are still one of the most commonly found archaeological items today, often with the victims of their unfortunate software flaw still inside.
Twenty-five years after its inception, the project had become the largest employer in the world. Ten years after that and the majority of employment in the world was connected one way or another to the Plan; the activities of humanity revolved around it the way that for many generations the cycles of life in ancient Egypt had ebbed and flowed around the building of the Great Pyramids.
Humanity’s possible extinction was headed our way, but at the literal end of the day people still wanted to have a decent meal and a comfortable place to sleep. Better still if you could fall asleep with your favorite film playing all around you, a stacked bank account, and a hot new ride in your parking slot. As the various projects started paying for people’s lives, public opposition to the Plan began to wane. By the halfway point of the project, children were growing up into a world with actual enthusiasm for the Plan.
The departure of many moderates left the remaining opposition to the Plan much smaller, but now the zealotry and radicalism were more concentrated. They would still be heard from on a continual and sometimes spectacular basis, as we would painfully find out.
“Nobody knows if this will work.”
-- German soldier Jacob Grunner-Metz, the first human to undergo nanosymbiotic hibernation, 2069 C.E.
Point #1 of the CSP concerned itself with the partial or near-total devastation of Earth’s surface. It assumed moderate to heavy meteoric bombardment, with resultant long-term geophysical events: fallout winters, seismic and volcanic activity, disruption of the biological cycles that made life possible. And Point #1 worked.
The majority of humanity did of course die. Earth took three major hits along with hundreds of smaller ones. The planet’s population was decimated in the first three years, and halved in a decade, mostly due to starvation. It is estimated that fifteen years after the first strike, there were less than a hundred thousand people left alive on the surface of the Earth, most surviving in wave-powered floating habitats along the equator or in specially prepared caves or small artificially covered valleys in extreme Northern and Southern latitudes.
Underground, almost forty million people survived, along with hundreds of species of animals, thousands of species of plants, and the ability to – theoretically – bring back many of the species which had been lost.
A very small minority of these people survived in private shelters, dozens of types of which had been commercially available for decades before the Cataclysm arrived. Most of the individual shelters proved flimsy or poorly designed and prone to failure; those which were smart and rigorous enough to properly do the job they had been designed for tended to disgorge their survivors into a frozen ash-gray world devoid of living humans or indeed any other kind of biological support.
Those who lived in planned communities deep underground, particularly the Warrens, fared better. Cataclysm Studies was my Study of Minor Specialty in Second School so I have expertise in that area. I chose that Minor because despite the reality that living in the Warrens or presumably, the BioShip, represented hardship and deprivation, they were so cunningly designed for human needs that it was romantic in an odd sort of way. The ship and the underground communities also represented the triumph of the human spirit over the worst the universe can offer. As a young girl living under a warm sun and blue skies, eating fresh food and drinking natural water, I sometimes found myself wishing I lived in the Warrens, exploring the tunnels that linked the different underground habitats. Perhaps I would visit the farm, with its handful of live animals and actual crops under an artificial sun, or the school, or the food labs. Most exciting of all would be to take the days-long trip from the population habitats nearer the surface to the intentionally isolated and highly secured Future Bank kilometers below the rest of the Warrens, to see the square kilometers of art and technology and other cultural treasures of humanity all awaiting the future in one place.
That was a silly but frequent fantasy of mine until I turned thirteen. Then it and all other fantasies were replaced by the silly fantasy I just yesterday missed out on actually living.
Point #2 of the Plan assumed biological destruction of the Earth and the extinction of humanity on the planet. The Mars Colonies were enlarged and redesigned in an attempt to make them self-sufficient, and they included equivalents of our Future Banks. They didn’t store any art treasures or old vehicles, but they had full gene banks and, in crystalline storage, the collected writings and AV recordings of humankind. Additionally, a new class of food-producing space vessel was designed to provide a long-lived nutrition source for the isolated pockets of people living elsewhere in the Solar System – the Moon bases, the research stations on Jupiter’s satellites, and inside various large asteroids, the field HQ’s of the large trans-orbital mining corporations. Other than Mars none of these communities were expected to become permanently self-sufficient but rather just to hang on by themselves for up to fifty years as additional Future Bank insurance. In theory they would be able to communicate with each other and even provide mutual support in the form of launched supply packets, and in theory they could even repopulate Mars or Earth afterwards if humanity was extinguished on both worlds during the Cataclysm.
Unfortunately, none of these populations survived.
Mars took several hits. One colony was destroyed by debris raining back down from orbit after being launched into space by a Cataclysm strike elsewhere on the planet; Mars’s own rocks precipitating in molten form to sandwich the installation. Its remains are beneath a bronze statue and twenty meters of metamorphic basalt today. The other two colonies survived the Cataclysm itself, but enough damage was done to their infrastructure and to the environmental conditions of the planet itself that indefinite self-sufficiency became untenable. They hung on for generations, but eventually chose to stop reproducing and in 67 A.C. the famous Last Five held hands as they popped the hatch. By then most of the smaller outposts had died off; the Moon bases were ravaged by seismic tremors early on, and all the mining bases in the asteroid belt starved out except the NEOSpace facility, which was disturbed by a Cataclysm body and hideously flung off into outer space. The change in course is calculated to not have been violent enough to kill the population; what did those people do, I wonder, as they realized they were headed for interstellar space? There’s talk of sending an expedition to track the ill-fated asteroid, so perhaps someday we’ll find out.
Only the combined Jovian facilities survived for any length of time, an amazing feat given the number of gravitational and meteoric incidents in Jupiter space during the Cataclysm. The resourcefulness of a population of scientists and engineers, along with the protected positions of the installations themselves, on the far sides of their respective satellites from the giant gas planet and its potential radiation bursts, allowed the community to hang on eighty years. But they had shrunk from nine hundred people in fourteen facilities to fifty-three survivors in three damaged bases.
Fourteen of them died in the crash of the Lady Callisto in the attempt to land on Mars. The rest died out like the victims of the other space outposts; Karl Edgar Nassim wrote Last Human Standing in 88 A.C. and died in his sleep the year after. Given radio silence from Earth, from the BioShip, from Mars and from everywhere, it’s quite understandable that he really believed he was the last human being, and it’s what gives the work so much raw power. He wrote the collection of essays believing no one would ever read it.
Everyone has read it.
The third and most controversial point of the CSP assumed complete