All I could glean from them was that the light spectrum of this star is very different from the star in our home system. The spectrum analysis done on such a light spectrum is completely different from the assumption that the scientists had made. I wonder, why this was not factored in. Shouldn’t the scientist have known this before?
Now we are here, and there is nowhere else to go, so we have to make the best of it. All is not lost though. The 4th planet (we no longer call it the fabled world), is the right size and the right texture. It has all the right minerals and metals. The problem with the planet is that it has almost no atmosphere to breathe. This makes it far colder, despite getting far more sunlight than our home world.
The other major problem is the severe lack of water on the surface of the planet. Still it is not that bad. There is plenty of frozen ice on the poles. It would be more than enough for the pitiful number of our species that have come to settle this world. The great leader is working with the engineers to find a suitable place for us to build a habitat.
The big surprise in this system has been the 3rd planet. It is teeming with life far denser than even our home world, which we used to think as the most fertile in the universe. We only had the worlds of the two alien species we had conquered for comparison. Clearly we had not seen enough of the universe.
The 3rd planet would have been ideal for us to settle, but for a major issue. The oppressive gravity of that planet. The 3rd planet was far larger than our home world, and the gravity was more than 3 times that of our home world. As a physician I had been consulted about the effect on our bodies from that kind of gravity.
I had given my professional opinion that I would highly discourage from exposing our bodies long term to such high gravity. It would aggravate injuries and cause serious longevity and health issues. We would be more vulnerable to disease due to the constant overtaxing of our immune system. All this did not even take into account that our lives would be an endless misery due to the oppressive weight of our own body. We would find carrying even simple things like our tool boxes a major task.
There was also the outside chance of being infected by pathogens contracted from native life that had evolved on that planet. The probability of that happening was low, but it was possible in theory. I had records of the biome of the two alien species that we had conquered, and the latest aliens encountered had been sampled and the data has been uploaded to us. All three of the alien biomes were so drastically different from ours that there was no chance of cross infection.
The great leader had finally taken a decision. We would settle on the 4th planet. Once we have settled in, we would better explore the 3rd planet by going down to the surface, rather than scanning from orbit as we had done before. There is no signs of technology visible on the 3rd planet, which would have been impossible to hide from orbit, so we face no danger there. Probably very complex life had not evolved on the 3rd planet yet.
Year 22
It has taken us over a year of hard work and discomfort, but we have finally completed the construction of our habitat. It has turned out to be a reasonably comfortable place to live. We continue improving it daily to make this place more beautiful and livable. Our people seem to be happy for the moment and hopeful after a long time that things may work out fine after all.
We have taken great care to hide our presence in this world and the system. We do not expect to be found if we don’t get careless. We hope that this place will give us the foundation to start all over again, and increase our numbers to populate this world. Only once we are numerous enough to be able to build a production system and a civilization do we dare start moving to the surface and risk discovery.
The great leader had called a team of specialist yesterday to finally explore the 3rd planet. I was honored to be in that team of specialist. I am excited at the prospect of visiting the 3rd planet. Our ship has been hidden, and it will stay that way for a long time to come. We will be going to there in the only shuttle that has been left on the surface in the camouflaged hangar.
On my insistence the expedition will be taken in extremely slow and cautious steps. I explained to the great leader about the small but non-zero risk of alien pathogens. He agreed that it is better to be safe than sorry. We are the last of our kind, and we cannot take any risk, however small, with the continuation of our species.
Year 23
What a year this has been! We have made some of the most amazing and wonderful discoveries in the last year. Some that were not even imagined to have been possible in biology! The 3rd planet of this system is the most amazing and beautiful place that our race has ever seen, other than our home world.
It takes getting used to the blue of the planet before you start appreciating the color and the majesty of the sight from space. Once you get to the surface, the green landscape gets a bit overpowering. It feels unnatural and weird for some time, to see everything green, that should have been red, but one gets used to it after some time. Then one can start appreciating the incredible beauty of the place.
The most amazing thing about the 3rd planet though is the water. We have water on the surface of our home world, but nothing like this. Some of us had mistakenly thought that the entire world was covered in water. The sheer amount of liquid water in this planet is unimaginable.
The 3rd planet is also a biologist’s heaven. It has diversity of life that had been hitherto unimaginable. Our team of specialists agreed that it would take thousands of biologist several lifetimes to be able to study even a fraction of the life that is thriving in this planet. If not for the cursed gravity, this could have been our fabled world.
The most amazing surprise that the biology of the 3rd planet threw at us was how amazingly similar it was to ours. Many of us were initially deeply worried about the risk of infection from pathogens on this planet due to the similarity of the basic structure of life. We have done extensive testing and found to our relief that the pathogens are different enough not to be able to attach to our cells.
Another surprise that the biosphere threw at us was the amount of complex life this planet has. This is a planet of giants. We saw herd of giants roaming the icy plains, moving on their four thick pillar like legs and a long trunk that foraged vegetation. They had two fearfully long spear like teeth coming out of their mouth.
We thought that we had seen the largest creatures biologically possible, till someone found incredibly large creatures swimming in the large water bodies. These creatures were the size of some of our mountains in the home world! They spouted water from their mouth orifice that rose up incredibly high above the surface. Our science had believed that such large creatures should not even be possible. Now we realize that the incredibly rich ecosystem of this planet is able to support very large creatures.
What we evolutionary biologists find the most intriguing though is why such a rich and diverse ecosystem has not developed a single creature with higher intelligence. By all rights such a rich planet should have given rise to very intelligent creatures who should have ruled this galaxy. Yet no such creature exists.
There is one creature which has shown some promise, but I am not personally hopeful about its prospects. This creature lives in a cold northern continent. It makes rudimentary tools like our ancients in the time before time did. It has basic language and symbols, but nothing sophisticated to be able to even communicate properly with them. Our great leader however thinks that this species of creature holds promise.
I personally think that there is another creature on the planet, closely related to the cold living creatures that holds better promise in terms of intelligence. This cousin of the previously described species lives in a warm continent on the equator of the 3rd planet. It is a continent that is an explosion and celebration of diversity of life. The continent has more variety of life on it than we as a race have encountered in every other planet and moon put together.
In this continent lives a species with looks and behaves in similar fashion to the c
old living cousin of theirs. The reason our great leader does not favor this warm living species is because of the relative physical strength difference between the two. The cold living species is shorter but stockier with incredibly strong muscles and strength. The warm living species is thinner and taller, with relatively weaker muscles, although this thinner species are incredible long distance runners.
The reason that this thinner and weaker species caught the attention of some of us was that there was something different and unique amongst them, something we cannot easily identify, but it is something that makes them special. These creatures can behave both rationally, but sometimes they behave irrationally driven by emotions. In many ways they are like us, appreciating beauty and creating beautiful objects, and yet at times they are scary and monster like, similar to that monster alien species that destroyed our world.
The master plan of our great leader is to try and genetically engineer the physically stronger species. We will attempt to make them more intelligent, so that they can wield modern weapons. Our great leader wants to make these animals into our soldiers, who can match the strength of the aliens who destroyed our home world. With their physical strength and our technology, we may be able to defeat the alien species.
I understand and even agree with the great leader’s idea in general. However I think that too much emphasis is being put on physical strength and not enough on the spirit of the species. I feel that the species living in the warm continent may be physically weaker, but they are far stronger in spirit. If given a chance they are capable of much more.
I have to however go along with the decision of the great leader. We have tested and experimented on these strong ones both in the field as well as in our labs. We have a complete genome mapping of the strong ones, and we now understand their reproductive cycle completely. We have been able to introduce experimental modifications to their genetic instructions.
We have several test groups both in the field as well as ones brought back to our lab here on the 4th planet. Genetic modification is an inexact science and takes many generations to show results. We would know if we are making progress only after a few generations have reproduced. Unfortunately these creatures take a long time after hatching to become reproduction capable, so we have had to force the issue by taking the DNA from one generation and inserting it into adult cells to speed up the second generation.
So far the results are on expected lines. Some genetic modifications are extremely harmful and kill the creatures, disable them or cause defects and disease. There are other modifications which seem to have no effect at all. A small number of modifications though are showing promising results. We are following standard procedures, and hope to get a breakthrough, although no one can predict how soon.
Year 89
I just returned from another trip to the 3rd planet. I have now lost count of the number of trips I have made over the years to that planet. The field trips would have been enjoyable, but for the oppressive gravity. Still I look forward to the trips. Every time I go there I learn something new.
This time for example we learnt something we would have never suspected. It could have ramifications on our research and experiments if we are not vigilant. We have been steadily expanding our experimental population of the strong ones, slowly moving south from the cold northern continent, till we have now reached a narrow isthmus, which connects the continent of the strong ones with the continent of the weak ones.
In our field visits this time we realized that just as the strong ones had spread south from their continent, the weak ones had spread north from their continent and they were now moving into each other’s territory. We witnessed clashes between the tribes and clans of the strong ones and the weak ones, fighting for resources.
One would have imagined that the strong ones would have prevailed in those fights, but to our surprise in majority of such clashes it was the weak ones who gained advantage. The fights were rarely to the death, although the skirmishes did cause casualty and occasionally mortality. Most fights would see the strong ones cede some territory or resources to the weak ones. Slowly the weak ones over the generations seem to be driving the strong ones out.
It was not that the weak ones were greater in number. Our drones have taken census count of the strong ones as well as the weak ones. In most case it was the strong ones who were greater in number, and yet the weak ones through their guiles would somehow outsmart the strong ones.
It vindicates my original assumption that there was more that physical strength that was needed to win a fight, and somehow the weak ones had the hunger to win far more than the strong ones. Unfortunately the great leader does not agree with my observation, and we persist with the strong ones.
These struggles between the two cousin species however is not the cause of our worries for our research. What surprised us even more was the fact that these two species despite their mutual animosity, interbred with each other! We have suspected it since last year when we saw some very peculiar genetic profile amongst the population which did not exactly match with either the strong ones or the weak ones.
This field trip, we set the specific objective of validating this hypothesis. Our observations show that the two species keep to their own clans normally, but occasionally we found that a band of weak ones consisting entirely of non-child bearing type of creatures, would abduct an isolated or lost strong one of the child bearing type. The abducted creature would be forcibly kept in the habitat of the weak ones, and surprisingly after some time, usually as the abducted creature became pregnant, it would stop trying to escape and become part of the abductors’ clan.
We did not observe any weak ones’ child bearer being abducted by the strong ones, although we cannot categorically rule it out. We believe that this difference in behavior us due to the fact that the weak ones ironically are a lot more aggressive than the strong ones.
The cause of worry for our research is that such hybrid creatures are almost impossible to distinguish from their physical traits. These hybrid creatures look either entirely like the weak ones or entirely like the strong ones. The only way to determine a hybrid creature is to take a genetic test, and even then it is easy to miss them. As a result of this observation, we have increased the number of cages in our labs here in the 4th planet and started a controlled breeding program of the strong ones to ensure that they are not contaminated with genes of the weak ones.
There is an interesting side note to this whole hybrid affair. I have not mentioned it in my formal research and refrained from inserting the technical data about this in the official archives. The great leader does not approve of us frittering our research efforts on the weak ones. He demands our full attention be focused on the strong ones and that we deliver results as fast as we can.
Many of the weak ones are now carrying the modified genes that we introduced in the strong ones due to a few generations of cross breeding in the wild. That in itself was expected and unremarkable. What is a point of note is that almost all the specimens of the weak ones that carried our modified genes were in some form of leadership position within their clans.
This was too much of a co-incidence, so some of us who are in a minority in believing that the weak ones are the most promising species, did an impromptu and off the books research on the field to satisfy our curiosity. We gave measured them on the same intelligence scale using the standard intelligence test that we have always used on all animals. The results were interesting but inconclusive, unless further tests are done, which the great leader is unlikely to authorize.
All the weak ones with the modified genes on an average 8% to 12% faster in problem solving than the average of the weak ones we had measured in our initial testing over 60 years ago. Similar improvements were noticed on all sub measures of intelligence in our tests.
A species does not become 10% more intelligent on its own within a few generation. It points to the fact that our modified genes is having the desired effect, albeit on the wro
ng species. We have noticed no such improvement in the strong ones. We had originally chosen the strong ones not only on the basis of them being physically stronger, but also the fact that on most core survival related intelligence tests, the strong ones had been a few percentage more intelligent than the weak ones.
The only place where the weak ones had shown higher intelligence was in creativity, especially of arts and culture, as also in lateral thinking and inventiveness. The later has some survival value, but the former has no survival value. Thus we had rated the strong ones as more intelligent than the weak ones.
If the improvement in the weak one’s intelligence due to the modified gene is inheritable, permanent and becomes wide spread, as any genetic modification that gives advantage is likely to be, then the weak ones will become slightly smarter than the strong ones. As our own evolutionary history has shown, just a 2% difference in the average intelligence between two species can mean the difference between survival and extinction. I just can’t keep wondering – did we bet on the wrong species?
Year 95.22
There have been a few unexplained and peculiar deaths of our people in the last two weeks. We have brought the cadaver down here to the lab to study and test in details. I and my colleagues have been working on this emergency continuously, but we have no clue as to what affliction caused the death of these fellow crew members.
There is an atmosphere of fear in our habitat due to these deaths that cannot be explained. It has not helped that each and every one of them died a horrible death. Their body fluids have oozed out of every orifice possible as their internal body organs slowly liquefied. No medication we administered helped or even had the slightest effect on their symptoms.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 11