A team of scientists was sent down to further investigate this site. They were accompanied by Chukkas who scouted the bay for feasibility to establish a permanent presence there. First reports coming back were overwhelmingly positive. 3D holovision feed showing bright sunshine, beautiful natural scenery and crystal clear pristine waters had a mood raising effect for the whole population onboard Magellan. Chukkas were praising the clear waters in the bay. Establishing an ecosystem would be simple as the underwater hot springs would provide enough nutrient sources for their fish farms and kelp fields.
The situation that initially had looked very bad for the survival of the Lydow-4 expedition was now looking very positive. Any planetary scale climate change program could wait until the first colony would be built and populated.
A quick contest was created to give a name for this new colony. The name that got the most votes was ‘Oasis’. That name did fit well to their situation - they would have their own green oasis in the middle of the icy desert.
A digital city plan ‘Oasis’ was presented in a town hall meeting. The plan included customized dwellings for all inhabitants, down to the room layouts, interior colors and even furniture. The plan also included communal and recreational buildings, including a design for a huge indoor spa that resembled an improved version of the Marina Harbor Island and surrounding underwater Caribbean style reefs. This spa design was proposed by Aurora’s school architecture class. It was added after the feedback on very successful arrival beach party that both humans and Chukkas were praising. Almost everybody though that it was a great way to continue building relationships in relaxed atmosphere suitable for both humans and Chukkas.
Additional teams and materials were sent to Oasis to prepare the site to start the construction work. First set of 3D replicators created machines to create material supply chain and other machines and robots. The whole process took only a few days and the infrastructure, power grid, street layout, buildings and facilities were replicated from the digital master plan using AI and all these automated machines and robots. In only two weeks a brand new and shiny city “Oasis” was ready to start receiving the inhabitants.
Chukkas were also busy building their new home. Underwater construction was progressing quickly and soon the pristine bay waters were filled with life. Chukkas were masters in bio-engineering and they tapped into millions of years of experience to customize and optimize the lifeforms for the purpose at hand. They understood ecosystem dynamics and used advanced mathematics to optimize the energy and matter flows through this ecosystem built to support growing Chukkas population indefinitely.
After spending 10 years in tight quarters of Pyxis the sixty female expedition participants were more than ready to lay their eggs and procreate the next generation of Chukkas. Some 25 million new eggs were laid in carefully crafted nurseries.
MARRIAGE SEASON
JULIA AND ELIAS started to spend a lot of time together since the arrival. Elias had moved into Julia’s house near Harbor Island Marina and they both enjoyed the newly found physical intimacy between them. They were finally able to share their feelings in physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual levels after being secretly in love with each other for the last 31 years. They both took time off from their official duties and disappeared for hours to have sex in Elias’ private apartment.
People around them in Magellan did certainly notice the difference in their behavior. Officially Julia was still reporting to Elias in her Chief Scientific Officer role and some people started to question the organization structure that Elias had put in place 10 years ago. People felt that this arrangement and their behaviors were not in line with the Magellan ethical code of conduct that everybody had to review and take a test on annual basis. People talked about them privately and everybody was wondering what had happened to them on that day of the Arrival.
It wasn’t until Mrs. Oneida Wilkinson from accounting department filed an official complaint to the ethics committee before Elias became aware of these issues. He replied to the ethics committee members that he would consider the complaint and would make appropriate changes to remediate the situation.
The following day Elias took Julia out in a sailing boat from Harbor Island Marina and they sailed for a good forty five minutes out in the ocean. Then he took the main sail down and dropped the anchor. Julia was wondering what was going on.
He pulled a small black box from his pocket and was kneeing in front of Julia.
“Julia, would you marry me?” Elias asked looking Julia into her deep blue eyes.
“Yes, my love,” Julia said with tears of joy coming down her cheeks. “I will marry you. I thought you would never ask.”
“I wanted to do this the day I first met you. Sorry that it took me 31 years to build enough courage to ask you,” Elias replied laughing as he put a beautiful diamond ring on Julia’s finger.
“It is beautiful, Elias,” Julia said touching his right cheek gently.
“Where do you want to go for our honey moon?” Elias asked.
“You’ve already taken me into stars and heaven. How about Oasis, my love?” Julia replied kissing him passionately.
The following day Elias and Julia announced their engagement and they started planning for the wedding party. They planned to invite all humans and Chukkas to join their wedding. The wedding was set to stage in Oasis, in that huge indoor spa that Aurora’s architecture class at school had designed.
Elias announced also some organization changes, he promoted captain Jim Hunter as the new Chief Executive Officer. Elias kept his role as the chairman of the board of Lydow Expedition Inc., the company Elias had founded to purchase Magellan and prepare it for this expedition. He invited Julia to join as a board member and asked Orin Gun and Unun also to join the board. They all accepted.
The news of the upcoming wedding of Elias and Julia spread in hours through the Magellan community. This triggered a series of engagement and wedding announcements. It appeared that many people had been holding off a commitment during the long voyage. Many relationships had been built over the years in the starship and now that Oasis was ready people felt more comfortable making a long term commitment. In the following two weeks several other engagements were announced and people were busy planning their weddings.
UNUN AND LAMBDA
UNUN HAD BEEN working with Lambda while Julia’s focus had been elsewhere. Julia had explained Unun her discoveries on the new, different data structures and algorithms in the AI core of Lambda. She had also covered her intervention that had changed successfully Lambda’s beliefs on the bad characters from his past and ‘cured’ him.
Unun wanted to build more redundancy as Aurora was still a ‘single-point-of-failure’ running Hermia AI system for the colony. Flushing out the Oracle DNA from Chukkas cells and replacing with Hermia AI core DNA turned out to be much more complicated process than he had anticipated.
“Perhaps Julia would also have a bit more time to help me with DNA project in the future once her love hormones will come back to normal level,” Unun was thinking. “I won’t try to interfere, I think this is part of Mother’s plan anyways. She seems more happy and content with her life than I have ever seen before.”
He was looking into hosting a new AI system in the photonic crystal computer hardware that Lambda had created for Julia two weeks ago. They had transported this computer to Oasis and after running several performance tests Unun was convinced that this would provide an excellent interim solution while he was working on the DNA problem.
While working with Lambda Unun came up with some ancient history files from the time asteroid collision. According to the files there was a small Chlorean remote colony on the 3rd planet that had existed for hundreds of years after the impact. Then all communication had ceased and Lambda had not heard about them for millions of years.
Unun was interested in learning whether there would be still some historical artifacts to be found and he proposed a short space mission to check ou
t the remains of the colony. Orin Gun agreed to provide two Chukkas space shuttles and a crew of three Chukkas to explore the 3rd planet. Everybody else was very busy building the necessary infrastructure and ecosystems in the Bay of Oasis.
CONSTITUTION
ORIN GUN HAD been working long and hard on the new constitution proposal. He used all the wisdom he had learned from his father Ogun and had studied human history trying to accommodate all the lessons learned from the history records available in Hermia’s archives. He tried hard to strike a good balance between Chukkas interests and what he perceived to be human interests for the new society they had embarked to build. He had reviewed several draft versions with Unun whose wealth of experience with humans he valued the most. When Orin Gun felt he was ready, he called up a meeting with Elias, Julia, Jim Hunter to give them a preview of his proposal.
“As we agreed two weeks ago I took a task to draft a new constitution proposal,” Orin Gun started. “I have worked on this almost full time and would like to get your comments and feedback, before moving any further.”
“We are all ears and eager to hear your proposal,” Elias replied.
“This document is based on values that I believe are shared between humans and Chukkas. I have worked hard trying to strike a good balance between different interests of the constituents,” Orin Gun continued. “I have also included the most important lessons I have found both from human and Chukkas history.”
He started reading the document that was projected both in English and Chukkas native symbolic language in the air in front of the meeting participants. The document was well structured, logical and emotional at the same time, clearly explaining the founding values and governance principles, laying out the foundations of the government, defining the split of responsibilities and powers, the fundamentals of the legal system and ways to handle disputes and disagreements, the sources of power and how to protect against any single group taking over or misusing their influence and so on. As they went through all the twenty five pages Orin Gun saw humans nodding their heads in agreement for most of the text, but also in some sections that humans didn’t seem to grasp but made perfect sense for Chukkas.
“Overall, this is amazing work, Orin Gun,” Elias said after they finished the first pass of reading through. “However, there are some sections that I just don’t understand. For example, why does the supreme board of governance have eight members. What happens if they are voting and cannot make a decision? Shouldn’t there be odd number of members, like seven or nine instead?”
“How would you nominate the members? If we have odd number, either Chukkas or humans would have majority. How would you get the population to accept anything other than equal split of power?”
“I’m sure there are also those who would argue that the power should be split by count of individuals with a vote. That would mean 1582 adult humans vs. 135 Chukkas.” Elias argued.
“Given what I have seen happening on our side there could be millions of Chukkas vs. thousands of humans in the next ten years, “ Orin Gun replied.
“I see, so you have clearly put thought into this. But it doesn’t resolve the even voting problem,” Elias commented.
“Any proposal that is so poorly prepared that votes are split in half, would need to go back for preparation with more cool heads. If the law is written only to serve the interests of a minority of the population, it should never come to a decision at this level,” Orin Gun replied.
“So how would you protect the rights of minorities in this model,” Julia asked.
“When we start writing into law what kind of bathrooms we all should be using based on our sexual orientation, the society has lost the use of common sense,” Orin Gun replied. “Laws are not meant to be over-arching rulebook for every possible situation and for every possible minority. There are always individuals who try to gain power by focusing on what separates us. The individuals we choose to represent us should focus on what is common between us instead.”
“There are large cultural differences in different human societies,” Julia stated. “In the western world the focus has been to highlight individualism, whereas in some eastern cultures being part of the community plays more important role. We have people representing 42 nationalities in the crew of Magellan.”
“Yet you have been able to get them to join this expedition based on a common goal,” Orin Gun came back on Julia’s remarks.
The discussion continued several hours. Each section was reviewed again and arguments in favor as well as counter-arguments were discussed. Orin Gun took notes and ideas how to modify the language to reduce ambiguity and get on a common ground with most topics. They agreed another review session within a week.
NEW DISCOVERY
UNUN LAUNCHED HIS short mission from Magellan. The 3rd planet was in a favorable orbit position and it took only 48 hours for the two Chukkas space shuttles to get there. Unun launched a set of micro satellites to collect data while they were orbiting the planet. Using the coordinates provided by Lambda they found the ancient colony quickly. The structure was still visible from the orbit but they did not detect any movements nor life forms.
Unun landed in one of the shuttles to investigate the colony closer. The area had gone through some geological changes and quite a lot of erosion during the 223 million years but the outline of city was still visible. They landed on a flat area next to a dome temple carved from a mountain. The outside had deep marks of erosion but the general shape of the dome was still intact.
Unun and his crew mate walked out of the shuttle in their exoskeleton armors and looked around. No movement anywhere, the place looked totally abandoned very long time ago. They walked through the partially collapsed temple entrance and a set of pillars having swastika symbols carved into them. Finally they were inside of the stone dome. It was getting dark so they turned on the lights.
There, inside the temple and protected by weather Unun saw thousands of pictures made of small colorful tiles carefully fused inside of the stone wall. These pictures were artfully crafted and told a story of an ancient civilization that had carved cities in mountains and built rockets to launch to space from the 4th planet. The story continued with the imperial family rising to power, apparently talking to gods through a bright white crystal. The gods sent magnificent gifts to the imperial family, the pictures were showing colossal golden temples with the giant emperor ruling over armies millions of small Chloreans.
The symbol of the emperor god was shaped like a swastika. The imperial family built many colonies all across the planets and moons, each marked with the swastika symbol, including the temple that Unun was standing inside. The story continued with a picture where a large glowing rock that flew from a star shaped as swastika, hitting directly into a giant city and totally destroying the emperor and the entire 4th planet in a giant explosion. The picture of the explosion was emotionally charged and Unun could feel the desperation that the unknown artist had managed to capture using these colorful tiles.
The Chloreans in these colonies believed that the gods were angry and would come after them next. They offered sacrifices, killing young Chloreans at ever increasing rate, like the imperial family had done for thousands of years. Eventually there was no more youngsters left and the colony collapsed. The pictures grew ever darker and more violent, Chloreans killed each others under the swastika symbols.
The last picture was especially disturbing for Unun, as it was showing two eight legged monsters rising from the sea and coming after the last Chlorean covered in black cloth with white stripe lying on the ground trying to defend himself with a white crystal in his claw.
Unun took high resolution 3D holovision recording of all the thousands of colorful pictures. He was still wondering about the message in that last picture on the way back to Magellan. Those eight legged monsters looked looked very much like the standard issue of Chukkas exoskeleton armor.
POLITICS
ONBOARD STARSHIP MAGELLAN people were com
fortable with the strict hierarchy where the captain of this ship had the ultimate authority. This made sense to people and had been customary for hundreds of years. As soon as people started to settle in their new homes in Oasis a clear change of mind took place. People were starting to ask for a more democratic form of a government. Even before the new constitution proposal was shared, some people started to position themselves as candidates for new political roles, such as the Mayor of Oasis.
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