by Chad Spencer
Even though he was up hours before sunrise, Jeff pushed himself to keep going. He wanted to get used to the local cycle of day and night. When evening finally came, he had his dinner.
As Jeff settled down to sleep he thought, ‘Tomorrow I’m bringing down a real bed. I’m already tired of sleeping in this pilot’s seat.’ Exhausted, he fell quickly to sleep with Bob snoozing contentedly on his stomach.
The next day, Jeff was up and at it again. He had to refuel his shuttle pod from one of the Ellsworth’s huge tanks. After a week of continuous labor, Jeff got sick of hauling pieces of the house. He took a couple of days off to relax. It gave him time to take some soap and bathe in the river. He was smelling pretty ripe. After his break, it took Jeff another week to finish the job.
When at last Jeff had all of the parts he needed for his house, he activated its computer. “Thank you for purchasing your HappyHome 5000 Colony Housing Unit,” the computer babbled. “This self-assembling housing module is designed to provide you with maximum comfort and reliability for a minimum cost.”
“Shut up and start building,” Jeff spat at the computer.
It ignored him. “Now you can have the benefits of modern community living without the crowding. The HappyHome 5000 Colony Housing Unit automatically searches for connections to your planetary grid. If none exists yet, it establishes a network with your nearest neighbors. You can live as much as 20 miles apart and still have a fully functional local grid. Anyone within the 20-mile radius can call your home, or make calls to any network enabled devices that are within range. Additionally … “ The house’s computer prattled on, nearly driving Jeff crazy.
After giving its cheery sales pitch, the house started to assemble itself. The work proceeded rapidly. The house even drilled its own well to provide water to its built-in plumbing system. By the end of the day, Jeff was standing inside his new home. “I guess I’ll get the furniture tomorrow,” he said, his voice echoing in the barren rooms. He moved his bed into one of the two bedrooms.
By the evening of the following day, Jeff had his entire house furnished. He even found a park-style bench that he put on his porch next to the front door. He sat there with Bob beside him eating his first dinner of real food since he arrived on the planet.
Jeff thought, ‘I’m going to run out of food sooner or later and I don’t wanna eat synthpaste. I guess I need a garden. And I should get some animals out of cryostasis. Chickens maybe. And a couple of cows. I wonder what else is up there?’
His datacrown provided the information. “The ship’s manifest indicates that it currently contains a wide variety of fish, a few different species of chickens, cattle, goats, pigs, Nestorian porcuhogs, sheep, llamas, ducks, geese, pheasants, doves, buffalo, oxen, caribou, antelopes, wildebeests, and horses in cryostasis.”
“Horses! I can have a real horse.” Jeff thought back to the time he spent riding horses with Linmei in the Ellsworth’s AR suite. The memory flooded him with wrenching waves of loneliness. Sadly, he wondered what had happened to the others aboard the Ellsworth. ‘I hope they’re ok,’ he thought.
Bob was sleeping, so Jeff picked him up and carried him into the bedroom. He set the dogbug on a cushion he had placed in the corner of the room. But Bob didn’t stay on his cushion the whole night. The dogbug wiggled its way up onto Jeff’s bed and crawled under the covers to sleep between his feet. Jeff didn’t mind.
Arvix was already cooking breakfast when Jeff awoke the next morning. Wandering into the house’s main area, he inhaled the smell of real toast, eggs, and Martian sweet plumapple.
The kitchen was separated from the rest of the main area by a half-height wall. Jeff had placed a rectangular table and four chairs in the dinning section. But the empty chairs silently screamed out his aloneness. He sat in the house’s living section on the overstuffed couch in front of the 3D video entertainment system he had brought down from the Ellsworth. He watched a show that was stored in the house’s computer while he ate.
After breakfast, Jeff took Arvix and made a run to the Ellsworth. According to the datacrown, it would take him forty-eight trips to haul down the parts for a barn. Jeff spent the next six weeks ferrying the barn parts down from the ship. He didn’t mind all the work. It kept him from being lonely.
Like the house, the barn built itself. As it did, its computer prattled on about all of its features. The barn was completely self-cleaning. It even came with a hovermower that he could drive around the island’s vast meadows to cut grass for his animals. Jeff gave it a try. The mower neatly chopped down the grass and processed it into litter for the stalls and chicken nests. The mower could also hack the grass into different lengths to use as animal feed.
The barn was able to automatically milk cows whenever the cows wanted. The video on the computer’s display showed cows trotting contentedly into stalls for milking. They got to eat as the machines did their work. After the milking was done, the barn gave them each a warm shower.
Jeff was pleased to discover that the structure would pasteurize the milk it gathered, or process it into yogurt and several different kinds of cheese. In addition, the computer said that it could automatically process animals into meat. ‘Ugh,’ thought Jeff. He got a little queasy as he watched the video. ‘But I do like the meat.’
When his barn was finished, he brought down three cows and a bull from the Ellsworth. He also retrieved ten hens, a rooster, six goats, two pigs, and two horses. There were spots for each of them in the barn, and the barn cared for the animals completely. Using fencing from one of the cargo bays, Jeff fenced off about two acres for the animals. He wasn’t surprised to find that the fence could assemble itself as well.
“Humph,” Jeff said as he stood looking at the animals exploring the area around the barn. “You always hear stories about how hard it is to colonize. About the only thing left for me to do is grow a garden and cut grass for the animals to eat.”
Next Jeff brought down greenhouses. The fully automated structures could simulate any type of climate. He planted wheat in two of them so he could have bread and some dwarf fruit trees in a third. The trees were packaged with a growth accelerant in them, so he would be getting fruit from them in just a few months. He decided to also put some blueberry, raspberry, huckleberry, and strawberry plants in another greenhouse.
Outside Jeff planted banana and mango trees as well as a pineapple patch. Using a hovertractor that he brought down from the Ellsworth, he easily was able to prepare three acres in a day and plant it with anything he wanted. He took time to put two more acres into corn so that he could use it to feed the animals.
Every day, Jeff took time to ride one of the horses. He had a stallion, whose name was Hurricane, and a mare named Lakota.
In the evenings, Jeff sat on his porch eating his dinner. The gas giant that planet Akio orbited loomed large in the sky. Near the equator, he saw a large, swirling storm. As he stared at it, he saw that the leading edge looked like a girl’s face. The trailing edge was a long swirl of red clouds that looked like her hair blowing in the wind. Jeff smiled to himself. “Harriet. Every night I can look up and see Harriet.” He chuckled. “You’re planet Harriet and you have to keep me company.”
He wondered what he would do with himself. His little farm didn’t require more than two or three hours of chores a day. He remembered the workstation he’d brought down from the Ellsworth. When the house was finished, Jeff had had Arvix set the workstation up in the spare bedroom, but until now he had ignored it. ‘If I’m going to get off this planet,’ he thought, ‘I’m going to have to finish the Living Freighter. That’s not going to be easy, doing it all myself.’
As the sun went down behind the mountains in the center of the island, a faraway music whispered across the grassy expanse. Jeff stood and peered out the window into the distance. It sounded like a choir of tiny little people singing in a strange language. He strained to hear. Slowly, an unending cloud of emeraldbugs wafted gently into the air. The light from the receding sun da
nced off their rainbow wings and a sweet chorus of music rolled into the evening sky. Each insect emanated a green glow as it drifted above the grass.
Jeff had never seen or heard anything so spectacular. He laughed. “They’re celebrating with me because my farm is finished!”
Running out into the deepening darkness, Jeff flung out his arms and threw his head back, laughing. Music washed over him, calling him toward the sky. The emeraldbugs swirled around him. He wandered through the dark field, watching the display of insect lights above him and wishing he could fly.
The next day was cloudy. Jeff woke to a pattering sound on the roof. He put on his clothes and datacrown. A little fearful, he wondered what the sound was. “Rain hitting the roof,” the datacrown told him.
Jeff walked hesitantly outside. The warm tropical sprinkling gradually soaked through his clothes as he stood gazing into the sky. He decided he liked the rain.
Going back inside, Jeff got into some dry clothes. He entered the spare bedroom and turned on the workstation. Using his house’s antenna, Jeff contacted the Ellsworth’s communication system. Once he was logged on, he established a connection to the ship’s main computer. He pulled up all the files on the Living Ship project. The work was mostly finished, but there were important parts of the gravity, communications, and power systems that had yet to be completed. Jeff didn’t know a whole lot about those things. ‘I guess I’ll have to learn,’ he thought. He started in to work.
The following day was rainy as well. So was the day after that. Each day, it fell harder. Jeff wondered why there was so much rain all of the sudden.
“Many tropical locations have monsoon seasons in which it rains steadily for weeks,” the datacrown explained.
“Weeks?” Jeff moaned. Even though he liked the rain, he didn’t like it that much.
Every morning, Jeff ate and then went out to work on his farm in spite of the rain. As he had on the Ellsworth, he enjoyed the fresh eggs and milk. He let the hens keep some of the eggs so he would get chicks.
Each night, Jeff sat on the porch to eat his dinner with Bob at his feet. He usually placed his pocket watch on the bench beside him. Harriet’s image ate dinner and happily chirped out phrases like, “I hope you’re having a good evening Jeff” and “I’m happy to see you.” It was the closest thing he had to company.
Work progressed slowly on the Living Ship. Even with the datacrown to teach him, Jeff often didn’t understand what was needed to finish the project. The datacrown told him, for instance, that the lining of fusion generators needed a neutron neutralizer matrix. He knew he had to write the program that would direct the ship’s nanobots to build the matrix. But he didn’t know why. And he had no idea what a neutron neutralizer matrix was or how to make it. He wasn’t even sure he knew that much about neutrons. So step by step, the datacrown explained the concepts to him.
‘It’s like being back in school,’ Jeff thought. The datacrown often had to explain how particular technologies were discovered in order for him to understand them. That led to history lessons. Learning how everything worked required a lot of math, physics, and chemistry. It seemed he would never know enough to finish. But he found learning was much faster with the datacrown. ‘I guess it must be because of the datacrown,’ he conjectured. ‘I could never pick things up this fast before.’
Ignoring the continuing rain, which now came down in sheets, Jeff rode one of his horses each day. Hurricane didn’t much like being out in the rain. “But you need your exercise,” Jeff told the big red horse as he groomed him. Hurricane shook his head as if disagreeing. Jeff smiled. He liked Hurricane, even though the horse could be difficult to manage at times. “And I think he likes me too,” Jeff told himself.
Lakota, the black mare, was always ready to be ridden. She was very cooperative, but didn’t seem to need the attention from Jeff that Hurricane did. Jeff wasn’t sure whether the slim horse really liked him or not. “I’ll bet you’d be fine with any owner just as long as you got your food and exercise,” Jeff told her. The mare eyed him placidly.
Bob was big enough now to trot along beside Jeff whenever he went out on one of the horses. Jeff would often tell the creature, “You’re probably the happiest bug I ever met.” Bob bounced his way through the tall grasses, snapping at the few emeraldbugs that were still around.
After four weeks of solid rain, Jeff was getting sick of it. He rode Hurricane up the hill to take a look at the soggy countryside. The river was so swollen that it was approaching his pineapple field. He rode down to the edge of the field. “I wonder if I’ll be eating any pineapples this year,” he mumbled.
Jeff decided to go to the beach and use the scanner in his binoculars to scan the water. “I want to see if there’s some fish that I can catch and eat,” he said as he turned his horse toward the ocean.
As Jeff rode along the beach scanning for fish in the water, a movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Far down the long strip of beach, Jeff saw something coming up out of the sea. It was huge. The creature moved like a snake, winding itself back and forth. But its body was composed of segments, like the body of an insect. Its arrow-shaped head swiveled toward Jeff and examined him with empty, dead-looking eyes.
“This isn’t good,” Jeff said.
The monster slipped toward him, slowly at first but picking up speed as he went. Jeff kicked Hurricane in the sides as hard as he could. The big red stallion took off like a shot. Glancing back over his shoulder, Jeff saw that snake-thing was now barreling toward him at tremendous speed. He desperately dug his heels into the horse’s sides, but Hurricane was already moving as fast as he could.
Jeff whipped his plasma rifle out of its saddle holster, turned, and took aim. With the gun at its most powerful setting, he let loose a blast at the snake-thing. The creature only howled and moved faster. Jeff shot at it desperately again and again until the gun was completely drained of energy. The snake-thing got much angrier. Jeff holstered his gun.
They were nearing the farm. Jeff shouted, “Go Hurricane! GO! GO!” But the horse was exhausted. Its speed gradually diminished. Panicked, Jeff cast a desperate glance backward. The snake-thing was almost on them. At that moment, Hurricane tripped.
Jeff felt himself tumbling through the air as everything seemed to move in slow motion. His shield came on just before he hit the ground, saving him from injury. “Yes!” he shouted as he scrambled to his feet. His shield disappeared.
Hurricane’s tortured cries reached Jeff’s ears. He turned to see the snake-thing swallowing the thrashing horse whole. Jeff began to tremble. Behind the great creature, he saw more just like it. Hundreds more. They were emerging from the ocean like a silent army.
As fast as he could, he turned and ran toward the shuttle. Having swallowed the horse, the snake-thing pursued after him. Jeff was getting near his home. His feet pounded across a freshly mowed grass as he ran with every ounce of his strength. The soggy ground slowed him down. Choosing the worst moment possible, sky suddenly opened up and deluged rain upon him like a waterfall. Panting heavily, Jeff knew he wouldn’t make it. But he desperately kept going anyway, his lungs fighting for air as he struggled across the meadow.
As he neared the shuttle, the snake-thing pounced. Instinctively, Jeff dove for the ground but never made it. The snake-thing closed its cavernous jaws over the lower half of his body.
Time seemed to stop.
Jeff found himself in the jaws of the beast, but his shield was protecting him. The creature could not swallow him. It thrashed him back and forth angrily. Jeff screamed and pounded it with his fists, hitting his own shield instead. In sheer terror, he clawed at the creature, trying to free himself. His hands started glowing a bright white-blue. Lightning leaped from them and passed through his shield, striking the snake-thing full in the face. It dropped him and his shield vanished again.
Scrambling to his feet, Jeff resumed running. The snake-thing immediately snapped him up once more. But again, the beast couldn’t swa
llow him because his shield reappeared. It bellowed its frustration.
This time, Jeff was stuck headfirst in the snake-thing’s gaping maw. Looking down into its throat in horror, Jeff raised his hands to try and push himself out of the creature’s jaws. Instead, his hands glowed a fierce orange-yellow. A column of searing flames leaped from his hands, passed through his shield, and flooded their way down the snake-thing’s throat. Inhaling the blast of flames, it instantly fell dead.
Pulling himself frantically out of the mighty jaws, Jeff crawled away from the inert beast as he shook and panted. Another snake-thing was barreling down on him. Without thinking, Jeff leapt upward. In an instant, he was flying. The snake-thing snapped its jaws at Jeff and tried to make a meal of him. Jeff beat his wings against the air and gained altitude. Out over the mud and grass he sailed, far ahead of the snake-things.
“Wings!” Jeff shouted. “I have wings! And a tail!” Glancing over his shoulder, Jeff saw that his wings projected through openings that formed themselves in his shirt—just like in Stacy’s AR program back on the Ellsworth.
Reaching at the shuttle, he landed and his wings and tail disappeared. Bob bounded down from the porch and came to him, barking in alarm. Jeff looked wildly around to see the flood of snake-things coming toward his farm. He frantically pulled open the hatch and got in with Bob trailing after. Pouncing on the shuttle’s control panel, Jeff powered up the engines and lifted off. He scanned the scene below.
There were snake-things everywhere. The big barn doors were smashed open. The scanners showed no signs of any of the animals he’d brought with him from the ship. His house was pretty beaten up, but not broken open. He thought that was odd until he realized that there was no food in there the snake-things could smell. “They could smell my animals,” he huffed. “That’s why they broke into the barn.”
The snake-things were digging holes with their arrow-shaped heads. He zoomed the scanners in on one that had finished its hole. It was laying eggs—lots of eggs. “They came ashore to lay their eggs,” he moaned.