Chapter One

by Katie Heffring

The year is 2056…the date? Don’t know. We’ve only been able to keep track of the hour and the year.  Everything got fucked up after the war.  Sunrise, sunset, night, day – I heard these once existed, but not anymore.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years on Station 187.  Almost half of my lifetime, I suppose.  The “Death Star”, as some people jokingly nicknamed, has just over two hundred people on board.  The world stood on the brink of a nuclear war, and the United Nations chose us from around the world to maintain a growth operation in space in case the Earth could no longer supply food.  The people on Death Star were the best physically fit horticulturalists on the planet.  Now, we germinate various types of rice, grain, vegetables, nuts, and create freshwater.  We are the keepers of an elaborate seed bank.  We also generate meat, eggs and fish from stem cells.  Since then all we’ve done is replicate…

We are not the only ship.  The UN called the special project, “Operation Noah’s Ark”.  An estimated count of two hundred ships rocketed into space before the war began.  But, now, only thirty-two drift through our Solar System.  A lot were destroyed by technical malfunctions, or collisions with space debris, or who knows?  Can’t say the plan was failsafe.

The Noah’s Ark ships were meant to preserve the treasures of Earth.  Like flying museums, they carried everything from historical documents to precious metals to capsulated embryos of various flora and flauna.  So much of it useless.  Pointless.  Everything has changed.  Of the ships that have survived, most are filled with the DNA of all kinds of organisms, to be cultured and cloned.  Others carry cargo – medical supplies, tools, various metals, and fabrics.  Mostly are filled with geneticists, biologists, chemists, pedologists, doctors and engineers.  Does that make life on Earth again hopeful?

The captains of every ship have been communicating with each other weekly for updates, new finds, any necessary aid, etc.  We lost all contact with Earth only one year after entering space.  No one fully knew the magnitude of the nuclear war, but the inevitable electro-magnetic pulse that fucked all possible methods contact told us, without a doubt, it happened and when.  So every ship set their clock. 65700 hours later we were scheduled to return to our planet.

But when the pending hour grew nearer, the captains agreed to only send 800 people down – the socalled “first release”.  They said they could only speculate the consequences of nuclear war and thus, logically, not everyone should be “sacrificed” (if be the case).  Most of the guinea pigs were between the ages of 20 and 45.  Another determination based on logic, I suppose.  I am 28, I was selected, and so I go.

In 24 hours, I will enter a space pod alone.  The pod contains a medical kit, a tool box, a generator, a water replicator and purifier, subzero clothing, an invisible suit, blankets, enough food to sustain at least ten people over a five year period, one ray gun and one rifle…enough bullets to follow.  In 12 hours, over 800 pods from the other stations will drop onto various locations around the world. My destiny is Greenland and there I will set camp. I know, in 4 hours, I will meet with three other people who will land on Greenland at the same time as me.  One woman and two men.  Will anyone else be living there?

In 20 minutes…60 second…10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1…

My name is Sega Gargle and these is my chronicles, and this is day one…

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