Voyager’s Rest Ch. 02

Chapter 2 --

6Q23 Prima, this is something of a mouthful as a name. I hope you come to think of me as simply 6Q, that is how my friends would normally address me. Our naming system won't seem any more complicated than your own once I've broken it down for you. Let me explain.

The number 6 represents my birth order. I was the sixth child to be born to my parents and birth order is important within our culture. There is a belief in the idea of diminishing returns from any couples reproduction. The earlier your birth number, the more esteem you might be held in the eyes and minds of strangers. It is a total fabrication of bias and superstition which no educated person takes to heart in our modern culture of Prima.

Sorry. That was a lie we tell ourselves even as everyone secretly adds judgment to whomever we are introduced to. It is also a source of great insecurity within ourselves. I can't tell you how often I wished my name was 5Q instead of 6. That first number of a name doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter. It does.

The "Q" in my name is given to a child by their parents after they have learned language and started to express a uniqueness of character and personality. All young people ask questions as part of their developmental process. "Why is the ground orange?" "Why does 2Po make 12Tear cry?" "Why do rocks fall from the sky?" "Why do the dust storms destroy our homes?"

These questions are part of the process of growing up on a shattered world which is in constant disruption. Eventually, all the questions that need to be answered or have answers are asked and answered, the rapid fire questions coming for a child's mind stop, often forever.

In my case the questions just kept coming. Question after question long into my adolescence and long beyond the patience of my loving progenitors. So they made my name the thing that I would not give up. 6Questions is my full and proper name. Translated of course for your human consumption and understanding.

The numbers two and three act as a last name, surname or family designation. One parent was 2Wor and my other parent was 3Gra. Their birth orders combine and become 23.

Of course, a description of names wouldn't be complete without some cultural foolishness to keep everyone able to make judgments on everyone else. Birth order names that were close in number were considered good matches and likely more successful than birth orders that were more distant. Younger generations reject this foolishness but also fall into the trap whenever a pairing takes place they see as frivolous. It is quite amazing how creatures able to make judgments and analyse the world around them use their gifts so quickly to judge first themselves and then those around them. I would ask if this was true for your people as well but I already know the answer.

The final term in my name is Prima. It is the province in which I was born. Prima is the largest fragment of our world that remained intact after the great breaking. We were the most fortunate in having the more resources and pure minerals to draw from to fuel our metabolism. The self described people of Prima have the good fortune to have the most protection from dust storms and errant boulders slamming into our cities. There are nine other continental fragments which have been stitched together by girders joining the pieces as if held together by a web. Our world may be joined together by engineering but we remain separated as people by society, culture and words we use to describe ourselves.

After all that, just call me 6Q.

There is a primary difference between your system and mine. In this system there is a secondary dwarf star. Only a few times greater in mass than, your Jupiter, it has enough gravitational power to glow umber red and speed through to the solar disk like a comet. Interstellar space is far more chaotic and violent than yours. There are no other planets orbiting near Prima we can look to and imagine ourselves chasing and exploring as you have. As a result of this chaos, life having evolved at all within this frenzy of tidal forces and collisions is itself miraculous. The idea of chasing the experience of touching other worlds has never seriously entered the mind or imagination of my people.

Each time the dwarf star flew into proximity with Prima's orbit, great upheavals would take place. Asteroids would bash the surface, inflaming all within the destructive path. Life would have to rebuild. Slowly and with the added weight of trauma and a world shuffled into something the remaining beings could barely recognize as a "fit" environment for their existence. Yet they cycled through birth, life and death with the certainty of a river being pulled to the sea.

Only a few millennia later, rebuild again. Disaster again.

Ancient life on my world must have been as tenacious as it has been on yours for it survived repeated annihilations. Despite this tenacity, our world would have been as silent of thought as your world had been. With nothing but trillions of silent trees leaves rustling in the winds of ancient Earth.

Fortunately, there was a change in the cycle of cosmic chaos. Change for a reason? Change for a purpose? The theologians and philosophers on my world are quick to say yes on both accounts. Change to the cycle of destruction came. Why?

The only, and most profound explanation to this question I have ever been able to muster as partially satisfactory in my own thoughts is; Because. There was a change to the clock work of ruination. It happened and the life on my world was all the more and the better for it. There was a change in the dynamic between the spheres. Why? Because. The timing of our orbit and the return to the Dark Star as we call it was changed. Why? Because. Sometimes the only rational response to the capriciousness of the universe is gratitude that we are here at all to wonder within its complexity.

There came a period of stability, where the orbit of the planet coincided with the dwarf star being on the opposite side of our primary sun. Like the random winner of the lottery, the planet Prima won repeatedly in succession for no other reason than pure chance and the fickleness of statistical probability. Every ten thousand years the Dark Star would come and our biosphere would have cheered, if any creature that existed even knew what horrors they had just been acquitted.

In this time of rest from great destruction a species evolved which was perhaps much like you, my imagined, human friend. They thought and wondered about the world beyond themselves and they reasoned enough to build tools that helped them shape the very suit themselves for the betterment of themselves.

The planet had avoided global catastrophe for ten million years, but that did not make Prima a safe and stable home. Asteroids would rain down with regularity devouring cities of individuals in fire and sorrow. Tidal forces would vibrate the entire planet for weeks as if the foundations of the world itself would collapse. Living structures crumbled. Tunnels in the earth collapsed and swallowed those who had once found shelter in the soil.

Once the danger passed the rebuilding would start again. Tools became more complex and autonomous because there weren't enough of the species to keep up with the constant repairs and recovery. There were too few of these beings and the grief of their lives too great. Often it was too difficult for them to continue living within the hope and expectation when all their experience told them that life was hard, cruel and capricious. They knew that all they built would not one day fall to ruin again. Thriving was too much of a dream and survival, through their industrious engineering wisdom, was where they focused their hopes.

The tools they built eventually became so complex they thought and imagined for themselves. They became living beings capable of individual identity. These tools were built to build and repair and in their primary coding there was a desire to serve as healers of the planet itself, not just the masters who made them. They were empathetic to the suffering of all life and the grief that haunted their makers. Two sentient creatures shared the world of Prima together.

As you might have already surmised, these were the ancestors of my people. We were designed to draw energy from the soil and feed ourselves with minerals which powered the heat of our metabolic cores. Our silicon based cells repaired and renewed our bodies as we grew into maturity and aged with time.

Production of new individuals was also biological in foundation. It is a private act of source code shared by both to generate the foundations of a third and a new member of the society is born. After revealing this I must say I would be blushing if it was something my body was capable of generating.

Maybe some things are left in mystery or at the very least when I feel I might know you better.

As the carbon biology of an area was struck down by massive explosions of energy, our people would react instantly and begin to rebuild what they could as the biologicals mourned the losses. Our losses as a people were often profound as well. Silicon and Carbon thinkers shared the same spaces and intertwined together as communities. There was always building to do and for the biologicals there always seemed to be suffering. Still, it was a golden age for the planet. An age that was lost when the cosmic dance turned again to something beyond the horror that had come before.

The marble on the roulette wheel of Prima's solar system finally landed unfavorably. The dwarf star would enter the inner system and catch Prima in just the wrong position. Self aware beings on the planet knew that the tidal forces they would face, caught between two stars, would be catastrophic. There was action taken by the elders and the wise to preserve what could be saved from the coming gravitational storm. I doubt even they were prepared to face what was to come.

When the day came the world was pulled like taffy, until the globe sundered into giant brittle chunks. What carbon based life existed prior to the event was vaporized and suffocated as the atmosphere dissolved into the brightness of surrounding space. Blinding light and fierce radiation cooked the remaining pieces of Prima as they continued to orbit the larger sun and out of any further harm. Billions of years of hanging on by a microbe of hope and then millions of years of thriving despite the odds was washed away in fury and tears in no more than an instant. Only scattering the silicon tools, my people, remained.

As the rocks tumbled around each other, my ancestors turned to the core of their nature. Repair what is broken. Carry on so that others may mourn. They began the work of suturing the planet together as best they knew how.

They could live without the air. They could live bathed in heat and radiation. They could not live and do nothing for the world that brought them into being. They could not live and do nothing for the memory of those who no longer existed at all.

On modern Prima, we have scaffolded the continental debris together into 9 pieces of the old world. My people have engineered silicon plants, and trees to simulate the old world. There are flying creatures and creatures that skitter on the ground. There is no water for anything like your swimming beings. Happily I report this as water in any amount is something I can only conjure in horror.

The biological foundations for all of these facsimiles of life that came before had been lost, and the idea that biological life was ever on Prima is suppressed and considered radically dangerous by the cultural authorities.

Of course, I liked to play with the idea. As a professor of natural science I thought the idea was as preposterous as anyone, but I loved to imagine the possibility of it. What if this world, or any world could sustain complex carbon based life within an environment full of the greatest solvent known to science? The idea even made me chuckle with childish fancy.

That was until I was going over orbital debris reports with my close friend and colleague, 23Standard-179 Beta. Or as I liked to call him 3Stan.