Creation

[Aardvark]

Human expansion into space was inevitable. With no further room on our own planet, or even in our own solar system, we were destined for a life among the stars. Light speed, once broken, proved to be the speed equivalent of an incredibly obvious crossword puzzle answer that eludes a genius for hours on end. How we'd failed to break that back in the early days of rocket propulsion was beyond us. And as an added kicker, when you broke the light barrier, you actually travelled backwards in time. Meaning that the average superlight ship would reach its destination before it left. Also, it used up negative energy. No scientists could explain this one, but that didn't stop the commercial application of a useful property of interstellar travel, a regenerating fuel supply. Of course, there were problems associated with this kind of travel. Such as what happens when the ship reaches its limit of fuel. Can you just blow a fuel dump valve at 2.8 LS? And what about the occupants of the vessel? Turns out, these two dilemmas would solve themselves.

 

The worst thing about emerging from chronostasis is that uncomfortable feeling that you're not quite right. First thing to get to you is your teeth. They just don't seem to bite properly. Then your skin. It's never exactly as dry or soft as it was before you entered. From there it goes downhill. Chronomadness was one of the many longterm health risks predicted from extended use of chronostasis. Explorers were travelling around the universe, forever seeking out habitable planets, or inhabitable planets that qualified for terraforming. A cosmic fixer-upper, if you will. These explorers, travelling in a colony ship just waiting and ready to set up shop on a new world, would never see their home system again. It was rumoured that some colony ships had actually been able to predate mankind's evolution on Earth using superlight speed. Of course, this lead to the theory that mankind's existence was merely the result of our superlight expansion across the universe and that we're merely a cosmic timeloop.

 

Mental therapy has seen a boon ever since the light barrier was broken.

 

But back to stasis. You never feel quite right when you leave that pod. How they worked was a mystery, but they did require enormous amounts of energy to operate, which was just as well, as superlight travel just happened to generate enormous amounts of energy. So it all balanced out in the end, with the bill for travel being issued to the passengers in the form of their teeth feeling wrong. This usually took several days of adjustment, but was an acceptable price to pay to ensure the survival of the species. Everyone and everything on this ship travelled in stasis. Passengers, embryos, genetic materials, supplies and any lifeforms that are deemed useful enough in their current form to start life anew and unchallenged on a foreign world. Fungus were particularly good at this. As was kelp and plankton, if you could find a suitable ocean. Also, for reasons unknown to us, Ants. They seemed to have no trouble adapting to any environment. On this particular ship, stasis was extremely important.

 

There are two types of colony ship. Cloneships and Broodships.

 

Cloneships work on the simple premise that a computer controlled incubator factory, armed with the entire genome for every living thing known to man, will be able to tailor life to suit the planet, gently altering it towards human habitation, then populating it with freshly grown humans, who then go on to procreate and multiply as normal. These ships were few and usually reserved for intergalactic journeys.

 

The more common ship, the Brooship, worked on the theory of Advanced Eugenics. The theory goes that as a species evolves, intelligence and higher brain functions will increase with every passing generation. In practise, this only seems to occur to a small percentage of each successive generation, meaning that as the population grows, the intelligent population will still only be a minority and will only really begin to appear after several generations.

 

So what intelligent people from Earth, realising that they could save resources used for policing the underclasses and put them towards the expansion and survival of the species, did was to round up these underclasses, often against their will, pack them all in stasis and send them off to some far flung solar system, where they were forcibly educated in the tasks they would need for survival, namely agriculture and construction, then dumped on the planet with enough tools and resources to get them started and enough supplies, laced with inhibition-reducing drugs to encourage procreation, to last until they were self-sufficient. This random, uncontrolled pattern of colonisation worked rather well, initially. Due to the diverse genetic patterns being spawned, once all morals had been drugged away, intelligence seemed to crop up within five or six generations.

 

Critics of the broodship often argued that reducing man to the level of stock, fit only for breeding, even if it did serve a greater purpose, was immoral, unethical and just plain criminal. They never got any arguments, because the Oligarchy running Earth was more concerned with controlling the rampant overpopulation problem than making people feel good about themselves. Critics also argued that intelligent people would also get caught up in the sweeps of the slums and lower class areas that fed the Broodships, which would account for the patterns of intelligence that the colonisation project sought out in freshly established broodcolonies. Once more, their criticisms were ignored. They never criticised too loudly, in case they just happened to be caught up in sweeps. Political prisoners were common and any prisoner could be easily reprogrammed before a trip in a broodship, giving them valuable terraforming skills and a desire to die creating a habitable environment for people to live in. But the voices were still there. They weren't actively silenced, just ignored.

 

The biggest problem with the broodship method of colonisation was ensuring the intelligent did pair up and actually produce offspring. Observation determined that as a colony grew, even with established morals, the more intelligent couples would produce less offspring than their less intelligent fellows, or forego the production of children at all. Even when they did produce a steady stream of mentally superior humans, fit to lead the rabble, there was usually a primitive governmental system in place that would do anything it could to avoid losing power to these cocky young smart people.

 

The solution could be thought to be older than Humankind itself.

 

God.

 

Give the people a deity to believe in, then encourage a generation of priests, prophets and other holy individuals, all claiming to hear God and all gifted with the ability to kill upstarts using the Divine Power of the Almighty, which just happened to be neutron projectors that could be concealed on the wrist, and watch as a once-chaotic, ever-growing, slowly evolving mass of humanity turn into a tightly ordered civilisation, ready to turn the planet into another Earth.

 

Sure, it was cruel and lead to the eventual creation of underclasses of mentally inferior specimens, but there would always be more Broodships to fill

 

How to create a modern day Deity. Simple. A few flashing lights in the sky, the occasional well-aimed proton beam at the occasional wild animal and the sudden appearance of well-dressed prophets, all with a simple explanation of these events and religion was born.

 

Which brings us to the story at hand. Me. I'm a faith engineer. Who I was originally is lost to me. I know my mind was scrubbed clean and a new personality imprinted onto me, before a quick education in philosophy, religious history, theology and all things needed to create a functioning religion that will encourage a population to grow in the right direction was beamed directly into my brain. With a few simple adjustments to my mental makeup, not only am I unable to care enough about my origin to try and locate and re-establish it, I am aware of all this and still don't care. For me, the one thing I desire is to direct a people onto the path that will lead them to salvation. Or enlightenment. Or hedonistic pleasure. I haven't decided yet. All equally good techniques, it all comes down to a matter of personal preference.

 

Onboard the ship, still in stasis, were hundreds of other people. Records show they were all criminals at one point in life. All were just waiting for re-education and a chance to be put towards something useful. Even though I'm sure I was one of them, once, I feel no empathy towards them. Even if I did, there would be nothing I could do for them. Their minds had all been scrubbed before they were loaded onboard. Standard procedures state this is done in the event of a stasis failure, to prevent hostile individuals capturing a superlight vessel. Instead, the ship would be overrun with zombies. All these people had also been repaired physically. All scars, marks, injuries, diseases and mutilations (tattoos, piercings, cyberbionics) had been fixed, repaired, removed or whatever verb applied. They were blank slates, ready for me to carve my commandments onto.

 

The only other being aboard was the ship's computer. Although not truly an intelligence, there were several personality profiles that could be active at any given time, each with pre-programmed responses to any pattern of enquiry. Each of them was an expert in a certain field. All would gladly aid me in my work.

 

Down below, on the planet's surface, external monitoring devices showed me a detailed feed of the events transpiring. This ship got lucky. They landed on a planet with abundant reserves of iron, tin, silver and other useful metals. Of course, this had already lead what all such discoveries invariably lead to, which was all out war. Several settlements had sprung up across the main continent. They all seemed to have a standing army and they all seemed to hate one of the other settlements enough to send their armies to attack and possibly destroy them. This could work to my advantage, as great wars were known to produce great leaders, who, coincidently, just happened to have the backing of an allpowerful deity. Of course, this meant I'd have to fry a few hundred people to strike the fear of God into them after they start to question, but this just happened to be the way of things.

 

Other scans of the planet revealed several useful landmarks. A mountain covered in plant life that exuded a flammable vapour. A sea with an extremely high salt content, thus buoyancy. Large, vast oceans, teaming with life. And enough water locked away in the crust to cause a Great Flood, if needs be.

 

With the ship in a high orbit, I prepared to return to Stasis. Things just weren't right for me. They didn't feel right. I'll not work, unless there is but one thing that doesn't feel right. My teeth.

 

As the stasis pod sealed me in, I felt nothing. Seconds later, it opened again. Down below, things were vastly different.

[Sweetcherrie]

thought provoking, nice

[Katzaniel]

It occurs to me that you rarely get very much feedback for your stories, Aardvark, and yet you are one of the Pen's best writers. I look forward to your posts; they are always creative, insightful, thought-provoking, strange, often scary, but invariably cool, and very well-written.

 

Just thought you should know that.

 

(PS. Found just one typo, but three times: You want "led", not "lead" as the latter means either the material (ie, "lead pencil") or the present tense of led.)

Edited January 4, 2006 by Katzaniel

[Aardvark]

Cheers, I was half asleep and exhausted when I wrote it. Unemployment takes a lot out of a person