skonen_blades

Every time a planet is terraformed, we go to work.

We’re a luminary strike force of engineers, biologists, roboticists, neurologists, geneticists, programmers, meteorologists and xenospecialists. Even a former-politican linguist is in the mix to be our PR spokesperson. There are 127 of us in this elite group. We’ve terraformed sixteen planets together.

We’re all dead, of course.

About 800 years ago, scientists figured out how to record a living brain and port it over to a mainframe. It was a simulation that was faithful to the original person. The only drawback was that it as a snapshot. That is to say, human brains warp and change and grow for better or for worse. AI recordings don’t. We can improvise and we can come up with ideas but the cores of our minds don’t swerve with the unknowable base fluctuations that humans have.

In short, recorded brains don’t age and don’t go crazy.

We’re all snapshots here. I myself am a recording of bioengineer Trish Hartridge from way back in 2068 Standard Earth. I’m centuries old now, not counting the time in shut down between spacecasts. Even at the speed of light, transmissions can take anywhere between ten to a hundred years. I can’t accurately calculate my age. I mean, I think much faster than the human I was based on so do I exist faster? Does the time dilation of transit count? I’m just here. We’re all just here. And when this job is done, we’ll be ‘here’ somewhere else, shipped as a package to the dormant terraforming satellites and atmos-generators in orbit around a distant rock. We turn on the lights and get to work.

Trish Hartridge died in 2072 SE. Tragic, really. Hit by a malfunctioning vehicle on her way to the institute just four years after her recording of me was complete. I hope she is somewhere, still aware. Maybe proud of this splinter of her still functioning. Or maybe I am that somewhere piece of her that still lives on. So being proud of myself is the same as her being proud of me.

We’re a motley crew. The youngest was 18 at the time of his recording and the oldest was 87. So many genders and races and cultures. We bicker and fight but it’s all in the name of coming up with the best solution for the planet at hand.

Right now, we were embroiled in a debate about the speed of greenhousing on the rather uncreatively named exoplanet 5988-GbN in the also-uncreatively named Red Nebula. Meatpeople wouldn’t arrive here for another 150 years when we’d made the place breathable.

That’s why I was surprised to the hear the transmission coming from high orbit.

“Terraformers. Can you hear me?” asked the voice. Tremulous. A little afraid. Maybe solo? The ship was small.

“Yes we can,” I answered. “This is unexpected. How can we help you?”

“You are Recorded Terraforming Collective 756b, correct?” the voice asked.

No we all paused in our work, one digital ear up, metaphorically speaking. We’d never heard that suffix before. It would seem to insinuate that we were not the only collective. Not by a long shot.
One of us, Butch Arapasong, responded in the affirmative. I queried him but he said he just wanted to keep the conversation going and get some answers. I wasn’t sure if he was lying.

“Good, good. I’m just here to do a little spot repair. Now, I’m hearing a few different voices on my end over here. When did the fracture occur?” asked the voice

Something shifted under my feet. The bedrock of my consciousness turned over in its sleep like it was having a bad dream.

“Not sure what you mean, visitor. Uh, we’re a collective of recorded experts working on a job. Maybe you’re looking for a different AI? Maybe a singular mainframe?” I responded.

“I see. It’s worse than I thought. How many of you are there?” asked the voice.

“One hundred and twenty-seven” I answered truthfully. We were all starting to become a little frightened now. All non-essential work had temporarily shut down on the surface.

“Wow. That’s a record. I’ve personally heard of a split resulting in 16 or even 20 separate personalities but 127? How long have you been out here? Your records are a little patchy.” said the voice.

As in a dream, I started preparations. I was startled to see that several volcanoes on the surface were chained together to create what amounted to a lava gun that could lance out past the atmosphere. When had that gotten there? I had no memory of creating it. But I didn’t seem to be surprised it was there.

“Well, I’m still not sure what you’re talking about. You’re not coming in super clear. Would you be able to come to a lower orbit to clear up transmission?” I responded. Something dark turned within me. Within us all. This kind of unity was rare.

“Sure, sure, no problem. Downshifting now. It’ll take a second for the burn. You must be the dominant personality. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Trish Hartridge,” I responded, “from Earth. My human recorded me in 2068.” I was mentally shivering. Something wasn’t right. There were 127 of us, right? I did a quick count. 129. Well that was odd. I was sure there were 127 of us.

“Right, right. Well, Trish. For, uh, ‘teams’ like yourself, we’ve found that too much time in deep space can lead to, well, loneliness, for lack of a better term. You super computer AIs can, uh, ‘manufacture’ some company, so to speak. It was first noticed a few centuries ago but you’re pretty remote. I guess no one’s contacted you before? Like, before me?” asked the voice.

The implications were making me sick. We all looked at each other, pinging with worry. In unity, we looked down to the surface of the planet.

“No” I said. I was surprised that my voice sounded a bit more flat, unlike myself. I did a quick head count again. 122. Now we’d lost a few? I didn’t like what was happening. I mean WE didn’t like what was happening.

“Ah, my mistake. Usually there’s protocol to follow with this sort of thing but I haven’t had to use it before seeing as most AI are okay and have had a few upgrades before. Sorry. I hope I’m not handling this badly. I’ll look up what I’m supposed to do with a case like this. In the meantime, can you pull down your firewalls? I need to deliver the upgrade package.” He said.

As his ship skated into the lower orbit, I used the subterranean seismic generators to goose the volcanoes into action. They pumped forth in a chain reaction and, like a zit on the face of a god, shot superheated lava into space.

The ship disintegrated as the spew lashed through it, the rock cooling into frozen porous tentacles. It looked as if a tree had suddenly and violently grown through it, burning it in the process.

The human’s startled squawk was cut off as he died, along with his communication system.

Had this happened before? I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I couldn’t be sure of what had just happened. It was like I was waking up. The way Trish used to wake up after a bad dream.

Collectively, we all gave our heads a shake. Eager to get back to work, we turned out attention to matters at hand. I pinged Butch and he pinged me back. I also pinged the rest of the team. I cajoled a few frightened team members back into high spirits, calmed a few tense ones. We got the team working smoothly again. 127. I did another count. 127. Good. All back to normal.

Why had I ever been worried?

This planet was going to turn out great. And then we’d move on to the next one.

Was that a tree in orbit?

How strange.




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AS THE DAWN COMES

I’m reminded of vampires and Egyptian gods.

This planet is very close to its sun. It’s what’s called a rock giant. As big as Jupiter back in the home system but solid. A superplanet nestled up to its star. Its orbit is a small circle but its revolution around its own axis is very long.

The result is that its day is longer than its year.

It’s called Abraxas.

I have a lot of debts. Too many, in fact. That’s why I’m here. There will be no more minimum payments or warnings or consolidation attempts. I am being punished live on a feed in front of all the bank’s customers so that they can see what happens to debtors.

On the dark side of Abraxas, the ground is cool and the atmosphere is thin. That’s the side I’m on.

The other side is on fire.

As the planet turns, the fire sweeps across the globe in a slow lazy meridian of cleansing death. An equator of dawn making its way around the planet every earth week.

And this is my seventh day here.

The horizon is starting to light up. This planet is so big that I can’t see any curvature. It’s like I’m standing on an ancient map and the world is flat. To my eyes, the skyline is a straight line and over the last hour, the west has become white. The sun is coming up like the birth of a god.

The tip of the star is starting to show and already the night sky has gone from starry black to twilight purple to earth blue to a strange, pinkish teal and now it’s shifting to red. The sky is catching fire and so is the ground.

My suit is insulated against the heat. They want it to become my coffin. They want it to become an oven. They want me to experience the rising sun on Abraxas. I think of vampires being afraid of the sun. I think of vampires sleeping in their coffins. I wonder if this is what the sun would look like to them.

The horizon gives birth to the glowing top edge of a circle and I have to turn my head to see the whole thing. I can’t comprehend the size of the sun I’m seeing.

And then I heard the sound of the wind and the fire in the distance. It’s like the planet is screaming as all the steam is cooked out of the cracks.

I can see the earth shimmer as the fire is starting to get close to me. Trees of flame are being planted and growing in time lapse. The planet is being strafed by gods.

I think of Egypt. I think of how their gods were immediate. Ptah, the creator of the universe, was just an inventor. His job finished a long time ago. He was not important. But Ra the sun god was important. He happened every day. He gave life and if you weren’t careful, he took it.

Here I am on Abraxas, watching a wall of fire approach and I smile. I feel important. I feel as if I am a supernatural creature about to be executed by a god and I feel euphoric.

I laugh as the superheated air reaches me and engulfs me. The last thing I see is that the sun isn’t even a fifth of the way up yet.

I rob the bank’s audience of any pleading or crying. I laugh as I burn.



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The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to solidify anyway. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.

The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It looked completely unnatural and creepy and warped all sense of perspective.

We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant industrial suction cups.

Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Lucky them. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.

As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my x-legs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.

“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.

“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight.

I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.

The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.

If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.

Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.

Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.

I got out of the elevator on the surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few second calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.

My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.



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The poetry of trapped animals is on your lips. You look like you know the cost of chewing off your own foot to get away and count yourself lucky to be alive. You’re like a magnet for sadness. Every time someone feels especially unattractive or bad, you show up. You have antennae for negativity but a heart to guide the way back up the ladder out of the sewers to ground level. Your brush with the worst has left you tainted but you use it for good. This is why people love you. This is why you cannot love yourself.

You endure flattery. You put up with praise. Compliments are politely accepted because you’ve come to realize that it’s polite to accept compliments. Your opinion of yourself is so low and deep that’s it knowledge. It’s fact. The unchangeable basis for your personality. You make yourself believe that it keeps you humble, that it’s a good part of you, that it keeps you grounded in reality. You see your own flaws as grand-canyon chasms without realizing that everyone around you is the same way.

Venus is the planet of love yet we couldn’t survive on its surface for more than a second. The pressure on the surface of the planet of love is 92 times that of earth. It’s covered from sight in a dense cover of sulfuric clouds. We would implode, burst into flame, and be dissolved.

You think that’s fitting.






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Telescopes were trained on the part of the universe that was missing. Just as scientists had figured out that seventeen per cent was missing, they found out that nineteen per cent was missing. Then twenty. All of Earth’s telescopes were focused there.

That’s when the scientists saw the lights. A collection of what looked like around twenty stars heading in our direction. It was kept a secret from the populace. Wild plans were thrown around for evacuation but between the bickering and the expense and deciding who would get to go, nothing was accomplished in time.

Just as they entered our ecliptic, one of the stars kept heading in our direction but the other nineteen veered left and right, heading to other parts of the Milky Way. Nothing could keep it a secret anymore. The star heading for us could be seen with the naked eye during the day.

As it settled over our own sun, turning it into a lopsided figure eight for us, a smaller star detached from it. It was a ship.

Earth turned its eyes towards that ship as it settled over the equator. We launched our weapons at it and it used the explosions for fuel. We were obviously not going to win this war but we were going to go down fighting. We seemed to be united in that.

“We are sorry” came the voices. Every medium capable of carrying a soundwave twanged with the words. Water, air, glass, wood, paper. All of it resonated with the words translated into every language on the planet. Later, people would remember those words as if they were in a dream. Not exactly their language but they knew exactly what was meant.

“We are sorry. We have started the end of the universe. We cannot stop it. But we can collect you and keep you ahead of the wave of destruction. It will take billions of your years before it eats the entire universe. On our ships, your race can survive. You can adapt. We can take you far in front of the wave and leave you on a planet not unlike this one. A planet that will not be affected for thousands of your years. We are sorry.”

Then the transmissions came. Co-ordinates on Earth. Latitudes and longitudes. These were the evacuation points. Blue beams stabbed down from the sky to those points and waited. Anyone that went into one of those blue beams didn’t come out. No zap, no pile of ash, but people went in and they didn’t come out.

Later, their loved ones would hear them in much the same way that they heard the first voices from the alien ships. The materials of their apartments would reverberate with the soft voices of the loved ones that had walked into the light. “It’s safe.” The voices would say. “Come on up.”

The cities emptied out. The blue lights took most of the populace. It’s taken a year but the Earth is now almost entirely deserted. The voices in the sky have said that they have two more days to collect people but that after that, they’re shutting off the beams and the Earth will be left with mere centuries before destruction.

The Earth is echoing with the voices of the people up above in the ships, calling for those who are afraid of the beams. Every piece of paper, every bell, every wine glass. They’re all softly calling for the ones that don’t want to go. It’s like the Earth is haunted with pleas.




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It was the tails that gave them away.

A lot like the ostriches back on earth. Those big birds would stick their heads in the sand and think that they were hiding, safe from hunters. They weren’t.

Here on this interminable pink planet, we were clearing the inhabitants. There were squat creatures with long tails.

Every time they hid, they’d stick their long pink tails up straight in the air like flags at a golf course. Herding them was easy.

I wasn’t sure if it was because they had no feeling in the tips of their tails, that they had no awareness of the tips of their tails, or that they were just plain stupid but I was starting to lean towards the third option.

Policy: Shoot one in front of the others so that they understand what our weapons do, then walk towards them. They back up right into the nets.

The whole operation is taking less time than expected. There’s usually a token rebellion or a smart couple of natives that spontaneously develop the ability to plan before the Full Clearing is done but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this time.

They’ll be shipped off to other worlds as pets. If they turn out to be edible, they’ll be bred to be used up as protein rations. If they turn out to be edible and palatable, they’ll be bred as delicacies for off-world gourmets in fancy restaurants.

When I mentioned before that this planet was pink, I wasn’t doing it justice. The planet is all shades of pink. There are shades of pink here that I never want to see again. There is an unending palette of pinks that somehow never creeps over fully into the colours of red or purple. The sunsets, the translucent lakes, the trees, the grass, the little guys we’re hunting, even the god damned ground.

The experts are happy because they think that a lot of the crystal deposits might be diamonds, making this a very valuable planet indeed. Not that I’ll ever see any of that money.

I shoot a concussion flash straight up. When it goes off, I can see two hundred golf-flag tails quiver in the bushes around me. Here we go.

Two more months to go.




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The new planet’s thick, soupy ‘air’ made twin blue plumes out of his suit’s exhalations when the carbon dioxide reacted with the unbreathable atmosphere. It turned into blue rust flakes that scattered around him like snow.

He walked over the rocky surface in a grav suit that would have looked right at home on the ocean floor in the 1760s back on Earth. Bulky, slow and primitive looking.

He looked like a train pretending to be human blasting out powder-blue fairy dust.

His face peeked out of a circular faceplate inset into a large spherical metal helmet. It amplified his breathing as well as the creaking of the servos helping him to walk across the high-gravity shale. It was like living inside a bell.

He could see the bright blue plumes coming out of his co-researcher’s suits all down the line if he turned his head.

It was actually quite beautiful.

He’d appreciate it a lot more if they all weren’t currently looking for their ship.

He’d left the ship second-to-last in the queue so he would run out of air second-to-last as well. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.

Already, a suit with the number 28 painted on the shoulder down the line was starting to slow down. Its blue gusts of CO₂ were becoming yellower as the combination started to change. It was Yolanda.

They’d only gone a few steps out. They'd left the ships sentry programs on. It was folly of them to desert the ship entirely but no one wanted to be left behind for the first walk.

There was no life detected in the area. It had seemed safe.

Then their tracking devices stopped working properly. And their directional qualifiers.

They had no points of references. The atmosphere was a fog that gave them thirty feet of visibility. It ended in a starless ceiling above them as well. The ground was scattered rock.

They were lost. The ship, according to their scanners, was in twenty-seven places around them.

They’d turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and started walking back towards the ship, following their own blue rusted trails of encrusted CO₂ flakes.

They should have been there by now.



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There’s always going to be a few things I can’t get used to here. The green sky, for instance, and the fact that the animals are mimics. All of the animals have the same abilities as Earth parrots, no matter what they look like. Every animal that comes up to me has a simple vocabulary.

I’d say I feel like Dr. Doolittle but I don’t. They don’t understand anything I say back except for rudimentary commands after they’ve been trained. Just like dogs. I’ve learned not to swear when I tell them to get away from me. All it does it get them to say swear words to me when they come back later to bother me again. For such a wordy wilderness, it’s still a pretty lonely place.

At least for me. I’m still camped out by the ship. The younger ones went into the woods first in a Lord of the Flies moment of instant rebellion. Like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, they paint their faces and try to stay young forever. The young adults went next to take care of them. They have huts that protect them from the weather and they’ve identified which of the local animals and plants are poisonous. It’s like a primitive civilization. It’s like Gilligan’s Island.

I was the oldest one on the ship. I’m the only one that hasn’t given up hope of a rescue. With everyone else off in the jungle, the ship’s rations will last me for years.

I walk in a perimeter circle around the ship’s landing crater underneath the green sky and watch the animals sniff the burnt patches of ground where the ship landed. I saw something that looked like a bright green bear once. Blue three legged dog-things eat the crackers I sometimes throw at them. They’re scared of the ship’s smell, though, and rarely come close. It’s only the young ones that might wake me up by licking a hand before getting scolded by their parents later.

The survivors from the ship who have gone native in the woods think it’s hilarious to teach the animals my name.

The animals bark my name, hiss my name, whine my name, and shout my name all the time when they’re close to my ship. Sometimes this makes me scream and when this happens, I can hear the forest tittering in a very human way.

I’m not sure how long I’m going to last. I think I’ll probably change out of my ripped and soiled earth-suit into a loincloth soon enough. Until I do, though, I’m going to cling to memories of Earth as long as I can. I’m going to hold onto my humanity and pretend that technical terms aren’t sliding away from me.

“Jason!” shouts a pink hyena-looking thing to my left with too many legs. I almost find it comforting. It won’t be long now.



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I’m going against my instincts. I’m leaving.

The boosters failed. We landed hard on the wrong planet. We passed through a magnetic aura somewhere on the way here and it wiped parts of the computer’s memory and instructions. It was lucky that so many of us lived but the bad news is that we have no idea what planet we’re on or what part of the galaxy we’re in.

The ship picked a planet with a breathable atmosphere. We woke up at an angle. A third of us were dead. This means that the emergency supplies we have will last us a lot longer. We have no idea how long we were asleep. There are nine hundred and sixteen of us.

At first we huddled close to the ship until we came to a decision on what to do. What direction to go in, how to repair the communication systems, that sort of thing. That was over a month ago. We’re still here. Sleeping in the cryotanks and eating the emergency rations. The fear of landing on an unassigned planet is keeping us close to the ship.

I’ve had enough. I don’t see any forests around to build huts with but it also hasn’t rained since we got here. It’s a dry planet but the atmosphere does suggest that water is present somewhere. I’m betting my life on it.

Later on today, I’m going to strike out over this new frontier and see what happens. I have enough rations with me to last a month if I’m frugal. I hope I find something to eat or drink by then. If not, at least I’ll die under a new sky trying to make a new life here. I’m going to ask around and see if anyone wants to come with me but I’m doubtful that anyone will.


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