Quote:
Wake up,
Live again, and Discover, Captain Aeron
The dead man stuttered back to life, and it was one of the most painful acts he had ever forced upon his body, more painful ever than there had been, greater than the loss of his left eye and arm, and more so than he could have fathomed the mechanized implants had ever cost his psyche. The man felt his heart shiver with electricity as probes lit the thing up, causing it to quiver and thunder in his ears. Blood started to work, and his lungs, previously empty gasped for air, pulling it down greedily from the fixture over his mouth and nose. The nodes that connected to his body rolled about, their whirring mechanisms working to activate his muscles and body, rousing him from his slumber, bringing his dead body back to life. He opened his right eye to the watery coffin that he'd slept in for what must have been a few years, at least. He never knew. There were ways of knowing, to calculate how old, chronologically, his body truly was, but what did it matter? The world, System, Galaxy and Universe were what you made of them, right?
The fluid in the clear prison he'd placed himself in was draining to his feet, the water He shivered, the newly flowing blood and steady stream of nutrients he was being fed chilled him, but this wasn't his first time, and it wouldn't be the last. He was just going to have to endure it, and learn to handle it. He eyed the console before him blearily in the dark, his eye adjusting slowly to read. He looked at the planet patiently, reading across the description and noting different facts about it. It could have passed for a drunkenly rendered Earth, as far as he could have told anyone, since he'd never seen it, but he supposed it must be similar. Green brown and blue. Whitish clouds. The climates seemed akin to earth in ways, but it was hotter, to some degree. It was good that things were measured in relative ratings as a sidebar, but sometimes he pondered the wisdom in that. Most of the humans had never seen earth when they were awake. Returning meant little, as there was nothing left to be seen. What purpose was there in going to an empty spot in a forgotten solar system? It was just a heap of crust left, the bread gone for centuries.
Their home, long discarded, the humans had taken everything they could, which amounted to a considerable achievement. When the world ended, billions of humans entered into the mass exodus from their home and sought refuge in the stars, their planet dying under their feet rapidly. So they had formed a new system, a method of finding new homes by telescopes and sending the Seeds out to attempt to analyze and cultivate land far away. It took many years, but the human race had a confidence that few could deny in their theories and philosophies. By using the Theory of Relativity, they were able to assume that somewhere out there, the conditions existed/could be created/ would one day occur to make a second earth, another Terra where they could live freely as before.
Seeds were ships designed to begin a new world. A colonies worth of near-inexhaustible, easily amassed energy that would make the trip out to vast reaches, though time often stood in the way of expedited discoveries. As far as the man knew, the Seed was to accomplish his mission, and nothing could be a more sure sign to him than the lone planet he could see, with it's multiple moons circling lazily around it.
Discover.
Explore.
Sample.
Analyze.
Peace.
Cultivate.
Plant Seeds.
Grow.
Seven simple steps. He hardly needed implants to bear them in mind, or know that they were his ture objective, in everything he did. The mission remained the same, no matter where or when he woke up. A tingling at the base of the skull rose and he felt his eye and left arm flicker to life. He'd lost both of them before becoming a Seed. He'd been working on a space station in the early days, before the Seeds or the Cultvating, and some machinery had gone haywire and ground the arm to dust. Hunks of it had spattered him, coating his body in gore and bone. Some reflexes simply weren't enough. He'd managed to more or less gouge out his own eye in the altercation. Trifling, these days, with modern medicine and prosthetic, it was possible to regrow his eye, but the function had been gone to him. He'd had it replaced with a less-natural but mufti-functioning cyborg eye.
The thing flickered in and out, before emitting a more steady, faint light. It passively set about measuring and analyzing everything he looked upon. With this he was able to access more data than the regular implants that most of his people were now born with. Not that too damn many of them were being born. It was rare to see the population growing, as each of the Seed ship was filled to the brim, carrying a thousand opaque pods. Each one would activate in turn if he should be slain, or if he should find a place to call their home. Time was a luxury for some, but why wait? The hibernating humans they traveled around were what was needed to start society and they had them in abundance.
The man flexed slowly, running his body through a series of self-administered tests to assess his physical condition and ponder if he really felt like he'd been asleep more than a few hours. It always felt more like blinking than sleep, and he never felt fully rested, but at least he didn't feel like he'd died and come back to life by some technological marvel. He loathed it, but it was better to use his youth to his advantage than spend the long years grating through as an old man, simply riding a ship through the vast blackness of space. At least, that would be what he imagined. Who would want to live that way? Some of his trips took fifty years. Could he honestly say that he'd want to spend fifty years waiting only to find that he'd grown old and feeble for a failed opportunity, or a rotten planet?
The man stood now, all six-feet of fit male human, sans one eye and one arm, at age thirty two. He had shaved his head bald and had the hair lazered from his body to keep from wasting his time awake maintaining it. He missed it sometimes, but never regretted it. At his age, time was something he couldn't afford to wast dallying about, right? Probably. Some would say that it was time he start looking to move up, and become a Fruit captain, one of the floating hulks that traveled from Tree with the Seeds, trying to spread them carefully through the universe. It would certainly garner him better implants, but it would be a prison. Even maimed, the captain was more interested in adventure and discovery than he'd ever been in power or authority. Sure, he was his own boss in the sense that he was responsible for his own productivity, but what more was there out here?
The captain of his own ship, and in unfamiliar territory, he left the pod before it finished drying his body and stood before a case, before selecting one of the suits he wore. The only type of garment he owned, not that there was something better. Fitted to his body, the suit fit like a glove and protected him more thoroughly than any sort of thing he'd worn before. The only thing that came off as more durable was the metallic left arm that got suited up anyways. With all the gadgets and tools that the suit came with, it was hard to deny it's careful design and well-made ability to be used as a defense and more importantly, it made his work go more smoothly.
Need to hide? Change color. Need to jump? Trust the suit and your implants, it'll work out. Need some food? There was even some supply in it, nutrients he could take from to retain his energy and press on, when his body would have normally failed him. In the ship, and on 'safe mode' the bald man stood carefully into soft boots and felt the whole suit flex and churn slightly around him as it was plugged into his brain and interfaced with him. He shuddered once, and then felt himself grow more comfortable, as if he'd put on an extra skin, one that would be more useful than the tissue he wore beforehand. It was something he was used to, it made him feel...complete. Secure.
The helmet of the suit folded down, to cover the back and sides of his neck, while the rest of his body was encased in what looked to be hard plates mixed with mesh and other substances. It was the best defense, and standard-issue. He found himself flexing in it, marveling at the miraculous thing as he often did before he left the Sleeping Room and stood in the bridge of his ship. He looked down on the planet from space and drew his breath slowly before whistling at it slowly, letting the note fall as he pressed a gloved fingertip to the screen with a clink. Turning, he moved to the walls and looked over the product he was trying so very hard to deliver. Scores of men and women. All of them his allies and friends, his kin. The people he was trying to give a home to. The future hung on his walls, and gazed upon him through their opaque cases, waiting for him to put them where they belonged. To plant.
The ship had already analyzed the planet for a full rotation and mapped out some civilization on the face of it, taken a once-over to the moons it could find from it's position. It seemed interesting and promising. From here he was shown a handful of the indigenous species, creatures who lived there already. He perused the files and catalog, waving his fingers in carefully rehearsed gestures as his eye and implants worked together to show them in his vision, rather than on screens while he read the facts the systems were able to analyze. Only so much the machines would do, else they'd have been able to do all of they're work in probes and drones, but it was... too impersonal. Too methodical. It was a blight, to be caught 'Automating'. What a deplorable act, as having a planet monitored and judged in such a fashion...
Aeron stood on the platform as it lowered him into the bowels of the Seed, to the where his smaller, more versatile ship waited, sitting patiently like a good dog. Whatever those were. He assumed it must be as it was meant to be as he pulled himself up into the ship, using the neuro connectors on his suit to jack in and find himself leaving the main ship and moving to the planet at a measured pace, moving to avoid an orbiting moon with an easy grace before he punched it, his ship hurtling towards the planet with abandon, his excitement getting the better of him, his eyes dancing mentally, thrilled. He made no effort to especially mask his approach, as such a thing would be nothing more than a streak of light across the sky, no more interesting than a shooting star to what he figured were probably primitive creatures regardless.
Maybe the y were still the primitive sort who believed that it would be a sign for change, and a new era. They would be right, Aeron thought as he landed his ship in a wooded clearing, before removing his connectors and settling himself into the earth once, before waving it away. The ship took off, leaving him there, alone on an alien planet, watching the ship flicker in the sky past the moon, waiting for his next order. It would come, after a few more steps. No sense leaving a hulking evidence of his presence here until he was ready to make himself known. He stood and stretched in the clearing, letting the helmet fall back over his face and head, obscuring his vision less than it enhanced his sense, drawing in the sweet smells of grass and trees, listening patiently as he rolled his vision along the forest, thrill rising in his heart, causing it to pound as the suit shifted slowly into the dark greens to match, obscuring him from any onlookers at least a bit in the darkness.
