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A New Life - Part Four


Quinn23

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I spent a week listening to Aphelia speaking in my head telling me about psych profiles and aptitudes. She said I was appropriate for ground or ship maintenance. Just what I went to school to do. But she was looking at aptitude and not reality.

 

Interesting that I started thinking of the voice in my head as a she. Can a metallic voice have a sex? Can a computer be one or the other? I think it is natural to think of inanimates as the opposite sex. It was a comfort and an affirmation of the self. At least it was for me.

 

Aphelia told me about Kyrium and the things I could build with it. Of the tool I would wear and use to manipulate the miracle substance. She showed me a utopia. That was a mistake I think. It was going to be a struggle. We would be protected close to the ship, now useless for flight but still useful as a base and provider, for a time. It’d be a miracle if most of us survived the first year. Hell, we didn’t know how long a year would be. But Aphelia told us that too.

 

Homesteading would be hell, not utopia. At least that I believed at the time. Experience has proven I was right. Too many refugees trying to eek out enough food and water on a planet we didn’t know, a planet with its own dangers, its own predators—which included us. Earth showed humans destroyed whatever we touched. Funny, we thought destroying our eco-system would be our end. It wasn’t.

 

When I was a kid, I learned about nomadic tribes and the migratory cultures that existed before man learned agriculture. We’d have to do that. I learned about the wheel and the lever, Galileo, gravity, the solar system, all things we’d have to do again. But Aphelia was guiding us, at least for now. I thought that would make us week. We needed to learn from ourselves to make our mistakes and find new ways to do old things, and new things that neither we nor Aphelia could have thought of. But then what of man?

 

Even at the end, Winston had fallen to our predatory nature. Even after our destruction was known, we still gave in to greed and violence, natural states for some. There would be no room for avarice in utopia. We would have to work together for the common good. But could we? Could mankind put aside basic genetics? Could we contain our instincts that told us to fight or flight? In the end, it had still come to fight. So many wars. So many lives. Would we do better? Utopia? I doubt it. More like Purgatory.

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