A New Life - Part Five

[Quinn23]

Aphelia finally let me out of the freezer. She had slowly warmed me up while she trained me and pumped nutrients into my body, a frail shell of what I had once been. But then we all looked like that, barely human, mentally vacant, and emotionally spent. Huddled together, our bodies thawed out, we were raw, and scared.

 

The ark was relatively warm compared to the freezer, more of which were opening every minute spilling out the human meat cargo they carried and had kept alive for thousands of years only to deliver them to an empty planet with only the words of a computer for safety. Yeah, welcome to Utopia.

 

I looked at the other meat skeletons. I didn’t know any of their faces. If I had, I wouldn’t have recognized them. I sure as hell that none of them recognized me. Ten thousand years is a long time to hold a grudge, but there were those that might. My dealings had not always been on the up and up.

 

When you owe money and you know how to circumnavigate security systems, you start taking jobs that you might previously have considered morally objectionable. But you justify it to yourself: Just this once; Just until I get out of debt; just until I have a little extra—then you stop questioning it because the truth is, we’re all going to die and it’s not going to matter who has what or how they got it. What is it the saying: Possession is nine-tenths of the law?

 

But who was the law here?

 

We had no possessions, only ourselves. I was sure the first murder would happen that first week. Maybe not murder, but the first death from fighting over possessions. You really can’t have law without government and there was no government nor would there be for some time to come. Government requires reason and people operating on basic fight or flight rarely use reason. I saw that before we left Earth. And why we waited for that first fight, the first death came within the first hour as someone decided to just walk off the top of the ship.

[Anonymous]

Really enjoying this. Moar!