Vestige
Chapter 11

…a Half-Life…

cMaj’s night sky still had that haze; even after twenty years of the Synthetics’ Rebellion. No one saw it coming, among the humans. At least, not Tyra Housenn Sohill’s generation. It was told of their generation, but as a mere reference: That someday, Humanity would suffer from something called the Singularity. Even Tyra’s and her husband’s teachers and parents weren’t exactly sure what that meant, but, apparently, it was that fateful day when the synths had pierced the thick, metallic hide of the old Ship they had landed ashore of planet cMaj.

Tyra’s and Charmain’s respective portable devices still worked—the advanced technology of utilizing bits of star-energy; bits of molecules floating in cMaj’s air…the way the devices understood Singularity, it was a concept that was a tiny percentage of what the average portable inherited from the late-Ship’s actuator’s systems. Deep in history, Singularity was understood by the computerables to be some tipping-balance. Some reversal of one dominate force tipped over by another force. From her days in that once beautiful, spinning planet-like cylinder inside the old Ship, Tyra was told by her grandparents that Singularity was some kind of justice-day! That humans would have to speak up for some of the bad things the species had done to, presumably, other species from their ancient home-planet…

Apparently, as Tyra’s portable explained to her, Charmain, and the children, there was just enough of the nuclear energy thing in the ancient sector of the old Ship, that when the synths used those scouting ships as missiles, the nuclear inside worked as an explosive-source. Not a lot of the nuclear was left in that old Ship, then. But it was enough to cause the entire Colony to blow—leaving that strange haze in cMaj’s sky at nights.

Even some of the Ship’s infrastructure survived the blast! Towering, hulks of metal littered parts of cMaj’s plains. They were so big, the debris from the old Ship looked like a city that was spread out in the open plains of cMaj! But, of course, much of it was still contaminated by the nuclear. At least, what Tyra’s and her husband’s portables could scan.

It was ironic. The time of twenty years that had passed since the synths’ bombing was the same amount of time that the old Colony had left before its super-dreadnaught would run out of the nuclear fuel that no official of the old nodule-government even knew was fueling the Ship!

The tiny Housenn Sohill clan consisted of five humans: Tyra, a former technician on the old Ship; her husband, Charmain—former mechanic; the eldest of their children, Miriana (15 years old); Janneca (13); and the youngest and only male offspring, Charl (11).

The other, former Colonial scouting crewmembers of the cMaj planet, also, paired up! Their former mission commander and an astrophysicist, Cairo an Preun, espoused the former chemist of the scout team, Luciana Salomenes. While the pilot of that scouting mission, Lanay Thuall, paired with former geologist Fillip Natsome…those two families, also, became their own clans.

It was well understood, that, with the old Colony obliterated, those three clans were, truly, the last hope of the species of homo sapiens’ viability…for in addition to the defunct generational-ship, the three other scouting teams that were assigned to cMaj’s three moons eventually died out from natural causes.

There simply was no atmosphere on any of the satellites of cMaj. And although those three scouting teams had the technological vehicles and suits to last them for several more years, they simply could not grow produce on barren, lunar surfaces…

For the sake of the cMaj crew that had survived, all three of the scouting crews of the three moons decide to cut communications with them. They all knew it would make it easier for the cMaj scouting crew if they did not have to go through the psychological trauma of losing contact with the lunar teams as they died off…

cMaj had a much thicker atmosphere than what humans were used to, true. But it also had soil, and moderate rain that had traces of H2o mixed in—just enough for the Three Clans to siphon water with their high-tech, single-flyers and other equipment they still had. Plus, they were able to utilize the stored food and seeds they took with them during the scouting mission those twenty years earlier. Back then, when the old Colony was still alive, it was standard practice for every scouting mission to carry produce seeds and extra food. For, as the philosophy went back then: One never knew when the opportunity to seed a new world would come up!

Indeed, there was an opportunity for another group of survivors of the fall of the generation-Ship: many of the synthetic laborers that were assigned to all four of the scouting teams all those years ago!

They were the synths that stayed behind on cMaj and the three moons during the Synthetics’ Rebellion on the old Ship. Obviously, since they were synthetic beings, they required no food, no air, and a great deal many other things that humans needed! It was all part of the mutinous synths’ plan: wait out the humans as they set up camp on cMaj’s three-moon system, while the horde of synths in the Colony would start shutting down many of the old Ship’s defenses.

It worked. That vague Singularity balance that so many generations of humans had heard of was finally reached twenty years ago…though, like the humans, virtually all the synth population was wiped out in the Ship’s explosion, they still had the majority populace within the cMaj system! Not by much, though. Indeed, as the Three Clans families began to slowly repopulate their homo sapiens species, their supremacy by numbers would not last long. For they were synthetic beings—they did not have the ability to procreate.

Eventually, the surviving synths on planet cMaj took up residency within those thousands of building-sized debris scattered on the plains from the destroyed generational-Ship. The radiation levels from the nuclear explosion years prior were manageable, though even the mighty synthetic beings had to venture away from the debris from time to time—just to mitigate their radiation exposure…

Even before the remnant-human population on cMaj had become clans, the scouting crew, under Mission Commander an Preun, had escaped with their equipment stashed aboard their single-flyers and managed to find hide-outs in caverns of cMaj’s hinter cliffs.

How strange, Maintenance Technician Tyra Housenn, back then, thought to herself as the tiny survivor-populace of humans took to building their permanent camps in the cliffs. She loved history, and she remembered something from her formative school years about homo sapiens dwelling in caves back on their home-planet. For shelter and for protection from predators…

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