Vestige
Chapter 19

The governing councilor of the township of Vestige 2 on planet cMaj decided to delay a village meeting on the lake. It was one of the few times Tyra Housenn Sohill had done so since the human remnant colony had gotten together in a conference and elected Tyra as the official Councilor of Vestige 2 decades ago, just after the Tribe had re-located their Settlement hundreds of miles from the crash-site of the old Ship.

When Tyra was young, she used to make snap decisions or aggressively attacked situations. Even after the bombing of the Ship by the renegade synthetics of the Rebellion. But, like her eldest adult child, Mirana, had often scolded her own mother about: Tyra Housenn Sohill sometimes still acted as if there were a grand colony floating above cMaj—there to help the remnants of that Colony should things go wrong.

Even then, in her early seventies, she had to remind herself that her adult children’s generation and their children and there after, were all born on cMaj and had never experienced living in the original Colony, Vestige. At the very least, all three of her adult children—Miriana, Janneca, and Charl—had all gotten a chance to visit the debris field of the old Ship; where the house-sized pieces of the generational ship had crashed landed.

Since the Move of the Tribe just over twenty years after the bombing, was when the original Colonists’ children began to pair up and started to have their own children…all the offspring of the original Colonists had a completely different psychology from Tyra and her generation! They had never known what it was like to live in a civilization with high technology being a very part of their being; where, though artificially induced, the land’s soil still had that ancient Earthy smell and the wide variety of vegetation were more numerous than the entire human population on cMaj; where the governing nodule government was just as much of a machine as the Ship itself and had tended to every needs of the Colony’s two-and-a-half million citizens…All those experiences were totally alien to Tyra’s generation’s offspring. They were truly the aliens to Tyra’s generation’s form of existence and the eon of generations of humans from the old Ship…

Hence, Councilor Housenn Sohill had actually taken a lesson from the next generations: Be mindful that the planet that they were on, cMaj, was it! There was no giant spaceship circling the planet above that would send military help to Vestige 2, should the rogue synthetic beings decide to attack them. There was no colony in the millions that had spare food to ship down to them during the dry seasons on cMaj. There was no hospital above the atmosphere that could supply medicine or physical care for the villagers should a serious disease breakout among them…

In a word—and with total irony—the vestige of the human species on cMaj was a lot like it was when the huge Colony was spinning within the old Ship: Out on their own out in space with no plan B…

Before Councilor Tyra Housenn Sohill and synthetic laborer Number Four returned to the Settlement, they wanted to check the lake’s general vicinity for any other possible bodies of water or any other geographical features that might benefit the Colony. It took them the rest of the day, and by the time Number Four had flown Tyra back to the colonial plateau area via the hand cart, it was late evening.

Number Four had pictographically recorded their excursion for scientific and historical purposes. That, of course, included the shoreline of the lake, with its slow-moving lake-shore due to the apparent-living sand. With the aid of Tyra’s portable device, which had spent the whole day recharging in cMaj’s local star’s light, Tyra and Number Four watched the recorded events at the lake the rest of the night as all three made scientific and everyday observations about the lake and its surrounding ecosystem.

When the trio had finished what amounted to an impromptu meeting, the councilor asked both computerables to file that recorded session that evening for her own safekeeping. Her portable asked if she wanted to share the recording of the session and that of Number Four’s from the day, surprisingly to both computerables the councilor said no! What was more, she did not even bother to explain why she wanted to keep that day private.

But before cMaj’s night segued into dawn, Councilor Housenn Sohill had an important mission for the synthetic being, on behalf of the entire human population…

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