As he looked at the shape projected before him, he slid his long fingers under the stiff collar of his sturdy shirt. He wrapped them around his tall, thin neck. If he squeezed tightly his fingertips would almost touch, though it left him momentarily unable to breathe. It was a nervous habit. Both his birthing mother and his nurture mother would swat his wrist smartly whenever they caught him doing it. In their society, except for the barbaric period when weapons were common, strangulation was anciently and was now presently the most frequent murder. The long thin necks of their people were strong by their standards, but they’d evolved on a smaller world. Their light gravity did not necessitate the strength found on stocky beings of other worlds. Thus, snarling aggressively while tightening one’s own fingers around their own neck was regarded the most heinous of insults, even a legitimate threat of violent death. Perhaps for this reason tall stiff collars were the universal fashion except among the lewd.

‘Do not trouble the child,’ his father would project softly to his mothers. ‘He is not an aggressive child. He has no demeanor of anger to frighten; he will grow out of it.’

Despite his father’s assuring calm, they most certainly troubled the child. It was their right as the procreating pair — one who birthed and tended the egg, the other to nurse and nurture the hatchling — to rear the child. Outwardly, they disregarded his counsel. Inwardly, they heeded his authority and did nothing, aside from their words and occasional wrist-slap, to discipline the child. While the rights of parenting justly lay with the procreating pair, without their mate, they could no longer serve this calling and would fall to the status of honored drones. In his childhood, the Explorer had believed his father held influence over his mothers’ power. He now understood it was they who influenced the power, and it was his father that held the power. The Explorer was grateful for that arrangement for selfish reasons. Despite being troubled often by his mothers, he never outgrew the habit.

He placed the finger of his other hand into the ethereal object before him and turned it. He could see — rather, he could sense — its structure not only in the moment but also its structure at the time of its creation, through its use, and into its future. The image projected before his eyes did not change, its known history and predicted future instead projected into his mind. Just as an ancient petro-chemical engine is better understood by its emitted sounds , he better understood his engine by its emitted time.

‘It will most certainly fail,’ he projected to his companion, ‘but I cannot feel how it will fail … or why.’

‘Neither can I,’ his companion thought back, ‘so I shall be unable to repair it before then.’

They both puzzled.

‘Regardless, the Explorer thought to his companion, ‘we continue as planned.’

‘I concur,’ came the thought-reply, ‘We must press forward in finding a home for the colonies. I shall rebuild the engine matrix when it reveals its failure.’

The small, one-man ship had been the Explorer’s home for years. The opportunities to step out and set foot on a solid world were both rare and glorious.

He walked far further along the ancient, dried riverbed, than their mission necessitated, but he would not deny himself the opportunity to walk such a linear distance unbound by bulkheads.

‘You can see the water flowing through millions of seasons,’ he said back to the ship, ‘It was a glorious torrent, destructive … ,’ he reconsidered, ‘… or constructive in how it shaped the land.’

He bent down and filled his hand with the powdery dust. It had a reddish hue, as the whole planet did, caused by iron. How could they free all the oxygen from the oxidized iron, he wondered? He looked deep into the dust he held, stretching his senses.

‘There was life here, barely,’ he projected to the ship. ‘I can see it, but it vanished a very long time ago.’

Dozens of miles to either side of the dry riverbed canyon walls rose, they themselves climbing upwards of five miles. The canyon ran thousands of miles with innumerable tributaries branching as crevasses into the surface of the dead world.

Far beyond one canyon wall rose the largest shield volcano he’d ever encountered in all his travels. It rose more than thirteen miles vertically into a rarified atmosphere. Yet, the volcano was as lifeless as all else on this world.

‘Are you ready to depart?’ the ship thought to him.

He ignored it a moment as he watched the dust escape between the fingers of his gloved hand.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘What is the complexity of terraforming?’ It was an honest, and appropriate question, but it was borne not out of legitimate inquiry but forlorn hope. He reviewed to his companion: ‘Planetary mass is good; material composition favorable in metals; orbit is positioned in its star’s green belt despite being outward of ideal; meteorite activity previously high but now stable; two captured asteroid-moons; ancient surface water activity and two substantial polar caps; atmospheric pressure too thin; composition toxic; temperature variability extreme.

‘Hypothesize scenarios for me, please,’ he thought out to the ship.

He felt the mental surge as the ship’s intelligence focused upon his proffered challenge.

The Explorer continued walking away, looking closely at the ground, past and present, seeking to divine anything that would change the planet’s barren future: a film of organics on stale water, a patch of lichen, a blade of grass, a woody twig, a bleached bone, or perhaps a plastic bag rising aloft in a dusty zephyr. He felt only rock and dust to its ultimate future — a time when its star would swell into a red giant and engulf the world into its fiery furnace.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

‘Hypothetically,’ his companion finally began, ‘bombarding the planet with water ice could provide both the water for the environment and gaseous oxygen for the atmosphere. The poles are principally carbon dioxide, not water. However, this system’s seventh planet is a gaseous giant with a substantial ring system composed in its majority of water ice.

‘There are, unfortunately, additional element needs, particularly nitrogen and carbon for which I cannot recommend a remedy without further information. To terraform, I anticipate a substantial effort requiring centuries. Given the time we have remaining, it would not likely be adjudicated a candidate,’ the ship concluded.

It was hopeless, the Explorer knew. He was tired of the sterile worlds and the confines of his ship. He didn’t know which of those urged him strongest to stay outside and neglect travel to the next dead world.

He closed his eyes and let his head sink. With his long neck, his forehead touched and rested against the clear faceplate of his spacesuit helmet. He rested. He knew the emotions he radiated and knew the ship would feel and understand. It had always been upbeat and entertaining. Yet it was not without the foibles accompanying thought and emotion. At times torrential waves of emotion rebounded between them. He was glad this was not one of those times. He was grateful for their friendship.

After the sun had risen and fallen a few times, he drew himself up, turned back toward the ship and began slowly walking back.

‘What’s the next stop in this solar system?’ the Explorer asked through thought-speech as he walked.

‘This is the outermost of the system’s four terrestrial planets. The most logical course is to visit the third, then the first, then the second. The second is presently on the far side of the star. The first lies well before the green belt; I recommend we disregard it. The second and third are similar in size and are both high mass, being three times the mass as this present world.’

‘Ugh,’ he groaned aloud in his mind. He despised the high mass planets. He doubted his people could tolerate such as world as their new home. Perhaps, if they did so as they waited to terraform this one? He morbidly wondered if they’d prefer the extinction that continuously clouded the thought-voices of his people.

It seemed to him the universe would not allow his race to outlive its own world. They had not realized it would be an impossibility to find another to sustain them. Their small planet possessed a thick, oxygen rich atmosphere. Its mass and atmospheric pressure were, as it turned out, traits at odds with each other in the genesis of creation. He wondered if that would be true of the worlds of other intelligent species — if any were ever found. Could such another even exist?

They’d completed two orbits of the third planet over the last few hours. At first, they’d been very encouraged by what they’d observed, both in sight and in time. From afar their initial spectroscopy threatened false hope. Their approach belied the falseness to true hope. Their naked-eye look and their reach into time could do nothing but vindicate those early readings. The world before them shone brightly in blue, green, brown, and white hues under warm, yellowish sunlight. All through its past, it felt changing and adapting. The planet seemed … alive.

What concerned and excited them both were not only what they saw in the light — grey smudges along the shores of seas and rivers — but also what they saw in the dark — clusters of dim lights appearing in semi-regular patterns. They could not believe they saw civilizations, but they could not deny it.

Of the two, the ship brightened with the most excitement. It jabbered away at the oft-debated and never implemented inter-civilization exploration protocols. Its glee rattling around in the Explorer’s mind kindled happiness long forgotten. He’d allowed himself only a moment’s emotional revelry as he dreamed back to a mate-pair he’d loved. Though promised, he bowed to them and was given release to embrace the loneliness of this forsaken journey for his people.

‘So, we’re agreed?’ the Explorer asked, ‘Set down near a remote habitation and assess the enlightenment and technology levels of this life? As they’re likely diurnal, set down at night?’

The Explorer adjusted the ship’s orbit as they passed under the sun’s zenith. Over the next forty minutes, their orbit would slowly drop into the thick, oxygen rich atmosphere, and place them inland a short distance into a major continent, far from what would likely be major ports or rivers. They hoped to find a small, remote habitation of few lifeforms. The Explorer knew the gravity would be oppressive, but this discovery overpowered his fear with excitement, an excitement the two shared. Once landed, he didn’t imagine he’d likely stray far from his friend as he usually did.

Minutes passed quickly. The force of their deceleration into the heavy planet’s thick atmosphere weighed heavily on his chest. Though he didn’t feel he was suffocating, nor that he was in any mortal danger, the labor to breathe unnerved him. He grew concerned with his ability to control their descent.

‘Take control,’ the Explorer projected to the ship with a groan. His mind let go the controls. He could feel the ship taking them gingerly from his mental grasp. He tipped his head back to stretch his neck and chest. He fought against the slowly-increasing force of the pressure against him. It had been a very long time since he’d experienced an entry this powerful.

‘I’ve got control; everything is going fine,’ the ship assured him, ‘we’re almost to the peak; you’re almost there, then it’ll start easing off.

‘You’re doing fine. We’re almost there.’

At last, their planetfall ended. Though the forces of their entry into the atmosphere were gone, the oppressive force of this planet’s gravity was not. His excitement gave way. It was as if he were recovering from a terrible illness. It was hard to breathe, and though he filled his chest with each breath, the air did not seem to fill him.

‘There,’ the ship told him, directing his mind toward a solitary cluster of small rectangular structures. It was ideal.

‘Concur,’ he thought back, tersely, to the ship.While he feared the ground, he no longer wanted to be in flight.He wanted to survey this world, execute the inter-civilization protocols, and return to space.The ship banked itself and set its glide slope to land within a couple hundred yards of the habitation, as it transitioned to landing.

In the transition, in an instant, the sensation of fear overwhelmed them both. All thoughts of home vanished, their existential mission became a forgotten task, an urgency to grasp the controls seized upon the Explorer’s mind. But there was nothing to be done. In that instant, their engine’s near future, as well as their own, came into brilliant focus.

The sensation of gravity vanished as the ship dropped. The Explorer took an easy breath. A sense of calm filled his soul as the ground rushed mercilessly toward them.

‘Are you there? … My damage … my damage is extensive … my self-healing … it’s not … it’s not … Are you there?! I can’t see! I can’t hear you! Are you there? Help me! Talk to me!’