Jack slowly opened his eyes. His vision was fuzzy and his head felt like it was full of fog. He brought his hand up to rub the sleep from his eyes but suddenly felt his arms go stiff. His mind cleared as he remembered the strange blue glow and his body locking down. He could feel his heart start to beat faster as he tried to blink the sleep from his eyes. He quickly noticed that he could move, breathe, flex, blink, and swallow, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs more than an inch or two in any direction.
His vision was filled with bright blue light. He was in some sort of ball, but the light coated his entire body like a thin film. He flexed and struggled, trying to escape this strange claustrophobic prison, but it was very clear that he was completely trapped. Panic started to build in his chest until a creature flickered into existence before him. It looked like a hologram from an old sci-fi movie, made from the same blue light that had ensnared him and was semi-transparent.
The creature looked like a mix between a blackbird and a human. It was wearing what looked like a bluish-gray lab coat that covered much of its torso and legs. Its feet were the scaled feet of a bird, but each of the long sharp talons was clearly painted with pink nail polish. Its hands were similar to a human's; with four fingers and a thumb, but its nails were longer, and black feathers grew out of its forearms. The creature had the beaked face and beady eyes of a bird, with several clearly painted feathers displayed on the top of its head. It looked to be about five feet tall, and despite the avian features Jack was sure that there was no way this creature could fly on its own.
The alien made a series of hesitant cawing and clicking noises, and then a robotic voice spoke in English.
“Hello. I am called Kyrxess, I am the Olma System Research and Observation Team Manager.” The voice was feminine and high pitched. With an aggressively neutral accent that Jack was sure came from whatever technology the bird women were using to translate.
Jack started to ask what was going on, but Kyrxess spoke over him.
“I know you must have many questions. I am currently speaking to one hundred million of your species all at once. This is a recorded hologram message to help give you a basic briefing of the current situation.” The bird woman seemed to deflate a bit, and she looked down, unable to meet the eyes of humanity as she delivered the news.
“Your world, Sol Three, or Earth, in your language, has been wiped clean of life. An asteroid measuring close to three hundred miles wide crashed into your northern polar ice cap. The resulting explosion caused global tidal waves, and a cloud of debris to cover the sky and plunged the world into an unending winter. The plants died, the oceans starved, and approximately thirty years after the impact the eternal winter led to the deaths of the last living creatures on the planet.” She spoke with a hoarse voice, and the caws and clicks that Jack heard sounded mournful.
Jack was shocked. He felt his heart go quiet as the gravity of her words started to sink in. The world had died. An asteroid had crashed into it and wiped out all life. Was this the afterlife then? This certainly didn’t match any of the versions of heaven his grandmother had told him about. And he very much felt alive. His attention returned to Kyrxess as she moved. She had stopped speaking, apparently giving humanity a moment of silence to process her words.
“While your world is gone, you are not. Millions of years ago, one of the greatest empires the galaxy has ever seen found your planet, and the people fell in love with it. This coalition of species found evidence that the world was going to be destroyed by an asteroid impact, and despite their will to save the species of your world, they were unable to prevent the asteroid from colliding with the world and wiping out all life. Rather than give up, the scientists tasked with studying your planet designed a nature preserve where they could take the species that were at risk of extinction and give them a new home that was protected from both super destruction events, such as asteroids and poaching from other galactic powers. They created an artificial intelligence and an army of replicator drones to observe the planet long after its creators' deaths and preserve each species for the future. The problem is, when the asteroid eventually hit Earth, life did not end as was predicted. Instead, life bounced back, and a new era of evolution took place. But by this point, the Old Empire had fallen as well. The galaxy was plunged into war and there was no one to take notice of the AI still running on Earth. So it was ignored, and by the time that this region of the galaxy was peaceful again, there was no one with the knowledge to open the error reports let alone do anything about it. Our organization has only been studying this region of space for the past three thousand years and we still fail to understand the technology used to create this place.” She shook her head. And another clicking sound from behind her went untranslated. She clicked her tongue, seemingly in annoyance, before speaking again.
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“That brings us to your current situation. You, along with five hundred million other humans, have been brought to this nature preserve by the AI. You have been in stasis here for five sun rotations while we have been trying to extract you from the exclusion field that protects this planet. When the Old Empire terraformed this planet, known as Olma Four, or Kittis, they attached an experimental exclusion field powered by the planet's core to prevent poachers from raiding the nature preserve. This technology was cutting edge in their time, and despite hundreds of years of study, we are no closer to breaking through it. Nothing that enters the planet can leave.” She looked down again, not meeting Jack’s eyes.
“The stasis chambers are designed to hold up to five hundred million creatures to be repopulated on the planet as populations fail or need to be readjusted by the preserve AI. Sentient creatures were never supposed to be a part of this system. We have managed to stop the distribution of your species onto the planet while we attempt to come up with a way to evacuate you, but the AI has started to read our attempts at interference as an error and is preparing to purge its stasis fields and reboot. If it does this, every person trapped in stasis will be killed. The only way we have found to prevent this is to allow one-fifth of the total remaining human population to be released from stasis on the planet. You have been selected to be a part of this group.” Kyrexx looked back into Jack’s eyes.
“I am sorry. If there were another way, I would choose it. But this is the best out of a handful of bad options. Please pay attention to what I am about to tell you, as your lives may depend on it.”
She paused for a moment to let people handle their emotions. Jack was sure that millions of people would be panicking or breaking down. But ever since the strange alien had told him that the world was gone, his entire focus had been on her. His emotions kept calm.
“The world you will be entering is not like the one you came from. The ecosystem has been maintained by a planetary AI called The Groundskeeper for millions of years to keep the original inhabitants of your planet in healthy population numbers. You will likely be deposited in vast plains of grass or dense jungles, and you will find the world is full of large and dangerous predators. The planet Kittis is several times larger than your old world, with much more land mass rather than ocean. We do not have any way to control where you will be populated on the planet, but we do know you will be placed in groups of around two hundred individuals based on the geographical location you were taken from. We have prepared a device to assist you in surviving. This device will appear in the hands of your leaders once they are chosen. They will help you bond with the animals, identify what foods and plants are harmful to your bodies, allow you to scan the local terrain for resources, and to help you understand the topography. However, each of these devices has limited power that will need to recharge slowly after each use. So use them wisely. For most things, a single day-night cycle will be enough to refresh the charge on the device. They are waterproof and while they are durable we urge you to not use them as weapons or physical tools as they can be broken.”
Her tone had turned into one Jack recognized from his old college professor, explaining simple things to children while knowing they were going to ignore their advice regardless of what warnings were given.
“We are a research and observation base with less than a hundred staff. We sent a request for help to our government for the resources to assist your kind, but the issue has been debated for three years in our court system and we have run out of time. So we have only been able to make two million of these devices. We will continue to make more as we can, but know that if your tribe's device breaks, you will not be getting a new one any time soon. Decide on your leaders quickly to be among the groups that receive devices. Once the devices have been given out we will start preparing other tools to help you all survive. These tools will be handed out as fairly as we can manage. This may mean that the tribes most prepared to make use of them will receive them.”
“Finally, I believe it is your right to know that the AI on earth that selected you to be saved had strict criteria to decide who was selected. Only those of your species below the age of forty years that were fertile and without any major deformities or genetic diseases were saved. We have held back releasing any children below the age of eighteen in this wave of survivors, so that you may build homes for them to live in and increase the chance of survival. It is not our goal to hold your children hostage but to give them to you now would be akin to killing them. Build a home and have your tribe leader request the child’s name. We will do our best to provide them to you if they are in stasis.”
Kyrexx gave a final nod to humanity.
“Good luck.”
Jack blinked and found himself standing in the center of a clearing surrounded by thick jungle. A hundred dazed people between the ages of eighteen and forty all blinked in unison, some stumbling and others falling to their knees. Jack managed to stay on his feet as the disorientation cleared. There was a long few seconds of tense silence, and then the screaming started.