Instinct A Dark Sci-Fi Romance

I have been exiled, sent as far away as possible, once more left to resist the intrigue of a wild new world on my own. I will be much more careful this time. I will not allow my presence to bring suffering down on whatever life might exist below.

I hope I can get some useful information, impress the Patron and his council with not just my observations and discoveries, but interpretations. Raw data means nothing. It has to tell a story. Some of the best explorers didn’t really see anything. They just tore meaning from chaos, reassured those who keep our species in stasis that it was worthwhile to keep doing so. When most of your population is on ice, things can start feeling a bit meaningless.

I am one of the very few who get to see, to search, to bring home knowledge. It’s a privilege, and in spite of what the Patron thinks, I haven’t forgotten that.

I move to the observation deck and sit down in the comfiest chair in the ship. It has to be. I’m going to spend many, many hours here just watching the world below unfold.

Once comfortable, I set about calibrating the instruments. They’re incredibly sensitive, and even from a relatively high orbit, they can pick out lifeforms on a broad taxonomic level. I might not be able to tell from here if there are humans, which there very likely aren’t. But I will probably be able to tell if there are mammals in the same order.

A planet, any planet with life, is a gene swarm. When the instruments first lock on, they find a buzzing confusion of data that takes hours and hours to sort into discrete lifeforms.

That’s why I turn the cameras on and that’s why I like to look. A human eye and mind can perform that task in a fraction of the time. We generally know when we’re looking at something that is or has been alive.

My stomach growls, so I grab some noodles from the ration generator, and settle back down. This is a punishment, to be sure, but an exciting one. I am sure the Patron is interested in what I am able to gather here. If I send back some decent reports, I might even be allowed back to Base Eden, the place where I grew up, sometime in the next century.

I hit buttons, put the camera feeds up on the big screen in front of me. Out the window, I see the mass of it, the edge tapering into darkness.

The cameras reveal a beautiful planet. Its land mass is largely one big continent, with several smaller islands at the verge. The sea level is fairly low, no more than ten thousand feet in any given part. Unlikely to be home to leviathan creatures then. But the lands, they are a different matter. There are multiple large inland lakes where I focus my search. Life loves water.

For the first few hours, all I do is stare, chewing the occasional noodle. I think this might be the most stunning place I’ve ever seen. There are massive plains and towering mountains, forests through which great rivers flow. The polar regions are minimal, and the humidity seems to be high throughout most of the territory.

Suddenly, being stuck on this ship is more punishment than ever, and I realize just how devious the Patron has been. If I was staring into the void of space, or looking down at a burning planet, I would be perfectly content in my nice oxygen-rich little star home. But now I am seeing this world laid out before me, and I can imagine what it would be to swim in those lakes, or stand atop those mountains, feel the rain that is falling across parts of the world, or bask in the sunshine of the great star beyond.

I miss being planet-side. I miss being part of a system of life. As an explorer, I am nothing more than a speck of existence floating about space so infinite sometimes I wonder if I exist anymore, or if I’m just a wandering thought lost to the void.

I need ground beneath my feet. I need to be part of something. The connections between humans are so distant and tenuous now it almost feels as though we are already dead.

“Snap out of it,” I lecture myself as my thoughts drift toward the maudlin. It’s far too easy to slip into self-pity out here. “Look for the humans,” I tell myself. “They’re here. We survive. It’s what we do.”

I have hope, even though hope seems futile. Most planets evolve some form of life. Intellect is not guaranteed, but brutal animal instinct is.

The humans who came out here were originals, direct from Earth. Records show that a small colony may have been established here, largely by accident. They decided to explore instead of going directly to the next waypoint. When they tried to return to course, their heading was off by a few degrees and it took them into deeper space than any other ship could reach and also expect to survive.