People.
A lot of them.
About fourteen billion.
They’ve cluttered this sad little planet, destroying everything in sight, for over two million years (according to the georgian callendar).
But now, ladies and gentlemen, grab your popcorn, because humans have finally done it.
They’ve destroyed the planet.
Now it’s just a brown blob floating around a yellow dwarf.
Dead.
Used-up.
And of course it’s non-suitable for anything to live there. And of course they’re „sorry“. And of course they want to fix it.
But, surprise, surprise, they can’t.
And they kinda know it, so now they’re searching for other planets to infest.
Like a parasyte.
The project has been running for about two hundred years, since the moon landing in 1969. We’ve managed to make some breakthroughs, but nothing major, nothing that’ll get us somewhere else.
…
No, I’m lying. We’ve made blueprints for a spaceship that could sustain human life, but – not a lot of it. A few thousand people and some plants and animals. It’d take at least seven generations until we get to an inhabitable planet.
But people are not ready to wait.
Nor are they ready to die.
The governments of the world – all 251 of them – have told us not to make it. „People will riot“, they said, “everyone will want to be in the selected few who get on the ship. They will destroy the chances of the human race surviving.“
But alas, we did.
At first people thought it was a joke. A scam to get their money. But soon some guy working on the project leaked a video of the spaceship in construction, and people went full riot mode. Killing scientists, bombing research centers and such.
But we kept on working.
I’m not even sure where we got the funds from. Such high tech was worth quadrillions upon quadrillions of dollars. I guess we just kinda worked really hard with what we’ve got, and I think we even used some trash from a nearby junkyard.
We were succsessful.
Now it was time for the hard part.
Filtering people in such a way that only the smartest, strongest and the healthiest ones get on the ship.
But how?
An IQ test? On the whole population? All fourteen billion?
That wouldn’t work. There’s too much of us.
And if we only filter the military?
Good idea, actually. There’s only about three billion soldiers.
Designing the test itself wasn’t too hard, but we couldn’t use any of the traditional elements of an IQ test because people might cheat.
Then, we built a giant building. Three, to be precise. One for every billion people.
Divided the people, searched them. Temporarily blocked their Internet access. If they somehow figure out a way to hack their implants and ask other people for the answers, then congrats, they are qualified to carry on their genes.
Only ten percent are smart enough to live.
After we’ve filtered the smartest, it was time to filter the strongest of the smartest.
That isn’t such a challenge, but it sure is necessary. The military’s become lazy and weak, since all they need to kill a person in this day and age is a camera, a remote-controlled toy and some (commercially available) ricin.
And so, we’d selected the ten percent of the ten percent, and now was the time to filter the one percent of that number, the healthiest, which left us at roughly three hundred thousand people who get to live, including, of course, us scientists and our partners.
My husband has been against this from the very beginning. He says that it’s wrong and we should stick to our home planet and not divide and select people.
I’ve never understood earthists.
But I’m not leaving him here.
Even if that means I’m going to have to physically drag him on the ship.
We’ve been practically living on UNSS Acks for, like, a month now. Setting up the living quarters, making sure every pipe works perfectly, reinforcing walls, tending to the plants and animals that we’re trying to make adapt to the ship, etc. etc. The people are getting impatient.
Who wouldn’t?
No one wants to continue living in this hellhole we call a home.
But soon, they won’t need to.
We’ll be free.
We’ll be out of here.
Once we leave the atmosphere, there’s nothing that could stop us.
All done.
We’ll leave the blueprints on Earth, in hopes that someone might find them, understand them and save themselves and a few hundred more people.
Probably won’t happen.
The population is generally unintelligent.
And if they were to understand them, they’d be too lazy to actually make it. No one does, well, anything anymore, and we can thank the housebots for that.
We guide the people to their living quarters, assign them a job, upload a map of the Acks on their implants.
I hope we won’t hate the new planet like we hated the Earth.
