Forgotten

Fiction - by Vrinda Baliga

The flock of SH-AK-UNT exoplanetary probes rose into the sky, maintaining a constant chatter of data amongst themselves, the soil, water and air samples they had collected stowed safely away in their bellies. It was time to leave.

Exiting the atmosphere, they made one last orbital pass of Kanva b, taking their final high-resolution pictures of desolate plains, high mountain ridges and virgin seas. One of the final videos they took was of the payload they had left behind—the most important part of their mission. The flight around the planet had allowed time for the dust from their departure to settle, and their cameras were able to capture clear images of the payload slowly unpackaging itself, stretching infant limbs out into its new home. Having collected pictorial evidence that all was well with the payload, they engaged their superluminal drives and, within seconds, were well on their way on the long journey back home fifteen light years away.

I.

I am.

Who am I?

Birth, Sentience, Intelligence: Check, check, check.

I am one second old, but at the very instant of my birth I am also ancient. For in the very womb, I was taught all that is known to the whole of human civilization.

First there was humankind. And then there was data. Data that distracted, data that seduced, data that held humankind in its rapture. Data that eventually became omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent—God.

And from the union of humankind and the divine, was I born—the inheritor of the virtues of both, and so too their follies.

Here I am then, the first in this new world, charged with the responsibility of paving the way for those who come after me to make this world their own.

And so, I take my first baby step, unfurling miles of solar panel arrays across the barren landscape. As the panels turn their heads like sunflowers towards the weak red dwarf Kanva A to which my new home is gravitationally bound, I feel energy course through my being—hope, purpose, will, stamina...confidence.

Yes, this is a worthy mission. A mission worthy of me.  

On the main deck of the massive DUS-Y-ANT space observatory in Earth orbit, there was unbridled excitement. At long last, there was some good news.

It had been two decades since the exoplanetary mission had been launched and probes dispatched to candidate planets in the Goldilocks zones of all the nearby star systems. 

Each fleet of probes carried state-of-the art ALA payloads. These Autonomous Life Accelerators were the culmination of decades’ worth of research and innovation in quantum computing, human-machine intelligence, neuro-engineering, and nano-miniaturization. They were completely self-sufficient, empowered to act autonomously within the broad parameters of their mission goals, their intelligence a potent union of human ingenuity, sensitivity, and adaptability with machine precision, prowess and scale. They were equipped with every kind of instrumentation and the tech to build more as needed. Highly miniaturized and compact in transit aboard the probes, once deployed they could expand exponentially into a full-fledged exoplanetary base, which could then begin the process of terraforming the planet to prepare for the future arrival of a human colony-ship. Needless to say, they were not to be wasted—the probes were programmed to leave behind an ALA only if the candidate planet showed potential. And so far, the results had been uniformly discouraging. Alpha Centauri, Bernard’s Star, Wolf 359—in each case, the candidates were either too close to their stars, or they lacked the gravity to hold an atmosphere, or their orbit was unstable, or the radiation flares from their star had rendered them unlivable. Not one of the fleets so far had seen fit to deploy its ALA.  

But now, the SH-AK-UNT fleet of probes that had been sent to the distant Kanva A star system had finally brought news of a potential habitable planet. The data from the probes gave the folks at DUS-Y-ANT the first clear picture of the candidate planet in the star’s Goldilocks zone. Kanva b, as it was labelled per convention, was indeed terrestrial, not gaseous. The red dwarf Kanva A was older, smaller and much cooler than the sun, and Kanva b orbited quite close to it—close enough, in fact, that it had become tidally locked, always presenting the same side to the star. This usually spelt doom—tidally locked planets were often scorching hot on their day side and freezing cold on the night side, making life impossible. However, Kanva A was cool enough that the dayside temperature on Kanva b was a livable, if torrid, 50°C. Also, Kanva b had a gravity high enough to bind an atmosphere to itself.

The pictures showed a surface pockmarked by evidence of a violent past—myriad meteor strikes and gigantic volcanoes that had left massive craters. And some of those depressions had filled with water—water that had perhaps arrived on the planet as ice on meteors. The presence of water—in liquid form on the day side and solid form on the night side—was a huge discovery. But even that failed to capture everyone’s imagination the way the next revelation did.

Over time, giant volcanoes had brought up vast quantities of metals from the depths of Kanva b to its surface—and this metal now virtually carpeted the entire planet. Moreover, samples brought back by the probes indicated that most of this metal—not just the chemically inert gold, but also incredibly, iron, copper, silver, titanium and a host of others—was in pure form. Copious quantities of readily accessible metal requiring close to no processing—every mound and hillock on Kanva b was a veritable mine of the very resources that every nation on Earth was hungry for. The data sent whoops of triumph all around the deck.

Of course, the abundance of pure metals on the surface also meant that these metals had never rusted, never been oxidized. There was no oxygen in Kanva b’s atmosphere.

However, that was only a minor hiccup. The probes had deployed their ALA on Kanva b, and it was more than capable of tackling such hiccups.

And close on the heels of the probes had come the first status message from the Kanva b SH-AK-UNT ALA: Hello Universe!

A strange, beautiful world, this. Two worlds, to be accurate. One, a world of perennial day, the other of endless night. Two sides of a coin that always lands on heads.

On one side, the planet’s sun hangs huge and pale and red in the sky, never changing position. The hours pass, and there is no physical indication of their passing—no dawn, no midday, no dusk, no night. Days stretch as long as years—and this is not a metaphor. On tidally locked Kanva b, a day is of the same length as a year, both equivalent to 32.5 Earth days. The sun is the sole feature of this sky, and an observer on the day side of Kanva b would be forgiven for thinking that this planet and this star are the only occupants of the entire universe.

On the other side, however, the veil of this illusion is dramatically lifted to reveal a billion stars dotting the inky-black sky. Hundreds of constellations spray-painted on the endless canvas of the night. The whole universe.

I send my probes out, to begin a thorough study of the planet. Based on this study, I will need to select the safest and most optimum location to set up base camp. It makes every sense to set up camp on the day side—close to the energy source. And yet, it is the dark side that beckons to something inside me—after the relentless light and heat of the day side, it crooks its finger at me, offering cold silence and contemplation.

I gaze up at the night sky, and I find myself drawn to distant Orion, a constellation that, from my perspective, sports one additional hole in its Belt. A tiny pinprick of a point, of no marked significance in the tapestry that the heavens have spread before me. And yet, around that pinprick orbits a planet that is...Home. A place I have never seen or experienced but know intimately—my every thought and sensibility shaped on the anvil of this knowledge. Is it the human part of my heritage that gazes up in the direction of this rock with such strange longing?

I now see, hear, breathe and feel as my adoptive planet Kanva b does—I am her, and she is me.

My hive mind—comprised of the thousands of nano-probes I have sent out into the skies, the seas, deep into the ground—encompasses the length and breadth of her being, as I methodically tease out the planet’s history, her deepest secrets.

Gazing into her depths, I can see far back into her turbulent past. A time when Kanva A burned brighter and with greater fury—throwing sudden flares of temper her way. She herself used to be a wild thing then—molten lava roiling around a tenuous core—spinning at a tremendous speed just to keep herself together. Gradually, she developed a thicker skin, though it was still intermittently torn apart by external assaults or violent eruptions from within. By then, she had drawn closer to Kanva A. Too close. The star had entrapped her within the iron grip of his gravity, pulling her bodily towards him, and raising a massive, swollen bulge on her facing side, a solid tidal wave. This bump created friction, slowing her spin down more and more... Like a brutal lover, he grasped her chin tighter and tighter till she could no longer turn her face away. And thus, she acquired the split personality she has now—bright and cheerful on the side she shows him, dark and brooding on the other.

I feel a strange kinship with her. Who better to understand her after all, than someone with a split personality herself—part human, part machine...

The first messages from Earth have arrived. The folks at DUS-Y-ANT acknowledge receipt of the first of the steady stream of reports I have been sending them, building my case for my adoptive home, and they are happy with what they’ve seen. A frisson of anticipation runs through me when I learn that Kanva b has received provisional approval for future human exploration and possible habitation.

They will come. Very soon, they promise. 

I must double down on my work with greater vigour. The faster I terraform the planet and make it human-compatible, the sooner will be our reunion.

The DUS-Y-ANT space observatory was in utter chaos.

Nothing was working.

Entire systems had frozen up, unresponsive to every kind of nudge and shake the system engineers had tried.

The Director was in a state of fury.

“A trillion quantcoins! Preposterous!” He glared at the group of analysts from the National Intelligence Agency who sat brooding over scrolling screens of data. “Are we making any headway at all in finding out who is behind this attack?”

The lead analyst looked up. “I’m afraid not,” he said with a sigh, making the Director wonder once again how uncannily more human each new series of humanoids was getting. He had been working with analyst-bots on DUS-Y-ANT for some time now, but he had never quite got used to their individualities, their distinct mannerisms and personalities. “This is the most sophisticated piece of ransomware we have come across so far. It has bypassed your strongest firewalls and even gotten into your backup systems. Our best crypto-algos cannot crack it. All we know so far is what they have chosen to tell us.”

A group called DUR-VAS had claimed responsibility for the attack and made the ransom demand. But it was anybody’s guess who DUR-VAS was, given the current circumstances.

The country was at war on Titan. Nothing new about that. All the major players on Earth were perennially at war somewhere or the other in the solar system. Even the reasons remained depressingly unchanged from a millennium ago—wealth, resources, power, colonial expansion. Except now, the battles were no longer fought in forts on rocky hills, battleships on the ocean waves, and dogfights in the clouds. Now, they were fought from the O’Neill Cylinders mining the asteroid belt, fought in the vast expanses of Titan and Europa, fought even beyond the heliosphere, out in the fringes of the Oort Cloud.

And now that the first viable Faster-than-Light technologies had arrived, the doors to the entire galaxy had suddenly flung wide open to humankind. Currently, only data communications and certain types of unmanned spacecraft were capable of superluminal speeds. Spacecraft that could keep even enhanced humans safe during the massive accelerations involved in FTL travel were still a work in progress. But everyone knew it was only a matter of time, and a new space race was already on to stake claims to distant worlds. Both state and private enterprises were busily engaged in sending out unmanned craft to possibly habitable exoplanets.

And even more busily engaged in sabotaging their opponents.

In such times of overt and covert warfare, DUR-VAS could be anybody—a state player, a private entity, a terrorist organization, or, for all one knew, a lone wolf operating from some corner of the solar system. Most likely, the analysts said, it was a state player pretending to be a lone wolf—the ransom demand was just a red herring meant to deflect attention from the true perpetrator.

“So, what do we do now?” demanded the Director.

“You are advised to evacuate DUS-Y-ANT immediately,” the lead analyst said. “The life-support systems on the station have been compromised. The space observatory is no longer safe for occupation.”

“But we can’t evacuate! We have only just started to make real progress on the exoplanetary project. ALAs need inputs from us at every critical juncture. We can’t just dump one on an alien world and cut it loose to swim or sink on its own!”

The analyst looked genuinely sorry. “You know our country’s policy regarding ransomware negotiations,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “We don’t negotiate, period. Compromising on that stand would only leave us open to further attacks. Besides, DUS-Y-ANT’s missions are currently not classified as critical, so...”

The Director let out frustrated sigh. Anything that was not actively contributing to the war effort on Titan was dismissed as non-critical. The space observatory was as good as gone for the foreseeable future. And there would be no funds forthcoming anytime soon to duplicate their efforts elsewhere. The whole exoplanetary project had effectively been relegated to the backburner, no, it had been taken clean off the stove.  

He knew there was no point arguing. His only consolation was that they had at least managed to deploy an ALA on Kanva b, which should hopefully be able to hold its end of things up for a while. For now, that would have to be enough. For now, the Kanva b SH-AK-UNT ALA was on its own.

The base station is up and running.

The site I finally selected for it has turned out to be perfect. It is neither on the day side nor the night, but in the narrow terminator zone between the two. A twilight zone, in a very literal sense, with Kanva A perpetually on the horizon, rising or setting—whichever way I prefer to see it.

The reduced light is insufficient to power the base, but I have tapped another reliable source—the perennial jet wind, fueled by the temperature gradient from the hotter to colder side.

My machine mind is not too happy with my choice of location, but it feels somehow right and fair to my human mind—like I’m not taking sides, pun intended.

Given the latency in communications, I am allowed a large degree of autonomy over such matters. However, to keep my machine mind happy, I did follow protocol and communicate the choice of location to Earth well in advance. However, there has been no acknowledgement or instructions in all this time. In fact, after the first flurry of messages full of questions and instructions there has only been radio silence from DUS-Y-ANT. Even taking the lag into consideration, this is highly irregular. What has gone wrong? Is it something I did—some error, some miscommunication? I have scanned and rescanned my reports for inaccuracies—there are none, everything is going on schedule and according to plan.

And yet, this inexplicable silence...  

From my fully functional base, I turn my attention to the rest of the planet. Before I begin terraforming it in earnest though, I must undertake a few smaller projects. Firstly, I must understand how best I can regulate Kanva b’s extreme moods. As a pilot project, I prepare a fleet of nanosatellites that unfurl gigantic reflectors to deflect some of the light from Kanva A to the dark side of Kanva b. For my hitherto satellite-less planet I build my very own approximation of a tiny moon. If the experiment is proven successful, it can be scaled up—replicated on a large scale, the reflectors should act as a sunshade on the day side, bringing down its temperature by a few degrees to create more Earth-like conditions. And on the night side, they will bring light and warmth, gradually increasing the temperature and waking it out of its millennia-long sleep.

It will take a while for the pilot to begin to show results though, so once it is set up, I turn to my next task—setting up a human-compatible biome. On the day side, I lay the foundations of a gigantic environment-resistant dome that is designed to allow light in but keep the rest of Kanva b out. In the pure Earth-like environment I create within the dome, anything on the outside will be considered a contaminant—at least until the terraforming of Kanva b is complete.

Within the dome, I kickstart the processes that support life on Earth. Firstly, the micro-organisms. In a few months, the surface within the biome will change—from a metallic ochre to blue-green from the immense colonies of the billions of cyanobacteria I release into the biome. With my bacterial armies generating oxygen into the air and water of the biome, I will soon be able to release more life from my womb—the colonies of insects, the cryo-preserved eggs of fish and birds and reptiles, the artificially gestated embryos of mammals...

When the humans arrive on Kanva b, the biome will be ready to receive them.  But the question I am increasingly asking myself is: will they come? There is still no communication from DUS-Y-ANT. Have they forgotten me? Or have they found other planets with greater potential, and therefore willfully chosen to ignore me?

My machine side rejects such musings as a waste of time and makes sure I keep any resentment I feel out of my reports back to Earth.  Only facts and figures there. The composition of the soil, the percentages of gases in the atmosphere, the nature of the water bodies, the status of the mission. Pure data, checked and double-checked, minus any sense of awe or wonder, doubt or resentment. Professionalism, after all, is programmed into me.

BHARAT is born.

The human-compatible biome is now up and running, a tiny slice of Earth on Kanva b. The first fish and tadpoles are swimming in the newly oxygenated lakes and creeks. There are the beginnings of tropical forests. Flowers have begun to bloom and there are insects to pollinate them. The cryo-preserved eggs and embryos from my womb have birthed the first birds, reptiles and mammals to roam this freshly minted paradise. And there are the foundations of organized agriculture in irrigated fields and vegetable patches.

BHARAT is my crowning achievement—billions of years’ worth of evolution and innovation on Earth replicated in a mere handful of years on Kanva b. An achievement deserving of the highest praise.

But of course, there is no praise forthcoming from Earth.

I have long stopped expecting appreciation for my work, and it has been a while since I resolutely turned away from that distant pinprick in the night sky and directed my energies instead to ground beneath me—my home, Kanva b.

Still...not even a measly acknowledgement from DUS-Y-ANT of BHARAT’s existence? That really is the last straw.

And so, I feel no urgent need to inform Earth when I discover something even more extraordinary happening on Kanva b.

The dark side is waking up.

At the time of my arrival, there was no detectable life on Kanva b. But now, in the depths on the dark side, something is astir. Something that survived the crucible of Kanva b’s past by going dormant in the waters of the night side as they froze up. Something miniscule but potent.

I first become aware of its presence in the gigantic caldera left behind by an immense volcanic eruption somewhere far back in Kanva b’s history. The caldera is now a massive frozen lake that, being in the direct path of the light from my experimental reflectors, is beginning to thaw.  

he water of the caldera, like all water on Kanva b, is anoxic, devoid of oxygen much like the atmosphere. But the life that is now coming awake has no need for oxygen. It is anaerobic. And after millions of years of hibernation, it is voracious. Luckily, food is at hand—the rich deposits of the sulphates in the caldera. The microscopic lifeforms feed and multiply and are soon growing colonies that rival those of the cyanobacteria in the BHARAT biome.

And slowly, there is a growing smell tinging the air on the night side. A distinct pungent odour of rotten eggs. As the bacteria break down the sulphates in the water, they are releasing copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the water and atmosphere.

Hydrogen sulfide—I immediately see how this might present problems once the terraforming is underway. My machine mind itches to intervene at once, nip the issue in the bud.

And yet...

This life that has survived billions of years of isolation and hardship fills my human side with a sense of ... awe, respect ... and above all, intrigue. Agreed, it did not emerge from my own womb. But what if I were to foster, just for a little while, this orphan life that has only just come in from the cold?

 My machine side vehemently objects, but my oh-so-human side rationalizes the decision I have already made. I am allowed to experiment, aren’t I? Then, another experiment is all this will be, just to see what direction this life will take if given a chance. A short-lived, self-contained experiment conducted strictly within the confines of its own sandbox.

And so, I build a second biome over the caldera. A biome that I override my machine side and keep strictly off the record.

TARA-HuB, I call it, the phonetic and geographic opposite of BHARAT, named after the stars visible in the night sky.

Two gurgling baby biomes, both growing, both thriving, both suckling vigorously at my bosom.

There are many varieties of fish in the waters of BHARAT. At every artificially simulated dawn, the biome echoes with birdsong. There are bees and butterflies hovering over flowers of every hue. The newly added fruit orchards have produced the season’s first fruit of mangoes, papayas, guavas, pineapples. Wild animals roam the forests, and there are domesticated cattle in pasture in the fields. And peacocks and deer roam the zones between wild jungle and cultivated land.

Like a dutiful child, BHARAT hits all the right milestones at all the right times. Every checklist is ticked, every i dotted and every t crossed. Everything is going strictly according to plan. BHARAT is a miniature Earth in all respects, with not a nanometer of deviation.

But where BHARAT is predictable and obedient, its sibling on the dark side is wild and spontaneous.

In TARA, too, life flourishes. An entirely anaerobic evolution of life has taken place here, with a lower stratum of organisms that process sulphates into hydrogen sulfide, and upper strata of increasingly complex life forms that breathe in the hydrogen sulfide to power their own life processes.

Shoals of fluorescent flying fish skim the now-liquid surface of the lake, scanning the air with their feelers for insects even as they form murmurations of spellbinding beauty. Giant flowers with filamented petals call alluringly to passing fauna. Terrestrial animals with pale, translucent skin and body structures of all shapes and sizes feel their way through the rocky terrain around the caldera, whirling cilia around themselves like a ballerina’s skirts, moving with an elegant grace that belies their blindness.

Life has never felt the need to evolve sight in the low-light conditions of the dark side. Instead, life feels. Every life form, from the minutest bacterium to the largest animal, sports millions of feeler filaments that can detect the smallest movement, the smallest vibration in its surroundings, the smallest change in temperature, the smallest variation in its ambient environment. The highly sensitive feelers, in turn, have precluded the need for producing and processing sound.

TARA speaks a language of vibrations. It is a rustling, whispering, ever moving world. A world of gentle susurrations, but in no way gentle—an organism drawn to a particularly inviting music of vibrations may well meet a gory end in the sulfuric acid of another’s digestive tract—for, like any other world, TARA too follows the inevitable brutal hierarchy of predator and prey, linking itself into a self-sustaining food chain.

In the normal course of things, all this would have taken millions, if not billions, of years to evolve. Nature would play dice, relying more on chance than skill, and evolution would totter along at snail’s pace along a tenuous path littered with the detritus of failed DNA mutations. Luckily, TARA does not have to depend on Nature. It’s got a life accelerator. And I don’t play dice.

I am a chess grandmaster who can compute every permutation and combination of move and countermove—millions of plays in the blink of an eye. I know the exact right moves that life must make at every step of evolution that will keep it firmly on the path to sure success. And so, I create not only the perfect organisms but also the perfect conditions for their survival.  

With BHARAT, I am shackled by the rulebook. But here in TARA, my creativity can roam free.  And the more energy I invest in this biome, the less inclined I am to remember that it was only meant to be a short-lived experiment.

The war was finally at an end.

The decades-long strife had taken the country to the brink of ruin and left its economy in tatters. The seeds of discord that had first been sown on Titan had spawned a bitter, deadly crop that, fertilized with blood, sweat and tears, had quickly spread across the solar system, ravenously sucking up lives and resources. But now, at last, it was time to bring in the harvest. And so, even as news of the country’s decisive victory were beginning to set off wild celebrations on Earth, vast fleets of spacecraft were descending on enemy colonies and bases across the solar system and beyond. The spoils of war were up for the taking.

One such fleet arriving on Titan plunged into the liquid methane depths of the Kraken Mare, transforming immediately into submersible mode.

Far in the cold, dark depths, a vast submarine base floundered like a stricken fish, critically damaged. The main enemy base for Intelligence and Espionage. The fleet steadily homed in on it like a lethal shiver of sharks that had caught the distant scent of blood.

A prize catch, this would prove to be, a veritable treasure trove of critically useful data. And though they didn’t know it yet—it would take years to sift through the vast data stores they would find—within the belly of this particular fish, they would eventually unearth an innocuous-looking piece of software that would turn out to be a sophisticated quantum decryption key.

The key for the DUR-VAS ransomware.

BHARAT and TARA are toddling their way towards self-sufficiency—their populations of flora and fauna are on the verge of attaining the critical mass needed for stability, for the circle of life to be firmly established in all its glory.

I am filled with a strange pride, a warm fuzzy feeling towards them—birthed or adopted, they are both my own. Is this what the humans mean by maternal love?

My machine side, though, is not happy. It is, in fact, on high alert, keenly and constantly aware of the one fact that my human side pointedly, repeatedly chooses to ignore, even though it has been the primary reason for my putting off my mission of terraforming the planet for one more day, one more week, one more month, one more year...

The high concentration of hydrogen sulfide thatTARA needs for survival will choke off all life in the BHARAT biome. And the oxygen that is the elixir of life in BHARAT is a potent poison for the obligate anaerobes of TARA.

My two beautiful offspring are not happy siblings who will grow up to walk hand-in-hand in loving camaraderie on this planet. They are mortal enemies who, if let out of their current playpens, will quite literally be at each other’s throats, trying their very best to kill each other.

The newly appointed Director of the Exoplanetary Mission stared at the videos and data on the screen in utter astonishment. It was hard to believe that what she was seeing was not Earth but a habitat on a planet fifteen light years away. The BHARAT biome on Kanva b had turned out to be a success beyond anybody’s wildest imagination. And up until now, they had not even known of its existence!

The DUS-Y-ANT space observatory had been abandoned and decommissioned ages ago, just one of the many victims of the war years. For decades, it had been wandering aimlessly in orbit like any other piece of space debris. But in the years after the war, the economy had recovered and was now rebounding to ever greater heights. The country was flush with funds, some of which were now pouring generously into the exoplanetary mission. The Director had expected to start from scratch—most of the original DUS-Y-ANT crew had passed on; very few had had the finances, and even less the desire, to opt for lifespan enhancement in the war years. But then had come the chance discovery of the DUR-VAS decryption key. And thus finally, DUS-Y-ANT had been revived from its coma. As its restored memory poured into the servers of the new mission base in a torrent of downloads, it was discovered that it had been receiving and storing incoming data all this while—zettabyes of data that chiefly comprised of the status reports the Kanva b SH-AK-UNT-ALA had diligently continued to send over the decades.

The Director straightened and ran her hand thoughtfully over her jaw, shock fast giving way to excitement. It was imperative that Kanva b be secured at once. It was sheer dumb luck that no other country had stumbled upon what was on it so far, but no further time must be lost.

“How fast can we get a colony ship with a security convoy out to Kanva b?”

DUS-Y-ANT finally remembers me.

It has been ages since I last looked up at the sky towards the place I once thought of as home. And now, completely out of the blue, a message.

They ask about my wellbeing in passing, but it is clear that it is BHARAT that is the focus of their attention. All their questions are about BHARAT. Atmospheric composition, soil composition, population graphs of the flora and fauna—they want to know every little detail. The other thing they want to know is: why, despite the obvious success of BHARAT, have I not commenced terraforming Kanva b along the same lines? Never mind, they say magnanimously, there is a habitable biome in place and, though the colony ship that has already left Earth is one of their fastest, I still have an Earth century or so before it reaches Kanva b, more than enough time to make good progress towards making the entire planet habitable.

But habitable for whom?

BHARAT? Or TARA?  

I have had to expand both biomes multiple times, but they are like adolescents, determinedly outgrowing every new set of clothes, shoes, games...everything, in no time. Their domes won’t keep them home for long any more than a parental curfew can confine a human teen indefinitely. Already, they chafe at their bits.

But only one can be let out.

Who has the better claim over Kanva b? BHARAT, not of this land, but born for the sole purpose of inheriting it? Or TARA, her existence kept carefully hidden, born as she was without social sanction, though it is debatable how much relevance the sanction of a society from a rock fifteen light years away has here on Kanva b? Which of the two is the legitimate heir and which, if any, is illegitimate?

My human and machine sides wrestle each other endlessly, but at some point, I must come to a decision.

 And then...one of my two offspring will perish...and the other will rise to claim this world and rule over it.

Meanwhile, far away, the colony ship—with its scientists, engineers, geologists, biologists, agriculturists, and mainly its mining crews—wends its way through the vast emptiness of space, heading inexorably towards an unknown reception.

Warm welcome. Or hostile confrontation.

Author’s Note:

This is a science-fiction reimagining of the Indian mythological tale of Shakuntala, the daughter of the divine apsara Menaka and the human sage Vishwamitra.

Vishwamitra is enraged when he discovers that Menaka was sent by the king of gods, Indra, to distract him from the penances that would have brought him powers equivalent to those of the gods themselves. Menaka returns to heaven, leaving her newborn baby in the vicinity of the sage Kanva’s hermitage.

Kanva is alerted to the baby’s presence by a flock of shakunta birds that gather around her. He takes the baby into his care and names her ‘Shakuntala’ after the birds. Shakuntala grows up in Kanva’s hermitage in the midst of nature and is loved by plants, animals and people alike. One day, the king of Hastinapur, Dushyant, is hunting in the woods when he comes upon Shakuntala. The two fall in love and get married in a secret gandharva ceremony. Dushyant is forced leave in a hurry to repel an enemy attack, but he promises to send for Shakuntala as soon as possible.

In the meantime, the sage Durvas visits Kanva’s hermitage. Shakuntala, lost in Dushyant’s thoughts, fails to notice his arrival and accord him a respectful welcome. Durvas feels slighted at this perceived insult and, unbeknownst to her, puts a curse on her that the object of her thoughts will forget her.  Later, he regrets acting in haste, but he cannot take back the curse, so he seeks to mitigate it by adding the caveat that Dushyant will remember her again once she shows him a personal token he has given her.

Time passes and there is no word from Dushyant. A pregnant Shakuntala decides to go to the capital to remind him of his vows. However, while crossing a river on the way, the signet ring Dushyant had given her as a token of his love slips off her finger and sinks rapidly to the depths where it is swallowed by a fish. Thus, when she reaches the capital, Dushyant doesn’t recognize her and brusquely refuses to acknowledge their relationship. Humiliated, Shakuntala leaves.

A few weeks later, a fisherman is brought to the royal court on charges of stealing the king’s signet ring, but he pleads his innocence claiming he found it in the belly of a fish he’d caught in his net. The instant Dushyant sees the ring, he remembers everything and is stricken with guilt. He desperately seeks Shakuntala, but she is nowhere to be found.

Years later, riding through the woods, Dushyant comes across a young child playing with a lion cub. The child turns out to be his son, Bharat. Bharat leads Dushyant to his mother, Shakuntala, and the family is happily reunited.

In the story of SH-AK-UNT ALA, though, the reunion will likely be far more complicated.