The Inhabitants

The vision of late-twenty-second-century humanity was not to be fulfilled after all. Despite everything it had achieved, Corvolea II had overlooked some serious damage dealt by the gamma-ray burst - damage to a system far more critical than its communications software. When it initiated the process of replicating the three great kingdoms of multicellular eukaryotes in its memory bank, it found that vast swathes of them had been corrupted. The fungal subfolder was luckily the least degraded of the three, allowing the probe to inoculate its planet with vast quantities of spores while it searched for a solution. None presented itself.

Corvolea had no choice but to make do with the tiny handful of plant and animal species whose genomes it could reconstruct using what remained of its files. Plants were hit hardest of all; only a single vascular species could be recovered. Buffalograss (Bouteloua dactyloides) was seeded planetwide, yielding a short turf of foliage that would serve as the only large-scale terrestrial biome. A meager assortment of bryophytes and lichens were planted as well, though unfortunately they did not include in their numbers any of those cold-tolerant species that might've formed a rudimentary tundra ecosystem. 

Animals fared a bit better, with a whopping six species larger than 5mm successfully introduced. Woodlice of the species Armadillidium vulgare were the first of the six to establish a population, sustaining themselves on rotting plants and whatever strange aquatic biofilms occasionally washed ashore. Then came the kiwis (Apteryx australis), which were intentionally given a head start over other vertebrates that Corvolea knew would pose a threat to them. New Caledonian crested geckos (Correlophus ciliatus) were next in line for the same reason. As fate would have it, brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) were also among the lucky few. Though Corvolea was aware that rats posed a serious danger to the previous two species, it opted to introduce them anyway, for this planet needed every species it could get, and a prolific generalist was just what this simplified ecosystem would require if it was to persist. One freshwater minnow, the mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) made the cut, accompanied fittingly by a single mosquito, Aedes aegypti.

Of course, the Corvolea drones themselves can be numbered among the creatures that populated this planet and defined its ecology in these early days. For the first few generations, they actively managed the growing grasslands, hoping to maintain a semblance of a stable environment while their mothership escalated its attempts to recover the lost species files. They carried out preprogrammed orders to observe and protect the planet's newly-arrived life, document its landscape, and even give names to its different regions and landforms. A holdover from the more human-friendly programming of Corvolea I, this procedure was designed to automatically write legible, unbiased scientific reports on every planet the spaceship came across. Unfortunately, the program suffered significant gamma-ray damage, and the write-up describing this planet was never completed. Among the few intelligible fragments was a name for Corvolea's final resting place: Apterra, after the largest animal it had managed to replicate.

In all, more then twelve million species were deemed irretrievable. Major gaps were left even among the simpler organisms; diatoms, for instance, did not see any representatives survive the gamma-rays. Corvolea had no recourse and no contingency plan for sustaining such a desolate ecology over the long term, so it gradually ramped down its presence on Apterra's surface. Its drones continued making observations from afar for quite some time, but no further attempts were made to actively shape the biotic or abiotic environment. Corvolea turned itself off, abandoning once and for all the world that was, to its knowledge, the last remnant of Earthly life anywhere.