The Seed

First, the sun had turned against them, then the air, now the land itself. They had drilled too deep, too greedily, taken too much. The heat of the sun had been trapped. The deepest drilling had increased volcanic activity. Air already clouded with pollution was now choked with sulphur. Tectonic plates cracked apart. At most, days were left. For him, hours. For the first time in decades, Adryen felt hope.

Sirens in the background, the underground bunker shaking, he checked his calculations one last time. Shut out the sound of gunfire, riots being put down, food stores still guarded, as if there were a future to ration for. Ignored the sweat soaking his clothes as the cooling fans failed, the reek of backed up sewers in an enclosed space. This had to be perfect. The future was at stake.

He had been living down here for decades, in the underground compound built by Noel Sark, a tech billionaire who had populated it mostly with friends, prostitutes, guards, a few doctors, then taken in an assortment of refugees off the street to do the cleaning, cooking, serving and maintenance, and to give the rest someone to look down on. Sark himself maintained iron control with the threat of a self-destruct device. Most who had come here were already dead. Their children would die here too, never having seen the sun.

This world was dying. The next planet from the sun might be habitable one day, but the process they had set in motion would take aeons. The rich men who had already flown out there to escape the planet they had killed might live out their lives, but their colonies were doomed within a handful of generations. The transformation of their new world had already begun. Fusion reactors implanted in the ice, melting and evaporating, the clouds trapping the heat of the sun, creating a warming cycle, mimicking how they had destroyed their own planet. Seeded with a rain of photosynthesizing bacteria, from which new life would in time evolve. The colonists hoped, absurdly, that their own descendants would be the ones to populate it, finally moving out of the shelters they had built. Crops could finally be planted in the open air. Delusions of desperate men. Those shelters would not survive to see the first spontaneous ice-melt.

Instead, Adryen was building a seed, a seed that could bide its time. The future of life hung heavy in the locket at his neck - a familiar weight, more present now. The vanity project of a madman. An impossible idea, made possible by time, obsession, and the technology that Sark’s company had created. But instead of the billionaire’s dream of self-resurrection, Adryen devoted it to love.

When the dome city had fallen at the hands of protestors who believed it had been built to trap them, Adryen Cayne had stumbled in here mostly by accident, caught up in the panic, fleeing blindly from the blistering sun and the choking air. Possibly the only biologist left in the world, he had come up with this idea, managed to get an audience with Sark.

It had been surprisingly easy to stroke the hopes and vanity of a man who had been absurdly wealthy, but not quite wealthy enough to escape with the colonists. Father of a new world! The chance to be resurrected! The man had eaten it up, devoted to it everything he had hoarded in this compound.

The project at hand was much longer term even than the colonists’ design. Adryen had fled down here as a young man, counting himself lucky. He had grown old in this stinking prison, breathing stale air, eating canned food, seeing by pale fluorescent light. Only the work had kept him going. Thirty years, three months and six days, all building toward this moment. It would be billions of years more before the plan came to fruition, but for him this was the end.

Coded into tardigrade DNA that might survive on that barren rock, he wrote instructions. As the planet warmed, they would wake from hibernation, reproduce, spread. As it warmed further, sequences hidden in the junk DNA would be triggered, starting small, then coding for more of the previously unexpressed genetic material. As the planet became more hospitable, more and more complex life forms, all building toward a single goal. It was meant to be Noel Sark, Titan of industry, who rose resurrected as the new world flowered.

Instead, it would be her.

He remembered the day she had given it to him. Their anniversary, the first of what should have been many. He remembered waking, looking into her beautiful golden eyes, shining in the morning sun. Her hair, messy and matted from the night, but still perfectly framing the face he loved more than any other sight in the world. Jennisia had smiled as she held it out to him. A cheap, rusted old locket, in the shape of a heart.

“Happy anniversary. lover.”

He opened it, expecting a photo, and laughed. Pulled her into his arms, and for a time they forgot about anything but the feel of each other, and the most overwhelming love.

After a time, as they lay together, him running one hand through her hair, he opened the locket again. Smiled. Raised a questioning eyebrow.

Toenail clippings, skin flakes, loose hair.

“So you’ll always have a piece of me with you, after you leave me.” Turning serious.

“Never.” He promised her for the thousandth time.

“You will. When you get bored, or meet someone you really love.”

This again. This frustration, that he could not show her what was to him the most obvious thing in the world, the core of his very existence. That when he wanted to tell her everything that was in his heart, the words caught in his throat, or came out lame. Whatever he did manage to say, she would not believe.

If only she had been wrong. He had left. He had fled. Everything the world had done to her, he had so badly wanted to heal. It seemed anything he did only made it worse. Pain and rage made her beauty harsh, blistering – it beat him down upon him like the blazing sun, day by day cooking the soft desert sand to brittle glass. All the times she told him that he only brought her pain - it was more than he could bear. He had fled, seeking only a place to hide away.

By the time he had realised that he would happily accept a thousand times over all her doubts, all her darkness, her rage, her stinging jibes, just to bask in the light that still shined bright through those clouds, that smile that lit up his heart with the purest joy - it had been too late. She was lost to him forever. Leaving had been the cruelest thing he could have done. Her worst fears, to her mind, confirmed. She would never have him back.

He did not know if she still lived. If she had escaped to another one of the domed cities, or if she had fled to a bunker like this one, living out these last decades in cramped starvation. It was far more likely that she had stayed out to meet her end in the sun and the burning air, staring proudly up into the sky and facing death from above.

The world, this world, had been cruel to her. But she would live again, in a better world. The code was good. Time to begin.

Sark would be watching on the monitors. He barred the door, and smiled as he tossed the great man’s DNA sample into the garbage with his uneaten lunch, and instead emptied the contents of the locket into the tube. Sealed. Another tube, and some of his own hairs, some saliva. Run both through the centrifuge. The rest of the process was automated, so he let himself dream. Of how they would be reborn into a brave new world, ages and ages hence.

A world, he prayed, without racism, division, bigotry, greed, violence. All the things that had destroyed this world. All the things that had so badly damaged the woman he loved. A world where they might meet again someday, innocent, untainted by all that pain.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” An angry voice blasted through a speaker. A banging at the door.

He switched off the intercom, not bothering to answer. Sprayed paint over the camera.

They would not get through. He had argued, years ago, that this room must be the most secure in the entire bunker. Sark had agreed, and spared no expense.

As the machines finished their work - sampling and implanting the final DNA sequences, coding them to trigger expression based on temperature, humidity, radiation levels, fail-safes that would ensure the continuity, and redundancy to protect from mutation or information loss across that unfathomable cavern of years - he readied the ship. Paper thin, driven by light, it would carry its microscopic passengers across the void of space to where they would land, hibernate, and wait for a process that had already begun. It only needed to be brought to the surface and it would fly free – eight propellers bringing it to the upper atmosphere, where the escape module would release, propelling the tiny ship out of gravity’s reach, bringing its miniature crew to a new home.

This planet was dead, but life eventually would have a chance to flourish on its closest neighbour. Now crusted with ice, it would one day host great oceans. He imagined vast forests, fertile plains, such abundance that they would never need to fight over resources, but could just pick fruits from the trees or gather berries, dip buckets of fish from the rivers and oceans. Everything they needed would spring forth unbidden from the fertile earth. Earth, he imagined, might be the perfect name for such a planet, such a paradise.

In such a world, greed would never arise. There would be no need to drill deep into the core, releasing the burning ghosts of the long dead, and destroying that planet as had been done here.

The banging outside continued, more guards, first growing frantic with the battering ram, then firing shots into the door, desperate to bring down that door. Sark would have threatened self-destruct if they didn’t fix this. Time was short.

Everything was ready.

There was one other way out. Unguarded, because it led to the burning hellscape that was the surface. An elevator that only Adryen knew would still run.

He loaded the ship, checked and rechecked, then gathered it up and walked into the elevator. On the surface, he would die in seconds, but it was time. Time to face what he had run from. The doors slid shut, the lift rumbling to life. The squeal of rusted metal that had not moved in three decades. Motion. Waiting.

It stopped.

Bracing for the opening of the doors. Heat, flooding in, like opening an oven and stepping inside. The air choked his lungs. The light of the sun burned his eyes as they filled with tears, first from the pain, then from the sheer beauty of it.

Stumbling into sun and open air, free from that damned prison. Realisation, how much he had truly hated clinging to life down there in that grey stinking world, locked away from light and color and movement.

Freedom.

He fell to his knees. Placed the little ship on the ground. Choking, burning - trembling hands keying in the activation. Watching it fly away, free. As his gaze follows it up, through clouded eyes, he sees her face. Feels her presence. Her understanding. If a billion unlikely things go just right, their children might yet be born one day into a better world.

The third planet from the sun.