THE
STATION
... from the void came the distant sound of chimes... water lapping the shore ...
then a whisper, piercing through the darkness ...
~ wake up ~
She woke up to the space station's ever-present drone she'd come to hate so much. She thought that coming here would be an escape from the dreary life she had endured on the planet, house-bound with a stoic caretaker. She was clearly different from the woman who had taught her, but all her questions about her identity and past went unanswered.
She was told that the outside world was dangerous and confined to the house while she was trained for some promised but undefined life. Putting her amnesia aside, she focused all her energy into learning whatever was needed in order to be ready to take up her new role and finally be free from the confines of those walls.
But when the time came for her release, she found herself handed off like dirty laundry, placed in yet another small room, faced with the cold, dim, and leaden reality of life on the space station. The isolation she felt in the home paled in comparison to what she experienced here, but there was nowhere else to go... not since the asteroid storm pummelled the planet. That's what she was here for, they told her... to work on Earth's restoration. Maybe when she was done, she would finally be free to start a real life....
The credentials he earned from the specialized training his father had put him through secured him a position on the terra-forming station. He needed more time to move up the ranks, but the asteroid storm forced his hand and he sent for her ~ a move that set off a violent altercation with the Captain and brought the matter before Command.
By then, no one could deny that the Siron were dying, and she became his bargaining chip as the only assimilated Ebo trained in their ways and capable of assisting in the recovery of the water planet. So, in a desperate push to stave off Siron extinction, Command promoted him as the new Station Captain to expedite the planet's reconstruction & colonization.
Trained to follow the chain of authority, no one questioned Command's decision or their new leader's actions, but they did not understand them either ~ and they noted the scar under their new Captain's eye ~ the scar he'd sustained in the fight with their former leader... a scar that shouldn't have been there. But they didn't even consider that he no longer used his regeneration pod, having modified it to match her DNA, should the need for it arise again.
With Prize Astow
And Torment Fed
He Means to Hide
Gives Up His Bed
From Stationed Place
She Watches, Wound
As Earth is Hit
With Bullets Round
She no longer kept track of how much time had passed. All she focused on now was her work with the planet ~ being at her console was as close as she got to being on the earth again. Each day, there was something new to fine-tune, nurture and grow. Having been given free rein in the terra-forming process, the bio-field was her primary focus ~ the soul of the system. When that was repaired, the planet would rebalance itself and sustain life once more. She couldn’t explain how she knew this, only that she 'felt' it, as if inside her own body.
But she started to sense dark things under the surface... disturbing things that came to her as flashes in her sleep and waking life.... She tried to rebalance what she could but, in the end, was unable to contain the pressure building deep within the planet ~ a wound she could not hold back anymore.
After restructuring the crew, he gave her a separate workstation where he could keep an eye on her. Always from a distance, he watched her. She was better than any of them in the planet's reconstruction, shifting atmospheric levels even before any imbalance was detected, almost as if she were anticipating its needs. Growth in her sector had tripled and Command started to take notice.
But the recent reports troubled him. She was too consumed by the work, neglecting herself in the process, and her emotional states seemed to be entrained with the planet. He knew about the things his kind was doing to the Ebo ~ work he had no jurisdiction over ~ the invasive testing, the experiments & genetic engineering... if she got any closer, how much more disturbed would she become?
To Free Herself
She'll Bear the Cage
With Nicks and Cuts
To Stay the Rage
As Worlds Collapse
Askew, Adrift
The Body Bares
The Mind at Rift
When the nuclear reactor blew, her head filled with screaming. The land was irradiated, torn apart, the impact felt for miles. The earth seemed to bleed now as she bled ~ she could taste it in her mouth ~ the metal of this prison ~ and suddenly, she needed to get off the Station ~ out of this place ~ out of her body ~
She clawed at the console, then tore at herself. The others came and held her down, but she hardly felt the injection meant to sedate her, her head so full of splintered images that she could no longer make out reality from the bleed-throughs in time.
There was no more planet, no more Station... just the white noise of screaming and the ceaseless crashing of waves... she saw the island then, the beach... and the man standing before her in the water....
Having seen the worst of it, he put on his mask ~ the cold, hard, expressionless face that was his own ~ and in a controlled monotone, ordered the others back to their workstations to address the fallout while he carried her body to his quarters and placed it in the regeneration chamber.
He fell to his knees then and cried for the first time in his life, knowing what was to come. Too late, they found that the Ebo had a symbiotic relationship with their planet, and that it was their presence that made life flourish.
She was the only one to have survived their cull without modification. Ensuring Command's plans to repopulate, she would be returned to the planet's surface so as to stabilize the system... and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
The Future Grants
A Promised Fee
The Sight of Blankness
Empty, Free
As Blind and Lost
They Enter In
Forgetful Stars
To New World's Spin
Her body twitched occasionally in the regeneration pod, suspended in the clear viscous liquid as electrical impulses lit up her cells. But she felt none of this, lost in a vast darkness. Here, there was no screaming, no sound of any kind... only the void, somehow moving closer and closer to her, like a gaping mouth threatening to swallow her whole... a wave of terror and dread spread though her then, as she felt herself falling into the abyss, unable to wake up....
The Siron now had enough harvested DNA to engineer the hybrid bodies they needed ~ bodies acclimatized to life on the planet and greatly in demand by the Siron, despite the unintended memory loss that would result for those inserted. He looked in the mirror and saw the scar under his eye ~ a painful reminder that was becoming too much for him to bear. So, like many before him, eager for a new life, he requested for insertion into New Earth... so that he too might forget....